Shadowfire

by Tanith Lee

  I raised my arm to Ettook.

  “Greeting, my chief. Your son salutes you.”

  He looked down at me, glad, no doubt, of the cave’s elevation. Already he was no longer able to look down on me when we stood foot to foot.

  “Greeting, Tuvek. I hear you are in a wasp’s nest once again.”

  “Wasps are easily disturbed, my chief,” I said as sweetly as I could for the feel of vinegar in my guts.

  Seel shouted something at me. He was often unintelligible in his rages, though his intentions were transparent enough.

  “Seel says you have something to answer for,” Ettook said. “He suggests to me you have profaned the Rite, the thing which must not be spoken of.”

  The Rite was usually given this extra title, implying some mystery that must once have belonged in it. I became aware that Seel had not told Ettook precisely what was wrong. It was to be a grand shock and show for them with me as the focal point.

  “My chief,” I said slowly and clearly, “maybe the seer forgets I am your son, and that your honor is touched by mine.”

  Ettook swallowed this down. His eyes narrowed and he stared at me, calculating. I said, “The seer shall say what I have done, then I shall reply, and then you, my chief, shall judge.”

  “Very well,” Ettook said. He looked at Seel. “Say then.”

  Seel drew himself up and quivered all over. He hawked and dislodged his phlegm in the fire, and cried, “I myself marked him as a warrior is marked. He was not willing, speaking oaths and struggling. When the other boys rose up men, he was groaning and insensible. The herb woman must tend him for a fever. Then I came and witnessed him bare, and saw the One-Eyed had punished him for his cowardice and weakness.”

  I was dressed in winter gear like the rest, shirt laced and a cloak over it. They would see nothing yet. Seel leaned forward, scrabbling through the air at me.

  “Take off the garment. Strip, strip and show your wretched shame.”

  The warriors were rock still, waiting. Ettook grinned and scowled at once. Seel-Na’s eyes sparkled through their shireen eye-holes. I made no move and Seel’s attitude exploded into a hopping, frothing dance on the ledge.

  Having incensed him before, there seemed nothing to gain by holding out any longer.

  “Be careful, grandfather,” I said to him courteously. “Your old bones must be brittle, you should be more gentle with yourself.”

  “What is this shame?” Ettook snapped finally, impatience wiping his face over like a cloth. “You must answer, Tuvek.”

  “Very well. I answer. The old madman there did his work so poorly with the needles that my flesh healed without a sign.”

  I opened my shirt and showed them, and they grunted and jumped down the slope to get a better view, save for Ettook, Seel, and the fruit of Seel’s loins.

  They were puzzled, the warriors. They prowled around me, lowering under their ginger brows, then went back toward the cave in a bunch. One said, “He is not warrior.” That was all that was needed. Everyone took up the howl.

  At this, even though I had been waiting for it, the fury came up in me like a flood tide. My voice had broken early; from my twelfth year I spoke like a man. I filled my lungs and I roared loud enough to drown the lot of them.

  “So I am not a warrior? Let each warrior who thinks I am a boy still come here and fight me. That is fair, I think.”

  That quieted them. They glanced about, wondering whether to gibe or kill me, which was a hard decision for their fleas’ minds.

  High on the ledge, Ettook laughed.

  “My son is valiant,” he said. “He has fourteen years and seeks to slay grown men.”

  “Do you require me to kill them?” I asked him. “Is it to the death? I’m ready.”

  I had only my boy’s knife, but it was to hand, and I had spent some minutes sharpening it before I came.

  Ettook glanced about at the warriors, still laughing. Seel cracked his knuckles, and the bitch-daughter had let the beer boil over.

  “Yes,” Ettook said abruptly, “this matter of the patterns. Maybe there is some mistake; the sweat of the fever has washed out the inks. Let him prove himself. Let him fight. If he can best a warrior, he shall be a warrior. I am the chief, that’s my word. You, Distik. Give him one of your own knives and use the other. Don’t be easy on him just because he’s my blood.”

