The Birthgrave

by Tanith Lee

  We had not far to go. There was a big wooden door, studded with metal. The guards rapped on it, a voice barked inside, and they opened it and thrust me through. The door shut, the guards on the other side of it. I was in a square stone room, not lit by brands but three oval lamps. Skins hung on the walls, and swords and shields. There was an oak table, and facing me across it, from his huge wooden chair, a big man dressed as an officer. He looked impatient, callous, disinterested. The iron armlets shone dully on his wrists. It did not seem he had any use for the woman in me. He picked up a roll of rough reed paper and tossed it across the table toward me.

  “Can you read?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  I picked up the roll, and read. My eyes were blurred and would not focus properly, and the light hurt them. I could not seem to concentrate on the ornately written words; the curlicues uncoiled and snapped back again like snakes in pain.

  “I do not understand,” I said at last.

  “I thought you said you could read. I reckoned that was a wild boast for a snot-nosed bandit mare. Well. You’re to go free of here. By order of the Warden. To the protection of some stinking tribal savage who says you’re of his krarl.”

  “Who?” I asked. “None knows my krarl.”

  “Who cares, girl? Not I.”

  He gave another bark and the door opened again. A guard stood there, and with him a lean brown figure, naked to the waist. The hair, caught back in its club, took pale color from the lamps. On the breast was the tattoo of a moon circle, and, within it, a five-pointed star.

  The officer looked him up and down, and then, with a contemptuous grunt, picked up the roll and threw it to him. Asutoo caught it.

  “Out,” the officer said.

  I went toward Asutoo very slowly. His face was difficult to see in the doorway where shadows clustered. He did not touch me, only nodded, and I walked in front of him, behind the guard, toward the prison’s door, so strangely open for me.

  * * *

  It was a dark noon, and the rain fell heavily. I must have heard it through the grating of the cell, but I suppose it had meant nothing to me then. Three of the bronzy plains horses were tethered to a post by the low doorway from which we had emerged. A guard on duty huddled in his cloak. We were in the back alleys of Ankurum, hovels and stench, worse, much worse, in the gray rain. Asutoo gave me a black cloak and indicated I should put it on, and mount the nearest horse. When this was done, he himself mounted. He rode a little ahead of me, leading the third horse, which bore a pack on its back.

  I think I had no thoughts or even any wonder in me as we rode through the gray rain and the hovels of Ankurum.

  Very few people were about. A scattering of curious stares at the tribal man and his woman, that was all. Eventually there was a wall and a gate, and, riding out of it, we were among the hills, a wild part, growing tall trees. Into these trees we went, and a small river ran by, frothing in the rain, over gray stones.

  I reined in my horse and stared down, and saw Kel’s arrow go floating along the water after I had snapped the shaft. They would have hanged Maggur already. His neck—so strong—would the cord break it? Or would his be the slow choking death . . . ?

  Asutoo had stopped a little way ahead. I looked at him and he spoke to me for the first time.

  “Do you need to rest here, my brother? There is a place farther up—a cave ledge that will shelter us from the sky’s weeping.”

  “Asutoo,” I said, “why am I free?”

  “I asked for you,” he said.

  “Your word would be dust to them,” I said, realizing dimly that we spoke in the tribal tongue.

  “The merchant-lord, Raspar,” he said. “I begged your life from him.”

  A flickering light moved behind my eyes, in my brain.

  “Asutoo, my brother, why do we ride here, and not back to the krarl of the Star?”

  He stared at me across the rain, his blue eyes very wide, water drops caught on the lashes. I rode forward a little way, until I was near to him, near enough to touch.

  “Asutoo, my brother, why do we not ride to your chief’s krarl?”

  “I am an Outcast,” he said.

  “Why, Asutoo?”

  “My brother, it is between me and my chief.” He glanced away abruptly, indicating the pack horse. “I have your man’s clothes there and your knives and bow. Do not fear dishonor to be with me. Many warriors will join my spear. What I have done—is—between my chief’s law and my own.”

