The Blue Star, Fletcher Pratt [essential books to read .TXT] 📗
- Author: Fletcher Pratt
Book online «The Blue Star, Fletcher Pratt [essential books to read .TXT] 📗». Author Fletcher Pratt
Now the musicians struck up and everybody began dancing, even quite an old woman in a corner who had no partner, but stepped alone through the figures. The groups did not form patterns, but each pair toed it by themselves until they reached the end of the measure, when all formed a circle, partners pledging each other in their festival-cups and crying; “Light! Light!” Gaidu Pyax danced well, swinging Lalette strongly when the step called for it. Food was presently brought in, and from time to time a servant would summon the elder Pyax, whereupon he would go to the door and return with a new guest on his arm, clapping hands to make everyone stop what they were doing, whereupon all shouted “You are welcome!” as before, and there would be more drinking of pledges.
Lalette began to feel quite giddy and happy, no longer minding that all these people seemed to be talking about how terribly expensive everything was, or staring at her across their shoulders, as though she were an actress. She did not think anyone here would betray her to the provosts; the women all seemed to be trying to be kind. The thought of what Dame Leonalda would say if she knew her daughter were in such a place struck Lalette as funny, and she sat down, laughing softly to herself over it, to find Aunt Zanzanna bending over her.
“Would you like to lie down for a while in your room? We have such a nice one for you.”
It was easier to walk with the older woman’s arm around her. The room was up two flights, heavily bowered with hangings, and Lalette thought she noted a scent of musk as she lay down on the rich bed in all her clothes. The musk made her feel sick; when she returned from the cabinet she felt so weak she had to lie down again, but the melody of the volalelle they were dancing down there would not let her alone, it kept going round and round inside her head as she slipped down through drowsing wakefulness to full dream and an uneasy sleep. It must have been nearly day when she woke again, and she felt stiff. The scrape of violins still came from below; for a few minutes she considered returning to the festival, then slipped off her clothes and got into bed.
IVShe woke again to see complete spotted sunlight bright across the wall, wondering for the first sleepy seconds where she was. It was a footstep that had roused her; she turned her head and saw Gaidu Pyax looking down, with spots on his costume.
“The greeting of the morning,” he said. “It is spring.”
“Oh,” was all Lalette could say, pulling the covers close around her neck, and then; “Well, I greet you.”
The smile she had once thought rather pleasant became fixed. “I have come to keep the spring with you.” He laid his hand on the edge of the covers. “You are my partner.”
“No. Not this time. No.”
“It is festival morning. You must.”
“No. What would Rodvard say?”
His laugh had an edge of nastiness. “His head will be on another pillow now. I know him. Why should you not do it as well as he?”
He reached down and began to paw at the bedclothes against her resistance, the scream she tried to give was only a squeak in that heavy-hung and distant room, and then he flung himself on her, catching her wrist to twist it around, crying; “Witch, witch, I will tame you or break all your bones.” She bit at the hand that touched her face, and with her own arm swung a sweeping blow that took him where head and neck join. He was suddenly standing beside the bed again, and she was saying low and furious, through tears:
“If you force me, I will kill myself and you, too. I swear it by the Service.”
Gaidu Pyax’ lips pouted out like a little boy’s, he sank slowly to one knee beside the bed, reaching a hand out gropingly. “Ah, I knew it couldn’t be true,” he said, and lifted toward her a face of wordless misery.
For a long minute she looked at him, all her fierceness and resolution melting in the face of that unhappy desire. (She felt no spark for this boy, only thought: and what if I do, they do not want me, it was all a deceit put upon me, and I can at least heal this one’s hurt); and was just reaching from under the covers to draw him to her and comfort him—
When a flash of lightning wrote in letters of fire across the inside of her mind the words Will you go with me now? and though there was no meaning in what they said, she understood that it told the unfaithfulness of her lover.
The hand that had extended to take that of Pyax patted it instead. “I am sorry,” she said. “Perhaps it was my fault. I should have told you. . . . When others do it, I never could. But I thank you for the good festival.”
13FAREWELL AND GREETING
Back again to the place of masks through streets littered with the sour debris of festival, among which languid sweepers toiled. After what had happened, Lalette did not ask to say farewell to the elder Pyax or Aunt Zanzanna. There was a twitch at the corner of the doorman’s mouth as he let them out; she would not let Gaidu accompany her farther than the market square (for morning had brought back all the anxiety of the price still on her apprehension). He remarked somewhat spitefully that he could understand how she would not wish to have her people see a Zigraner bringing her home.
Laduis answered her knock; he seemed truly happy to see her. The widow was at the cookshop; Lalette changed the mask of Sunimaa for her worn clothes, finishing just as the woman returned. They ate, talking but little, and that much in light terms. Dame Domijaiek sent the boy out, and as his footsteps went down the stair:
“Did you find him?” she asked.
