The Games of Neith Read online

  The Games of Neith

  (1960)**

  Margaret St. Clair

  Chapter One

  Through the long range windows, facing to the south, the summer air of Gwethym, bland and fresh, came nimbly in. Anassa had been standing looking out over the harbor, feeling the wind's exquisite touch along her body, while she talked to Wan. Now, as she turned to face the room again, strands of her long hair blew out behind her in the salt-sweet air.

  She picked up her narrow tunic from a chair and let it slip over her head. Indistinctly, through the folds of her yellow silk, she said, "The committee rejected it because they thought it was too farfetched."

  Wan was lying on the k'ang smoking a tiny pipe. "It's not farfetched, actually," he answered. "Few things are more certain than that the universe will eventually reach a dead level of energy. When that time comes, no action at all will be possible because every particle in the universe will have exactly as much energy as every other particle. It's called the heat death."

  Anassa fastened the tunic on the side. "I thought that Hoyle—"

  Wan shook his head. He was a stocky, broad-shouldered young man, sinewy and compact, wholly Chinese in appearance except for the startlingly blue eyes a Norwegian grandmother had given him. "The steady-state universe is a fairy tale," he said. "No competent astrophysicist believes in Hoyle's theories any more."

  "Oh." The girl sat down at her dressing table and began combing her heavy amber-colored hair. "Even so," she said, "the ritual you wrote for us is wildly unsuitable. Don't you remember what the temple's charter says about the purpose of the Games? They are to 'uplift the spirit, refresh the mind, open the heart'. How could four hours of poetry—it's splendid poetry, Wan, I don't deny that—but how could four hours of poetry about the heat death of the universe uplift anybody's spirit? And what has this heat death to do with us on Gwethym? It won't happen for billions upon billions of years."

  "Um." Wan answered. He knocked out his pipe and filled it again.

  "Don't you really see it, Wan?" the priestess asked a little plaintively. "We couldn't possibly have produced your ritual for this years' Games. It's not only farfetched, and depressing, but you didn't give the dancers anything at all to do. They'd have had to spin around like tops for the first half-hour or so, and then gradually stop moving. During the whole last half, they'd just stand motionless. What kind of a ritual would that have been? How could we have produced it?"

  "Um," Wan said once more. He reached over the edge of the k'ang and patted Baldur on the head.

  "On top of that," she continued, "it's particularly important that the Games be celebrated splendidly this year. There are plenty of adherents of the old persuasion around, and they're gaining influence. The worship of Neith is supposed to act as a counterweight to the old Jovis worship to keep the excesses of the Jovis migration from repeating themselves."

  "Nobody really believes in Neith, though," Wan said. He yawned and stretched.

  "No, of course they don't," the girl answered. "We don't really want them to. If they did, the same thing might happen with Neith that happened with Jovis. It doesn't make much difference, ethically speaking, what the name of the god is to whom one offers human sacrifice.

  "How odd, really, that the blending of three ethnic stocks, two of which are famed for phlegm—Norwegian and Chinese—and only one of which, the French, is moderately excitable, should have produced, on Gwethym, a population that is addicted to religious passion and excess! On Terra, the Chinese were never actually religious at all."

  "Phlegm is where you find it," Wan answered. "I remember my great-grandfather telling me, when I was a boy, about how he'd been involved in the Oslo riots. During the fighting somebody threw a grenade at him, and he just managed to chuck it out of the way in time. He was so overcome he had to stagger off to the side and vomit.

  "A good Samaritan, who'd been looking on at the riot interestedly, offered him a drink of aquavit. Great-grandad accepted with gratitude. After he'd drunk, the Norwegian said, 'I didn't know a Chinese would be so bothered by a close escape. I've always heard that life was cheap in the Orient.'

  "Grandad knew enough of the lingo to be able to answer him. He said, 'Not when it's my life.' "

  Anassa gave a rueful chuckle. "Speaking of life, did I tell you somebody tried to poison me again?"

