Darkness, I by Tanith Lee

Author:Tanith Lee [Lee, Tanith]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯), Fiction.Horror, Fiction.Dark Fantasy/Supernatural
ISBN: 9780751512199
Google: jJXDGwAACAAJ
Amazon: 0751512192
Publisher: Warner Books
Published: 1995-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Three

There was a dream.

It happened after the dress and the meal of chicken. She had sat in the ebony chair and put up her feet, now in sandals trimmed by silver and red stones, on the crouching lion stool.

Anna had thought, again, Here I am.

But she slept. Upright and silent, like a dead queen in a chair at Alexandria.

The River was golden with the weight of barges.

The sun glistered on the water and on oars tipped by gold and scarlet and blue. They rowed downstream.

Under the green awning, as if in spring reeds, the girl Ankhet waited, in marvel and terror, afraid to move.

The priestess sat in the centre of the boat on an upright seat of gold and ivory. Like a queen. But she was more.

Ankhet had seen statues, drawn downriver. She did not move. A girl with a fan kept the heat and the stinging insects of the River from her.

The River seemed invincible now, its liquid muscles towing the three barges. And the soldiers, in their kilts of metal, stood outside the awning, silently enduring the sky, Ra’s power.

Above, the gong gave the stroke to the oars.

The maidens sang. They were bare-breasted, like goddesses.

Their song was curious, and seemed to make no sense, consisting of disjointed words.

Spring, spring. The birth, the swelling.

We. The lion mother.

Mother and queen.

We, spring, the cat, we...

On and on.

Ankhet trembled. They had brought her from her village. She had known nothing else. But now—

Her fear rose and fell. Like the oars.

And scaled backs showed in the river and sank. Flights of birds shot like arrows from the straight green reeds.

Spring, spring, gold and silver.

A great curve was coming in the bank. The oarsmaster stilled the gong. The oars lifted, like wings. In the forward boat, as in this one, and the one behind.

They had stopped, only the muscles of the River still tugging at them. They drifted.

And coming about the River’s curve, Ankhet saw the baskets floating at the edge of the reeds, and in every basket a baby lay. Some slept and some wept and kicked. They were secured by straps not to fall into the River. Brown burnished babies like dolls.

‘There,’ said the priestess. And she pointed with a golden finger. Her nail was long and blue.

One of the soldiers moved along the boat and shouted to the boat ahead. ‘That one. There.’

Another soldier on the forward boat hastened to excavate from the River the indicated basket. Its child did not cry or sleep, it lay wide awake. It was, from the look of it, scarcely two months old.

‘That’s all. We will take no other,’ said the priestess.

The soldier on her boat shouted to the forward barge, ‘No other.’

Then the oarsmaster bawled, and the oars went down with a heavy silken splash.

They moved vigorously again, and passed the crying, bundled babies, like turtles in the River, and moved on between the barricades of the green reeds.

The lioness, silver and gold...

Ankhet was six or seven. To her the babies had looked very young; unreal.

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