The dark stillness that filled the caves was briefly interrupted by a flicker of artificial light. It illuminated an uneven stream of silent, moving shadows, and then the light was switched off.
Using primarily their sensitive noses to catch the drafts of streaming air, and their hands and feet to feel their way where necessary, the group of fifteen Ivorite hunters ranged themselves in a perfect network formation down either side of the evenly cut tunnel. Once they were all in place, the artificial light flashed one more time. It reflected briefly off of high powered energy rifles, the type that fired clusters of photon packets: short, broad energy bursts that ripped apart flesh and bone long after impact. As soon as the light went out and the darkness returned, there was a long pause. And then the phalanx of hunters moved forward with great care. They were silent, and nobody stumbled in the complete blackness, nor did any of them break their evenly spaced, widely spread formation. They moved with a timed rhythm, hunters born and trained to kill anything in their way.
As the tunnel narrowed, they accommodated perfectly, the flow of the air telling then when to bunch in to avoid the jagged stone walls, and when they could fan out again. Boots and jewelry had been left behind, and they stalked barefoot in the darkness for the sake of silence, their broad, thickly padded and heavily furred feet making no more noise on the stone floor than a cat's paws would have done.
They moved into the section of tunnels untouched by cutting tools, and the strengthening breeze told them that they were nearing the location of the sink hole that ventilated the tunnel system. The breeze had been unremarkable in its message: dry and cold. But as they progressed, a warmer scent reached them, a faint whiff that disappeared and then reappeared as the undulating breeze shifted: old urine from a living creature. No human hunter would have smelled it, but their keen noises detected its faint signature.
And then, more exciting to them as they continued, the scent of a living creature: female, warm blooded. Several of them salivated and automatically touched their knives or rubbed at their sharp tusks. It would never do to rip apart a human carcass with their guns. They would kill her with their tusks or their knives to ensure that nothing of her flesh was needlessly destroyed. But first, they had to destroy whatever was imprisoning her and protecting her.
Further down the tunnel, they saw a block of light cast against the black wall. The breeze was much stronger, and all of them could smell the human scent, but they could detect nothing else, other than a strange sweetness that did not signal animal or intelligent life. As the tunnel lightened from black to dim, the two leaders waved for the others to stop and maintain their positions. The troop behind them obeyed. Just as the two leaders would have moved forward, something crashed through the first and then the second of them, and their bodies dropped soundlessly. The strikes were so fast and the tunnel so dim that the others couldn't discern what type of weapon had fired, nor where it had come from.
A third great blow struck the roof of the tunnel, and a hail of dust and shards came down. Three of the youngest hunters panicked, thinking it was a cave-in, and darted for the light ahead of them. They were killed by three successive blows, swift as rifle fire.
The others abruptly realized that their attacker had come up behind them, and they turned to fire. But the tunnel had been descending down a ridge, and their attacker was hidden behind this rise of ground. Two more speedy streaks of black, and two more of the hunters were splashed against the walls of the tunnel.
The remaining half closest to the danger rushed up the rise into the darkness, their weapons firing golden streaks into the blackness. The first four found themselves seized by great clamps and they were jerked down to the stone floor, pinned, their breath crushed from them. Only then did the great figure rise from behind the rise of ground. To its victims it was only a brief shadow. It struck the four remaining hunters dead as they scrambled for cover and took aim at it, and then it killed the four it had stunned on the ground.
As the dust from the minor cave-in settled, Athena reached forward and began to gather the remains together.
* * * *
The Doctor, his face hidden by the skillfully applied mask but his eyes visible, jerked his head back from the blade of the knife and closed his strong hand---now covered with red hair---over the knife hand of the door warden.
"Password is it?" the Doctor growled. "The password is this: 'Kill the fool who asks for a password!'" And with this statement, he twisted the Tusker's wrist around, locked the elbow, and the door warden found his own knife, still in his hand, but at his own throat. "What idiocy is this about passwords?" the Doctor growled.
Behind him, not certain what to do, Kogrik also settled for a menacing growl. It bared the fangs of his Tusker snout.
"Yes, Yes!" the guard said quickly. "It was just a test! Such a far flung group tonight, and the Ambassador dead. Killed by outsiders. We're looking for intruders. Somebody who would panic at being questioned."
