Bradley, Marion Zimmer - SSC 03 Read online

  She almost thought for a moment that he would get away. Then she kicked the fallen bench aside and leaped on him, the sword out to run him through. This one was not so easy; he had jerked out his own sword and warded her off with no small skill. Men and women and children surged back to leave them a clear space for fighting, and Lythande, angry because she did not really want to kill him at all, nevertheless knew it was a fight for life, a fight she dared not lose. She crashed down backward, stumbling as she backed away; and then the world went into slow motion. It seemed, a minute, an hour that Ginger Whiskers bent over her, sword in hand, coming at her naked throat slowly, slowly. And then Lythande's foot was in his belly, he grunted in pain, and then she had scrambled to her feet and her sword went through his throat. She backed away from the jetting blood. Her only feeling was rage, not against Ginger Whiskers, but against the larith. She slammed it back into the scabbard and strode away without stopping to look back. Fortunately, the larith did not resist this time, and she made off toward the northern gate. Maybe she could make it there before Beccolo could get through the crowd to trail her. Within mere minutes, Lythande was out of the city and striding north, and behind her—as yet—there was no sign of Beccolo. Of course not. How could he know to which quarter of the compass she was making her course?

  All that day, and into much of the night that followed, Lythande strode northward at a steady pace that ate up the leagues. She was weary and would have welcomed rest, but the nagging compulsion of the larith at her belt allowed her no halt. At least this way—she thought dimly—there was less likelihood that Beccolo would trail her out of the city and northward.

  Shortly after Keth sank into the darkness, in the dim half-twilight of Reth's darkened eye, she paused for a time on the bank of a river, but she could not rest; she only cleaned, with meticulous care, the blade of the larith and secured it in the scabbard. Dim humps and hillocks on the riverbank showed where travelers slept, and she surveyed them with vague envy, but soon she strode on, walking swiftly with apparent purpose. But tn reality she moved within a dark dream, hardly aware when the last dim light of Reth's setting beams died away altogether. After a time, the blotched and leprous face of the larger moon cast a little light on the pathway, but it made no difference to Lythande's pace.

  She did not know where she was going. The sword knew, and that seemed to be enough.

  Some hidden part of Lythande knew what was happening to her and was infuriated. It was her work as magician to act, not to remain passive and be acted upon. That was for women, and again she felt the revulsion to this kind of women's sorcery where the priestess became passive tool in the hands of her sword . . . that was no better than being slave to a man! But perhaps the Larithae themselves were not so bound; she had been put under compulsion by the ravished Laritha and had no choice.

  The Laritha requited the impulse that caused me to stop, in the vain hope of saving her life or delivering her from her ravishers—by binding me with this curse! And when that came to her mind, Lythande would curse softly and vow revenge on the Larithae. But most of that night she walked in that same waking dream, her mind empty of thought.

  Under cover of the' darkness, on her solitary road, she munched dried fruit, her mind as empty as a cow chewing its cud. Toward morning she slept for a little, in the shelter of a thicket of trees, careful to set a watch-spell that would waken her if anyone came within thirty paces. She wondered at herself; in man's garb, she had wandered everywhere beneath the Twin Suns, and now she was behaving like a fearful woman afraid of ravishment; was it the larith, accustomed to being borne by women who did not conceal their sex, but walked abroad defending it as they must, that had put this woman's watchfulness again on her? How many years had it been since Lythande had even considered the possibility that she might be surprised alone, stripped, discovered as a woman?

  She felt rage—and worse, revulsion—at herself that she could still think in these woman's ways. As if I were a woman in truth, not a magician, she thought furiously, and for a moment the rage she felt congested in her forehead and brought tears to her eyes, and she forced them back with an effort that sent pain lancing through her head.

