Shadowfire

by Tanith Lee

  “That is the past,” I said. “The future is now.”

  “Maybe. The bird in her breast beats its wings for you, yet her brain rebukes her. I have many essences in my place, liquors and banes. There is a little stone jar in the chest; a drop or two out of it is good for the old men’s pain in the limbs, but more than a drop or two and the heart stops. Your Eshkir has questioned me about these things and, since she is to be the wife of the chief’s son, I have answered her.”

  The dark had grown sharp edged, and the wine sour in my throat.

  “Well, Kotta?”

  “The stone jar has gone with your bride,” said Kotta. “She took it. She understands Kotta is blind, and reckoned Kotta would not observe what she was at. But Kotta has her own way of seeing.”

  I stood still, made idiotic by her news. A white surge came and went across my eyes.

  “So she will poison me,” I said. “It is she who shall die.”

  “The stream runs deeper than you think,” said Kotta. “I have warned you so you can be wary, but try her before you act.”

  I was already striding away up the path.

  My blood beat like a drum in my head. A million strategies came and went like pigeons flying around in my skull. About six paces from my tent, it came to me how I should find her, that she would change even murder with her looks. And then I knew my scheme as if I had been planning it a month.

  I opened the flap of the tent.

  The light was soft within. Her hair and her flesh seemed woven from the light. She was masked—it was for me to unmask her on this marriage night—but she had removed her robe, and waited there for me, lying on her elbow, clothed in her body with no need for more. It was a city pose, a courtesan’s pose for a prince to come in and find. It showed all, yet made it secret, a mystery. The shadows ran and draped between her thighs; the dip of her waist, accentuated by her stance, was girdled with silver from the lamp. Her hair hid her breasts and did not hide them; as she breathed, the glistening strands parted like plants beneath the sea. In her other hand, curved back to rest upon her hip, she balanced the silver cup, the bride-drink she must offer me, symbol of herself.

  “You see, warrior,” she said, “I have obeyed your customs.”

  If I had walked in there, tipsy with desire, perhaps I should not have questioned it. Yet now I recognized it was too saccharine a fruit, the web too certain to catch me.

  My knife rested against my side. Now we shall see, I thought, my lust gone to black night in me. But I went to her, hot-eyed and eager as she had meant me to.

  I did not swallow anything of what was in the cup, but made believe I took some. It had a strange smell, very faint. I should never have noticed it if I had had no warning.

  “Your city wine is bitter,” I said to her. “I have never found it so before.”

  Her eyes in the mask were steady. She had schooled herself for just such a scene.

  “Then drink no more,” she said.

  “And waste good liquor?” I pretended again to quaff it down. Then I reached and drew the mask from her face.

  She was very white, that she could not conceal, and her mouth flinched. Her eyes had become wide, expectant.

  “Demizdor—” I said, as if something had surprised me. Then I let the cup fall, so the doctored wine ran out onto the rugs.

  She drew herself into a knot and shrank from me.

  I had watched men die enough times to be able to mime it. If she had been calmer, she would have recalled that the hearts of dead men do not pound as mine was doing, that you can see a man breathe, however shallowly. Yet she was so certain she had killed me, she looked for nothing else.

  I gazed at her beneath my lids, wondering with a crawling cold what she would do now, and my hand lay dead but ready, next to my knife.

  She did not move at first. When she did, the light disturbed a flash of white on her cheeks. She was weeping; I had never witnessed her tears before, even when her lover slew himself, even when I took her as a slave, or Chula raked her with the comb.

  She came creeping to me, slowly, on her knees.

  Women had told me, once or twice, my lashes were thicker than a girl’s. Certainly the thickness did me a service then, for I could watch Demizdor through them with no great effort, and she not guessing it.

  She began to speak in her own tongue, yet my name was mingled in it. She rocked herself to and fro, as the shireens did above their dead men, the lamp catching her, so beautiful that another part of me would have betrayed to her presently that life still lingered in the corpse. But suddenly she leaned and snatched my knife, too quick for me to stop her.

  For a moment I supposed she had reasoned out my deceit, and meant to kill me again and be sure of it. But in a splinter of a second so brief that I had barely come up with myself, I saw the direction the knife was going.

  I moved at that. She did not anticipate it, assuming me dead. I seized the knife and threw it away, and pulled her down and turned her so she was under me.

  “What’s this?” I said, my voice hoarse as if I were half-dead indeed. “Kill me, then die with me? That would be a fine marriage night.”

  She did not seem afraid, more stunned, as she had some cause to be.

  “Someone warned me,” I said. “It was make believe. I am not poisoned. If you wished me slain, why weep for me?”

  She was still crying. The tears ran down into her hair.

  “I have been twenty nights nerving myself to it,” she choked out. “I cannot live with you. But when it was done—”

  “You did not cry or die for your man in the fortress,” I said.

  She shut her eyes. She did not need to tell me. For all her murdering, she loved me, and for all my anger I could not kill her, having stopped her own arm at the work.

  I touched her as she lay beneath me, the curves and hollows of her gliding flesh. Her eyes tightened, and her hands fastened on me of their own volition.

