It was strange. His face was peaceful and expressionless, but his look was full of a fixed terror. He could not get put of my grip. My eyes were white serpents, already numbing him with their poison.
“I have betrayed the hearth-guest of my chief. I have eaten the bread of friendship with him, but still given him into the hands of his enemies. The krarl priests will set me a penance for it, but they will understand the need.”
“What need, Asutoo, my brother?”
“No man may take a warrior-woman and use her as a woman unless she allows it. Darak took her without honor, and she went gladly. He would have drained her warrior blood and shown her no courtesy. I, Asutoo, the chiefs son, would have let her ride before me to the battle, not dragged her by the reins of the horse. And he put her into a woman’s dress, like any girl of the tents, the white dress-even the one who rode in his chariot. He made of her the shield, that was the spear. It must not be, I walked after in the shadows, and the silver one passed in the sky, the Star chariot. It was my sign.”
“What then did you do, Asutoo, my brother?”
“I found the merchant Raspar before the Great Race of archers. It was hard, but I made him know who Darak was, and he remembered no other had brought a caravan safe to Ankurum. They had some of Darak’s men in the Warden’s dungeon, and took two and burned them with fire until they told the truth. Raspar said the race must pass first; they could take Darak at the feast, unarmed. I asked the warrior woman be spared. He said at first it could not be done, but afterward he sent me word it could, and there was writing from the Warden-”
He stopped speaking, staring into my eyes.
I was cold, so cold, but I smiled at him, although he could not see it behind the shireen. Within the icy shell a scarlet bird tapped its beak to be free. Raspar would have kept me for himself, perhaps, had I wanted to stay with him, but Raspar had wanted his good name most of all. Well, he had recovered the price of the weapons of the north.
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I stood up. Asutoo stood up. We faced each other quite still and quiet, as I turned the blade in my hand.
“Asutoo, my brother,” I said at last, “it is fitting I should give you my thanks.”
The shell burst, and it filled me, flowing warm and bright from my guts into my lungs, heart, and brain; and from my brain into my arm, my hand, my knife. I stabbed forward, and down into the groin, twisted and withdrew. I, who remembered how to kill cleanly, had taken the privilege of my kind, and forgotten it. He bowed forward, groaning over the agony, trying to hold the blood inside himself with his hands. I leaned against the wall and watched him die. It took a little while.
Then I turned and went from the cave, down the slope, and found the hobbled horses gnawing at the rain-wet grass. The downpour had eased. I wiped my knife on the moss and resheathed it. I mounted, and, with the slightest pressure of my knees, I directed the horse upward, toward the mountains.
Near the crest of that place, I turned suddenly, and looked back at the dark mouth of the cave, and it seemed there was a waterfall plunging down from it, not white, but red. The scarlet bird in me was beating now to be free. It burst from my mouth in long bloody streamers of sound, and the horse, terrified, bolted under me, upward, upward, until it seemed we had left the ground, and flew in the face of the bright red sky.
BOOK TWO
Part I: Across the Ring
1
One by one the red flowers dropped from my hands, down the dark shaft of the tomb. At the bottom, the dead one lay.
“Weep,” said the voices around me. “If you would only weep, he would be whole.”
But I could not weep, although my throat and eyes scorched with the unshed tears. And he was changing now; it was too late. Into green hard stuff he was changed, into a man’s figure of jade.
“Karrakaz,” I said into the dark. “I am here, Karrakaz.”
But Karrakaz did not come. Somewhere in the deep of me, gorged on the blood of Shullatt, of the villages, of the merchants at the ford, of Essandar and the others in the Sirkunix, but best of all, bloated with the blood of Asutoo, the ancient Demon of Evil and Hate lay sleeping.
“We are one thing, you and I,” it had said to me in Keeool.
“So Karrakaz enorr,” I whispered. “I am Karrakaz.”
I was not certain how I had come there, that high-up echoing place. I remembered the plains horse running in terror under me, but then probably I had fallen or been thrown. I was very close to the sky; I sensed this more than knew, for I lay in a black hole in the rock. I say a hole-it was a cave, I suppose, yet the darkness was so thick it pressed closer than any stone. No light. Yet behind my eyes, light: pale and green and red. I do not know how long I had been in the cave, perhaps as much as fifteen days. It was very cold, and I was not really at any time properly conscious. Dreams, hallucinations, and the dark reality were all mingled and lost in each other. I cannot really say what I felt. I can
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only recall that recurring fantasy that If only I could weep, Darak would be restored to me, and each time, somehow, the blazing tears would not burst forth, and he was turned to jade.
Voices, new voices. Not the voices in my mind, but things separate and alien. A deep voice, urging and impatient, a higher, lighter voice, shrill with echoes, hanging back a little, but not much. Then other sounds, unmistakable and intense in the dark. And then a little silence. Suddenly the girl whispered, frightened,
“Gar, Gar! Look!”
Gar grunted something.
“No, an animal. Over there.”
There was a small altercation between them, then Gar getting up, a big, shaggy, strong-smelling man. His blackness, blacker than the black around me, fell over my eyes.
“Sibbos!” he muttered-some deity’s name, used as an oath. “It’s a boy-no, a woman-a masked woman.”
The girl was scrambling up beside him, pulling down her skirts as she came.
“She’s dead.”
“No, she’s not, you blind bitch. I’ll take off this mask-” His great hand came reaching for the shireen, and, in an instant, my own flared up and struck his away. He cursed, and jumped back, startled, while the girl shrieked.
“Alive, all right,” he muttered. “Who are you, then?”
“No one,” I said.
“Simple,” the man observed. He turned. The girl caught his arm.
“You can’t leave her here.”
“Why not?”
They argued as the man strode down the length of the cave, whistling, the girl hanging on his arm. And then, abruptly, he cursed again, strode back, and picked me up. He slung me across his shoulder, and, in so doing, whether from anger or clumsiness I was unsure, he cracked my head against an overhang. A pain like an adder lanced through my temple, and I was thrown back into the dark.
I thought I was in the ravine camp. There was smoke and muddy light, what seemed a huddle of tents around me. Meat was roasting, dogs were running about yelping at kicks, as though being kicked still surprised them. Something creaked continuously overhead, a yellow arc against the darkness.
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“Shall I fetch her some meat?” a voice asked.
“That one couldn’t eat meat in her state; broth or porridge.” This was an old voice, and soon an old woman was bending over me. It was easy to classify her as old, her face was wrinkled, and wrinkled again upon its own wrinkles like sand after the path of the sea. Her skin was yellow but her teeth amazingly white and sharp, like the teeth of a small fierce animal. Her eyes, too, were very bright, and when she moved, she was like a snake, sinuous and strong. She bent over me, but I had shut my eyes.
“What about the mask?” the girl was asking. “Shouldn’t you take it off?”
“That’s the shireen,” the old woman said. “This one’s a Plains woman. They think if they go bare-faced with any but their own men, they’ll die.”
The girl laughed scornfully.
“Laugh away. You’ve never had such a belief drummed into your head since childhood. Have you never seen a cursed man? No, I daresay you haven’t. Well, a healer puts a curse on him and says: ‘In ten days’ time you’ll drop down dead.’ And the man goes away and thinks himself into it, and on the tenth day he does just what she says. It’s all what you believe, girl. And if this one thinks she’ll die if she’s unmasked, we’d best leave her as she is.”