Soldier of the Mist

Soldier of the Mist Page 3

"Do you understand it?" I asked in wonder.

"Of course. Most of it, at least. Very likely even this child does."

Io shook her head. "I wasn't listening when the priest explained."

"Actually," Pindaros told her, "I provided more of the explanation than he did, thus drawing this trip upon myself; people suppose that poets have all of time at their disposal, a sort of endless summer."

I said, "I feel I have none, or only today. Then it will be gone."

"Yes, I suppose you do. And I'll have to interpret the god again for you tomorrow."

I shook my head. "I'll write it down."

"Of course. I'd forgotten about your book. Very well then. The first phrase is 'Look under the sun, if you would see.' Do you understand that?"

"I suppose it means I should read my scroll. That's best done by daylight, as you pointed out to me a moment ago."

"No, no! When sun appears in the utterances of the sibyl, it always refers to the god. So that phrase means that the light of understanding comes from him; it's one of his best-known faculties. The next,

'Sing! Make sacrifice to me!' means that you are to please him if you wish for understanding. He's the god of music and poetry, so everyone who writes or recites poetry, for example, thereby sacrifices to him; he only accepts rams and rubbish of that sort from boors and the bourgeois, who have nothing better to offer him. Your sacrifice is to be song, and it would be well for you to keep that in mind."

I told him I would try.

"Then there's 'But you must cross the narrow sea.' He's an eastern god, having come to us from the Tall Cap Country, and he's symbolized by the rising sun. Thus that's where you're to make your sacrifice."

I nodded, feeling relieved that I would not have to sing at once.

"On to the next stanza. 'The wolf that howls has wrought you woe!' The god informs us that you've been injured by one whose symbol is the wolf, and points out that the wolf is one of nature's singers - thus the form of your sacrifice, if you are to be healed. 'To that dog's mistress you must go!'

Aha!"

Pindaros pointed a finger dramatically at the sky. "Here, in my humble opinion, is the single most significant line in the whole business. It is a goddess who has injured you - a goddess whose symbol is the wolf. That can only be the Great Mother, whom we worship under so many names, most of which mean mother, or earth, or grain-giver, or something of that sort. Furthermore, you are to visit a temple or shrine of hers. But there are many such shrines - which is it? Very conveniently the god tells us: 'Her hearth burns in the room below.' That can only be the famous oracle at Lebadeia, not far from here, which is in a cavern. Furthermore, since we wouldn't want to use the coast road with the ships of Thought prowling the Gulf, it lies on the safest road to the Empire and the Tall Cap Country, which clinches it. You must go there and beg her forgiveness for the injury you did her that caused her to injure you. Only when you've done that will the god be able to cure you - otherwise he would make an enemy of her by doing so, which he understandably doesn't want."

"What about the next line?" I asked. "Who is the God Unseen?"

Pindaros shook his head. "That I can't tell you. There was a shrine to the Unknown God in Thought, and that's surely Death's Country now that the army's destroyed everything again. But let's wait and see.

Very often in these affairs, you have to complete the first step before you really understand the next. My guess is that when you've visited the Great Mother in Trophonius's Cave, everything will be clear. Not that it's possible for a mortal - "

Io shouted, "Look down there!" her child's voice so shrill that the black man sat bolt upright. She was shielding her eyes against the sun, which was now rising above the lake. I rose to look, and many of the other soldiers stopped what they were doing to follow the direction of her eyes, so that our part at least of the whole great encampment fell silent.

Music came, very faintly, from the shores of the lake, and a hundred people or more capered there in a wild dance. Goats were scattered among them, and these skipped like the dancers, made nervous, perhaps, by two tame panthers.

"It's the Kid," Pindaros whispered, and he motioned for me to come with him.

Io caught my hand as we joined the stream of soldiers going to the lake for water. "Are we invited to their party?" I told her I did not know.

Over his shoulder Pindaros said, "You're on a pilgrimage. It wouldn't do to offend him."

