From the Monastery of the Sapient Eye the Sakbe road wound south through familiar country. The rumpled green foothills of Do Chaka lay like old friends along the way on the right hand, the west, and the dun-coloured patchwork fields of ripening grain swept off to the horizon and beyond to mighty Bey Sii and the centre of the Empire on the left. This was the landscape Harsan knew well.
The first two days produced the expected crop of aches and blisters, but thereafter Harsan found his muscles hardening and his body becoming road-wise. Farmers and women might ride in the agonisingly slow Chlen-catts, and the aristocracy sat high in palanquins borne by trotting slaves; aside from one’s feet these two were the only methods of transportation on Tekumel. Harsan needed neither. Being able to march at the same rate as the booted traders and hard-faced soldiers somehow exhilarated him. This was the first time he had really used his limbs in all the years since the Pe Choi had brought him to the monastery, and he began to luxuriate in the rhythmic cadences of walking.
The Sakbe road thrust out before him like a triple-tongued blade of grey stone. Harsan perforce used the lowest level, a paved thoroughfare wide enough for fifteen men to march abreast. The eastern parapet stood a good two man-heights above the sunbaked fields below, while the western side was a solid wall that rose up to the next higher level, five handspans beyond Harsan’s tallest reach. The second level was narrower but smoother, and its western wall in turn ascended another spear-length up to the third and highest tier. The lowest roadway was used by anyone: merchants, peasants, work-gangs, caravans of slaves bearing the goods of the Empire, the great trundling Chlen-caits which creaked their leisurely way from city to city laden with heavier items, and common travellers such as Harsan. The middle level was reserved by custom-and by harsh Tsolyani law- for members of the aristocracy, troops, officials, and priests of the higher Circles. The uppermost level belonged to the great nobles, the highest clergy, and couriers upon the Emperor’s business.
Every few Tsan these triple roadways were blocked by a squat guard tower. Many of these were dark and empty in these days of relative peace, used by sojourners as convenient places to unroll sleeping mats and spend the night. Some were occupied by detachments of blue-armoured soldiery. These paid but perfunctory attention to a lone, grey-robed priest, and after a bored glance at Harsan’s writ, they let him be off upon his way. It had not always been so. There, where the mist-wreathed peaks of the Inner Range actually lay within the borders of Mu’ugalavya, the outer parapet of the third and highest level, buttressed and embattled like a fortress, always faced to the west, a line of defensible fortifications stretching from north to south along the frontier of the Empire. There was no war now-and had not been for over three hundred years-but there were rumblings along the border and whispers of an alliance between the “Red-Hats” of Mu’ugalavya and Baron Aid of Yan Kor.
At first he met few travellers. Most of these were peasants or townsmen, carrying goods on their backs or in Chlen — carts to some nearby market or fair. They saluted Harsan respectfully and held out a hand for him to touch in blessing. In these parts it was thought good luck to meet a priest of Thumis, or one of Thumis’ Cohort, Ketengku, the Patron of Physicians.
On the second day he passed a tax collector, a thin-lipped old man, borne in a litter by ten slaves. This august personage ignored Harsan’s greeting, though some of his retinue of scribes, record-keepers, and guards called out jocular salutations. On the second day, also, two parties of merchants overtook Harsan, their heavily laden burden-slaves jogging along at a fast trot that he could only envy.
On the third morning he encountered two cohorts of soldiers in blue-lacquered Chlen — hide armour. Some of these leaned down from the middle roadway to shout obscene but friendly greetings, and a junior officer, resplendent in helmet and breastplate, tossed down a small skin of Tumissan wine for good luck. These were troops on their way north to reinforce the Tsolyani forces on the Yan Koryani border near Khirgar.
He even met a party of Pachi Lei. This was another of the eight friendly nonhuman species which shared Tekumel with humankind. Harsan had not been this close to one of these creatures before. They were pear-shaped, soft-skinned beings, greyish-green in hue, a hand taller than a man, with four curiously articulated lower limbs for locomotion and four more, longer upper limbs for swinging in the trees of the forests of the Pan Chakan Protectorate that lay to the south of Harsan’s own Do Chakan hills. The Pachi Lei wore little more than cross-belts of untanned hide, and their leader carried a thick, short spear tipped with a barb of white bone. Harsan stared at them, and they stared back from round, platter-sized eyes, greeting him pleasantly enough in oddly accented Tsolyani and chattering amongst themselves in their own burbling tongue.
