Hart's Hope Page 4

  Sleeve enclosed her in the folds of his own robe, so that no one could see the naked body of the little Queen. Little Queen, thought Asineth. I will remember the name he called me, she told herself. He will know someday who is little, and who is great. Are you the strongest of all men, so strong that you can be merciful to me, a weak woman? Here is the undoing of your strength: I am not a weak woman. I am not a Little Queen. And your mercy will be your undoing. You will regret leaving me alive, and someday you will remember possessing me, and yearn to possess me again.

  What was the third lesson that Asineth learned? She told me herself, many times, when she dwelt in your palace and you hopelessly wandered the forests of Burland.

  Asineth learned that justice could be cruel, and crueler yet necessity, but mercy was the cruelest thing of all. That would be useful to her. She would remember that. That is why she left you alive for three centuries when she had the power to kill you whenever she wished. As the Godsmen say, no act of mercy goes unrewarded. Ah, Palicrovol, will you not learn that mercy is as good as the person to whom the mercy is given? You spared Asineth, who should have died; now you will not spare Orem Scanthips, called Banningside, whose good heart should be born a hundred thousand times upon the earth. Are you like Asineth? Will you learn all your lessons backward?

  3

  The Descent of Beauty

  This is how Beauty came into the world, struggling to find her true image among many faces.

  THE PRIESTESS OF BRACK

  The wizard fisher came in a smallish craft and without greeting built his hut on an unused place at the bottom end of the bay. The other fishermen of Brack eyed him carefully. His ship was too slow for a pirate, which was just as well—a pirate would starve on what he could steal from their fishing boats. His ship was rigged for just one man, and from the look of him he was not a sailor. So it was not jealousy that made them fear him. It was the way he kept himself covered in all weathers, as if he feared the sun; it was the stark white hair of his head, the gleam of pink in his eye like a crazed treehopper; it was his secret way. He knew more than they did, knew more than the wind as it teased the sea, knew more than the air-breathing octopus that spread himself on the water, knew more than the priestess of the Sweet Sisters who tended her burning stones at the point of the bay.

  “What is he?” the fishermen asked their wives. “Who is he?” the wives asked the priestess. She touched the hot obsidian; the flesh of her finger sizzled; and she looked deep into her pain and said, “He rules by the power of blood. He finds shelter from storms in the open ocean. He finds shoals that make no whitecaps on the sea. He can dip into salt and bring up fair water. And the fish follow him dreaming, dreaming.”

  A wizard then, but not to be dreaded. So they took to watching him respectfully, and in a matter of weeks they learned that he meant to be kind. For if they followed him out to sea in the early hours before dawn, he would sail in his clumsy fashion for an hour or so, then stop and cast in his net. If the fishermen cast in their nets at that time, they found nothing. But if they waited until his net was full, if they watched as he laboriously brought it aboard, then he would sail back home, and they could then dip their nets into the sea and catch well, every day that they followed him, boats full to the brim with fish on some days, and never a day that the fish escaped entire.

  So the coming of the pink-eyed wizard brought good to Brack. Not that they ever became friendly with the man. It’s never good to mingle with folk who draw their power from the living blood. Besides, even if they had lost all their fear of the wizard fisherman, there was his daughter.

  It seemed at first that she hardly knew she was a woman. She never left his side, and when he drew in his heavy nets, there she was beside him, pulling on her side, and pulling well—when the fishermen still thought she was a lad, they praised the boy among themselves for his hard work, if not for his skill. They knew soon enough that she was a woman, though. If the wizard dressed too much under the hot sun of the southern sea, his daughter dressed too little, wearing dungarees like a man, and casting away her shirt when the day was blazing, until back and breast alike were burnt dark: She seemed at first to care nothing for their gaze; as time passed, however, they began to think she was something of a wanton, shedding her clothing deliberately, so they would see her. They saw how her breasts grew fuller and more sluggishly pendulous as she worked. They saw how her belly swelled. She could not be more than a year or two into womanhood, and yet she was full of a child.

  Whose child? When at last the fisherman’s daughter had her confinement, it was not hard to guess. The wizard fisherman had come in the end of autumn, only weeks after the coronation of the King, and the babe was being born now, well into the new autumn. Ten months. The child must have been conceived since the little ship first came into the bay of Brack, and the father of the child could only be the child’s grandfather as well. It was a terrible thing, but the ways of those who buy their power from the living blood are not to be questioned.

  The priestess of the Sweet Sisters knew better, however. She, too, could count the months, but when she poured tears, sweat, and sea-water drops on the hot pumice, they beaded up and stayed, skittering for a moment, then drifting across the rough stone like a fleet of sailboats in a bay, runing for her the message of the Sweet Sisters to this watcher by the sea. It was no incestuous child that would be born, but a daughter whose blood was filled with awesome power: a ten-month child ruled by the moon from her birth.

  What should I do? asked the priestess, terrified.

  But the water evaporated at last, leaving thin trails of salt upon the stone. It was not for her to do anything, only to watch, only to know.

  Some of the wives saw the fear in her face as the priestess looked across the water to the wizard fisherman and the hut where the babe already crawled in the sand.