  “Asutoo,” I said, “forgive my doubts. You are my brother, and I will ride with you to the cave. I am very tired.”

  So we rode, up the hillside through the trees.

  * * *

  Long, but not low or dark, the cave stretched to its own mossy backbone. Asutoo had built a fire a little way in from the entrance, and crouched there, feeding the orange tongues, while I shed the filthy black velvet, and drew on the clothes I had worn as a bandit woman. There was a difference—the shirt was black, not multicolored, and Asutoo had not brought me any of my jewelry, not the gold rings or beads, or even the precious jades. But he had brought my knives and bow, and that one long-knife I had had from the caravan. I drew it from its crimson velvet sheath, and turned the blade so that the silver leopard leaped in the firelight.

  “This is good, Asutoo,” I said. I sat across the fire from him and he would not meet my gaze. He looked instead at the silver leopard as I turned it, glittering, on the blade. The white light flicked and dimmed, flicked and dimmed. After a while I said softly, “Asutoo,” and he glanced up, almost sleepily, into my eyes, and I held him. “Now tell me, Asutoo my brother, why you are Outcast?”

  It was strange. His face was peaceful and expressionless, but his look was full of a fixed terror. He could not get out of my grip. My eyes were white serpents, already numbing him with their poison.

  “I have betrayed the hearth-guest of my chief. I have eaten the bread of friendship with him, but still given him into the hands of his enemies. The krarl priests will set me a penance for it, but they will understand the need.”

  “What need, Asutoo, my brother?”

  “No man may take a warrior-woman and use her as a woman unless she allows it. Darak took her without honor, and she went gladly. He would have drained her warrior blood and shown her no courtesy. I, Asutoo, the chief’s son, would have let her ride before me to the battle, not dragged her by the reins of the horse. And he put her into a woman’s dress, like any girl of the tents, the white dress—even the one who rode in his chariot. He made of her the shield, that was the spear. It must not be. I walked after in the shadows, and the silver one passed in the sky, the Star chariot. It was my sign.”

  “What then did you do, Asutoo, my brother?”

  “I found the merchant Raspar before the Great Race of archers. It was hard, but I made him know who Darak was, and he remembered no other had brought a caravan safe to Ankurum. They had some of Darak’s men in the Warden’s dungeon, and took two and burned them with fire until they told the truth. Raspar said the race must pass first; they could take Darak at the feast, unarmed. I asked the warrior woman be spared. He said at first it could not be done, but afterward he sent me word it could, and there was writing from the Warden—”

  He stopped speaking, staring into my eyes,

  I was cold, so cold, but I smiled at him, although he could not see it behind the shireen. Within the icy shell a scarlet bird tapped its beak to be free. Raspar would have kept me for himself, perhaps, had I wanted to stay with him, but Raspar had wanted his good name most of all. Well, he had recovered the price of the weapons of the north.

  I stood up. Asutoo stood up. We faced each other quite still and quiet, as I turned the blade in my hand.

  “Asutoo, my brother,” I said at last, “it is fitting I should give you my thanks.”

  The shell burst, and
it filled me, flowing warm and bright from my guts into my lungs, heart, and brain; and from my brain into my arm, my hand, my knife. I stabbed forward, and down into the groin, twisted and withdrew. I, who remembered how to kill cleanly, had taken the privilege of my kind, and forgotten it. He bowed forward, groaning over the agony, trying to hold the blood inside himself with his hands. I leaned against the wall and watched him die. It took a little while.

  Then I turned and went from the cave, down the slope, and found the hobbled horses gnawing at the rain-wet grass. The downpour had eased. I wiped my knife on the moss and resheathed it. I mounted, and, with the slightest pressure of my knees, I directed the horse upward, toward the mountains.