On the sixth day, footsore but nevertheless pleased with his growing stamina, Harsan reached Paya Gupa-not PA-ya Gu-PA, as the Tsolyani called it, wrongly accenting the last vowel, but PA-ya GU-pa. The name meant “Red Mountain” in the older dialect of Do Chaka, and thus it appeared: walls and towers of rufous sandstone heaped along the summit of a low hill spurring out of the Chakan forests. The houses behind the walls were whitewashed, tiled with reds and tans, and scattered like children’s blocks around the summit upon which the palace of the local governor stood.
Harsan’s writ obtained lodging at the temple of Thumis. The sect of the Master of Wisdom was very powerful here, and Lord Gamulu hiBeshyene, the Grand Adept of the Temple, made his summer headquarters in the old, grey shrine that clambered down the hill to the west.
The Proctor of the Dormitories arranged for Harsan to continue on to Tumissa and thence to Bey Sii in the company of a party of merchants. This was in itself somewhat daunting, for the capital still lay over a thousand long Tsan away. Even though Harsan felt himself capable of making thirty to forty Tsan a day, he wondered if he could keep up.
He need not have worried. Much of the cargo carried by the thirty-odd slaves of the little caravan consisted of fine pottery and the crimson crystal goblets and ewers of Mu’ugalavya. Mnesun hiArkuna, the chief of the party and owner of most of its merchandise, fussed over the packing of each reed basket and the balancing of every slave’s burden in the morning and then again over its unloading at night while the other merchants dawdled over their food and the tasks of the camp. They made little more than twenty-five Tsan a day. Harsan guessed that it would take seven days to reach Tumissa, one day more than if he had travelled alone. Yet he found the bustling routine comforting and the company of the others a reassurance.
Besides Mnesun, squat and thick-set as a river Ghar- beast, there were six in the party, not counting the slaves. Two of these were twin brothers, Mu’ugalavyani, whose goods included rare earths, perfumes, and scented oils from distant Kheiris. The third, a Salarvyani named Bejjeksa, was a trader of much experience and self-proclaimed cunning. He was now returning home with bales of finely-figured cloth and chests of soapstone carvings, products of Livyanu, the land to the south of Mu’ugalavya. The next, Hele’a of Ghaton, brought wares concealed within stoppered jars. Of these he said nothing, nor did he speak much otherwise: a small, tight, hard, little man as grey as the seas of his northern homeland. The fifth man was Sa’araz, a Livyani who affected all the airs and niceties of that nation’s aristocracy, though none could actually attest to his antecedents. He had neither chests nor bales but carried whatever it was he sold in a worn leather wallet affixed to his belt with a stout chain of rare iron.
The sixth member of the group was a nonhuman, a hulking reptilian Shen, native to the hot lands south of Livyanu, half a continent away. He traded in the flame opals of Pan Chaka and in garnets, commodities which the Shen knew were valued by humans and other races, but which they themselves held in no particular esteem. Although the Shen was friendly enough, his guttural name was unpronounceable-something between a hiss and a snarl. Harsan made do with calling him “companion,” which seemed to please the creature greatly.
It was the afternoon of the seventh day before they saw Tumissa. Once the guardian of the western marches of the Tsolyani frontier, its ponderous bastions and serried battlements had seen no fighting since the two Protectorates, Do Chaka and Pan Chaka, had been wrested from Mu’ugalavya in the great war some three hundred years before. Harsan looked upon the looming rings of concentric walls inlaid with marching rows of serpentine glyphs in the old Classical Tsolyani script, the tier upon tier of red-tiled roofs, and the dizzy turrets of the prow-like fortress which crowned the city’s westernmost hill, and would have greatly liked to spend a few days here. Others in the monastery had had much praise for Tumissa: its goods and shops, its rich palaces and mansions, its great library of hoary fame, the image called “Thumis Ascending to the Sun,” carved long ago by Marya of Tsamra, and many other wonders. They had also spoken of entertainments and displays more to the tastes of a young man-and of pretty clan-girls and courtesans and a dozen things more. But Mnesun gruffly stated that the caravan would journey forth in the morning. Lodgings were arranged outside the walls in the clanhouse of the People of the White Pebble, a mercantile clan allied by both blood and marriage to Mnesun’s own Clan of the Green Reed.
