The Birthgrave

by Tanith Lee

  I was very confused still, but this new awakening was beginning to make sense. I lolled my head a little, and made out other, similarly adorned males, going to and fro among the wreckage of the fallen tower. Looters, not rescuers. What had I expected? And if they had come so far in order to glory in this collapse of a piece of City power, they would have no time for a woman of that City, half-dead and apparently worth nothing. They would strip my rings and the silver mask, for these were all part of the tower pickings, and then they would ride off and leave me to my fate, or else, perhaps, run a spear through me to help me to it. Unless, of course, they had a fancy for a high-born slave.

  They were talking again, and I forced myself to hear what they said. This time the pattern came clear and strong, and I found I could speak it at last. They were discussing their holy man, or seer, who had apparently foretold the fall of Tower-Eshkorek, and insisted they ride to it, declaring they would find something precious here. Precious? What other secrets had there been, then? I had no time for speculation. I took the cue luck had given me. They respected religion and magic, it seemed, and dimly I remembered now that Mazlek had mentioned their continual wars.

  “I am the precious thing your seer spoke of,” I broke in, and their faces dipped to me, startled. “I am a magicianess of great power, a healer and prophetess. I will help you in your battles, intercede for you with your gods.”

  It was a ridiculous announcement for a woman lying on her back, her hair matted with dust and filth, and her torn skirts around her waist. Yet they took it from me, with the naïveté of savage men to whom all things are simple, or else extraordinary and great. And I had used their language. How could I know it if I were not what I said?

  “Of Eshkir,” one said, using the tribal name for Eshkorek Arnor.

  “No,” I said. “And what I am, or where I came from, is of no concern to you. Your wise man told you. Is that not enough?”

  The third of them, who had said nothing all this time, leaned forward abruptly and picked me up. He was strong and it seemed easy for him. He did not carry me elegantly across his body, as a City man would have done, but over his shoulder, like a kill, and I thought of the wagon people.

  I could see now that the tower, in falling, had filled up one side of the moat, making a bridge for them to cross by.

  Things grew blurred, and somehow rather amusing. I was put facedown over a shaggy brown horse, which liked this state of affairs as little as I, and shifted discontentedly, so that my nose was banged with an infuriating rhythm against the rough horse blanket on its back. As I lay like this, their seeress as untidily placed as before, the tribal men gathered themselves together, and presumably discussed matters. After a while of discomfort, dull heat, and nose-banging, my champion mounted himself behind me, and, with some jerks and bumps, we set off. My mind was closed to everything except the humor and indignity of my situation, and I laughed.

  And so that is the way I left Tower-Eshkorek, head down over a horse, laughing.

  * * *

  I recollect little of the journey, only waking occasionally to catch glimpses, from the tail of my eye, of a round bluish moon. It seems they made no halt when night came on; they knew their road from the mountains very well. From time to time snatches of their brief conversations sounded through my dozing, but again I could not seem to understand. That did not trouble me much at the time. There were dreams, too, about the things that were past, though it was not for some days that I remembered how the tower had fallen in a close cradle over our heads, a trap, but one which held the rest of the rubble away from us. There was no air in that place, and gradually the murky soporific of death crept in. Asren had not been afraid, and of that I was very glad. He lay in my arms quietly, and long after he was dead, I held him as I waited. I had not thought anyone would ever come to bring me new air so I could breathe again, and had not greatly cared. Yet these warriors, sent by their seer, had opened a way.

  It was a long journey for them to come. I reckoned later it took three days or more for the return.

  There was a halt or two. Once I was offered food, but I did not want it, and could not have eaten it, in any case, without raising the lynx mask.

  How long had I lain under the tower? They would not have come immediately—not until the soldiers had gone. At one point I thought of the child, wondered if it were dead in the womb, and, if it were not, how it liked my position over the horse. The warriors had had scant respect for a swelling pregnancy. But I had not thought of it before.

