The Birthgrave Read online

  And they were beautiful, were they not, the men and women of my race? Golden and alabaster, their long hands alight with jewels, their eyes like green stars, masters of every element and magic the world held. Through flames and over waters they walked; they flew with the black wings of great birds, wheeling across the red skies with the moon a white bow beneath them; they vanished, and moved like ghosts. I remember she I once was, riding the back of a huge lion in some desert place, smiling and lovely as the orchids embroidered on her skirt. But she was evil too.

  After seven days of this, I was feverish and strange. We rode all day long, but at every stop I was impatient to move on. At night I would walk up and down the camp, putting off the moment of sleep. But sleep always came, and would not be resisted. I began to bleed, too, which is natural enough with all creatures that carry a womb, yet it had not happened before with me, and it was painful and distressing. Besides, I feared this fertile womanhood. I knew none of the methods of contraception my race had clearly understood. As for the bandit women, what they did was quite absurd, and achieved nothing, except, I suppose, to keep some witch or other from starving. I did not want to conceive. Any child would have been a misfortune then, and Darak’s seed—a bandit brat, tying me perhaps forever to a life that was not mine—was unthinkable. I did not know what to do. I simply willed myself into barrenness, wildly and hotly, whenever I thought of it.

  It was on the ninth day that we came to the city.

  “Is this Ankurum?” I asked Darak.

  My eyes were swimming with the fever and the heat haze, and I seemed to see on the horizon white walls and towers, and vistas of many buildings behind them.

  “No,” he said, “we’re days from Ankurum yet.”

  Maggur said: “That’s a ruin, Imma. Only a ruin.”

  “Some of the Plains tribes call it Kee-ool,” Darak said. “That means Evil One. They keep away from it, and from the road, or we’d have had company long ago. A place to suit you, goddess.”

  There was always a little poison ready in him when he was unsure of me, but I hardly heard what they said.

  “We pass through it?” I asked.

  “Yes. The road goes through.”

  “Then stop there, Darak.”

  He grinned without any good humor.

  “We have the time,” he said.

  * * *

  It was late afternoon when we reached it. Perhaps we would have stopped here anyway, although some of the men muttered and grumbled. They took out their amulets, and kissed and shook them, but they did not come to Darak asking to go on. Their leader did not fear Kee-ool, they thought, and would laugh at them. Though Darak was edgy, and did not like this place. Truly, there seemed to be something miasmic about it, apparent even to an unimaginative man.

  On either side of the paved way, it stretched for miles toward the dim mauve shapes of what must be hills or low mountains. The buildings, or what remained of them, were very white, bleached like bones by the sun. They were like bones in other things, too, the way they stood, gaping, the rib cases and skulls of palaces, joints of pillars, leaning, fallen. There was no color except for the odd vine or weed with flowers that had struggled through to crawl in and out. The land in its eternal brownness, the sky soaking into carnal scarlet, were only a backdrop, something additional, as if the city had stood in space a long while before earth and air formed around it.

  I was not sure why I needed to go into it. It was not here that I remembered from my brief childhood how many centuries ago.

  I sat in my hard-won place in Darak’s tent, while he and his captains drank around their calendar. It was a primitive colorful thing of carved and painted wood. On it, every season, month, and day had a symbol. Late summer was a golden frog, and now they were ringing the day which was an owl, for this was the time they had arranged with the Plains tribes for their first selling of weapons.

  “Madness to let go fine stuff like this on those savages. They’ll pick their teeth and cut up apples with it.” The man spat. Arrogance here too, then, in the hierarchy of human standing. But I was hardly listening. They passed me the beer jug from time to time, and I occasionally drank to symbolize my involvement. I said nothing.

  When the tent emptied, Darak stretched out on the rug bed, and looked at me.

  “Well? When are you leaving to wander in Kee-ool?”

  “When the moon is up,” I said.

