Arvath sensed that her mood was not entirely angelic, and it made him even more constrained. "I have come to ask—to claim—your promise. . . ."
"As is your right," Domaris acknowledged formally, stifling with the attempt to control her breathing.
Arvath's impetuous hands went out and he clasped her close to him. "O beloved! May I claim you tonight before the Vested Five?"
"If you wish," she said, almost indifferently. One time was no worse than another. Then the old Domaris came back for a moment in a burst of impulsive sincerity. "O Arvath, forgive me that I—that I bring you no more than I can give," she begged, and briefly clung to him.
"That you give yourself is enough," he said tenderly.
She looked at him, with a wise sorrow in her eyes but said nothing.
His arms tightened around her demandingly. "I will make you happy," he vowed. "I swear it!"
She remained passive in his embrace; but Arvath knew, with a nagging sense of futility, that she was unstirred by the torment that swept him. He repeated, and it sounded like a challenge, "I swear it—that I will make you forget!"
After an instant, Domaris put up her hands and freed herself from him; not with any revulsion, but with an indifference that filled the man with apprehension . . . Quickly he swept the disturbing thought aside. He would awaken her to love, he thought confidently—and it never occurred to him that she was far more aware of love's nature than he.
Still, he had seen the momentary softening of pity in her eyes, and he knew enough not to press his advantage too far. He whispered, against her hair, "Be beautiful for me, my wife!" Then, brushing her temple with a swift kiss, he left her.
Domaris stood for a long minute, facing the closed door, and the deep pity in her eyes paled gradually to a white dread. "He's—he's hungry," she breathed, and a hidden trembling started and would not be stilled through her entire body. "How can I—I can't! I can't! Oh. Micon, Micon!"
Chapter Two
THE FEVER
I
That summer, fever raged in the city called the Circling Snake. Within the Temple precincts, where the Healers enforced rigid sanitary laws, it did not strike; but in the city itself it worked havoc, for a certain element of the population was too lazy or too stupid to follow the dictates of the priests.
Riveda and his Healers swept through the city like an invading army, without respect for plague or persons. They burned the stinking garbage heaps and the festering, squalid tenements; burned the foetid slave-huts of cruel or stupid owners who allowed men to live in worse filth than beasts. Invading every home, they fumigated, cleaned, nursed, isolated, condemned, buried, or burned, daring even to enter homes where the victims were already rotten with the stink of death. They cremated the corpses—sometimes by force, where caste enjoined burial. Wells suspected of pollution were tested and often sealed, regardless of bribes, threats. and sometimes outright defiance. In short, they made themselves an obnoxious nuisance to the rich and powerful whose neglect or viciousness had permitted the plague to spread in the first place.
Riveda himself worked to exhaustion, nursing cases whom no one else could be persuaded to approach, out-bullying fat city potentates who questioned the value of his destructive mercy, sleeping in odd moments in houses already touched by death. He seemed to walk guarded by a series of miracles.
Deoris, who had served her novitiate in the Healers sponsored by her kinsman Cadamiri, met Riveda one evening as she stepped out for a moment from a house where she, with another Priestess, had been caring for the sick of two families. The woman of the house was out of danger, but four children had died, three more lay gravely ill, and another was sickening.
Seeing her, Riveda crossed the street to give her a greeting. His face was lined and very tired, but he looked almost happy, and she asked why.
"Because I believe the worst is over. There are no new cases in the North Quarter today, and even here—if the rains hold off three days more, we have won." The Adept looked down at Deoris; effort had put years into her face, and her beauty was dimmed by tiredness. Riveda's heart softened, and he said with a gentle smile, "I think you must be sent back to the Temple, my child; you are killing yourself."
She shook her head, fighting temptation. It would be heavenly comfort to be out of this! But she only said, stubbornly, "I'll stay while I'm needed."
Riveda caught her hands and held them. "I'd take you myself, child, but I'd not be allowed inside the gates, for I go where contagion is worst. I can't return until the epidemic is over, but you . . . " Suddenly, he caught her against him in a hard, rough embrace. "Deoris, you must go! I won't have you ill, I won't take the chance of losing you too!"
Startled and confused, Deoris was stiff in his arms; then she loosened and clung to him and felt the tickly stubble of his cheek against her face.
Without releasing her, he straightened and looked down, his stern mouth gentle. "There is danger even in this. You will have to bathe and change your clothing now—but Deoris, you're shivering, you can't be cold in this blistering heat?"
She stirred a little in his arms. "You're hurting me," she protested.
"Deoris!" said Riveda, in swift alarm, as she swayed against him.
The girl shivered with the violent cold that crawled suddenly around her. "I—I am all right," she protested weakly—but then she whispered. "I—I do want to go home," and slipped down, a shivering, limp little huddle in Riveda's arms.
II
It was not the dreaded plague. Riveda diagnosed marsh-fever, aggravated by exhaustion. After a few days, when they were certain there was no danger of contagion, they allowed her to be carried to the Temple in a litter. Once there, Deoris spent weeks that seemed like years, not dangerously ill, but drowsily delirious; even when the fever finally abated, her convalescence was very gradual, and it was a long time before she began to take even the most languid interest in living again.
