Marion Bradley - The Fall Of Atlantis

All this Demira endured calmly enough—but when she heard who had fathered her child, she screamed out between the words, "No! No, no, no ..."

"Silence!" Ragamon commanded, and his gaze transfixed the shrieking child as he adjured solemnly. "This testimony shall bear no weight. I find no record of this child's parentage, nor any grounds save hearsay for believing that she is daughter to any man. We need no charges of incest!"

Maleina caught Demira in her arms, pressing the golden head to her shoulder, holding the girl close, with an agonized, protective love. The look on the woman's face might have belonged to a sorrowing angel—or an avenging demon.

Her eyes rested on Riveda, seeming to burn out of her dark, gaunt face, and she spoke as if her voice came from a tomb. "Riveda! If the Gods meted justice, you would lie in this child's place!"

But Demira pulled madly away from her restraining hands and ran screaming from the Hall of Judgment.

All that day they sought her. It was Karahama who, toward nightfall, found the girl in the innermost sanctuary of the Temple of the Mother. Demira had hanged herself from one of the crossbeams, a blue bridal girdle knotted about her neck, her slight distorted body swaying horribly as if to reprove the Goddess who had denied her, the mother who had forsworn her, the Temple that had never allowed her to know life... .

I

Silence ... and the beating of her heart ... and the dripping of water as it trickled, drop by slow drop, out of the stone onto the damp rock floor. Deoris stole through the black stillness, calling almost in a whisper, "Riveda!" The vaulted roof cast the name back, hollow and guttural echoes: "Riveda ... veda ... veda ... eda ... da... ."

Deoris shivered, her wide eyes searching the darkness fearfully. Where have they taken him?

As her sight gradually became accustomed to the gloom, she discerned a pale and narrow chink of light—and, almost at her feet, the heavy sprawled form of a man.

Riveda! Deoris fell to her knees.

He lay so desperately still, breathing as if drugged. The heavy chains about his body forced him backward, strained and unnaturally cramped ... Abruptly the prisoner came awake, his hands groping in the darkness.

"Deoris," he said, almost wonderingly, and stirred with a metallic rasp of chains. She took his seeking hands in hers, pressing her lips to the wrists chafed raw by the cold iron. Riveda fumbled to touch her face. "Have they—they have not imprisoned you too, child?"

"No," she whispered.

Riveda struggled to sit up, then sighed and gave it up. "I cannot," he acknowledged wearily. "These chains are heavy—and cold!"

In horror, Deoris realized that he was literally weighed down with bronze chains that enlaced his body, fettering hands and feet close to the floor so that he could not even sit upright—his giant strength oppressed so easily! But how they must fear him!

He smiled, a gaunt, hollow-eyed grimace in the darkness. "They have even bound my hands lest I weave a spell to free myself! The half-witted, superstitious cowards," he muttered, "knowing nothing of magic—they are afraid of what no living man could accomplish!" He chuckled. "I suppose I could, possibly, bespeak the fetters off my wrists—if I wanted to bring the dungeon down on top of me!"

Awkwardly, because of the weight of the chains and the clumsiness of her own swelling body, Deoris got her arms half-way around him and held him, as closely as she could, his head softly pillowed on her thighs.

"How long have I been here, Deoris?"

"Seven days," she whispered.

He stirred with irritation at the realization that she was crying softly. "Oh, stop it!" he commanded. "I suppose I am to die—and I can stand that—but I will not have you snivelling over me!" Yet his hand, gently resting upon hers, belied the anger in his voice.

"Somehow," he mused, after a little time had passed, "I have always thought my home was—out there in the dark, somewhere." The words dropped, quiet and calm, through the intermittent drip-dripping of the subterranean waters. "Many years ago, when I was young, I saw a fire, and what looked like death—and beyond that, in the dark places, something ... or some One, who knew me. Shall I at last find my way back to that wonderworld of Night?" He lay quiet in her arms for many minutes, smiling. "Strange," he said at last, "that after all I have done, my one act of mercy condemns me to death—that I made certain Larmin, with his tainted blood, grew not to manhood—complete."

Suddenly Deoris was angry. "Who were you to judge?" she flared at him.

"I judged—because I had the power to decide."

"Is there no right beyond power?" Deoris asked bitterly.

Riveda's smile was wry now. "None, Deoris. None."

Hot rebellion overflowed in Deoris, and the right of her own unborn child stirred in her. "You yourself fathered Larmin, and insured that taint its further right! And what of Demira? What of the child you, of your own free will, begot on me? Would you show that child the same mercy?"

"There were—things I did not know, when I begot Larmin." In the darkness she could not see the full grimness of the smile lurking behind Riveda's words. "To your child, I fear I show only the mercy of leaving it fatherless!" And suddenly he raised up in another fit of raving, heretical blasphemies, straining like a mad beast at his chains; battering Deoris away from him, he shouted violently until his voice failed and, gasping hoarsely, he fell with a metallic clamor of chains.

Deoris pulled the spent man into her arms, and he did not move. Silence stole toward them on dim feet, while the crack of light crept slowly across her face and lent its glow at last to Riveda's rough-hewn, sleeping face. Heavy, abandoned sleep enfolded him, a sleep that seemed to clasp fingers with death. Time had run down; Deoris, kneeling in the darkness, could feel the sluggish beating of its pulse in the water that dripped crisply, drearily, eroding a deep channel through her heart, that flowed with brooding silence ...

Riveda moved finally, as if with pain. The single ray of light outlined his face, harshly unrelenting, before her longing eyes. "Deoris," he whispered, and the manacled hand groped at her waist ... then he sighed. "Of course. They have burned it!" He stopped, his voice still hoarse and rasping. "Forgive me," he said. "It was best—you never knew—our child!" He made a strange blurred sound like a sob, then turned his face into her hand and with a reverence as great as it was unexpected, pressed his lips into the palm. His manacled hand fell, with a clashing of chains.

For the first time in his long and impersonally concentrated life, Riveda felt a deep and personal despair. He did not fear death for himself; he had cast the lots and they had turned against him. But what lot have I cast for Deoris? She must live—and after me her child will live—that child! Suddenly Riveda knew the full effect of his actions, faced responsibility and found it a bitter, self-poisoned brew. In the darkness, he held Deoris as close and as tenderly as he could in the circumstances, as if straining to give the protection he had too long neglected ... and his thoughts ran a black torrent.

But for Deoris the greyness was gone. In despair and pain she had finally found the man she had always seen and known and loved behind the fearful outer mask he wore to the world. In that hour, she was no longer a frightened child, but a woman, stronger than life or death in the soft violence of her love for this man she could never manage to hate. Her strength would not last—but as she knelt beside him, she forgot everything but her love of Riveda. She held his chained body in her arms, and time stopped for them both.