The Skull of the World (22 page)

Fand crouched in the darkness, listening. Although the silence was undisturbed by even a shiver of air or a slow trickle of water, Fand knew that they were there, listening to her as intently as she listened to them.

Gingerly she risked moving, stretching out one foot and extending her toes, clenching and unclenching her fingers. It had become a horrible sort of game to her, the only sort of resistance she had to the constant torment of their regard. They wanted her to die, she knew it, they wanted her to give up and let her muscles lock, her lungs collapse, her blood freeze. Although Fand longed for the gentle release of death, to die would be to allow them to triumph. Some stubborn shred of resoluteness kept her alive within the ruins of her mind and spirit, kept her heart beating despite all they did to her.

Fand did not know how long she had been trapped here. Her life before the sisterhood was like a fragment of dream that lingered on long after one had woken, more an impression of emotion than a memory. She had been happy, she knew. There had been a shining sea and soft sand and warm kisses that had filled her body with light and life. There had been a face, dark skinned and proud, with silver-blue eyes intent with passion . . .

The darkness stirred. She froze.

"Who?" they whispered. "Who do you love? Who do you hate?"

Fand did not reply. Slowly the lurid green light grew up all around her. A circle of priestesses stood over her, their faces made grotesque by the shifting green phosphorescence.

"Why do you not die?" one asked.

"Are you not cold enough? Are you not hungry enough?"

"Why do you not die?"

"Do you hate us?"

"Do you wish we were dead?"

"Do you love us?" They bent over her. Doom-eels wriggled in their left hands, their squirming tails shining blue-white. Fand shrank back. "Who do you love?"

"I love you," she said, her voice hoarse. Her limbs twitched uncontrollably.

"Well, we do not love you, stupid spawn jelly," they said and lashed her with the electric tails of the doom-eels. She scrabbled away, but they were all around her, laughing. She curled up into a ball, her arms about her head, her knees drawn up to her chin. The doom-eels did not strike again. After a moment she looked up.

"Do you love Jor?" The hiss was soft, sibilant.

"Yes, yes, I love Jor," she gabbled.

"Jor is all. Jor is might. Jor is strength. Jor is power." The priestesses paced around her, their voices rising in passion. "Jor is all. Jor is might. Jor is strength. Jor is power."

"Jor is all," Fand agreed. "Jor is power."

For a long time the only sound was the swish of their furs on the stone, the hiss of the doom-eels' tails. Fand waited.

"Who?" they whispered. "Who do you love? Who do you hate?"

"I love Jor. Jor is all. Jor is might. Jor is strength. Jor is power."

"Jor is all. Jor is might. Jor is strength. Jor is power," the priestesses echoed.

"Jor is all. Jor is might. Jor is strength. Jor is power," Fand repeated desperately.

Again there was silence. Fand felt sweat springing up along her hairline, on her palms and the soles of her feet. Every muscle in her body was clenched tight in anticipation of pain. It did not come.

One of the priestesses bent and smoothed back the hair from her brow. Fand flinched, and she clucked her tongue in sympathy. "Hush, hush, little girl-human. You do well."

"You have not died," one of the others said.

"Why have you not died?" asked another.

"Are you not cold enough? Are you not hungry enough? Are you not weak enough?"

The hissing tails of the doom-eels writhed about her. Fand pressed herself against the icy stone.

"You do well," the first repeated, stroking Fand's hair tenderly. "Maybe you are not so weak as we had thought."

"Not so weak, not so weak," the others echoed softly.

Fand could not help looking up at the priestess's face, tears springing to her eyes.

"Do you love me?" the priestess said gently. Fand nodded, the tears beginning to spill down her face. The priestess unhooked her heavy sealskin fur and let it drop upon her. "Sleep, little one," she said.

Gratefully Fand clutched the warmth and softness to her and closed her eyes.

She was woken only a minute or two later by a freezing deluge of snow and water, the fur cloak wrested away from her. She could not help screaming in shock and pain. They lashed her with the doom-eels, shrieking at her, accusing her. Among the cacophony of voices, she heard them crying, "You must love none but Jor, none but Jor. Jor is your god, your master, your lover, your purpose for being. Jor is all. Jor is might. Jor is strength. Jor is power."

"Jor is all. Jor is might. Jor is strength. Jor is power," Fand repeated dully, but the attack did not abate. All she could see were blue-white arcs of hissing light as the doom-eels were raised and brought lashing down, and behind, the floating spheres of green-dark light. She closed her eyes and endured.

