So I fished the spring streams, and played gambling games with the warriors, or shot at a mark, tended my new horses, took my dogs and hunted, lay with Chula or Asua or with another woman or two about the krarl, and presently the tents were struck and we were on the old road of the Snake going east, and there were spears and arrows to be refurbished, and weapons to be got in trim for the season’s battles. And here and there, between these activities and actions of a tribal male, I would catch glimpses of a woman in the black shift and the black shireen, walking with pots to a pool, or bent to wash linen, or at the cook-fire (she was never idle, Chula saw to that), and her hair would fold into the wind of spring like a golden wave.
The krarl had not forgotten my hero’s deed as swiftly as I had supposed they would. When the first war challenge came on Snake’s Road, the five of Ettook’s tents I had got from the fortress crowded around me like old comrades, telling the tale again, vowing I should eat the livers of the Skoiana, who had flung the war spear. Now that I should have some fighting I
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thought I would work the thorn out of my hide that way. It is not constructive to ponder on a woman’s thighs when you are shoulder to shoulder with a battle-wild brave and a band of his spear-brothers flying up on left and right. But the next part of my lesson was to perceive I had lost my fighting madness, lost my joy in killing, lost my hate, or most of it. It was not that I was afraid. It was that it no longer mattered to me, my strength and my youth and my valor had gone for nothing because I could not take my victories to her.
I did not realize any of this; at least, not with my brain, only in my guts and my spirits.
Still, we fought the Skoiana and the Hinga, six battles in twelve days. The last was a hunt, far off the road, with a Skoiana krarl burned at the end of it and a host of prisoners, women and herd animals brought off-there was still the feud of the broken truce between the Dagkta and the Skoi. I was away three days in all on that venture, and returned bone tired and raw with anger. There had been women in plenty and I had not wanted them, only one, and she was in the tent of my wives, that black shireen with her filigree hair.
I rode back with the braves, they half drunk and reeling in their saddles, the dismal train of captives blundering behind. Ettook had gone ahead with his older men to count his spoil on the sly. He was distressed as ever that I had missed death; he never ceased, I think, to wish for it.
But I paid all this small heed. The entire while I was remembering Demizdor, how she had thrown her dagger at me, how I had stabbed her deeper. I had made a pact with my lust, that I would have her with no regard for any effete city-female silliness. I would use her up, and be done with her. There was no other way to cut the arrowhead from my flesh.
It was the Warrior month, and well into it, the margin between spring and summer, a line no thicker than a silver wire. We came through the stockade near evening, and the krarl women ran out of their hiding places to greet us with raucous cries and screams; all tradition, and very stale it seemed to me.
The sky was deep blue, sheer blue, with not a cloud. It was a mild season after the cruel winter, smelling already of flowers from the forest that lay alongside the camp. When the warriors and their wives grew quieter, you could hear the
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flint-striking of the crickets in the grasses, and the central summer fire was pale as water in the flashing sunlight.
Before I set about the business in hand, I went to the rocky Wood-shore where the pines grew in a tangle, and a stream ran bright as a knife. I slung down my gear and washed off the war paint in the stream, and drank there. I was exhausted but not ready to sleep, rather wound up tighter than a spring. I could think of nothing but Demizdor. How she looked, how her face had looked when last I saw it, her walk, her body, her eyes. Something of Tathra’s gloomy murmuring came to me, of the goddess-women who ate a man’s soul. I knew that if Demizdor resisted me I should kill her, and if she lay like ice and I could not warm her through, then a bit of my manhood would wither in that cold. It was very like a spell, a curse.
When I left the stream I was trembling, and it was not the cool of the water alone.
I rubbed myself dry on my cloak and dressed as the shadows were lengthening, turning to red-amber and purple from the fringe of the pines. If I had had a god, I should have offered to him. For the gentleness of my slave so she should spare me the rod of her scorn.
Then, like a filament of the sorcery itself, I saw a figure coming along the path the women had worn to the stream, carrying a great jar to be filled. And it was Demizdor.
I was almost afraid of her, or of the moment, or of my own self. I had not, even at that instant, understood the power of the image, made worse by denial and three nights and days without it. You have had this bitch, I thought; you will have her again. She’s yours to take, so take her and have done.
I leaned on a young pine by the rushing water, and let her come up.
“My wives keep you busy,” I said. “That’s good. A slave should not waste her time.”
I put my hand on her shoulder to wheel her around to me. And she cried out, and the jar fell from her hands.
I knew at once she would never have cried so, simply at a touch. She would have been disdainful, silent, wooden, not this. This was unpremeditated, an expression of shock, or pain. Immediately everything in me was altered. I felt the change but did not recognize its principle.
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“What now?” I said softly. “Has my dulcet wife been scourging you as she begged to do?” She did not speak. She stood straight and looked away from me.
Then I discovered a red wetness on my fingers that had met her body, and I took hold of her gently and drew her back and found that the shoulder of her smock was sticky. There was a lacing there; I knew it well, having had occasion to unlace a woman before. Presently I had the garment peeled open.
I had been looking at death and wounds head on for days. This was like my first sight. Her skin, cream and smooth as almond, had been ground into a pulp of blood and flesh on the point of her shoulder.
When I saw, my eyes blackened and there came a roaring white thunder in my throat.
“Who?” I said to her. Somehow, this time, I guessed she would answer.
“My mistress, the wife of my master the warrior,” she said, steady as a blade.
“Chula.”
Despite her immobility, her tone, she was burning hot under my hands. Her weakness cauterized mine.
“How did the sow do this to you?” I said.
“Oh, she is very just. I broke her enameled comb, your gift as I believe. So she combed my skin for me to remind me in the future to be more careful of her possessions. She said I should always have the scar. She made sure of it.”
“Demizdor,” I said. I had long since got her name perfect. None of the others could speak it; they called her Demya, when they bothered with a name. I held her against me, and her eyes came up to mine, wide, cloudy with fever, greener than wild grasses. She heard it in my voice; I also. It had needed this to make me see where my path had led me.
I sat her on the bank, tore my cloak and sopped up the water with it to bathe the wound. She whimpered at the cold of the water, and I saw her clench her teeth beneath the veil of the shireen not to whimper again.
“You shall go to Kotta,” I said. “She will tend this better than I.”
I took her up in my arms; she was lighter than when I had raised her last and she had been nothing to carry then. She had starved as well as all the rest it seemed.