"Then learn not to trifle with your betters!" And the Doctor released him and grimaced to show the fangs of his own mask. "I was trusted by the Ambassador and a personal contact of his!"
"Enter then, enter. I am only protecting the door."
The Doctor and Kogrik passed into the dark building.
They walked up a short hallway and came into the sanctuary, which was nothing other than a dark, windowless room, lit by torches. One side of the room was taken up by a wooden slab that looked much like the slab in the dead Ambassador's quarters. Behind it was an open furnace with many iron fixtures at either end of it, and hooks that ran in a line along the back of it. Facing this, a great squared-off horse shoe of tables had been set with empty platters, plates, more varieties of knives, and large golden goblets.
Tusker males were taking their places, and the drinking had already started with a certain cheerless dedication. The ends of the horseshoe closest to the furnace appeared to be the places of honor. The Doctor led Kogrik to the far side of the room, where they would have their backs to the windowless wall, and they could see who came and went.
But within a few minutes, as more and more Tuskers packed the great room and the furnace was stoked, the Doctor heard the outer doors close with a great clang. And his keen ears detected that a bar had been dropped across it. They were barricaded inside.
A tall Tusker, imposing in spite of grey in his matted hair, and flanked by two attendants who were sharply conspicuous by the absence of any adornment at all on their tusks or garments, took his place near the end of the table close to the furnace. He was clearly the guest of honor, the supplier of the mauracine. As though on a signal, all the other banquetters took places at the great horse shoe of tables.
Kogrik had taken up a goblet in his massive hand, and as he leaned forward to set it down, he kept his head down and whispered. "Door in wall. Near fire."
"Yes I see it," the Doctor said under his hand. "I think it leads to a scullery. Washing up."
Kogrik grunted.
A Tusker clad in scarlet with a gold chain around his neck stood and waved them all to stillness. The room was now super heated by the roaring fire in the furnace. And the Tuskers had been drinking wine with an industry that one would attribute to hard work rather than enjoyment. There had been little conversation other than that which was necessary to direct for more wine to be poured from the great pitchers.
But as this scarlet-clad host stood and gestured for them to cease, they filled and then set down their goblets and turned their attention to him.
"Tonight we mourn the Ambassador---" he began, and the Doctor realized that he was, indeed, some sort of religious leader, and this was the sanctuary of their temple. Tusker religion, apparently, had been boiled down to catering to their appetites: to drinking and to eating. Perhaps other things. He would have to wait and see.
"A toss to the Ambassador!" the attending guest of honor said darkly. But the priest, or whatever he was, went on as though not hearing this. "And one of my own order, the noble and reverend and right honorable Dhunlup, Elder of the Order of the Predestinated, Deacon of the Order of Those Who Choose Aright, has been slain while upholding his office aboard a slave ship in the---"
"Quiet about that!" the guest of honor ordered.
The cleric shifted emphasis quickly. "We must mourn for noble Dhunlup, for he spoke well, and he hunted well, and he was excellent among the anointed---"
"Even though he had sex with a pig on Ghelbar---" the guest of honor said.
"Yes he did have sex with a pig," the cleric intoned. "But he was a lord of appetite, and the rest of his appetites were quite noble. Except for the pig incident."
"Then drink to Dhunlup and be done with it!" the guest bellowed. "And then drink to the dead Ambassador! We have work to do and appointees to make!"
A growling from several of the attendees showed that they were in agreement with this idea. The Ambassador's place had to be filled, and that meant that somebody at the table was in line to receive a tremendous promotion.
"Lift your cups, then, and let us drink to Elder Dhunlup, the fattest, shrewdest, cruelest, greediest, and most lustful of the holy order!"
All in one motion, they lifted their goblets, the smallest of which held a liter, and upended them. Nor did they stop until each had drained his cup. They hurriedly reached for the pitchers and poured again in order to drink to the Ambassador. The room was getting hotter from the roaring furnace. The Doctor had managed to get down his liter of wine with the others, but he felt a certain unsureness about being able to do it again to honor the Ambassador. Next to him, Kogrik filled his own goblet to the brim. Wine and intoxicants had little effect on Ogrons, who preferred eating sweets and tobacco to drinking alcohol. The Doctor hoped that the speech to the Ambassador would be long enough to afford him a chance to recover.
