by Tanith Lee
So I went to my mother’s tent, leaving the rest of them about the fire, only telling Chula, as I passed, to see to my horses in the pines, and to getting me some food.
I was at least sensible that I should not go rampaging in on Tathra when she thought me a corpse; that much I did right. In fact, I had had an inclination to seek Kotta first, and have her carry the tidings before me, but her tent, when I came on it, was full of wailing and groans, some woman’s sickness she was busy with and would not leave for me. So I must manage everything by myself.
When we reached my mother’s tent, I tethered the horse and left Demizdor beside it, telling her not to stray or the warriors would think her fair game, after all. I was beginning not to like her docility, and the task before me made me uneasy besides.
I went into the tent very softly.
There was a brazier burning by the bed place, no greater light than that. For a moment I did not find Tathra, then I discovered where she sat, in the shadow of the tall Eshkiri loom. There was a cloth on the loom, black and white, the cloth a tribal woman constructed to wrap her dead in, when she had his body. But she was not weaving, and the cloth was barely started on.
She kept as motionless as the night. Black as night, too, with her hair and robe, and her face hidden by the shireen. Yet there was something in her attitude that was as naked as her face was not. Her eyes were shut. She did not weep, but she looked finished and withered as a branch burned in the fire. Her loud crying was inside. Whatever my victory, this I had done, and I was not happy at it.
“Ettook’s wife,” I said, speaking very low, and addressing her as a stranger would do it, trying to come to her gradually. She never stirred. “Ettook’s wife, there is a better tale than you have been hearing.”
“Thank you, warrior,” she said. “You honor me. But do not tell me now, for I am only a fool of a woman who is too stupid to understand in her grief.”
I had disguised my voice too well, I saw. I hooked aside the flap of the tent so some of the light from outside should enter, for the sky had cleared and the risen moon was shining bright.
“Your son lives,” I said to her. “That is the news.”
At this she woke. Her lids lifted, and I turned a little, letting the moon describe me, bit by bit.
“Tuvek,” she said. Her tone was cold and empty enough that it frightened me.
“Yes, Mother,” I answered. “I’m flesh, not ghost. Come and touch me to be sure.”
She got up, stiff as an old woman, and began to walk to me with slow deliberate steps. I dared not go to her, she seemed so full of disbelief and terror; she was almost terrible herself.
But about four paces from me, she must have sensed, as an animal senses it, the warmth from my body, the scent of something living. She gave a muffled sound and stopped as if the earth had hold of her feet. And then her eyes went away from my face, by me, into the moonlight dark beyond the tent, almost as Chula’s had done, except that my mother’s eyes widened and became stony as though the sight had gone out of them, and she dropped down on the ground.
I spun around with my heart in my mouth, but nothing was there, just my horse and Demizdor, who could barely be seen against the brilliant sky, only the sheen of her silver mask and her unbound hair bleached by the moon to the pallor of snow.
I gathered Tathra up and put her on her bed. As I set her there, she stirred. She clasped my hand and muttered, “Did I dream it?”
I was leaning close; she could not see the doorway. I said, “Yes. Whatever horror you saw, you dreamed, for I saw nothing. I made you ill by coming in too quickly. I will go for Kotta.”
“No,” she said, “it was the Eshkir woman, with her white hair. She must have died in the wild valleys those twenty years ago, and be envious of your life. Throw away the lynx mask, Tuvek, or she will harm you through it.”
Then I understood. Something in me shivered, but I laughed and told her of Demizdor. I supposed Tathra would be reassured, shed tears and get better, but her eyes were dry and her hand was like ice when she took it out of mine.
“The city women are not women,” she said. “They think themselves goddesses. They eat the soul of a man to get his strength.”
“We shall see about that,” I said.
Just then Kotta came into the tent on her own. Of course some woman could have told her the news, and she had used her head in regard to Tathra. The healer paid no special attention to me, as if dead warriors rising were a common event among the krarls; she merely courteously bade me go, so I left and was glad to. I had had enough of the fears and conjurings of women. It was not the greeting I had wished for.
Outside, Demizdor still stood against the shining night sky, and yet as dumb as the moon. For a second I entertained the notion she had been witch-sending Tathra, but cursed myself for a fool, and put the scare aside.
Unspeaking, I went to my tent. Unspeaking, she followed.
5
The fire was already roasting meat for me.
Moka and Asua were preparing the food and did not run at me, but seemed glad enough that I was back. A widow’s lot is seldom sweet, and they were good women in their way, I now acknowledged, ready to please me, and be satisfied with pleasing me. Some of the men’s side was there too, my marriage kin, Doki and Finnuk, and all Moka’s brothers, even Urm Crook Leg. They had supplied meat and the grain for the loaves, and the beer, as they told me instantly. I thanked them, and promised them rewards later from my loot-chests, which no doubt they had been at already, thinking me crowpie.
Chula, meantime, stalked about the roasting joints, ordering this or that done and doing little herself.
I drank a cup of beer with my kindred to content them, though they would be roaring drunk presently, and I flat sober. Then I took Demizdor across to the hen-tent, where my women lay when not with me and the babies were nursed, and called Chula from her bullying.
