Shadowfire

by Tanith Lee

  She did not want to go.

  The night had turned chill, blue-black as raven’s wings with stars caught in the feathers of it. Finnuk had a fire outside, and sat there with his two sons after his meat. I pushed her to him.

  “Here is your daughter,” I said. “You may have her back.”

  At first they were all mute with astonishment, their mouths open, only the flames speaking. Then Finnuk surged up, heavy with his anger as only old men can be, for he was old to be a warrior.

  “Have her back? By the snake, I do not want her back.”

  “Ah!” I roared. “So she was no use to your tent either?”

  He floundered around a little, and the sons and their dogs growled and padded up and down, eyeing me. Chula meanwhile crouched there, crying inside her veil in loud, furious crowings. By now others had come to see, having followed our progress through the krarl.

  “This is my daughter,” Finnuk finally informed me.

  “Own her, then,” I said.

  “I do. I do, by the snake. What wrong has she done? She is a good wife to the chief’s son. She has borne him three healthy boys.”

  “She has borne me trouble,” I said.

  “How has she done so?”

  “I had a slave,” I said, “valuable, a city woman of great worth I might have bartered and enriched this krarl thereby. This one, at your feet sniveling, has scarred my slave, my property.” I knew very well the tack to take. He frowned and grumbled under his breath.

  “If that is so, no doubt the slave was disobedient—”

  “This woman, your Chula, is disobedient, and to me. I have done with her. Take her, or let the wolves have her. She is no longer anything of mine. You see, Finnuk, there are many witnesses to hear.”

  Chula wailed. She buried her face in the dirt and kicked her heels.

  “Wait now, Tuvek Nar-Ettook,” Finnuk remonstrated. “She has been stupid and you should beat her. But this is not a thing for which to cast her off. What of your sons?”

  “They are no sons of mine. I renounce the sons with the dam. Maybe she has been dishonest in this, too. Am I to be her whore-master?”

  He trampled around his fire, glaring, at a loss.

  “There is the matter of her dowry,” he said at last.

  I was only too ready for this. I flung down by Chula a leather bag of gold rings, all war spoil, worth more than what he had given me with her, save for her emerald, which Tathra wore now. He was quick enough to point that out to me.

  “The Eshkiri slave your slut has ruined brought me a bodice of emeralds. Finnuk may come and take his pick.”

  He shook his head. He did not want to let it go at this, but could see no way around. Besides, I looked and sounded angry, mad-angry, as a bull shut from the cows. I was not, in fact, as angry as that, only drunk with a host of emotions that were painfully new to me. I was cutting the cloth to fit me, and Finnuk and his daughter getting the edge of the knife.

  “Tuvek Nar-Ettook,” he said, “she is worthless dross. She has displeased you, and I shall improve her. I will keep her in the tent of my women for a few turns of the moon. Then you shall decide.”

  I shrugged.

  “That is of no significance to me. Keep her and keep the gold. For I shan’t want her till the moon falls.”

  At this, Chula raised herself. She tore at the air with her hands, and screamed, “Tuvek! Tuvek—Tuvek—”

  Her eyes were wilder than any I had ever seen. They told me something of my own injustice to her, and I did not like it. There was no room in my world for anything but one.

  “I will wed the Eshkir woman before I claim this mare,” I said.

  And I strode off from Finnuk’s fire, and once more there was silence behind me, only the crackle of the flames.

  I went to Kotta’s place next. She met me at the flap.

  “I have come for the Eshkir,” I said.

  “Have you, warrior?” Kotta said. “I have dressed the wound, but she has fever, your slave. If you take her to your tent and lie with her, you kill her. The city women are for the most part not strong, and she will not bear it.”

  “Then I will not lie with her,” I said. “She shall stay here.”

  Kotta’s eyes, seeing nothing, seeming to see everything, unnerved me.

  “This is a new sickness,” she said. But, as I ducked inside the tent, she added, “I am thinking Tathra has not met her son this night.”

  “Her husband will be with Tathra,” I answered. “I will go tomorrow.”

