THEN AZYUNA DANCED by Lynn Abbey

1

He was a handsome man, somewhat less than middle-aged, with a physique that bespoke a soldier, not a pnest. He entered the bazaar-stall of Kul the Silkseller with an authority that sent the other patrons back into the dusty afternoon and brought bright-eyed Kul out from behind his bolts of cloth.

'Your grace?' he fawned.

'I shall require a double length of your finest silk. The colour is not important - the texture is. The silk must flow like water and a candleflame must be bright through four thicknesses.'

Kul thought for a moment, then rummaged up an armload of samples. He would have displayed each, slowly, in its turn, but his customer's eyes fell on a sea-green bolt and Kul realized it would be folly to test the priest's patience.

'Your grace has a fine eye,' he said instead, unrolling a half-length and letting the priest examine the hand and transparency of the cloth.

'How much?'

'Two gold coronations for both lengths.'

'One.'

'But, your grace has only recently arrived from the capital. Surely you recall the fetching-price of such workmanship. See here, the right border is shot with silver threads. It's certainly worth one-and-seven.'

'And this is certainly not the capital. Nine Rankan soldats,' the priest growled, reducing his offer further.

Kul whisked the cloth out of the priest's hand, spinning it expertly around the bolt. 'Nine soldats ... the silver in the cloth is worth more than that! Very well. I've no choice, really. How is a bazaar-merchant to argue with Molin Torchholder, High Priest of Vashanka? Very well, very well - nine soldats it is.'

The priest snapped his fingers and an adolescent temple-mute scurried forward with the priest's purse. The youth selected nine coins, showed them to his master, then handed them to Kul who checked both sides to be certain they weren't shaved - as so much of Sanctuary's currency was. (It was not fitting that a priest handle his own money.) When Kul slipped the small handful of coins into his waist-pouch, Torchholder snapped his fingers a second time and a massively built plainsman ducked under the stall's lintel, holding the door cloth until the priest departed, then taking the bolt from the silent youth.

Molin Torchholder strode purposefully through the crowded Bazaar, confident the slaves would keep pace with him somehow. The silk was almost as good as the merchant claimed, and in the capital, where better money flowed more freely, would have brought twice what the merchant had asked. The priest had not risen so high in the Rankan bureaucracy that he failed to savour a well-finessed haggling.

His sedan-chair awaited him at the bazaar-gate. A second plainsman was there to hold his heavy robes while he stepped over the carved-wood sides. The first had already placed the silk on the seat and stood beside the rearmost poles. The mute pulled a leather-wrapped forked stick from his belt, slapped it once against his thigh and the entourage headed back to the palace.

The plainsmen went to wherever it was that they abided when Molin didn't need their services; the youth carried the cloth to the family's quarters with the strictest instructions that the esteemable Lady Rosanda, Molin's wife, was not to see it. Molin himself wandered through the palace until he came to those rooms now allotted to Vashanka's servants and slaves.

It was the latter who interested him, specifically the lithe Northern slave they called Seylalha who practised the arduous Dance of the Consort at this time each day. The dance was a mortal recreation of the divine dance Azyuna had performed before her brother, Vashanka, persuading him to make her his concubine rather than relegate her to the traitorous ranks of their ten brothers. Seylalha would perform that dance in less than a week at the annual commemoration of the Ten -Slaying.

She had reached the climax of the music when he arrived, beginning the dervish swirls that brought her calf-length honey-coloured hair out into a complete, dazzling circle. The tattered practice rags had long-since been discarded, but she was not yet twirling so fast that the priest could not appreciate the firmness other thighs, the small, upturned breasts. (Azyuna's dance must be danced by a Northern slave or the movements became grotesque.) The slave's face, Molin knew, was as beautiful as her body though it was now hidden by the swinging hair.

He watched until the music exploded in a final crescendo, then slid the spy-hole shut with an audible click. Seylalha would see no virile man until the feast night when she danced for the god himself.

2

The slave had been escorted to her quarters - more properly: returned to her cell. The beefy eunuch turned the key that slid a heavy bolt into place; he needn't have bothered. After ten years of captivity and especially now that she was in Sanctuary, Seylalha was not likely to risk her life in escape-attempts.

He had been there watching again; she knew that and more. They thought her mind was as blank as the surface of a pond on a windless day - but they were wrong. They thought she could remember nothing of her life before they had found her in a squalid slave-pen; she'd merely been too smart to reveal her memories. Neither had she ever revealed that she could understand their Rankan language - had always understood it. True, the women who taught her the dance were all mutes and could reveal nothing, but there were others who had tongues. That was how she came to learn of Sanctuary, of Azyuna and the Feast of the Ten-Slaying.

Here in Sanctuary she was the only one who knew the whole dance but had not yet performed it for the god. Seylalha guessed that this year would be her year the one fateful night in her constricted life. They thought she didn't know what the dance was. They thought she performed it out of fear for the bitter-faced women with their leather-bound clatter-sticks. But in her tribe nine-year-olds were considered of marriageable age, and a seduction was a seduction regardless of the language.

Seylalha had reasoned, as well, that if she did not want to become one of those mutilated women who had trained and taught her she'd best get a child from her bedding with the god. Legend said Vashanka's unfulfilled desire was to have a child by his sister; Seylalha would oblige the god in exchange for her freedom. The Ten-Slaying was a new-moon feast; she bled at the full-moon. If the god were man-like after the fashion of her clan-brothers, she would conceive.

She knelt on the soft bed-cushions they provided her, rocking back and forth until tears flowed down her face; silent tears lest her guardians hear and force a drugged potion down her throat. Calling on the sungod, the moongod, the god who tended the herds in the night and every other shadowy demon she could remember from the days before the slave-pens, Seylalha repeated her prayers: 'Let me conceive. Let me bear the god's child. Let me live! K-eep me from becoming one of themF

In the distance, beyond walls and locked door, she could hear her less fortunate sisters speaking to each other on their tambours, lyres, pipes and clatter sticks. They'd danced their dance and lost their tongues; their wombs were filled with bile. Their music was a mournful, bitter dirge - it told her fate if she did not bear a child.

As the tears dried she arched her back until her forehead rested on the soft mass of her hair beneath her. Then, in rhythm to the distant conversation, she began her dance again.