  But I am a woman, she thought, and then in a furious backlash: No! I am a magician, not a woman! the wizard is neither male nor female, but a being apart! She resolved to take off the watch-spell and sleep in her customary uncaring peace, but when she tried it, her heart pounded, and finally she set the watch-spell again to guard her and fell asleep. Was it the sword itself that was fearful, guarding the slumbers of the woman who bore it?

  When she woke, Keth was divided in half at the eastern horizon, and she moved on, her jaw grim and set as she covered the ground with the long, even-striding paces that ate up the distance under her feet. She was growing accustomed to the weight of the larith at her waist; absently, now and again, her hand caressed it. A light sword, an admirable sword for the hand of a woman.

  Children were playing at the second river; they scattered back to their mothers as Lythande approached the ferry, flinging coins at the ferryman in a silent rage. Children. I might have had children, had my life gone otherwise, and that is a deeper magic than my own. She could not tell whence that alien thought had come. Even .as a young maiden, she had never felt anything but revulsion at the thought of subjecting herself to the desire of a man, and when her maiden companions giggled and whispered together about that eventuality, Lythande had stood apart, scornful, shrugging with contempt. Her name had not been Lythande then. She had been called . . . and Lythande started with horror, knowing that in the ripples of the lapping water she had almost heard the sound of her old name, a name she had sworn never again to speak when once she put on men's garb, a name she had vowed to forget, no, a name she had forgotten . . . altogether forgotten.

  "Are you fearful, traveler?" asked a gentle voice beside her. "The ferry rocks about, it is true, but never in human memory has it capsized nor has a passenger fallen into the water, and this ferry has run here since before the Goddess came northward to establish her shrine as Larith. You are quite safe."

  Lythande muttered ungracious thanks, refusing to look round. She could sense the form of the young girl at her shoulder, smiling up expectantly at her. It would be noted if she did not speak, if she simply moved northward like the accursed, hell-driven thing she was. She cast about for some innocuous thing to say.

  "Have you traveled this road often?" she asked.

  "Often, yes, but never so far," said the gentle girlish voice. "Now I travel north to the Forbidden Shrine, where the Goddess reigns as Larith. Know you the shrine?"

  Lythande mumbled that she had heard of it. She thought the words would choke her.

  "If I am accepted," the young voice went on, "I shall serve the Goddess as one of her priestesses, a Laritha."

  Lythande turned slowly to look at the speaker. She was very young, with that boyish look some young girls keep until they are in their twenties or more. The magician asked quietly, "Why, child? Know you not that every man's hand will be against you?" and stopped herself. She had been on the point of telling the story of the woman who had been ravished and killed in the streets of Old Gandrin.

  The young girl's smile was luminous. "But if every man's hand is against me, still, I shall have all those who serve the Goddess at my side."

  Lythande found herself opening her lips for something cynical. That had not been her experience, that women could stand together. Yet why should she spoil this girl's illusion? Let her find it out herself, in bitterness. This girl still cherished a dream that women could be sisters. Why should Lythande foul and embitter that dream before she must? She turned pointedly away and stared at the muddy water under the prow of the ferry.

  The girl did not move away from her side. From under the mage-hood, Lythande surveyed her without seeming to do so: the ripples of sunny hair, the unlined forehead, the small snub nose still indefinite, the lips and earlobes so soft that they looked babyish, the soft little
fingers, the boyish freckles she did not trouble to paint.

  If she goes to the Larith shrine, perhaps then I might prevail upon her to take the sword of Larith thither. Yet if she knows that I, an apparent male, bear such a sword—if she goes to petition the shrine—surely she must know that no man may lay a hand upon one of the larith swords without such penalty as were better imagined than spoken.

  And since I bear that sword unscathed, then am I either accused of blaspheny—or revealed as a woman, naked to my enemies. And now, close to her destination, Lythande realized her dilemma. Neither as a man nor as a woman could she step inside the shrine of the Goddess as Larith. What, then, could she do with the sword?

