by Judith Tarr
Keen knew what anger was. She had a temper, though her mother had taught her to master it long ago. But she had never felt what she felt now.
This was rage. More than rage—wrath. It had no reason in it. It had nothing to do with sense. It was born of Walker’s neglect and her own grief and illness. It was larger than she was, and far stronger.
She would go to her father. Her mother had died in the winter, and she was not close to the other wives. Flint was old and his mind tended to wander, but he was still a very rich man, and very clever in adding to his wealth through trading and favors and, rather often, wagers on this or that. He was fond of Keen and proud of his son-in-law. He would not be the least bit pleased to hear of this invader.
The Tall Grass servants were doing well enough. Keen laid on them the terror of her husband’s reputation, the mighty curses that a shaman could lay on those who stole from him or so much as looked at his belongings. When they were suitably round-eyed and appalled, she left them to finish what they had begun, and went to find her father.
oOo
Flint, by good fortune, was sitting in front of his tent while two of his youngest wives combed and plaited his hair. He had been drinking deep of the wild berry wine that his eldest surviving wife was renowned for, and was wrapped in warm good humor. He greeted Keen with delight, pressing a cup of wine on her till she took it to avoid offending him.
He watched her closely, so that she had to drink a sip or two. Then, content, he sat back against the knees of his plump fair wife, while the dark one wove a string of beads into one of his plaits. He was a vain man. He never left his tent before he was properly dressed, his beard combed, his thinning hair plaited.
He smiled at Keen and said, “Daughter, you’re as lovely as ever I remember. Where have you been keeping yourself? Is your husband treating you well?”
Keen’s anger, at least, burned away the tears. She was able to return his smile, to shrug and say, “Well enough. He’s been kind to me, as husbands go.”
“Good,” said Flint. “Good, good. And how’s that new wife of his turning out to be? I hear tell, she refused every man of her own tribe and most of the tribes round about, till her father threatened to give her to the next man who walked into the camp.”
Keen sat still. She felt as if she had taken a blow to the middle. When she looked for air, there was none.
At length she managed to find her voice. “You—knew that he was—”
“Of course,” said Flint. “He’s been courting the girl since he came to the gathering. I’ll wager he got her to accept him—he’s got a honeyed tongue on him, that lad, and a smile to go with it.”
Keen stared at the cup in her hand. With a sudden motion, she lifted it to her lips and drank it down. The wine was gaggingly sweet, and strong enough to dizzy her. “The women haven’t talked about it at all,” she said from somewhere remote and cold.
“Oh, they know, they know,” her father said with a sweep of the hand that sent his cup flying. Wine splashed Keen’s skirt. She ignored it. He, oblivious, said to her, “I suppose they keep their tongues leashed when there’s a senior wife about. How does it feel to be that at last? Has the girl’s father given you a nice big tent?”
Keen regarded him in despair. He did not understand at all. Whatever hope she had had that he might prevail on Walker to send that insolent child back to her father, vanished as Flint babbled on. Not only did he think that she had known of this; he too obviously saw it as a good thing.
“It’s time,” he said, “that you had someone to wait on you and look after the tent and do the things that servants do. Not that I blamed you overmuch for not wanting servants when I tried to give them to you—a first wife wants her man to herself for a while—but a year of that should be enough for any woman. Maybe once the girl’s had proper training, she’ll give you time to make a baby or two, eh?” He winked and nudged her in the ribs, nearly falling over with the rush of wine to his head.
Keen steadied him without speaking. If she tried to say anything, she would scream.
He staggered up, leaning heavily on her. He grunted, belched richly, and patted her head. “You’re a good child,” he said. “Now I’d best go and celebrate the bridegroom. Don’t forget: senior wife lays out the bridal bed. A few flowers, a charm or two, he’ll do his duty for the nine days and then come back to you—I’ll lay wagers on it. That’s a pretty girl, they say, but nothing like my yellow-headed darling.”
She set her teeth at his clumsy stroking of her hair, stood still and let him weave off in the direction of the Tall Grass camp, without ever speaking the words that she had come to say.
23
Keen went back to the tent that had been hers, but which now, by the laws of marriage, she must share with another woman. It was much improved, the stranger’s belongings removed or shifted out of the way. She sent the servants home to their mistress, retrieved the fish that she had all but forgotten, and set numbly to cleaning and stuffing and baking them. They would spoil if she left them; baked, they would keep a little while at least, and she could give most of them away.
She did not trouble to make herself beautiful. What point? He was not coming tonight. He would be lying about in the Tall Grass camp, being charming to his new wife’s kinsmen.
The fish were done just at sunset. Keen dug them out of the fire and broke the clay that had baked hard over them, and emptied them into a basket. Their scent, so rich and savory, made her stomach churn. She had no appetite at all. The wine that her father had made her drink was heavy in her middle, weighing down her spirit.
She covered the basket and laid it aside where camp dogs and children could not get at it. Moving slowly, without thinking much past the task at hand, she banked the fire and spread her sleeping-furs and lay down.
She had always slept in the outer room, in the man’s place—beside Walker when he was there, alone when he was not. He had never objected, indeed had said once that it was convenient; they could lie together all night long if they chose.
