by Tanith Lee
“On the night of your birth,” Kotta said, “the Eshkiri woman gave her hands to Tathra and Tathra bit and clawed them. The Eshkir was young, and she was not as other women are. Her hair and her skin were white, and her eyes like white jewels. She carried also, but she was small. I did not guess she would bear so soon, but she bore, here in this tent, at sunrise, when I was off among the warriors to tend their wounds after the battle. She did not leave much trace of it, but Kotta is a healer, Kotta knew. When I returned, the Eshkir and her baby were gone.”
I took a dreary interest in her tale, but she had pushed me to the door flap.
“Go,” she said. “Return at sunset. There are words that must be said. I have promised Ettook’s wife, before you came, to say them.”
Abruptly I was outside. The daylight seemed too strong, and I did not see who might be lingering there; it was like trying to gaze through milk. I did not seek my tent or Demizdor. I walked away across the hill, past where the white stones ran, under the face of the low-burning autumn sun.
I came back at sunset, not because of any interest or reasoning in me, but because it was some road to take, some destination to achieve.
It was the night before Sihharn, and the watch-fires were being built through all the krarls across all the green-brown slopes in the dusk. But from Ettook’s tenting there came a dismal low ululation, the noise the shireens made at the death of a chief’s woman. I thought how they wailed, and how they must be smiling as they did it. Seel’s daughter, who would lead the chant for Tathra at moonrise, would barely keep from laughing as she tossed the autumn flowers on my mother’s body.
I did not want to meet any of them, Ettook least of all. I climbed in, therefore, like a thief over the stockade, avoiding the central cook-fire, and reached Kotta’s tent in the first thick shadows of night.
I called her name, and she replied immediately, bidding me enter.
The tent was much changed, different rugs on the ground, the brazier bright with fire, and the lamp burning, which Kotta lighted for others, not needing it herself. I glanced everywhere before I could stop myself, searching for my mother, but she had been taken to her own place.
“Sit, warrior,” Kotta said.
Having no more tempting pastime, I sat and waited.
“What I am to tell you,” Kotta said, “Tathra, the wife of Ettook, has charged me to say. Kotta has known these things some while, Tathra, too, in the dark of her heart. Now. Shall Kotta speak straight out to the warrior, or would he rather she went slowly to the matter?”
“What matter? Speak as you wish,” I said.
Kotta said, “Tathra was not your mother, Ettook not your father, the krarl of blue tents not your krarl, the Dagkta not your people.”
It was like a sword-flash in my brain; my lethargy ran away. I stared at her and said, too surprised to feel it yet, “Is this some riddle you are making?”
“No riddle. Do you remember I spoke of the Eshkir, the white-haired, white-eyed woman who was brought as a slave into the camp, and fled when her child was born?”
“I remember it.”
“Tathra also bore that dawn, a male, but it was sickly. I could gauge from my craft it would be dead within the day. When I left the warriors and came in the tent again, I found this: Tathra sleeping, the Eshkiri woman gone, and in the birth basket a child, as strong and sound as bronze.” Kotta leaned toward me. The brazier shone in her veiled face. Her hair was bound in a blue and scarlet cloth, and her sightless eyes, catching the glow, gleamed dully the same blue, the same scarlet from the flames. “Kotta is blind,” she said, “but Kotta sees, in her own fashion. The child in the basket might pass for Tathra’s child. A son, and healthy; it would bring her honor. But it was not Tathra’s child. Her boy was gone; the Eshkir took it. I think it died when I was from the tent. The Eshkir left her living baby and stole the dead; it was her gift to Tathra, the fruit of her own womb, which she did not want. You are that fruit. The Eshkir was your mother. Any might see it now. You have her beauty in you, and the man’s beauty of your father, too, that your mother loved and hated and slew.”
I began to feel as if I would strangle. My brain was alive with pictures and half-formed words, and my hands shook, but not from weakness.
