They were all immodestly stripped, but that was nothing new to Deoris except for the careless mingling of castes. Some wore curious girdles or pectorals on their young bodies, engraved with symbols that looked vaguely obscene to the still relatively innocent Deoris; one or two were tattooed with even older symbols, and the scraps of conversation which she caught were incredibly frank and shameless. One girl, a darker beauty with something about her eyes that reminded Deoris of traders from Kei-Lin, glanced at Deoris as she shyly divested herself of the saffron veils Riveda had asked her to wear, then asked Demira an indecent question which made Deoris want to sink through the earth; suddenly she realized what the old slave woman had meant by her taunts.
Demira only murmured an amused negative, while Deoris stared, wanting to cry, not understanding that she was simply being teased in the traditional fashion for all newcomers. Why did Riveda throw me in with these—these harlots! Who are they to mock me? She set her lips proudly, but she felt more like bursting into tears.
Demira, ignoring the teasing, bent over the edge of the pool and, dipping up water in her palms, with murmured words, began swiftly to go through a stylized and conventional ritual of purification, touching lips and breasts, in a ritual so formalized that the symbols had all but lost their original form and meaning, and done swiftly, as if from habit. Once finished, however, she led Deoris to the water and in an undertone explained the symbolic gestures.
Deoris cut her short in surprise: it was similar in form to the purification ceremonies imposed on a Priestess of Caratra—but the Grey-robe version seemed an adaptation so stylized that Demira herself did not seem to understand the meaning of the words and gestures involved. Still, the similarity did a great deal to reassure Deoris. The symbolism of the Grey-robe ceremonies was strongly sexual, and now Deoris understood even more. She went through the brief lustral rite with a thoroughness that somehow calmed and assuaged her feeling of defilement.
Demira looked on with respect, struck into a brief gravity by the evident deep meaning Deoris gave to what was, for Demira, a mere form repeated because it was required.
"Let's go back at once," Demira said, once Deoris had finished. "You were in the Ring, and that can exhaust you terribly. I know." With eyes too wise for her innocent-seeming face, she studied Deoris. "The first time I was in the Ring, I did not recover my strength for days. They took me out tonight because Riveda was there."
Deoris eyed the child curiously as the old slave woman came and wrapped Demira in a sheetlike robe; enveloped Deoris in another. Had not Riveda himself flung Demira out of the Ring, that first time, that faraway and disastrous visit to the Grey Temple? What has Riveda to do with this nameless brat? She felt almost sick with jealousy.
III
Demira smiled, a malicious, quirky smile as they came back into the bare little room. "Oho, now I know why Riveda begged me to look after you! Little innocent Priestess of Light, you are not the first with Riveda, nor will you be the last," she murmured in a mocking sing-song. Deoris angrily pulled away, but the child caught her coaxingly and hugged her close with an astonishing strength—her spindly little body seemed made of steel springs. "Deoris, Deoris," she crooned, smiling, "be not jealous of me! Why, I am of all women the one forbidden Riveda! Little silly! Has Karahama never told you that I am Riveda's daughter?"
Deoris, unable to speak, looked at Demira with new eyes—and now she saw the resemblance: the same fair hair and strange eyes; that impalpable, indefinable alienness.
"That is why I am placed so that I may never come near him in the rites," Demira went on. "He is a Northman of Zaiadan, and you know how they regard incest—or do you?"
Deoris nodded, slowly, understanding. It was well known that Riveda's countrymen not only avoided their sisters, but even their half-sisters, and she had heard it said that they even refused to marry their cousins, though Deoris found this last almost beyond belief.
"And with the symbols there—oh!" Demira bubbled on confidingly, "It has not been easy for Riveda to be so scrupulous!"
As the old woman dressed them and brought them food—fruits and bread, but no milk, cheese, or butter—Demira continued, "Yes, I am daughter to the great Adept and Master Magician Riveda! Or at least it pleases him to claim me, unofficially, for Karahama will almost never admit she knows my father's name . . . she was saji too, after all, and I am a child of ritual." Demira's eyes were mournful. "And now she is Priestess of Caratra! I wish—I wish . . ." She checked herself and went on swiftly, "I shamed her, I think, by being born nameless, and she does not love me. She would have had me exposed on the city wall, there to die or be found by the old women who deal in girl-brats, but Riveda took me the day I was born and gave me to Maleina; and when I was ten, they made me saji."
"Ten!" Deoris repeated, shocked despite her resolve not to be.
Demira giggled, with one of her volatile shifts of mood. "Oh, they tell some awful stories about us, don't they? At least we saji know everything that goes on in the Temple! More than some of your Guardians! We knew about the Atlantean Prince, but we did not tell. We never tell but a particle of what we know! Why should we? We are only the no people, and who would listen to us but ourselves, and we can hardly surprise one another any more. But I know," she said, casually but with a mischievous glance, "who threw the Illusion on you, when you first came to the Grey Temple." She bit into a fruit and chewed, watching Deoris out of the corner of her eye.
Deoris stared at her, frozen, afraid to ask but half desperate to know, even as she dreaded the knowledge.