  Fourth day? Morning changing the sky as I cricked my neck trying to see it. A great deal of jolting, and I realized that we were working a way down from the mountain slopes; just a glimpse of their sun-painted terraces behind me. I was too fully conscious now to bear my comfortless position.

  “Let me up,” I called, and the warrior whose horse carried me grunted. It occurred to me I had spoken in the City tongue. I corrected myself clumsily, struggling with the new words. “Let me move—let me ride with you.”

  The man laughed nastily. I became aware no mere woman would be allowed to sit a horse, let alone a horse with a warrior already on it.

  “Then let me down,” I said. “I will walk.”

  He consulted his neighbors, a taciturn dialogue. After a moment we halted and I was pulled off. One of them tied a rope around my waist, and attached it to “my” warrior’s saddle horn.

  “This is not needed,” I said. “I shall not run away. I come freely to your tribe to be seeress and healer.” Their faces were blank, and I broke off, conscious of having slipped back again into City speech, and of waving my arms and hands in pointless gesticulation, as I have seen people do when they cannot express themselves properly in an alien language. Abruptly I wondered if I had managed it as well as I judged at the tower; had I imagined their apparent acceptance?

  With a jerk at my tether, the horse began to move, and I began to move after, of necessity.

  I thought at first it was a lucky place to have chosen, for we were on the last of those slopes, and the way grew easier by the minute. I was glad to be walking, even roped as I was, even though my legs felt weak and occasionally buckled unexpectedly at the knees, and even though court sandals are not made to stumble in over jagged holes and boulders, and I stubbed each toe a thousand times. We were going down into a valley of rocky turbulent shapes, clustered with stands of thorn, thin pines, and other dark slender trees. The valley was full of velour shadows, but the sky overhead was golden-green, still streaked with red fingers of cloud. I was far from happy as I looked at it; how could I be happy? Yet a sort of calm seemed to flow into me, inhaled like a drug of forgetfulness from the cool air.

  And then, feeling better ground under them, my escort kicked at their shaggy horses, mine included, and broke into a gallop. I tried to run with them, but I had no hope. The rags of my dress caught my feet, and in an instant the rope snapped taut, and I was pulled down. Dust in my eyes and nostrils, grazed by every stony upthrust, torn by sharp rocks, I was dragged helplessly forward, practically strangled by the cord at my waist. This is what the charioteer goes in fear of, if he has room for fear, one of those deaths the Sagare can offer. My left arm across my breasts in an instinctive protection, I tried to claw the rope free of me with the other. No use. I screamed for them to stop. No use.

  Suddenly the way was smoother. More dust. Incongruously I twisted to avoid a heap of goat dung, and was hauled through a broken bush tuft instead. My journey came to an end.

  I lay there on my face for a moment, and then crawled to my knees. Around the makeshift track was a scattering of dark blue tents among the tall pines. Ahead, a larger tent, painted yellow on the blue, and before it a big fire-pit, smoking, and only just alight from the labors of four shireen-masked women in black sleeveless garments. They had stopped work to stare at me. One of the warriors gave a yell at them and they ran like terrified hens, into the trees and out of s
ight.

  We had come to this place around a jut of rock, which hid it well from the roll of the slopes. They had otherwise no stockade, yet this was a krarl, though not large—about twenty tents in all.

  The dust was still settling, the warriors riding circles, our horses still snorting and agitated from the gallop, when two men emerged from the painted tent, one before the other. The first was a very big man, yet with not enough stature for his girth, heavily muscled, and with a hint of fat to come from many jugs of tribal beer. His large blue eyes were pouchy, stupid—and yet cunning, too; and in addition to red plaited hair, he wore a full beard, well greased and plaited also. This beard dressing must be an irksome thing to him, and, from the look of it, it was most probably performed not more than three times a year, the last session being long past. He was unmistakably a chieftain, and he swaggered as he came, very sure of his ground. Dressed as his warriors in leather jacket, leggings, and boots, he wore many collars and trinkets over his tattoos, armbands of burnished copper, and there were tassels swaying from his belt. The other, who came behind him, was a different thing again. Thin, tall, covered by a long brown robe caught at the waist in a leather thong, his hair unbound and fiery-colored yet streaked with gray, his face shaved like the faces of the warriors but painted black, so that it seemed he, too, went masked. Wild pale eyes rolled around in that black face, which, despite the gray hair, looked of indeterminate age, and he clutched at a wooden shape hanging on his chest. Their seer?

