Shadowfire

by Tanith Lee

  I recollected Kotta speaking of this the night before the Boys’ Rite, and how Tathra had cringed in on herself.

  “Did she work you ill, the Eshkir woman?”

  “No,” Tathra said, “but the women of the great cities are evil, and where they pass they leave a trail like burning.”

  “I will take this object and be rid of it,” I said.

  “No, it is what you chose; it was meant for you. The sorcery is long spent; it will not harm you.” Tathra sighed behind her veil as if she had been holding her breath, mistaking it for something that must not escape. “It was meant for you,” she said again. “It will not harm you.”

  4

  That year, as ever, the winter truce ended on Snake’s Road in the month of the Warrior, and I had my first mans’ battles.

  The fighting was haphazard and bloody. Who won took what he liked from the vanquished—metal, weapons, women, drink. Most often there would be a pact made next, squeaking females returned to their own tents, and vows sworn between the men. Nevertheless, outside truce and pact, krarl fell on krarl indiscriminately. The Dagkta sometimes feuded among themselves and continually with the Skoiana, the Moi, the Eethra, and all the rest. You might barter and share meat with someone winter or summer, and have to shear off his limbs in the spring. This was the custom of the tribes, and perhaps, in the fogs of their past, the scheme had had its reasons. Yet like many of their ways, only the peel remained, the fruit was long gone. I served it—since it fitted my nature, giving me a chance to spend my hate lavishly—but I never thought it noble or wise. Only the black marsh tribes did not fight. It was said they reverenced a book rather than a deity, and they were reckoned strange. Having no horses or wealth, however, they were spoken of with scorn and left in peace.

  Naturally, the little wars were dressed up in ritual and significance. War spear challenge was followed by war dance, and invocation of demons, the one-eyed snake and diverse totems. I bowed to none of these, having seen early the vulgarity and impotence of the tribal pantheon. Generally men create gods in their own image.

  Besides, I had already a kind of belief in myself, in my own body and what it could do, which was not amazing after what had gone before. Now I saw braves hang themselves with amulets, leave tidbits for spirits, and still take an arrow in the neck. I, worshiping nothing and bribing nothing with prayers, rode among an enemy unscathed, scything them like summer wheat. It was a virtue among the krarls for the men’s side to glory in butchery, but I outdid them, and I noticed several mark my eyes as I came on at them, and their knees turn to butter.

  I had discovered the sweet sharp joy of slaughter. I had not properly known it before. Learning the lesson, I would have fought all year round, season to season. As it was I had killed upward of thirty men by the time we reached the eastern pastures and the summer camping, and got a name among the krarls with whom we had warred. The Dark Warrior of the Red Dagkta, the Unmarked One. It was good to see unease and terror replace the sneers and winks. My own krarl feared me most but, like Ettook, began boasting of me. I would paint myself black and scarlet and white in the stead of tattoos, and ride out like a devil in the morning. I wore my hair loose too, it would never keep in plaits for long; let a man catch me by it if he had a mind, and see how I gifted him for his trouble.

  In the final battle before the tenting, a blade went in my thigh and broke off there, and when they came to cut it free, the flesh had closed around it, tight as secrets. The seer showed his teeth about the krarl and told Ettook his son would perish of a diseased wound, but it healed clean, to both their sorrows.

  Since the Boys’ Rite, Seel had given me his distance, and his words came secondhand. And at the war dance his daughter never offered me her flesh, at which, of course, I broke my heart.

  That summer I took a wife. Now that I was a man and out of the boys’ tent, I had some need of one to see to my gear. I knew Tathra did not like this. She foresaw girls of the krarl she thought I should value more than her, but presently she and they came to understand there would be no great changes.

  Chula’s father Finnuk stepped in the painted tent in the marriage month and said she was big with my child and would I acknowledge her. Soon Ettook called for me, and the girl was brought. She looked much altered from the last time we had had dealings, her eyes cast down and the lids painted green, and her shireen embroidered with butterflies of blue silk. Finnuk had loaded her with the family jewels to show me the dowry I could expect, gold and silver and one large emerald of which they were justly proud.

