by Mary Mackey
"Praise to Xori!" Marrah, the young man, and the other dancers cried. "All praise to the Great Bird who brings love on Her holy wings!" And dropping the ends of the ropes, they fell into each other's arms and kissed as the pipes and drums played and the crowd applauded.
That evening Marrah went off into the forest with the young man from Shiba whom the Goddess had given her, and as they lay at peace after satisfying each other, she thought how beautiful and mysterious the world was, and how it contained far more things than could be seen with the eyes alone.
CHAPTER FIVE
Stavan broke off a piece of goat cheese, wrapped it in an acorn cake, and ate it thoughtfully. He and Marrah were sitting on a rock, away from the others, eating their midday meal and dangling their feet in a tide pool. It was a fair day, sunny and cool, good weather for walking back to Xori, but they had been moving slowly because Stavan had refused to ride in the litter. To everyone's surprise, he had made it through the morning, but now, white-lipped and exhausted, he was taking a rest and talking to Marrah in Shambah while he ate his cheese and shared a handful of blackberries she had picked along the trail.
Now that Marrah knew he would be leaving at the end of the summer, she wanted to find out as much about him as she could. Except for Sabalah, she had never known anyone who had been more than a five-day walk from the Sea of Gray Waves — except traders, of course, but traders didn't count since travel was their profession and they always earned their supper and a warm place by the fire by telling fantastic tales no one with any sense believed. Marrah had heard them describe distant lands where people flew on golden wings, and villages rose out of the waves at dawn and sank at night, and monsters breathed fire and spit stones, and all sorts of other nonsense, but she wanted to know what the rest of the world was really like.
Stavan seemed willing to oblige her. He spoke slowly, as if conjuring up his people from a great distance, looking at her with steady, cool blue eyes that never wavered, but there was something about his voice that made her suspect he was lonely.
"My people are of the tribe of the Hansi," he began. "Han is God of the Shining Sky and it is our word for wolf, so we're 'the wolves of God,' put on the earth to rule over all living things as the wolf pack rules. Zuhan, my father, is the Great Chief, which means he has the power to call all the Twenty Tribes together and lead them into battle. We live far to the east of here on a great plain we call the Sea of Grass, and we've lived there since the beginning of time. We're famous warriors; we own more horses and cattle and long-haired sheep than any of our neighbors, and so we move often to keep them fed, and when we move the steppes tremble under the hooves of our herds and our enemies scatter out of our way like rabbits. Our strength comes from the rich milk we drink and the blood we stir into our porridge, and we've never been without meat, not even in the lean season of my great-great-grandfather's time when the rains failed to come and lesser tribes starved."
He paused and finished off his acorn cake. Then he licked his fingers and took up where he'd left off. "The first thing I can remember is the grass, higher than my head, green and tasseled against the sky. I must have been about two years old, and I'd wandered away from my father's tent to chase a butterfly." He smiled and his blue eyes suddenly glittered with amusement. Marrah found the effect slightly startling, like sunlight hitting open water. "All at once, I realized my mother was nowhere to be seen, and I began to cry for her. The next thing I knew she was there, bending down to sweep me up in her arms."
The light went out of his eyes as quickly as it had come, and he picked up another piece of cheese and went back to eating in a sturdy, efficient way as if the memory no longer held any great charm for him. "That's the only memory I have of my mother. She died a few weeks later. All I can remember is that she had a soft voice and light brown hair that smelled like flowers and dust. Her name was Nona. She was my father's favorite concubine, but she had been born the daughter of a powerful chief, taken from her people when she was only six and raised to dance for the warriors."
He helped himself to the blackberries and began to eat them, licking the juice from his fingers. "When she found me out there on the steppes bawling my eyes out, she laughed and held me over her head and cried, 'Look at the horses, my little chief!' and I looked and saw the waves of grass" — he waved his hands expansively — "spreading out forever to the horizon, and my father's herd of fine horses, galloping across the plain, running like the gods themselves, and my bastard half brother Vlahan mounted on a roan gelding, driving them toward the warriors who were going to catch them and ride them off to battle."
