by Tanith Lee
“Ah, my son,” she said now, “my fine son. Tomorrow you will be made a warrior.”
I would not even swallow the constriction out of my throat in front of her. I answered, “Yes,” as if I had given the matter little thought.
“There is none like you,” she said. She tangled her fingers in my hair which had long ago unraveled from its boy’s plaits. She could never leave my hair be, a thing I have found in other women since, as if the color or the texture magnetized their fingers. The knot in my throat was growing; I glanced at the cloth on the loom to get my anger back and ease it. She saw my glance. “This is your warrior’s cloak I am making.”
That undid me.
“Mother,” I said, “maybe I shall not be needing it,” then bit on my tongue, I was so vexed with myself.
“Tuvek,” she said softly, “now we have the truth. What do you think will be done to you?”
“No woman knows the Rite,” I said.
“True. But she knows the men survive the other side of it. And am I to think you less than them? You, better than any?”
“I flinch from none of it,” I said arrogantly, because she expected too much of me at that moment, “but I think I may die. So be it.”
Then I saw that she also was uneasy, that she had only spoken as she did because she was frightened. Her hands tightened on me.
“Kotta,” she said, “do you hear this?”
I jerked around, angry again certainly at this. I had thought we were alone in the tent. Now I saw the shadow beyond the loom, the blind healer-woman, resting her great arms on her knees. It was an odd thing with Kotta, though her eyes were sightless, she seemed to see everything there was, as the boys learned early when they tried to steal from among her things. Near big as a man, raw-boned, her blind irises shone blue as slate from her shireen. She was often to be found where you did not think her to be. She helped the women bear, and healed ills and wounds, and she was frequently with my mother. It was common women’s talk about the krarl that Tathra would have died of her brat, and the brat too, if Kotta had not aided the birth. I had arrived on a morning of victory after some battle between Ettook’s Dagkta and a Skoiana krarl, but Tathra fought harder than any warrior to get me born. She had conceived no other child and some said this was also Kotta’s work, as a second bearing would be fatal to Ettook’s out-tribe bitch-wife.
Kotta’s enamel earrings clinked when she shifted and stared right at me as if she saw every feature.
“You distrust the tattooing,” she said.
“I distrust nothing,” I said, furious and cold as only fourteen can be.
“You do well to distrust it,” she said, making an idiot of me. “As you say, it may be bad for you. Nevertheless, I hazard you will recover from it, as from the snake’s bite. But I wonder if they will waste their ink.” I did not understand. I was about to throw some harsh sentence to her, and leave the tent, when Kotta added, apparently for no reason, “That loom is from Eshkiri city. There was an Eshkir woman once among the tents.”
I would have made nothing of this except that Tathra stiffened into a curious immobile grayness.
“Why do you speak of her?” she presently said. “She was a slave the warriors stole, and she ran away. What more is there to know?”
“True,” Kotta said, “yet she saw him come,” nodding at me. “She kneeled behind you and held you, and you had torn her hands in pain. She was young and strong but she, too, had her child to shed. I wonder how it went with her in the wild.”
This was all obscure to me. It held me only because I could see the drawing of my mother’s face, like skin about a wound.
Then Kotta said to me, “You won’t die tomorrow, young buck. Never fear it. If you are sick, Kotta will see to you.”
She had put some sort of spell on me, too. The day’s troubles had altered as a shadow alters when the sun goes over the sky.
I went outside to clean my deer, and later, when the cloud roof on the mountains turned all the red, purple, yellow, and black of the warrior’s cloak my mother was weaving me, I secured a place by the fire and ate my last meal as a boy.
2
You sleep in a new and isolated place that night, alone with other boys who are to be made men the next day.
At dawn the krarl priest comes to wake you, his face freshly coated with black. He wears a robe tasseled with the tails of beasts and jinking from bronze disks and ivory teeth, the dentition of wild cats, wolves, bears, and men. I had not slept, and I heard him coming before he cuffed me. If he had crept in softly I should yet have known him from his stench.