  “See,” he said, tapping her ripe belly, “this is your planting, Tuvek Nar-Ettook.”

  “Is it?” I said. “How am I to know that?”

  “Chula was unbroken till she lay down for you last fall of leaf.”

  “I don’t deny I had her, but maybe others have been visiting since then.”

  At that her eyes flashed up, fierce as the emerald, though not as green. I had never seen her unveiled, but there are ways of telling something about a woman’s face, even through cloth, and she looked fair enough in the tribal fashion. Her body was pleasing, and her teeth excellent, as I had reason to remember.

  “Kotta says the child is from one sowing,” declared Finnuk. “She is fertile, a good field, my daughter.”

  “Perhaps it will turn out a girl,” I said. “If she’s a breeder of girls, I don’t want her.” But I was coming around to it. The flash of her eyes had stirred me up a little, as the downcast lids had not. “Take her back in your tent,” I said. “If it’s mine, she’ll bear before the month is run. If she’s made me a son, I’ll have her.” I nearly laughed at the look in her eyes then. I could foresee wild times if we wed. “I’m surprised she’s willing,” I remarked. “She lost a tooth in my shoulder on the previous occasion.”

  About sixteen days before the month was done, she dropped her child, and it was indeed a boy. No doubting the father either, for its tuft of hair was black.

  A priest of another Dagkta krarl joined us, for Seel would not since there was bad blood openly between us. I imagine he meant to shame me, but he failed. After the fighting ends, the summer truce holds the tribes together again, and there were plenty of other holy men to choose from over the hill. It needs only a few words spoken inside a ring of fire to make a woman a warrior’s property.

  In my tent, she put things to rights, got out a silver cup I had on a raid, and brought me beer in it for the bride-drink, like a dutiful wife. She had left the child with her mother for our marriage couching. I was fifteen then and Chula two years older, but I stood taller than she, and men would take me for nineteen or more if they did not know my birth-night. When I drew off her shireen, I saw she was pretty and well acquainted with a mirror. Her father had been soft with her, no doubt. She had brought the emerald as part of her dowry, and gold bells were clipped on the ends of her hair, chinking. She kept her glance on the floor very meekly. She had not really looked at me beyond that one memorable look in Ettook’s tent.

  “Well,” I said, “what is it to be this time?”

  “I am your first wife,” she said, “and I have borne you a son.”

  “Perhaps you will not be my only wife to do that,” I said.

  “Perhaps,” she said, “but I was your first woman, and that can never be altered.”

  Then she stared at me, hard and bright, and wrapped herself around me tight as grass. I was surprised at her insistence.

  Afterward she did not want to let me go. It was a busy night.

  Later, I heard she had been boasting of me, the way the women did. She was arrogant, too, of the child, who was a fine, healthy, bawling, kicking brat. I felt no vast interest in him myself, despite my warrior’s ranting in the painted tent. Ettook’s un-love had not taught me a particular worth in sons. In any case, I got the boy as a weed will grow.

  There was not much to do in the summer beyond the hunting. The fru
it swelled thick on the trees, and rogue orchards and fields, resown by the winds, spilled across the sloping land. None of these things provided man’s work, only tasks of agriculture for the women and children.

  There were ruined places north of the pasturing, old towns with broken roofs of pink tile, arid broad streets choked by young trees. Each season the hungry forest reclaimed a little more. Here and there thin towers would pierce above the rest, looking high enough to stir the clouds. It made me wonder who could have built them. On the bald green hills the white stones ran like a giant’s fencing, but they did not look so tall to me as once, for every year they had sunk I had been growing.

