The Tombs of Atuan Page 8

“He has no powers, down here. Take him there, Manan.”

  So Manan lugged him back, half again as far as they had come, too laboring and breathless to protest. When they entered the Painted Room at last, Arha took off her long, heavy winter cloak of wool, and laid it on the dusty floor. “Put him on that,” she said.

  Manan stared in melancholy consternation, wheezing. “Little mistress—”

  “I want the man to live, Manan. He’ll die of the cold, look how he shakes now.”

  “Your garment will be defiled. The Priestess’s garment. He is an unbeliever, a man,” Manan blurted, his small eyes wrinkling up as if in pain.

  “Then I shall burn the cloak and have another woven! Come on, Manan!”

  At that he stooped, obedient, and let the prisoner flop off his back onto the black cloak. The man lay still as death, but the pulse beat heavy in his throat, and now and then a spasm made his body shiver as it lay.

  “He should be chained,” said Manan.

  “Does he look dangerous?” Arha scoffed; but when Manan pointed out an iron hasp set into the stones, to which the prisoner could be fastened, she let him go fetch a chain and band from the Room of Chains. He grumbled off down the corridors, muttering the directions to himself; he had been to and from the Painted Room before this, but never by himself.

  In the light of her single lantern the paintings on the four walls seemed to move, to twitch, the uncouth human forms with great drooping wings, squatting and standing in a timeless dreariness.

  She knelt and let water drop, a little at a time, into the prisoner’s mouth. At last he coughed, and his hands reached up feebly to the flask. She let him drink. He lay back with his face all wet, besmeared with dust and blood, and muttered something, a word or two in a language she did not know.

  Manan returned at last, dragging a length of iron links, a great padlock with its key, and an iron band which fitted around the man’s waist and locked there. “It’s not tight enough, he can slip out,” he grumbled as he locked the end link onto the ring set in the wall.

  “No, look.” Feeling less fearful of her prisoner now, Arha showed that she could not force her hand between the iron band and the man’s ribs. “Not unless he starves longer than four days.”

  “Little mistress,” Manan said plaintively, “I do not question, but . . . what good is he as a slave to the Nameless Ones? He is a man, little one.”

  “And you are an old fool, Manan. Come along now, finish your fussing.”

  The prisoner watched them with bright, weary eyes.

  “Where’s his staff, Manan? There. I’ll take that; it has magic in it. Oh, and this; this I’ll take too.” And with a quick movement she seized the silver chain that showed at the neck of the man’s tunic, and tore it off over his head, though he tried to catch her arms and stop her. Manan kicked him in the back. She swung the chain over him, out of his reach. “Is this your talisman, wizard? Is it precious to you? It doesn’t look like much, couldn’t you afford a better one? I shall keep it safe for you.” And she slipped the chain over her own head, hiding the pendant under the heavy collar of her woolen robe.

  “You don’t know what to do with it,” he said, very hoarse, and mispronouncing the words of the Kargish tongue, but clearly enough.

  Manan kicked him again, and at that he made a little grunt of pain and shut his eyes.

  “Leave off, Manan. Come.”

  She left the room. Grumbling, Manan followed.

  That night, when all the lights of the Place were out, she climbed the hill again, alone. She filled her flask from the well in the room behind the Throne, and took the water and a big, flat, unleavened cake of buckwheat bread down to the Painted Room in the Labyrinth. She set them just within the prisoner’s reach, inside the door. He was asleep, and never stirred. She returned to the Small House, and that night she too slept long and sound.

  In early afternoon she returned alone to the Labyrinth. The bread was gone, the flask was dry, the stranger was sitting up, his back against the wall. His face still looked hideous with dirt and scabs, but the expression of it was alert.

  She stood across the room from him where he could not possibly reach her, chained as he was, and looked at him. Then she looked away. But there was nowhere particular to look. Something prevented her speaking. Her heart beat as if she were afraid. There was no reason to fear him. He was at her mercy.

