by Tanith Lee
Abruptly, hoof sounds opened the night. Silence fell in the camp. At once a man’s figure, a horse shape, flying mane and hair showed, caught in the flame glare. Shouted words I could not grasp, an arm upraised, and something flung over the stockade of stones to bite deep in the soil. The rider turned again, mount rearing, and was gone, swift as he had come. Ettook ran to the thrown thing, pulled it up, and shook it—a pointed stave about four feet in length, tied with strips of scarlet wool, and ringed three times with white clay.
“War spear!” Ettook cried with a fierce joy in his voice.
Shouts went up. The warriors leaped and lifted their arms. The women came closer together—except for one, the tall daughter of the seer. She rose and went among the tents for her father, and was soon back with him.
Seel raised a bony hand, and clutched the one-eyed serpent with the other.
“War dance,” he called out, and the warriors cheered.
As if it were a signal, all the women got to their feet and ran into their various tents, all but Seel’s daughter and myself. They did not see me in the dark tent shadow. Seel’s daughter carried over her arm a black robe, which now she put on her father. Over it were embroideries of many colors, barbaric depictions of sun and moon, tree and mountain, sea and fire. He shook out the wide sleeves, folded his arms, and began to intone some ritual chant which had no meaning for me. The warriors drew back in a half-circle, and into the space between the seer and Ettook and his men slunk the girl, hair like one of the flame tongues all around her. She spat on the ground left and right, and made a sprinkling action around the half-circle with her fingers. Seel’s chant came to an end, and his daughter ran at once to Ettook, and Ettook clasped her to him. That she was the symbolic intermediary between man and the power of magic was clear, that she would now give herself to the chief was also clear. Perhaps sexual arousement was integral in their war frenzy. The warriors’ feet began to stamp as Ettook’s large and uncouth hands traveled the snake-writhing body of Seel’s daughter.
“No, not for you,” a voice said, Kotta’s voice, at my shoulder.
I got up. I had no real wish to see their blood-lusts rise in the fire-lurid dark. We went among the shadows to the tent, and slipped inside.
“Had they found you, girl,” she said to me, “it would be a beating or worse, perhaps. Even Seel’s daughter must hide her eyes in her father’s tent when they’ve done with her.”
“When will they fight?” I asked.
“Tomorrow. Daybreak. It is man’s work.”
I laughed. “I too have fought and killed, Kotta. It is the work of fools, not men.”
And then I sat very still, for a great truth had come to me out of my own mouth, as if another spoke it. I had indeed killed, not only with sword blade but with thought, also. I, in my hubris, slew and wounded, and because of it my Power had left me. It was quite obvious to me in that moment.
I bowed my head and whispered, “What have I done?”
Kotta said nothing. She took up my sewing and began to unpick it.
After a while I said, “I am blind also, Kotta of the tribe.” I did not care what I told her, whether she believed or not. A slow procession of words came from my mouth, in which Darak and Vazkor, Asren and Asutoo, Mazlek and Maggur, the Sirkunix and the War March were inextricably mixed. She could not have understood, but she recognized the need in me to speak. When I was still, she, too, was still. We sat quiet for an hour or more in the dark tent, while outside their feet thudded among the red flicker, and they invoked their gods and the savagery within themselves.
After that time, I lay back on the rugs to sleep, and it was then she spoke to me, as if our conversation had had no break.
“Now I will tell you something. Kotta was born blind to the krarl—in the last years of Ettook’s father, it was. A blind one is no use, as a cripple boy is no use, for he cannot ride to war. In a way, a blind woman is worse, for she may bear blind children, so I might not go to a man—had any wanted Kotta, which none did. But I was let live, for I learned my chores quickly, and could do most things as well, or better, than the womenfolk with whole eyes. And I learned to tend the sick, and help the women bear, so I am useful among the tents. Now tell me, one of Eshkir, why do you say Kotta is blind?”
I lay in the dark, and I answered as if she had prompted me: “Kotta is not blind.”