"It was Craith—a Black-robe. They wanted Domaris killed. Not because of Talkannon, of course."
"Talkannon?" Deoris whispered in mute shock. What had her father to do with this?
Demira shrugged and looked away nervously. "Words, words, all of it—only words. I'm glad you didn't kill Domaris, though!"
Deoris was by now utterly aghast. "You know all this?" she said, and her voice was an unrecognizable, rasping whisper in her own ears.
Whatever slight malice had motivated Demira, it was vanished now. She put out a tiny hand and slipped it into Deoris's nerveless one. "Oh, Deoris, when I was only a little girl I used to steal into Talkannon's gardens and peep at you and Domaris from behind the bushes! Domaris is so beautiful, like a Goddess, and she loved you so much—how I used to wish I were you! I think—I think if Domaris ever spoke kindly to me—or at all!—I would die of joy!" Her voice was lonely and wistful, and Deoris, more moved than she knew, drew the blonde head down on her shoulder.
Tossing her feathery hair, Demira shook off the moment of soberness. The gleam came back to her eyes as she went on, "So I wasn't sorry for Craith at all! You don't know what Riveda was like before that, Deoris—he was just quiet and scholarly and didn't come among us for months at a time—but that turned him into a devil! He found out what Craith had done and accused him of meddling with your mind, and of a crime against a pregnant girl." She glanced quickly at Deoris and added, in explanation, "Among the Grey-robes, you know, that is the highest of crimes."
"In the Temple of Light, too, Demira."
"At least they have some sense!" Demira exclaimed.
"Well, Riveda said, 'These Guardians let their victims off too easily!' And then he had Craith scourged—whipped almost to death before he ever delivered him over to the Guardians. When they met to judge him, I slipped a grey smock over my saji dress, and went with Maleina—" She gave Deoris another wary little glance. "Maleina is an Initiate of some high order, I know not what, but none can deny her anywhere, I think she could walk into the chapel of Caratra and draw dirty pictures on the wall if she wanted to, and no one would dare to do anything! It was Maleina, you know, who freed Karahama from her bondage and arranged for her to enter the Mother's Temple. . . ." Demira shuddered suddenly. "But I was speaking of Craith. They judged him and condemned him to death; Rajasta was terrible! He held the mercy-dagger, but did not give it to Craith. And so they burned him alive to avenge Domaris—and
Micon!"
Trembling, Deoris covered her face with her hands. Into what world have I, by my own act, come?
IV
But the world of the Grey Temple was soon familiar to Deoris. She continued, occasionally, to serve in the House of Birth, but most of her time was spent now among the Healers, and she soon began to think of herself almost exclusively as a Grey-robe priestess.
She was not accepted among them very soon, however, or without bitter conflict. Although Riveda was their highest Adept, the titular head of their Order, his protection hindered more than helped her. In spite of his surface cordiality, Riveda was not a popular man among his own sect; he was withdrawn and remote, disliked by many and feared by all, especially the women. His stern discipline was over-harsh; the touch of his cynical tongue missed no one, and his arrogance alienated all but the most fanatic.
Of the whole Order of Healers and Magicians, only Demira, perhaps, really loved him. To be sure, others revered him, respected him, feared him—and heartily avoided him when they could. To Demira, however, Riveda showed careless kindness—entirely devoid of paternal affection, but still the closest to it that the motherless and fatherless child had ever known. In return, Demira gave him a curious worshipping hate, that was about the deepest emotion she ever wasted on anything.
In the same mixed way, she championed Deoris among the saji. She quarrelled constantly and bitterly with Deoris herself, but would permit no one else to speak a disrespectful word. Since everyone was afraid of Demira's unpredictable temper and her wild rages—she was quite capable of choking a girl breathless or of clawing at her eyes in one of these blind fits of fury—Deoris won a sort of uneasy tolerance. Also, for some reason, Deoris became very fond of Demira in quite a short time, though she realized that the girl was incapable of any very deep emotion, and that it would be safer to trust a striking cobra than the volatile Demira at her worst.
Riveda neither encouraged nor disparaged this friendship. He kept Deoris near him when he could, but his duties were many and varied, and there were times when the Ritual of his Order forbade this; Deoris began to spend more and more time in the curious half-world of the saji women.
She soon discovered that the saji were not shunned and scorned without good reason. And yet, as Deoris came to know them better, she found them pathetic rather than contemptible. A few even won her deep respect and admiration, for they had strange powers, and these had not been lightly won.
Once, off-handedly, Riveda had told Deoris that she could learn much from the saji, although she herself was not to be given the saji training.
Asked why, he had responded, "You are too old, for one thing. A saji is chosen before maturity. And you are being trained for quite a different purpose. And—and in any case I would not risk it for you, even if I were to be your sole initiator. One in every four . . ." He broke off and shrugged, dismissing the subject; and Deoris recalled, with a start of horror, the tales of madness.
The saji, she knew now, were not ordinary harlots. In certain rituals they gave their bodies to the priests, but it was by rite and convention, under conditions far more strict, although very different, than the codes of more honored societies. Deoris never understood these conventions completely, for on this one subject Demira was reticent, and Deoris did not press her for details. In fact, she felt she would rather not be too certain of them.