“If I am to swallow this, then give me the bitch’s name, this wild cat who sloughed me, and left me behind like excrement.”
“She gave no name to me,” Kotta said, “but something of her past I heard two nights before she bore you. Her living had been a rare jumble, not as a woman lives among the tribes; a maze of death and battles and men she had companioned—she had lived several lives in one, it seemed to Kotta, as the snake wears and sheds several skins. And in the cities of the mask-faces she had been worshiped as a goddess. The man that got you on her was a king.”
“So she would say, no doubt,” I answered sharply. “Goddess bedded with king. Yet she was not a gold-mask—the lynx is silver. More probably she was some captain’s doxy and he cast her off.”
“No. She was no man’s doxy. For all she walked bowed among the tents, for all the woman’s burden in her womb, she was unlike any women you have seen. Think of the Eshkir you have put by your hearth. She has surprised you. But your mother was to her as the moon to the star. And your father was not a red chieftain but a black-haired lord, master of cities. You have your darkness from him.”
“This is very fine,” I said. “Why spill the beer now?”
“The one whom it served to keep silent has died. Though, indeed, Tathra knew her changeling almost from the beginning. Do you not recall how she altered to you when you took the lynx-mask from Ettook’s spoil chest? The mask your city wife wears, which was her mask who was your mother.”
I put my hand to my face to wipe the cold sweat from it.
Kotta said, “That summer we were late traveling, near two months late to reach the Snake’s Road, for there was great fighting over the mountains, the beginning of the wars that toppled the cities down, and now and then the braves would go looting ruins. Presently Seel learned of a fallen tower, the tower of an Eshkiri fort to the west, where it was said a king had died with his treasure around him. The warriors rode there, but came back with only one thing, the white-haired woman, your mother. They said she was a witch, or had claimed to be, but they did not believe it in truth, nor did she prove cunning in that way. Ettook let Tathra have her as her slave, and so she journeyed with us till that dawn she ran away, into the wild lands. I think no one ever saw her face but Kotta, and Kotta is blind.”
“This king, then,” I said, “do you have a name for him?”
“Yes. She named him. She was wife to him, yet she had slain him, for he was cold and cruel, and she thought him a sorcerer.”
“So do jealous bitches ever,” I said. “It is the sum of myth and story. Still I do not have his name, this miraculous father you gift me with.”
The name she gave me then seemed to come up from the coals of the fire and set the tent alight. I had not looked for such a thing, and while I had not, I had kept her words at bay, holding them from me. Having his name, my father, it cracked me wide, and let in all the rest like white-hot water.
For she told me I was the son of Vazkor.
4
My life was altered in a moment.
I remembered everything, each of the portents, the signposts that had been there for me, I, who was so unlike the tribes, different in all things, an outcast in the midst of my folk.
I thought of my boyhood dream—the white lynx mating with the black wolf, of the lynx-mask I had chosen, and the shock that had numbed my arm when I set hand to it. There had hung her frigid witch-spell on it still, that cat-goddess, Uastis, who wanted none of me.
I thought of my father, what he had been—the red pig, gross, stupid, snorting at his pleasure, my enemy from a child—and of my father as I found him—noble, a king, my own image pai
nted on the history of all the land. I was back on the fortress rock where I had taken Demizdor. Who but my magician father had risen in me then, given me a portion of his Power, the ability to speak the city tongue as he had spoken it? The masked men had fallen on their knees, seeing his face in mine, hearing his voice in my voice. I remembered, too, the dream I had had before, the knives in the icy water, and the blindness, and waking to say aloud, “I will kill her.”
She had betrayed him, my mother, so much was clear; betrayed and murdered him, and next been rid of me because I was his seed. It was a wonder she had deigned to let me live at all.
Suddenly the female noise outside the tent rose to an abnormal gray keening. The moon was up, and the women were going to Tathra’s dead-couch to make the chant.
And between me and the vision of the dark glory there came the omen of her sunken lifeless face.