  Distik grinned.

  “I won’t, my chief.”

  He was the biggest of them, packed with wads of lean muscle and wiry as a young dog. I could see then for sure Ettook wanted my face ground in the snow for me. It occurred to me that if I were beaten, he could simply disown me as a weakling and elect one of his bastards for the heir; he had a couple older than I, already proved. They were thick-witted as he was, and had given me not enough trouble that I should remember them by it, and beware. Of course, if he cast me down, he would cast down Tathra with me, but she would have no say in that. It would not matter to him, he could still go to her and stick himself into her whenever he chose, so she would have all his attention without the honor and safety of the title of wife.

  Distik slung the knife to me. It was blunt, I could see, but I did not argue. I was not afraid; I had never feared a fight in my life. There had always been such a bitter snarling somewhere in me that I was only glad of the chance to give it something to bite on. And I had never been bested. Even when Distik came bounding along the slope, red and yelling, I had no doubt of myself. If I was the smaller I was not puny, and I had a brain to guide me.

  First off, I could tell, he thought it would be amusing. He could toss me around and make sport of me, and give me a wound or two to insure I regretted my arrogance. After all, he was a man and I a boy, so he did not approach me as he would have done his peers.

  When he came running I waited, then stepped aside and kicked his right leg from under him. It seemed slow to me but it was too quick for Distik. He went down with a shout, hard on his left knee.

  I let him slither up and whirl around on me. His face was red as his braids. He made a play with the knife. He was trying to get at my left side, for I had the long knife leading right, but I am agile with both hands, and when he swung in at me I brought up my left fist with my boy’s knife folded in it. He had not expected that, nor the sharpness of the blade. I cut his palm to the gristle and his own weapon went spinning down the slope.

  Distik faltered there a moment, the blood plopping crimson as beads on the white snow. Then he hurled himself on me like a wolf.

  His weight told; we both went plunging over, and rolled downhill after his knife. The hard rock under the ice slammed me in the back, and Distik punched at me hard as he could in the crotch. I had been rather too clever and not expected this of him, as he had not expected much of me. For a second the pain winded me and my sight blacked out, but I had enough of my senses left to kick the ground away, and keep us going on down the incline. While in motion he could not obtain much purchase on me or try to repossess his blade.

  The pain in my loins was subsiding to a drumlike ache that made me nearly vomit, and my eyes were full of sparks. He had me by the hair, long as his own; I think he was getting ready to break my neck once we should slow sufficiently; he was past caring who or what I was. With his other arm he had both of mine pinned fast to my sides. I had lost the two knives, I guess when he punched me. I remembered how he had crashed heavily on the left knee and caught it between mine as we fell, squeezing till I heard the bones grind. Distik grunted and his hand slackened on my hair. I went under it and had him by the throat. My teeth met through the skin, and his blood ran in my mouth. I was fighting mad by this time, and the salt of it gladdened me.

  He tried to shake me off, and loosened his other arm around me, grabbing to wrench my head back. Just then we tumbled into a soft mound of snow. I released his throat and hit him on the side of the jaw with all my might, a
nd felt teeth snap under the blow. He bellowed, on his side in the snow mound, and I sprang from him and fell back deadweight on his ribs. The breath went from him in a bloody gust, and he curled together on himself, crowing for it, and done.

  I stood up, shivering with hate-lust and triumph, and stared along the slope toward the cave.

  It was to be an hour of surprises. I had not anticipated what I saw. Three of them were coming down to me, making set brutal faces, metal ready in their hands, as they would go to finish off a bear in a trap.

  I thought, This is too obvious. Ettook can’t let them take me three to a boy; it shows too much how badly he wants me broken. But Ettook never stirred and the braves came on.

  I glanced around quickly, trying to see a knife, Distik’s or mine, in the snow, but there was nothing.

  I should have been anxious, but I was too eager to fight; the last bout had sharpened my appetite for it.

