The Tombs of Atuan (6 page)

“I will come alone after this,” Arha said, and then trying to turn away from Kossil she felt her legs give way, and saw the room turn over. She fainted in a little black heap at the priestess’s feet.

“You’ll learn,” Kossil said, still breathing heavily, standing motionless. “You’ll learn.”

CHAPTER 4

A
RHA WAS NOT WELL FOR
several days. They treated her for fever. She kept to her bed, or sat in the mild autumn sunlight on the porch of the Small House, and looked up at the western hills. She felt weak and stupid. The same ideas occurred to her again and again. She was ashamed of having fainted. No guard had been set upon the Tomb Wall, but now she would never dare ask Kossil about that. She did not want to see Kossil at all: never. It was because she was ashamed of having fainted.

Often, in the sunlight, she would plan how she was going to behave next time she went into the dark places under the hill. She thought many times about what kind of death she should command for the next set of prisoners, more elaborate, better suited to the rituals of the Empty Throne.

Each night, in the dark, she woke up screaming, “They aren’t dead yet! They are still dying!”

She dreamed a great deal. She dreamed that she had to cook food, great cauldrons full of savory porridge, and pour it all out
into a hole in the ground. She dreamed that she had to carry a full bowl of water, a deep brass bowl, through the dark, to someone who was thirsty. She could never get to this person. She woke, and she herself was thirsty, but she did not go and get a drink. She lay awake, eyes open, in the room without windows.

One morning Penthe came to see her. From the porch Arha saw her approach the Small House with a careless, purposeless air, as if she just happened to be wandering that way. If Arha had not spoken she would not have come up the steps. But Arha was lonely, and spoke.

Penthe made the deep bow required of all who approached the Priestess of the Tombs, and then plopped down on the steps below Arha and made a noise like “Phewph!” She had gotten quite tall and plump; anything she did turned her cherry pink, and she was pink now from walking.

“I heard you were ill. I saved you out some apples.” She suddenly produced a rush net containing six or eight perfect yellow apples, from somewhere under her voluminous black robe. She was now consecrated to the service of the Godking, and served in his temple under Kossil; but she wasn’t yet a priestess, and still did lessons and chores with the novices. “Poppe and I sorted the apples this year, and I saved the very best ones out. They always dry all the really good ones. Of course they keep best, but it seems such a waste. Aren’t they pretty?”

Arha felt the pale gold satin skins of the apples, looked at
the twigs to which brown leaves still delicately clung. “They are pretty.”

“Have one,” said Penthe.

“Not now. You do.”

Penthe selected the smallest, out of politeness, and ate it in about ten juicy, skillful, interested bites.

“I could eat all day,” she said. “I never get enough. I wish I could be a cook instead of a priestess. I’d cook better than that old skinflint Nathabba, and besides, I’d get to lick the pots. . . . Oh, did you hear about Munith? She was supposed to be polishing those brass pots they keep the rose oil in, you know, those long thin sort of jars with stoppers. And she thought she was supposed to clean the insides too, so she stuck her hand in, with a rag around it, you know, and then she couldn’t get it out. She tried so hard it got all puffed up and swollen at the wrist, you know, so that she really
was
stuck. And she went galloping all over the dormitories yelling, ‘I can’t get it off! I can’t get it off!’ And Punti’s so deaf now he thought it was a fire, and started screeching at the other wardens to come and rescue the novices. And Uahto was milking and came running out of the pen to see what was the matter, and left the gate open, and all the milch-goats got out and came charging into the courtyard and ran into Punti and the wardens and the little girls, and Munith waving this brass pot around on the end of her arm and having hysterics, and they were all sort of rushing around down there when Kossil came down from the temple. And she said, ‘What’s this? What’s this?’”

Penthe’s fair, round face took on a repulsive sneer, not at all like Kossil’s cold expression, and yet somehow so like Kossil that Arha gave a snort of almost terrified laughter.

“‘What’s this? What’s all this?’ Kossil said. And then—and then the brown goat
butted
her—” Penthe dissolved in laughter, tears welled in her eyes. “And M-Munith hit the, the goat with the p-p-pot—”

Both girls rocked back and forth in spasms of giggling, holding their knees, choking.

“And Kossil turned around and said, ‘What’s this? What’s this?’ to the—to the—to the goat. . . . ” The end of the tale was lost in laughter. Penthe finally wiped her eyes and nose, and absentmindedly started on another apple.

To laugh so hard made Arha feel a little shaky. She calmed herself down, and after a while asked, “How did you come here, Penthe?”

“Oh, I was the sixth girl my mother and father had, and they just couldn’t bring up so many and marry them all off. So when I was seven they brought me to the Godking’s temple and dedicated me. That was in Ossawa. They had too many novices there, I guess, because pretty soon they sent me on here. Or maybe they thought I’d make a specially good priestess or something. But they were wrong about that!” Penthe bit her apple with a cheerful, rueful face.

“Would you rather not have been a priestess?”

“Would I rather! Of course! I’d rather marry a pig-herd and live in a ditch. I’d rather anything than stay buried alive here all my born days with a mess of women in a perishing old desert where nobody ever comes! But there’s no good
wishing
about it, because I’ve been consecrated now and I’m stuck with it. But I do hope that in my next life I’m a dancing-girl in Awabath! Because I will have earned it.”

Arha looked down at her with a dark steady gaze. She did not understand. She felt that she had never seen Penthe before, never looked at her and seen her, round and full of life and juice as one of her golden apples, beautiful to see.

