The Birthgrave (51 page)

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.

I wrapped Tathra's dead baby in one of the filthy rugs, picked up my bundle and went to the tent flap. The feast was merry some way from this place, fire smoke, noise, movement, singing.

I slipped between the rocks, reached the unmanned stockade, and got over it.

I felt neither weakness nor remorse of any kind. My decision had been too quick, too abrupt, and yet I think I had known it long before, without realizing. There was no surprise in me at what I had done, what I did.

It was a steep treacherous way down from the krarl. After about half an hour's scrambling, I became aware of weariness and physical pain. Out of sight and sound of the camp, I crawled into a deep crevasse, hung over by yellow, sun-dried bushes, and slept.

Pitch-black night hung in the entrance when I woke.

I eased a way out, and stiffly took up my walk again, still clutching my morbid bundle. At last there was a waterway, very narrow and brown, but here the ground was softer underfoot. I made a mud grave for the thing I carried, then worked downstream, my feet in the cool water.

I came to trees under a high moon. The light was transparent indigo, and the trunks stood up like dim dark pillars irregularly carved, and supporting moonlight on their latticed arms. Mosses, stones, leaf-growths struggling beneath my feet. A warm, a silent night.

I had not considered, even, that they might come after me. They were too busy with their victory, and besides, I was of little worth. I lay to sleep again in the open, not thinking of men, or of animals hunting. Not thinking of anything at all.

And waking, with the thin gold of morning pouring through rents in the sky, it occurred to me not only that I was free, but also that for the first time since I had come from the Mountain, I had acted alone. No external motivation, no influence of another, but an action sprung from, executed by my own brain.

The morning chill, the unrelieved pressure of milk in my breasts, the ache between my thighs, seemed a small price to pay for it.

5

A little mound of leaning stones.

So familiar to me, yet I could not seem to remember why, as I lay under the trees looking toward them. Some way off, and beyond them, the sound of the stream I had followed the night before. Yes, that surely was the answer: the stones marked water. My body and my mouth were thirsty for water. I rose, every joint cracking, and walked between the trees to the stones, and looked down. It might have been a different stream, fast flowing here, gold-lit and glassy. I had not noticed in the tired dark. I stripped the black shift, and stood knee-high in the current, laving my skin with the coolness, drinking from my cupped hands until the mouth veil of the shireen lay wet and heavy at my throat, and my hair plastered in soaking white strings on my flesh. I ran my hand over my belly, the skin still flaccid, the deflated bag of birth, nevertheless tautening itself quickly. Soon muscle and flesh would be firm and whole. I, with my unique gift of self-healing, rejoiced, splashing in the stream.

I became aware of the other presence slowly. Looking up at last, I met a pair of icy yellow eyes, and was confused for a moment in my joy, because I had not before thought yellow a shade capable of such coldness. Around the eyes a gray streak-furred animal face, teeth points showing delicately above the jaw, ears flattened and tufted—a wild cat of the rock valleys, and probably on a quest for food.

We stared at each other, this well-equipped, well-armored hungry thing, and I, naked in the water, without a knife to defend myself, and with no Power left to stun or kill. At another time I would have thought the cat very beautiful. It began gracefully to pick a way down the bank toward me, the pines behind it thrusting at the sky, throwing shadows now, striped as its coat. At the last moment it looked away, dipped its head, and drank from the stream, perhaps two feet from where I stood. I could smell its musky odor. Its tongue made crisp pink motions, reminding me of Uasti's cat. After a while it lifted its water-beaded face, turned, and leaped back the way it had come, vanishing in the trees beyond the leaning stones.

Luck. It had eaten possibly after all, and had had no need of my meat. I began to shiver uncontrollably, scrambling from my bath, scrubbing my body with handfuls of dry grass until the action and the warm sun dried me.

Pulling on my shift, my hand struck the stone pile. One small pebble rattled loose and fell down into the stream where the current pulled it away. I watched that pebble go, and at once I saw an arrow in its place, and I remembered—the streams above the ravine, the river in the woods where Kel's arrow had floated, snapped in half because it had touched an evil place.
An altar of sacrifice
—
old as the ravine itself. I've heard them say some black god or other still broods here. . . .
And I had lain here, rejoiced here, and the wild cat had not touched me.

Freedom was so brief, despite my joy. There was no freedom. I carried my darkness on my back everywhere I went.

I ran from the stream, through the woods in the morning. Birds beat up from my path. When I could run no longer, I walked, swiftly, and without much thought. A steep way and many trees. I had no sense of direction. I snatched a few berries from a bush, and wept like a spoiled child when the stomach pains came to plague me.

The day passed, and night came when I was high on a rocky road, climbing from the woods to the darkening sky. I slept in a cave place, curled up small for there was little room, and I dreamed of a white marble chamber where I lay on a silk bed, a child by my side in a golden cradle. A pink baby, blue-eyed, with a trace of yellow hair.

“This is the child of Asren Javhovor,” I said, then the doors opened, but the dark man with the black-masked face strode by me with a sword uplifted, phallic and menacing. The blade swung and crashed across the crib. I saw how black hair curled closely on the back of the strong neck, for the murderer was Darak.

* * *

I did not know where I was making for, though I guessed I must long since have left that way Ettook's people named Snake's Road; no trace of a track remained. It was a dangerous land, peopled with wild beasts and the wild tribes of Ettook's kind. Yet I saw no men, neither did they see me, presumably—or I would have been dragged away by them for their fun. Animals I glimpsed were of the timid variety: long-horned slender deer, winding sinuous gray snakes, birds, and russet squirrels. Once at twilight four wolves ran through a rock cut far below, and spurred me to climb into a deeper cave for sleep. Across the vistas of the hills and woods by night, the weird barks and screeches of things echoed hollowly. I felt I had no part in this lived-in country, an intruder without rights or the ability to survive. I ate red berries which made me vomit, and realized I had been poisoned. The hem of my shift I had torn off at the knee, and the rest was tattered and frayed. I drank from glassy streams or at the brown mirrors of round pools where frogs clustered, croaking in the dusk. My milk began to dry in me.