She had left the flap tied open to let in such breeze as there was. It was a still night, and warm. After a while she slipped out of her tunic and folded it and laid it under her head. The fire without died slowly, sinking to embers. She sank with it into a half-drowse.
Her heart was heavy, as it had been when her mother died: a blackness, an emptiness, as if she had lost something precious. Yet all she had done, if custom were true, was to gain a new pair of hands in the tent and in her husband’s service—and since this was a wealthy woman, a whole flock of servants, too. She should be glad, not so deeply angry that she could see no way out of it.
A shadow came between her eyes and the dying fire. A small part of her heart leaped. She knew that shape, oh, yes: slender, tall, but wide enough in the shoulder, moving with grace that not so long ago had caught her breath in her throat.
It still could, if she let it. Walker slipped into the tent as he had so many times before, paused to let his eyes come clear in the dimness, moved toward her. Her body must have glimmered, to guide him; or he heard the sound of her breathing.
He did not greet her or speak to her. He lay down beside her, hand reaching for her breast. It drew taut at his touch. Her belly fluttered. Her secret place ached with wanting him.
And yet her heart was cold. He stroked her and fondled her, and her body roused as it always had, quick as a horse to its master’s touch. When he rose over her, she opened to him and took him inside her. They danced the dance, treading the familiar steps, knowing each other’s rhythms and cadences.
When they had come to the end, he did not leave her as he usually did. He held her in his arms, a rare thing, and one she would have much prized only a day before.
She lay still, not speaking. Her breathing quieted. The ache in her secret place had eased a little, but not so very much. As if, she thought, the dance of flesh on flesh was not enough. It needed something else. Something—
“My love,” Walker said
in his beautiful voice. “My wife.”
She did not respond. This was unlike him, too, even as he had been when he first took her to wife.
“I hear,” he said, “that you sent Blossom away.”
Was that the girl’s name, then? Blossom? Keen would have called her Ice, or Pickerel, or something equally chilly and sharp.
“I am sorry she came so soon,” he said, seeming undismayed by her silence. He stroked her as she spoke, cupping her breast, kneading it. She had never liked that. She had never told him so. Nor did she tell him now, though he went on and on. “Her tribe’s custom is somewhat different from ours. The new wife comes at her own discretion, and takes the husband’s tent for her own.”
“And if he already has a wife?”
She spoke so low, for a moment she did not think he heard. Then he answered, “The senior wife comes when she chooses.”
“I am senior wife.”
She felt how he stiffened. His hand tightened on her breast. It hurt. She set her teeth and endured. “My love,” he said in a tone she had never heard him use in this place before, though she had heard it often when he spoke before the People. “My sweet and golden lady. You are first wife and will always be. But her father is shaman of the Tall Grass people. She has always expected to be chief wife in her husband’s tent.”
“My father,” said Keen, “is king’s brother of the White Stone people.”
“The old king’s brother,” Walker said. “That day is past, my love. Flint is an old man. His powers have waned. Blossom’s father is in the prime of his life, at the height of his strength. The Tall Grass king is his sister’s son. His brother is the hunter of the tribe. He offers a great alliance, and great gifts not only to me but to our new king and to the People. So you see,” said Walker as if there were nothing more reasonable, “if his daughter requires that she be chief wife, then she will be. It need matter little to you. All the burdensome things you did, her servants will do. Keeping the tent, scraping the hides, cooking the meals—all done for you now. You can be free to do as you please. I’ve asked her to be kind to you, to be your friend. Haven’t you always wanted a friend?”
Keen had to struggle to breathe slowly, to be calm. There was so much to answer that she chose to answer only the last: “I have friends.”
“But not a sister-wife, a woman to share the tent and divide the tasks. You’re angry now, I can tell—you’re jealous. Don’t be. I’ve love enough for both of you.”
Or for none. For some reason, Keen heard that in Sparrow’s voice. She was seeing Walker again as Sparrow must see him: cold, cruel, blind to anything but his own wishes. And yet her father, who was neither cold nor cruel, had been just as blind.
“What,” she said, “if I had done the same? If I’d gone out, found another husband, made him lord of this tent—would you be wiling to accept it?”
“Of course not!” he said at once. “That’s outrageous. A woman belongs to one man, and one man only.”
“And yet,” she said, “you take away my rank, you cast down my father’s honor, you order me to step aside for a stranger. You would never permit it if I were to do the same.”
“Because,” said Walker, still with that air of preeminent reason, “a woman does not do such things. She is made to serve one man, as men are made to rule many women. That is the gods’ law.” He rose over her. His face was a pale glimmer, with shadowed eyes. Her hands, clenched by her sides, remembered the strong clean planes of it, the softness of his young man’s beard, the way his lips would set a kiss in her palm as it passed by.
She put that memory aside. He, like her father, spoke perfect sense, sense as the People had known it for time out of mind. Men did not share wives, unless they were kings; and then they chose who would lie with their women. Women shared husbands. That was the way of it. And if the first wife was not so highly ranked as one who came after, she stepped aside as she was bidden, because that was a woman’s lot.