  “Wake me,” he said. “I’ll sleep off this beer now, and come with you.”

  “I must go alone.”

  “Don’t be a fool. Wild animals run loose in that place; men too, perhaps as nasty-minded as my own. I know you can fight, and you’re no sniveling idiot of a woman, but remember the ford.”

  “I remember it,” I said. “Sleep then. I will wake you.”

  He was already drowsy with the drink, he had taken such a lot of it, as he always did. Otherwise he would never have believed me. I went to sit by him, and watched him slip into sleep. He was a beautiful man to look at, even sleeping. He slept like an animal, lightly but serenely, his mouth firmly closed, his body twitching sometimes, and his hands and feet, like the paws of an animal, dreaming. I kissed his face, and left the tent. It was twilight, starlit and quiet, except where men were drinking and making a lot of noise at the fires. They were louder than usual as if to defeat the heavy silence of the place. Only the wind made sounds, thin and rasping, as it piped through holes and empty rooms.

  3

  I left them behind me very soon. The firelight melted away, and the raucous singing that had started up. Only the wind now, thilling through stone, sushing through the dust. Darkening landscape, the whiteness a darker whiteness, picked out in starlight. I had an hour, perhaps, before the moon rose.

  It was easy to walk down the endless straight streets. Only here and there was the drum of a fallen pillar which must be climbed over. A few little scatterings of small animal fright away from me, but there did not seem to be many living things in this dead city, after all. All around were the shells of palaces. It was a city of palaces, and their gardens and pools and groves and statues and places of pleasure. There could be no lesser building in such a hive of opulent contempt. I walked up cracked marble steps to a high platform where two or three pillars still stood, but nothing else. I looked back and saw the little gleam of the firelit camp, faint and far off—farther than it was, it seemed, as though a semi-transparent curtain shut the city away from it. Ahead, beneath the platform, great terraces fell down to an oval space—some huge open theater. I walked down toward it, across narrower streets, then in at the vast arched doorway, carved with shapes of women and animals. Steps led upward to the terraces, other steps led downward. The wind brought me a faint odor from the descent that could not still be there—musky darkness, and fear. I went up instead, to the top tier. Marble seats, aisled, each with their columns and carvings. The staircases which ran down between them toward the oval floor were laid with colored stones, red and brown and green and gold. I stopped. Dimly, softly, I heard their voices around me. I turned, and they had come, but only as ghosts. Many men and women and their children, friends, and lovers. Their clothes were a ghostly pastel of scarlets and purples and white. Canopies dripped gold tassels, house banners floated. I looked toward the oval space—and the colors hardened around me, brighter and closer, and the sounds rose above the wind. Below, a green fire was opening like a flower. It shifted and spread itself around the arena, and took shape. A forest of flame, glittering and shimmering. Trees rose from it, with trunks of emerald, branches opening into fiery stars. Fountains burst out of the ground, and a white mist rippled like gauze, threading through everything. It was beautiful and incredible. A little applause stirred among the audience. It seemed I was one of them, aware of cool silk on my body, diamonds, a man’s fingers caressing on my breast until I brushed them off, not wanting my attention diverted.

  A girl ros
e out of the mist and flame. She was white-skinned with long black hair, but unreal, a two-dimensional creature, drawn around with a dark line. She moved her arms and head, dancing, and a snake came winding toward her, a cameo of cream and gold with a silver darting tongue. The snake, too, was unreal, and so was the golden-yellow man who followed it. The fire trees turned gradually to red, the mist to purple like a great storm cloud, the fountains ran like blood, and seemed to swell. The figures in the arena were growing in size, and changing as they entwined with each other. The snake coiled and twisted with a woman’s head; the man moved languidly, the head of the snake replacing his own: the woman slithered between them, headless, the man’s face growing under her breasts.