After that they left her alone for a very long time. She wept a little, then when the deep well of grief within her was all dried up, Fand lay there in a sort of stupor. Words and images ran through her mind, noisy, brightly colored, incoherent.

"Is it the prince Nila you weep for?" a gentle voice asked.

Fand did not respond.
Nila,
she thought.

"You must try to forget him," the voice in the darkness said, soft with sympathy. "He has forgotten you, that you may be sure of. He will have found himself some other concubine in which to spill his seed. Men are fickle, inconstant creatures. They do not love like women. Their love does not endure."

There was silence again for a very long time. Then softly, insistently, the voice spoke again. "Love will bring you only grief and pain, do you not know that? I loved once, a very long time ago. I am wiser now."

Fand felt a gentle hand on her hair, then a beaker of sea-squill wine was held to her lips. She drank thirstily, then accepted a few tidbits of raw fish held to her lips. The food and wine brought a rush of vigor to her body, so strong it made her feel nauseous. The hand stroked her damp forehead, and then the cloak was drawn up over her again. She sighed and turned her cheek into it.

"Do you love me?" the voice asked softly.

Fand shook her head. "No," she answered, so low her voice was almost inaudible. "I hate you."

"Do you love Prince Nila?"

"No," she answered, her voice a little stronger. "I love only Jor."

"That is good," the voice replied and then she heard the swish of the priestess's furs as she was left alone in the darkness, alone for the first time in months.

Dark silence was broken by oscillating green light and whispering voices. Pain was followed by dark silence. There was no other division of time. Darkness, green light and pain, darkness. Always they asked her the same questions, and Fand searched desperately to know the right answers. Gradually the pain came less often, though the questions changed.

"What is your name?"

"I have no name."

"Who are you?"

"I am nothing."

"Do you love me?"

"No, I hate you. I hate you all."

"Do you love Prince Nila?"

"No. I hate him. I love only Jor."

"Why do you hate Prince Nila?"

"Men are selfish, fickle. He abandoned me."

As the priestesses brought the doom-eels down upon her naked flesh, she cried out desperately, "I love only Jor! Jor is all. Jor is power. Nila is nothing. Nothing!"

The pain stopped. "Why are you not dead?"

"Because you wish me to live. Jor wishes me to live!"

"Why does Jor wish you to live?"

"So I may serve him."

They whipped her, ruthlessly, over and over again. "What worth are you, sea scum, spawn jelly? Weak, sickly, stupid, halfbreed human. What use are you? Nothing. What can you do? Nothing. Why would Jor want you? You might as well be dead, no one wants you. Why do you not die? We do not want you, useless pathetic bag of bones. Why would we? Can't even grow a tail. What use are you? Can't skin you to keep warm, no flesh on you to eat, no blood in you to drink, no fire in you to keep us warm . . ."

Something inside Fand snapped. There was a sudden incandescent flare that penetrated through the screen of her hands. Her flesh was red, the bones within dark. She heard a dreadful screaming. She uncovered her eyes, her heart hammering. The cave was lit up with golden warmth and light. All around her stood six pillars of fire, shrieking, beating themselves with flaming hands. On and on the screaming echoed. The priestesses rolled on the floor, threw themselves against the walls, while the hot, hungry flames devoured their flesh, their eyeballs boiling within their sockets of bone. Eventually they screamed no longer, writhed no longer. The flames sank down to smolder upon the shapeless, blackened forms. The cave stank of burned flesh.

"You wanted fire," Fand said. "Are you warm enough now?"

The tiny island of the Priestesses of Jor rose gray and forbidding from the seas, a tumult of white water raging around the feet of the sheer cliffs. The melancholy cry of thousands of seabirds filled the air, the loneliest sound Nila had ever heard. He floated in the icy water, staring at the steep rock with a heart frozen by foreboding. What would they do to him if they found him here?

I
do not care,
he thought.
What more can they do?

It had been a bitter six months for Nila. All joy had gone out of his life without Fand, all hope and happiness. His failure to save her haunted him. But what could I do? he had asked himself a hundred thousand times, without ever finding relief.