  “Should we drive them away?” asked one.

  “Wizards come and go as they like,” said the priestess. “The Sweet Sisters do not ban, they quicken what they find in the world.”

  “Should we leave, then?” asked another.

  “Do your men come home with empty boats or full?” asked the priestess in return. “Does the wizard do you good or ill?”

  “Then why,” asked another woman, “why are you afraid?”

  And the priestess caressed the quartz crystal at her throat and professed not to know.

  At last the priestess could bear no more. She got onto her feeble raft and poled her way across the placid water of the bay until she beached before the wizard’s hut. The fisherman’s daughter was playing with her child in the cool afternoon of early spring. She looked up curiously at the priestess who picked her way along the kelpy sand. The babe, too, looked up. The priestess avoided the baby’s eyes—a ten-month child is not to be caught in the gaze of a stranger—and so stared instead at the mother. She was younger than the priestess had thought, watching her from a distance. She might have been the babe’s sister. Her eyes were hot and challenging, cold and curious, and for the first time it occurred to the priestess that the mother might be more dangerous than the child.

  But it was the wizard she had come to see, not the women, and so the priestess of the Sweet Sisters went to the door of the hut, pushed aside the flap, and went inside.

  “Close the flap!” barked the wizard. “I could go blind from the sunlight, coming sudden like that.” When the flap was back in place, the pink-eyed fisherman stopped squinting. “You,” he said. “Took your sweet time about coming.”

  “I need a good day on the sea,” said the priestess. “I rarely travel.”

  “You witches, who use the dead blood, you don’t ever seem to have much life in you at all.”

  “Out of death comes new life,” she answered. “And out of living blood comes old death.”

  “May be true. I don’t much care, actually. You women never teach us your rite, and you may be sure it’s a fool who teaches a woman ours.”

  She looked around the h
ut and saw that it was better equipped with books than with the tools of fishing. “Where do you mend your nets?” she asked.

  “They never break,” he answered. “Child’s play.”

  “The child must die,” said the priestess.

  “Must she?”

  “A ten-month child is too powerful to stay in the world. You must know that.”

  “I’ve never studied the lore of births and bindings,” confessed the wizard. “There’s not much use a man can make of it anyway. I’ll look it up, though, now that you’ve mentioned it.”

  “I’ve come to do it for you.”

  “No,” said the wizard.

  “You cannot use the blood. It would consume you.”

  “I do not intend to use or not use the blood. I don’t intend the child to die.”

  “My tears stayed forever on the pumice.”

  “It’s not in my right to decide. The father of the child extends his protection over the girl and over her little one. Both will live.”

  “A wizard who draws the fish up from the sea, and you let the father of the child keep you from acting for the safety of the world?”

  “The child’s mother loves her.”

  The priestess saw that he did not mean to listen to her, and so she said no more and left. As she came from the hut she looked to where the childmother and the ancient child had been playing. They were gone. And then the girl’s voice came from behind her, and the priestess knew that she had heard all that was said indoors.

  “Can a woman use the living blood?” asked the girl.

  The priestess considered the question, and shuddered. “No,” she said, and walked quickly away. And all the way across the bay she cursed herself for coming to see them: for the girl had asked the question that no decent-hearted woman would ask, and the priestess feared the girl was wise enough to know that her answer was a lie. There were living bloods that a woman could use, but no woman who was not a viper ever would. Let her not use them, she prayed all night, washing her hair again and again in the tidewater that lapped against her skirts. Forgive me for having raised the possibility in her mind, and undo my day’s work.

  THE CAREFUL WIZARD

  Warned by the witch, Sleeve watched the babe more carefully. He had had little to do with children in his life, and so he had not kept track of how quickly the infant was learning things, how bright her mind seemed to be, until now. And now he began to find the passages in his books and pore over them, trying to learn what it was that the witch so feared. The hints were vague and obscure, and Sleeve grew more and more frustrated with his books. They spoke so little of women’s magic, for only men wrote and read these works. The ten-month child—they dreaded her, it was plain, and called for the child to die at birth, its blood poured out upon mouldering vegetation. But why the child was so dangerous they did not bother to explain, not in so many words.

  All the while the child grew. In spite of his fears, Sleeve found himself liking the little one; even more surprising, he liked Asineth as well. She was not just enduring captivity, but thriving in it. Her habit of fishing with him bare-breasted was annoying, since it was obviously meant to discredit him with the local fishermen, but now that she had the child, she seemed alert and alive and the hate left her face for hours, for days at a time. Asineth was no more friendly with Sleeve, but she babbled on with the child.

  “What will you name her?” asked Sleeve.

  “Let the father name her,” she answered coldly.

  “He never will.”

  “Then let her go unnamed,” she said. That was the only sign that she had not forgotten her woes. No matter how much her love for her daughter cheered her, she would not name the child.

  “Is it fair to punish the child because you hate her father?” asked Sleeve. Then he heard his own words, realized that it was a question Nasilee’s daughter might well have asked him, and left the conversation alone after that.