“Doesn’t the Temple mean anything to you?” she asked, rather harshly.

Penthe, always submissive and easily bullied, did not take alarm this time. “Oh, I know your Masters are very important to you,” she said with an indifference that shocked Arha. “That makes some sense, anyhow, because you’re their one special servant. You weren’t just consecrated, you were specially born. But look at me. Am I supposed to feel so much awe and so on about the Godking? After all he’s just a man, even if he does live in Awabath in a palace ten miles around with gold roofs. He’s about fifty years old, and he’s bald. You can see in all the statues. And I’ll bet you he has to cut his toenails, just like any other man. I know perfectly well that he’s a god, too. But what I think is, he’ll be much godlier after he’s
dead.
”

Arha agreed with Penthe, for secretly she had come to consider the self-styled Divine Emperors of Kargad as upstarts, false gods trying to filch the worship due to the true and everlasting Powers. But there was something underneath Penthe’s words with which she didn’t agree, something wholly new to her, frightening to her. She had not realized how very different people were, how differently they saw life. She felt as if she had looked up and suddenly seen a whole new planet hanging huge and populous right outside the window, an entirely strange world, one in which the gods did not matter. She was scared by the solidity of Penthe’s unfaith. Scared, she struck out.

“That’s true. My Masters have been dead a long, long time; and they were never men. . . . Do you know, Penthe, I could call you into the service of the Tombs.” She spoke pleasantly, as if offering her friend a better choice.

The pink went right out of Penthe’s cheeks.

“Yes,” she said, “you could. But I’m not . . . I’m not the sort that would be good at that.”

“Why?”

“I am afraid of the dark,” Penthe said in a low voice.

Arha made a little sound of scorn, but she was pleased. She had made her point. Penthe might disbelieve in the gods, but she feared the unnameable powers of the dark—as did every mortal soul.

“I wouldn’t do that unless you wanted to, you know,” Arha said.

A long silence fell between them.

“You’re getting to be more and more like Thar,” Penthe said in her soft dreamy way. “Thank goodness you’re not getting like Kossil! But you’re so strong. I wish I were strong. I just like eating. . . . ”

“Go ahead,” Arha said, superior and amused, and Penthe slowly consumed a third apple down to the seeds.

The demands of the endless ritual of the Place brought Arha out of her privacy a couple of days later. Twin kids had been born out of season to a she-goat, and were to be sacrificed to the Twin God-Brothers as the custom was: an important rite, at which the First Priestess must be present. Then it was dark of the moon, and the ceremonies of the darkness must be performed before the Empty Throne. Arha breathed in the drugging fumes of herbs burning in broad trays of bronze before the Throne, and danced, solitary in black. She danced for the unseen spirits of the dead and the unborn and as she danced the spirits crowded the air around her, following the turn and spin of her feet and the slow, sure gestures of her arms. She sang the songs whose words no man understood, which she had learned syllable by syllable, long ago, from Thar. A choir of priestesses hidden in the dusk behind the great double row of columns echoed the strange words after her, and the air in the vast ruinous room hummed with voices, as if the crowding spirits repeated the chants again and again.

T
HE
G
ODKING IN
A
WABATH SENT
no more prisoners to the Place, and gradually Arha ceased to dream of the three now long since dead and buried in shallow graves in the great cavern under the Tombstones.

She summoned up her courage to return to that cavern. She must go back there: the Priestess of the Tombs must be able to enter her own domain without terror, to know its ways.

The first time she entered the trapdoor was hard; yet not so hard as she had feared. She had schooled herself up to it so well, had so determined that she would go alone and keep her nerve, that when she came there she was almost dismayed to find that there was nothing to be afraid of. Graves might be there, but she could not see them; she could not see anything. It was black; it was silent. And that was all.

Day after day she went there, always entering by the trapdoor in the room behind the Throne, until she knew well the whole circuit of the cavern, with its strange sculptured walls—as well as one can know what one cannot see. She never left the walls, for in striking out across the great hollow she might soon lose the sense of direction in the darkness, and so, blundering back at last to the wall, not know where she was. For as she had learned the first time, the important thing down in the dark places was to know which turnings and openings one had passed, and which were to come. It must be done by counting, for they were all alike to the groping
hands. Arha’s memory had been well trained, and she found no difficulty to this odd trick of finding one’s way by touch and number, instead of by sight and common sense. She soon knew by heart all the corridors that opened off the Undertomb, the lesser maze that lay under the Hall of the Throne and the hilltop. But there was one corridor she never entered: the second left of the red rock entrance, that one which, if she entered mistaking it for one she knew, she might never find her way out of again. Her longing to enter it, to learn the Labyrinth, grew steadily, but she restrained it until she had learned all she could about it, aboveground.

Thar knew little about it but the names of certain of its rooms, and the list of directions, of turns made and missed, for getting to these rooms. She would tell these to Arha, but she would never draw them in the dust or even with the gesture of a hand in the air; and she herself had never followed them, had never entered the Labyrinth. But when Arha asked her, “What is the way from the iron door that stands open to the Painted Room?” or, “How does the way run from the Room of Bones to the tunnel by the river?”—then Thar would be silent a little, and then recite the strange directions she had learned long before from Arha-that-was: so many crossings passed, so many left-hand turns taken, and so on, and so on. And all these Arha got by heart, as Thar had, often on the first listening. When she lay in bed nights she would repeat them to herself, trying to imagine the places, the rooms, the turnings.