“Here is the slave I spoke of,” I said to her. Chula’s eyes narrowed. “Take her in and give her tribal garb. She has some jewels under her furs, they are mine. But you may keep the silver mask for yourself, if you wish. See she wears the shireen instead.”
“My husband is generous,” Chula said, greedy and suspicious at once. “After that, what?”
“Whatever you like. The slave is yours; put her to work.”
“Has my husband no interest in the matter?”
“None,” I said, for Demizdor’s benefit.
“Then why not give her to a warrior, to my father, Finnuk, perhaps, in return for his portions of meat to me when you were away?”
“I shan’t waste a woman on your father,” I said. “He’s past his prime for that kind of dance. Don’t be hasty, my loving wife. You will find her useful to take some of the load of work off your own bowed shoulders. If she’s lazy, beat her, but not enough to mark her, and never let her out to catch children in her belly. In the future I may be able to trade her to my advantage, so take care.”
“But I may beat her,” she said smartly, “if she is disobedient.”
“As you see fit.”
Demizdor never opened her mouth that I knew, but I had not imagined she would. Chula came forward to her like a cat stealing up on a bird, then grabbed her by the arm and thrust her inside the hen-tent. I tried to think this funny, but the aftertaste was sour.
Ettook never visited my welcoming feast, though several men were there who did not much like me, yet considered it expedient.
Later, I gifted Finnuk and the rest, and they took the presents, simpering like maids at a posy, though I could see they would like a city horse apiece as well. Only Urm grumbled, and said he had already had a present from me, and showed his crippled leg.
When the fire tired into crimson, the warriors rolled home. A mound of dogs lay in among the meat bones, and the sleepless city horses shifted their feet along the picket line.
&n
bsp; Chula was in my tent. When I had tied the flap, she sprang on me like a panther, winding me with her limbs and her red hair. She went at me as if she would get three more sons in one night.
She took the edge off my appetite, but nothing else. It was another I needed under me.
Somewhere near dawn, Chula woke me. She stood in the indigo dimness of the tent, and she had put on Demizdor’s dress of scales and the bodice of emeralds, which was too narrow for Chula at the waist and too large for her at the breast, and she was wearing, as well, the deer-mask, and her ruddy mane tangled behind. It was such a parody, I lay and stared at it without a word.
“Is this how she looked,” said Chula, “when you had her?”
“Did she tell you so?”
“No need,” she answered, my astute wife, Finnuk’s daughter. “I have seen her naked. You could never have let her be, my lusty husband.”
I thought of Demizdor in the women’s tent; I thought of her too long. When Chula came creeping to me again, I did not want her.
Part III: White Lynx
1
TO FALL SUDDENLY sick when you have never been ill is a hard lesson. If it teaches anything, it teaches you that you must not trust to the things you know, that it is better to build on shifting sand than the rock which may confound you on the day it shatters.
To fall sick, or to love. There is not much difference when you are unwilling, or untutored, in the fact. For near twenty years you rage about the earth, blinded in one eye, the eye of the heart. Then the eye is torn open.
I had given her to my wives, my Eshkiri slave. I had imagined they would rend her with their claws and she would run to me as her savior. I had never met pride in a woman before, not true pride, or, if I had, I had not known it.
So I fished the spring streams, and played gambling games with the warriors, or shot at a mark, tended my new horses, took my dogs and hunted, lay with Chula or Asua or with another woman or two about the krarl, and presently the tents were struck and we were on the old road of the Snake going east, and there were spears and arrows to be refurbished, and weapons to be got in trim for the season’s battles. And here and there, between these activities and actions of a tribal male, I would catch glimpses of a woman in the black shift and the black shireen, walking with pots to a pool, or bent to wash linen, or at the cook-fire (she was never idle, Chula saw to that), and her hair would fold into the wind of spring like a golden wave.
The krarl had not forgotten my hero’s deed as swiftly as I had supposed they would. When the first war challenge came on Snake’s Road, the five of Ettook’s tents I had got from the fortress crowded around me like old comrades, telling the tale again, vowing I should eat the livers of the Skoiana, who had flung the war spear. Now that I should have some fighting I thought I would work the thorn out of my hide that way. It is not constructive to ponder on a woman’s thighs when you are shoulder to shoulder with a battle-wild brave and a band of his spear-brothers flying up on left and right. But the next part of my lesson was to perceive I had lost my fighting madness, lost my joy in killing, lost my hate, or most of it. It was not that I was afraid. It was that it no longer mattered to me, my strength and my youth and my valor had gone for nothing because I could not take my victories to her.
I did not realize any of this; at least, not with my brain, only in my guts and my spirits.
Still, we fought the Skoiana and the Hinga, six battles in twelve days. The last was a hunt, far off the road, with a Skoiana krarl burned at the end of it and a host of prisoners, women and herd animals brought off—there was still the feud of the broken truce between the Dagkta and the Skoi. I was away three days in all on that venture, and returned bone tired and raw with anger. There had been women in plenty and I had not wanted them, only one, and she was in the tent of my wives, that black shireen with her filigree hair.