“Yes,” she said. “But Kotta does not look out through two sockets in her head, which men call seeing. Kotta looks inward, and there everything is. I did not know that I was blind until I was in my tenth year. When they told me, I did not understand, for I could see, and I thought they saw too, in the same fashion, looking in, not out.” She had unpicked my work on the cloth, and began again. “What color is this cloth?” she asked me.
“Blue.”
“Now what is blue? I have never seen blue. But I have seen colors you also have never seen, nor any who look outward. I turn to the sky and I see birds, but they are not as you see them, and I see men, but not as men see men.”
“In your tent,” I said softly, “when I took off the mask—what did you see of me, Kotta?”
“Something I have not seen before. Put your hand into cool water when the day is hot. That is what I saw.”
“Kotta,” I said sharply, “I am ugly beyond ugliness; did you not see that?”
“To yourself, and to others perhaps,” she said, “but to Kotta, beauty. Beauty I have not seen before. Beauty which is a fire and yet does not burn.”
“Your inner eye has misled you,” I said to her.
There was silence from beyond the tents. I got up from the rugs, and went to sleep in the open, curled among the rocks, cushioning my sore breasts with my arms. It seemed their man-magic had spread into her mind and mine, despite an averted gaze. Her words tormented me and I ran from her.
What bitterness she should see so well, and yet so falsely. And tomorrow they would fight.
4
I woke late, stiff and chilled in spite of the warming sun, and with a sense of wrongness—whether in the world or in myself I did not know.
I came out into the camp. There was no fire burning, though ashes in plenty strewn from last night’s ritual. A wandering goat stared at me superciliously. Silence hovered. It was a strange thing; apart from the goat and myself there seemed no one else here, and yet I felt there was. I picked a way over the broken ground, churned up further by stamping feet. Torn-off tassels lay about, and there was some blood— not human, but from a war sacrifice they had made, as if their own and others’ deaths were not enough. I reached the nearest tent, lifted the flap, and looked inside. The tent was empty. I crossed the track the women had already created, walking back and forth to the little waterfall on leather-bound hard feet, carrying pitchers. Three more tents, and into each one I thrust my search, and found nothing. I reached the fall where a spring burst in constant crystal urination from the lichen-stained rock, pouring into its own narrow well in the ground. No jars here now, and no sign that they had come today. My skin began to tingle. I turned to look over my shoulder many times. Was this some part of their battle I had missed—an invasion and taking? Yet, if they had been taken, why had I heard no sound of it? And there were no signs of violence.
Something nudged me in the side.
I cried out, flung sideways, rolled and scrambled upward, my hands reaching to grasp knives I no longer possessed.
My attacker—the goat—regarded me with mild amazement, and shook its head. I had begun to curse it when a sudden sharp spike of pain split my body. I bent over gasping, and, as if this were penance enough, was released from the vise as suddenly as I had been seized. Like the goat, I shook my head as if to shake the last vestige of the pain from me, and in that moment a woman shrieked, her cry, in the silence, seeming to fill the whole camp.
It was no ghost scream, too real, too large to be imagined.
I ran at once toward it, though I cannot judge why. It had occurred to me I was not courageous, had never been brave, only arrogant or unthinking.
Kotta’s tent. It was quiet now. The dry throat rattle of some bird started up in a thicket. I pulled open the flap and looked in. It was very dark, but I could see the blind woman crouched by an iron pot set on the little brazier.
“Kotta.”
She looked up.
“The Eshkir,” she said. “So they left you too. Good. You can help me.”
“But where have they gone?”
“The men to fight,” she said, “the women to hide. It’s always the way, in case the camp is taken.”
“Why not you also, Kotta?”
“I have work to do, and so has she. We shall be too busy to run off into the rocks.”