When the party gathered at dawn in the cramped courtyard to curse and coax the caravan’s slaves into wakefulness, Harsan discovered that another small group had been added.. A score of bearers and servitors in an unfamiliar clan livery stood stamping and yawning around a blue-curtained covered litter.
“We are joined by a lady,” Mnesun announced to all within hearing, “one Eyil hiVriyen, of the Green Kirtle Clan of Tumissa, who is on her way to marry her clan-cousin in Bey Sti.”
There was no sign of the occupant of the litter, and thus it remained for a six-day. The party now took the Sakbe road which branched off directly to the east, an endless three-step staircase, the highest level of which faced north towards hostile, distant Yan Kor. The foothills were left behind, dust storms lay ever along the flat horizon, and heat lightning flickered there throughout the summer evenings. All of the visible world consisted of endless fields of standing grain, plots of yellow-brown earth, lone Wes-trees, olive-drab and drooping like lost wayfarers in the tawny yellow desolation, and occasional villages of baked brick, where naked dusty peasants lifted their heads from the perpetual round of toil to watch them pass by.
The lady made but few appearances. Harsan had occasional glimpses of a tall, boyishly slender girl, attired in the embroidered open vest and slit-sided skirt preferred by the women of the western provinces. The Lady Eyil did not come to sit by their fire in the evenings but instead sent her attendant, a grim-faced peasant woman named Tsatla, to get her dinner from the common cookpots.
It had gradually come to be understood that, as the only priest in the party, Harsan would offer the prescribed libation before each meal. This he did with care, choosing words that would give no offence to worshippers of other gods than his. One evening when supper was finished and his comrades had retired to drink wine and gamble or to seek sleep, the woman Tsatla came to Harsan and said that the Lady Eyil would speak with him.
The litter lay in darkness, one curtain thrown back all along one side, forming a little three-sided room. The ochre-red glow of Kashi, Tekumel’s smaller, second moon, turned the gilded orbs of the four comer-posts into ruddy copper coins. Two of Lady Eyil’s attendants dozed upon their haunches nearby, while a little farther away her bearers lay sprawled in shadowed huddles, asleep.
“Worthy priest?” The voice was low and musical, the accent the purring, slurred speech of Tumissa. “I have troubled you that I may ask a question.”
“My lady?”
“You are a servitor of Thumis and not of my Goddess Avanthe. Yet both are of the Lords of Stability. Advise me, therefore, upon a matter of propriety.” A silhouetted hand moved within the blackness of the litter. “I grow bored riding in this conveyence day after day. My limbs ache with its jouncing, and the heat within these curtains is enough to melt even the Shield of Vimuhla, Lord of Fire.” (Harsan thought: the woman is educated, as glib as any temple priestess.) She continued, “Now tell me this: is it fitting for me to join your circle for the morning and evening meals? I wish no dishonour to my clan nor inconvenience to your merchants, yet I do yearn for a chance to move about…”
Harsan hesitated. Some northern Chakan clans, he knew, guarded their womenfolk as zealously as any heap of gold in a treasure-vault, hemming them all about with veils and guards and eunuchs. Those of the south, on the other hand, paid — little heed when their ladies walked abroad bare-breasted and bold amongst strange men. Nor, it was said, did they care overmuch about the paternity of the inevitable results. Custom in Tumissa and the western cities lay somewhere betwixt these two extremes.
He temporised. “My Lady, this must depend upon the practice of one’s clan. While some see nothing amiss in allowing a clan-daughter to exercise her limbs on a long journey and to alleviate the tedium with conversation, others find such behaviour brazen and ill-omened. Surely the tradition of your clan is better known to you than to an outsider such as myself.”
“True, but in this matter I have little to guide me. At home we girls are granted considerable liberty. But this is the first time in my memory that one of us has been married outside Tumissa, and I recall no precedent.”