  Half the tribes avoided the towns. The Hinga and the Drogoi claimed you would die if you went that way by night, and the dark-haired krarls, Tathra’s people, never ventured this far to the east. In my infancy, Tathra had told me of fallen palaces where dragons were guarding treasures and ghosts rattling spears—tales any child will relish. But I had often hunted there since, alone with my dogs at moonrise, and met nothing bad except for a boar or two who offered some trouble for their meat. And once I glimpsed a big cat, as white as milk, which made me think of the dream in the fever, and the silver lynx-mask. I had taken plenty of plunder since then, but nothing finer than that. Even Chula’s emerald I valued less.

  I would still go to my mother’s tent. I would take her a choice portion of my hunting, and sit to watch her at her loom. Yet there had come a sort of silence over us, dark as the veil she wore now always in my presence. I considered my marriage was to blame, but in my heart I knew it was the silver lynx that pushed between us, though she would not speak of it. At length this took away my patience, and after that we were less easy even than before.

  On Sihharn Night, when the men of the red krarls mount the ghost guard and the women of the krarls crowd together for their own watch, Chula was sitting among the torches with the child at her breast, brooding that I had recently found another I liked as well, for she had thought she might tether me like a steer. All the women share Sihharn, and Tathra sat spinning by Kotta. Soon Chula rose and, carrying the boy at his drink, she crossed to Tathra and spoke to her. I do not know what words Chula used, but the substance of them was that I would rather lie on my mother than on my wife, and had done so many times.

  The women were always ready to make Tathra’s road a stony one. Their ears must have pricked up gladly. Kotta said something to the effect that Chula’s sour mood would sour her milk too. But Tathra stood and went away to her own tent without a word.

  There are always tongues happy to tell any news. When I heard what had happened it was in the morning. I went directly to the fall where the women fetched water. Chula was there, and thirty or more shireens, which was good for I meant them to see. I walked up to her and struck her flat on the ground so the water pot was smashed. The women screamed and cowered away, but Chula was too scared to scream.

  “Speak once more to my mother as you did at Sihharn,” I said, “and you will be silent thereafter, for I’ll break your neck.”

  Then I reached forward—she anticipated my coming and squealed—and wrenched the blue-green gem off its chain. I shook it in Chula’s face.

  “This shall be your apology.”

  She knew better than to argue, though her eyes were starting from her head with fright and fury.

  I sought Tathra next, but Ettook was there; I could hear him grunting at his games. This sent me nearly mad with rage. I got my spears and my dogs and went off alone to the forest tracks to hunt the rage down, and anything else I could find.

  The dogs were good. I had them at a Dagkta gathering a couple of springs before, two high-legged, tassel-tailed devils, the color of gray sand; you could scarcely tell them apart.

  The compunction I had felt on my last boy’s hunt, when I had shot the deer by the winter pool, had left me. I had seen death for what it was that day only because I feared myself on the verge of it. Since then I had lived and killed men, unsparing of their blood and pain.

  The dogs quickly found the trail of a buck, and ran grinning down the avenues between the trees.

  The forest was burned to the ambers, golds, and reds of autumn, and the paths clotted with old magenta leaves already down. The smell of smoke left from the fires and torches of Sihharn had caught there, like the smell of the year itself, smoldering out.

  The dogs’ feet tacked among the leaves. Presently my rage cooled under the crimson boughs.

  We never took the buck. It was a rutting trail, fierce but not fresh, though there was small game in plenty. I lost the day in the forest as easily as I had lost my ill temper. At sundown, having no mind yet for my wife and my tent, I made a fire with flints and scorched the meat from the kill. I ate sparingly as ever, giving the best bits to the dogs to growl over.

  The dusky sky glowed and poured away like wine through the trees, leaving the forest serene as a lake, just the fall wind to speak in it. I kept my knife to hand, but was not wary to lie down in the open. Few savage things need to go after men in the warm months; even the wolf is fat. If anything came near, the dogs would rouse me.

  As I stretched there for sleep, I felt cleaned and cleared, and only what I was, a boy, with no one to answer to, and no squabbles to hinder me. I had a notion of striking off alone at sunup, leaving hearth and tent and krarl and tribe behind, leaving custom and pride, my scratchy wife, and the sneering words and the battle-lust and all the rubbish of my past. Yes, even leaving behind my mother with her black-robed face. It is good to dream, though you feel the anchor hold you back, root-deep in the seabed of your life.

