Soldier of the Mist

Soldier of the Mist Page 29

"Yes," shouted the priestess and the man who had spoken before; and after them, all the people shouted, " Yes! " Then Mother Ge told them what she required of him, and the blind priestess found a sharp flint for it, searching the ground on all fours like a beast.

Twice he tried to strike but drew back his hand at the first blood. Though Mother Ge had said he need not die, his progeny died that night to ten thousand generations, and he knew it as well as I. He stood well back from Mother Ge and from me; the other slaves crowded around him, cheering him and pledging tawdry rewards - a new roof or a milch goat. I knew then that I might slip away in the dark if I chose, but I waited as fascinated as the rest.

Then there was a stroke in which there was no hesitation. His manhood came away in his hand, looking like the offal from a butcher's shop when he held it up. Someone took it from him and laid it upon the fallen altar, and he stood with legs wide apart, bleeding like a woman - or, rather, like a bull when it is made an ox. The others made him lie on the ground and stanched his flow with cobwebs and moss.

"Now hear me," Mother Ge said. She straightened her back, and it seemed that a great light shone there, a light from which her body shielded us. "This man is sacred to me as long as he lives. In payment, I will fight for you, striving to make his master, Prince Pausanias, king of this land."

The slaves muttered against these words, and a few shouted protests.

"You think him your greatest foe, but I tell you he will be your greatest friend and perhaps your king, turning his back upon his own kindred. Still he, and I, may fail. If so, I shall destroy Rope - "

Here the slaves roared so loudly I could not hear.

" - then you must rise against the Rope Makers, your scythes to cut their spears, your sickles to beat down their swords. But first, your stones against their helmets. So you defeated them on this night.

Remember it."

Then she was gone, and the clearing seemed dark and far from the lands of men. One fire was dying, the other already no more than embers. In a litter they wove of vines, half a dozen men carried away the man who had unmanned himself. Others trailed behind them, bearing the bodies of relatives killed in the fighting. Some women asked me to come with them and offered to treat my bruises, but I feared them still because of the woman I had killed, and I told them to follow their husbands. They did as I ordered, leaving me alone with the dead.

Though the billhook was not intended for digging, I was able to scratch out a small and shallow grave in the soft earth of the clearing. I buried the girl I had not saved and heaped her grave with the stones that had been flung at us. I believe one of the dead Rope Makers was Eutaktos, whom I had known in some time I have forgotten. Though I robbed several of their helmets to study their faces, I could not be sure; I had seen Eutaktos only briefly and by firelight.

Nor did I any longer know who Kore and Europa were, nor what they had once meant to me, though I could recall a time not long ago when I had known. Their names and that memory troubled me at least as much as the thought that the lion and the wolf might still be near. I muttered "Kore" and "Europa" over and over as I built up the dying fire and carried blazing sticks to reestablish the other, until at last Kore and Europa ceased to have any meaning at all for me, ceased even to be names.

Walking up and down between the fires, I waited for dawn before I made my way through the split hill. The bodies of many Rope Makers had laid on that narrow path, and there were still many bloodstains; but the slaves had dragged the bodies away, so that they lay in the shadows beneath the trees, wrapped in the green life of the oaks. I do not think the other Rope Makers will find them there.

From the place where Drakaina had taken my arm, I could see the old goddess walking the valley, a woman taller than women, at once darker and brighter than the tree tops touched by dawn. She stopped at the grave, I think, for after a time she vanished from sight and I heard her weeping.

When I had passed the split hill, I cast aside my weapon and hurried through the dew-decked fields to this camp on the bank of the Eurotas, where now I write these words in the morning sunlight. Io met me. After I had told her something of what had happened that night and she had salved my bruises and mourned with many head shakings the blow that had struck me down, she took me proudly to see Cerdon, whom she had hidden among the hay that fed our pack mules; but Cerdon had died while she slept, and already his limbs were cold and stiff.

