The Priestess of Brack

The wizard fisher came in a smallish craft and without greeting built his hut on an unused place at the bottom end of the bay. The other fishermen of Brack eyed him carefully. His ship was too slow for a pirate, which was just as well—a pirate would starve on what he could steal from their fishing boats. His ship was rigged for just one man, and from the look of him he was not a sailor. So it was not jealousy that made them fear him. It was the way he kept himself covered in all weathers, as if he feared the sun; it was the stark white hair of his head, the gleam of pink in his eye like a crazed treehopper; it was his secret way. He knew more than they did, knew more than the wind as it teased the sea, knew more than the air-breathing octopus that spread himself on the water, knew more than the priestess of the Sweet Sisters who tended her burning stones at the point of the bay.

"What is he?" the fishermen asked their wives. "Who is he?" the wives asked the priestess. She touched the hot obsidian; the flesh of her finger sizzled; and she looked deep into her pain and said,

"He rules by the power of blood. He finds shelter from storms in the open ocean. He finds shoals that make no whitecaps on the sea. He can dip into salt and bring up fair water. And the fish follow him dreaming, dreaming."

A wizard then, but not to be dreaded. So they took to watching him respectfully, and in a matter of weeks they learned that he meant to be kind. For if they followed him out to sea in the early hours before dawn, he would sail in his clumsy fashion for an hour or so, then stop and cast in his net. If the fishermen cast in their nets at that time, they found nothing. But if they waited until his net was full, if they watched as he laboriously brought it aboard, then he would sail back home, and they could then dip their nets into the sea and catch well, every day that they followed him, boats full to the brim with fish on some days, and never a day that the fish escaped entire.

So the coming of the pink-eyed wizard brought good to Brack. Not that they ever became friendly with the man. It's never good to mingle with folk who draw their power from the living blood.

Besides, even if they had lost all their fear of the wizard fisherman, there was his daughter.

It seemed at first that she hardly knew she was a woman. She never left his side, and when he drew in his heavy nets, there she was beside him, pulling on her side, and pulling well—when the fishermen still thought she was a lad, they praised the boy among themselves for his hard work, if not for his skill. They knew soon enough that she was a woman, though. If the wizard dressed too much under the hot sun of the southern sea, his daughter dressed too little, wearing dungarees like a man, and casting away her shirt when the day was blazing, until back and breast alike were burnt dark: She seemed at first to care nothing for their gaze; as time passed, however, they began to think she was something of a wanton, shedding her clothing deliberately, so they would see her. They saw how her breasts grew fuller and more sluggishly pendulous as she worked. They saw how her belly swelled.

She could not be more than a year or two into womanhood, and yet she was full of a child.

Whose child? When at last the fisherman's daughter had her confinement, it was not hard to guess. The wizard fisherman had come in the end of autumn, only weeks after the coronation of the King, and the babe was being born now, well into the new autumn. Ten months. The child must have been conceived since the little ship first came into the bay of Brack, and the father of the child could only be the child's grandfather as well. It was a terrible thing, but the ways of those who buy their power from the living blood are not to be questioned.

The priestess of the Sweet Sisters knew better, however. She, too, could count the months, but when she poured tears, sweat, and seawater drops on the hot pumice, they beaded up and stayed, skittering for a moment, then drifting across the rough stone like a fleet of sailboats in a bay, runing for her the message of the Sweet Sisters to this watcher by the sea. It was no incestuous child that would be born, but a daughter whose blood was filled with awesome power: a ten-month child ruled by the moon from her birth.

What should I do? asked the priestess, terrified.

But the water evaporated at last, leaving thin trails of salt upon the stone. It was. not for her to do anything, only to watch, only to know.

Some of the wives saw the fear in her face as the priestess looked across the water to the wizard fisherman and the hut where the babe already crawled in the sand.

"Should we drive them away?" asked one.

"Wizards come and go as they like," said the priestess. "The Sweet Sisters do not ban, they quicken what they find in the world."

"Should we leave, then?" asked another.

"Do your men come home with empty boats or full?" asked the priestess in return. "Does the wizard do you good or ill?"

"Then why," asked another woman, "why are you afraid?"

And the priestess caressed the quartz crystal at her throat and professed not to know.

At last the priestess could bear no more. She got onto her feeble raft and poled her way across the placid water of the bay until she beached before the wizard's hut. The fisherman's daughter was playing with her child in the cool afternoon of early spring. She looked up curiously at the priestess who picked her way along the kelpy sand. The babe, too, looked up. The priestess avoided the baby's eyes—a ten-month child is not to be caught in the gaze of a stranger—and so stared instead at the mother. She was younger than the priestess had thought, watching her from a distance. She might have been the babe's sister. Her eyes were hot and challenging, cold and curious, and for the first time it occurred to the priestess that the mother might be more dangerous than the child.

But it was the wizard she had come to see, not the women, and so the priestess of the Sweet Sisters went to the door of the hut, pushed aside the flap, and went inside.

"Close the flap!" barked the wizard. "I could go blind from the sunlight, coming sudden like that."

When the flap was back in place, the pink-eyed fisherman stopped squinting. "You," he said. "Took your sweet time about coming."

"I need a good day on the sea," said the priestess. "I rarely travel."

"You witches, who use the dead blood, you don't ever seem to have much life in you at all."

"Out of death comes new life," she answered. "And out of living blood comes old death."

"May be true. I don't much care, actually. You women never teach us your rite, and you may be sure it's a fool who teaches a woman ours."

She looked around the hut and saw that it was better equipped with books than with the tools of fishing. "Where do you mend your nets?" she asked.

"They never break," he answered. "Child's play."

"The child must die," said the priestess.

"Must she?"

"A ten-month child is too powerful to stay in the world. You must know that."

"I've never studied the lore of births and bindings," confessed the wizard. "There's not much use a man can make of it anyway. I'll look it up, though, now that you've mentioned it."

"I've come to do it for you."

"No," said the wizard.

"You cannot use the blood. It would consume you."

"I do not intend to use or not use the blood. I don't intend the child to die."

"My tears stayed forever on the pumice."

"It's not in my right to decide. The father of the child extends his protection over the girl and over her little one. Both will live."

"A wizard who draws the fish up from the sea, and you let the father of the child keep you from acting for the safety of the world?"

"The child's mother loves her."

The priestess saw that he did not mean to listen to her, and so she said no more and left. As she came from the hut she looked to where the childmother and the ancient child had been playing. They were gone. And then the girl's voice came from behind her, and the priestess knew that she had heard all that was said indoors.

"Can a woman use the living blood?" asked the girl.

The priestess considered the question, and shuddered. "No," she said, and walked quickly away. And all the way across the bay she cursed herself for coming to see them: for the girl had asked the question that no decent-hearted woman would ask, and the priestess feared the girl was wise enough to know that her answer was a lie. There were living bloods that a woman could use, but no woman who was not a viper ever would. Let her not use them, she prayed all night, washing her hair again and again in the tidewater that lapped against her skirts. Forgive me for having raised the possibility in her mind, and undo my day's work.