  I woke at midnight.

  I sat up and looked around, but the dogs lay quiet as gray bolsters with their noses on the meat bones. The sky was many starred and the trees slimly mantled in shadow. Nothing seemed abroad to wake me, yet it was like a charm. I got to my feet and took a step or two, and the dogs slept on, and the forest, and I was left alone with whatever drew me.

  I walked light but with no sense of danger. I had gone about eighty paces and had a plan of returning, when I came suddenly on an older part of the wood where the trees were massive as pillars and the air heavy with their craggy scent. Maybe it was the scent that woke me, that stagnant muttering of soil and bark and centuries, on the crisp air.

  Among the trunks was an open place, and at its center, something white.

  For a minute I had a wild thought or two, recalling stories. Then I made it out. A stream bubbled from the earth here, and some thousand or so years ago they had built a basin to receive it, and put a marble girl on the plinth above. I think she was the goddess of the stream, or of the grove.

  The basin was green and growing weeds and the water only a trickle now, hardly that. A briar bound the plinth like dark rope. But she, the goddess-girl, was pure as morning under the moon, which still rained on her between the leaves.

  She was just human size, not tall but slender, with sweet secret breasts and a waist that narrowed like the waist of a dancer, and her carved gown gliding like serpents on her thighs. Her face had weathered but was still beautiful, like no woman’s face I had ever seen. And her stone hair rayed like a stiff flame outward as if some stony wind lifted it yet.

  I had never come on a girl I wanted for more than an hour or so. It was strange to find her like that, locked in marble. It must have been the time and the oldness of the wood, but I half got an idea I should have her, that she would come off the plinth and put on flesh for me.

  Then I heard the dogs begin barking as if a bear had roused them. I turned and ran back, cursing, with the spell broken in bits. I guessed they had only been looking for me; nothing else was about, and they rushed forward, wagging their tails like fools, smiling and panting.

  I did not retrace my steps to the grove, nor in the morning. I knew what I should find, a ruinous scabby statue with a chipped face and moss sprouting inside its lips. She would
have a piece missing from her shoulder or her breast. I did not want to see it.

  Going homeward to the krarl, I remembered the emerald in my belt.

  I seemed to have been away years; something about the night had refashioned time. I partly expected new faces, Ettook and Tathra and Chula long in their graves. A boy’s dream indeed. Coming along the slopes I soon observed the smoke of the central fire, and farther off, the smokes of other fires, where other krarls were settled.

  I went to Tathra’s tent and she was alone, unlike the day before.

  I was not inclined to be subtle. I let her see Chula’s gem.

  “Take this, and wear it. I have told her she’ll be sorry if she insults you again.”

  “No,” she said, hesitating, “I don’t want her jewel.”

  So I threw down the emerald by her mirror and her cosmetic pots, and turned to leave.

  “Wait,” Tathra said, her voice so full of pain, I felt it too. “Oh, Tuvek, do you hate me for what she said?”

  I waited with my back to her. When I could master myself, I said, “The girl is brainless. Must I have the same silliness from you?”

  “Tell me what I must do. I will do it,” she said. “How can I bear your anger? You are all I have.”

  “I told you what you should do. You will wear her jewel.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  Hearing her tone, I was sorry. I had no quarrel with my mother.

  “When I come here next,” I said, “leave the veil off your face.”

  “The law of the krarl—”

  “Do you think one of their red gods will strike you if you disobey? Obey me.”

  I listened to her movements, knowing I had got my way. She came to me and touched my arm, and she had unmasked herself.

  I had not been shown her face for several months. It was not as I recalled. I could not fail to see her age this close. The light seeped through the flap of the tent, and revealed to me the chiselings about her eyes and mouth. Her beauty was dying like a flame. I could have wept for it. I put my head down into her hair like a child so I should not see. She thought it was only love. It made her glad.