The slaves shouted aloud when I laid my hand on her, but quickly they fell silent again. When they came forward, many eyes streamed with tears-the eyes of men as well as those of women and of children. They would have touched her too, I think, if they could; but the lion and the wolf rushed at them, menacing them as the shepherd's dogs menace the sheep.
'Goddess!' one of the slaves shouted. 'Hear our plea!'
'I have heard your plea many times,' Mother Ge told him, and now her voice was like the singing of a bird in the sun, in lands that are drowned forever.
'Five hundred years the men of Rope have enslaved us.'
'And five hundred more. Yet you are seven when they are one. Why should I aid you?'
At that, they led the blind priestess forward. She cried, 'We are your worshipers! Who will feed your altars if we lose our faith?'
'I have millions more in other lands,' Mother Ge told her. 'And some for whom I am not yet bent and old.' She paused, sucking her gums. 'But I would have another sacrifice tonight. Give it to me willingly, and I will do all I can to free you. The victim need not die. Will you give it?'
'Yes,' shouted the priestess and the man who had spoken before; and after them, all the people shouted, 'Yes!' Then Mother Ge told them what she required of him, and the blind priestess found a sharp flint for it, searching the ground on all fours like a beast.
Twice he tried to strike but drew back his hand at the first blood. Though Mother Ge had said he need not die, his progeny died that night to ten thousand generations, and he knew it as well as I. He stood well back from Mother Ge and from me; the other slaves crowded around him, cheering him and pledging tawdry rewards-a new roof or a milch goat. I knew then that I might slip away in the dark if I chose, but I waited as fascinated as the rest.
Then there was a stroke in which there was no hesitation. His manhood came away in his hand, looking like the offal from a butcher's shop when he held it up. Someone took it from him and laid it upon the fallen altar, and he stood with legs wide apart, bleeding like a woman-or, rather, like a bull when it is made an ox. The others made him lie on the ground and stanched his flow with cobwebs and moss.
'Now hear me,' Mother Ge said. She straightened her back, and it seemed that a great light shone there, a light from which her body shielded us. 'This man is sacred to me as long as he lives. In payment, I will fight for you, striving to make his master, Prince Pausanias, king of this land.'
The slaves muttered against these words, and a few shouted protests.
'You think him your greatest foe, but I tell you he will be your greatest friend and perhaps your king, turning his back upon his own kindred. Still he, and I, may fail. If so, I shall destroy Rope-'
Here the slaves roared so loudly I could not hear.
'-then you must rise against the Rope Makers, your scythes to cut their spears, your sickles to beat down their swords. But first, your stones against their helmets. So you defeated them on this night. Remember it.'
Then she was gone, and the clearing seemed dark and far from the lands of men. One fire was dying, the other already no more than embers. In a litter they wove of vines, half a dozen men carried away the man who had unmanned himself. Others trailed behind them, bearing the bodies of relatives killed in the fighting. Some women asked me to come with them and offered to treat my bruises, but I feared them still because of the woman I had killed, and I told them to follow their husbands. They did as I ordered, leaving me alone with the dead.
Though the billhook was not intended for digging, I was able to scratch out a small and shallow grave in the soft earth of the clearing. I buried the girl I had not saved and heaped her grave with the stones that had been flung at us. I believe one of the dead Rope Makers was Eutaktos, whom I had known in some time I have forgotten. Though I robbed several of their helmets to study their faces, I could not be sure; I had seen Eutaktos only briefly and by firelight.
Nor did I any longer know who Kore and Europa were, nor what they had once meant to me, though I could recall a time not long ago when I had known. Their names and that memory troubled me at least as much as the thought that the lion and the wolf might still be near. I muttered 'Kore' and 'Europa' over and over as I built up the dying fire and carried blazing sticks to reestablish the other, until at last Kore and Europa ceased to have any meaning at all for me, ceased even to be names.
Walking up and down between the fires, I waited for dawn before I made my way through the split hill. The bodies of many Rope Makers had laid on that narrow path, and there were still many bloodstains; but the slaves had dragged the bodies away, so that they lay in the shadows beneath the trees, wrapped in the green life of the oaks. I do not think the other Rope Makers will find them there.
From the place where Drakaina had taken my arm, I could see the old goddess walking the valley, a woman taller than women, at once darker and brighter than the tree tops touched by dawn. She stopped at the grave, I think, for after a time she vanished from sight and I heard her weeping.
When I had passed the split hill, I cast aside my weapon and hurried through the dew-decked fields to this camp on the bank of the Eurotas, where now I write these words in the morning sunlight. Io met me. After I had told her something of what had happened that night and she had salved my bruises and mourned with many head shakings the blow that had struck me down, she took me proudly to see Cerdon, whom she had hidden among the hay that fed our pack mules; but Cerdon had died while she slept, and already his limbs were cold and stiff.
CHAPTER XXXII-Here in Rope
Strangers viewed with the greatest suspicion. This morning Drakaina, Io, and I went to see the famous temple of Orthia. Its enclosure on the riverbank must once have been separated from the city, but now the Rope Makers have built their houses right up to the boundaries of the sacred ground. Drakaina said, 'In the Empire, we wall our cities properly. When you're on one side of the wall, you're in the city; on the other, you're in the country. With all these straggling hamlets, who knows? Thought was almost as bad, but at least they had guard posts on the roads.'
'The Great King tore down your walls,' Io reminded her. 'That's what the regent said.'
Drakaina nodded. 'The People from Parsa have a sense of fitness. Its walls symbolize a city, and pulling them down is the destruction of the city. Rope's been destroyed already-or let's say that it's never existed. This is just four villages; no wonder they call it scattered.'
Slaves turned their faces to one side when we passed, and even the Neighbors we saw did not wish to speak with us. Rope Makers stopped us and questioned us, women as well as men, and many told us we were unwelcome. We soon learned to reply that we would gladly go elsewhere if only their regent would permit it, which silenced them quite effectively.
Drakaina shook her lovely head after one such encounter. 'There's no place in the world where men are less free than they are here, and none where women are freer-save perhaps in the country of the Amazons, the women who live without men.'
'Are they real?' Io asked. 'Once Basias said I'd be a strategist among them.'
'Of course they are.' Drakaina slipped her arm through mine. 'But you'll have to go far to the north and east-much farther east than my own city. And you'll have to leave Latro here with me. The Amazons don't care for foreigners any more than these Rope Makers, and they consider all men spies.'
I said, 'There can be no such race; they'd die out in a generation.'
'They lie with the young men of the Sons of Scoloti. If they bear a girl afterward, they sear her left breast so she can use the bow. Boys buy them the favor of their goddess, or so I've heard. I admit I've never seen one of these women warriors myself.'
I thought of the dream I had last night when she said that; perhaps later I will write of it here.
'There it is!' Io exclaimed, and pointed.
'About what I expected. They don't know what a real temple looks like here. Nobody could who hasn't traveled in the east, though some of these are at least beautiful. This isn't even that. In fact, if this whole city were destroyed, no one would ever guess from looking at the ruins that half the world had trembled at its name.'
The temple was indeed small and very simple, its pillars mere wooden posts painted white. I took off my
