“YOU ARE TO CALL ME VAZKOR,”
I said. “Did I not tell you?”
Her hair was like a bright smoke in the dawnlight and she said:
“There is the rubble of a tower near Eshkorek. That is the grave of Vazkor. Twenty years ago he took up the cities in his hands and ground them to his will, and smashed them. He wed a goddess-witch; she was called Uastis. There is some child’s legend that she was slain but recovered from death, that she took on the form of a white lynx, and fled before the soldiers came for her. They say she is living yet, in another land, Uastis Karnatis. But Vazkor is dead.”
My spine shivered and I bade her be silent. I could still picture how they had kneeled to me in the fortress, the elder men who could remember him, who maybe had looked in his face, and witnessed it once more in mine.
“You are to call me Vazkor,” I said.
DAW BOOKS BY TANITH LEE
THE BIRTHGRAVE
DON’T BITE THE SUN
THE STORM LORD
DRINKING SAPPHIRE WINE
VOLKHAVAAR
VAZKOR, SON OF VAZKOR
QUEST FOR THE WHITE WITCH
NIGHT’S MASTER
DEATH’S MASTER
ELECTRIC FOREST
SABELLA
KILL THE DEAD
DAY BY NIGHT
LYCANTHJA
DELUSION’S MASTER
VAZKOR, SON OF VAZKOR
by
Tanith.
Lee
Book One
PART 1
The Krarl
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One summer when I was nine years old, a snake bit me in the thigh. I remember very little of what followed, only being mad with heat and tossing about to escape it as if my flesh were on fire, while time passed in patches. And then it was over and I was better, and running on the green slopes again among the tall white stones that grew there like trees. I learned after that I should have died from the snake’s venom. My body turned gray and blue and yellow from it; a pleasant sight I must indeed have been. Yet I did not die, and even the bite left no scar.
Nor was this the only occasion that I brushed with death. When I was weaned I spewed up everything they gave me except goat milk. Another child would have gone no further, for the krarls generously leave their weaklings as a meal for wolves. Being the son of a Dagkta chief by his favorite woman, my mother’s pleading no doubt saved me. Presently I got over my delicacy and the forbearance of my father was justified.
I survived by fighting and my days were filled up with it. When I was not fighting for my life, I was fighting every other male child of the krarl. For, though I was Ettook’s son, my mother was the out-tribe woman, and I had all the look of her from my very first day in the world. Black-blue hair that was silk on her and a lion’s mane on me and her black eyes, like the blind back of the night sky.
One of my earliest memories is of my mother as she sat combing my hair over my scalp, neck, and shoulder blades. She drew the wooden comb through and through those whips with the sensuous possessiveness of all mothers. She was proud of me, and I was proud to have her pride. She was beautiful, was Tathra, and she was like me. I leaned on her knees as she combed me, and even then, I recall, my
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knuckles were cut open from some battle, someone’s teeth I had loosened because they had called her names. From the beginning I was conscious of being unique and out of the herd. I never lived an hour without it. It made me sharp and hard and taught me to keep my thoughts in my head, which was all to the good. My mother Tathra shone like a dark star in among the red and yellow people. It was clear, even to the child I was, they hated her for her glamour and her position, and me they hated as the symbol. When I fought them, I fought for her. She was the rock at my back. My ambition was that I must better all of them so that I should uphold her rights and keep her approbation. My father was not exempt from this ambition, nor my dislike.
Ettook was a coarse red man. A red pig. When he came in the tent, then I was put out. With others he would say, “Here is my son,” boast of my height and the muscle growing in me, boast because he had made me, like a good spear. Yet when I displeased him, he beat me, not exactly as a warrior beats his son to tan sense into his hide, or out of it, as the case may be; Ettook beat me with pleasure, because I was his to beat, also something more. I came to see later in my life that each of those blows was saying, “Tomorrow you will be stronger than I, so now I will be stronger than you, and if I break your back, well and good.”
Besides, I had no look of him. Somewhere in him, ignored by the pig that ruled his brain, festered the half-suspicion that Tathra had got me from one of her own folk, before he burned their krarl and took her as spear-bride. He had sons by other women, but Tathra he prized. I have seen him stand and look at some plundered bangle he meant to hang on her, and his cock would push out his leggings just from that. I could have killed him then, that red pig grunting for my mother’s white flesh. Supposedly it is the oldest hate of man for man, but always new. Truly, Ettook and I were not friends to each other.
The Boys’ Rite came due for me when I was fourteen. It fell always in the month of the Gray Dog, the second of the Dog months, during the winter camping.
In spring the tribes went to seek the fertile lands beyond the Snake’s Road; in fall of leaf they came back and moved up into the mountains. The high valleys, contained and shel-
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tered between jagged peaks, escaped the worst of the bladed winds and snow. In certain areas the valley bottoms plunged below the snow line; here grass flourished and evergreen, and waterfalls spilled smashing down, too fast to freeze. In these spots the deer and bear came to browse, sluggish, easy prey for hunters’ arrows.
Ettook’s wintering was shared with other krarls than the Dagkta, with red Skoiana and Hinga and yellow-haired Moi not five miles distant, everyone under a sullen truce. It was too bitter cold for war at that season. The men built long tunnels of packed snow, stone, hide, mud, and boughs, and the tents crouched under them, or in the ribbed caves below the mountain shanks. There was little to do in winter. Storytelling, drinking and gambling, eating and sex were the major pastimes. Sometimes a skirmish between rival hunting bands relieved the monotony. If one man killed another under truce, he must pay a Blood-Price, so the warriors murdered each other carefully and seldom. Krarl ritual was the only other solace.
The Boys’ Rite was one of the mysteries of the men’s side. No male became a warrior without he had undergone it. Since I could remember, I had known it was ahead of me, this milestone of my life, and I dreaded it, and did not positively know why. But I would rather have eaten my tongue than said so. Even my mother I did not tell. I could not let her see me weaken.
There was a girl I had had in leaf-fall. She was a year or so older than I, and had led me on and then vehemently regretted it when I took her teasing for earnest. She had been at me to shame me, for the women hated Tathra most and passed on their hate to their daughters. The girl thought me unready, no doubt, but she was mistaken. She screamed with pain and anger and bit my shoulders to try to dislodge me, but the shireen-her woman’s veil-mask-blunted her teeth, and I was enjoying things too much to let her go just then.
When I was done and found her bleeding I was sorry a moment, but she said, “You out-tribe vermin, you shall bleed too, and yelp when the needles go into you. I hope they may kill you.”
Generally the women feared and revered the males of the krarl, but she had some spirit for me because I was Tathra’s son. I held her by the hair until she whimpered.
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“I know about the needles. That is how the warrior-marks are made. Don’t think I shall be squeaking under them like a maiden with the key in her lock.”
“You,” she spat, “you will writhe. You will swell up and die of it. I shall ask Seel-Na to put a curse on you.”