  As the figures grew larger, the alterations became more complicated and bizarre. The purple cloud mist was pulsing from the oval space, filling the terraces with a heavy opiate smell, while the tableau rose up toward us, the things in it ten feet high or more. Delighted cries came from parts of the theater. The woman, serpent headed, bent backward, the man, his phallus replaced by the enormous thrashing tail of the serpent, leaned over her, inches from my face. My lover’s hand was on me again, and I did not now push him away, but leaned nearer. . . .

  A loose stone went from under my feet, rattled, struck, and plunged into the arena.

  The theater was chill, and broken, and empty.

  The wind tore my hair, and I was dankly cold. The moon was lifting. The light seared my eyes clean of what I had been staring at.

  But I was not alone. I sensed it, and looked across the theater. I was lucid then, not particularly feverish or dreaming. A street or so away stood a tall tower. What was left of it was little enough—one open side and the staircase winding round and round like a twisted spine. After I had seen these, I suppose the lucidity ran away out of me. Something drew me to the tower, strong and insistent.

  I will fly there, I thought. I felt a swift splitting pain in my back. I say pain, but in a strange way it was pleasant. I have heard men, whose arms or legs were lost in some fight, swear that they still felt them there, tingling and twitching to be used. This is what the wings felt like as they grew from my shoulders, and put down their roots into the muscle and bone of my back, like limbs I had lost but were still there, tingling and twitching. I moved them, and this was strange. An extra pair of arms would have been more familiar. Even in my fever-dream, I was amused by my first efforts at flight. No baby bird was ever so clumsy. But it came to me in the end, and I lifted. Then I felt the power of them. Each strong beat seemed to come more from the pit of my belly than from my spine. I held my legs firm together, and arms crossed under my breasts, as I had seen them do in my other dreams. It was only a short way to the tower.

  A stone altar stood there, and I knew it well enough. In the white bowl there was a flickering and a shadow. But I was not afraid.

  “So Karrakaz enorr,” whispered the no-voice in my brain, and I knew which tongue it used, now that I had heard the dream ghosts speak it. “I am Karrakaz. The Soulless One. You do not think you know why you are here, but you are here because Karrakaz is here, and we are one thing, you and I. I have grown since the volcano. You have fed me well. I will destroy you, but first we shall be one thing. Let me give you Power to rule these Shlevakin. They are only little things and much beneath you. But how dangerous the little poison ants who will eat you alive. You will not find the Jade, so I will give you a little Power, Princess of the Lost, before your Darak turns from your cursed face, and the jackals tear you.”

  It seemed good to me. The word Karrakaz had used—“Shlevakin,” the filthy dregs, the mud and excrement of an inferior people—so right to call them that, they were so far beneath me, what I was and what I might have been. But before I could stretch out my hand and say, “Give it to me,” some elemental thing took hold of me, and shook me. I clung to the stone of the tower before I could be shaken down, and screamed furiously, “Let me alone!”

  “Kill it,” the no-voice said.

  My hands found a huge loose tile, and I grasped it and thrust it out toward what seemed to be tormenting me.

  There was a crash, loud as thunder, in my right ear. The tower disintegrated and I fell.

  I seemed to fall, but not far. I opened my eyes, and was lying on the red and green stones of the theater steps. A hand got my arm, and pulled me up again almost immediately. It could be no other hand but Darak’s.

  His face was pale and angry in the moonlight.

  “You woke and followed me,” I said.

  “And found you standing here like a block of stone with your eyes wide open. I shook you and you didn’t wake up. If you have these fits, you’re a fool to walk up so high.”

  It was Darak, then, who had kept me from the evil in the tower. Yet I could not have been in the tower after all. The wings were gone for sure.

  “You’re coming back now,” Darak grumbled. “This place is as safe as the Pit of Death. A tile fell from nowhere just now and nearly brained both of us.”

  I could see where it had smashed. He had pushed me clear, and I was bruised to prove it. I felt weak and stupid and afraid. I was glad he dragged me away, across the ruined city, back to the camp.