Nila had been watched closely by his father's minions, unable to even seek the solace of solitude at the ruined witches' tower or in the dark depths of the Fathomless Caves. Every step he took there was someone behind him, spying on him, reporting his every move. He flaunted the black pearl upon his breast, allowed an undertone of mockery in his voice when he spoke to his brothers, and killed two of them in duels on the slightest of pretenses. He was filled with a reckless disregard for his own life, yet somehow this gave him an acute sensitivity toward anyone else's disregard. Nila survived three more attempts to murder him, killing another of his brothers and seven of his lackeys in the process. As the endless night of winter at last began to fade, Nila's tusks began to bud and he noticed a new favor in his father's voice. The Fairgean King approved of Nila's pride and insolence, his newfound aggression. Even his thirteen surviving brothers regarded him with a new wariness.

The ice that sealed shut the mouth of the Cave of a Thousand Kings melted away, and the warriors were able to go out in pursuit of the whales swimming past in their annual migration south. Nila at last had a chance to escape his father's scrutiny and he had swam at once in search of Fand.

The priestesses' island was not far from the Isle of the Gods. Nila had reached it in only a few hours, and he had spent the rest of the day trying to find some way in. He had circumnavigated the rock three times, tried to climb its cliffs, dived deep into the ocean to find an underwater cave. All to no avail. At last he had given up and swam back to rejoin his pod.

His absence had not gone unnoted, of rourse. He was humiliated in front of the whole court, his father frothing at the mouth with rage as he demoted Nila and sentenced him to six lashes by doom-eel. Nila endured the whipping in grim silence and smiled in private over his demotion. When most of the court left the Isle of the Gods to swim in the wake of the whales he would be left behind to guard the Cave of a Thousand Kings with the other second-grade warriors, considered too weak or old or unskilled to swim to the south. Although Nila would have been cut to the quick over such a demotion at any other time, now he could only be glad. He would have all summer to try and find his love.

Yet now the summer was almost gone and still Nila had not been able to find a way into the Isle of Divine Dread. And now a horrible fear lay upon him, choking him like an octopus's tentacle.

All through the months they had been apart Nila had been aware of Fand as clearly as if she called out to him through the darkness. He had felt pain and grief and anger and desolation, he had felt a slow dying within her. Then last night, the night of the summer solstice, he had been jolted from sleep, crying aloud her name. He had dreamed of fire, that terrible weapon of the humans, that all-destroying, profane, unnatural power that melted ice, evaporated water, and burned flesh to cinders. The horror of the dream lingered all day, and when at last he shook himself free of it, he realized that he could no longer feel Fand. It was as if she was dead.

Desperate with fear he had escaped the pod and swam for the Isle of Divine Dread, unable to admit that he might be too late. This was the sixth time he swam all around the towering rock and he had seen no other sign of life but the clouds of crying seabirds. Black despair filled Nila once more.

Suddenly the seabirds roosting on one side of the rock burst into flight, screeching and circling. Nila watched in bemusement, wondering what had startied them. Suddenly all his nerves tightened. He dived beneath the waves, swimming strongly toward the rock, his long black hair streaming behind him. Far ahead he saw the bubbling green phosphorescence of a drowned nightglobe. Abruptly he stopped, wrenching his tail sideways. He floated deep in the water, his nostrils clamped shut, his gills fluttering. The light grew stronger, then he saw six priestesses come swimming up out of the inky black depths, carrying their nightglobes close to their bodies. With their eyesight dazzled by the green brightness, they did not see him. They swam up toward the glowing surface and then their heads broke through, so that all Nila could see was their strong silver tails undulating powerfully as they swam away.

He waited until his lungs were burning and his gills were quivering with strain, then swam up to the surface to breathe. He was very close to the island, perilously close. Just ahead of him the waves rose in long green swells that smashed upon the rocks in a welter of white foam. He could feel their strength dragging at his tail. He filled his lungs with air and then dived.

Down into the blackness he swam, his eyes wide open and staring. His hand brushed the plunging roots of the island, smooth and slimy to the touch. He followed the rock down, one hundred feet, two hundred feet. He had never dived so deep. His heartbeat slowed, a deliberate muffled pounding in his ears. His lungs burned with pain. Three hundred feet. Nila felt sick and giddy. He no longer knew which way was up, which way down. Only the rock sliding past his fingers reassured him. He wondered how long he had been diving. Certainly longer than he had ever dived before. Most Fairgean could only stay submerged for five minutes or so. He had been diving for three times as long. He had to fight the desire to breathe through his nose, knowing he would take in only water. Spots of color danced before his eyes. His heartbeat was so slow he panicked in each long moment before its returning throb. Just as he had decided he was about to die, his fingers felt nothing but emptiness. He slowed his descent, twisted his tail, and followed the curve of the rock.