“What commandments, then, were given to your attendants by your father or clan-patriarchs when you set forth?”
“Why, to serve me, to protect me from harm, and to see me safe into the house of my clan-cousin, noble Retlan hiVriyen of Bey Sii.” There was a hint of what sounded like suppressed amusement in the girl’s voice.
Priestly dialectics came to Harsan’s aid. “If these are the precise words, then the first and last clauses have no application. The second injunction, too, is of little relevance. You are certainly ‘protected from harm’ by your clan’s travel contract with the merchant Mnesun. He and his colleagues will do all possible to honour their agreement, for to act otherwise would bring shame upon their clans; they would be open to a lawsuit and demands for Shamtla — money paid to satisfy a grievance or to compensate for a crime-would follow. None would trust them thereafter. Barring the untoward, thus, there is no question of ill befalling you in this company.”
“Then?”
“Ah-surely the needs of a healthy person for exercise and the desire for decorous and instructive conversation cannot be classified as ‘ill.’ ” Harsan knew not quite where this path led, but logic seemed to point in this direction.
“I see, I see. My thanks for having unriddled the matter so clearly, wise priest. Henceforth I shall join you for meals, and you shall enlighten me further in questions of ethics and theology, areas in which I lamentably lack instruction.”
The Lady Eyil clapped her hands, and Harsan had a fleeting glimpse of slender wrists encircled by golden bangles. One of the attendants rose-the woman Tsatla-and bowed Harsan back to his sleeping mat beside the greying coals of the cook-fire.
All night long he kept seeing images of lithe wrists, tapering fingers, and narrow gold bangles.
Thereafter the Lady Eyil graced their meals. Attired in a voluminous overcloak of blue Giidru- cloth, she sat demurely to one side of the circle, gruff and silent Tsatla ever just behind her. (As one of the Mu’ugalavyani brothers put it: “Like the demon Tusu’u, who hovers ever at the shoulder of the Goddess Dlamelish…”) Lady Eyil took little part in their conversations but listened with apparent interest to their recountings of profits and losses, goods and caravans, cities and peoples. She was unfailingly courteous, using the “you of perfect piety” to Harsan, as was fitting for a priest much more learned than he, and the “you of pleasant dealings” to the merchants, even including the Shen, upon whom such niceties may well have been lost. The thirty-four pronouns for “you” of the Tsolyani language made the maintenance of such social distinctions easy.
None could dispute that the Lady Eyil was a Tumissan. She had the heart-shaped face, pointed chin, wide and mobile mouth, and long, heavy-lashed eyes of the women of the west. She was as long-legged and lithe as Harsan himself, small-breasted, and perhaps a trifle narrow through the hips for Tsolyani tastes. Her mane of black hair often escaped the confines of her cloak, and she restrained it with a headband of blue, proclaiming her allegiance to the goddess Avanthe.
Day pursued day across the hot, fertile plains of the Tsolyani heartland. Harsan walked more and more beside the litter of the Lady Eyil, or, better yet, tramped with her upon the grey river of the Sakbe road. Their discussions grew ever longer. She knew little of theology and the arts Harsan had been taught in the Monastery of the Sapient Eye, but she bubbled like a cookpot with the doings of the clans and lower nobility of Tumissa.
Harsan was intrigued. He was no stranger to women. The monastery contained both male and female clerics and acolytes, and there was no objection to friendly couplings, experimentation, or to marriage. Yet most of the girls of his experience had been fellow students involved in the same studies and pursuits, or else had been the village girls of the Chakas, unlettered, earthy, and quite unabashed before the mysteries of sexuality. Here, however, was a girl who cut her meat daintily with a tiny knife, who never put more than the first knuckles of her right hand into her food, who quoted romantic verses gleaned from the ladies of the governor’s court, and who chattered of etiquette and formalities as alien to Harsan as the sun is to the black depths of the sea.
At times she asked Harsan questions which betrayed her ignorance of even the most fundamental matters of knowledge and religion. This unsettled him somewhat. Was her religious training then no more than a veneer? What was education in the Empire coming to? He put it down to the well-known apathy to abstract wisdom prevalent amongst the better clans and the aristocracy and answered her questions as simply and faithfully as he could.