Seel was the seer of Ettook’s krarl. His father had been seer before him, and had slunk in from the forests with only his sorcery to recommend him. Seel’s god was the one-eyed serpent, the Treacherous Beguiler, for whom the twists and turns of Snake’s Road had been named centuries out of mind. Sometime Seel had taken a wife and got a daughter on her. Shortly, the woman died, which did not surprise me. The daughter, meanwhile, grew up into a bitch. She was her father’s handmaid at his conjurings, the lay of half the tribe besides, but her status was mighty. Seel-Na—she had no other name than Seel’s daughter, this being the mark of her glory—was ever looking to be Ettook’s wife in Tathra’s stead. She had one son, a year younger than I, Fid, and she would have liked to claim him as Ettook’s, but did not dare. Red Fid had a squint in his left eye, and Jork was the only other krarl warrior who squinted; Ettook’s eyes were set straight. It must have rubbed her raw.
When Seel had roused us, we went into the open beyond the tent. Here we stripped and scrubbed our bodies over with snow. The place was far from the other tents under the tunnels, and there was no sound to be heard in all the valley but the sounds we made, shivering and balking at the cold. The shireens must hide and even the braves keep quiet at this hour of initiation.
The priest came up and looked us over. He prodded and pried at the boys. I was still angry; I had had the company of my anger all night. I thought, If he puts his talons on me, I shall strike his eyes out through his skull’s back. But he must have sensed me on the boil, for he left my body alone. Then shortly, naked as we were, he herded us up along the valley, running to keep ourselves warm enough to live, past the pool under thin ice that generally the women came to smash for water—though not today, no woman being permitted to take this route on the morning of the Rite—and over the ridge. Beyond lay pines and cedars, black as gashes in the dim flaring yellow of the rising sun. Our path struck through the trees, through the dark shadows to the loom of the great tent of many hides, like death’s own house, into which we must run.
Inside the tent it was pitch-black. We fell down gasping where unseen hands pushed us. The floor was rough with rugs, and the air close and hot after our short freezing journey. There were others there ahead of us, and others behind, panting like dogs after the hunt. The darkness seethed with bodies, breath, and terror. I was not the only apprehensive one among them, yet none of them had my fury to season it.
There must have been near sixty youths crushed into that pavilion, males of several Dagkta krarls, while all through the winter valleys the tribes would be holding the rites of this Day of Initiation, each subtly different from the rest.
Soon there rose an odor of smoke, like sweet wormwood.
You took a breath or two of this and half began to choke, but instead the swirling stuff burrowed into the lungs and stilled them. It was a magic incense of the priests. The head seemed gradually to loosen from the body, and float off in the air. My head and I were up in the roof, yet somehow aware of my belly below, with a pit to it as hard and acid as the nut found in a peach.
Next drums started up, either from the corners of the vast tent or in my body, I was not sure. There was a murmuring sound and a sort of disturbance in the blackness, and something squealed out like an animal, but I did not really care.
I lay a long while i
n the smoke, not caring and at the same moment knowing I should care, should keep hold on my anger, it was all I had.
Suddenly hands fastened on my arms; I was lifted and hauled across the rugs, over the bodies of boys lying in their stupor. I suppose they had been dragging the young males through this way for some time, maybe they had even trodden on me as I now drunkenly trod on others. I had noticed nothing and no one noticed me.
The partition of hides gave on to a cave, and the air turned abruptly dank and white-cold.
There was a light here. I became aware of it in stages. They had dropped me on my back on a hard bed and the chill pierced up through it like teeth. Water wept down walls and someone grunted and someone cried out and the drums muffled and blurred as my eyes were doing.
I was confused enough to imagine I was getting back my senses, and began to shudder with the cold and struggle weakly, for I had discovered they had tied me. I was desperate to be afraid now, for I felt it was my only defense and somehow had been taken from me, but all the mundane images and details—scent, sight, sound—got in the way. Finally death leaned down, black-faced with eyes like bleached iron, and I recognized Seel. This was the time and the place of the tattooing. They were going to make the scars of manhood on me, and I should die.