* * * *
Sarah Jane found herself in a field of very rough grass and occasional high humps of rock. She was wearing familiar corduroy slacks and a sweater. The sun poured down light like a living presence. The air was warm and radiant, but the breeze cool. Her bangs were whipped about her face, and she had the feeling that this was intended to be a moor in Scotland, something pulled from her mind and interpreted through an intelligence that had never been there. Nearby, Jeanne sat perched on a great rock, her heavily skirted legs dangling over the side. The old woman, eyes not seeing much, was facing the warm sun, staring up at it as no true human could have done, her face serene. But she turned to Sarah Jane as the young woman pushed her way through the rough grasses.
"Are you comfortable at last?" Jeanne asked Sarah Jane. The rock on which the old Scottish woman sat was much taller than Sarah Jane, so that Jeanne looked down at her, the hem of her long skirt and her heavy shoes just even with Sarah's shoulders.
Hands in the pockets of the soft corduroy slacks, Sarah Jane stopped before the old woman. Jeanne, clothed with a pale white shawl draped over her wool jumper, moved aside so that Sarah Jane could climb up and sit alongside her, for there were many footholds and hand holds in the rock, but Sarah Jane was too ashamed---and a little afraid---to accept the invitation. Instead, she looked down at her shoes. "Jeanne, I'm sorry." For she knew, as certainly she knew the water that she drank, that the cold, remote, vast presence that had healed her spear injury and yet terrified her into stillness, had been this creature who represented itself as a kindly old woman.
"Nobody who has come to this planet has ever laid eyes on me in my true form," Jeanne said. "I don't intend to terrify, but I do terrify creatures such as yourself. And Athena, of course, kills trespassers and invaders who enter the cavern by force."
"But Athena spared me."
"Of course. You asked for mercy, didn't you? Poor little dear. You needed mercy, and you knew it. I would have come out from my passageway at your first call, but my true form would have undone you." Jeanne reached down and touched Sarah's head. "It would have killed you, though I intended you only kindness."
"Why can't I understand what you are?" Sarah Jane asked.
"These." Jeanne gently touched the edge of her eyes. "They are good for navigating you, but your mind pays them great heed in matters where they are actually of little use."
She didn't know what to say. Truth to tell, the presence of this person in its truer form had been far more alien to her than the great and deadly Athena. But where Athena had been horrifying to her, this person in its true form had been terrifying. And Sarah Jane realized that there was, indeed, a difference in the two qualities of fear. And even now, when this person had assumed its meek, gentle, and approachable form as the kindly old woman, Sarah was troubled in its presence.
"Don’t be ashamed," Jeanne said. "You love what I really am. It's only my form that would frighten you. It's easier for me to see what you really are than for you to do the same. You are so limited by your eyesight and senses."
"But you talk so much about Mercy." Sarah Jane hesitated, embarrassed, but she blurted the truth. "I don’t mean to sound stupid, but what, exactly, is mercy?"
"It's what the water bearer forever pours into my mouth, Sarah Jane. In fact, I am the mouth: the mouth that receives the joyous giving of the life that is poured into me, and from me, an ocean is poured forth."
Sarah Jane stopped and stared at her.
"If he were ever to stop, I would cease to exist, but the flow of the water is written into the heavens. It's written that I must always be given water from that heavenly abundance. Therefore, because all my life is the receiving of mercy, I am mercy. I am the mouth of the fish that receives mercy, and you first perceived my great emptiness, my waiting, and my expectation. This frightened you and made you feel abandoned, for in your world, these things mean hunger and privation. And in mine, they mean the certainty of fulfillment."
"You're a mouth?" Sarah Jane asked. "A mouth that drinks water?"
Jeanne inclined her head. "Yes. I swallow everything that comes to me. That's the truest answer I can give you." She extended her hand. "Come here, Sarah Jane."
But Sarah couldn't move.
* * * *
"Parman Nehven?" Mags Hardbottle asked the young Salafian clerk as he slid a magnetic card over his office door to lock it. Here in the geological survey section of the Federation Administrative Offices, the offices were tiny but still private: tiny three meter by three meter cells with sturdy doors and sophisticated locks. As many as possible had been crammed into the gleaming, multi-windowed skyscraper. The building looked airy and spacious on the outside, but inside it was a maze of narrow hallways and endless, blank cell doors.
