The Birthgrave (21 page)

I must leave this place.
The thought came sudden and ice-cold. At once I saw the room as though it had been frozen, paler, almost transparent. I forgot the dictates of etiquette. I was about to get up and say— I was not certain, perhaps I would simply run down among the tables to the door. But the Warden's jeweled hand went up, a lordly flick, a horn sounded, and he rose. Comparative silence fell. He was about to toast the Victors. Impaled by the moment, I sat still and did not move. A sea of faces, nodding a little, touched gold by light, smiling, laughing, harmonious. The Warden lifting his silver cup again and again as the Speaker cried out the Victors' names and towns, and the horn echoed him, and the shouts and cheers. And then the trained voice with its slight overemphasis, “Victor of the Sagare: Darros of Sigko.”

The great roar and clapping, the Warden bending smiling toward Darak. And then that fleshy hand, waving the sound gently down.

Still standing, the Warden lowered his cup to the table.

“Darros of Sigko,” he repeated, his rich voice carrying. “We know him well, do we not? The courageous merchant who brought his caravan safe to Ankurum, a feat unparalleled—and then rode to win the empress of our races, the Sagare.” Cheers beat up like birds, and gently again he waved them down. Smiling still, he leaned out toward the tables now. “And one more thing our Darros had done. He has deceived us all.” The silence grew closer. The Warden laughed a little. “The Victor of our Sagare is, in fact, nothing more than a thief, a murderer, and a bandit—Darak, the gold-fisher, the scum of the northern hills.” He turned to Darak and nodded. “Your little game is over,
charioteer.”

The guards started forward from the walls behind us, ten men straight toward Darak. There was uproar below now, and some women were screaming. We had brought no weapons into the hall with us; it was not etiquette to do so. I could not seem to move. I saw Darak standing, leaning back against the table, grinning at the ten who had come to take him. I am not sure how I saw, for Gillan and the Warden were between us. I saw Darak's hand reach back onto the table and pick up one of those toy golden knives they had given us—useless, it would bend, not bite—yet one of the guard saw that movement. The iron guard-sword licked out and forward. I heard Darak gasp. His hands fell to his sides. He looked at the man, almost lazily, his mouth still curved, not knowing quite yet that he was dead. Two guards caught him between them as he fell, hoisted him, and began to carry him out. They had been very quick, no blood even spilled on this golden table. Two of them had my arms, had had them, I realized now, since the Warden first spoke his accusation. They were pulling me up and away with them. I think they had put something in my cup, in Darak's too; my legs were like heavy iron as they dragged me. And Darak's men had been so quickly subdued in the body of the hall. Yet they had not kept it so tidy there. Ellak and another man lay dead. One guard was dying, several bloody. Women's white faces stared at us as we passed, like a funeral procession, following Darak's corpse.

His head hung back, the face very still, his mouth firmly closed, solemn now in death. His scarlet cloak trailed behind him.

Scarlet for the vine. Little doll-goddess, you took your offering after all, then—death for death, little goddess of the scarlet vine.

10

“Karrakaz!” I screamed down the black places of the mountain. “Karrakaz, et So! Et So—Sestorra!”

A hand clamped my mouth. I was shaken from one dark to another. Maggur's eyes, red-shot in the gloom.

“Ssh, Imma, who do you call out to?”

Strange, he did not know the old tongue, yet he seemed to know what I had said. I lay quiet on the rank filthy straw of the prison room.

“What time is it, Maggur? How long now?”

He shook his head. “Sun looks low from the grating. Near sunset.”

There were other men in the stone chamber—all they had caught from the hostelry. Those that had been brought here before the feast of Victors, after their brothel brawl, we neither saw nor had any word of.

We had been here two days now, and to begin with they had laughed and jibed at the guard outside, throwing out bones at them from the door hole. They had told stories: “Yes, Slak's lot got away, took a few pieces of these pigs' hide with 'em, too.” Now their spirit was burned out in the dank black hole, stinking with their own excrement and fear. We were all to be hanged—publicly. And we were to go to it three a day. You were not sure when they would come for you, or who they would pick. The first time the three had gone with a salute and a swagger. Men climbed up to the grating high in the wall and saw them dangle in the square. The second time it was less bold, that going out. That second day, too, there had been a fourth man strung up. They had hung Darak's dead body with the rest.

How the crowds had roared at it, in the square, loud as they had roared in the Sirkunix. Louder. Life loves to look on death.

A man at the window—I cannot remember who—spat out of the grating.

“On you, you sty of a stinking town.”

Yet I had not been dreaming of Darak, but of the Mountain, and I had run toward the altar crying, “Here am I! Here am I! The Accursed One!”

I sat up. My hair was tangled with the straw, and the red beads still hung in it.

“How long, Maggur?” I whispered. “Will they leave me until last, Maggur, because I took the classic shot?”

But it would come. The reins around my throat, the running horses. I would hear the crowd yell as they broke my neck.

Maggur put his great arm around me, and I leaned on him in the darkness.

* * *

The next day, the footsteps came at noon.

Door rasping, spill of ocher torchlight from the night-dark passages outside. Six guards, with drawn swords, and two jailers.

“Out. You, you, and the black one.”

Two of the men rose—one of them was Gleer. Maggur got up more slowly, his hand lingering on my arm. Gleer began to whistle, a brothel song; the other man made a little lunge at the guard that brought all their swords up in a knot, and laughed at them.

“Come on, you, the black one. You won't be losing your girlfriend yet awhile, she's coming too.”

I took Maggur's hand and let him draw me up. The four of us walked toward the door. I do not think I was afraid. There must be substance to breed fear, and I was hollow. The door clanged shut behind, and we were herded through the pitch-black runnels of that foul warren, guided by the jailers' murky brands. After a time there were stairs, and at the top a corridor stretching to left and right. Two of the guard suddenly swung me aside from the rest, pulling me right while Maggur and the others were marched left. Maggur halted at once, ignoring the prodding swords, the cuffs and curses. He was a giant of a man. Here, in this narrow place, he could throw two or three of them off his back like a wild dog, shake them and throw them, until they had hacked him to pieces. I shook my head at him. I knew what he thought, what I thought too, that I was to pleasure some of the guards before they took me out. It was nothing. Only one more thing to accomplish before death. He seemed to sense my lack of concern. He let them turn him around, and was led away, into the darkness behind the worm-tail of receding torchlight.

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.”