What bitterness she should see so well, and yet so falsely. And tomorrow they would fight.
4
I woke late, stiff and chilled in spite of the warming sun, and with a sense of wrongness-whether in the world or in myself I did not know.
I came out into the camp. There was no fire burning, though ashes in plenty strewn from last night’s ritual. A wandering goat stared at me superciliously. Silence hovered. It
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was a strange thing; apart from the goat and myself there seemed no one else here, and yet I felt there was. I picked a way over the broken ground, churned up further by stamping feet. Torn-off tassels lay about, and there was some bloodnot human, but from a war sacrifice they had made, as if their own and others’ deaths were not enough. I reached the nearest tent, lifted the flap, and looked inside. The tent was empty. I crossed the track the women had already created, walking back and forth to the little waterfall on leatherbound hard feet, carrying pitchers. Three more tents, and into each one I thrust my search, and found nothing. I reached the fall where a spring burst in constant crystal urination from the lichen-stained rock, pouring into its own narrow well in the ground. No jars here now, and no sign that they had come today. My skin began to tingle. I turned to look over my shoulder many times. Was this some part of their battle I had missed-an invasion and taking? Yet, if they had been taken, why had I heard no sound of it? And there were no signs of violence.
Something nudged me in the side.
I cried out, flung sideways, rolled and scrambled upward, my hands reaching to grasp knives I no longer possessed.
My attacker-the goat-regarded me with mild amazement, and shook its head. I had begun to curse it when a sudden sharp spike of pain split my body. I bent over gasping, and, as if this were penance enough, was released from the vise as suddenly as I had been seized. Like the goat, I shook my head as if to shake the last vestige of the pain from me, and in that moment a woman shrieked, her cry, in the silence, seeming to fill the whole camp.
It was no ghost scream, too real, too large to be imagined.
I ran at once toward it, though I cannot judge why. It had occurred to me I was not courageous, had never been brave, only arrogant or unthinking.
Kotta’s tent. It was quiet now. The dry throat rattle of some bird started up in a thicket. I pulled open the flap and looked in. It was very dark, but I could see the blind woman crouched by an iron pot set on the little brazier.
“Kotta.”
She looked up.
“The Eshkir,” she said. “So they left you too. Good. You can help me.”
“But where have they gone?”
“The men to fight,” she said, “the women to hide. It’s always the way, in case the camp is taken.”
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“Why not you also, Kotta?”
“I have work to do, and so has she. We shall be too busy to run off into the rocks.”
I looked where she pointed, and saw Tathra lying on the rugs. The brazier picked out beads of sweat on her uncovered face like little red glass jewels. She twisted and murmured to herself, and then abruptly tautened, and began a series of awful grunts, louder and louder, until at last she reached the summit of her agony, and shrieked once more as I had heard her do from the fall.
My impulse was to go to her, quiet her. I recalled Illka, the girl who died in the ravine, and was still. Besides, what could I do now? Kotta drew the iron from the brazier, poured out thick liquid into a clay bowl, and took it to Tathra. She raised her head on one big arm and made her drink.
“A while yet,” Kotta said. “This will ease you.”
Tathra’s head fell back. Her large frightened eyes closed themselves.
“Useless,” she moaned. “Ettook will die in the fight, and they will kill me.”
After this, she seemed to doze, only murmuring from time to time incoherently.
Kotta laid out her things, primitive shapes of metal which bore a little resemblance to physicians’ instruments in the Cities. She set water to boil, and when it boiled away, sent me for more water at the fall.
The day dragged by and thickened into a brassy late afternoon light. I went outside, and looked around from the vacated camp. Nothing seemed stirring. I had asked Kotta where their place of battle was, but she did not know, or care. And it would be useless to look for them yet. If they won their fight it would be the other’s camp they would go to, for the women and the beer.
The black figure of a bird on long ragged wings wheeled over the sky, and away.
I rubbed my back, which was full of a thin relentless ache, and went in again to endure the rest of the vigil.
A hot summer moon rested lazily over the camp when Tathra’s child finally decided it would be free of her.
It seemed foolish for me to hate the child; it obeyed an instinct as old as woman herself, had no choice, and no doubt suffered also. Yet I hated it for the pain and terror it caused
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her, and through her and her shrieks and prayers to unknown gods, caused me.
Kotta had known it would be bad for her, though she had said nothing. Now she did what she could, but it was little enough at this time, for the machinery of birth was locked in Tathra, and could not be oiled or operated from outside. I gave her my hands, one after the other, and she tore them with her teeth and nails like a frenzied animal in a trap. All the black night hours’ she screamed in the tent, and the darkness wore itself down against us like a sharp knife blunting its edge on our nerves.
Toward dawn she lost consciousness and lay still. Her face was gray and shriveled, her body soaked in sweat. The waters had broken an hour before, and the tent smelled strong of blood. Kotta massaged her limbs, felt at her belly, under which the contractions rippled like sea-waves.
“Bad,” she said. “The child is wrongly placed. I feared as much.”
I helped her turn Tathra on her side, and kneeled so that her back could rest against me. Kotta took her copper instruments to the water and dipped them.
“I will do it now,” she said, “while she feels nothing. You are a strong one. If she wakes, you must hold her still.”
I put my arms around Tathra’s arms, and grasped her. Kotta came, and I looked away from what she did, abruptly squeamish and faint, despite the death I had seen and been the cause of. After a moment, I felt Tathra’s body quicken. She came awake in one frightful lunging effort.
“Hold her,” Kotta cried out, and it was very hard. My bones seemed snapped by her frantic twisting-and then she jerked twice, and she screamed as she had not screamed before, a mindless, unpremeditated scream, which was all one surprised, unbelieving accusation. Between the copper crabpincers of Kotta’s birth tongs, lay the body of a child, which had come from the womb feet first in its hurry to be out. So tiny, this thing which had caused such great distress.
“Ettook has a son,” Kotta said.
“Is it over?” Tathra sobbed, her eyes fast shut. “Is it finished?”
“All over, all finished,” Kotta said. She cut the cord with her knife.
I let Tathra onto her back, and presently Kotta pressed gently on her body and the afterbirth left her.
Then into that new soft silence rang another noise, a commotion that came from the forgotten world beyond the tent.
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“They are back,” Tathra said dreamily.
“Back or not, you will rest now. Ettook can wait to see his child.”
“His son,” Tathra said. She had not even opened her eyes to look at it, yet she knew herself safe now, held fast by that symbol of her worth. A bearer of warriors.
I slipped out of the tent to watch them come up between the rocks, and I felt a heady contempt. They were drunk and bloody, tattered like hawks from a sky fight, tipping back their red-plaited heads to drink from leather beer-skins. After them came a string of valley horses loaded with stolen gear: weapons, food, jewelry, and a train of out-tribe women, whimpering from the rough treatment they had already suffered and premonitions of further rough treatment to come. They were redheads, too, a krarl half kin to this one, yet still fair game.