He looked up in surprise at this slim, black-clad figure. Mags had her visor on, masking her eyes.
"You're workin' late," she said, reaching behind her back, into her belt. "Must pay to work late. Such a good time to alter documents and such."
"Who are you?" he asked.
"A geology buff," she said. "Seems to me you done a bit a' slipshod work a coupla' years ago."
"What are you talking about?"
"Tuskers and Fomalhaut. What's out there?"
"I don't know what you're talking about---"
He would have moved away, but a sudden light flashed, and he found himself caught by a double-sided dagger through his jacket, pinning him to his door. The dagger had stuck into the loose cloth close to his hip, but as he bent down to stare at it, another dagger whizzed past his blue nose and sank into the door. He looked up to see Mags taking careless aim with another.
"Sometimes I miss," she said. "Which is actually to say, I hit. Not that I mean to hit. But you know how it goes." She flipped another razor-edged dagger at him, and it hit the door on the other side of his face. He started back, flattening himself.
"What do you want?" he asked.
She threw again, and the next dagger just missed his ear. She slipped another one from her belt. "Fomalhaut system. What's out there?"
"I could be killed for talking about that---"
"Don't move---" He froze, and she flung it into the narrow space of door below his chin and above his collarbone. She pulled out another dagger. "You could be killed for not talking," she said conversationally. "Or scarred, which means the Tuskers will assume the worst and kill you for me."
She was about to throw again, and he exclaimed. "Wait stop! I'll tell you. But you have to promise not to tell them!"
"Who? Tuskers? I don't have nuthin' to do wit' 'em. So spill it."
"They'll kill me if they find anybody out there."
"That gives you just enough time to get your stuff together and clear out," she said. "Before they find out anything. Your game is up, Parman Nehven. But you can get out alive, which is more than most folks can say who've dealt with Tuskers. Now what's out there? I won't blab it, and you can clear out to places where Tuskers don't go." As he still hesitated, she threw again. The dagger nicked a furrow through his ear. "Oops," she said.
"It has silver," he gasped. "There was an old civilization there. Remains of it. A network of tunnels."
"Like ancient miners?"
"No," he gasped. "Some sort of religious significance. The tunnels wound around the silver veins. When the light from their sun hit them, they were illuminated. It was a sort of observatory and temple, maybe. But something destroyed it. There were cave ins. The Ivorites wanted the easy access to the silver. They wanted it kept secret."
"So they paid you to alter survey records?"
He afforded himself a slight shake of his head. "First they threatened me. They dragged me to that temple of theirs and showed me their chopping block. Said they'd feast on me. After I agreed to it, they paid me. But not all that much!"
She stopped and slipped the knife in her hand back into her belt. "Don't stay, Nehven. Get offa' this planet until it all blows over. It's drug traffic and other stuff. The mauracine trade. They use the silver crudely extracted to draw out sodium from the drug and refine it. So get outta sight. As far away as you can manage."
"How?" he asked bitterly. "I'm a clerk. I've only gotten as far as civil servant level three."
She passed him a wad of bills. His eyes widened. She nodded. "Now we're square. I got you outta' contact from them Tuskers an' away from their drug traffic."
She hurried away.
* * * *
As Sarah stayed frozen in place, Jeanne continued, unoffended at Sarah's fear. "In another sense, I am also the flow that is poured out. The one cannot exist without the other." And Jeanne touched Sarah Jane's forehead with her fingertips. "Mercy must always be extended and received. It is the tie that binds the fish to the water bearer and makes them one. Nothing is lost between them, though everything is poured out."
Sarah Jane couldn't answer her.
“Come here, dear,” Jeanne said. “Come.” She opened her hand again to Sarah Jane, to assist her to climb onto the rock and sit next to her.
This was both invitation and yet clearly a command, a direct statement of Jeanne's will for her, and Sarah Jane did not dare decline. But surely, Sarah thought, this unearthly creature would swallow her into its emptiness. Not from anger, or animal hunger, or arrogance, but simply because whatever Jeanne was, the truest thing that she could say was that she was an open mouth. Whatever came to her, she swallowed up. And Sarah, having experienced the unearthly emptiness that was this creature in its true form, knew that she would be only a tiny morsel for it to swallow. But Sarah didn't dare disobey. She took Jeanne’s strong hand, set her foot in a niche in the rock, and quickly climbed up.