  “You can live with me,” I said. “You will see.”

  I never feared her treachery after. It could have been all too simple for her to finish me in the nights that followed, when desire was slaked or when I slept. Yet she did not, and I knew she would not. There is one sound way a man can bind a woman to him, the same way she will bind him, and with the same rope. That hour I had the proof of her liking. I thought the feuding was done forever.

  So Demizdor became my wife, though never like a wife of the krarls. It was Asua and Moka who waited on me, who saw to the duties of the tent, the food, the washing and mending. Demizdor did not even carry the jars to the waterfall. Demizdor lived as a brave lives, scorning the women’s tasks, going with me to fish, riding with me to hunt, for she had ridden with her gold-mask on his wars, though never fought in them; so the city women were, it seemed, half man if not warrior. When the krarl saw her mount the black horse I had given her, their eyes expanded and they muttered. Choke it down, I thought. Though the meat is gristly, there are tougher joints to come. I gave her saddle gear of scarlet and the bridle had tassels of white silk. She wore a man’s breeches too, to ride. That caused a stir. She could cast a straight spear at a need, but generally was content to watch me.

  I taught her the bone games of the Dagkta; she taught me stranger ones with bits of stone for the pieces, a thing called Castles, which you must play hating and cool to get it right. She marveled elaborately when I learned it straight off, calling me a clever savage. They had some art for the bed also; neither was I a slow pupil at that, nor did she mock me then.

  I think she was happy enough at this time, shutting her ears to the inner voice that stung her. I took her through the old white summer towns with their roofs of broken pink tile, and in the mossy courts we would couple like lions, and later she would tie my hair into the grasses and laugh at me, but she loved me then.

  I hoped I should get her with child that
summer. It was the first child I had ever wanted. It would have been like a pledge between us, another link in the chain that bound our lives. I see from this that even then I felt the shadow brush me.

  She told me something of her life among the city clans, though it was a wild, weird tale, and she was reticent, as if the memory frightened her. A prince of the high class of the gold had fathered her on his mistress. Demizdor had the rank of the silver, which was mighty but not mightiest. She had experienced no passion for her lover, a man twelve years her senior, whom she was given to, according to the ways of form and etiquette; yet he was a god to her, so she had been trained to see him. When the wounded silver-mask crawled into the pavilion with his news of Vazkor’s rising, her lover had sent her out. The faces of the princes before they masked them were strange, already deathly. It was as if a plague had entered the fortress. She knew what they intended, but her rank precluded entreaty or even questions. She did not comprehend but she must comply. She stood behind the brocades, listening to the silence of their suicide. It was like the ending of a world to her. The dagger she had thrown at me, she had taken up for herself. Of the legend who caused all this—Vazkor—she knew little, only that they feared his name even now. He had overthrown a dynasty and begun the ruin of the land. The ancient order crumbled before the tramp of his armies, and he had raised a witch-goddess from her grave to aid him. These garbled accounts were all she possessed, for the people of the cities did not boast of Vazkor the magician, and he had been dead for twenty years or more.

  Certain of their customs she retained. She would not eat in my presence, but at the back of the tent behind a curtain, as if such a thing were disgusting or forbidden. I questioned this only once. She looked away, and answered that centuries before her folk had been supernatural, having no need for food, and that they were ashamed to have grown mortal. I consoled her with mortal pleasure, and we did not speak of it again.

  We had two months, a little less.

  The shapes of the year, the seasons, moved about us, changing their tempo and their forms. The mild summer burned gently into the tinder of autumn. The fruits were harvested, the haphazard grain, the leaves were yellowing, everything drawing to its close.

  One night I woke to hear her crying softly. We had gone hunting in the woods, and slept beside the fire, the dogs near us. I took her in my arms, and asked her why she wept, but she would not answer, and that was answer enough. She had taught me also tenderness, with her at least. It did not irk me anymore that her pride wounded her because of me, but then I did not properly understand it. I thought it should pass, that all would be well.

  So I held her, and I spoke to her of how I had found the statue in the trees, that fall of leaf when I was fifteen years, the marble maiden of the grove on her plinth above the spring.

  Demizdor lay still in my arms, listening. Somewhere an owl called, sailing the moonlight on his broad wings. Sparks burst purple and golden in the fire, and the dogs twitched dreaming tails through the warm ashes.

  “One day you will regret me,” she said. On her shoulder the scar of Chula’s spite was growing dim, like a pale, dark flower. She filled her hands with my hair and kissed my throat. “You are not of the tribes,” she murmured. “You are a prince of the Dark City, of Ezlann, Uastis’ citadel.”

  As I drew her down, I saw the lynx-mask glint at me across the fire where she had left it, like a face watching with black hollow eyes. And, for a moment, those eyes seemed filled by life before the fire sank again among the wood.

  3

  Moka bore me a daughter in the month of Yellow-leaf. She looked guilty when I came in (it had always been boys before), but I was lighthearted and reassured her. I gave her a garnet to hang on the baby’s basket, for they were reckoned lucky stones, strengthening to the blood.

  Three evenings after this, Tathra’s child began to move, some forty days too soon.

