Shadowfire

by Tanith Lee

  I had not had her since that first coupling. She judged me a savage, a dog, whose sex drove him back to her, and I sensed she imagined she might get the better of me through it. So I did not touch her, though my loins were full of snakes. I had never troubled with diplomacy before in the matter of a woman. Like a boy, silly for some wench who would not, I practiced her name under my breath, striving to get it right. When I offered her food and drink she turned away, as if this were the rape, and she would rather be forcibly bedded than fed. I recalled the weird myths of the cities and let her be.

  We holed up that night among the mountain steeps. We had encountered no fresh game to shoot, and drank to mute the hunger. I took her a bowl of city wine—there had been casks of it among their tents—but she would not drink when I was by. I left her the bowl, and coming back I discovered it drained.

  I lay by her for her own safety, for my pride too. The warriors would have made a sweet song of it, if I had taken a girl and not served her. I did not sleep well. I lay all the while arguing with myself, whether or not to have her and be done.

  Close to dawn I heard her stirring, and told myself I had been wise to keep awake. I recalled the dagger she had thrown at me. Presently I saw her outlined on the lightening sky, standing where the ground jumped away into air. For a second I fancied she meant to throw herself off the rock, as the city men fell on their swords.

  I tensed, ready to spring and tumble her back, and she said, “Lie easy, warrior. I am not brave enough for that. Not today, at least.”

  “You are to call me Vazkor,” I said. “Did I not tell you?”

  Her hair was like a bright smoke in the dawnlight and I could see every curve of her through the silver dress, and it nearly drove me from my wits.

  She said, “There is the rubble of a tower near Eshkorek. That is the grave of Vazkor. Twenty years ago he took up the cities in his hands and ground them to his will, and smashed them. He wed a goddess-witch; she was called Uastis. There is some child’s legend that she was slain but recovered from death, that she took on the form of a white lynx, and fled before the soldiers came for her. They say she is living yet, in another land, Uastis Karnatis. But Vazkor is dead.”

  Her words struck echoes inside me. My spine shivered and I bade her be silent. I could still picture how they had kneeled to me in the fortress, the elder men who could remember him, who maybe had looked in his face, and witnessed it once more in mine.

  Late in the morning we reached the valley of the spring gathering. There was some smoke rising; it had misled us. We trotted the fine city horses over the upper ridge, and looked down on the aftermath of the great tribal camp, black from old fires and entirely vacated. Not even a hound to welcome us. Only a few flapping, mottled heaps of wings and beaks, where the big birds were dining on dead dogs and horses and on parts of men. The krarls had meant to bury their dead as we had done, but, impatient at the numbers of the slain, had not stayed to tend the funeral fires. These had presently gone out, and left dainty roasted meats for the scavengers. It was not a pleasing sight and turned my stomach. I had seen corpses in plenty, but had not returned to a battlefield when the crows were banqueting there.

  She was sitting beside me. In her silver mask, I could not see her mood, but she faced straight down to the valley, and her hands were motionless and nonchalant on the rein.

  “The carrion eaters must bless your princes that provide such dinners for them.”

  “Do the tribes never kill?” she said, quick as a blow.

  “We kill hand to hand, belly to belly. Not with iron phalluses shot from behind a hill.”

  “With our cannon we have razed our own cities,” she said. “Don’t think I will pity your little loss.”

  “For a slave you set up a strident mewing.”

  “I am not your slave,” she said, “though you may play at it. Hang me with shackles, beat me, murder me. I am still no slave of yours.”

  “None of this is necessary. I will get you with child. Then we will see how much my slave you are.”

  She had no tune to counter that.