“That’s my girl.” Jeanne beamed at her as Sarah Jane sat next to her. “Isn’t it pleasant in the sunlight, dear? Is this how the moor smells on your world?”
“Very much like this, Jeanne,” she said. Her voice was trembling, and she tried, unsuccessfully, to make it stop.
Jeanne made her own voice kind, and she covered Sarah's hand with her own, comforting her. "It's all right. Tell me about the moor in your world."
Sarah made herself answer. “Well it smells like this only in the early summer. The smells and the feel of the moor in my world change from season to season."
This startled Jeanne. "But how is it that you can make an image of it in your mind?" she asked. "If it is ever changing?"
"When I remember it, I can remember it only in an instance of time, not the way it is throughout the seasons," Sarah Jane told her.
“Oh.” And the eyes behind the thick lenses became thoughtful, genuinely puzzled at this revelation. Jeanne, Sarah Jane realized, tended not to take time into consideration. "So you can never really think of the moor as the moor is. But it is not considered an untruth to remember the moor only in one instance of time. Even though that one instance cannot show the entirety of the moor or all its conditions."
“My world is a world of change,” Sarah Jane said gently. For a moment she forgot her own fear long enough to realize that although Jeanne lived in a physical and material place, the great creature's mind was focused on other things and other places, other plains of existence where change did not occur or where it occurred much more slowly than it did on planets like earth. Now Sarah understood the slightly unreal quality of this moor that Jeanne had created for her. Jeanne had neglected the elements of change, of withered grasses, of the faint, sweet, heavy scent of decomposition, of moisture and mold and decay. This moor was a place where death had never stepped. The seasons here would never change. Sarah Jane had assumed, as she had come to realize that Jeanne was giving her meeting places that she would find familiar, that these places were shadowy dreams. But now she realized that they were fixed in place forever, while she would be the one to pass away with time. It also struck her that Jeanne would have no comprehension of what death would mean to a creature like Sarah.
“But of course my person need not frighten you,” Jeanne said gently, taking Sarah Jane’s hand again. "Nor should my emptiness frighten you. For though I can swallow entire worlds, Sarah Jane, I don't devour. I only receive, and I pour forth."
The realization that Jeanne comprehended her fear was a comfort rather than an embarrassment. Sarah Jane took a breath. Then she nodded and said, her voice now steady, “If it does frighten me, it’s probably a good sort of fear, Jeanne. The sort of fear that's good for me.”
Jeanne's eyes became perfectly round, and her voice was so sober and filled with wonder that it dropped to a whisper. "What sort of fear is that, child? Are there fears that are good for your people?"
Without thinking, hushed by Jeanne's awe, Sarah also whispered: "Well, I mean, you're a higher creature than I am, aren't you? Shouldn't I be mindful of that?"
Again, the eyes in the aged face filled with understanding. "I see. You find it good to ponder that there are beings higher than you, and some degree of fear assists your understanding."
"That's part of it." And Sarah nodded. "Isn't that right?"
Jeanne folded her arms and rested her chin in her hand again, a sign of her need to ponder and consider these ideas. After a moment, she spoke. "Neither you nor I gave ourselves our own lives or our stations, dear mouse. In the truest sense, we are only what has been given to us, and when we meet on those grounds, we are equally indebted to the Mercy that flows to us."
"Oh, but good people always say that," Sarah blurted. "They always say everybody's equal." Then she bit her lip, realizing that she had interrupted her hostess.
Jeanne was startled at being interrupted, but she answered with the same kindness and clearness. "Good people know and know alike that we are all indebted to the Mercy that gave us all that we have. Only those who reject that Mercy force themselves to snatch and gobble up what would come to them without their efforts if they would only be subject to the Way of the universe."
Sarah did not want to contradict. But this creature that said they were equals was surely superior to her. In her own boldest moments, Sarah Jane would not have dared to think herself equal to Jeanne in any form.
Jeanne lifted Sarah's face by the chin. The brown, spectacled eyes looked at hers. Jeanne was smiling faintly, aware of Sarah's thoughts. And the old woman acquiesced. "In another sense, mouse, I do serve a function that is elevated in the heavens, and I know that. Yet being elevated has never distracted me from fulfilling my role to the most minute degree. And the heavens have decreed that I swallow you into the flow of water from the Water Bearer."
