The Tombs of Atuan: Chapters 6–8

She had not thought he would stay so long at the unavailing door, but it was the only place she knew to look.

“What brings my mistress?” said the stout woman, cold and watchful.

It flitted across Arha’s mind that Kossil looked very like Penthe imitating Kossil, and a wild laugh rose up in her, was repressed, and died away.

Then as Kossil continued to look at her with disbelief, she added, “I know a man by sight, though I have seen few.”
Kossil disdained her irony. “How came a man there?”

His movements were listless.

He was still obstinate, but the power was gone out of him.

Even his sorcerer’s light was wan and dim.

Then doggedly he picked it up and tried to force the broken blade between the stones.

He had not opened the iron door; he had not summoned magic food, nor brought water through the wall, nor conjured up some demon monster to break down the walls, all of which she had feared he might be able to do.

She and Manan had not walked five hundred paces on their tortuous course when they came upon him, crumpled up in the narrow corridor like a heap of rags thrown down.

His face more melancholy than ever, Manan obeyed, hoisting the young man effortfully up onto his shoulders like a long sack.

He staggered along after Arha thus laden. He could not go far at a time under that load.

Manan stared in melancholy consternation, wheezing.

In the light of her single lantern the paintings on the four walls seemed to move, to twitch, the uncouth human forms with great drooping wings, squatting and standing in a timeless dreariness.

“Little mistress,” Manan said plaintively, “I do not question, but...what good is he as a slave to the Nameless Ones? He is a man, little one.”

“It’s pleasant to have light,” he said in the soft but deep voice, which perturbed her.

“What’s your name?” she asked, peremptory.

His dark eyes watched her intently.

“But you’re an infidel, an unbeliever.”

The little girls with their pale faces and furtive ways, the restless novices, the priestesses whose looks were stern and cool but whose lives were all a secret brangle of jealousies and miseries and small ambitions and wasted passions—all these women, among whom she had always lived and who made up the human world to her, now appeared to her as both pitiable and boring.

And in that unending night, the prisoner: the dark man, practicer of dark arts, bound in iron and locked in stone, waiting for her to come or not to come, to bring him water and bread and life, or a knife and a butcher’s bowl and death, just as the whim took her.

The fellow in the Labyrinth ate up her meager portions of bread and cheese and beans as a toad eats a fly: snap! it’s gone.

Clearly he could have done so five or six times over; but he thanked her soberly, as if he were her guest and she his hostess at a table such as she had heard of in tales of feasts at the palace of the Godking, all set with roast meats and buttered loaves and wine in crystal.

The tallow candle in her lantern burned dim and steady.

“You gave me your cloak,” he said as if in reproach. “Can I give you nothing? Well, don’t worry. It’s only illusion; see.”

The Priestess of the Godking had only to send her servant Duby to throttle him tonight; or if she and Duby did not know the Labyrinth this far, all she need do was blow poison-dust down the spy hole into the Painted Room.

Afraid of the dark places she might be, but she was one who would subdue her fear to gain her ends.

“No,” said Manan, dour and fretful.

To the left there was a ledge or curb, not much more than a hand’s- breadth wide.

But above that chasm, where they went in the dark tunnels, the corridors grew slowly narrower and lower, until even Arha must stoop.

Indeed the place filled her with a dull dread, and she felt some mistrust of the prisoner, pinioned though he was.

He said nothing, and his face was quiet, but there was in his eyes something that moved her: a desolation, the look of one betrayed.

He would have nothing for warmth in that dank vault but his own short cloak, no bed but the dusty stone.

She dreamt of the souls of the dead on the walls of the Painted Room, the figures like great bedraggled birds with human hands and feet and faces, squatting in the dust of the dark places.

Sunrise gilded the eaves of the Small House.

Food, after three days of semi-fasting, made her feel solid, gave her ballast; she didn’t feel so wild and light-hearted and frightened.

“He is not dead yet,” she said at last, trying to feign the indifferent tone that had come so easily a moment ago.

She must not answer so quickly, in that foolish, appeasing tone; she must be on her dignity with Kossil.

He turned, heavy with reluctance and foreboding, but obedient, and trudged down the long hall under the columns and the ruined roof.

When he had been gone some while she turned and went around the dais of the Throne, and vanished into the dark behind it.