I rode back with the braves, they half drunk and reeling in their saddles, the dismal train of captives blundering behind. Ettook had gone ahead with his older men to count his spoil on the sly. He was distressed as ever that I had missed death; he never ceased, I think, to wish for it.
But I paid all this small heed. The entire while I was remembering Demizdor, how she had thrown her dagger at me, how I had stabbed her deeper. I had made a pact with my lust, that I would have her with no regard for any effete city-female silliness. I would use her up, and be done with her. There was no other way to cut the arrowhead from my flesh.
It was the Warrior month, and well into it, the margin between spring and summer, a line no thicker than a silver wire. We came through the stockade near evening, and the krarl women ran out of their hiding places to greet us with raucous cries and screams; all tradition, and very stale it seemed to me.
The sky was deep blue, sheer blue, with not a cloud. It was a mild season after the cruel winter, smelling already of flowers from the forest that lay alongside the camp. When the warriors and their wives grew quieter, you could hear the flint-striking of the crickets in the grasses, and the central summer fire was pale as water in the flashing sunlight.
Before I set about the business in hand, I went to the rocky wood-shore where the pines grew in a tangle, and a stream ran bright as a knife. I slung down my gear and washed off the war paint in the stream, and drank there. I was exhausted but not ready to sleep, rather wound up tighter than a spring. I could think of nothing but Demizdor. How she looked, how her face had looked when last I saw it, her walk, her body, her eyes. Something of Tathra’s gloomy murmuring came to me, of the goddess-women who ate a man’s soul. I knew that if Demizdor resisted me I should kill her, and if she lay like ice and I could not warm her through, then a bit of my manhood would wither in that cold. It was very like a spell, a curse.
When I left the stream I was trembling, and it was not the cool of the water alone.
I rubbed myself dry on my cloak and dressed as the shadows were lengthening, turning to red-amber and purple from the fringe of the pines. If I had had a god, I should have offered to him. For the gentleness of my slave so she should spare me the rod of her scorn.
Then, like a filament of the sorcery itself, I saw a figure coming along the path the women had worn to the stream, carrying a great jar to be filled. And it was Demizdor.
I was almost afraid of her, or of the moment, or of my own self. I had not, even at that instant, understood the power of the image, made worse by denial and three nights and days without it. You have had this bitch, I thought; you will have her again. She’s yours to take, so take her and have done.
I leaned on a young pine by the rushing water, and let her come up.
“My wives keep you busy,” I said. “That’s good. A slave should not waste her time.”
I put my hand on her shoulder to wheel her around to me. And she cried out, and the jar fell from her hands.
I knew at once she would never have cried so, simply at a touch. She would have been disdainful, silent, wooden, not this. This was unpremeditated, an expression of shock, or pain. Immediately everything in me was altered. I felt the change but did not recognize its principle.
“What now?” I said softly. “Has my dulcet wife been scourging you as she begged to do?” She did not speak. She stood straight and looked away from me.
Then I discovered a red wetness on my fingers that had met her body, and I took hold of her gently and drew her back and found that the shoulder of her smock was sticky. There was a lacing there; I knew it well, having had occasion to unlace a woman before. Presently I had the garment peeled open.
I had been looking at death and wounds head on for days. This was like my first sight. Her skin, cream and smooth as almond, had been ground into a pulp of blood and flesh on the point of her shoulder.
When I saw, my eyes blackened and there came a roaring white thunder in my throat.
“Who?” I said to her. Somehow, this time, I guessed she would answer.
“My mistress, the wife of my master the warrior,” she said, steady as a blade.
“Chula.”
Despite her immobility, her tone, she was burning hot under my hands. Her weakness cauterized mine.
“How did the sow do this to you?” I said.
“Oh, she is very just. I broke her enameled comb, your gift as I believe. So she combed my skin for me to remind me in the future to be more careful of her possessions. She said I should always have the scar. She made sure of it.”
“Demizdor,” I said. I had long since got her name perfect. None of the others could speak it; they called her Demya, when they bothered with a name. I held her against me, and her eyes came up to mine, wide, cloudy with fever, greener than wild grasses. She heard it in my voice; I also. It had needed this to make me see where my path had led me.
I sat her on the bank, tore my cloak and sopped up the water with it to bathe the wound. She whimpered at the cold of the water, and I saw her clench her teeth beneath the veil of the shireen not to whimper again.
“You shall go to Kotta,” I said. “She will tend this better than I.”
I took her up in my arms; she was lighter than when I had raised her last and she had been nothing to carry then. She had starved as well as all the rest it seemed.
She lay against me, relaxed as death, and said, “Vazkor is generous to his slave.” There was still some acid in her tongue.
“Console yourself,” I said. “Chula shall suffer worse than you. I will ensure that. When I have lashed her, I shall cast her off, and her brats.”
“Only for correcting a slave? You are too harsh,” she murmured.
We had reached the tents now, black on the westering glare. The shireens were at the central fire and turned to stare at me; the warriors, lounging over their tackle or captives, stared too.
Through the sea of sunset and firelight and staring, I carried Demizdor. She was the only reality in the world at that hour.
Later, I took Chula to Finnuk’s tent.