  Wan sat up abruptly. "Again?" he said. "That's the second time in six months. I don't like this, Anassa. I don't like this at all. You must be careful."

  "Oh, I am. There's not much danger, actually, as long as Baldur is with me."

  "I hope so. What happened this time?"

  "It was at the evening meal in the courtyard with the temple attendants. I'd just picked up my rice bowl and was poking around in it with my chopsticks when Baldur jumped up and knocked the bowl out of my hands. It fell on the tiles and broke. I was just about to scold him when I noticed that the temple doves, who'd flown down to pick up the rice, were fluttering wildly. In no time at all three of the doves were dead."

  Wan gave a deep sigh. "I wonder how he knows?" he said. "That's the second time he's saved you."

  "He must smell the poison. Of course I reported it to the sureté, but I don't suppose they'll find who did it. They didn't the other time."

  "You think it was one of the Jovis people?"

  "Who else could it be? If they're really serious about killing me, though, I don't see why they don't just stick a knife in my ribs. Baldur couldn't smell that."

  Wan shivered. "Priestess of Neith sounds like such a cushy job," he observed. "Who'd ever think that being priestess of a synthetic goddess, rationalized and secular, would be so dangerous?"

  "It wouldn't be, except on Gwethym. But now you see one of the reasons why I want a good ritual for this year's Games."

  "Yes." Baldur had put his head against Wan's knee and was looking up at him with dark, intelligent eyes. "Good boy," said Wan, pulling the animal's ears. "Take good care of her, old fellow. She belongs to us."

  Baldur wagged his tail.

  "He will," Anassa said confidently. "The ritual we finally selected, Wan, isn't half so good from a literary standpoint as yours, but it's more appropriate. It's about the Oslo dock-side riots during the migration, the fighting your grandfather was in, and how Brun appears and calms everybody down by getting them to shouting, 'Jovis is a first class god!' "

  "Hm. I shouldn't think this would exactly soothe the feelings of any members of the old persuasion who are still with us."

  "Not in itself. But of course we're supposed to choose an incident from folk history, and this one was relatively harmless. And the theme of the thing is reconciliation, the laying aside of old hatreds. It might help."

  She had finished dressing her hair. She went over to the rack on the wall, her tawny thighs flashing out through the deep slits in the sides of her tunic, and took down a kin.

  "Good," said Wan. "You're going to play."

  Anassa nodded. She tuned the kin in orthodox Chinese fashion, testing the strings against each other. But what she played on it was not the classical Chinese theme one might have expected, but an old French marching song, clearly recognizable through the sliding, liquid Eastern harmonies with which she embellished it.

  Anassa sang, "Que donneriez-vous, ma belle, pour voir votre mari?" and she answered herself, in the next verse, with, "Je donnerais Versailles, Paris, et St. Denis ..."

  Wan laughed. When she had finished singing, he said, "At the present moment I have little use even for the most beautiful woman in the world. Nevertheless, for you, 'Na, I would give not merely Paris, St. Denis, and the kingdom of my royal father and mother, but Gwethym, Terra, and every planet in the galaxy. Heat death or
no heat death!"

  "What a pretty speech!" She laid the kin aside and kissed him on the mouth. "I meant to ask you, though. What gave you the idea for your ritual in the first place, Wan? It's certainly not an obvious theme. I'd never have expected the physicist-in-residence at Sun Yat-sen University to come up with it."

  Wan considered, rubbing his nose. "I think the basic idea came from a conversation I had with a sailor in a bar, two or three years ago. He'd been on a voyage to the Polar Islands and had had to spend several months there all alone.

  "He said that the sun—in those latitudes, you know, the sun neither rises nor sets; it moves in a circle around the horizon, and it's always twilight—he said that the sun seemed to take weeks to make its course around the sky. He felt that all his bodily processes had slowed down. He said that it seemed to take him hours to walk from one side of his cabin to the other, and that minutes elapsed between successive beats of his heart."

  "Was he frightened?" the priestess asked curiously.