  Distik had continued lying prone and gasping. I hauled him onto his back and he threshed about, attempting to ward me off. Around his neck hung a great ivory tooth, long as my hand, and perfect save where the hole was pierced for the thong to go through. He found it in some back cave years before and wore it for luck. Seeing his luck had deserted him, it was almost fitting I should rip it off his neck, and perhaps he agreed for he did not offer to stop me. In my grasp the tooth looked nearly as good as a dagger.

  The warriors were biding their time approaching me, for the slope was slippery from our fall, and someone had maneuvered ahead of the rest. I saw his squinty eye and recognized Fid’s father, Jork. Then I took the slope at a run, going up to meet him.

  I went fast, too fast to lose my footing, and slammed into him and plunged Distik’s monster-tooth in his neck where the big vein is. The blood jetted over us both; he reeled sideways with a choked cry and collapsed, dragging my weapon with him. Something happened inside me at that, like tough tissue splitting open. A white light sliced through my head. It was like a voice singing to me: Now the beast is out of the cage.

  I had come up with the last two warriors. I barely noticed who they were. The left-hand man lunged in at me and cut me in the flank, and next moment I ducked and caught at him and was bursting up in a whirl of blood and snow and cloaks, with him held over my head the length of my arms, like an offering to the sky.

  He was a big man and I was only a boy. I had always been tall and well-grown and very strong, yet I had never known my strength, and neither had they. It was no bother to me to hold him high and kicking and bawling there, or to swing around with him and cast him off into the other one and watch them go hurtling down together to where Distik lay.

  I was meaning to follow them, perhaps to kill them with their own knives, but as sudden as it lit, the white light in my head went out. I stood there in a somber daze getting back my sanity after the fight. And when I raised my eyes to the slope, I ascertained that this time nobody else was coming.

  The warriors were very silent, as well they might be.

  Seel had prudently combined with the shadows, but Ettook remained by the fire where I had seen him last, and his face was a greenish-white, though he grinned as he jumped down and strode toward me.

  “Am I proved, my chief?” I called out to him, loud enough for all of them.

  Ettook turned in midstride, shaking his arms at the men.

  “Is he proved warrior?” he shouted. “Proved—yes, more a brave than any of my fighters, this, my son Tuvek.”

  The warriors began to stamp and clack their spears on the rock of the mountain under the cave to show their approval and consent, but not a face matched the noise. Their looks were better suited to a burying, or Sihharn Night when they mount guard against the spirits of the Black Place.

  However, Ettook came up to me and clapped me on the shoulder.

  I immediately kneeled before him in the snow. I could master as much diplomacy as he.

  “If I am a warrior, the strength of my arm is for your service alone, my chief and my father,” I said. And he dug his fingers in my hair as any father might, proud of a loved son who had done him honor. I wondered what price he set on this act of his, showing his liking of me after what had gone before. And not for the first time, I wished I had a friend, a single man I could trust my back to.

  Ettook took his hand off my bowed head, and I rose.

  “The blind woman must bind your hurt,” he said, jolly as a grinning death’s-head. “First blood from your own people. That’s something. I only let so many come at you because I knew you could beat them.” I barely kept from laughing myself at that. “The seer shall make the warrior-marks on you freshly,” he said.

  “No,” I said, “that carrion has put his hands on me too often. I must be the Unmarked Warrior of the krarl.” We were still speaking loudly for the benefit of the crowd, even some shireens were stealing out now, and a woman had begun mewing for dead Jork; not Seel-Na, I noted. I glared at the warriors and said, “Let my deeds speak for me. When I go to battle I shall paint the tribe’s colors on my skin, and if any man takes exception, let him tell me so; he shall be answered, as I have answered here.”

  The woman crying made my spine crawl. I had been thinking of my life and not Jork’s death when I slew him. I went to her and lifted her up and hit her in the face, not very hard.

  “Don’t wail for him in front of me,” I said, and she shut her mouth. “I will pay you Blood-Price for him,” and I turned to Ettook.

