The Birthgrave (48 page)

“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.

Slowly, I drew the silver mask from my face, looking at her eyes. They did not flinch at all. I put the mask in her large strong hands, and drew on instead the strange familiarity of the shireen.

* * *

The dawn came, and I went to Ettook's painted tent, walking at first but soon creeping, with head bowed and shoulders slumped, as I saw the other women did who were of no importance in the krarl. Tathra would not creep, but then she was the wife of Ettook and, like his horse, had acquired some value from his interest.

I had thought, despite the early hour, Ettook would not be there with her, for I had come to imagine she wished to have me there on her own, to learn those City ways she had hoped I knew. But he was still there, on his back among the rugs, naked and snoring. And he did not snore as other men—rhythmically—but in fits and starts after irregular intervals—great snarling, snorting explosions, that had a sound of wild pigs at war.

Tathra sat beside him, but when I entered she pushed the rugs away and rose. She wore no garment and no mask; as a slave, apparently, my eyes on her face counted for nothing. Despite her pregnancy, she was, as I had already been aware, incredibly lovely. There was a lushness to her, a ripeness, yet with no sense of excess, as sometimes there is in women who carry this kind of beauty. And she had delicacy, too, narrow slender hands and feet, catlike chin and eyes and nose, and a mouth that might have been painted it was such a perfect shape, and colored like a pale red flower.

She nodded at Ettook, and put two fingers on this witch's mouth, in the warning I must be quiet. In sign language she pointed out perfumes and other cosmetics in a carved chest. Silently I washed her and applied her scents, and finally brushed her hair as she kneeled before a mirror of polished bronze. I did not feel in any way demeaned by this. She was too beautiful. I became aware of something in me which gave a kind of reverence to beauty—that special beauty I had seen in Asren, in the palace girl he had loved, and which now I found so unexpectedly among the tents of barbarians. I, after all, bore the curse of ugliness; even my body, which Darak had found lovely enough, was disfigured now.

I plaited strands of her hair and fastened on their ends little bells of silver. From a jar she took a blue cream and smeared it on her eyelids, and from another jar a red cream which she rubbed over her lips. I did not like her to do this. It offended me in some curious way, for it was neither necessary nor an improvement.

She got back among the rugs with him then, and a pang of anger clenched in my belly—not for myself, but for her, so special in her looks, to court the favor of the disgusting, snorting creature on its back at her side.

With gestures she sent me off for his food, and I made my way among the goats to the morning fire. There were no men about that I could see, and the women at the pit called out shrilly at me. When I went nearer one picked up a piece of wood and threw it at me. It glanced off my shin, and they laughed raucously.

I rummaged in my mind for words.

“Tathra,” I said, “I am sent by Ettook's wife—for the food for the chief.”

* * *

They muttered and drew together, and presently one of them, rather tall and full-breasted, with a vivid red-blonde tide of hair, came up to me and slapped me across the head. There was more laughter.

“You want food,” she said, “you ask me.”

“I ask you, then.”

“I ask—I
ask
—listen to the City one, the Eshkir.” She mimicked me, and was applauded. “I am Seel's daughter,” she said. “You have angered Seel. Those who anger the seer do not feed among the tents.”

“Not for me—but for the chief, Ettook.”

She hit me again, casually, and before I had reckoned what I did, I had given her blow for blow, and she was on her back among bits of charcoal from the fire.

The women shrieked and screamed at me, and Seel's daughter got up slowly, and then would have come running at me, but another voice cut across the clamor and they were still. Kotta stood at her tent door, her blind eyes which seemed to see fixing on each of us in turn, unerringly.

“What trouble are you causing, daughter of the seer? She wants only to serve the chief. She is Tathra's now, so you should mind your manners with her.”

Seel's daughter lifted the veil of her shireen a little and spat on the ground, then stamped on the spittle with obvious symbolism.

“Tathra,” she snapped, “out-tribe, spear-bride whore.” She stood away from the fire, and pointed to a row of cooking pots sitting on the flames. “Take, then, white-hair.” I went by her, and she hissed at me: “You will remember later which one you struck.”

Reluctantly a woman filled platters for me, one with a kind of thin porridge smelling strongly of goat's milk, one full of ripe black-red berries, a third with dark brown bread. There was also a jug of frothy beer which she ran off to fetch. The items were placed on a tray of stiffened woven matting and left on the ground for me to pick up. As I crouched to get it, a foot struck me in the side and I rolled over.

I did not know which of them had done it, but Kotta called out from her tent door, “No more of that. She has a child in her. Ettook won't thank you if you lose him a warrior with your bitch ways.”

I did not know how she realized what they had done. There had been little sound. I picked up the tray and hurried away from them, back to the painted tent.

Going in, I found Ettook was awake, sitting up and glaring at me.

“What were you at, slut?” he roared. “Did you have to do the berrying and brewing yourself before you could bring it?”

“The women—” I said.

He roared me into silence, and snatched the tray so that everything fluid on it slopped over the sides of its container. He began to thrust food into his mouth, while Tathra filled his silver-bound cup with beer. Abruptly he snatched at her nearest breast in much the same way as he had snatched the tray. He laughed. Tathra nodded at me.

“Go now. I will have you brought when I need you.”

I turned and went out, and stood in the harsh sunlight, struggling with disgust.

The women were still at the fire, except for Seel's daughter—gone to feed her father probably. Kotta also had gone in. I did not know what I was expected to do now.

I crept across the camp, and found a narrow stream running through the pines, a little beyond the tents. I wondered if I should follow this stream which would perhaps find a river course between the slopes of the dark mountains beyond the trees, a course which would guide me, not toward Eshkorek, but ultimately south, toward the unknown sea. Nothing, after all, bound me here.

I took half a step, and an unseen wall seemed to block my path. I do not know what it was, prescience, perhaps, perhaps only a desire for whatever security I could find, however precarious. I shook my head, as if to the stream and the road it might offer, and turned back into the krarl.

* * *