  It was dull in the healer’s tent, a tan smoky light. Demizdor lay on the rugs, and her head was turned from me. I saw she was unmasked; only a foam of her bright hair had washed across her face to hide it. My pulses ran so fast the tent leaped before my eyes, but I went to her quietly.

  “Demizdor,” I said, “when you are well, you shall come to my hearth, but you need fear nothing.”

  She did not look at me, but the blanket over her breasts moved more swiftly than it had before I drew near.

  “Demizdor,” I said, “I have taken the woman back to her father. My other two wives will not trouble you. I tell you now, when the fighting is done and we are in the summer camping, I will wed you. You shall be my first wife in Chula’s stead.”

  Very softly she asked, “How shall I support this matchless honor?”

  The adder was still under the flower, I saw. I did not reply. I lifted the swathe of blond silk from her cheeks, and turned her face gently with my hand. Her eyelids flickered as if she were sleepy; she would not look at me.

  “You shall have a city mask to wear,” I said. “Not the silver deer, the other has had that. I have a better one, a silver lynx with amber ornaments for the hair. And I will get you fine weave from the Moi. You will find it kinder on your skin.”

  “So,” she murmured, “why do you bother to woo me, warrior? I am your property. You may use me at any time you wish.”

  Then I knew somehow—maybe from her eyes and from her talk, which was not like the cold, harsh talk I had had from her before—that she was in the same net with me.

  I leaned and kissed her. For all she was ill, her mouth was cool and sweet. She caught my arms and held me to her. I had never dreamed that such a thing could make me glad.

  Yet when I let her go, she turned from me and hid her face again, muttering in her own tongue, the language of the cities, which now I could not understand. Her liking for me must have been seething in her some while, fermenting against her will into the wine I had just tasted. It did not occur to me then that it could shame her to love me, shame her blood and her pride, make her doubt her reason almost, that she should hunger for one on whom her kind spit.

  I went out of Kotta’s tent on fire with the victory, acknowledging my fortune.

  Let no man count himself fortunate till his gods brand it on his back.

  2

  The fighting and the raids of the Warrior month were past, and the green month that comes after was done too; it was the month of the Maiden, the marriage month, and the krarl had settled among the wild fields and orchards and the sinking white stones of the eastern summer pasture, when Demizdor came to my tent.

  She had had the fever a long while, and then she had been fragile as a leaf. So much might have told me how she feared to come to me, but I was a fool still, and finding desire in her eyes and in her touch, believed the battle won. Seeing she was sick, I left her in Kotta’s charge and in her tent. Here Demizdor dwelt, communicating with no one save the healer and me. It was as well she had my protection. I knew the women of the krarl hated her for her difference and for her beauty—it was the old story of Tathra all over again. Indeed, Tathra hated Demizdor, too, and about this matter, Kotta and my mother fell out. I do not know what words were spoken or what threats offered and scorned. Certainly Kotta had no choice but to harbor the Eshkir since
I had ordered it.

  Presently Demizdor recovered sufficiently to ride on a mule behind the mule of Kotta as we traveled—she had journeyed in a litter before that, slung between two horses, with a canopy on a frame to hold off the sun, a conveyance usually reserved for women after childbirth if the krarl was on the move. When camp was made each night, Demizdor would sit outside Kotta’s tent, daring to be idle, as no woman of the tribes would dare to be. Later, when the lamps were lit, I would visit her, for I could not keep away.

  Our conversations were slight, our touches few. It was less than a crust to my starvation, and her tongue was still sharp. She chided me for a savage, she mocked me; she damned our ignorance, our lack of books or music, our treatment of our women and ourselves. I bore all this because her eyes denied it. Her eyes were now as I had seen other women’s eyes. One part of me was glad at my restraint, my waiting for her health before I lay with her, for she was waiting too; this much was clear. She wanted me, for all I was shlevakin—city word for barbarian, scum. So I made her wait as she had made me wait, though almost every night my sleep was full of her. And when I was away for a dark or two on some fight or looting, I would think of her, taking no other to my bed-place with me. I had never before, since I began, been celibate so long, but I knew the feast was coming.