Keen had never minded that she was a woman. Sparrow complained constantly, condemning this unfairness or that—never wishing she could be a man, certainly not, but just as certainly declaring that a woman should be able to do all that a man could. Sparrow was odd and outspoken, and was going to suffer terribly if she was not careful.
Keen had never minded, either, that as a child she could do so much more than she could do as a woman. Once her courses came, she was content to put on the long tunic and put up her hair and wait to be given to a husband. Keeping his tent, warming his bed, bearing his children when they came—she had taken joy in all of that.
Even when she thought of sharing with other wives: well, and every woman did, sooner or later.
Sooner had come, and before she expected it. Walker was only doing what was best for his fortunes, and no doubt for the People. She should be schooling herself to accept it.
She could not. This was not right. The way he had done it, without a word to her—coming to her after it was done and breeding her like a heifer and thinking that that would be enough to soften her heart.
It was being alone that had done it, waking from her blood-red dream to find all the People gone and herself forgotten. Walker had never come to her, not once, until tonight.
It did not matter that there were reasons for it, reasons that would seem important to a man. Keen was not a man. She had lost a child. Her heart had needed him to make it whole, and he had been finding himself a new wife.
She was a very selfish, small-minded, unreasonable person. She knew that. She could not make herself care.
Walker took her silence, maybe, for acquiescence. He stooped to kiss her. If he felt the cold passivity of her lips, he did not speak of it. He fondled her breast again, a touch that made her flinch inside, then rose. His voice came down from far above her. “There, my love, I know; it’s always difficult the first time, even knowing what the gods have willed for us. You’ll come to love her. She’ll be your sister and your friend. You’ll see.”
Keen said nothing, which in the end was her only refuge. He seemed to have expected it. He turned and slipped out, striding away into the night.
When he was well gone, Keen rose in her own turn. She found and shook out her tunic and put it on. She gathered a few things, finding them by touch in the dark, and tied them into a bundle. With that in hand, she slipped out as he had, and went where her feet saw fit to take her.
24
Sparrow had avoided going to the women’s house for a handful of months now. She had found that if she gathered up certain things and put on a certain air and walked out without stealth, she could gain herself a handful of days with the mare, and never be missed at all.
It should have been even easier in gathering, with so many tribes and so many houses, and women wandering from one to the next as it pleased them. But when Sparrow woke on the sixth day of the sacrifices to the familiar ache and ruddy flow, sought the basket with the necessities, and slipped out, she found herself accosted by no less than White Bird, her father’s odd but undeniably lovely wife.
White Bird had never had any use for Sparrow. But this morning; for some reason best known to herself, she held up her own basket and said brightly, “You, too? Come, we’ll share the days together!”
Sparrow barely restrained herself from glancing about to see if Walker was watching. How would he know to thwart her so? The gods well might, but them she could not see, not with her daytime eyes.
There was no help for it. She had to go to the hut that the White Stone women had raised. It was set upstream of the camp on the little river, well out of sight and sound of the sacred places. There were two other women sitting outside of it, one of the White Stone, one of the Red Deer who had been born to the White Stone. She was a tireless gossip, and she knew every scandal.
She was chattering when Sparrow and White Bird came, and she did not stop chattering, day or night. By the third day, they knew the arrangement of each and every basket in her husband’s tent, what was in it and how much,
where each wife slept and on what kind of fur, how many children they had, what their names were, and precisely how large and of what shape was the organ of the man who had sired them all. “Or most of them,” said Magpie, “if you’re charitable.”
Sparrow thought she might go mad. She wanted to be away from here, free on the plain, riding the mare—and maybe watching over Linden from afar, though that would not be easy. Yet she was trapped by her body and her kinswomen. When Magpie was not chattering, White Bird was babbling of the spells she would cast and the songs she would sing, so that next month she would not be in the women’s house, she would be growing a son in her belly.
The third woman, Redwing, at least was quiet. From what little she said, her husband was thinking of sending her back to her father for her failure to bear him a son, though she had given him four daughters. He had refused to name all of them, every one—as he refused to name the daughters his other wives gave him. None of them had given him a son.
Sparrow tried to imagine a woman whose arms were so empty, who had carried and birthed four children, and each one had been taken away to be given to the wolves. White Bird, whose daughter was growing up lusty and strong and completely unacknowledged by her mother, would not hear Redwing’s story. She ran straight over it with her sweet breathless voice. “I shall bear a son in the spring. You’ll see. It’s all prepared. As soon as I leave this place, I’ll start the spells.”
Redwing shut her mouth and did not open it again. Magpie began to chatter anew. Sparrow shut her eyes and prayed for an end to it.
oOo
She endured it for close on four days. Redwing left late on the third, no doubt with enormous relief. As if Redwing’s silence had served to quench the full spate of her chatter, Magpie redoubled her efforts to deafen her companions.
By dawn of the fourth day, Sparrow had had enough. She was not done with her courses. She did not care. Magpie was chattering in her sleep. White Bird was babbling, it seemed, to herself. Sparrow simply walked away.