I think I bit him. He struck me in the face, and I felt the blow and did not feel it. Then the bronze claw scratched me, a delicate smarting itch. It spread across my breast and ribs and arms, preceded by the lascivious lick of the wool tuft, making the pattern. Bronze needle and needle of bone and rasp of the wool thread drawn through under the skin. To begin with it seemed nothing. Next it became unbearable, that incessant twitching-kissing followed by scratching silver pain. I had forgotten biting him, and only recalled after. I had forgotten who he was. I stared into the ebony face, the eyes where the vague glow caught them, and writhed and twisted at each deft stroke.
But from being unbearable, the sensation became stealthily pleasing. I shut my eyes, and a girl was gently raking nails over me trying to wake me up, and she was waking me in every way, but when I reached for her she was up in a second and running off laughing down a tunnel in the mountains.
I ran after her, but I did not catch her. Instead I came to an area where the walls hugged close toward each other, and I made out a warm light shining ahead in an oval cave. I felt a need to reach the cave, but the way was very narrow. And suddenly a woman’s voice flashed clear as diamond in my head. I did not know what she had spoken, but it was a rejection, a command. It brought an agony with it that curled and shriveled me like a burned leaf. I shouted aloud then because, of all things, I had not expected death in such a form.
* * *
I was only ill a day or so, but I had some strange dreams. The idea of the ancient cities had got into my fever, masked men and women and one symbol more curious than the rest, a female lynx, salt-white, with a black wolf mounted on her back. Also I had some notion the tribe was stoning me because I had turned a spring of water into blood, to make them afraid.
Eventually I opened my eyes with a mouth full of bone dust, my body like stones, and looked around. I was in the hut of sticks and mud near the boys’ tent where the sick ones went. It had been dark, but now a light had come close to me. Behind the light I made out a skinny shadow and recognized its smell as Seel.
By the trembling of the lamp I could tell he was in an ugly humor. He would sometimes froth at the lips and scream like a woman birthing, a thing that alarmed the warriors, who feared his magic. Seeing me conscious, he started gobbling out some curse over me, calling me worm’s dung and other tender things. Now and then a fleck of his tepid spittle hit my face. I remembered biting him.
“Greeting, Seel,” I said. “Was it your dirty needles that poisoned me, or your dirty flesh?”
He gave a squawk straight off, and some of the hot oil tipped out of the clay lamp onto my chest. I would not have been so forthright with him had I been quite well, I think, for he was a bad enemy and I had unfriends enough. But it seemed funny at the time.
Then I heard Kotta’s voice in the far corner of the hut.
“He speaks nonsense, seer, it’s only his fever. Take no heed. Such ravings are beneath you.”
Seel flung around and the lamp showed her. She was at some healer’s work, intent as if she could see all she did.
“He has no fever, woman,” Seel rasped. “It is the out-tribe blood in him. He does not bow to the ways of the red krarls. Tomorrow dawn he shall come to the painted tent and I shall judge him, and the One-Eyed.” And his gnarled hand crawled around the snake-carving on his breast.
“As you decide, seer,” Kotta rejoined politely, “but he is the chief’s son.”
Seel dashed down the lamp, and strode out like a thin evil wind.
“It is a clever boy,” said Kotta, “to enrage Seel.”
“Don’t lesson me, Kotta,” I said. “Tell me how long I’ve been here.”
“The afternoon of the Rite, the night following, the day just gone.”
This scared me a bit. It seemed a good while to lose from your life. I said, “Am I better?”
“Better or worse. You, and others, shall reckon it.”
“Women always speak in riddles,” I said. I sat up and my head rang a little, but quickly cleared. I felt near enough myself, and I was hungry. “Get me some food,” I told her.
“I will get you a mirror first,” she said, “then see if you still hunger.”
