The Birthgrave (49 page)

I found out soon enough what my duties were.

I had sat down in the dust near Kotta's tent, puzzling a little over the blocked path at the stream, when the women called out their men and children to eat around the fire-pit. Not for them that first meal abed, which was Ettook's right, and Seel's too, presumably. I was roused to action by one of the krarl warriors, who dragged me to my feet, and cuffed me on the ear for sitting idle, and soon a thin woman, more anxious than unfriendly, recruited me to serve the men and boys their food, with all the other women. This took a while, and not once did the females of the camp eat, sit, or even stand still in the male presence. It was tradition with them, but they were more enslaved than the Dark People. Even I was less of a slave, for rebellion had stirred in me at last, and though I could do nothing about my lot, I did not accept it. The krarl women, even their little girls, did so wholeheartedly and without question; even Seel's daughter, who ministered with the rest. When the men were done, they got to their feet, wiping their mouths, not glancing at their servitors, and went about their men's business: preparations for a hunt (for these ate meat, when they could get it), sharpening of knives, grooming of horses, and general important talk and discussion, not to be let slip into our ears. The boys slouched after in imitation. Their male glory began early, it seemed.

The women ate now, the scraps and bits of what was left, and, while the little girls played noisily at a distance, they, in their turn, talked women's chatter. It was all that was allowed them, that inane mode of conversation which consisted of: their possessions, their expected possessions, their children and babies (possibly this could be classed under the previous heading), planning of food, planning of chores, their man's prowess, either in bed or at hunting or at war, and jealousy for any woman either not present or out of earshot.

It was Tathra they maligned most, as she qualified on both points. Listening at the fringe of their circle about the fire, I gathered Ettook had won her from an enemy tribe in a fight a year ago. She was not yet accepted—the Out-Tribe Bitch they called her. They did not like it that Ettook's favor had gone to her instead of to one of them; neither did they like her pregnancy, which could establish her further with him, particularly if she bore a son.

The women's meal, however, was not long. Soon they were up, and I with them, to scrape out bowls and cups, and rinse them in the very stream I had come to before. In the course of this work, I went by that earlier boundary without thinking, and when I realized this, I did not at first understand, though I suppose the moment when I could have gone was finished, like all those moments when I might have escaped events in the past, and was prevented by some circumstance or emotion.

After this cleansing came a washing of garments and rugs, a rinsing and pounding at smelly items over the rocks. My back was aching when we were done. It was midday, and I half expected some rest, but they pegged out the clothes to dry on little cages of wood constructed for the purpose, and then ran back to the main camp to begin chores of darning, weaving, and sundry other wearisome tasks. The girl children had shown some interest in me, mainly in poking me and calling me names—in imitation of their mothers, as the boys' indifference had been imitation of the warriors. Now they were sent off to play, and flew off into the pines, relishing this brief time of freedom.

Seel's daughter had been at the washing and pegging, and I had expected every minute that she would hit me or worse, but she did nothing. Then, as we were walking to the tents, she came up beside me and half-whispered: “I have told my father, the seer, of how you struck me. He is angrier than before. There was a great store of gold in the tower, and your impudence made the warriors forget. Now it is too late to return, for we are already on Snake's Road, and must go East. He will put a withering on you, Eshkir slut. Your bones and sinews will warp, and you will go crippled all your days.”

Despite myself, I turned sick when she said this. I had no respect for Seel's powers, yet ill-wishing can do damage if hate is strong enough. But the worst thing one can do is to help the attacker by believing it.

“Seel-the-Goat's spells will do no harm to me,” I said. “I have magic of my own—magic I have not loosed on him before because I was compassionate. Let him beware, not I.”

“You,” she snarled, “you cannot even speak our tongue.”

“There are other tongues than the mouth uses. Your father, if he is anything of what you say—which I doubt—will know it.”

She was silent, chewing reluctantly on what I had said. After a moment she gave me a push and hurried off.

I had to stop still then, and say to myself in my brain,
He is nothing and cannot harm you. Death cannot harm you, and the old man is less than Death.

But then the words came suddenly into my mind as I had seen them scratched on the wall of that tunnel through the Ring:

Death, the old dark man, is coming to carry you off . . .

The curse of humanity against my own Lost Race.

Instinctively my hands went to my breast for the jade I had torn from Shullatt's neck, and did not find it. As I stood there, a girl's voice spoke.

“The Spear-Bride wants you.”

It was the best name they could find for Tathra among the tents.

I think I was glad to go to her, to leave my forlorn self outside. Ettook was no longer there. He had gone to join the hunt. She had me dress her and brush out her hair once again. She said little to me, and I guessed she was uncertain as to how she should approach me. What did she think I knew? Perhaps more than that quest for knowledge to keep her safe in Ettook's liking, she needed another presence—if not friendly, then at least not actively hostile. We had a kind of kinship, she and I, not only in pregnancy, but because both of us were the captives and the unaccepted of the krarl.