  Near the crest of that place, I turned suddenly, and looked back at the dark mouth of the cave, and it seemed there was a waterfall plunging down from it, not white, but red. The scarlet bird in me was beating now to be free. It burst from my mouth in long bloody streamers of sound, and the horse, terrified, bolted under me, upward, upward, until it seemed we had left the ground, and flew in the face of the bright red sky.

  Book Two

  Part I: Across the Ring

  1

  ONE BY ONE the red flowers dropped from my hands, down the dark shaft of the tomb. At the bottom, the dead one lay.

  “Weep,” said the voices around me. “If you would only weep, he would be whole.”

  But I could not weep, although my throat and eyes scorched with the unshed tears. And he was changing now; it was too late. Into green hard stuff he was changed, into a man’s figure of jade.

  “Karrakaz,” I said into the dark. “I am here, Karrakaz.”

  But Karrakaz did not come. Somewhere in the deep of me, gorged on the blood of Shullatt, of the villages, of the merchants at the ford, of Essandar and the others in the Sirkunix, but best of all, bloated with the blood of Asutoo, the ancient Demon of Evil and Hate lay sleeping.

  “We are one thing, you and I,” it had said to me in Kee-ool.

  “So Karrakaz enorr,” I whispered. “I am Karrakaz.”

  I was not certain how I had come there, that high-up echoing place. I remembered the plains horse running in terror under me, but then— Probably I had fallen or been thrown. I was very close to the sky; I sensed this more than knew, for I lay in a black hole in the rock. I say a hole—it was a cave, I suppose, yet the darkness was so thick it pressed closer than any stone. No light. Yet behind my eyes, light: pale and green and red. I do not know how long I had been in the cave, perhaps as much as fifteen days. It was very cold, and I was not really at any time properly conscious. Dreams, hallucinations, and the dark reality were all mingled and lost in each other. I cannot really say what I felt. I can only recall that recurring fantasy that if only I could weep, Darak would be restored to me, and each time, somehow, the blazing tears would not burst forth, and he was turned to jade.

  * * *

  Voices, new voices. Not the voices in my mind, but things separate and alien. A deep voice, urging and impatient, a higher, lighter voice, shrill with echoes, hanging back a little, but not much. Then other sounds, unmistakable and intense in the dark. And then a little silence. Suddenly the girl whispered, frightened,

  “Gar, Gar! Look!”

  Gar grunted something.

  “No, an animal. Over there.”

  There was a small altercation between them, then Gar getting up, a big, shaggy, strong-smelling man. His blackness, blacker than the black around me, fell over my eyes.

  “Sibbos!” he muttered—some deity’s name, used as an oath. “It’s a boy—no, a woman—a masked woman.”

  The girl was scrambling up beside him, pulling down her skirts as she came.

  “She’s dead.”

  “No, she’s not, you blind bitch. I’ll take off this mask—” His great hand came reaching for the shireen, and, in an instant, my own flared up and struck his away. He cursed, and jumped back, startled, while the girl shrieked.

  “Alive, all right,” he muttered. “Who are you, then?”

  “No one,” I said.

  “Simple,” the man observed. He turned. The girl caught his arm.

  “You can’t leave her here.”

  “Why not?”

  They argued as the man strode down the length of the cave, whistling, the girl hanging on his arm. And then, abruptly, he cursed again, strode back, and picked me up. He slung me across his shoulder, and, in so doing, whether from anger or clumsiness I was unsure, he cracked my head against an overhang. A pain like an adder lanced through my temple, and I was thrown back into the dark.

  * * *

  I thought I was in the ravine camp. There was smoke and muddy light, what seemed a huddle of tents around me. Meat was roasting, dogs were running about yelping at kicks, as though being kicked still surprised them. Something creaked continuously overhead, a yellow arc against the darkness.

  “Shall I fetch her some meat?” a voice asked.

  “That one couldn’t eat meat in her state; broth or porridge.” This was an old voice, and soon an old woman was bending over me. It was easy to classify her as old, her face was wrinkled, and wrinkled again upon its own wrinkles like sand after the path of the sea. Her skin was yellow but her teeth amazingly white and sharp, like the teeth of a small fierce animal. Her eyes, too, were very bright, and when she moved, she was like a snake, sinuous and strong. She bent over me, but I had shut my eyes.

