She was sitting beside me. In her silver mask, I could not see her mood, but she faced straight down to the valley, and her hands were motionless and nonchalant on the rein.
“The carrion eaters must bless your princes that provide such dinners for them.”
“Do the tribes never kill?” she said, quick as a blow.
“We kill hand to hand, belly to belly. Not with iron phalluses shot from behind a hill.”
“With our cannon we have razed our own cities,” she said. “Don’t think I will pity your little loss.”
“For a slave you set up a strident mewing.”
“I am not your slave,” she said, “though you may play at it. Hang me with shackles, beat me, murder me. I am still no slave of yours.”
“None of this is necessary. I will get you with child. Then we will see how much my slave you are.”
She had no tune to counter that.
The men behind us were sitting also very quietly, sullen and sour at the deserted camp. Against the odds, they had hoped for better. But their chiefs and their kin had reckoned them lost and discounted them, and when the night of the gathering was done, they had turned homeward for the Dagkta tentings. I wondered how many dying men had been helped across the threshold by the priests’ knives. I wondered, too, how Ettook celebrated to himself my death, for he would be sure of my death, knowing where I had gone. I had not sampled this dish before. Too much alive, I could not envisage my alleged slaughter. I visualized instead his bastards
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squealing for their dues, and widows wailing for their husbands taken captive, and at that I remembered my mother. She also would believe me slain or slave. I had forgotten that.
“So,” I said to the warriors, “they would not wait. Let’s make on and surprise them. They will piss blood when they see us. But there’s half a day’s riding yet.”
The men growled agreement, turning their mounts along the track.
I set a hot pace for them on my new horse, using its starry spurs, and dragging my silver-faced slave by her bridle.
4
The sun was long down, the night moonless and black, when we picked over a narrow pass between the craggy, pine-bearded heights, and the spoons of the camping valleys appeared below, falling away into the mountains, and scattered for miles with several thousand yellow coals of fires.
The warriors were already breaking into bands, making for their own krarls and their own revelations. Already the bond was snapped that had held the twenty-three as one, and their shout for me was only so much frosty breath left behind. I saw then I should have bound them harder to me, that it might have profited me to do so. They had been ripe for swearing blood-brotherhood; they might have followed me after, strength at my back. It was too late now, the time of action blown away, ridden off over the slopes with them. Even Ettook’s five men still with me were champing to get home, the dangerous adventure just a story nagging to be told. I had lost my chance.
It was not so much slovenliness that had made me miss it, either, but the arrogance that had come on me when I entered the fortress, and which had never ebbed from my veins. And she had made it worse, my goddess-slave. Her razor con-
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tempt had sharpened mine. I saw them all through her eyes, as she was seeing me, a herd not worth the driving.
As I idled there, the impact of the other grim farce smote me. For not frequently do the dead sit among the mourners at their own burying.
To Ettook’s warriors I said, “Once we are over a ridge or two, maybe we should go quietly. It will be pleasant to see how we are missed, and by whom.”
And they showed their teeth, tasting the flavor of it, though their loyalty to me was gone.
So we went, delicate as mice, into Ettook’s krarl.
As I got closer, I could hear plain enough what they were at.
There was a humming and howling, and sometimes a screaming like beasts in a trap. They had lost the most of any krarl: seven dead from the cannon, five stolen or dead, and one of those the chief’s heir. They could not choose but hold a death-watch tonight, the fourth night, as the custom was.
I left Ettook’s braves to their own plots, and tethered my city horses on the outskirts of the camp. Whatever else, I did not think the warriors would come back and steal them. Demizdor, however, I kept with me, still mounted.
They had cleared a great square below, I could see it from the pines, and I came down following the trees like a shadow, to watch the fun.
Torches burned at the four corners of the square, and a fire at its center. A couple of young trees had been hacked up and set burning on it. Around that fire they stood, my grieftorn kindred.
On the west side were the women. Ghula was foremost, hi all her adornments, everything I had ever given her, glittering and gleaming, like a heap of plunder, with her hair tattered and her dress tattered, and her arms and the round tops of her breasts scored by her nails. Her shireen clung to her tears beneath it, but her fists were clenched. Through her weeping, you could see her fury. She had missed her miniature queenship because of my death, and she could have killed me for dying.
At the back of my first wife the other two were sobbing less obtrusively, with their children around them. Big-bellied Moka had her four little sons clasping to her knees, crying
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too, without understanding, the way children will when the adults set up a dirge. Asua held in her arms the girl baby who had so far surprised me by living, but she was watering it as if she meant to drown it now. Chula’s three boys, meanwhile, had been lined up by their mother, parading their sorrow as she did, though the eldest was only just upward of four. They looked like three tiny black bears, still in their winter furs. No doubt she would have begun shouting later that their heritage was denied them, gone to the grave with me.
There was a mass of other women, wringing their hands and lifting their heads occasionally to ululate like she-wolves. They were bewailing the clan totems-the chief’s son and braves, rather than the man Tuvek, or their own dead husbands.
I looked for Tathra next, with my heart booming, but she was nowhere. I thought how she had been when I left, and how she might have grown ill from bad news. It took the spice from the meat, and I was going immediately to seek her, when the drums of the men’s side east of the fire began.
Out of the press of warriors, Seel came, his tarry face painted like a skull now, white on the black, and in his magic robe of embroidered symbols, the robe of the war dance. He clutched his hands on the one-eyed snake-carving at his neck, and behind him moved Ettook, bowed as if a mountain of misery sat on his shoulders. It gripped me. They were going to make the death chant for me. These, my best of enemies, were going to exclaim to their gods of my virtues and the joy they had had from me. They were going to entreat the Lords of the Black Place to set me free to return to them.
The people drew back from the fire somewhat, to give Seel room. He started to stamp and flap like on of those birds I had seen feeding on corpses earlier in the day. As he blundered by it, he threw pinches of stuff in the flames, and they spat and hissed.
He screeched the names of the men the krarl had lost; at each one a woman or two shrieked. At my name there was a huge moaning, and the warriors beat their spears together.
“Our master is Death. Death is god,” Seel ranted. “Twelve of our sons has he taken, but worse than our sum of sons, the son of the chief, the hope of the krarl, the rising star among the tents, our tomorrow, has he taken!”
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Chula screamed excellently on the cue. The three tiny bears dived into her skirts in fright, so I felt sorry for them.
Ettook lumbered in the broad firelight. He showed around the spearheads, the gold bangles and bronze knives I had taken in the last war months. In the manner of the ritual he praised my valor and my cleverness.
“Tuvek, the flower of my loins, my son best of all sons. Generous to me as the rain to the pasture, brave as the leopard in his battles. Who does not remember Tuvek’s courage when the foe ran before him like rabbits? Who was the young god riding among the warriors? It was my son, Tuvek. He who made the women sigh like a wheat field in the wind, he who rode the men beneath the hooves of his horse, whose arms were stronger than brass, and whose wit was sharper than diamond, whose desire made sons, whose anger mad© silence. Ah, Tuvek, my son, what is there in death’s place which causes you to linger there?” He rubbed his face, which was a healthy jocund color. “When the raiders came,” Ettook roared, “who but Tuvek dared to follow them? It must mean death to try blade for blade with the cities, yet still he would go. I forbade him, for his safety, yet he paid no heed. He went to save his brothers, the braves. He died for them. Who will not weep for Tuvek, my best of all sons, lord of all warriors?”