This much Demira did tell her: in certain grades of initiation, a magician who sought to develop control over the more complex nervous and involuntary reactions of his body must practice certain rites with a woman who was clairvoyantly aware of these psychic nerve centers; who knew how to receive and return the subtle flow of psychic energy.
So much Deoris could understand, for she herself was being taught awareness like these magicians, and in much the same way. Riveda was an Adept, and his own mastery was complete; his full awareness worked like a catalytic force in Deoris, awakening clairvoyant powers in her mind and body. She and Riveda were physically intimate—but it was a strange and almost impersonal intimacy. Through the use of controlled and ritualistic sex, a catalyst in its effects on her nerves, he was awakening latent forces in her body, which in turn reacted on her mind.
Deoris underwent this training in full maturity, safeguarded by his concern for her, guarded also by his insistence on discipline, moderation, careful understanding and lengthy evaluation of every experience and sensation. Her early training as a Priestess of Caratra, too, had played no small part in her awakening; had prepared her for the balanced and stable acquisition of these powers. How much less and more this was than the training of a saji, she learned from Demira.
Saji were, indeed, chosen when young—sometimes as early as in their sixth year—and trained in one direction and for one purpose: the precocious and premature development along psychic lines.
It was not entirely sexual; in fact, that came last in their training, as they neared maturity. Still, the symbolism of the Grey-robes ran like a fiercely phallic undercurrent through all their training. First came the stimulation of their young minds, and excitement of their brains and spirits, as they were subjected to richly personal spiritual experiences which would have challenged a mature Adept. Music, too, and its laws of vibration and polarity, played a part in their training. And while these seeds of conflict flourished in the rich soil of their untrained minds—for they were purposely kept in a state little removed from ignorance—various emotions and, later, physical passions were skillfully and precociously roused in their still-immature minds and bodies. Body, mind, emotion, and spirit—all were roused and kept keyed to a perpetual pitch, restless, over-sensitized to a degree beyond bearing for many. The balance was delicate, violent, a potential of suppressed nervous energy.
When the child so trained reached adolescence, she became saji. Literally overnight, the maturing of her body freed the suppressed dynamic forces. With terrifying abruptness the latent potentials became awareness in all the body's reflex centers; a sort of secondary brain, clairvoyant, instinctive, entirely psychic, erupted into being in the complicated nerve ganglions which held the vital psychic centers: the throat, solar plexus, womb.
The Adepts, too, had this kind of awareness, but they were braced for the shock by the slow struggle for self-mastery, by discipline, careful austerities, and complete understanding. In the saji girls it was achieved by violence, and through the effort of others. The balance, such as it was, was forced and unnatural. One girl in four, when she reached puberty, went into raving madness and died in convulsive nerve spasms. The sudden awakening was an inconceivable thing, referred to, among those who had crossed it, as The Black Threshold. Few crossed that threshold entirely sane. None survived it unmarred.
Demira was a little different from the others; she had been trained not by a priest, but by the woman Adept Maleina. Deoris was to learn, in time, something of the special problems confronting a woman who travelled the Magician's path, and to discount as untrue most of the tales told of Maleina—untrue because imagination can never quite keep pace with a truth so fantastic.
The other girls trained by Maleina had exploded, at puberty, into a convulsive madness which soon lapsed into drooling, staring idiocy . . . but Demira, to everyone's surprise, had crossed The Black Threshold not only sane, but relatively stable. She had suffered the usual agonies, and the days of focusless delirium—but she had awakened sane, alert, and quite her normal self . . . on the surface.
She had not escaped entirely unscathed. The days of that fearful torment had made of her a fey thing set apart from ordinary womanhood. Close contact with Maleina, as well—and Deoris learned this only slowly, as the complexity of human psychic awareness, in its complicated psycho-chemical nervous currents, became clear to her—had partially reversed, in Demira, the flow of the life currents. Deoris saw traces of this return each month, as the moon waned and dwindled: Demira would grow silent, her volatile playfulness disappear; she would sit and brood, her catlike eyes veiled, and sometimes she wou
ld explode into unprovoked furies; other times she would only creep away like a sick animal and curl up in voiceless, inhuman torture. No one dared go near Demira at such times; only Maleina could calm the child into some semblance of reason. At such times, Maleina's face held a look so dreadful that men and women scattered before her; a haunted look, as if she were torn by some emotion which no one of lesser awareness could fathom.
Deoris, with the background of her intuitive knowledge, and what she had learned in the Temple of Caratra about the complexity of a woman's body, eventually learned to foresee and to cope with, and sometimes prevent these terrible outbursts; she began to assume responsibility for Demira, and sometimes could ward off or lighten those terrible days for the little girl—for Demira was not yet twelve years old when Deoris entered the Temple. She was hardened and precocious, a pitifully wise child—but for all that, only a child; a strange and often suffering little girl. And Deoris warmed to this little girl in a way that was eventually to prove disastrous for them all.
Chapter Seven
THE MERCY OF CARATRA