3

Snake's Road they called their way eastward, to the marshes and the fertile forest-land beyond; who made the track they did not seem to know. It was a passage down from higher mountain valleys to the rock plains and across, and it twisted and turned to find room for itself among crags and subsidences like the one-eyed serpent some of them worshiped, the symbol of which was hung from Seel's stinking neck. Ettook's people, along with many other tribal communities, sheltered in the higher places during the winter, began to make eastward in the late spring and early summer, and came to feed off the bountiful pastures of the eastlands when the year was at its full. Along the way there would be fights and battles, and skirmishes, too, at the final camping ground. Territory, however impermanent, was hard won.

Two days after I had come among them, the tents were dismantled, pack horses laden, and we set off. There were vast stores of food dried by the women in those moments when they were not tending their men. Meat from the hunt-kill hung from horseback to dry in the sun, dripped blood, and attracted colonies of flies. The warriors rode some way ahead, disdaining the slow pace of the women, who walked or shared a few mules between them. Children ran about, occasionally remembering to drive the goats as they were supposed to do. The goats, meanwhile, milled around the track,
maa-
ing discontentedly, and watchdogs barked, and ran to lick up blood and gorged flies spilled from the strung carcasses.

Tathra rode a black mule, partly because of her status, partly because of her pregnancy. The mule was hers, and therefore no other had a right to it, and they grumbled at that. Kotta also rode, a privilege of her blindness, yet she seemed to see as well as any of us from the way she looked at things—deer bucks fighting on a distant level of the plain, birds wheeling overhead. When you talked to her, she would look intently in your face. It occurred to me that perhaps she retained a little of her sight, however dim, and traded on it, though this did not seem to be her character. And besides, she had witnessed me unmasked and had shown no reaction, and once I saw her bend near the fire with her eyes still raised to the woman she listened to, and there was no narrowing of the pupils. She was indeed sightless. I reasoned then that perhaps her other senses had sharpened to compensate the loss, and this was what had made her appear so aware of all things.

A camp was made at the end of each day's journeying, a little aside from the track. Seel would bless our setting out on it each morning, one hand on the serpent amulet.

Around us, the wild jumbled land ran away from the mountains. There were water pools in plenty, and glades of dark thin trees, but otherwise the summer heat pressed on us and drank us dry. I lived on goat's milk, and did not like it much. I brushed Tathra's hair in the first cool of dusk, before Ettook came in to her from the big evening meal around the fire, drunk, greasy, and belching.

I slept my nights in the open, which did not matter greatly in such mild weather, and yet it was a symbol of my little worth. None of the warriors troubled me; it was a rule with them not to lie with a woman once she showed her womb filled, though I had not noticed Ettook daunted by this ruling where Tathra was concerned.

My breasts grew larger and uncomfortable with milk, and I began to have pains in my back, and at the base of my spine.

“What is the matter?” Kotta said to me. Perhaps I had made an audible protest at the pain, but I did not think so. I told her my trouble, and she asked Ettook for a mule. It must have been the old argument—one more male for the tribe—for the mule was mine, and I rode after Tathra from then on.

Seel did not come near me, and if he had cast his spell, I knew nothing of it.

* * *

It was a monotonous traveling, but dullness can be preferable to certain other things.

On the ninth day out on the road, near sunset, there was some agitation among the warriors up ahead. We were passing through a narrow gully, where the track took up the path of a dried-out stream bed. Rocks went up on either hand, trees leaning over us from roots clawed into the rock side, and swaying darkly on the tops like plumes on a metal helm. Above, among those trees, the warriors had seen some movement, it appeared, not animal in origin.

Once this news trickled back to the van of women and goats, weak panic broke out among both. An enemy tribe, planning to attack us from the gully roof? Yet there was no attack then. We reached higher ground, and night came.

They made camp in the shelter of other rocks, and piled rocks around the three open sides as an improvised stockade, and lit brushwood fires on the inside of this. In the red light, warriors stood sentry, and there was a look on their faces of taut pleasure. It was good to fight. A sign of virility in the tribes of the valleys to have taken many women, fathered many sons, but best of all, to have slain many men. The women huddled near the main fire, chattering nervously as if purposely overacting fear in order to make their men's bravery the more obvious. I sat at my post, a little way from Ettook's tent, sewing without interest or accuracy at a bit of cloth. The cloth, in other hands, might have become a carrying bag of sorts, but it was, for me, only an excuse for labor. They did not like women in the krarl to be idle; this way I seemed employed, yet truly was not. Grouped at the wall fires, Ettook and his elder warriors were drinking and laughing.

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.”