The Gold Falcon - Katharine Kerr [108]
“What would happen to a woman if she betrayed our goddess with a man?”
“Naught, but that she would have to take him in marriage, were he able to marry, or go back to her old life with her family were he not. She be a woman, too, and demands no punishment or the like. But a priestess the sinner would never be again.”
“So a woman who’d been with a man could never become a priestess?”
“Nah nah nah, naught so harsh, just so long as she were no priestess at the time. No vow taken, no vow broken. She may forswear her love and take then the holy vows.”
“You know, that seems a truly decent law. In Deverry things are harsher.”
“I do hear that they bury any priestess alive who does break her vows.”
“Oh, that’s not true. They make her leave the Moon Temple, that’s all. The man, though, they hang.”
“That’s a dreadful thing, to punish someone for a thing they can’t help but do! What more can one expect from men, but—ah well, let me not ramble and say mean things. Let us pray together. I promise you, Alshandra will fill your heart with more joy and comfort than ever I could.”
The threat of hours of prayer would be even better than hanging to prevent men from falling into sin, Salamander decided. Although he tried to pay strict attention to Rocca’s words, he eventually fell asleep where he knelt, sagging over like a half-empty sack of grain. He woke to her gentle laughter and a boyish punch on his shoulder.
“My apologies,” he stammered.
“None needed,” Rocca said, smiling. “You be new to the faith and not yet tempered in your soul. Do go to sleep, Evan. Tomorrow we shall reach the holy shrine if naught impede us.”
The Horsekin had chosen the location for their new dun well. Thanks to Rocca’s roundabout path, Salamander could only guess at how many miles west of Cengarn they’d traveled—a good long way, he figured, at least a hundred—distant enough to make supplying an army difficult even if the high king should send one. Eventually, they came to a river that led them south into a part of the world he’d never seen before. First they left the hills behind, then the deep forests, until they traveled through scrubby, rocky grasslands, not quite flat and not quite hilly either. Off to the west Salamander saw dark smudges along the horizon—clouds, he thought at first, but when they never rolled in or away he realized that he was seeing the fabled mountains of the far west.
“Those mountains.” He pointed them out to Rocca. “That’s where Taen—your city, I can’t remember its name—but that’s where it lies, isn’t it?”
“It does lie in the mountains,” Rocca said, “but you have a fine pair of eyes if you can see them from here.”
“Oh, I’ve always been gifted that way.”
Salamander could only be grateful that she lacked concrete information about Vandar’s spawn. From now on, he reminded himself, he would have to be more careful.
The river cut its channel out of a reddish sandstone. As they followed a well-marked path along its western bank, the cut grew deeper and deeper, until finally it became a canyon. On their last night out, they camped at the top of a thirty-foot cliff while the river rushed by below. And how, he wondered, are we going to get an army across without a bridge?
“We’ll reach Zakh Gral on the morrow,” Rocca said.
“Good,” Salamander said. “My heart longs to see our goddess’ holy shrine.”
On the morrow he caught his first glimpse. They had tramped along the canyon’s western rim all morning when Rocca suddenly laughed and pointed straight ahead.
“There!” she said. “You can just see the fortress.”
Salamander shaded his eyes with his hand and studied the view. For hundreds of yards around, the forest cover had been cleared down to the ground. In the midst of rock and weeds he could see a tower rising above walls.
“It be still made of wood,” Rocca said. “Getting enough stone here from the quarries—they do lie in the foothills a fair bit west, you see, and it be far more difficult, fetching the blocks, than the builders did think at first.”
Thank the real gods for that! Salamander thought. Aloud he said, “Well, it looks