  "No, I don't think so. He was too numb, too remote for emotion. He was too slowed down to care.

  "I think that's where the basic idea of my ritual came from—the idea of a world where everything is running down. But I really didn't write it. It wrote itself. I got the whole thing done in a couple of evenings. It came up from the depths."

  She nodded. "I knew a woman who had an experience like that of your sailor. She and her husband had gone in a sloop to the Li Tai Po Archipelago to do some archaeological work. They found more of interest there than they had expected, and by the time they were ready to leave the hurricane season had begun.

  "They decided they'd better stay where they were until a better season of the year for sailing. In the meantime, she'd become pregnant, and she had her baby on one of the bigger islands.

  "She said it seemed that she was pregnant for two or three years, and that her labor lasted for a week. Hours seemed to pass between each separate contraction of her uterus.

  "I asked her whether she'd been frightened, and she said no, she was too far away to have any emotion. But she said, 'Even now that I'm back in New Christiana, things still feel far away. I'm a sort of ghost.' "

  Wan's face wore an intent frown. "And where did you say this happened?"

  "In the Li Tai Po Archipelago. Why? I shouldn't think the location would make any difference. It was the isolation and the fact of her pregnancy that made her have an experience like your sailor's."

  Wan did not answer. Anassa was still looking at him, puzzled, when the note of a gong, deep and tremulous, filled the room with a silvery vibration of sound.

  The girl sprang to her feet. "The evening service for Neith," she said. "I didn't know it was so late. I must go."

  From her dressing table she took a slender golden chain with a huge amethyst pendant carved in the form of a bee—the badge of her office—and clasped it around her neck. She touched her throat with perfume, thrust her feet into slippers, and put a cloak of heavy gold brocade around her throat.

  From the door she said, "Good-by, Wan. I shan't be long. Are you all right? Why don't you say good-by?"

  Wan turned on her the look of a man struggling upward from the depths of a heavy sleep. "Yes, I'm all right. It's only—"

  "Only what?" the girl cried. "I've got to go!"

  "Only that I'm wondering whether my ritual was so farfetched after all."

  Chapter Two

  As always when she passed from the dim corridor to the flickering lights of Neith's temple, Anassa had a moment of dazzlement. She stood on the threshold, letting her eyes adjust themselves. Then she tossed her gold cloak to an attendant and moved forward with her taut, precise dancer's step through the priestess' door.

  Her entrance was the signal for the choir to begin. A fourth of the original colonists of Gwethym had been Norwegians who, before they had been converted to belief in Jovis, had been Lutherans; what the choir sang, though accompanied by a Chinese orchestra, was not too remote from Bach's Durch viele Trubsal.

  Anassa waited until the point in the music was reached when it was proper for her to step forward to the altar and salute the statue of Neith. When the worship of Neith had been instituted, fifty or sixty years ago, a plebiscite had been held to determine what the attributes, the appearance, and even the name of the synthetic divinity should be.

  The results of the voting had indicated that the new deity should be primarily a sea goddess, but one who also patronized farming and sericulture. She should be the patroness of love, both sacred and profane, and at the same time a strong defender of the state against its enemies, internal and external alike. She should be represented naked, for the sake of her beauty, and clothed, for the sake of modesty. And her name should be Neith.

  Faced with these difficult and somewhat contradictory requirements, Siegfried Moy, the sculptor who had been commissioned to make Neith's statue, had thought for a long time. Then, since he was a man of talent and originality, he had come up with a conception of the divine personality that was an oddly convincing one.

  He had modeled Neith naked and beautiful, nearly eight feet tall, and had cast his statue from an alloy of copper and titanium whose soft luster and pale-gold color pleased him.

  He had taken care of the requirement of modesty by projecting a wavering zone of milky, blue-green light around the lower part of the statue; Neith seemed to be standing naked in cloudy, sparkle-shot sea water, whose level might rise nearly to her breasts or sink below her knees, but which never quite retreated from her.