  * * *

  The fires were still alight, but mostly men were asleep. A few sentries prowled.

  Darak set me on the rug bed, and pulled off my boots.

  “I imagine you still have your woman’s trouble,” he said to me. I nodded. “So I don’t even get a reward.”

  He arranged us for sleep with an endearing selfishness, his head on my shoulder.

  But I did not sleep. I lay, stiff and cold, waiting for the morning, waiting to be away, yet glad to be awake, for I feared the dreams the city would give me now.

  It was near dawn. There is a different scent in the air at dawn; one could tell it blindfold. There came a faint drumming under me. I thought I imagined it, but it grew.

  “Darak!” I hissed.

  He woke and growled at me. But then the earth moved beneath us.

  In another second we were flung apart and together. Weapons in the tent, chairs, the brazier, tilted over, and the poles went too, bringing the hide down on top of us. Spilled coals licked at the rugs, and caught. In a moment the tent was blazing. It seemed incredibly difficult to get free now that there was no longer any obvious opening. The flames on our heels, we hacked and scrabbled a way out. The ground was still sliding sideways. Stones flew by, and bits of paving lifted and went down.

  It settled as abruptly as it had begun.

  I stood up. A pillar had fallen across the road, crushing three tents, and putting out a fire or two. The tents, for some reason, were empty.

  “We have earthquakes in the hills, too,” Darak said. “This wasn’t so bad.”

  Maggur and Kel came running up, and another man who flung water on the burning hide.

  I stared back over the city, and felt a pent-up anger and hatred swelling at me, for the moment impotent.

  “Darak,” I said, “we must ride now. Quickly.”

  He glanced at me, and nodded. “As you say.”

  But he made no great hurry about it, and the men, as always, took their cue from him. Even the nervous dallied. After all, they had spent a night here, and were still unharmed; a little more delay could make no difference.

  Finally, the caravan moved, and the sun was up, burning a round white hole in the sky. The horses were restless, frightened by the quake, and still uneasy. Men ate as they rode, throwing back bones to lie among the bones of the city.

  It took an hour to get through the length of it, and all that time I felt some menace on every side, and it seemed we were going so slowly. Overhead the light turned gradually yellow as a rotten peach. The horses tossed their heads, and drew back their lips silently.

  Suddenly the threat was very close. I seized Darak’s arm.

  “Ride
fast now, or we will die here!”

  He did not take his orders from me, but this he took. He knew me now. He turned and gave the jackal’s sharp bark which was their signal for danger and speed, then dug in his spurs, and struck my horse across the flank.

  The horses needed little encouragement. They bolted, and the others behind bolted too. The wagons ground and roared after us.

  And at that moment, the city rose against us. Or against me alone, perhaps.

  They called it the “earthquake” afterward, but it was not. The earth drummed and rumbled, it is true, but nothing fell—except the last wagons, because the paving heaved up and tilted them. At first there was stillness, and then a wind came screaming across the city toward us from both sides, and the wind never blew two ways at once that I had seen before. Stones whirled up from inside the city, pebbles and little chips, and then big blocks and gigantic tiles, and all of them were caught up in that wind, and hurled at us. The tops of the pillars seemed to fly off and fling themselves too, and huge pieces of roofs. The horses screamed and reared and plunged, the wagons leaped and went over. Metal chests of weapons crashed on the road, and knives and daggers fell out in a silvery rain. I bowed my head against my horse’s neck. Behind me, Kel squealed as a missile struck straight through into his brain and killed him. The yellow light ran past us like water, and I thought I should be dead in an instant, but I did not understand death, only the pain, and so I thought of it with terror. Flying stuff nicked my face and hands with stinging chisels.

  But we were on the outskirts of that place of bones, Kee-ool, the Evil One. Suddenly the ghastly hail dropped back. I heard the prolonged rattle of it as it settled. Our horses stopped still on their own, sweating. I turned and looked.