  The sword didn't care. So long as the damned thing got home in one piece, she supposed, it mattered not what the carrier was—swordswoman, a girl like that one, or one of those virgin goats who played such a part in the profanity of Gandrin. If she simply asked the girl to take it to the shrine, she revealed either her blasphemy or her true sex.

  She might plant the sword upon her, spelled or enchanted into something else; a loaf of bread, perhaps, as the herb-seller had been given barley grains spelled to look like gold. It was not, after all, as if she were sending anything into the Larith shrine to do them harm, only something of its own, and something, moreover, that had played hell with Lythande's life and given her four—no, five; no, there were all the ones she had killed over the body of the Laritha—had given her eleven or a dozen lives to fight among the legions of the dead at the Last Battle where Law shall fight at last against Chaos and conquer or die once and for all. And something that had dragged Lythande all this weary way to get back where it was going.

  She seriously considered that. Give the girl the sword, enchanted to look like something other than what it was. A gift for the shrine of the Goddess as Larith.

  The girl was still standing at her side. Lythande knew her voice was abrupt and harsh. "Well, will you take a gift to the shrine, then, from me?"

  The girl's guileless smile seemed to mock her. "I cannot. This Goddess accepts no gifts save from her own."

  Lythande said with a cynical smile, "You say so? The key to every shrine is forged of gold, and the more gold, the nearer the heart of the shrine, or the god."

  The girl looked as if Lythande had slapped her. But after a moment, she said quietly, "Then I am sorry you have known such shrines and such gods, traveler. No man may know our Goddess, or I would try to show you better," and looked down at the deck. Rebuked, Lythande stood silent at the ferry bumped gently against the land. The passengers on the ferry began to stream onto the shore. Lythande awaited the subsidence of the crowd, the larith sword for once quiet inside the mage-robe.

  The town was small, a straggle of houses, farms outside the gates, and high on the hill above a sprawling market, the shrine of Larith. One thing, at least, the girl spoke true: there was nothing of gold about this shrine, at least where the passerby could see; it was a massive fortress of unpretentious gray stone.

  Lythande noticed that the girl was still at her side as she stepped onshore. "One gift at least your Goddess has accepted from the sex she affects to despise," Lythande said. "No women's hands built that keep, which is more fortress than shrine to my eyes!"

  "No, you are mistaken," the girl said. "Do you not believe, stranger, that a woman could be as strong as you yourself?"

  "No," Lythande said, "I do not. One woman in a hundred—a thousand, perhaps. The others are weak."

  "But if we are weak," said the girl, "still our hands are many." She spoke a formal farewell, and Lythande, repeating it, jaws clenched, stood and watched her walk away.

  Why am I so angry? Why did I wish to hurt her?

  And the answer rushed over her in a flood. Because she goes where I can never go, goes freely. There was a time when I would willingly have pawned my soul, had there been a place where a woman might go to learn the arts of sorcery and the skills of the sword. Yet there was no place, no place. I pawned my soul and my sex to seek the secrets of the Blue Star, and this, this soft-handed child, with her patter of sisterhood . . . where were my sisters on that day when I knew despair and renounced the truth of my self? I stood alone; it was not enough that every man's hand was against me on that day, every woman's hand was against me as well!

  Pain beat furiously in her head, pain that made her clench her teeth and scowl and tighten her fists on the hilts of her own twin swords. One would think, she said to herself, deliberately distancing herself from the pain, that I were about to weep. But I forgot how to weep more than a century ago, and no doubt there will be more cause than this for weeping before I stand at the Last Battle and fight against Chaos. But I shall not live to that battle unless somehow I can contrive to enter where no man may enter and return the cursed larith where it belongs!

  For already she felt, streaming from the larith, the same intense, nagging compulsion, to plunge up the hill, walk into the shrine, and throw down the sword before the Goddess who had dragged it here and Lythande with it.

