The Birthgrave (6 page)

I knew little enough of his plans. I picked up some gossip as befitted my station as a woman. At night, when he lay in the blue tent, I eavesdropped by the fires; during the day, I listened here and there as I walked the length of the ravine and back again.

There was a place, high up, near the falling shaft of the waterfall, where I used to climb and sit for hours. Nourished by the water, which broke off in little streams and carved itself channels along the slope, the trees grew thick and dark green here. There was the sweet sharp smell of pine resin, and scents from the various flowers that pushed through the soil. They showed like white bells among the boulders, changing to reds and blues as they neared the stream. Some grew in the water itself, like filmy lavender bubbles, then hardened into purple on the far side where a little mound of stones stood leaning together. There was a slight fume of water over the spot from the falling spray. It was refreshing in the heat of the day. I used to sleep here sometimes, glad to have escaped the claustrophobia of my painted tent for a new and cleaner privacy, for no one ever seemed to come here. Lower down, where the fall had produced a round pool, the women came and filled their jars or bathed. I could see them clearly, small as dolls, and sometimes a snatch of voices blew up to me, the words always drowned by the roaring water. Below that place, I would look down again, and see the whole of the ravine, the tents, the animals and Darak's men, wrestling and firing arrows into a target, flaying dead animals for their leather. It looked innocent and homely enough from the slope, perhaps because I was no longer part of it. I could see Darak, tiny and breakable as an insect, go into the horse field and pick out his black, or its white mate, and ride them, wheeling and jumping, standing up on their backs, somersaulting and coming down with sure feet. Darak the gypsy and the showman, the boaster, who needed admiration like food, yet seemed to know his needs. I had seen him closer, as he rode in the horse field, his face laughing, open as a small boy's, but, as he came out afterward amid clapping and cheers, the inward-looking amusement of his eyes. He knew.

* * *

In the middle of the night, a woman screamed and screamed outside my tent.

I got up, drew open the flap. Two girls, one with a pitch-brand that seared my eyes with its raucous light. Their faces were drawn and somehow angry. The third woman was in the arms of a big, dark-skinned man, one of Darak's “captains” I had long ago surmised. At the moment her body was arched and straining, her hands knotted into fists.

“What is the matter?” I asked them.

The girl who did not carry the torch stepped forward, and I saw her face clearly. She did not look in my eyes but at my neck, from which, she correctly guessed, hung the jade I had pulled from hers. Shullatt.

“Illka's in labor with Darak's child, and things aren't going well. We've come so you can cast your spells on her, and save her baby.” She looked scornful, and her mouth opened to say more, but the screams began again.

The bandit holding on to the one they called Illka said furiously: “Keep still, you damned bucking mare.”

“Bring her inside,” I said.

He ducked under the tent flap and deposited the girl, still arched and wailing, on my bed of rugs.

I looked at her and her belly was almost flat.

“In labor?” I asked. “How long has she carried?”

“Five months,” Shullatt snapped.

Illka was obviously in agony, almost unconscious, except when the pain brought its automatic responses.

“I tell her,” the other woman said, “she's miscarrying, not bearing.”

“Where is Darak?” I asked.

“Away.”

I was not certain why I asked. I felt obscurely that some of this pain should fall upon him, who had helped cause it. But had he been in the camp, the tent with its pattern of blue eyes would have had him, or perhaps another.

I leaned over Illka, and I could not see how to help her. Her eyes were wide now in pain and fear, but I was another shadow revolving around her agony, without a place in it. She had no faith in the witch.

“Have you no midwife?” I asked.

Shullatt sneered. “No.”

“I cannot help this girl.”

Shullatt fastened on my defeat with triumph.

“Can't help her? Why did Darak bring you here, then, to eat our meat and drink our drink and stroll where you will in our home?”

Illka screamed.

I kneeled down beside her. Blood was running onto the floor. I did not know what to do. I put my hand on her forehead, and looked into her eyes. At first there was no response but then, after a while, something stirred between us. I reached down into her eyes, into her mind, and closed a coolness on her brain.