He finished the blackberries and wiped his hands on his tunic. "Which war they were fighting that year, I don't know. There were always so many. With the Tcvali, perhaps. The Tcvali have never acknowledged my father as Great Chief. They're a pack of thieves, always stealing our horses because all they can breed are swayback nags not fit for a man to mount."
He paused, as if waiting for Marrah to react, but she had so many questions she didn't know where to begin. Whenever he was at a loss for a word, he lapsed back into his own language, which made it hard for her to follow what he was saying. What was a "concubine," a "horse," a "roan gelding," a "bastard," a "chief," a "warrior," and a "battle"? What had he meant when he said his mother had been "taken from her people"? And if it meant what she thought it meant, why wasn't he more upset about it? She felt confused and slightly embarrassed. She had thought she spoke Sharan better than this. Still, Sharan and Shambah weren't exactly the same language; perhaps that was why she was having so much trouble keeping up.
She decided not to ask for explanations. If she tried to get him to explain all the words she didn't understand, he might get impatient and stop talking, and his story was too fascinating. Better to let him think she was following him. There would be plenty of time later to admit he'd used words she didn't know. Maybe when they got back to the village, Sabalah could supply the meaning of expressions like "swayback nags not fit for a man to mount."
"Who became your stepmother after your mother died?" she asked. Now that was a simple question, straightforward and practical.
He stared at her blankly. "Stepmother?"
So she wasn't the only one who was having trouble. Relieved, she explained.
"Oh, I understand. You're asking who adopted me." He shrugged. "No one did."
"No one?" This time Marrah understood the words but had trouble relieving them. How could a small child not be adopted instantly? In Xori there would have been half a dozen women begging to be honored with the stepmothering of a little boy whose mother had died.
Stavan looked puzzled by her reaction. "It isn't too surprising, really. Even though I was my father's favorite son next to Achan, I was only the offspring of one of his concubines, so I wasn't important enough for Zulike, his old peaceweaving wife, to take into her tent. Zulike was terribly jealous of my mother, and I think she would have left me behind for the wolves if I'd been a girl child, but since I was a boy she gave me to Tzinta to nurse. Tzinta was the slave girl who taught me how to speak Shambah. By the way, it was only by chance that I cried out in Shambah when you showed me Achan's body. I'd decided weeks ago that you people didn't speak any tongue I could understand, but I was upset, and sometimes when I get upset, I return to the language of my childhood." He smiled. "I have Tzinta to thank for that. I was very fond of her. She was my half brother Vlahan's mother, and she had been taken from the savages when she was nearly a grown woman, so it took a lot of beatings to keep her in line. Vlahan was always ashamed of his mother, but I admired her spirit." He chuckled. "When old Zulike came at Tzinta with a horsewhip, Tzinta would call her 'goat face' and 'cow shit' in Shambah so Zulike wouldn't understand. The rest of the time she called Zulike the 'old hag,' which for years I thought was the word for 'chief's wife.' "
"Stop!" Marrah cried, putting her finger over his lips to silence him. "How can you laugh when you're saying such horrible things? How could one woman beat another
and not be cast out of your tribe? Why, my people would cut off this Zulike's ear lobe and drive her into the forest."
Stavan looked at her as if he couldn't imagine why she was getting so upset. "I don't think you understood what I just said," he announced stiffly, and the guarded look came back into his eyes. "No one would dare cut off Zulike's earlobe. She's the wife of my father, the Great Chief, and Tzinta — who died years ago — was only a slave. If a chief's wife wants to beat a slave, she has every right to. My people say that Han created the powerful to rule the weak and the weak to submit to the strong."
"This god of yours sounds cruel." She was too upset to be diplomatic. "If that's an example of one of his commandments, then I think you should..." She sputtered to a halt, not sure what she thought Stavan should do, and then it came to her. "You should worship the Goddess Earth instead of Han. Her first commandment is that we should all live together in love and harmony."