Tathra was yet my mother. Though not my flesh, though I had not been shaped in her body, still it was so. Her breasts had fed me, her arms rocked me before ever I knew it. The other, though she had carried me and given me my life, was less mother to me than the beast who eats her young.
I got to my feet and the tent seemed to have shrunk about me; I felt taller than the roof of it.
“Kotta,” I said, “I am done with this place. I thank you for opening the cage.”
She said nothing, and I went out into the night.
It was the amber moon that follows the ripeness of the year, and the sky was cobalt blue about it, veiled at its horizons by the smoke of many hundred krarl fires. I stood on the somber earth, and I sensed him go from me, the man I had been, the warrior, the chief’s son, Tuvek Nar-Ettook. Even my bones and flesh seemed changing, and my brain rang.
I turned and walked toward the painted tent of Ettook. I, Vazkor’s son.
He was sitting among his elder warriors, and Seel was there in a corner, his eyes like spikes.
Ettook was mourning in his own way, not the death of his wife, but the death of his redheaded son.
“She was too old,” he said. “I was too amenable. I should have had done with the mare long since and taken a younger one who would not lose me sons. He was a fine boy, well made, but she killed him. They have little enough to do, these animals of women. Can they not even give us our sons alive?”
This putrid nonsense was volleying out of him like foul air as I opened the flap. When he saw me, he jumped, in the usual manner; then he analyzed me more closely, and he grew very nervous.
“Come, Tuvek,” he said. “Share the loss with me. She was a good wife for all that. She shall have a bangle or two to take with her into the earth. A good wife.”
The light of the lamps flickered over his face and over the yellow patterns on the blue walls.
I said, “Stand up, you bloody hog, and get on your feet. If you cannot live as a man, you shall at least die as one.”
The warriors sprang up instead, cursing. But they were like dogs without a master. My mind went back to how I had bested grown men when I was fourteen years, and I smiled.
Ettook sat quite motionless.
“What is this?” he said stupidly, sweating, knowing too well.
I had meant to knife him, to fight him and knife him if he rose to fight. Then I would cut down any others who came at me. I never dreamed I could not do it.
But, looking at him as he cringed there, showing his dirty teeth, his dirty mouth still sweet from his praise of Tathra, I knew there was another, better way to kill him.
I felt it come, like a slow wave, through my brain.
It was his, my father Vazkor’s, skill. He was guiding me as on the fortress rock.
I could kill a man by wanting him dead.
There was a pain in my skull, a splitting, slender, golden pain. And then a pale blotting of light over the painted tent.
The yellow patterns danced and united, the lamps guttered and smoked.
Ettook lunged from his cushions, impaled on a sword of slim lightning, screaming louder even than Tathra had screamed dying of his cockerel’s work. I let him sample it to the full.
Then, with no warning, the vital force in me became too great. I could not hold it. I felt my brain seared and bulging, and the arteries of my body were alive with molten heat. I was a man who had devoured fire, and was now devoured by fire from within. Everything seethed in light and vanished in it.
And the light folded into blackness like the turning of a page.
There were no dreams in that blackness, and no guide.
I swam up from the pitchy river to discover myself lying on my back, and over my face a broad sultry sky was swirling.
Not recognizing where I could be, only partially recalling the sequence that had gone before, I tried to raise myself. At once I was capsized by strengthlessness and nausea. Dragging myself over onto my side, I brought up everything that might have been in my belly and, so it seemed, half my guts into the bargain.
This done, I fell back wishing for death.
I ached and hurt as if I had tumbled to the bottom of a cliff and yet survived it. While I was unconscious, plainly someone had been paying me court with his feet; I had been pulled over the ground to this open place and left all night, tied only by my legs and a long halter at my neck to a thing of wood I could not properly make out. There were besides a host of amulets, little beads and pierced bits of metal knotted into the cords that bound me. And on my breast the leather was ripped open, and the one-eyed snake was daubed there in charcoal.