  The men behind us were sitting also very quietly, sullen and sour at the deserted camp. Against the odds, they had hoped for better. But their chiefs and their kin had reckoned them lost and discounted them, and when the night of the gathering was done, they had turned homeward for the Dagkta tentings. I wondered how many dying men had been helped across the threshold by the priests’ knives. I wondered, too, how Ettook celebrated to himself my death, for he would be sure of my death, knowing where I had gone. I had not sampled this dish before. Too much alive, I could not envisage my alleged slaughter. I visualized instead his bastards squealing for their dues, and widows wailing for their husbands taken captive, and at that I remembered my mother. She also would believe me slain or slave. I had forgotten that.

  “So,” I said to the warriors, “they would not wait. Let’s make on and surprise them. They will piss blood when they see us. But there’s half a day’s riding yet.”

  The men growled agreement, turning their mounts along the track.

  I set a hot pace for them on my new horse, using its starry spurs, and dragging my silver-faced slave by her bridle.

  4

  The sun was long down, the night moonless and black, when we picked over a narrow pass between the craggy, pine-bearded heights, and the spoons of the camping valleys appeared below, falling away into the mountains, and scattered for miles with several thousand yellow coals of fires.

  The warriors were already breaking into bands, making for their own krarls and their own revelations. Already the bond was snapped that had held the twenty-three as one, and their shout for me was only so much frosty breath left behind. I saw then I should have bound them harder to me, that it might have profited me to do so. They had been ripe for swearing blood-brotherhood; they might have followed me after, strength at my back. It was too late now, the time of action blown away, ridden off over the slopes with them. Even Ettook’s five men still with me were champing to get home, the dangerous adventure just a story nagging to be told. I had lost my chance.

  It was not so much slovenliness that had made me miss it, either, but the arrogance that had come on me when I entered the fortress, and which had never ebbed from my veins. And she had made it worse, my goddess-slave. Her razor contempt had sharpened mine. I saw them all through her eyes, as she was seeing me, a herd not worth the driving.

  As I idled there, the impact of the other grim farce smote me. For not frequently do the dead sit among the mourners at their own burying.

  To Ettook’s warriors I said, “Once we are over a ridge or two, maybe we should go quietly. It will be pleasant to see how we are missed, and by whom.”

  And they showed their teeth, tasting the flavor of it, though their loyalty to me was gone.

  So we went, delicate as mice, into Ettook’s krarl.

  As I got closer, I could hear plain enough what they were at.

  There was a humming and howling, and sometimes a screaming like beasts in a trap. They had lost the most of any krarl: seven dead from the cannon, five stolen or dead, and one of those the chief’s heir. They could not choose but hold a death-watch tonight, the fourth night, as the custom was.

  I left Ettook’s braves to their own plots, and tethered my city horses on the outskirts of the camp. Whatever else, I did not think the warriors would come back and steal them. Demizdor, however, I kept with me, still mounted.

  They had cleared a great square below, I could see it from the pines, and I came down following the trees like a shadow, to watch the fun.

  Torches burned at the four corners of the square, and a fire at its center. A couple of young trees had been hacked up and set burning on it. Around that fire they stood, my grief-torn kindred.

  On the west side were the women. Chula was foremost, in all her adornments, everything I had ever given her, g
littering and gleaming, like a heap of plunder, with her hair tattered and her dress tattered, and her arms and the round tops of her breasts scored by her nails. Her shireen clung to her tears beneath it, but her fists were clenched. Through her weeping, you could see her fury. She had missed her miniature queenship because of my death, and she could have killed me for dying.

  At the back of my first wife the other two were sobbing less obtrusively, with their children around them. Big-bellied Moka had her four little sons clasping to her knees, crying too, without understanding, the way children will when the adults set up a dirge. Asua held in her arms the girl baby who had so far surprised me by living, but she was watering it as if she meant to drown it now. Chula’s three boys, meanwhile, had been lined up by their mother, parading their sorrow as she did, though the eldest was only just upward of four. They looked like three tiny black bears, still in their winter furs. No doubt she would have begun shouting later that their heritage was denied them, gone to the grave with me.