I looked where she pointed, and saw Tathra lying on the rugs. The brazier picked out beads of sweat on her uncovered face like little red glass jewels. She twisted and murmured to herself, and then abruptly tautened, and began a series of awful grunts, louder and louder, until at last she reached the summit of her agony, and shrieked once more as I had heard her do from the fall.
My impulse was to go to her, quiet her. I recalled Illka, the girl who died in the ravine, and was still. Besides, what could I do now? Kotta drew the iron from the brazier, poured out thick liquid into a clay bowl, and took it to Tathra. She raised her head on one big arm and made her drink.
“A while yet,” Kotta said. “This will ease you.”
Tathra’s head fell back. Her large frightened eyes closed themselves.
“Useless,” she moaned. “Ettook will die in the fight, and they will kill me.”
After this, she seemed to doze, only murmuring from time to time incoherently.
Kotta laid out her things, primitive shapes of metal which bore a little resemblance to physicians’ instruments in the Cities. She set water to boil, and when it boiled away, sent me for more water at the fall.
The day dragged by and thickened into a brassy late afternoon light. I went outside, and looked around from the vacated camp. Nothing seemed stirring. I had asked Kotta where their place of battle was, but she did not know, or care. And it would be useless to look for them yet. If they won their fight it would be the other’s camp they would go to, for the women and the beer.
The black figure of a bird on long ragged wings wheeled over the sky, and away.
I rubbed my back, which was full of a thin relentless ache, and went in again to endure the rest of the vigil.
* * *
A hot summer moon rested lazily over the camp when Tathra’s child finally decided it would be free of her.
It seemed foolish for me to hate the child; it obeyed an instinct as old as woman herself, had no choice, and no doubt suffered also. Yet I hated it for the pain and terror it caused her, and through her and her shrieks and prayers to unknown gods, caused me.
Kotta had known it would be bad for her, though she had said nothing. Now she did what she could, but it was little enough at this time, for the machinery of birth was locked in Tathra, and could not be oiled or operated from outside. I gave her my hands, one after the other, and she tore them with her teeth and nails like a frenzied animal in a trap. All the black night hours she screamed in the tent, and the darkness wore itself down against us like a sharp knife blunting its edge on our nerves.
Toward dawn she lost consciousness and lay still. Her face was gray and shriveled, her body soaked in sweat. The waters had broken an hour before, and the tent smelled strong of blood. Kotta massaged her limbs, felt at her belly, under which the contractions rippled like sea-waves.
“Bad,” she said. “The child is wrongly placed. I feared as much.”
I helped her turn Tathra on her side, and kneeled so that her back could rest against me. Kotta took her copper instruments to the water and dipped them.
“I will do it now,” she said, “while she feels nothing. You are a strong one. If she wakes, you must hold her still.”
I put my arms around Tathra’s arms, and grasped her. Kotta came, and I looked away from what she did, abruptly squeamish and faint, despite the death I had seen and been the cause of. After a moment, I felt Tathra’s body quicken. She came awake in one frightful lunging effort.
“Hold her,” Kotta cried out, and it was very hard. My bones seemed snapped by her frantic twisting—and then she jerked twice, and she screamed as she had not screamed before, a mindless, unpremeditated scream, which was all one surprised, unbelieving accusation. Between the copper crab-pincers of Kotta’s birth tongs, lay the body of a child, which had come from the womb feet first in its hurry to be out. So tiny, this thing which had caused such great distress.
“Ettook has a son,” Kotta said.
“Is it over?” Tathra sobbed, her eyes fast shut. “Is it finished?”
“All over, all finished,” Kotta said. She cut the cord with her knife.
I let Tathra onto her back, and presently Kotta pressed gently on her body and the afterbirth left her.
Then into that new soft silence rang another noise, a commotion that came from the forgotten world beyond the tent.
“They are back,” Tathra said dreamily.
“Back or not, you will rest now. Ettook can wait to see his child.”
“His son,” Tathra said. She had not even opened her eyes to look at it, yet she knew herself safe now, held fast by that symbol of her worth. A bearer of warriors.