  Arms went up in salute. The gaudy chieftain nodded and looked at me.

  “What is this?” I heard him say through the throbbing of my blood.

  “An Eshkir, from the tower, Ettook,” one of them said, and then laughed. “A seeress, she said. The precious thing Seel sent us to find.”

  The holy man Seel moved around Ettook the chief, and came toward me. I wanted to get up to face him, but I could not seem to manage it, and, as I kneeled there, I struggled to find words instead.

  “I am a magicianess,” I said; but I had used the City tongue.

  Seel came very close, and I smelled the stink of his body, the stench of skin forever wrapped up in a covering, and never exposed to sun or air or water. He seemed angry, his dry hands knotting and unknotting, his sharp yellowish fangs bared in a grin of hatred for me. His eyes glittered and darted. Suddenly he spat into my masked face. He shrieked some words I could not understand, and broke into a hopping dance. He leaped away from me, and, still screaming, he ran to each warrior in turn, poking at them with bony fingers. The warriors seemed afraid and backed away. I could not properly follow, but it appeared I was not what he had wanted brought; there had been some other thing—and they had missed it.

  Again I felt I might begin to laugh, despite the pain I was in. And yet I must deal with them now, these tribal savages, or else I was lost. I made myself think of how they had dragged me those last yards over the ragged ground, of how the seer had spat in my face. Anger came, hot and bright, and filled me like a jar. I got to my feet.

  “Old man,” I called out to Seel, deliberately discourteous, and I had the right words now, for he flung around frothing, and glared at me like a filthy old dog, which can still bite. “I told you,” I said, “I am a magicianess.”

  I looked at him, and the anger rose behind my eyes, a great throbbing tide. But no light came, no pain of opening, only the pain of a huge thing that could find no way out. I struggled with myself as I stood there, striving to release my Power on Seel, to kill him, and prove myself before these dangerous tormentors. But I could no longer control or utilize my Power. My anger sagged and lay still. I recalled how I had burned from the brain of Vazkor the nest of ability, how I had sealed the avenues of his thought forever. In doing that, it seemed, I had drained myself, destroyed myself. Oh, I should have known it sooner; I had been unable to understand their speech as we rode, was still unable to master it fully, and that was a gift I had always had until now, since I woke under the Mountain.

  Appalled and terrified, I confronted Seel, totally at a loss. The warriors began to laugh. Ettook began to laugh. Seel, however, did not laugh at all. He came to me and clouted me several ringing blows across my head, until at last the sound became the warning gongs of Belhannor, clamoring because Anash and Eptor were at the gates.

  2

  The tent where they had put me was very dark, and smelled of women and women’s things, yet I thought at first it was empty except for myself. There were goatskins and rugs on the floor, and I lay among these, stiff and sore and sick. I began cautiously to explore my body, for I was in a cold panic now lest, along with everything else, my self-healing had vanished too. It seemed it had not, for the rents and gashes on my body were sealing themselves, the black bruises fading.

  Abruptly I saw the woman’s shape ahead of me. She had been standing very still until this moment, now she moved and came forward. The little drift of light through the tent wall caught her, and showed me a covered face from which large dark eyes stared coldly. Perhaps thirty years old, which in the tribes would be the forty of Ankurum, yet beautiful; this I could tell without even seeing her face. She had a beautiful body also, under the black garment, or would have had, for now it was swollen with far-advanced pregnancy, and the large firm breasts were drooping with their milk. She was dressed basically as the ordinary women of the krarl—those who had run away from the warriors—in a sleeveless black shift and a black shireen. Yet her bare arms were ringed from wrist to shoulder with bracelets of copper, silver, and painted enamel, and around her throat was a collar of nothing less than gold, set with dull blue gems. Earrings holding the same stones rattled from her ears. Her hair was black as the mane of a black horse, and hung around her head and neck and down her back like a curtain. Clearly she was not of this krarl, and not of the Dark People either, for her skin was creamy, almost white, except for its slight acceptance of the sun.