"When will you do that, Jeanne?"
"I already have done it, dear mouse. I swallowed you as soon as you came into my cavern, and I have been bringing you into the flow of my Mercy."
In an instant, it all made sense. "Thank you," Sarah Jane whispered.
"The day will come when our roles will be reversed. And I will joyfully and fearfully abandon all that I am at this moment and become the thing that you name for me to be." Jeanne said this quietly, as though reminding Sarah Jane of something obvious, and then she changed the subject: “There is a great task in front of you, Sarah Jane.”
All thought of their conversation vanished. "To help those poor slaves?" Sarah Jane asked instantly. She had not forgotten what she had overheard in the early days of her existence here.
"Slaves?" Jeanne asked. "What slaves?"
Her face was completely puzzled. Sarah Jane, amazed that Jeanne didn't even know what was going on all around the world exterior to the cavern, told her. "Why, the slaves that those tusked creatures are using. Those horrible tusked creatures---like the one that chased me into Athena's cave---are forcing captives to work. And every now and then they kill one just to terrify the others---and eat him!"
"Oh no," Jeanne said. "No, Sarah Jane. The tusked creatures are gone. All gone."
"And the others? Their slaves?"
"I'm not sure. I think they're living on the food that remains."
"But what happened to the tusked ones? Did they leave?"
"Athena has killed them. They were coming too close to the cavern. In the mornings when she has departed the cavern, she went about the caves and killed the tusked hunters who were looking for you." Jeanne's tranquility did not waver as she imparted this startling information.
"She killed them? You let her?"
"Sarah Jane, I could not prevent her. But why do you pre-suppose that I should have allowed them into the cavern? For if they had been given their way, they would have killed faithful Athena and made her a trophy. And they would have killed you to eat you as food. And had they come as far as my doorway, my presence would have killed them anyway."
Sarah Jane did not dare to suggest that this great person should have fled to avoid the marauding creatures. But she was amazed. The old woman seemed quite unworried by the death of a dozen or more of these fierce hunters.
* * * *
Somewhat woozily, the Doctor set down his goblet after drinking to the dead Ambassador. Voices around them were rising and falling, rising and falling. His hand fell limply along his side, and Kogrik quickly flipped it back onto the wooden table top. "Sit like Tusker!" the Ogron hissed.
The warning carried through the mists in the Doctor's mind that had been created by two rapidly consumed quarts of potent wine. Tusker, wine, he realized was fortified to suit the voracious Tusker appetite for intoxicants. He wondered if it were potent enough to explode a timelord's stomach. He wondered what would happen if those little energy synapses between nerves should strike a spark in the tremendous pool of alcohol now pressing to escape his digestive tract and expand into his blood. He had never known how many livers these tuskers had, but he was reasonably sure that humans had only one, and certainly no more than two. He could not remember much about the timelord liver, or if timelords had livers. Perhaps that was the problem now.
"Sit!" Kogrik hissed again. "No slump!"
With a supreme effort, the Doctor forced himself to sit up. The heavy folds of Ivorite clothing were covering him like a tent. The heat in the room was unbearable. The voices were arguing. Nobody was paying much attention to him. The scarlet-clad priest was trying to speak, and the drug distributor was saying something derogatory.
This is his meeting, the Doctor thought. And he knows it. He's already got the successor to the Ambassador picked out.
It was an amazingly clear thought from what was becoming a deeper and deeper drunken stupor. Kogrik's huge hand pulled on the back of his robe, keeping him upright.
"Sit straight!" the Ogron hissed again.
"He must be stopped," the Doctor said, his speech slurred. "That one making fun. He's running it."
He must have passed out in spite of his own efforts to stay lucid. What roused him again was a sharp, hideous growling. For a moment he was back in the fenced and caged arena with Mags, swinging knives and swords at a stream of Tuskers. But for this spectacle, both he and Mags had been dressed in British evening gowns, with wigs and pearls, and in the background, a small orchestra was playing "God Save the Queen." He was sweating, but the evening gown prevented him from moving freely.
The growling was getting louder. Ogron growling. It was Kogrik. The Doctor opened his eyes.