  There was a mass of other women, wringing their hands and lifting their heads occasionally to ululate like she-wolves. They were bewailing the clan totems—the chief’s son and braves, rather than the man Tuvek, or their own dead husbands.

  I looked for Tathra next, with my heart booming, but she was nowhere. I thought how she had been when I left, and how she might have grown ill from bad news. It took the spice from the meat, and I was going immediately to seek her, when the drums of the men’s side east of the fire began.

  Out of the press of warriors, Seel came, his tarry face painted like a skull now, white on the black, and in his magic robe of embroidered symbols, the robe of the war dance. He clutched his hands on the one-eyed snake-carving at his neck, and behind him moved Ettook, bowed as if a mountain of misery sat on his shoulders. It gripped me. They were going to make the death chant for me. These, my best of enemies, were going to exclaim to their gods of my virtues and the joy they had had from me. They were going to entreat the Lords of the Black Place to set me free to return to them.

  The people drew back from the fire somewhat, to give Seel room. He started to stamp and flap like one of those birds I had seen feeding on corpses earlier in the day. As he blundered by it, he threw pinches of stuff in the flames, and they spat and hissed.

  He screeched the names of the men the krarl had lost; at each one a woman or two shrieked. At my name there was a huge moaning, and the warriors beat their spears together.

  “Our master is Death. Death is god,” Seel ranted. “Twelve of our sons has he taken, but worse than our sum of sons, the son of the chief, the hope of the krarl, the rising star among the tents, our tomorrow, has he taken!”

  Chula screamed excellently on the cue. The three tiny bears dived into her skirts in fright, so I felt sorry for them.

  Ettook lumbered in the broad firelight. He showed around the spearheads, the gold bangles and bronze knives I had taken in the last war months. In the manner of the ritual he praised my valor and my cleverness.

  “Tuvek, the flower of my loins, my son best of all sons. Generous to me as the rain to the pasture, brave as the leopard in his battles. Who does not remember Tuvek’s courage when the foe ran before him like rabbits? Who was the young god riding among the warriors? It was my son, Tuvek. He who made the women sigh like a wheat field in the wind, he who rode the men beneath the hooves of his horse, whose arms were stronger than brass, and whose wit was sharper than diamond, whose desire made sons, whose anger made silence. Ah, Tuvek, my son, what is there in death’s place which causes you to linger there?” He rubbed his face, which was a healthy jocund color. “When the raiders came,” Ettook roared, “who but Tuvek dared to follow them? It must mean death to try blade for blade with the cities, yet still he would go. I forbade him, for his safety, yet he paid no heed. He went to save his brothers, the braves. He died for them. Who will not weep for Tuvek, my best of all sons, lord of all warriors?”

  The beasts’ threnody gushed up again, the spears rattled.

  Seel lifted his arms, and a carmine sun and a white moon staggered on his crow’s sleeves.

  “Death,” sang Seel. “In your dark tent our men are standing. Relent, Death, relent. Return to us our men, return to us the son of our chief.” Then, raising his voice, he flung himself at the four points of the world, north, south, east, and west, from any of which the answer might arrive, which is why they allow four nights before they seek it, one darkness for each. “Tuvek,” the seer squealed, “come back among your folk, come back from the black tent, the bone-grove, to the warm hearth. Death may give you horses and hounds, but you have horses and hounds in the land of life. Death may give you women, but they bear no fruit and you have women of flesh and blood who shall. All Death can offer, you possess. Tuvek, come back among your folk.”

  “Say no more,” I said, stepping out into the raw red light. “I am here.”

  Only in legend does the dead man reply to the call, generally ghastly to behold, and without his head or some such thing. On the living earth nobody comes; it is just a piece of the chanting to crave and entreat. Although they bark for it, they do not expect the bone.

  For a space long enough for me to repeat my words ten times over, they made not a sound. Their eyes crawled up me like flies. Then a woman fell over in a fit—though even the women drink a good deal before a dead-watch, and I think it was the beer more than the ghost that undid her. At this Seel changed his stance. Leaping upward as though his drawers had caught alight, he whirled at me, beating his arms, squawking, “Away, Undead, away, away! Back to the Shadow Region!”