  “It’s pleasant to have light,” he said in the soft but deep voice, which perturbed her.

  “What’s your name?” she asked, peremptory. Her own voice, she thought, sounded uncommonly high and thin.

  “Well, mostly I’m called Sparrowhawk.”

  “Sparrowhawk? Is that your name?”

  “No.”

  “What is your name, then?”

  “I cannot tell you that. Are you the One Priestess of the Tombs?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you called?”

  “I am called Arha.”

  “The one who has been devoured—is that what it means?” His dark eyes watched her intently. He smiled a little. “What is your name?”

  “I have no name. Do not ask me questions. Where do you come from?”

  “From the Inner Lands, the West.”

  “From Havnor?”

  It was the only name of a city or island of the Inner Lands that she knew.

  “Yes, from Havnor.”

  “Why did you come here?”

  “The Tombs of Atuan are famous among my people.”

  “But you’re an infidel, an unbeliever.”

  He shook his head. “Oh no, Priestess. I believe in the powers of darkness! I have met with the Unnamed Ones, in other places.”

  “What other places?”

  “In the Archipelago—the Inner Lands—there are places which belong to the Old Powers of the Earth, like this one. But none so great as this one. Nowhere else have they a temple, and a priestess, and such worship as they receive here.”

  “You came to worship them,” she said, jeering.

  “I came to rob them,” he said.

  She stared at his grave face. “Braggart!”

  “I knew it would not be easy.”

  “Easy! It cannot be done. If you weren’t an unbeliever you’d know that. The Nameless Ones look after what is theirs.”

  “What I seek is not theirs.”

  “It’s yours, no doubt?”

  “Mine to claim.”

  “What are you then—a god? a king?” She looked him up and down, as he sat chained, dirty, exhausted. “You are nothing but a thief!”

  He said nothing, but his gaze met hers.

  “You are not to look at me!” she said shrilly.

  “My lady,” he said, “I do not mean offense. I am a stranger, and a trespasser. I do not know your ways, nor the courtesies due the Priestess of the Tombs. I am at your mercy, and I ask your pardon if I offend you.”

  She stood silent, and in a moment she felt the blood rising to her cheeks, hot and foolish. But he was not looking at her and did not see her blush. He had obeyed, and turned away his dark gaze.

  Neither spoke for some while. The painted figures all around watched them with sad, blind eyes.

  She had brought a stone jug of water. His eyes kept straying to that, and after a time she said, “Drink, if you like.”

  He hitched himself over to the jug at once, and hefting it as lightly as if it were a wine cup, drank a long, long draft. Then he wet a corner of his sleeve, and cleaned the grime and bloodclot and cobweb off his face and hands as best he could. He spent some while at this, and the girl watched. When he was done he looked better, but his cat-bath had revealed the scars on one side of his face: old scars long healed, whitish on his dark skin, four parallel ridges from eye to jawbone, as if from the scraping talons of a huge claw.

  “What is that?” she said. “That scar.”

  He did not answer at once.

  “A dragon?” she said, trying to scoff. Had she not come down here to make m
ock of her victim, to torment him with his helplessness?

  “No, not a dragon.”

  “You’re not a dragonlord, at least, then.”

  “No,” he said rather reluctantly, “I am a dragonlord. But the scars were before that. I told you that I had met with the Dark Powers before, in other places of the earth. This on my face is the mark of one of the kinship of the Nameless Ones. But no longer nameless, for I learned his name, in the end.”

  “What do you mean? What name?”

  “I cannot tell you that,” he said, and smiled, though his face was grave.

  “That’s nonsense, fool’s babble, sacrilege. They are the Nameless Ones! You don’t know what you’re talking about—”

  “I know even better than you, Priestess,” he said, his voice deepening. “Look again!” He turned his head so she must see the four terrible marks across his cheek.

  “I don’t believe you,” she said, and her voice shook.

  “Priestess,” he said gently, “you are not very old; you can’t have served the Dark Ones very long.”

