The Gold Falcon - Katharine Kerr [107]
“Well, if you say so,” Salamander said. “I know that I’ve only begun to learn her ways.”
“There be ahead a stream we call the Galan Targ, the home border. Once we do cross that, our way will lie straight before us. All of Vandar’s evil traps will lie behind us then. And it be not far. Fear not!”
Indeed, they reached the Galan Targ late that afternoon, a wide but shallow stream running over clean sand. On either bank someone had cleared away the underbrush, and big stones marked out the ford. Salamander offered to let Rocca ride on his horse for the crossing, but she refused.
“You do ride over, and then I’ll be a-following after,” she said. “There be a need on me to bless the waters as I pass through.”
Salamander’s horses crossed easily, as the water ran only a few feet deep. On the far bank he dismounted and waited, watching, as Rocca raised her arms into the air and intoned a short prayer. Perhaps the stream wasn’t in the mood for a blessing, however, because as she stepped into it she slipped, falling to her knees. She got to her feet only to stumble again, falling headlong into the water. Her hair lost its bone pins, and the long strands spread out in the water around her head. Salamander started into the stream to help her, but she scrambled up, soaking wet but laughing, to wave him back.
“Stay dry!” she called out. “I did step on a sharp pebble or suchlike under the sand, but no harm done! Here, there be a need on me to find those hairpins, though. They be all I have.” She knelt in the water and groped around the sand for a moment, then stood up, frowning. “They be gone, sure enough.”
“I can whittle you some more,” Salamander said.
“My thanks, then.” Her smile returned in a blaze of good spirits.
She came splashing up on to the bank and shook herself like a dog, smiling all the while. Her thin linen shift, somewhat cleaner than before, clung to her body, and her wet hair, freed from the pins, draped over her breasts and hung nearly to her waist. Salamander turned away and concentrated on slacking his horse’s bits so they could drink.
“We shall camp here tonight,” Rocca said. “Safe at last, and your beasts will have good grass as well as sweet water.”
Salamander busied himself with tending his horses as well as gathering firewood. He’d begun to think like a true neophyte, he realized, a change he’d not noticed until that moment. He was honestly ashamed of himself for looking lustfully upon a priestess, but there was no denying that he was. Her linen dress shrank as it dried, pulling tight across her breasts as she sat cross-legged by their fire, as unself-conscious as a child. She was concentrating on combing out her wet hair, a mass of snarls. Judging by its appearance she’d not washed or combed it in years.
“I could help you comb that out,” he said. “Round the back, like, where you can’t reach.”
Rocca burst out laughing. “You be new to our ways, Evan. You know not what you did just say.”
“My apologies, Your Holiness. Was it a wrong thing?”
“Not wrong, but unknowing. Among us a man will try to comb a woman’s hair when he wishes to marry her. If she does allow him, then married they are.”
“Ah, I see.” Salamander had the loathsome feeling that he was blushing—his face burned with embarrassment.
Rocca cocked her head to one side and considered him for a moment. “There be a need on you to know that never shall I marry,” she said at last, “nor shall I ever have aught to do with a man in matters of love.”
Salamander made a strangled little noise that might pass for “of course not.”
“It be a rule of our priestesses, that never shall we lie with a man for fear of getting a child,” Rocca continued. “Why would we wish to bring more souls into Vandar’s evil world? Would that not be cruel, to trap souls here for him to torment?”
“It would, Your Holiness. I’m truly truly sorry—”
“Oh, grovel not! Am I not a woman, too, and flattered?” Rocca paused to smile at him. “But I have no wish to leave her service.