The days flickered by in brief sleeps and half-waking dreams. She lay watching the play of shadows and sunlight on the walls, listening to the babble of the fountains and to the musical trilling of four tiny blue birds that chirped and twittered in a cage in the sunlight—Domaris had sent them to her. Domaris sent messages and gifts nearly every day, in fact, but Domaris herself did not come near her, though Deoris cried and begged for her for days during her delirium. Elara, who tended Deoris night and day, would say only that Arvath had forbidden it. But when the delirium was gone, Deoris learned from Elis that Domaris was already pregnant, and far from well; they dared not risk the contagion of even this mild fever. At learning this, Deoris turned her face to the wall and lay without speaking for a whole day, and did not mention her sister again.
Arvath himself came often, bringing the gifts and the loving messages Domaris sent. Chedan paid brief, shy, tongue-tied visits almost every day. Once Rajasta came, bearing delicate fruits to tempt her fastidious appetite, and full of commendation for her work in the epidemic.
When memory began to waken in her, and the recollection of Riveda's curious behavior swam out of the bizarre dreams of her delirium, she asked about the Adept of the Grey-robes. They told her Riveda had gone on a long journey, but secretly Deoris believed they lied, that he had died in the epidemic. Grief died at the source; the well-springs of her emotions had been sapped by the long illness and longer convalescence, and Deoris went through the motions of living without much interest in past, present, or future.
It was many weeks before they allowed her to leave her bed, and months before she was permitted to walk about in the gardens. When, finally, she was well enough, she returned to her duties in the Temple of Caratra—more or less, for she found them all conspiring to find easy and useless tasks which would not tax her returning strength. She devoted much of her time to study as she grew stronger, attending lectures given to the apprentice healers even though she could not accompany them in their work. Often she would steal into a corner of the library to listen from afar to the discussions of the Prie
sts of Light. Moreover, as the Priestess Deoris, she was now entitled to a scribe of her own; it was considered more intelligent to listen than to read, or the hearing could be more completely concentrated than the sight.
On the evening of her sixteenth birthday, one of the Priestesses had sent Deoris to a hill overlooking the Star Field, to gather certain flowers of medicinal value. The long walk had taxed her strength, and she sat down for a moment to rest before beginning the task when, suddenly, raising her head, she saw the Adept Riveda walking along the sunlit path in her direction. For a moment she could only stare. She had been so convinced of his death that she thought momentarily that the veil had thinned, that she saw not him but his spirit . . . then, convinced she was not having hallucinations after all, she cried out and ran toward him.
Turning, he saw her and held out his arms. "Deoris," he said, and clasped her shoulders with his hands. "I have been anxious about you, they told me you had been dangerously ill. Are you quite recovered?" What he saw as he looked down into her face evidently satisfied him.
"I—I thought you were dead."
His rough smile was warmer than usual. "No, as you can see, I am very much alive. I have been away, on a journey to Atlantis. Perhaps some day I will tell you all about it . . . I came to see you before I left, but you were too ill to know me. What are you doing here?"
"Gathering shaing flowers."
Riveda snorted. "Oh, a most worthy use of your talents! Well, now I have returned, perhaps I can find more suitable work for you. But at the moment I have errands of my own, so I must return you to your blossoms." He smiled again. "Such an important task must not be interrupted by a mere Adept!"
Deoris laughed, much cheered, and on an impulse Riveda bent and kissed her lightly before going on his way. He could not himself have explained the kiss—he was not given to impulsive actions. As he hastened toward the Temple, Riveda felt curiously disturbed, remembering the lassitude in the girl's eyes. Deoris had grown taller in the months of her illness, although she would never be very tall. Thin and frail, and yet beautiful with a fragile and wraithlike beauty, she was no longer a child, and yet she was hardly a woman. Riveda wondered, annoyed with himself for the direction his thoughts took, how young Chedan stood with his lovemaking. No, he decided, that is not the answer. Deoris had not the look of a girl mazed by the wakening of passion, nor the consciousness of sex that would have been there in that case. She had permitted his kiss, as innocently as a small child.
Riveda did not know that Deoris followed him with her eyes until he was quite out of sight, and that her face was flushed and alive again.
Chapter Three
CHOICE AND KARMA
I
The night was falling, folding like soft and moonless wings of indigo over the towered roofs of the Temple and the ancient city which lay beneath it, smothered in coils of darkness. A net of dim lights lay flung out over the blackness, and far away a pale phosphorescence hung around the heavier darkness of the sea-harbor. Starlight, faint and faulty, flickered around the railings which outlined the roof-platform of the great pyramid and made a ghostly haze around the two cloaked figures who stood there.
Deoris was shivering a little in the chilly breeze, holding, with lifted hands, the folds of her hooded cloak. The wind tugged at them, and finally she threw back the hood and let the short heavy ringlets of her hair blow as they would. She felt a little scared, and very young.