“Priest Harsan,” she asked one day, “in our great temple of Avanthe at Tumissa there are shrines to many of the Goddess’ Greater Aspects: Sunrudaya the Young Bride, Ngachani the Patroness of Mothers With Babes, and a score of others. Why is it that the Goddess appears in so many forms if She is but one person? Once, when I was a child, I asked our clan’s house-priest, but he replied with such weighty words that I understood him not.”
“My Lady, it is because your Goddess holds sway over all that concerns women in their relation to society,” he replied. “She is the newborn baby girl, the innocent who suffers the first coming of the blood, the maiden in the ecstasy of love, the new-married girl who goes in to her husband for the first time, the wife, the mother, the sister, and finally the clan-mother wise in years and great in honour in her household. Avanthe is all of these and more: the fertility of the crops, the forces of nature, the creatures of the forests, the fish of the rivers. We who are unable to conceive of her oneness all at once can perceive her better through her diversity.”
“Then what of Dilinala, her Cohort? Is she not ‘woman’ as well?”
“Yes, but in different spheres. Dilinala does not participate in home, children, and clan. She is ever-virginal, ever-chaste, celibate, free from the eternal duality of woman and man. She is woman focussed inward upon herself. She is separate from Avanthe, yet a part of the whole.”
“I am not intrigued by Dilinala.” Lady Eyil pushed back her thick, heavy tresses, a pleasingly feminine gesture that Harsan did not fail to note. “Further, then, if Avanthe and Dilinala make up ‘woman,’ tell me what functions are served by the Goddess Dlamelish and her Cohort, Hrihayal?”
“My Lady, these are not of the illumined side but of the dark. Just as a silver mirror held to the sun blazes and reflects its light, so is the back of it in shadow. Dlamelish is woman as wanton, as destroyer, as the violence of the female soul; just as the Fire Lord, Vimuhla, signifies the cruelty and ferocity that dwell within the heart of a man. Dlamelish is woman as a selfish individual; Avanthe is woman as a builder of society and the smooth running of the cycles of life and of the world. So does Lord Karakan, the Brave God of Noble War, oppose Lord Vimuhla. Both stand for violence, but Lord Karakan represents violence in the cause of stability and the preservation of order; fighting for one’s home, for the Imperium, for the doing of noble actions and the establishment of glory…”
“And Hrihayal?”
“She governs only lust, sensuality with no purpose beyond hedonism, the gratification of the body with no thought of what is beyond. All these things exist in every soul. If the balance tilts one way, then that person devotes herself to Avanthe or to Dilinala. If it tips the other, then she serves Dlamelish or Hrihayal.”
“If these Goddesses are all ‘woman’ in some form or other, how and why, then, do men-priests and clansmen-serve them?” “Why, Avanthe requires both male and female for procreation and for the operation of the natural order of things. Dlamelish and Hrihayal appeal to the more lustful side of a man just as to a woman, and some of their Greater Aspects are said to be male-I know little of their doctrines. As for Dilinala, she is indeed solely the patroness of females, and her hierarchy admits no males.”
She gave him an arch look. “If all these qualities are found in some measure or another in every woman-and in men as well- then why not argue that all four of the Goddesses are naught but Greater Aspects of just one goddess? Nay, say even that Karakan and Vimuhla and all the rest are parts of one supreme godhead as well? Just as the front and the back of a mirror are only parts of the same object? La, priest Harsan, see how I have just reduced all the Gods and Goddesses of Tsolyanu to just one! What a saving on temples and priests!”
Shock tumbled over horror to Harsan’s lips. “Lady Eyil, this is the gist of the Heresy of Chu’inur, discredited and refuted now for over three thousand years! The great Priest Pavar, who discovered the existence of our twenty deities-and who, it is recorded, spoke to them as I now speak to you-unequivocally states that these entities are separate and distinct beings. The Scrolls of Pavar-’ ’
She did not let him finish but was off on another tack. “I have often wondered how it would be to serve Dlamelish or Hrihayal. I have seen the spring rites of our Lady Avanthe, and they are… very frank. But must the sensuality condoned by our Goddess always end in some dullard clan-cousin’s bed? A brood of brats for a husband who has other wives, and whose interests lie not in me but in his male pursuits: his friends, his enemies, his plots, his status, and his post-in some petty bureaucratic hierarchy?’ ’
Harsan strove for an answer. At length he said, “My Lady- one may serve the body and its lusts for perhaps a score of years. Yet what thereafter? Once beauty is fled, the priestess of Dlamelish or Hrihayal has naught to comfort her old age but her empty rituals-and an emptier bed. The clan-mother, on the other hand, is honoured by her children and those of her clan-sisters, and her last years are peaceful and secure.”