  “But I have. Very long! I am the First Priestess, the Reborn. I have served my masters for a thousand years and a thousand years before that. I am their servant and their voice and their hands. And I am their vengeance on those who defile the Tombs and look upon what is not to be seen! Stop your lying and your boasting, can’t you see that if I say one word my guard will come and cut your head off your shoulders? Or if I go away and lock this door, then nobody will come, ever, and you’ll die here in the dark, and those I serve will eat your flesh and eat your soul and leave your bones here in the dust?”

  Quietly, he nodded.

  She stammered, and finding no more to say, swept out of the room and bolted the door behind her with a clang. Let him think she wasn’t coming back! Let him sweat, there in the dark, let him curse and shiver and try to work his foul, useless spells!

  But in her mind’s eye she saw him stretching out to sleep, as she had seen him do by the iron door, serene as a sheep in a sunny meadow.

  She spat at the bolted door, and made the sign to avert defilement, and went almost at a run toward the Undertomb.

  While she skirted its wall on the way to the trapdoor in the Hall, her fingers brushed along the fine planes and traceries of rock, like frozen lace. A longing swept over her to light her lantern, to see once more, just for a moment, the time-carven stone, the lovely glitter of the walls. She shut her eyes tight and hurried on.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE GREAT TREASURE

  NEVER HAD THE RITES AND duties of the day seemed so many, or so petty, or so long. The little girls with their pale faces and furtive ways, the restless novices, the priestesses whose looks were stern and cool but whose lives were all a secret brangle of jealousies and miseries and small ambitions and wasted passions—all these women, among whom she had always lived and who made up the human world to her, now appeared to her as both pitiable and boring.

  But she who served great powers, she the priestess of grim Night, was free of that pettiness. She did not have to care about the grinding meanness of their common life, the days whose one delight was likely to be getting a bigger slop of lamb fat over your lentils than your neighbor got. . . . She was free of the days altogether. Underground, there were no days. There was always and only night.

  And in that unending night, the prisoner: the dark man, practicer of dark arts, bound in iron and locked in stone, waiting for her to come or not to come, to bring him water and bread and life, or a knife and a butcher’s bowl and death, just as the whim took her.

  She had told no one but Kossil about the man, and Kossil had not told anyone else. He had been in the Painted Room three nights and days now, and still she had not asked Arha about him. Perhaps she assumed that he was dead, and that Arha had had Manan carry the body to the Room of Bones. It was not like Kossil to take anything for granted; but Arha told herself that there was nothing strange about Kossil’s silence. Kossil wanted everything kept secret, and hated to have to ask questions. And besides, Arha had told her not to meddle in her business. Kossil was simply obeying.

  However, if the man was supposed to be dead, Arha could not ask for food for him. So, aside from stealing some apples and dried onions from the cellars of the Big House, she did without food. She had her morning and evening meals sent to the Small House, pretending she wished to eat alone, and each night took the food down to the Painted Room in the Labyrinth, all but the soups. She was used to fasting for a day on up to four days at a time, and thought nothing about it. The fellow in the Labyrinth ate up her meager portions of bread and cheese and beans as a toad eats a fly: snap! it’s gone. Clearly he could have done so five or six times over; but he thanked her soberly, as if he were her guest and she his hostess at a table such as she had heard of in tales of feasts at the palace of the Godking, all set with roast meats and buttered loaves and wine in crystal. He was very strange.

  “What is it like in the Inner Lands?”

  She had brought down a little cross-leg folding stool of ivory, so that she would not have to stand while she questioned him, yet would not have to sit down on the floor, on his level.

  “Well, there are many islands. Four times forty, they say, in the Archipelago alone, and then there are the Reaches; no man has ever sailed all the Reaches, nor counted all the lands. And each is different from the others. But the fairest of them all, maybe, is Havnor, the great land at the center of the world. In the heart of Havnor on a broad bay full of ships is the City Havnor. The towers of the city are built of white marble. The house of every prince and merchant has a tower, so they rise up one above the other. The roofs of the houses are red tile, and all the bridges over the canals are covered in mosaic work, red and blue and green. And the flags of the princes are all colors, flying from the white towers. On the highest of all the towers the Sword of Erreth-Akbe is set, like a pinnacle, skyward. When the sun rises on Havnor it flashes first on that blade and makes it bright, and when it sets the Sword is golden still above the evening, for a while.”