Ten days I traveled, without comfort or much intelligence, and with no destination in mind. On the eleventh day the land began to alter. It leveled and flattened, rocks faded back into the soil. From a dark crisp world, angular with stones and pines, it became a gray-green world, fluid and sloping.

The twelfth day. No longer the sharp, bittersweet scents of the highland, but smoke-mists clinging in the nostrils, stinging; mists so fine you could scarcely see them, only the effect they had upon distant things. The sky was a hot metallic shield over many pools, reed beds, muddy places, steaming. The bird calls were different. Clouds of insects buzzed. At night I lay where the ground was driest, without thought of any bonus of safety, and whitish phosphorus moved between one stretch of water and the next. I had reached the marshes.

* * *

On the fifteenth day, my fourth in the marshes, I was weak and angry. The water was not any good to drink—I had tried it, and I
knew.
Apart from a few berries, some of which were poisonous, I had not eaten since I left Ettook's krarl. My breasts, still slightly tender and swollen with the unused milk, led me to wonder if I could feed myself from my own body—but they were not well-placed for such an endeavor, and I had no vessel other than my hands. I struggled a while, milking myself, trying to be cow, cowherd, and bucket at once, and, in frustration, saw the nourishment spurt thinly onto the ground. I cursed my breasts, a curse to which, luckily, they did not succumb.

I became dizzy from the mosquitoes' drone, and lay through the noon heat in the rush shade.

On the seventeenth day I came to a vast place of water, shallow, the ruined green of an old glass goblet. Trees grew out of it, smooth-full of liquid, ancient bends of brown marble leaning over or away from their own marbled reflections, spilling lank leaves among the reed drifts, all one colorless color that could be given no name. I began to cross this water, the mud sucking at my soles, the greenness, however, only reaching to my knees. Gray heat drizzled on my eyes, and I thought at first I imagined the shape ahead of me. Then I reasoned it was a tall, particularly thick-boled tree, then a stand of trees. Finally I realized it was the ruin of a tower made of old white stone, and around the ruin was a wedge of land solid as an island in the low water. I stopped very still, and listened. Over the insect hum and slight viscous
swash
of water, I heard—sounds, sounds familiar and unloved and unlooked-for. Man.

Like an animal, I crouched back against the nearest tree, afraid of the hunters. And, like an animal, a single connective thought stirred in me. Man. Food. Where he settled, settled his cook pots, and his tents, even here, in the marshland.

Very quietly now, I slid toward the island. At the bank, I crawled among the rushes, and forward through thick springy undergrowth. I lay about forty feet behind the tower ruin, almost flat to the ground, and peered out. And saw them.

A krarl, this I could see, and yet . . .

They were not Ettook's breed, that was certain. Their hair was long, unbraided, shining like black fire, their skins very dark, almost as black as that hair. Moving about their fires, among their black hide tents, in black clothes, I could tell they had an instinctive elegance of movement, a physical beauty, a narrow, hard, sculptured look, that made them seem unreal. White tower, black tribe, glint of metal and ornaments and fire. Yes, another nomad people, traveling east across the marshes, as Ettook's krarl had planned to do. Yet—they were not on Snake's Road.

I lay in my hiding place all day, watching them, waiting for the dark. On the whole they were very silent. Tall, slight, grave children played games with white squares, cross-legged in tent mouths. Toward sunset women cooked food at separate fires, and sat with their men to eat. I was very hungry. I began to notice only what they did with the food. Red sun-stains dripped across the water. I bit my tongue, stomach burning, and drifted into a half-sleep of longing.

* * *

Water, trees, and island one reflective glimmering turquoise in the dark. They seemed to have set no sentry.

I eased forward until I reached the base of the tower. No sound at all. I eased forward until I reached the banked-up smolder of the first fire. I had noticed a collection of about twenty goats, earlier, penned on the other side of the tower, and I was tensed as I moved for them to begin bleating (they are better than watchdogs usually), but I had not apparently disturbed their goat-sleep. I searched by the fire and found nothing. Unlike Ettook's men, they were not careless as they ate, unfortunately. No help for it then, but to go farther into the camp.

I prowled among the hide tents, my eyes very wide. Between the dull red crusts of embers I searched carefully, and found a scatter of tasteless crumbs. Horses—surely they had horses with them? And perhaps the stores might be there—yet they did not seem to have horses or wagons or carts. I paused by a tent shape, lifted the flap so slowly it and my fingers seemed to creak like a rusty door. Inside—blackness, black curled figures and the smooth sounds of their sleep. And—! My hand snaked out before I could stop it. Three grayish cakes lying by the flap on a dish, and a little pitcher of water. They might have been put there for me to take. It was all I could do to stop myself from eating then and there in that unsafe place. I dragged myself away, out of the camp, back to my shelter. There I drank deeply, and crammed my mouth with food, which tasted pleasantly of honey for all its color. It was the first time I had ever been truly hungry, with a desire for actual food. When I was finished, I dug out a scoop in the soft earth and buried the empty pitcher. Slowly I slid myself into the water, and trod carefully back into the shelter of the bending trees, some way from the island. One of these, with a cradle of low-slung branches, offered me a bed. I crawled into it, and, despite the raging pain in my belly, fell suddenly asleep.