In their obscure confusion, they scattered before us. I hacked the kneeling men away to get at the standing angry men behind. I felt no battle lust; it was a grim task that must be done. Presently, I had a city sword, red to its hilt, and I was bathed with blood. It was like a killing of pigs. Though
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more than twice our number, they scarcely resisted us, as if some destiny had found them out and we were its instrument.
In the end they were silent, and no others came to challenge us.
During the fight, such as the fight was, the guiding principle left me. I was glad to lose it, once it was gone. I wiped off my new sword on the furs of a corpse, and grinned with no laughter, telling myself, Well, now, Tuvek, you have been possessed by a demon, in which kind you do not believe. I congratulate you. I spit on the ground, as if I could spit out the ancient language I had mastered and forgotten, both so quickly.
The warriors were stripping jewelry from the dead. A few had ventured to the tents and were inventing doors in them with their blades, and pulling out threadbare cushions of velvet sewed with pearl and similar mildewed wonders. Now and again they would happen on a rack of swords or a metal dainty worth keeping, and a ferocious yell of acquisition echoed through the broken fort.
I, too, went searching shortly, destructive and covetous as any of them, with a sense of I knew not what gnawing at my spirits.
I walked right through the empty tent homes, and reached the last pavilion, and realized I had selected well.
This pavilion was the largest, set a little back, half hidden, around an angle of the eastern wall, and ten black horses were penned there. By the pen one of the dark-haired slave men was squatting. He was like those I had seen earlier, though this one was wide awake. I had met with none in the fight, and supposed they had run off, so I glared at him, and shook the sword, anticipating a prompt view of his heels.
His face remained blank and wooden as a slat, and. sluggish as muddy water, he stepped aside to let me by. I did not trust his docility and that made me reconsider.
We had dealt with around sixty men in this camp, but the force that had come on the valley had been stronger-seventy or eighty. Likely some had ridden ahead to another destination, but here were ten horses by a large tent. Might there be ten men inside, prepared for me?
I spun about on the dark slave, and caught him by his gray-fleshed neck. I asked him questions, but I had lost the
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magic speech, and either he did not understand the tribal tongue or had no wish to. Finally I fisted him asleep, having had enough killing and foreseeing more, and went to the pavilion timidly as a bride.
Before it a golden banner, real gold beaten thin as a wafer and painted with a crested bird in white enamel, whistled softly in the wind on its pole. The pavilion was crimson velvet, almost black with age. Tassels of green-tarnished gold cascaded across the drapery of a hidden entrance, artfully showing where the opening might be discovered. I went to another side and stuck the sharp city sword straight in the velvet and tore it up like rotten flax. Then I dashed into the tent, alert to deal instant death on either hand.
No need. He had been there before me, the skull-headed gentleman.
A lamp of amber glass depended from the roof frame, showing the scene in perfect detail.
There were but three of them, after all. They had pulled aside the elegant rugs with which the floor of the tent was strewn, and fixed their own blades in the craggy floor of the ruin beneath, point uppermost, then neatly fallen on them.
I had often heard the tale of men who preferred suicide to this or that shame or deprivation or terror. However, hearing the tale and seeing the evidence are not the same. It shook me, though. It made me think at once, rationally and with an abject, instinctive loathing, what would be my test, my ultimate unbearable burden, that I would choose my own iron in my belly rather than endure?
Each man was golden masked, one in the manner of a hawk, and his saffron hair spilled in his spilled blood-the rider in the thorn wood.
Why this? Lost honor, humiliation that we had come from the slave-pit and beaten them? But these had not even ventured out to fight.
I raised my head. The pavilion was hung with soft dazzling silks, embroideries, and fraying gauzes, which made an effervescence of the amber lamp. Then a gauze stirred and drifted aside like powder. And something stood across from me, silver gleaming, a great dart of fire through a jewel-I leaped back, the sword ready. And lowered the sword like lead in my leaden hand.
It was not a city warrior standing there. I had not con-
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sidered women might be with them, there had been no others we had seen; besides, at first she did, not seem a woman but a sorceress, unheralded, materialized so bright and sudden, and the three dead between us.
She wore some kind of silver dress of snake scales, and a bodice of milky emeralds that left bare her breasts. Her waist was narrow but her breasts were full, a soft tactile whiteness flushing to warm darkness at their tips, and round as little moons. Her breasts might have reassured me she was human, too distracting to be celestial flesh. But her face was masked, the shape of a silver deer with eyes of apple-green quartz, and behind it her hair was like another sort of fire, a fire of glacial gold, burning with coldness.
She spoke to me in the city speech I could no longer interpret. I did not comprehend the words, but her meaning was exactly conveyed: the contempt of the king for his slave-no, worse, of the goddess for a piece of human offal spoiling the pasturage of paradise.
I had never got such a tone from a woman, nor ever considered I should. I was too amazed not to bear it a moment, like the mule his load, and no doubt my mouth was ajar to tempt night-flying insects.
Then I saw how her right hand, half hidden in the folds of her skirt, was clenched on a small shiny star, and I flung myself sideways in the second she threw her dagger at me. It flashed over my shoulder, and sliced among the draperies of the tent wall.
At that, seeing her failure, she cried out. It was a mortal voice, a young voice, rough with grief and fury and fright. It gave me back my sight and I looked again. Now I saw only a girl, trembling with her fear, a masked girl with naked breasts that made my mouth go dry.
“Well,” I said, abandoning the sword, “your luck isn’t with you tonight, deer-headed maiden.”
I knew she could no more understand the tribal speech than I hers. The lack of verbal communion reduced our intercourse to one eternal symbolic channel. I was glad it was so mundane, glad I had now the excuse to forget how she had seemed to me a dagger-cast before.
I crossed over the dead men, and, as I came at her, she turned and tried to run. All her pale topaz hair gushed like a
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fall of water over her back. It was easy to grab her by the hair, to bring her to face me and to thrust off her mask.
She was beautiful. I had never seen beauty before, not like her beauty. Her skin was white, her hair white as silver at the roots where it entered her white flesh, her mouth was smooth and shaped, and red as a summer fruit, and her eyes were green as the gems of her bodice. Everything of this I glimpsed like a flame burning up at me.
She did not struggle any longer. Her fight was done. I had her easily.
Her breasts filled my hands and she smelled of youth and womanhood. I did not hurt her, there was no need for she never tried to evade me; nor was she a virgin. I had not expected it, coming as she did out of that camp of men. She was their whore, or someone’s, and now she would be mine. The gate between her thighs was golden as her hair, and the road beyond the gate was made for kings. Her green jewel eyes reflected back the lamp in the roof. She never shut them; neither did she look. Despite her heart and mind, her body Was good to me.