  “Yes,” he said, “I will see Tuvek gives the Blood-Price for your man. But my son shall also come to my tent and pick out treasure for himself.”

  When I went to my mother’s tent, the news was there ahead of me.

  Her face was whiter than Ettook’s, and she, too, was smiling, but hers was a smile of victory, though old fear and a confused eternal rancor were mixed in it. When I stooped under the doormouth, she rose and almost ran at me, then stopped, holding herself back. I went to her and put my arm around her, and then she wept.

  “Did you suppose I should fail?” I asked her. “I thought their sly needles in the dark might injure me, but never their half-wit’s knives. Did you hear all of it?”

  “All,” she sobbed. Her breath scalded my neck, and she clenched her hands on the conquest she symbolized for herself in my flesh. “How you broke Distik’s ribs, and let the life from Jork, and that Urm and Tooni will not go hunting again until the moon has thinned to a bow.”

  It made me glad to hear her fierceness speak out like this, she was so much more than the other women who could only whine or screech.

  “It seems Tathra would defeat the braves of the krarl herself.”

  She gazed up at me, her eyes shining.

  “Tathra has made a son who can.”

  She put her hand on mine and so she encountered what I had brought in. She had not seen it before, being intent only on me. Now she snatched her fingers away and the brightness in her dulled over.

  “What is that thing?”

  “The gift of your husband, my mother, the chief’s bounty given to his new warrior. He took me into his tent and opened up the chest there, and told me choose what I had a mind to.”

  “Why this, of all the treasure?”

  “Why not this?”

  She turned from me and went away across the tent and sat down where she had been before. She picked up the shireen that lay there and covered herself with it. Although it was the custom, I felt it like the cold.

  “You are a warrior,” she said, seeing me frowning, “I must hide my face.”

  “I was a warrior when I entered, but you were unveiled then. Is it this you’re hiding from?” And I lifted up the token I had carried here from Ettook’s chest of spoils, and held it out at her.

  He had taken me into the tent and pushed open the wooden box with its turmoil of glitter inside. There lay the looting of several hundred raids and battl
es; as much as give me a gift, he had wanted to show me how many men had had their necks beneath his heel. I put my hand in the heap, and he came up beside me and spilled out quantities on the floor so I should see better what he had garnered. There were cups of bronze circled in bright gold, spear hafts of gray hard iron, brazen bucklers set with water-green gems and arm rings of yellow and white metal, handfuls of stones like fires or blood, and collars of ivory strung with blue carbuncles. I had not guessed him so wealthy, and hesitated, wanting the prize of his collection and not certain what it might be. Then my firsts and his had cleared a path, and I found it.

  It was a mask, made for a woman for it was small, all pure scintillant silver: the face of a lynx.

  My dream came back to me at once—the black wolf mating with the white lynx. I moved my hand and touched the mask, and a shock went through my palm clear up into my shoulder joint. It was like grasping lightning. But I did not shift, and the sensation dwindled and was gone. I lifted the mask and showed it to Ettook.

  “I will have this, if my chief permits.”

  He nodded, sullen as a child whose toy has been stolen. I had got the best from him as I had hoped to. The mask was of value, besides its curious beauty, and obviously it had come from the workshops of the ruined cities. At the back, long yellow cords hung down to decorate the hair, and on the end of each was a little perfect flower of translucent yellow amber. It pleased me and set the crown on my combat, for I was still a boy. I had some notion that I might give it to Tathra to wear in place of the shireen, and let the women chew on that.

  Now I saw this was not to be. Tathra shunned the mask, shunned it as something known. I recalled the shock from the metal when I grasped it in its sleep, some old magic locked in the silver, some ghost thing.

  “I will give it back to him,” I said to her. “Is it cursed?”

  “No,” she said. I could no longer read her emotions behind the shireen. “There was an Eshkir woman among the tents; the warriors captured her. She was my slave, but she ran away after you were born. The mask was hers.”