The Tuskers must have settled their differences. They were shouting and calling. A small, slight figure, bound, was being pulled from the scullery door to the table before the guest of honor. He was laughing, too.
"---best. Still, it's the youngest of what we could get," the priest was declaiming. "And it's all yours. We shall dine on Federation raised oxen. But this little fighter is yours for the slaughter, and yours for the picking."
The drug distributor stood in anticipation and drew one of his knives from his belt. But the thing being dragged to him was two-legged, with arms and a recognizable head. "That's a rational creature!" the Doctor gasped.
"Ogron child!" Kogrik shouted. "Help me, friend!"
"Right! Let's go!"
They both leaped up. Kogrik cleared their own table with one massive leap. The Doctor followed, but as he leaped up, his head swam. He crashed over the table onto the hard stone floor as Kogrik darted across the room to save the youthful Ogron prisoner from slaughter.
* * * *
Jeanne's eyes became distressed. "But why do they not ask for mercy?" This question startled Sarah Jane. "What?" she asked.
"Sarah Jane, why do the ones who were enslaved not ask for mercy?"
"I'm sure they do," Sarah said.
But Jeanne, her nearsighted eyes filled with wonder, shook her head. "No. I would hear a cry for mercy. As I heard yours. But all I hear on this planet is moaning and sighing and cursing."
"But Jeanne, isn't that enough for you to act?"
"Act?" Jeanne asked.
"You've got to be the most powerful creature in this solar system. You can do something!"
"Sarah Jane, I am an empty mouth that is continually filled. I don't do anything, not if by that you mean initiate an action. All the power and the light and life and the glory is worked upon me. I receive the water of the great Water Bearer."
"But you saved me."
"Because you opened your mouth wide and cried out for mercy, and when it was that way for you, I simply aligned you to what I receive, and we received it together. I gave you only what I have received, what has passed through my mouth. And then Athena was free to help you."
This explanation was in some ways so confusing, and yet so clear, and in some ways to strange, that Sarah Jane was silent on the matter. The concept that this person could be great and yet passive, at rest, had not occurred to her.
"I am not a powerful creature," Jeanne told her. "Not in the sense you are thinking. But a great power goes through me. You sense a great wonder and fear and majesty about me, but that is not me. It's what goes through me."
There was no reply to this. After a moment, Sarah Jane asked quietly, "Then what is my task, Jeanne? What must I do?"
"The task is two-fold," Jeanne said. "And the second part relies on the first being completed. The first part is that you should go, of your own free will, to Athena, and commune with her. Stand under her eyes, and let the breath from her fall on you, and you will learn her secret, and the secret of this cave. She will enact the will of the heavens on you, if you willingly go forward to receive it."
"Yes, all right," Sarah Jane said.
"When you are ready. Avoid haste, and prepare yourself. Your body and your mind."
"But can I ask you something?"
"Anything." And Jeanne looked at her.
"What does Athena live on? What does she eat?"
Jeanne framed Sarah Jane's face in her hands. "She lives on life itself. I pour out my life to her, and she is sustained."
"So she---she won't hurt me?" And Sarah Jane was ashamed to ask it, but she had to. The idea that Athena had been going out of the cavern and killing off the tusked people while nurturing Sarah was disconcerting.
"You don't quite understand," Jeanne said. "I pour out my life to sustain Athena. And she pours out the same energy to you in a form that can sustain you. We three are aligned: I in the heavens where I receive the flow from the Water Bearer, and Athena here where I give her life from my life, and you in the earth below where you receive the same mercy through her in the form that you can consume." She rested her aged hand on Sarah's head. "Whoever comes with open mouth, seeking that alignment, will find it here. Whoever comes to interfere with it will be shattered in pieces. Torment cannot be endured near my presence. It is either swiftly healed or swiftly ended."
Sarah was trembling again. This creature, whatever it was, and as sovereign as it seemed to be over Athena, was also tremendously humble. She was completely willing to sustain an inferior creature like Sarah Jane, with no thought of anything other than giving Sarah relief and comfort. And yet the creature was severe, too. And yet justified in what it allowed.
"Athena will align herself with the heavens, and she will deliver to you the will of the heavens," Jeanne told her. "As she does with every creature she meets. So there is no reason to unduly fear her, for she will act out the will of the heavens, and nothing else. She simply brings to you---your fate, your next step, the next change."