This irritated me, for mirrors were women’s toys. I did not blame Tathra that she might want to gaze in one, for there was something worth observing, but I hardly knew my own face. Still, Kotta brought me a bronze mirror and held it where I could take note. It was not my face she was showing me but my breast and arms, where the claws of the tattooing needles had patterned the sigils of tribe and krarl.
I thought the lamp was at fault, next, the bronze or my eyes. At length I reasoned the fault was not in any of these.
“Is this so?” I asked her.
“It is,” Kotta said.
I touched the muscular body that belonged to me, comprehending it with my hand, and stared down at myself. Even without the mirror, I could see.
There was not a tattoo on me, not even a scar from the needles, and the colors might never have been.
“Did he trick me then?” I said. “Only pretend he worked on me as the other priests did, and the drug-smoke deceived me?”
“Oh, no. The work was done. Many saw it—the spear-pattern of the krarl and the stag-sign of the tribe, and Ettook’s mark like three rings. But now it has healed and faded from that hard marble flesh that never has a blemish, oh son of Tathra.”
She had predicted well. The hunger had left me.
“Without the tattoos I am not a warrior,” I said.
“Just so,” said Kotta, “you are not.”
3
Once, maybe, the ritual of the Boys’ Rite may have been profound and meaningful. Certain of the priests still murmured of gods who came at such times, and the black people of the marsh-towers were said to worship a golden book that spoke to them. But in Ettook’s krarl, as with all the red peoples—Dagkta, Skoiana, Hinga, Eethra, Drogoi—the rites were just the husks left over from deeper things, no pith remaining and no mystery, nothing to lift up the soul or go to the brain like wine. And, as generally happens, the more truth the ritual lost the more they bolstered it with significance. There is a saying among the Moi: The chief is clad in gold and purple, only the god dares to go naked.
So they made much of the Rite because it was nothing, and I had failed to be marked by it, as if to prove it nothing. They would be against me now with a wall to back them in all their bewildered savage little pride. And there was something else. Their ways had never meant much to me; to be made a warrior was only a form, I felt no honor in it or glory. I had never been kin with them. To myself I claimed Tat
hra’s blood alone; her obscure krarl, now vanished, I considered mine. Yet to be accounted by the Dagkta as less than the dregs of the pack, less than the youths I had fought and bested all my life and scorned to take as equals, wretches that used certain explicit gestures for my mother’s name—to be reckoned less than these, that I would not bear. I bethought myself at last how I was indeed the chief’s son, Tuvek Nar-Ettook.
When the sun rose I was ready, as I had not been ready for that other thing. I was concerned with my death, that morning of the needles, and here I was, alive, and whole.
Ettook’s painted tent stood higher than the tunnels, in the mouth of a vaulted cave. The land ran down from the mountains here on the eastern side to the winter byres of the goats and horses. There were always a few men moving about there to guard their livestock from the neighboring krarls of the campment, since any krarl would thieve from another when stores got low. Today I could spot only two guards, though the horses were out in the field, chewing the bark from the pines.
I soon found where the men had gone.
The slope below the painted tent was thick with warriors leaning on their spears, their faces, sneering and laughing, I could see even as I came up from the tunnel ways. They had scared the women off from the assembly, but big eyes had been staring all along my route, and fingers pointing me out. If I went unrecognized today, my life henceforth would not be easy. I should have the vixens on my back as well as the foxes’ teeth in my throat. I had no mind to be a joke for the women’s side.
A fire gemmed red on the lip of the cave. Ettook was by the fire, scratching his plaited beard. He had an expression I had seen before, uncertain whether my trouble angered or pleased him. Seel was at his elbow and, at his back, crouching to heat beer for them, Seel’s bitch-daughter. That whetted my mood, to be sure. Her hands glowed from the heat of the flames, but she was eager to warm herself at the blaze of my shame. She was younger than Tathra but thin and stringy except for her breasts, which were heavy, shapeless, floundering things, not tempting to me in the least; her faded hair was the color of sour apricots.