“He is at Sedad Vix.” Her mouth worked a little, and with the calm eyes fixed upon her, she could keep it back no more. “He has been unfaithful to me.”
“I do not understand.”
“In the witch-families we cannot help—”
“Ah. Then it is a knowledge gained through falsity and witchcraft, not through the God of love, and so will lead to no good end.”
“I am unhappy,” was all Lalette could whisper, (not understanding what the woman was trying to say).
“It is because you look on this man as personal to you. Love must share with all.”
(There was something passionately wrong with this, Lalette felt, but rue and the after-lash of last night’s wine and this morning’s experience had left her too low to seek out the flaws.) She began to weep softly.
After a few minutes, the widow said: “Let us reason. If you owe him not less than all love, so he owes as much to you; and by destroying your joy, he has failed his obligation. Do you still love him, not as we must love all, but to yourself, as of the material world?”
(It seemed to Lalette as though there were something big and dark and heavy in her breast where her heart ought to be, and she had no clear thoughts at all any more.) “I did not—ah, I do not know, he is all I have.”
“You have a mother, child.”
“A mother who tried to sell me! And still would, if she could find me.”
“Because she wishes to save you from distresses she herself has felt. That also is done in love, I think.”
“Then I’ll have no love!” cried Lalette, looking up furiously, tear-drops sparkling on her lashes. “I’ll hate and hate and hate.”
A tiny red spot appeared on each of Dame Domijaiek’s cheeks. “I do not think you had better say that again in this house,” she said. “I have an arrangement to make, and will return before evening. Tell Laduis.”
She went out, leaving a Lalette who could hardly bear herself, nor find anything to do, in her mind going over and over the dreadful ground of Rodvard’s treachery and the fact that he was one of the Sons of the New Day. Even if he came to her now, she would not have him, that book was closed by his own hand; and the boy Laduis coming in, she allowed him to draw her out of her megrims, so that when the widow returned, they were almost gay together. But it was almost dawn before sleep touched her.
IIShe came awake with a start, and the sense that something dreadful had happened. It must be late morning; the widow was gone from the other side of the bed and Laduis’ cot was empty and neatly made up. There was—
All at once the whirl at the back of her mind resolved itself into a pattern. There were two things in it, a picture of a strange room where men talked before a fire while a sea beat on a rocky shore, and running through it as though the picture were transparent, an appeal so naked and desperate that it brought her to her feet at once—mind speaking to mind without words to say that the holder of her Blue Star was lying bewitched and near death.
There was no wine; it was horribly hard to trace out the pattern of the counter-witchery in water, even with the help of some dust from the corner, and the effort of the projection left her so weak and shaken that when it was done she collapsed across the bed in the shift that had served her as a night-dress and did not even hear Dame Domijaiek come in.
“So you have done it,” said her voice (and Lalette thought that she had never in her life heard anything so cold).
Lalette raised her head. The older woman was looking at the patterns which still moved faintly, not at her at all. “I ask your pardon,” she said. “It was an emergency; I learned—”
“Nothing you can say will change the fact that you have brought witchery into my house.”
Lalette struggled to her feet. “Well, I will go.”
“Yes,” said the mask-maker, “I think you must go. You have brought on me and my son even worse dangers than you dream of. You must go. When you spoke of hating yesterday, I thought it might come to that, but I foolishly let sympathy overrule my judgment.”
In the room above them, Mme. Kaja struck a chord on her music, and after one false beginning, launched into the bride’s aria from “The Disinherited.” Lalette looked at the floor and there were tears in her eyes. The widow spoke again:
“Yet you were sent to me for help, and help you I will, if you will take it. I think there is only one chance in the world for you, and that is to go to Mancherei and place yourself under the dominion of the Prophet.”
“But I have no money to get there, no money at all, and what could I do there?” said Lalette (now angry with herself for having jeopardized herself and the widow too, in some manner, for the sake of false Rodvard; and willing in her contrition to follow this leading, but not seeing how it could be done).
“Love forever finds a way to draw to itself those who need it. There is a fund for the transportation of those who would go thither; and under the ordinance of the Prophet, there have been established the houses called couvertines of the Myonessae, where there is shelter and gainful employ for such girls as yourself, who need them.”
“I—I do not believe in this religion, and—I am a witch.”
“Few believe in the beginning, but only turn to our doctrine for relief from some condition of the world. It is this witchcraft you must escape.”
Lalette heaved a sigh. (Her head ached now, and what was the use of this struggle to be free and one’s own? The strings tightened, one was drawn back to puppethood.)
“Very well. If you will tell me what to do.”
IIIThe conventicle was held at the back of a warehouse; people sat on bales of wool, or leaned against them. Guards against the provosts had been set at the door. One, who was addressed as “Initiate” pronounced a discourse of which Lalette hardly understood a word, it was so abstract. She could hardly keep her eyes open; the descent into doze and the jerk back
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