Riveda's face, starkly austere in the pallid light, brooded with a distant, inhuman calm. He had not spoken a single word since they had emerged onto the rooftop, and her few shy attempts to speak had been choked into silence by the impassive quiet of his eyes. When he made an abrupt movement, she started in sudden terror.
He leaned on the railing, one clenched hand supporting the leaning blackness of his body and said, in tones of command, "Tell me what troubles you, Deoris."
"I don't know," Deoris murmured. "So many new things are coming at once." Her voice grew hard and tight. "My sister Domaris is going to have another baby!"
Riveda stared a moment, his eyes narrowing. "I knew that. What did you expect?"
"Oh, I don't know. . . ." The girl's shoulders drooped. "It was different, somehow, with Micon. He was . . ."
"He was a Son of the Sun," Riveda prompted gently, and there was no mockery in his voice.
Deoris looked up, almost despairing. "Yes. But Arvath—and so soon, like animals—Riveda, why?"
"Who can say?" Riveda replied, and his voice dropped, sorrowful and confiding. "It is a great pity. Domaris could have gone so far. . . ."
Deoris lifted her eyes, eager, mute questions in them.
The Adept smiled, a very little, over her head. "A woman's mind is strange, Deoris. You have been kept in innocence, and cannot yet understand how deeply the woman is in subjugation to her body. I do not say it is wrong, only that it is a great pity." He paused, and his voice grew grim. "So. Domaris has chosen her way. I expected it, and yet. . . ." He looked down at Deoris. "You asked me, why. It is for the same reason that so many maidens who enter the Grey Temple are saji, and use magic without knowing its meaning. But we of the Magicians would rather have our women free, make them SA#kti SidhA#na—know you what that is?"
She shook her head, dumbly.
"A woman who can use her powers to lead and complement a man's strength. Domaris had that kind of strength, she had the potentiality . . ." A significant pause. "Once."
"Not now?"
Riveda did not answer directly, but mused, "Women rarely have the need, or the hunger, or the courage. To most women, learning is a game, wisdom a toy—attainment, only a sensation."
Timidly, Deoris asked, "But is there any other way for a woman?"
"A woman of your caste?" The Adept shrugged. "I have no right to advise you—and yet, Deoris . . .
Riveda paused but a moment—yet the mood was shattered by a woman's cry of terror. The Adept whirled, swift as a hunting-cat; behind him Deoris started back, her hands at her throat. At the corner of the long stairway, she made out two white-robed figures and a crouching, grey and ghostly form which had suddenly risen before them.
Riveda rapped out several words in an alien tongue, then spoke ceremoniously to the white robes: "Be not alarmed, the poor lad is harmless. But his wits are not in their seat."
Clinging to Rajasta's arm, Domaris murmured in little gasps. "He rose out of the shadows—like a ghost."
Riveda's strong warm laughter filled the darkness. "I give you my word he is alive, and harmless." And this last, at least, was proven, for the grey-clad chela had scuttled away into the darkness once again and was lost to their sight. Riveda continued, his voice holding a deep deference exaggerated to the point of mockery, "Lord Guardian, I greet you; this is a pleasure I had ceased to expect!"
Rajasta said with asperity, "You are too courteous, Riveda. I trust we do not interrupt your meditations?"
"No, for I was not alone," Riveda retorted suavely, and beckoned Deoris to come forward. "You are remiss, my lady," he added to Domaris, "your sister has never seen this view, which is not a thing to be missed on a clear night."
Deoris, holding her hood about her head in the wind, looked sullenly at the intruders, and Domaris slipped her arm free of Rajasta's and went to her. "Why, if I had thought, I would have brought you up here long ago," Domaris murmured, her eyes probing her sister's closely. In the instant before the chela had risen up to terrify her, she had seen Riveda and Deoris standing very close together, in what had looked like an embrace. The sight had sent prickles of chill up her spine. Now, taking her sister's hand, she drew Deoris to the railing. "The view from here is truly lovely, you can see the pathway of the moon on the sea. . . ." Lowering her voice almost to a whisper, she murmured, "Deoris, I do not want to intrude on you, but what were you talking about?"
Riveda loomed large beside them. "I have been discussing the Mysteries with Deoris, my lady. I wished to know if she has chosen to walk in the path which her sister
treads with such great honor." The Adept's words were courteous, even deferential, but something in their tone made Rajasta frown.
Clenching his fists in almost uncontrollable anger, the Priest of Light said curtly, "Deoris is an apprenticed Priestess of Caratra."
"Why, I know that," Riveda said, smiling. "Have you forgotten, it was I who counselled her to seek Initiation there?"
Forcing his voice to a deliberate calm, Rajasta answered, "Then you showed great wisdom, Riveda. May you always counsel as wisely." He glanced toward the chela, who had reappeared some distance away. "Have you found as yet any key to what is hidden in his soul?"
Riveda shook his head. "Nor found I anything in Atlantis which could rouse him. Yet," he paused and said, "I believe he has great knowledge of magic. I had him in the Chela's Ring last night."