Stavan turned pale and made a strange sign with his hands, extending his index and little finger. "Don't say that. You'll bring Han's curse down on us. Say you didn't mean it, please."
He looked so genuinely upset that she relented and said she didn't mean it even though she did, but the conversation didn't get any better. By the time they finished the acorn cakes and cheese, Stavan had explained to her what a "slave," a "concubine," and a "warrior" were, and she left the tide pool so upset by the violent world he had described that she avoided him for the rest of the afternoon.
Stavan realized that something had gone wrong with the conversation, and as he labored to keep up with the others, he wondered what he might do to wipe the disgust out of her eyes. It was not so much that he was attracted to her as a woman — although she was unusually pretty for a savage — but rather that he never liked having anyone think badly of him. He had come in for a lot of mocking and cruel teasing and even sharp reprimands from his father for caring about such things, but he couldn't help himself. If she had thrust burning sticks against his flesh, he would have endured the torture without a cry, defied her, and sung his war songs. He was no coward, but the look she had given him as she walked away from the tide pool made him flinch the way no blade could have and he felt — although he couldn't say exactly why — that he'd done something dishonorable.
The truth was that his ways and the ways of his people weren't one and the same. He had never fit particularly well into the tribe, and his relatives, in turn, had always found him slightly peculiar. Vlahan, his half brother, who hated him and would be glad to see him dead, liked to call him "woman-spoiled," but the other men were less sure that was the problem, for besides being one of the Great Chief's sons, he was big, with plenty of courage, a good eye, and a throwing arm that could fling a spear with the speed of a descending hawk. Even as a child, he had ridden the wildest horses as if he and they were made of a single piece of flesh, and no one could follow animal tracks better or endure hunger, icy cold, and broiling heat with fewer complaints.
As for his loyalty, it was unquestioned. Many younger sons of chiefs spent their lives plotting ways to kill their older brothers and seize power, but Stavan had never once wavered in his fidelity to Achan. Once you were Stavan's friend, you were his friend for life, and this had been true even when he was a child.
Then there was the matter of the Tcvali raid. When he was thirteen he had been guarding the horses and cattle with five other boys when a band of Tcvali warriors took them by surprise and fell on them, killing everyone but Stavan, who was left for dead. It was winter and the steppes were covered with snow, but instead of giving up and freezing to death, he had survived and staggered back to camp to sound the alarm.
No one had expected him to live through the night, although Changar, the diviner, was called in, and Zuhan ordered a horse sacrificed — which was remarkable considering that the boy was only the son of a concubine. But live Stavan did, and the raw courage of his journey through the snow to warn his people was repeated so often and so widely through the Twenty Tribes that no one could ever again reasonably ask if the youngest son of the Great Chief had what it took to be a man — no one, that is, except Stavan, who secretly asked himself that question more often than was good for his peace of mind. He knew what no one else could: under his brave exterior was a person not really born to be a warrior.
He first discovered this weakness in his character on the retaliatory raid that took place soon after he recovered his health. Sometime during the season of snows when the Warrior Stars rode high in the sky and the days were short, Zuhan had called Stavan into his tent to tell him that he was going to be allowed to ride with the men to avenge his slain companions, and for the first and last time in his life Stavan felt the hot, excited thrill of that moment when a warrior knows he will soon be shedding the blood of his enemies.
"We'll wipe out the Tcvali and take back our horses and cattle," Zuhan promised, looking at Stavan through narrowed eyes and liking what he saw, for the boy was big for thirteen, and he had the arms and legs of a man born to ride. "And if you kill one of their warriors — not one of their women, for that would be too easy — I will order Changar to cut the marks of manhood into your flesh even though you're still a year too young for the ceremony."
No one was ever prouder than Stavan at the moment he heard his father promise to make him a man, and as he bowed and kissed the ground at Zuhan's feet, he promised himself he would be the fiercest warrior the Hansi had ever known. The next morning he rode out armed with a spear and a battle-ax, knowing nothing about war except the games boys played and the stories men told as they sat around the campfires at night.