  Within the shrine, all women are welcomed as sisters. . . . did the whisper come from the girl who had spoken of the shrine? Or did it come from the sword itself, eager to tempt her on with someone else's magic? Not I. It is too late for me. Through the pain in her head, Lythande’s old watchfulness suddenly asserted itself. The ferry had moved from the shore again, and at the far shore, passengers again were streaming on its deck. Among them, among them—no, it was too far to see, but with the magical sight of the Blue Star throbbing between her brows, Lythande knew a form in a mage-robe not unlike her own. Somehow Beccolo had trailed her here.

  He did not necessarily know the laws of the shrine. All of the north-country was scattered with shrines to every god from the God of Smiths to the Goddess of Light Love. And her shrine, too, is forbidden to me, as all is forbidden save the magical arts for which I renounced all. Forbidden to men lest they know my Secret; to women, lest some man attempt to wrest it from them. . . . Beccolo probably did not know the peculiarities of the Larithae. If she could lead him into the shrine itself somehow, then would the priestesses work on him the wrath they were reputed to work on every man who found his way inside there, and then would Lythande be free of his meddling. What, indeed, would the Goddess as Larith do to any man who penetrated her shrine as Lythande had done to the Temple of the Blue Star, in disguise, wearing the garb and the guise of a sex that was not her own?

  She fought to resist the magical compulsion in her mind. The larith that had brought her all this way, almost sleepwalking, was now awake and screaming to be returned to its home, and Lythande could hear that screaming in her mind, even as her own rage and confusion fought to silence it. She could not enter the Larith's shrine as Lythande, nor as the Adept of the Blue Star, though at least if she did, Beccolo could not follow her there—or if he tried, would meet swift vengeance.

  She saw the ferry approaching the shore, and now could see with her own tired eyes, not with the magical sight, the narrow form of the Pilgrim Adept who had trailed her all this long way. The Twin Suns stood high in the sky, Keth racing Reth for the zenith, dazzling the water into brilliant swords of light that blinded Lythande's eyes with painful flame. She stepped into the market, trying to summon around herself the magical stillness, so that everywhere beneath the Twin Suns those who knew Lythande spoke of the magician's ability to appear or disappear before their very eyes.

  Most women seek to attract all men's eyes. Even before I came to the Temple of the Blue Star, I sought to turn their eyes away. Magic cannot give to any magician the thing not desired.

  And as that thought came within her mind, Lythande stood perfectly still. All the long road here, she had cursed the mischance that had led her into somebody else's magic. Yet nothing bad forced her to turn aside from her path to save the Laritha from violation; she could never have been entangled in the magic of the larith sword had something within her not consented to it. Had she turned aside from a woman's ravishment, the
n would Lythande have been supporting Chaos in the place of Law.

  Nonsense. What is a stranger woman to me? And, pain splitting her head asunder, Lythande fought the answer that came, without her consent and against her will.

  She is myself. She walks where I dare not, a woman for all to see.

  In a rage, Lythande turned aside and sought darkness between the stalls of a market. Early as it was in the day, men brawled in the shadow of a wineshop. Market women milked their goats and sold the fresh milk. A caravan master loaded protesting pack animals. In Lythande's mind, the larith sword nagged, knowing its home was not far.

  Could she send it now by some unwitting traveler bound for the shrine? She could not enter. She need not. Perhaps now she could seek a binding-spell that would return it home, or an unbinding-spell, now that the larith was in its own country, to free her of its curse, as she had freed herself of the curse of being no more than woman when the Blue Star was set between her brows. She had performed the most massive unbinding-spell of all, culminating in that day when she had been doom-set to live forever as what she had pretended to be. This lesser unbinding-spell should be simple by comparison with that.

  From here she could survey, unseen, the upward road to the shrine of the Larithae. Women went upward, seeking whatever mysterious comfort they could have from that Goddess; they led goats to the shrine, whether for sacrifice or to sell milk Lythande neither knew or cared. She fancied that among them she could see the young girl of the ferry, who had come to offer herself to the Goddess, and Lythande found herself following, in her mind, that young girl whose name she would never know.