And so we trooped down the gentle hillside to the lake shore through sweet spring grass and blooming flowers, Pindaros leading, Io clasping my hand, and the black man scowling as he followed some distance behind us. The rising sun had turned the lake to a sheet of gold, and the dawn wind cast aside her dark garments and decked herself in a hundred perfumes. Behind us, the trumpets of the Great King's army sounded again, but though many of the soldiers hurried back to follow them, we did not.

"You look happy, master," Io said, turning her little face up to mine.

"I am," I told her. "Aren't you?"

"If you are. Oh, yes!"

"You said you were brought to the god's house as an offering. Weren't you happy there?"

"I was afraid," she admitted. "Afraid they'd cut my neck j like they do the poor animals, and today I've been afraid the god sent me to you to be a sacrifice someplace else. Do they kill little children for this Great Mother the poet is taking us to see?"

"I've no idea, Io; but if they do, I won't let them kill you. No matter how I may have injured her, nothing could justify such a sacrifice."

"But suppose you have to do it to find your home and your friends?"

"Was it because I wanted to find those things so much that I came to the god's house?"

"I don't know," Io said pensively. "My old master and some other men made you come, I think.

Anyway, you were there when the steward brought me. But we sat together for a little while, and you talked to me about them."

Her eyes left mine for the line of celebrants that traced the shore. "Latro, look at them dance!"

I did. They leap and whirl, splashing in the shallows, watering the grass with their flying feet and with the wine they drink and pour out even as they dance. The shrilling of the syrinx and the insistent thudding of the tympanon seem louder now. Though masked men leap among them, the dancers are mostly young women, naked or nearly so save for their wild, disordered hair.

Io has joined them, and with her the black man and Pindaros, but I watch only little Io. How gay she is with the vine crown twined round her head, and yet how intent on imitating the frenzy of the hebetic girls, the nation of children left far behind her for so long as the dance lasts.

Pindaros and the black man and I have left it forever, though once long ago it must have been friends and home to them. As for me - though I have left it too, it seems near; and it holds the only home and the only friends I can remember.

Chapter 4 Awakened by Moonlight

I tried to read this scroll; but though the moon shone so brightly that my hand cast a sharp shadow on the pale papyrus, I could not make out the shadowy letters. A woman slept beside me, naked as I, and like me wet with dew. I saw her shiver, the swelling of her thigh and the curve of her hip more lovely than I would have thought anything could be; and yet she did not wake.

I looked about for something with which to cover her, for it seemed to me that we two would surely not have thrown ourselves upon the grass, thus to sleep with no covering where so many others slept too.

My manhood had risen at the sight of - oh! - her. I was ashamed by it, so that I wished a covering for myself, also, but there was nothing.

Water glimmered not far off. I went to wash myself, feeling that I had just started from a dream, and that if only I could cool my face I would recall who the woman was and how I came to lie upon the grassy bank with her.

I waded out until the water was higher than my waist; it was warmer than the dew and made me feel I was drawing a blanket about me. Splashing my face, I discovered that my head was swathed in cloth. I tried to pull these wrappings away, but the effort seared like a brand, so that I desisted at once.

Whether it was the water or the pain that awakened me a second time I cannot say, but I found that though the dreams I had half recalled were gone, nothing replaced them. The murmuring water lapped my chest. Above, the moon shone like a white lamp hung to guide some virgin home, and when I looked toward the bank again I saw her, as pure as the moonlight, a bow bent like the increscent moon in her hand and arrows thrust through the cestus at her waist. For a long while, she picked her way among the sleepers on the bank. At last she mounted the hill beyond, and at its very summit vanished.

Now came the sun, striking diamonds from the opalescent crest of each little wave. It seemed to me I saw it as I had seen it rise across the lake before (for I could see by daylight that the water was indeed a lake), though I could not say when. Since then I have read parts of this scroll, and I understand that better.

Even as the moon had awakened me, the sunlight seemed to rouse the rest, who stood and yawned and looked about. I waded back to the bank then, sorry I had stayed to watch the virgin with the bow and not sought farther for some covering for the woman who had slept with me. She slept still, and 1 cast the shards of the broken wine jar that lay beside her into the lake. Beside this scroll, I discovered a chiton among weapons and armor I felt were mine, and I covered the woman with it.

