me theyâd dieâbut theyâre alive! She made them live!â
Darakâs face set hard and contemptuous. He too spat, and turned down the street to a side alley, pushing the crowd out of the way. His bandits shouldered after him, and the girls ran to keep up. The murmuring was growing all around. I went up the steps and into the temple before they could move about me and close me in.
I pulled the broken screen against the door opening, and lay on the pallet, on my side, my knees drawn up, my hands under my chin, and against my lips the green smooth thing that was made mine, and seemed like a beginning.
* * *
Night came and blackened the world, and red stars ripped their places in the sky. I would go tonight, out, across the wide lands. Nothing mattered but the green promise. Even Darak seemed nothing at that dark twilight. But then the need of food came, unexpectedly, and with it nausea at the thought of eating, and the shrinking from the inevitable pain that would come after, and torture and slow me, and keep me from going away. How long had it lasted before? An hour, or two perhaps? Not so bad. I could bear it because I must. But it was ten days now I had not eaten.
I went out onto the steps.
A few lights flickered in open windows, in ruins, in rebuilt rooms, many in the wooden shelter Darak had had put up for the homeless. Food smells from there, thick and musky. I went that way.
Inside the narrow door fires were burning in stone rings or in iron braziers, and yellow lamps swung overhead. A big carcass was turning on a rough spit, crackling and stinking. The villagers were crowded close as if they liked this nearness to one another. Darak was not there.
As I went in the accustomed first silence slipped over them. They slid into the grooves of it with stealthy ease. I walked up the center aisle, between the fires and cook-pots. Every bit of food that I passed made me sick, but I found a caldron bubbling in a corner, and the smell of this did not repulse me so much.
âWhat is this?â I asked the girl bending over it, poised now, her mouth ajar at the sight of me.
âBroth,â she stammered, âvegetablesââ
âWill you give me some?â
She jumped around, beckoned, and a child came running up with a ladle and wooden bowl. Watched by the countless fixed eyes of the people in the shelter, and the swaying gold eyes of the lamps and candles, the girl began to fill the bowl with the ladle, once, twiceâ
âEnough,â I said. I took it, and thanked her, and at that moment a big hand knocked the bowl from my grasp, and the girl shrieked.
âDid Darak not tell you to give no food to the witch, slut?â a voice growled, guttural and menacing.
The girl took a step back. But the banditâs interest was no longer centered on her.
âSo, the immortal goddess, who sleeps for centuries under the mountain, still needs to fill her belly, eh? Darak told us youâd come here, and he said, when you came, to take you to him.â
I looked at the bandit through the eye-holes of the mask. A blank unimpressionable face. He knew their legend even, but had not been reared on it, as Darak had. I had no chance with this one.
I said: âIf Darak Gold-Fisher has need of the help of the goddess, he has only to ask. I will come with you.â
The bandit grunted and swung out, leaving me to follow.
âForgive us,â the girl whispered.
I touched her forehead with my finger, gently, as if in blessing, feeling nothing, while her face flooded with color and gratitude. Then I followed my captor.
* * *
He took me along the dark close alleys, telling me which path to follow now, and walking behind me. Here most of the buildings were flat. We passed a marketplace with broken sheep pens, and a burned tree like a huge stick of charcoal at the center. I began to hear music then, savage, bright music, instinctively tuneful and rhythmic, but with no pattern beyond an
Richard Burton, Chris Williams