Chapter 32 Here in Rope

Strangers viewed with the greatest suspicion. This morning Drakaina, Io, and I went to see the famous temple of Orthia. Its enclosure on the riverbank must once have been separated from the city, but now the Rope Makers have built their houses right up to the boundaries of the sacred ground. Drakaina said, "In the Empire, we wall our cities properly. When you're on one side of the wall, you're in the city; on the other, you're in the country. With all these straggling hamlets, who knows? Thought was almost as bad, but at least they had guard posts on the roads."

"The Great King tore down your walls," Io reminded her. "That's what the regent said."

Drakaina nodded. "The People from Parsa have a sense of fitness. Its walls symbolize a city, and pulling them down is the destruction of the city. Rope's been destroyed already - or let's say that it's never existed. This is just four villages; no wonder they call it scattered."

Slaves turned their faces to one side when we passed, and even the Neighbors we saw did not wish to speak with us. Rope Makers stopped us and questioned us, women as well as men, and many told us we were unwelcome. We soon learned to reply that we would gladly go elsewhere if only their regent would permit it, which silenced them quite effectively.

Drakaina shook her lovely head after one such encounter. "There's no place in the world where men are less free than they are here, and none where women are freer - save perhaps in the country of the Amazons, the women who live without men."

"Are they real?" Io asked. "Once Basias said I'd be a strategist among them."

"Of course they are." Drakaina slipped her arm through mine. "But you'll have to go far to the north and east - much farther east than my own city. And you'll have to leave Latro here with me. The Amazons don't care for foreigners any more than these Rope Makers, and they consider all men spies."

I said, "There can be no such race; they'd die out in a generation."

"They lie with the young men of the Sons of Scoloti. If they bear a girl afterward, they sear her left breast so she can use the bow. Boys buy them the favor of their goddess, or so I've heard. I admit I've never seen one of these women warriors myself."

I thought of the dream I had last night when she said that; perhaps later I will write of it here.

"There it is!" Io exclaimed, and pointed.

"About what I expected. They don't know what a real temple looks like here. Nobody could who hasn't traveled in the east, though some of these are at least beautiful. This isn't even that. In fact, if this whole city were destroyed, no one would ever guess from looking at the ruins that half the world had trembled at its name."

The temple was indeed small and very simple, its pillars mere wooden posts painted white. I took off my sword and fastened the belt around one.

Io said, "We're supposed to make an offering. See the bowl? Master, do you have any money?"

Drakaina told her, "I'll take care of it," and tossed one of the iron coins of the Rope Makers so that it rang against the bronze rim.

As we went from the brilliant sunlight of the portico into the shadowy interior, Io asked, "Where did you get that?"

"Hush!"

It was the age of the temple that impressed me most, I think, and perhaps it would be just to say that its age was the only impressive thing about it; but that made it truly a sacred place, the home built for a god when the world was young and men had not yet forgotten that when the gods are mocked they punish us by leaving us.

A priestess, white-haired but as tall as I and as straight as any spear, glided from some recess.

"Welcome," she said, "to this house in the name of the Huntress, and to this land in the name of the House of Heracles."

"It's true," I admitted, "that we're all foreigners here, madame. But we've come to Rope at the order of your regent, the great Prince Pausanias, who does not permit us to leave."

Drakaina quickly added, "We have the freedom of the city, however, and I am a priestess of your goddess."

The white-haired woman made the slightest of bows. "As such, you may sacrifice here whenever you wish. No one will prevent you. Should anyone question you, tell them you have my permission. I am Gorgo, daughter of Cleomenes, mother of Pleistarchos, and widow of Leonidas."

Drakaina began, "Then the regent is - "

"My cousin and my nephew. Would you care to see the image of the goddess?" She led us to a wooden figure, cracked and blackened by time. "She is called Orthia because she was found standing upright, just where you see her now, in the days when our forefathers conquered this land."

The bulging eyes of the statue gave it the look of a madwoman. In either hand it grasped a snake.

