The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin
“They were never men. They were demons, beast-spirits, who plotted against the sacred life of the Godking!” Kossil’s eyes shone with the reddish torchlight.
Arha looked again at the prisoners, awed and curious. “How could a man attack a god? How was it? You: how could you dare attack a living god?”
The one man stared at her through the black brush of his hair, but said nothing.
“Their tongues were cut out before they were sent from Awabath,” Kossil said. “Do not speak to them, mistress. They are defilement. They are yours, but not to speak to, nor to look at, nor to think upon. They are yours to give to the Nameless Ones.”
“How are they to be sacrificed?”
Arha no longer looked at the prisoners. She faced Kossil instead, drawing strength from the massive body, the cold voice. She felt dizzy, and the reek of smoke and filth made her sick, yet she seemed to think and speak with perfect calm. Had she not done this many times before?
“The Priestess of the Tombs knows best what manner of death will please her Masters, and it is hers to choose. There are many ways.”
“Let Gobar the captain of the guards hew off their heads. And the blood will be poured out before the Throne.”
“As if it were a sacrifice of goats?” Kossil seemed to be sneering at her lack of imagination. She stood dumb. Kossil went on, “Besides, Gobar is a man. No man can enter the Dark Places of the Tombs, surely my mistress remembers that? If he enters, he does not leave. . . . ”
“Who brought them here? Who feeds them?”
“The wardens who serve my temple, Duby and Uahto; they are eunuchs and may enter here on the services of the Nameless Ones, as I may. The Godking’s soldiers left the prisoners bound outside the wall, and I and the wardens brought them in through the Prisoner’s Door, the door in the red rocks. So it is always done. The food and water is lowered from a trapdoor in one of the rooms behind the Throne.”
Arha looked up and saw, beside the chain from which the torch hung, a wooden square set into the stone ceiling. It was far too small for a man to crawl through, but a rope lowered from it would come down just within reach of the middle prisoner of the three. She looked away again quickly.
“Let them not bring any more food or water, then. Let the torch go out.”
Kossil bowed. “And the bodies, when they die?”
“Let Duby and Uahto bury them in the great cavern that we passed through, the Undertomb,” the girl said, her voice becoming quick and high. “They must do it in the dark. My Masters will eat the bodies.”
“It shall be done.”
“Is this well, Kossil?”
“It is well, mistress.”
“Then let us go,” Arha said, very shrill. She turned and hurried back to the wooden door, and out of the Room of Chains into the blackness of the tunnel. It seemed sweet and peaceful as a starless night, silent, without sight, or light, or life. She plunged into the clean darkness, hurried forward through it like a swimmer through water. Kossil hastened along, behind her and getting farther behind, panting, lumbering. Without hesitation Arha repeated the missed and taken turnings as they had come, skirted the vast echoing Undertomb, and crept, bent over, up the last long tunnel to the shut door of rock. There she crouched down and felt for the long key on the ring at her waist. She found it, but could not find the keyhole. There was no pinprick of light in the invisible wall before her. Her fingers groped over it seeking lock or bolt or handle and finding nothing. Where must the key go? How could she get out?
“Mistress!”
Kossil’s voice, magnified by echoes, hissed and boomed far behind her.
“Mistress, the door will not open from inside. There is no way out. There is no return.”
Arha crouched against the rock. She said nothing.
“Arha!”
“I am here.”
“Come!”
She came, crawling on hands and knees along the passage, like a dog, to Kossil’s skirts.
“To the right. Hurry! I must not linger here. It is not my place. Follow me.”
Arha got to her feet, and held on to Kossil’s robes. They went forward, following the strangely carven wall of the cavern to the right for a long way, then entering a black gap in the blackness. They went upward now, in tunnels, by stairs. The girl still clung to the woman’s robe. Her eyes were shut.
There was light, red through her eyelids. She thought it was the torchlit room full of smoke again, and did not open her eyes. But the air smelt sweetish, dry and moldy, a familiar smell; and her feet were on a staircase steep almost as a ladder. She let go Kossil’s robe, and looked. A trapdoor was open over her head. She scrambled through it after Kossil. It let her into a room she knew, a little stone cell containing a couple of chests and iron boxes, in the warren of rooms behind the Throne Room of the Hall. Daylight glimmered grey and faint in the hallway outside its door.
“The other, the Prisoner’s Door, leads only into the tunnels. It does not lead out. This is the only way out. If there is any other way I do not know of it, nor does Thar. You must remember it for yourself, if there is one. But I do not think there is.” Kossil still spoke in an undertone, and with a kind of spitefulness. Her heavy face within the black cowl was pale, and damp with sweat.
“I don’t remember the turnings to this way out.”
“I’ll tell them to you. Once. You must remember them. Next time I will not come with you. This is not my place. You must come alone.”
The girl nodded. She looked up into the older woman’s face, and thought how strange it looked, pale with scarcely mastered fear and yet triumphant, as if Kossil gloated over her weakness.
“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
DREAMS AND TALES
ARHA 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 Godki
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.
THE GODKING IN AWABATH 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
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.