“No more pain,” I whispered.

Behind me, Shullatt snapped, “What?” craning nearer.

But the girl's face was relaxing, her body, arched for the new spasm, was leveling on the rugs. She smiled.

The other woman cried: “You've saved her!”

But this was not so: there was not enough belief in any of us to have saved her. I simply held her still and calm in some water of peace at the bottom of the soul, whispering to her of beautiful things. After a while, her eyes slipped gently shut. She turned stiff, and very cold.

I stood up. The man had gone out again. Birth and the complications of birth were not his province, and he wanted none of them. The two girls were still there, but it was Shullatt who moved and sparkled and was alive with venom. The other was quiet, awed by this soft, fearless death.

“You killed her,” Shullatt said.

I stood and looked at her. There was no reason to answer.

“You
killed
her,” she repeated. “You put a witch-sleep on her so she had no fight left! She couldn't feel the child tearing to get out—Darak's child. Illka you kill, and Darak's child you kill—why, witch-woman? What is it that makes you so jealous of the gifts he gives?”

Karrakaz moved in the gloomy tent. Evil would come to me and I would welcome it. What I had done to help the screaming girl and thought to be a blessing to her in the hopeless agony—was that only my self-deception? Would she have lived had I left her to struggle alone? I had my motives, as Shullatt instinctively guessed. Would I cut the forest of green trees down all around him, one by one, in insidious ways, until he had only the blunted faceless tree to cling to?

The black-haired girl in the tent of blue eyes, how easy it would be to be rid of her. Some drink, some balm, a perfume even. The knowledge of poisons and treachery waited in my brain.

“Take Illka away,” I said to Shullatt and the other girl. “I have done my best for her, but your goddess of bearing did not want another child as yet for the bandit camp. When Darak returns, tell him. If you have a complaint against me, I will answer it to him, not to you. He is the chief here, and you are nothing.”

The psychological ploy worked well enough. The thought of Man, the chief, herself, woman-who-was-nonentity, subdued her. She scowled. Her dark eyes blinked in the torch-glare. The other one went to the door and called. Another woman came in, older, and with no expression on her face.

The three hoisted Illka's body between them. She had no value now; they could not expect a man to carry her. They went out.

Blood had soaked into the rugs. I picked them up and flung them outside, and saw, in the faint moonlight, women scurrying together from the tents, like little black rats in the shadows. Whispers: “Illka is dead!” Shullatt would explain that the witch had killed her.

It had come, then.

3

Darak did not come back for three days. Where he was I did not know, but I guessed there might be outposts of his kingdom, lower in the hills, nearer the roadways, and perhaps he had business there.

During this time no one came near me, except once. No food, drink, or coals for warmth—but this did not bother me much. When I went to the round pool to get water, the group of women there drew off and stared at me, hostile but afraid. They would have liked to stone me and cuff me away empty-handed. Soon they would get the courage to do it.

On the third day a man came, and said he was going to move my tent higher up, away from the others. He looked slightly embarrassed for this whole episode was the work of the women, and it came hard to be under their influence. Nevertheless, the men liked me not at all. They were glad things had come to a head and I was to be got out of the way.

He and two others moved the tent, and set it up beyond the horse pens on a raised barren rock. From here, the rest of the dwellings looked small and bright at night, pressed together like nervous fireflies.

Soon I left the tent, and went to live in that flower-place I had found, where none of them seemed to come, and where there was water in plenty. I found berries here too, across the streams, behind the stones that leaned on one another, and gnawed mouthfuls of the bittersweet grass, and this was enough for me.

It seems it should have been easy for me to escape from them. I could have gone by night, up the steep track which was the only safe way I knew from the ravine. Surely I could have got by the sentries; I had learned enough now to know how to be silent. But Darak would come back, and my trial lay with him, and that was the answer to my self-questioning.