  The visit from the witch undid him, really, though no doubt the woman thought her mission a failure. Sleeve had been growing contented there on the edge of the sea. Even though Asineth almost never spoke to him and the fishermen shunned him, still this life was the least solitary he had ever been. The fleet of little ships that put out to sea with him in the morning—they were a comfort to him. Though his fragile skin could not bear the sunlight, so that he remained forever clothed against the eyes of the other fishermen, still there was friendship in this: that his arms knew what their arms knew, that he lived as they did with the smell of fish and salt spray and sunlight hard on the wood of the boat. For the first time in his life, he felt at one with other men, and if they could not match his wit, they were still brothers of the flesh. Asineth and the child had been a comfort, too; he had almost come to understand the home-feeling that he had always despised because it turned other men weak.

  Well, it turned him weak, too. Weak—or careless, anyway. Not that he was not alert to some things. He read all day until his eyes ached, trying to discover the menace of a ten-month child. Then he slept, letting his mind study again in dreams. Then he went out before dawn, leaving mother and child asleep, and the kettle of fish simmering on the fire. He would sail alone now, let down and haul up the nets alone. All the while he fancied he was studying out the problem. In fact he was only thinking about it now and then. Most of the time he was thinking a fisherman’s thoughts. Sometimes he even wondered if he would not have been better off to be born a fisherman than to have lived as he had, following the blood of the Hart.

  What he never noticed was that Asineth spent all morning every day inside the hut, reading whatever he had read, studying also to learn women’s magic from the books that were written to men. What he never guessed was that she knew enough of the Sweet Sisters’ lore that things that meant nothing to him meant much to her. Every book began with a page of warnings to guard these secrets, especially against the prying eyes of women—but Sleeve was careless of women, since only men had ever tried to steal knowledge from him. It did not occur to him that Asineth could understand what was written there.

  On a day late in summer, when the child was nearing her first yearday, Sleeve finally understood a passage that had long eluded him. It was while he was on the boat, feeling the rhythm of wind and current with his feet, his buttocks, and his arms; suddenly he trembled with discovery and nearly capsized himself as the jib went flying. Only one person had anything to fear from a ten-month child, and that was the child’s mother. Sleeve turned about at once and tacked back into the harbor, right among the fleet of fishermen who scrambled to maneuver their boats out of the way. They asked him for no explanation, and he did not offer any. True, the infant had done no harm till now, but now that Sleeve knew the truth he would not delay in taking precautions. It would not do to report to Palicrovol that Asineth had died because Sleeve had to finish his day’s fishing before getting back to save her life.

  Sleeve did not know that Asineth matched his reading day by day, and that she, too, discovered what he knew. She understood even more, however, much more, and when Sleeve got back to the hut, Asineth and the child were gone.

  He tried to follow her afoot, but she lost him in the rocky hills behind the shore. He bled himself copiously to buy power enough to search magically for her, but his searching eye could not see her. He knew then that he had moved too late. The infant already understood some of her powers.

  It was only when he realized that four of his books were missing that he first suspected that it was not the infant, not the daughter of Asineth and Palicrovol who was thwarting his search. It was Asineth herself, for the babe could not yet read. He cursed himself for having let her study what it was his duty to protect. But beyond that, there was nothing he could do. And so he waited, and built up his strength against the return of his adversary. He was not sure just how strong women’s magic might be, and he wanted to be sure of the victory in case the contest proved to be a difficult one. He was almost pleased at the prospect—he had not had a diffi
cult battle in decades, for there was no wizard that he knew of in the world who was a match for him.

  On the tenth night of his waiting, a woman called him from outside the hut. It was a voice that he did not recognize at once, but when he saw her face, even by the light of the cookfire he knew her.

  “Berry,” he said. “I thought that you were dead.”

  She smiled and raised her eyebrows. “And I had no idea that you knew her.”

  So this woman who wore Berry’s flesh was not Berry at all. “Asineth,” he whispered. It was a bad sign, if she had the power of changing shapes to such a degree that it fooled even him.

  “Asineth?” she asked. “I do not know her.”

  “Who are you, then?”

  “I am Beauty,” she answered. “I am the most powerful of all the gods.” With a single perfect, graceful motion she was naked. “Am I not perfect, Sleeve?”

  “You are,” he freely admitted. To see Berry’s body again, so perfectly recreated—Asineth could not have known that he had been Berry’s lover long before Nasilee had her, but the sight of Berry there on the beach unnerved him as no other ploy could have. Still, Sleeve was not one to be completely distracted by his own memories of love. “You are perfect—but you are not a god.”

  “Am I not? I came from battle to you, Sleeve,” she said. “I had learned so much, and I had to try it out. First I challenged the brute Hart, for I thought he would be easiest to rule. I was wrong, for my first battle was the worst of all, and he nearly won, and as it was I still fear him a little. But no matter—he is in chains at the root of the world, and you will have no help from him.”

  She was mad, of course. To challenge the Hart and win—absurd.

  “The Sweet Sisters next, for I had a quarrel with them. I was surprised at how easily they bowed—they have no weapons for the kind of war I wage. They have been born into the most amusing bodies, and in flesh they will stay, bound up as long as I want them there.”