"The wood is cypress, which is sacred to her. The snake in her right hand is the empyreal serpent, the one in her left the chthonic serpent. She holds both and stands between them, the only god who unites heaven to earth and the lower world. When she appears here, it is most often as a snake."

Io asked, "Could she help my master? He's been cursed by the Grain Goddess."

Drakaina added, "I've already offered sacrifices to our threefold goddess on his behalf. Do you remember Basias, Io? He promised to carry a message to her." She turned back to the priestess. "And Latro is much better. His memory was taken from him, and he still can't remember; but now he acts almost as though he could."

I said, "The goddess is angry."

"Why?" Gorgo's eyes were large and cool, the rare blue eyes that shine like ice.

"I don't know. But can't you see the way she looks at Drakaina?"

Io's hand flew to her mouth to stifle a shout of nervous laughter.

"No," the priestess told me softly. "I cannot see that. But you do. What has this woman done?"

"I don't know."

Even in the dimness of the temple, I could see how white Drakaina's face was. She said, "He is mad, most reverend Queen. Pasicrates and I, and the little girl, care for him."

"Pasicrates is a fine young man, and a faithful servant of the goddess."

"As I am. If I have displeased her - "

"You will be punished."

When Gorgo said that, there was a silence that stretched so long that it became unbearable. At last Io asked, "Is this where the boys get whipped?"

"Yes, child." One corner of the priestess's mouth lifted by the width of a grain of wheat. "In this city, we girls receive much the same education as the boys, but we are spared that. Here food is placed upon the altar, and the older men stand where you are standing, and on the portico outside, and as far as the sacred precinct of the temple reaches. The boys must dash past them and take the food, then dash past again; they are beaten as they run. See the stains their blood has left on our floor? Thus they learn what women already know: that without women there is no food for men. Because they are beaten that day, they can never forget. There is a statue of the goddess at Ephesos with a hundred breasts. The lesson is the same."

Pasicrates was waiting for us when we left the temple.

"My slave said you had gone out to see the sights," he told us. "This is the first most visitors want to see."

Drakaina asked, "And are there others?"

"We do not have the wealth of Tower Hill," Pasicrates conceded as he led us away, "and yet our city is not without interest. The well I am about to show you is known these days in every civilized land."

"Really?" She smiled at him; her sharply angled face gave her smiles a disturbing quality. "Is it like the one at Hysiai, that inspires all who drink to prophesy?"

"No," Pasicrates replied. He hesitated. "I was on the point of saying it isn't a magic well at all. Except that now that I think on it, it does have power, and power of a sort you might find particularly interesting.

It changes men to women."

Io said, "It seems like everybody's turning against you, even the Huntress."

Drakaina looked so angry that I feared for Io, though she faced up to it as bravely as any child could.

Pasicrates said, "What's this? Tell me, little girl."

"Latro says the goddess is mad at her. Sometimes Latro sees things other people don't. Sometimes he sees the gods; and talks to them, too."

"How interesting. I should have asked you more about him when we met. Foolishly, I wasted my time with one Eurykles. Latro, what did you see?"

"Only that she gave Drakaina a look of fury, just as Drakaina looked at Io a moment ago."

"And it's Orthia who sends sudden death to women. What a pity you're not a man, Drakaina. Is that your true name, by the way?"

She feigned not to hear him.

"She is also the protector of young beasts and of children," Pasicrates told Io. "Did you know that?

Our boys pray to her before they are beaten, and dedicate the end of their childhood to her. Yet she favors girls more. It goes ill with anyone who harms a girl here, unless he is high in her favor."

I said, "It will go ill with anyone who hurts Io, while I live."

Pasicrates nodded. "You might well be the instrument of her justice. So might I."

We had been strolling through the city as we talked; when nothing more was said for a time, I ventured to ask about the houses, saying it seemed strange to me to see so many windows in a city of his people.

"Ah, but you've been in Thought, even if you don't remember it. There they think about being robbed.

We don't. We're too poor, and there's little here to buy." He smiled. "But here's the well. Look down.