  “Who was Erreth-Akbe?” she said, sly.

  He looked up at her. He said nothing, but he grinned a little. Then as if on second thoughts he said, “It’s true you would know little of him here. Nothing beyond his coming to the Kargish lands, perhaps. And how much of that tale do you know?”

  “That he lost his sorcerer’s staff and his amulet and his power—like you,” she answered. “He escaped from the High Priest and fled into the west, and dragons killed him. But if he’d come here to the Tombs, there had been no need of dragons.”

  “True enough,” said her prisoner.

  She wanted no more talk of Erreth-Akbe, sensing a danger in the subject. “He was a dragonlord, they say. And you say you’re one. Tell me, what is a dragonlord?”

  Her tone was always jeering, his answers direct and plain, as if he took her questions in good faith.

  “One whom the dragons will speak with,” he said, “that is a dragonlord, or at least that is the center of the matter. It’s not a trick of mastering the dragons, as most people think. Dragons have no masters. The question is always the same, with a dragon: will he talk with you or will he eat you? If you can count upon his doing the former, and not doing the latter, why then you’re a dragonlord.”

  “Dragons can speak?”

  “Surely! In the Eldest Tongue, the language we men learn so hard and use so brokenly, to make our spells of magic and of patterning. No man knows all that language, or a tenth of it. He has not time to learn it. But dragons live a thousand years. . . . They are worth talking to, as you might guess.”

  “Are there dragons here in Atuan?”

  “Not for many centuries, I think, nor in Karego-At. But in your northernmost island, Hur-at-Hur, they say there are still large dragons in the mountains. In the Inner Lands they all keep now to the farthest west, the remote West Reach, islands where no men live and few men come. If they grow hungry, they raid the lands to their east; but
that is seldom. I have seen the island where they come to dance together. They fly on their great wings in spirals, in and out, higher and higher over the western sea, like a storming of yellow leaves in autumn.” Full of the vision, his eyes gazed through the black paintings on the walls, through the walls and the earth and the darkness, seeing the open sea stretch unbroken to the sunset, the golden dragons on the golden wind.

  “You are lying,” the girl said fiercely, “you are making it up.”

  He looked at her, startled. “Why should I lie, Arha?”

  “To make me feel like a fool, and stupid, and afraid. To make yourself seem wise, and brave, and powerful, and a dragonlord and all this and all that. You’ve seen dragons dancing, and the towers in Havnor, and you know all about everything. And I know nothing at all and haven’t been anywhere. But all you know is lies! You are nothing but a thief and a prisoner, and you have no soul, and you’ll never leave this place again. It doesn’t matter if there’s oceans and dragons and white towers and all that, because you’ll never see them again, you’ll never even see the light of the sun. All I know is the dark, the night underground. And that’s all there really is. That’s all there is to know, in the end. The silence, and the dark. You know everything, wizard. But I know one thing—the one true thing!”

  He bowed his head. His long hands, copper-brown, were quiet on his knees. She saw the fourfold scar on his cheek. He had gone farther than she into the dark; he knew death better than she did, even death. . . . A rush of hatred for him rose up in her, choking her throat for an instant. Why did he sit there so defenseless and so strong? Why could she not defeat him?

  “This is why I have let you live,” she said suddenly, without the least forethought. “I want you to show me how the tricks of sorcerers are performed. So long as you have some art to show me, you’ll stay alive. If you have none, if it’s all foolery and lies, why then I’ll have done with you. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very well. Go on.”

  He put his head in his hands a minute, and shifted his position. The iron belt kept him from ever getting quite comfortable, unless he lay down flat.