A grave man of forty years or so asked me if I was of his nation, and when I denied it, said, "But you are no barbarian - you speak our tongue." He was as naked as I, but he had a crown of ivy in place of my own head wrappings; he held a slender staff of pine, tipped with a pinecone.

"Your speech is clear to me," I said. "But I cannot tell you how it came to be so. I ... am here. That is all I know."

A child who had been listening said, "He does not remember. He is my master, priest."

"Ah!" The priest nodded to himself. "So it is with many. The God in the Tree wipes clean their minds.

There is no guilt."

"I don't think it was your god," the child told him solemnly. "I think it was the Great Mother, or maybe the Earth Mother or the Pig Lady."

"They are the same, my dear," the priest told her kindly. "Come and sit down. You are not too young to understand." He seated himself on the grass. At his gesture, the child sat before him, and I beside her.

"By your accent, you are from our seven-gated city of Hill, are you not?" She nodded.

"Think then of such a man as you must often have seen in the city. He is a potter, we will say. He is also the father of a daughter much like yourself, the husband of such a woman as you shall be, and the son of another. When our men march to war, he takes up his helmet, his hoplon, and his spear; he is a shieldman. Now answer this riddle for me. Which is he? Shieldman, son, husband, father, or potter?"

"He's all of them," the child said. "Then how will you address him when you speak to him? Assuming you do not know his name?" The child was silent.

"You will address him according to the place in which you and he find yourselves and the need you have for him, will you not? If you meet him on the drill field, you will say, 'Shieldman.' In his shop, you will say, 'Potter, how much for this dish?'

"You see, my dear, there are many gods, but not so many as ignorant people suppose. So with your goddess, whom you call the Lady of the Swine. When we wish her to bless our fields, we call her the Grain Goddess. But when we think of her as the mother of all the things that spring from the soil, trees as well as barley, wild beasts as well as tame, Great Mother."

The child said, "I think they ought to tell us their names."

"They have many. That is one of the things I would like to teach you, if I can. Were you to go to Riverland, as I went once, you would find the Great Mother there, though the People of the River do not speak of her as we do. A god - or a goddess - must have a name suitable for the tongue of each nation."

"The poet said your god was the Kid," the child told him.

"There you have a perfect example." The priest smiled. "This poet of whom you speak called him the Kid when he spoke to you, and was quite correct to do so. A moment ago, I myself called him the God in the Tree, which is also correct - Why this is extraordinary! Most extraordinary!"

Turning to look where he did, I saw a man as black as the night coming toward us. He was as naked as we, but he carried a spear tipped with twisted horn.

"As I have often told the maenads and satyrs of his train, such rites as we performed yesterday bring the god nearer. Now here is such proof as to be almost miraculous. Come and sit with us, my friend."

The black man squatted and feigned to drink.

"He wants more wine," the child said.

"He does not speak our tongue?"

"I think he understands a little, but he never says anything. Probably somebody laughed once when he tried."

The priest smiled again. "You are wise beyond your years, my dear. My friend, we have no more wine. What we had was drunk last night to the honor of the god, or poured out in libations. If you wish to drink this morning, your drink must be of water." He cupped his hand and turned it over as if pouring wine onto the ground, then pointed to the lake.

The black man nodded to show he understood but remained where he was.

"I was about to say," the priest continued, "when the unfathomable powers of the god produced our friend as an illustration, that our god is commonly called the King from Nysa. Do you, either of you, know where Nysa lies?"

The child and I admitted we did not.

"It is in the country of the black men, up the river of Riverland. Our god was conceived when the Descender noticed in his travels a certain Semele, a princess, daughter of the king of our own seven-gated city. We were a monarchy in those days, you see." He cleared his throat. "The Descender disguised himself as a king merely earthly, and visiting her father's palace as a royal guest won her, though they did not wed."