Eyil made a face. “Many of the priestesses of Dlamelish and Hrihayal declare themselves Aridani. Under the law a woman may thus pronounce herself independent of clan and family strictures and enjoy the same legal status as a man. Though she retains her clan, she cannot be married off, as you see happening to me. Nor can she be commanded and cozened by her husband or her clan-elders. She may become a priestess, an administrator, even a warrior, as she wills. I have met one such: the Lady Aveya hiBurutla of the Clan of the Jade Diadem. In her youth she served Lady Dlamelish and became an Aridani. Later, through certain of her lovers, she obtained a post at the governor’s court, and now she is Magistrate of the Markets in the Palace of the Realm in Tumissa. She has five husbands and a score of slave lovers as well. What, then, of that life?”
Harsan had regained his composure. Surely the girl was mischievously testing him. He said, “If she is satisfied, then she is blessed. But to give up the security of clan and husband is assuredly a hard step. And those who do often seem hard and uncompromising, different from other women, and yet not men. You do not seem such a person.” Two could play at word-games!
“Oh, Harsan, you do not know me yet! I am serious! If I were an Aridani and held an Imperial or temple post, I could support husbands and do as I pleased! — Or perchance I could serve in the army. Are not my breasts small enough to squeeze within a soldier’s breastplate?”
Harsan saw the perils of this question and struggled to change the topic. “There are many paths, and who are we to speak ill of the life-skeins of others? We of the Temple of Thumis see knowledge as the surest road to an understanding of existence. All things have purpose, and all help to maintain the balance beloved of our Lords of Stability
…”
She would not be diverted and went on. “You are perhaps right about me. It would be difficult to become an Aridani and abandon the solace of my clanspeople. Yet the idea of becoming the bride of a man I have never seen, and whom I hear is thrice my age-and who probably has other wives and stinks of the cloying Puru — oil so dear to those of Bey Sii-!” She stopped, leaned upon the coping of the parapet, and turned to face him. “Oh, Harsan, I am not at all eager to follow my own Skein of Destiny. I long for my home and my own people. Already I am well into the age of marriage-I am almost eighteen summers- but yet I cannot take cheer from these pretty songs you sing me of family, children, household chores, and a-a-a boring old age.”
She appeared to be upon the verge of tears, and Harsan knew not how to console her. In an effort to distract her he began to describe his own strange childhood, at first haltingly, and then pouring out the story in a rush of words: his life with the Pe Choi, his loneliness and the bitter sense of loss and betrayal when gentle T’kek took him to the Monastery of the Sapient Eye, his misery in those surroundings, his boyhood friendship with Zaren, his slowly burgeoning confidence among his new human comrades, his pride in his model of the Llyani language, then the sudden wrenching separation of this mission-as grievous as hers, he thought-and over all else his yearning for a clan and the security of knowledge of his origins, more precious in Tsolyani society than gold and lands and slaves.
When he had done, she took his hand and pressed it to her cheek. Then she wept indeed, and all he could think of to comfort her was to put an arm around her shoulders and to try, quite inexpertly, to stroke her hair.
The brazen yellow afternoon had distilled itself into the ale-coloured twilight of midsummer before Tsatla finally found her charge, lagging far behind the caravan, hand in hand with the young priest and uncaring of the amused stares of peasant workmen and other passersby.
Tsatla was properly irate, Lady Eyil appropriately contrite. Harsan, however, heard Tsatla’s acrid remonstrances no more than a boulder hears the rippling of the stream. Nor did he heed the banter of his companions at dinner that night-nor, for that matter, for many days thereafter.