His education was quick and brutal. So much snow had fallen since the raid that it should have been impossible for the Hansi to track the Tcvali across the steppes, but they had Chinzu, the best tracker in the Sea of Grass, and he followed every hump in the snow, every grain of dust, until they saw the smoke of the enemy fires drifting across the horizon. Knowing the Tcvali thought they were safe, they waited until just before dawn and then fell on the camp, raking the enemy by surprise and slaughtering every man, woman, and child, except for a few girls who were spared to become slaves and concubines.
When the tents of the Tcvali were nothing but charred rings of burned hides and the blood of the dead had soaked into the snow, they divided the surviving women among themselves and rode back to camp singing songs of victory. It had been a brilliantly successful raid, all the more so because the Tcvali had not expected to be attacked so late in the season, when fierce storms blew down from the north and a war party could be lost before it ever had a chance to strike.
"Hail to Zuhan!" the warriors sang as they threw skins of fermented mare's milk to one another and drank until they were drunk. "Hail to the greatest of Great Chiefs!"
Only Stavan was not singing. White-lipped and silent, he sat on his horse, sick at heart that he had ever come on the raid. The wholesale slaughter had turned his stomach. He had not been in battle more than five minutes before he realized that no power on earth could make him kill women and children, and more than once he had turned away instead of striking, an act that would have brought eternal shame on his father if anyone had noticed. Fortunately for his reputation, no one had. The smoke from the burning tents had hidden his cowardly acts of mercy — which had done the women and children no good since they were slaughtered anyway. Meanwhile, there had been plenty of Tcvali warriors to fight, and he had stabbed and slashed until he was dizzy with exhaustion, fending off armed men who did their best to beat him to the ground. By the time it was all over, he was covered with blood like everyone else, most of it from his own wounds, which by some miracle were not too serious. But the victory had given him no pleasure.
"Stavan has killed his man," the warriors sang. Chinzu, his oldest cousin, had grinned and thrown him a skin of fermented mare's milk, and Stavan had drunk deeply, wondering if drunkenness could erase the memory of the man he had supposedly killed. The Tcvali warrior had been wounded and dying before Stav
an ever came near him. He had charged wildly, and Stavan had done no more than strike at him once with his spear, knocking him off balance, but the other men were determined to give him the glory of the kill so he could be initiated into manhood, and as they rode back to camp, they sang his praises and invented deeds of courage he had never so much as thought of.
They were proud of him, his father was proud of him, but Stavan was not proud of himself. He knew there was something wrong with him, something that made him unlike other warriors, and that night as Changar cut the ceremonial scars into his shoulders and the palms of his hands, he prayed to Han that he would never have to fight again. Yet what other life was there for a man? He had a fine singing voice, but singing and dancing were something warriors only did when they ate the sacred mushrooms and prepared for battle. Men did not cook, or make pottery, or gather wild roots, or sew clothing, or milk cows, or cure hides, or tend children, or do any of the things he really enjoyed doing. Once in a great while, a man might be chosen by the gods to become a diviner as Changar had been when lightning struck him and he lived, but the only life for most men was the warrior's life, and if this was true for most, it was especially true for the youngest son of a Great Chief.
Still, even as Changar made the marks that would tell anyone who saw Stavan that he was forever a warrior of the Hansi, Stavan prayed never to ride into battle again, and to his astonishment, Han heard his prayers and gave him his wish, for not long afterward Achan came back from the west, lay down in his father's tent, and dreamed of the golden tents of Han. Soon after, he became obsessed with the idea of going west again to find them, and impressed by Stavan's courage and the fact that he spoke Shambah, he persuaded Zuhan to let Stavan go with him. So for four years Stavan had wandered with his brother through strange lands without ever having to admit that he preferred peace to war, took no joy in battle, and wasn't like other men.