  “What about the mask?” the girl was asking. “Shouldn’t you take it off?”

  “That’s the shireen,” the old woman said. “This one’s a Plains woman. They think if they go bare-faced with any but their own men, they’ll die.”

  The girl laughed scornfully.

  “Laugh away. You’ve never had such a belief drummed into your head since childhood. Have you never seen a cursed man? No, I daresay you haven’t. Well, a healer puts a curse on him and says: ‘In ten days’ time you’ll drop down dead.’ And the man goes away and thinks himself into it, and on the tenth day he does just what she says. It’s all what you believe, girl. And if this one thinks she’ll die if she’s unmasked, we’d best leave her as she is.”

  Through the slits of my eyes I looked at her, this cunning one, who knew so much. I could tell from the slight unconscious stress in her voice when she spoke the word “healer” that she was one. And now, as she got up and moved about, I began to see where I was, and it was her place, not a tent, but a wagon. The flaps were wide open, and outside, under the vaulted ceiling of a black eave, the cook-fires were burning, the meat roasting, and the kicked dogs running. In here a lamp swung above me, and beads and dried skins, and the skulls and bones of small animals hung and rustled on the canvas walls and from the wooden struts. I lay among rugs. The girl was crouched at the brazier where something—not food—bubbled in an iron pot. The old woman had taken her seat in a wooden chair, a black, long-eyed cat across her knees.

  “I see you’re awake,” she said then. The cat stirred, twitching the velvet points of its slightly tufted ears. “Are you hungry?”

  “As you said,” I answered, “broth or porridge. None of the tribes eat meat.”

  “True enough,” the old woman said. She ignored the fact that I had been listening so much longer than she had thought—or perhaps she had known anyway. She made a sign to the girl, who glared in my direction and jumped out of the wagon, making it rock.

  “How did I get here?” I asked, not so much wanting to find out as to divert the old woman’s attention, which seemed very piercing, the bright eyes delving like knives, quite impartial and, at the same time, quite merciless.

  “Gar went threading with some girl in the upper caves. They found you and brought you here. Where you came from before that is your own trouble; I don’t know it.”

  “I am a fighter from the tribes,” I said. “My man was killed in a street fight in Ankurum. I think I rode into t
he hills, but I was stunned and remember little. I suppose my horse threw me.”

  Her old face told me nothing. She stroked the cat.

  “Ankurum? You’re many miles from Ankurum now. Nearer Sogotha. And higher than the hills. These are the mountains—the Ring.”

  “Whose camp is this?” I asked.

  “Oh, not anyone’s in particular. Though ask another and he might say we were Geret’s people. A merchant camp. This is a caravan bound for the old cities beyond the Ring and the Water. We travel in a pack because of thieves. Not many in the mountains, but a few, and, with the winter coming on them, they like to be well provided for.”

  “Do you carry weapons for the city wars?”

  “Some. Mostly foodstuffs. It’s poor husbandry across the Water. A bad barren land.”

  Irony, bitter as herbs, tasted in my mouth. Another caravan; this time, a true image. And I in the wagon of the healer, I, who had been healer of sorts. And they went in fear of thieves.

  The girl brought a sticky porridge then, but I could not eat it. The old woman made me a drink, bitter as the irony in my mouth, and I slept.

  * * *

  I did not remember my dreams now. In the mornings I was heavy from the bitter drink, and at first everything was blurred and uncertain. We were on the mountain pass, it seemed, going over the Ring, but it was colder now, and there was a four-day-old rainstorm beating outside the string of caves in which they had taken shelter. You could hear the storm, but it did not sound like a natural thing, more like some huge animal howling and scrabbling to get in at us. Fresh icy water ran in the big cave, and the fires were always going, acrid and spitting.