  Chula, meantime, I left in her father’s tent. I did not formally cast her off before a holy man; after the first rampaging, I had lost interest in the drama. Officially she remained my wife, but not one misunderstood that I had put her aside. Finnuk tenaciously clung to the hope that I would relent, and did not claim the emerald I offered him, though he retained the gold. I never saw her about the krarl. I think they deliberately kept her from my sight.

  I have said Demizdor was my world in those months. This made me less aware of other things. Even fighting I got more wounds because of it, growing careless, though never feckless enough to let myself be killed. But I was stone-blind to Tathra. Afterward I cursed myself for my stupidity. By then the hour for cursing and for wisdom was past.

  I had gone to see her the day following the Skoi raiding, when I had taken Demizdor to Kotta and thrown Chula back at Finnuk.

  Tathra sat straight as a spear, but already her body was thickening, ripening with what was in it. I did not like this look, this infection on her which was of Ettook’s making. Her face was hidden by the shireen, and she did not attempt to remove it. Nor did she wear Chula’s emerald, which I had given her those years before. Instead she offered it to me in her hand.

  “Have you come for this, Tuvek? Since you have disowned her, she had better have the jewel. It was her dowry.”

  “Now, Mother,” I said, “I did not imagine you concerned for Chula’s rights.”

  “If you do not come for the jewel, why come to me?” she said.

  “Why, to see you,” I said, “to greet you. I have been away, or did you forget?”

  “I forget nothing,” she said. “It is the mother’s agony that she forgets nothing. I remember your birth, I remember you at my breast. I remember how you grew to be my pride. And now I am nothing to you. It is the son who forgets.” Her voice was bitter, and old and dry as a husk. I knew the whims of women when they carried a child, and assumed it no more than that.

  “Well, I am here. I have come to see you.”

  “I was here to be seen yesterday,” she said. “You did not come. You went in preference to your city whore, the witch with lard-pale hair, who ensorcels you. Do you take no heed of my warnings? Am I so little to you at last?”

  It was the eternal cry of mother for son. I might have recognized it and dealt differently with her, but her masked face, her wizened voice, her woman’s foolishness angered me. I had hoped myself done with this dire prognostication of evil spells.

  “Don’t try my patience,” I said. “You know how things are between us, you and I. You know nothing of my way with the Eshkir.”

  “I know you will wed her.”

  “Thus, you know.”

  “Yes, and do you suppose it anything but a witching she has set on you, she a slave and you a warrior, to get you to marry her before the seer?”

  “Enough of that!” I shouted. I had never met such foolishness from Tathra, nor such clammy ghost-chatterings. “You also, my mother, were an out-tribe prisoner garnered on a raid, a slave of the spear, Ettook’s whore, till he took you in the fire-ring and made you wife. Did you witch him, Mother? If you did, you made a poor choice. When I am husband to my Eshkiri slave, the women will not dare to slander her, or the men’s side to teach their sons to call her names, as all my life they have done with you. Your red pig praises you as a sow is praised, and tells how he mounts you before the whole tribe, and boasts that he ruts with others besides. Since I could walk, I have been fighting, boy and man, because I was your son, and he gave you no honor and therefore none to me. When Demizdor has sons by me, they shall not have to skin their knuckles to prove they are my heirs.” I broke off, breathing fast, having said too much, and cognizant of it.

  She sat there, still straight, still masked. She said, very quietly, “You have punished me enough by ceasing to love me. You do not need to punish me with words as well.”

  I was ashamed. The shame did not couple easily with the mood of gladness and victory I had had before. Of everything, it was hardest for me to forgive her that.

  “I am sorry,” I said. I was stiff and ungenerous; even I could hear it. “We will say no more of this.”

  “Too much has been said,” she answered. I expected her to cry, as once before. Then she had not, and she did not now. If she had wept I would have gone to her. She did not weep, and I did not go.