  In her left hand she held the distaff and spindle of the Gwethymian silk industry (it specialized in hand-produced luxury fabrics for the Earth trade). In her right, Moy had set the handled cross of the little paralyzer gun that the Gwethymians, then a persecuted religious minority on Terra, had developed in self-defense.

  And about his lady's head, seemingly hovering in free flight, Moy had put a double circlet of tiny golden bees, like a halo. He knew that no Gwethymian could see the statue without thinking of Anton Chou's famous poem whose first lines, in rough translation, run, "My honey-girl, my bee, don't sting! Be sweet! / There's nothing in a hive so sweet as you, / So sweet as love ..." From the bees' metal wings the temple lights were reflected in a thousand tiny glints.

  Anassa raised her hand in grave salute to the image. Two of the temple dancers came forward, one from either side, and the three girls began an intricate choreographic pattern before the statue. Then they broke apart, the dancers whirling off to either side. Anassa said, "Lady Neith, be pleased to accept our sacrifice."

  The dancers had come back, one with a bowl of rice, one with a flask of oil. Anassa scooped rice from the bowl out onto the flat surface of the altar. She poured oil over it. She picked up a smoldering stick of incense and blew on it until the resins in it began to smoke and flare. With the dripping flame she set fire to the oil on the rice. The smoke of bloodless sacrifice rolled toward the roof.

  Anassa said, "The sacrifice is made, La—"

  She must have heard the whir of the missile in the air. She winced aside, and the dart went past, but not harmlessly. It left a long gash on her temple. Had she not moved, it would have gone straight into her eye.

  Anassa thought she heard somebody shouting. The words were without meaning to her, though she was to remember them later. She raised one hand to her face, and saw the fingers wet with blood. She felt blood running along her cheek and dripping down on her neck. She struggled to remember what the next words were that she should speak, what her next movement in the ritual of sacrifice should be, but the temple lights were growing dim. She could no longer see Neith's image. Her knees bent under her, and she fell at the altar's foot.

  The dart that had struck her was still quivering in the rear wall of the temple, where it had thudded home.

  -

  Wan had been sitting on the edge of the k'ang, his head in his hands, scarcely breathing in the intensity of his concentrated thought.
He had not noticed Baldur's restless padding about the room at all. Now, when the door of the apartment was thrown open and Anassa was carried in, pale and motionless in the arms of two of the temple guards, he started up with an astonished cry.

  "Anassa! What is it? Are you all right?"

  "A criminal struck at the lady," the captain of the guards told him grimly. "He struck at her with a woman's spindle, when she was standing before Neith's altar. If the Lady Anassa had not moved, he would have killed her. We caught him, though. He'll pay for what he did."

  The temple surgeon had followed the guards in. He called for water, washed the blood from the wound, and sterilized it. Then, taking advantage of the girl's unconsciousness, he took three stitches in the gash.

  "She'll be all right," he told Wan as he was putting the bandage in place. "She's had a shock, she's lost some blood. She must be quiet for the next few days. But she'll be all right." He held an aromatic stimulant to Anassa's nose.

  The girl coughed and stirred. "Where am I?" she asked. "What happened? I—"

  "You're in your own apartments," the doctor told her. "A man tried to kill you while you were at the altar. But you're safe now."

  The girl put her hand to her head and frowned. "He said something," she murmured plaintively. "I heard him say something, just as the dart went by."

  "Don't try to remember, Lady Anassa," the doctor said. "You must rest." He gave a few simple instructions to Wan, and went out.

  "I wish I could remember what he shouted," the girl said when the surgeon and the guards had gone. "It might be important."

  "You've got to rest," Wan told her. He pressed her hand. There was a silence. Then Anassa said, "Now I remember. What he said was, 'Things are running down!' "

  "The assassin?" Wan asked keenly.

  "Yes." She stirred restlessly on the couch. "I wonder why he said that."

  "Do you feel well enough to talk?" Wan asked her.

  "I think so." Color was coming back to her cheeks. "I wonder if things really are running down."