* * *
I slipped out of the tent to watch them come up between the rocks, and I felt a heady contempt. They were drunk and bloody, tattered like hawks from a sky fight, tipping back their red-plaited heads to drink from leather beerskins. After them came a string of valley horses loaded with stolen gear: weapons, food, jewelry, and a train of out-tribe women, whimpering from the rough treatment they had already suffered and premonitions of further rough treatment to come. They were redheads, too, a krarl half kin to this one, yet still fair game.
They jumped over their own stockade, knocking stones out of it, and bawling with laughter. Soon the krarl women would come forth from their hiding place to tremble, admire, and feast the heroes. The camp, from being dry and empty, was now one fluid red riot of motion under the sun-broken sky.
Kotta came out beside me.
“I must go and see to their wounds,” she said.
“Their wounds?” The scorn was very bitter in my mouth.
“Either I go to them or they will come for me. Take care of her in my tent.”
“You had better tell Ettook he has a son. He will need telling; it has cost him nothing that he should otherwise know it.”
“Not even that perhaps,” Kotta said. “The child is small and weak. I doubt it will live through the day.”
I went back into the tent and kneeled by Tathra. She was sleeping, drained but peaceful, yet there was a dead look to her; part of her beauty was wrecked on the night, and the rebuilding might never come now. The boy lay at her side, in the wicker basket they used for their newborn. I looked at him for a long while, but then I went away and sat at the back of the tent. My belly and spine were all one continuous throb of hurt, and I had known for some time now that my womb was near to emptying itself. I did not feel afraid, perhaps because I was too tired. Besides, Tathra seemed to have borne for both of us, her trouble was so terrible. I could not believe whatever was in store for me could be as bad.
Outside the noise increased, thudding angrily. I heard women’s voices and the sizzle of meats on spits. It was full daylight.
After a while a sharp knife came and pierced me, and red liquid ran free. I curled over and thrust against the thing inside me, my torn hands tight around the pole of the tent. If you will to be free of me, then go, I thought at it. There seemed a response, very swift and hard. This thing is too big for me and will never get out, I
thought, but I thrust again at it, and my muscles cracked, complaining, and I felt it move. There was a brief interval then, but I felt the shifting pulse, and knew, and finally I pushed down at it with every ounce of my strength and rejection. I seemed to thrust a great stone forth from a cliff, saw it hang, ovoid and bloody, in my brain’s eye. Then a new pain answered, and I cried out, shocked at it, a long cry that ended differently in triumph, for I knew I had at length succeeded, and was rid of my haunting forever.
Away from me, but still chained, rolled the image of my hatred, the curse Vazkor had put on me. I reached for Kotta’s knife, and severed that final bondage, knotting it close to the child, then crouching and dispelling the afterbirth from me.
It was with as little trouble as this that my child was born.
* * *
My child, the son of Vazkor.
After I had sponged myself clean, I washed it in the brazier light, looking at it, yet not seeing. It was very small, as Tathra’s son had been, yet perfectly formed, compactly healthy, despite the time I had given it in Belhannor, and the other times circumstances had tried it with since then. It had a pale skin, pearly in the half-dark tent, unfocused black eyes, a wisp of black hair, the legacy of its sire. (I cannot say father; he mated us as another man would mate horses.) I felt no stirring of emotion, not even triumph or dislike now. I removed Tathra’s dead baby from its wicker tomb, and replaced it with my own. I did not even stop to think. The act seemed logical, precise, and very neat.
It waved its small hands at me, and rubbed its restless head on the soft lining of the basket.
When she was stronger, Tathra would wake and give it milk, and it would grow to its manhood among the tents of Ettook, dark-haired, dark-eyed, pale-skinned for its out-bride mother, possessing—what gifts? I could only guess at that. What a viper I might have left them—what a serpent to bite them long after I was gone. Would Kotta guess? Perhaps she who seemed to see might see this difference too—but who would believe her? Tathra would not dare.