Then I remembered, and fathomed, too, what they were at. And I recollected also Demizdor.
I was stirring in earnest now, and abruptly a bunch of warriors came around me, and gathered where I could watch them. There were about fifteen of them. They seemed afraid and working to hide it, joking and poking at me with their spear-butts. One spit on me. I had no powers of any kind to answer him; he saw as much and spit again, into my eyes.
The other thing, which had put me here, was like a fever I had had. I could not get it straight in my mind—Kotta’s tale, the name of Vazkor, the unleashing of energy. Still, I had come to realize I had slain the chief of the krarl and, from the amulets, that they considered me a magician and strove to protect themselves. No doubt imagining these symbols kept me tame, they began shortly to invent new sports. I was suffering this helplessness on the ground, trying sometimes to lurch aside from the tether and the bindings and the wooden pole, and come at them—though it was useless—when, unexpectedly, the warriors left off their play.
I rolled sideways, and looked. I lay on the hillside above the krarl. I could make out the smoke below from the big cook-fire, now that I had leisure, and the length of the shadows told me it was late in the day. Up along the spine of the hill was coming Seel the seer in his robe of beast-tails and teeth. The wind twitched the tails and clinked the bronze lozenges together. I could not see his face against the vinegar light, but I could guess.
He drew near and stood over me, jabbering softly, and fingering his black-painted jaw.
Certainly he would have avowed that it was spells that had overthrown me in Ettook’s tent, those spells which subdued me now; but, like the warriors, he meant to be sure. He leaned down, made some ritualistic pass at my forehead, then darted back, quick as a lizard.
I could do nothing. I was weaker than a sick puppy, and he took note of it.
He clutched the snake symbol on his breast and chattered his fangs at the warriors, telling them to hoist me up and bring me into the krarl again. I suppose they had tethered me for the night on the slope, to keep themselves a safe distance from violent magic.
I was hauled down the hill as they had got me up it. It was no easy journey; the clouds wheeled and the hard ground stabbed, dropped, and slammed the breath from me. Someone had cracked my ribs for me, and presently I managed the girl’s trick and fainted. I returned into myself among the
crowding tents and the tall stacks of the unlighted fires of Sihharn Night.
They judged me by tribal rule.
In Ettook’s stead, Seel presided, and there were very many who spoke against me. In fact, for every enemy I had in the krarl there was found an orator standing in his garments.
As I had always recognized, they had only been waiting for the chance to take me. I had built my own pyre and, for good measure, climbed onto it.
I lay on my back, clenching my teeth and swallowing down my vomit, listening, and catching glimpses of fire and men, with Seel’s stink always in my nostrils.
Even Chula slunk by, and whispered to Seel-Na, who in turn whispered to her father. I had been practicing sorcery some while, it seemed, and this was why I had turned Finnuk’s daughter from my tent, preferring one of the witch-bred city women. How else indeed could I have overcome the mask-faces in their fort, save by oblique conjurings? The tribes knew well that city raiders were not to be beaten by men, being magicians themselves. Thus even my hero-deed was used against me.
I surmised they would punish me soon and had decided on the way of it, having the clue of the wooden tethering pole. It was a measure of my state that I had no fight left, and scarcely cared what they did. Yet Demizdor had furnished the real horror in my confused thoughts, and their accusations drove me into a turmoil of uncontrollable struggling, at which they were much amused. They would doubtless kill her, too, but kill her by the immemorial practice of men with women, raping the life out of her, and they would hang me upside down from the pole to watch, until my brain burst.
It was already twilight, the sun fallen—I had missed its going, a pity, since it was the last sunfall I should see. Now it was Sihharn Night, when the undead went hunting. The men’s side should be mounting the ghost-guard, the watchfires and torches be lighted, but nothing was done. I wondered that they had not thought it unlucky to leave this business off for mine but, like all their customs, even the darker ones were shallow cups.
I had no gods to pray to. I felt the lack of them then.
