The Tombs of Atuan: Prologue–Chapter 3

As the blade swung to its highest point and poised, a figure in black darted out from the left side of the throne, leapt down the stairs, and stayed the sacrificer’s arms with slenderer arms. The sharp edge of the sword glittered in midair.

“O let the Nameless Ones behold the girl given to them, who is verily the one born ever nameless. Let them accept her life and the years of her life until her death, which is also theirs. Let them find her acceptable. Let her be eaten!”

Silent and shuffling, the procession formed and moved away from the throne, eastward toward the bright, distant square of the doorway.

Westward, the mountains caught its yellow light, as did the facade of the Hall of the Throne.

The other buildings, lower on the hill, still lay in purplish shadow, except for the Temple of the God-Brothers across the way on a little knoll: its roof, newly gilt, flashed the day back in glory.

All that day of the Remaking of the Priestess was filled with the low chanting of women’s voices, a dry unceasing drone.

In one place salt was placed upon her tongue; in another she knelt facing west while her hair was cut short and washed with oil and scented vinegar; in another she lay facedown on a slab of black marble behind an altar while shrill voices sang a lament for the dead.

And with this came a memory of being held, which was strange, for here she was seldom even touched; and the memory of a pleasant smell, the fragrance of hair freshly washed and rinsed in sage-scented water, fair long hair, the color of sunset and firelight.

The little bright-eyed baby lying in a cot of rushes weeping and screaming, and all over its body weals and red rashes of fever, and the mother wailing louder than the baby, ‘Oh! Oh! My babe hath the Witch-Fingers on her!’

Even then Manan had been set apart among the Ten Wardens as her particular guardian, and her cot had been in a little alcove, partly separated from the long, low-beamed main room of the dormitory in the Big House where the girls giggled and whispered before they slept, and yawned and plaited one another’s hair in the grey light of morning.

When she was quite little still, she enjoyed hearing people knock submissively on her door, and saying, “You may come in,” and it annoyed her that the two High Priestesses, Kossil and Thar, took their permission for granted and entered her house without knocking.

At last you got to the cool shade of the back courtyard of the Big House by the vegetable patch, and dumped the buckets into the great cistern with a splash.

Within the precincts of the Place—that was all the name it had or needed, for it was the most ancient and sacred of all places in the Four Lands of the Kargish Empire—a couple of hundred people lived, and there were many buildings: three temples, the Big House and the Small House, the quarters of the eunuch wardens, and close outside the wall the guards’ barracks and many slaves’ huts, the storehouses and sheep pens and goat pens and farm buildings.

It looked like a little town, seen from a distance, from up on the dry hills westward where nothing grew but sage, wire-grass in straggling clumps, small weeds and desert herbs.

Showier, and centuries newer, was the Temple of the Godking a little below it, with a high portico and a row of thick white columns with painted capitals—each one a solid log of cedar, brought on shipboard from Hur-at-Hur where there are forests, and dragged by the straining of twenty slaves across the barren plains to the Place.

Only after a traveler approaching from the east had seen the gold roof and the bright columns would he see, higher up on the Hill of the Place, above them all, tawny and ruinous as the desert itself, the oldest of the temples of his race: the huge, low Hall of the Throne, with patched walls and flattish, crumbling dome.

Behind the Hall and encircling the whole crest of the hill ran a massive wall of rock, laid without mortar and half fallen down in many places.

Sometimes Arha went by herself in the early morning and wandered among the Stones trying to make out the dim humps and scratches of the carvings, brought out more clearly by the low angle of the light; or she would sit there and look up at the mountains westward, and down at the roofs and walls of the Place all laid out below, and watch the first stirrings of activity around the Big House and the guards’ barracks, and the flocks of sheep and goats going off to their sparse pastures by the river.

“Slide down partway on the men’s side,” Arha hissed, and both girls wriggled lithe as lizards down the far side of the wall until they could cling there just below the top, invisible from the inner side.

“Hoo! Hoo! Potato face!” crooned Arha, a whispering jeer faint as the wind among the grasses.

She stood sullen and did not reply.

After the supper of potatoes and spring onions, eaten in silence in the narrow, dark refectory, after the chanting of the evening hymns, and the placing of the sacred words upon the doors, and the brief Ritual of the Unspoken, the work of the day was done.

I have been permitted to look after certain matters pertaining to the Domain of the Nameless Ones, until now.

It took some time for the fixed, dull, haughty expression of her face to change.

The girl stood up without haste and said indifferently, “Very well.”

But in her heart, as she followed the heavy figure of the Godking’s priestess, she exulted: At last! At last! I shall see my own domain at last!

They all bowed the knee to her now, even grim Thar and Kossil. All spoke to her with elaborate deference.

Once the ceremonies of her consecration were over, the days went on as they had always gone.

She spoke as if in trance, in rapture.

His slabby face never expressed much but stolid, careful sadness; it was sadder than usual now.

So formidable, so cold, so strong had Thar and Kossil always seemed to her, that she had never even imagined their being afraid.

“One of my mistress’s duties, as she knows, is the sacrifice of certain prisoners, criminals of noble birth, who by sacrilege or treason have sinned against our lord the Godking.”

Inside her long black sleeves her fingers clenched with elation.

A few yards down the slope an outcropping of red lava made a stair or little cliff in the hill.

The key, a long shaft of iron with two ornate wards, entered the crevice.

The prisoners were manacled by both ankles and one wrist to great rings driven into the rock of the wall. If one of them wanted to lie down, his chained arm must remain raised, hanging from the manacle.

“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.”

“Let Gobar the captain of the guards hew off their heads. And the blood will be poured out before the Throne.”

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.

Kossil still spoke in an undertone, and with a kind of spitefulness.