* * *

And I saw him come back. One smudgy dawn, stars still vivid in the sky, a group of men came riding in, not from the track, but from some passage in the ravine side, at the southern end. They passed the ruined farm, the orchards, and were about a mile away from the tents, when men and women began to come out, and run across the pasture to them.

Darak stopped. He seemed to be listening to what they said. I thought I saw him laugh. Then he rode on, and they scattered away from him. He came quite fast into the camp, and I could tell he was angry, little stiff black ant, on a black ant pony. Not angry for me, of course. Angry that such trivia should interfere with his plans.

There was more conference then. He ate, sitting outside his own big tent, and while the women brought him food and beer in great earthenware jugs, the complaints against me came and went. The hysteria was out of all proportion to the event, but it is their nature to turn on the different one. They must all be sheep.

Finally he stood up, and hit some man across the face. This must have been an insult against Darak himself. While the bandit sprawled, Darak turned, and began to walk toward my lonely pitched tent on the rock. I could almost have laughed then, seeing him go in, then come out again, and wave his arms furiously, and men go running in every direction across the ravine to search me out. But my heart began to drum, for he came toward the fall and began to climb the rocky slope as if he knew instinctively where I must be.

Watching him climb, so remote and far from me at first, but growing nearer, larger, more real and dominant, I felt as if I called him to me, and could not help myself. He paused at the pool below, looked around, then up. He did not see me. He frowned, and came on again.

I sat down by the leaning stones, and put one hand on them, for the cruel warmth of day was rising, and they were cool still, and hard and secure. I trembled, and my heartbeat stabbed in me, and I wished it were from fear.

I heard his footsteps on the stones, once through water. Twice he stopped, then moved on once more.

Then he had turned the path, and he stood in front of me, against the curdling sky of sunrise. He was dark against that light, but I could just make out his face.

He looked at me and said harshly: “Of course. Where else could you be?”

He moved along the edge of the little streams, but did not cross.

“You find comfort here, do you?” he said.

There was something in his voice and look that part of me cowered away from. I said nothing. I seemed to be drowning in his presence, but there was no help for it.

“They say”—he jerked his thumb toward the ravine—“you killed some girl because she had my child. Brought on a miscarriage with a potion, then drugged her and let her die.”

There seemed no point in speaking, but obviously he expected an answer.

“No,” I said.

“No,” he repeated, “of course ‘No.' Why should you do it? Shullatt speaks about you as if you were a woman, with a woman's emotions and spitefulness, but you're as cool as river clay. There may be wickedness in you, but not a thing as ordinary as jealousy. Besides, goddess, the gods accept only necessities. What they really want, they take without asking.”

I felt the need to grasp at this sentence, cynical, yet deeper than he meant it to be. There was no time.

“Why I brought you here I don't fully understand. There's a sickness with the sheep and the cattle, and this apparently is your doing too. They'll not be happy till you're gone.”

“Then I will go,” I said.

“Oh, no, it's not so easy, goddess. You know our stronghold. When I say gone, I mean gone underground with an arrow through you, or your neck broken. Of course,” he added, “if I cut off your tongue and fingers—”

“No!” a shrill voice shouted. “Kill her! Your men want her dead, too, Darak.”

Beyond Darak stood a woman's silhouette that spoke with Shullatt's voice.

Darak half turned.

“Who asked you to follow me, Shullatt? I didn't.”

“I knew she'd be here—the place with the Stones—and I knew you wouldn't do what we asked—kill and burn her, and rid us of the filthy curse she brought.”

I stood up and blood tingled through me. I must die and burn, because this bitch demanded it. I crossed through the water, and she darted at me suddenly with a knife in her hand. It was
her
swift moment this time. The blade slit my shoulder, and blood spilled fast as wine into the stream, turning the lavender flowers purple, the red flowers scarlet. I got her throat in my hands, my knee against her side. Fool, she might have thrust me off a thousand ways, but she stabbed again, into my arm, and with the impetus of pain, I thrust her body one way, her head another, and snapped her neck.