  “There is a hunt at dawn,” I said. “I will bring you something.”

  She thanked me and I left her.

  After that inauspicious meeting, she was bland and almost dumb with me, which got me into a similar habit. I began to think back over the earlier times when she had been odd and difficult. I started to despise her, as I despised the other women who claimed me without my wanting their claim. Yet I did not truly understand that I despised her. She saw it better than I. I spent less hours with her than ever, more with my girl in Kotta’s tent. It no longer bothered me that Tathra kept on her shireen in my presence. I barely noticed. It was Demizdor’s face I hankered to see.

  So my mother sat alone, swelling with Ettook’s seed, the fear which had once shown naked in her eyes now sunk to some cellar of her brain. Kotta brought her the medicines and haughtily she would drink them, without a word. Even her husband did not come to lie with her. He did not want her anymore. If she could give him another boy, then her security would spring up like a blossom, but if a girl or a sickly male, there would be nothing for her. Perhaps she saw her own self mirrored in Chula’s fate, and Tathra had no parent to take her in, no friend. As for me, the ties were rent.

  In those months of my triumph and my hunger and my fierce anticipation, the shadows must have gathered thicker than Sihharn Night for my mother Tathra.

  I married Demizdor in the tribal fashion, in the ring of fire, before Seel. He did not want, but I coerced him. I felt my pride that year, and knew what I could make of it. He rolled his eyes and sputtered his sentences through a snarling mouth, but wed us he did.

  I made sure it was not like other weddings. I presented many gifts, and much meat I had slaughtered myself, and a cask of strong crimson drink I had carried off and kept from the raid on the city palace-fort. I gave Ettook one of my city-man’s horses, too, and he grinned uneasily. Two or three of the mares seemed likely to foal, so it was no great loss to me.

  Demizdor I instructed to wear the silver lynx-mask, with its amber flower-heads turned almost red in her topaz hair. The Moi had come by with their eternal barter, and I had got cloth from them, a fine white linen striped through with lines of green and bronze. Moka, selecting the cloth, gabbled to them of Demizdor, proud o
f the attributes of my new bride as she would have been of a new bronze caldron. Moka was content with what she had, a share of a man, children and hearth and home. Demizdor was a spoil of war, something to increase my prosperity and status. To Moka, maybe, Demizdor was not even human, just another rich possession to grace the tent.

  Demizdor’s arms were bright with bracelets of bronze and silver and her neck with rings of gold. She walked like a chief’s daughter into the circle of fire to me. But behind the open eye-holes of the mask, her green eyes glittered with contempt. And then again, when I took her hand it trembled, and her breast rose and fell inside the moth-wing cloth as if she had been running. She knew well enough what was coming to her.

  I was glad I had made her wait, given her the space to burn a little, as I had burned.

  The wedding feast is for the men’s side, about the central krarl fire. Long before it is finished, the bride goes to the tent and soon the groom gets up to follow.

  The jumping firelight, the shouts and toasts and passing cups, had been a meaningless interlude between the departure of my woman and my going in to her. When I rose, the night seemed to gather around me, my head sang, and there was only one road on the whole earth, that which would lead me to her.

  The tent lines were dark and empty save for the occasional red glow of a brazier, or a scurrying woman late about her chores. Only Kotta’s tent showed a light outside, and she was sitting there by her lamp. When I passed, without hesitation, the blind woman called to me.

  “Tuvek, before you go where you are going, it is best you learn something.”

  I laughed, I was a little drunk—with sex rather than wine.

  “Do you think I don’t know my task?”

  “I think you know it well enough,” she said. “It is another thing you do not know.”

  “What, then? Come, Kotta, I have waited some days for this. A night has only so many hours, and I don’t want to waste them here.”

  She got up and drew near me.

  “In my tent,” she said, “the Eshkir spoke to me somewhat, as women will speak to women at a need. Her folk were noble, warrior men and consorts of their kings. She was bed-mate to one of the gold-masks who fell on their blades in the fortress: a prince. She counted that honorable, and you took her from it.”