His head broke through into air. Nila took great whooping breaths, his starved lungs struggling to swallow more oxygen. His head swam, his pulse leaping erratically. He felt a ledge of rock below him and crawled out of the water, too exhausted to even attempt to change back into his land-shape. All was dark.

Minutes passed. His pulse steadied, his breaths grew more even. He transformed shape, crawled higher out of the water, banging his head on a wall of rock. The darkness was so complete it terrified him. It was as dark as the octopus's pit, as dark as any of the Fathomless Caves. The darkness reminded him that he was committing sacrilege of the worst kind. A man trying to penetrate the mysteries of the Isle of Divine Dread?

Yet he had come too far to turn back. Nila crawled along the ledge, feeling his way with his hands, his head ducked down at an awkward angle to avoid any more collisions with the wall. He felt a breath of air on his cheek, turned that way, crept down a passageway that scraped the skin from his knees and palms. The wafting of air grew stronger. He received the impression of space. Although there was no sound, all the hairs on his head lifted, his scales shrank. He was being watched, being listened to. He froze into stillness, straining all his senses, trying to tell himself it was his terror that made him think so.

Suddenly light flared all around him, the queer distorted luminance of viperfish trapped within glass. He was surrounded on all sides by Priestesses of Jor, staring down at him malevolently. They did not speak, just stared at him, their pale eyes gleaming oddly in the greenish light. Nila stared back, a fatalistic calm settling over him.

"Prince Nila, fourteenth son of he that is Anointed by Jor. Why do you come creeping and sneaking into our home? Do you not know that we can have you gutted and skinned like a fish for your effrontery?"

"I have come for Fand," he said. His voice sounded odd to his ears.

"There is no one called Fand."

"Fand. My concubine. I have come for her."

"There is no one called Fand."

His head felt light, his pulse beat fast and erratic. "Fand," he said obstinately.

"The slave you knew as Fand is gone," the priestess said. Her voice was soft and sibilant, yet somehow terribly frightening. "She is now a Priestess of Jor. She has no name. She is nobody."

"Fand," he said desperately, searching all their faces, which were lit from below by their nightglobes, giving them all a look of demonic glee.

"Rise, Prince Nila, fourteenth son of he that is Anointed By Jor. You have dared to trespass upon the Isle of Divine Dread, and so you shall pay the price. But first, let us show you your one-time concubine."

The circle of priestesses parted. Somehow Nila found the strength to stand, though his bowels were weak and his knees trembled. He followed them through endless caves and passages, stumbling in the uncertain glow of their nightglobes. They came at last to a gallery and looked down upon a huge cavern that was filled with concentric rings of priestesses, all holding aloft glowing nightglobes. Fand stood in the very center, her eyes wide open and blank of all thought, her hands upon an enormous nightglobe set in a base of carved crystal. His eyes widened at the sight of it. The Nightglobe of Naia was the most secret and precious relic of the Priestesses of Jor. Many thousands had died to save it from the human attack, and it was sacrilege for any to look at it unbidden, let alone touch it. Fand must have very great powers indeed to be allowed to place her hands upon the Nightglobe of Naia.

"Only the most powerful may touch the Nightglobe of Naia," came the sibilant hiss of the priestess in his ear, as if reading his thoughts. "Your former concubine is blessed indeed."

Nila stared at Fand unhappily. She had the gaunt-ness of all the other priestesses, the look of gloating fanaticism, the sickly paleness of a skin that sees no sunlight. He had meant to call to her but the words choked in his throat so that he could hardly breathe.

"You may listen if you wish," the priestess whispered in his ear. She made a little sign with her hand, and as one all the priestesses below suddenly spoke.

"What is your name?" they hissed.

"I have no name."

"Who are you?"

"I am nothing."

"Do you love us?"

"No. I hate you."

"Do you love Prince Nila?"

"No. I hate him. I love only Jor."

"Why do you hate Prince Nila?"

"I love only Jor."

"Why do you love Jor?"

"Jor is all. Jor is might. Jor is strength. Jor is power."

"Jor is all. Jor is might. Jor is strength. Jor is power. Jor is all," the priestesses chanted, and Fand chanted with them, her eyes staring straight ahead, unnaturally wide.

As the chanting swelled into a crescendo, the priestess made another almost imperceptible gesture and suddenly Nila found himself seized and dragged away, the sound of the chant ringing in his ears. He struggled against them but could not match their strength. As he was dragged back into the passageway he suddenly found his voice.

"Fand, I am so sorry . . . Forgive me! Forgive me, my darling, my love, forgive me ..."