  I was not certain if he truly believed himself confronted by a phantom, but this was such a reversal of his former plaint that I leaned on a tree and laughed.

  Seel’s eyes rolled. He snatched some more of his magical fire powder and tossed it between us. He conjured me to vanish, and I stubbornly would not, but simply stood laughing at him till my ribs pained me.

  Presently he left off these antics, drawing back to where Ettook was, and making motions at me from there.

  Ettook’s face was now a picture, as might be imagined. The healthy, cheery countenance with which he had mourned my demise had given way to a flushed livid whiteness. He knew me a live creature directly, his curse come back to him. He opened his swollen lips to utter some exquisite idiocy, but there was suddenly a lot of screaming that saved him the trouble.

  Chula, my first wife, cast herself against me. She threw her arms about my waist, and clutched me as if she were drowning. Some city man’s knife had slit the shirt along my right side, and she fastened her mouth there, and sucked at my skin as if she could get sustenance from me. I tried to pry her loose but she clung like a leech.

  “Don’t eat me, woman,” I said. “I’m mortal, never fear.” The three little bears had not rushed after her. They were huddled together, still crying in alarm at their ghoul-daddy shouldered up from hell. “Look after your brood,” I said to Chula, and pushed her off me at last. Her eyes glared in the shireen, swirling with hurt, anger, triumph, and sex. Then they went past me, and fixed on the shapes of woman and horse behind me. I said, “I have brought you a gift from my battle. An Eshkir slave.”

  Everyone murmured, and Chula froze like a post.

  Meantime Ettook had recovered himself slightly; my wife’s passion had given him the leisure.

  “So my son fought the city raiders.”

  “Yes, my chief. Fought and killed.”

  It was a mark of my scorn for him that I did not mean to humiliate him in front of his subjects. Besides, enough men knew how he had praised me before I set out from the spring gathering, for such chat always finds legs.

  Ettook said hollowly some phrase about how welcome I was, and how worthy of preserved existence. He asked me where our Dagkta warriors were, for surely they had returned to the krarl with me? He was trusting I had boasted and they were lost after all. But his
luck was out, for even the few who had perished in the prison pit had not been his men.

  I was wondering where the five had gone, and wishing I had kept them by me, but I had no need to be anxious. They had only been waiting, with a sense of theater to equal mine, for just such a prompting as Ettook’s query. Pent-up high spirits and pride in their return had made them wild, for all five were as young as I. They galloped into the watch-square, whooping and calling in a huge surge of stolen horses, scattering the women and the fire, and setting the babies bawling.

  The warriors went on riding in circles for a minute or so, islands of the broken fire sparking on their grins, and on their hands full of looted knives, and the coats of their city mounts.

  Piecemeal, the noise and confusion shrank back into the sputter and flicker of the checkered light.

  I said, loud enough for everyone to hear me, “With these braves and eighteen more I took the city raiders’ camp. We slew them to a man, and kept only one prisoner, the woman here, who is my share of the spoil.”

  The five riders hooted and cheered me, keeping me hero; maybe it was lucky.

  I turned and went to Demizdor. She might have been blind and deaf for all the heed she seemed to take of anything. I wished I could see her face to know her thought.

  “Get down,” I said. “Now you are here, you will walk like the other women. I have shown them you belong to me, so you are safe.”

  She dismounted without a word. I said, seeing Chula’s eyes stuck on her still like beetles to a log, “I am giving you to my wives, Golden-hair. They will perhaps put you in the porridge pot and eat you.”

  When she stood by me, the crown of her head came just beneath my collarbone. I wanted to pick her up and take her away with me, running through the fire to some secret place. But instead, I told her to walk behind me. She obeyed, like any slave, and the need in me to see her face was like an itch I could not scratch.