  There had been one of the little Dagkta tribal councils to talk over this right or that. Generally the warriors met about this time, before Sihharn and the preparations for turning west along Snake’s Road. Ettook went and so did I. We were gone two days. When we came back it was to find Tathra already in labor.

  A boy brought Ettook the tidings. Ettook showed his teeth and made a great joke of it, saying his son was impatient to get out and be a warrior. He had a gibe for me as well, how I had better leave off riding my yellow-haired man-woman, and remember my brave’s war skills or the babe should best me even from his cradle.

  As for me, my vitals churned. I had kept sufficient of a reckoning to know it was too early, and now it all came borne to me, how I had been with Tathra, how I had neglected her. I recollected she had said, “You have punished me enough by ceasing to love me.” I might have shrunk down into a child again. Suddenly I could see her in my mind’s eye, her beauty and its loss, her wretched life, that she had needed me and I had found another. The mother is the boy’s first woman. And no man had ever valued her but me.

  It was the mid of the afternoon, warm and lazy, only bees and crickets buzzing in the grass. I went to Kotta’s tent. As a rule the warriors kept away at such a season. A decrepit grandmother or two hovered near, crackling in their old woman’s voices. Their teeth were black, their sour hair gray. They played with beads in their fingers and said it was a long while to be waiting, and mentioned gore and pain. Then they noticed me and tutted, drawing aside.

  As I came up to the flap, an animal screamed inside the tent.

  The blood ran out of my heart. I gripped the flap in my fingers and stood rooted there.

  The old women nodded approvingly.

  One said, “Listen, warrior. That is how you came.”

  And Tathra screamed again, and the old women chuckled, and congratulated each other on their predictions of a hard, prolonged travail.

  Close to the flap, I heard her pleading now, pleading to her gods, pleading with the pain to let her be. The sweat broke out all over me. I thrust open the flap and was in Kotta’s tent.

  The old women shrilled with outrage and interest. Inside it was red-dark from the burning brazier, and stank of blood and terror. Then Kotta came between me and the light.

  “No, warrior,” she said. “This is no hour for you. Men sow and women bear. That is how it is.”

  “Let me by,” I said.

  And from the rugs behind her, Tathra called frantically, with her voice broken up by panting and hurt, “Tuvek—go out. Don’t stay to see my shame. You must not—stay—” Then she caught her breath and tried not to cry aloud.

  I put Kotta aside and kneeled down where my mother lay. Her eyes were sunken but starting from her face and moisture streamed into her hair and a frenzied whining came from her throat. When she saw me so near, she tried to beat me away. I caught her wrists.

  “Scream,” I said. “Let the krarl hear you, and be damned to them. You are bearing another son, one who will treat you better than I. Come, tear my hands if you want. Let me feel your pain.”

  She fell back gasping.

  “No,” she said. “You must go.”

  But the vise seized her again. She drove her nails into my hands and shrieked.

  “Good,” I said. “It will be easier soon.” But she shut her eyes and scarcely breathed. Kotta was bending near.

  “How long?” I asked her.

  “Too long,” she said, having forgone dissuading me. “A night and this day already. It is like the last.” But next she said quietly, “I cannot turn the child. It may die.”

  “Let the thing die. Save Tathra.”

  “Hold her, then,” Kotta said, “if you are for helping her.”

  Accordingly, for an hour I held my mother, and Kotta aided Ettook’s son into this world. For it was a son. There was hair on its head, red hair as his had been, and it was dead.

  Tathra lay in my arms as Demizdor had lain not so many nights before.


  “Is it well?” she whispered.

  “It is,” said Kotta. “You have borne a warrior.”

  I wondered why she should lie, but Tathra’s unmasked face was showing me. Shrunken and colorless, it had acquired a silent inward look, as if she had begun listening to some music in her brain. The look gradually settled on her like a snow, like dust. It was the look of death.

  Kotta meanwhile moved about us, doing what she could. The blood fled from my mother as if it would be free of her. We wrapped her in blankets but she was cold. The coals of the brazier reflected in her open eyes, which presently ceased to blink, and thus I knew she had died.

  I could not even tell in the end if she realized who held her. Since her remonstrance she had spoken no further word to me, not even my name.

  I felt only emptiness. I thought, Long ago I came from this agony, into this tent. Now I have let her go back through the same gate.

  It is hard or impossible for a warrior to weep; the ease of it is never taught him, rather he must consider it a failing, a weakness. Therefore I could not, though my body was racked. There was no release for me, no purging of my anguish in grief.

  At length I laid her down, and went to stare at the child. That pulpy small mess of life with its badge of Ettook’s siring.

  Kotta came to me with a wooden cup.

  “Drink,” she said, but I put the cup from me. “You must leave,” she said. “There are things to be done here.”

  “That object is not like me,” I said of the dead baby. I scarcely knew what I said.

  “Tuvek,” Kotta said, “go out now. Go to your woman.”

  “It was his seed that killed her,” I said, “his red seed.”

  Kotta contemplated me with her blind eyes. She took up a salve and applied it to my hands where Tathra had torn me. I let her do this as if I were an infant.