  “I am Tathra,” she said to me, “Ettook’s wife. Ettook’s only wife,” she added, asserting her rights to my respect and fear.

  I said nothing, and after a moment she said, “You have been stupid. It is not good to anger Seel. I spoke to Ettook for your life. He listened.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “You carry,” she said without expression. “A City birth, but it can be weaned to our ways—one more spear for Ettook’s might. Or else, one more to bear sons for him. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes,” I said. She had spoken slowly, so I should be able to follow. “And for me?”

  “You I will have,” she said.

  “Your slave.”

  “My slave. A woman of the Cities must know many things, many ways for a wife to please her man.”

  Did I catch a flicker of unease in her words? Was she unsure then of the continuance of her husband’s fidelity? I could not find the words to test her.

  “Tomorrow dawn,” she told me. “You can come to me then. This day you will lie here, in the tent of Kotta, where the women come when they are sick.”

  She turned her magnificent, laden body, and went out. Things were settled. I was to be, after all, the high-born slave I had feared to be as I lay by the tower. Yet it was the best I could hope for. I had no longer any power or status. Who was I to argue with this destiny? At least I had been spared the tortures of Seel. I would be a drudge now, among the tents, and I would kneel before the warriors, and run from them when they shouted at me. I would be a woman, as women were reckoned in this place, a half-souled, witless animal, created to bear and pleasure men: an afterthought of the god.

  It was very hot. I dozed from the heat, uncomfortably and without refreshment. Later a woman came, big-framed as a man, with muscular arms, and her hair bound around with a blue scarf. Earrings clanking, she felt my body, and grunted to herself.

  “Sound,” she said to me, “for all the rough treatment of the braves. And this”—she prodded lightly at my belly—“many days
yet; a hundred, a hundred and twenty.”

  “No,” I said, “less.”

  She laughed.

  “Ah, no, you read your signs wrongly, girl. Kotta knows these things, and you are too small.” She poured me milk and I drank it slowly.

  “Is it—” I felt for the words. “Is it yet summer?”

  “Yes, summer for many days and nights now. Soon we shall be moving east again.”

  “The tower—when did the tower fall?”

  “Man’s business,” Kotta said. “I do not know, or care.”

  She went away from me, and busied herself at some chests I could hardly see in the gloom.

  It was summer, then. How long had I lain beneath the tower? Many days, it seemed, many, many days. A little pain from the milk twisted in my stomach.

  Kotta returned to me with a basin of water and a black garment over her arm. She put it by me, and with a few deft movements stripped the ruins of the velvet off my body. She sponged the dirt from me, and applied a little salve to my cuts, but they were healing fast, though it seemed to me not as fast as I had healed before. Then she slipped the black cloth garment over my head and arms, and did up the lacings at the neck. Her hands came for the lynx mask, and instinctively I shied away.

  I had not noticed her eyes till then, but now I caught the glint of them, very blue and still, and fixed on my face.

  “Ettook must have the mask,” Kotta said. “It is his right. Later he will have a right to your body, when you are delivered of the child.”

  “I must not show my face,” I whispered.

  She gave a fox’s bark of laughter.

  “Oh, so you learn the tribal ways so soon. That is good. Well, no fear that Kotta will see your face. Kotta is blind.”

  She said it in such a way as if she said it of another, using her name also as if she spoke of someone else. It did not seem to distress her, at least, only as she would commiserate another woman’s loss. And, for a blind person, she was very deft.