Presently Demizdor recovered sufficiently to ride on a mule behind the mule of Kotta as we traveled-she had journeyed in a litter before that, slung between two horses, with a canopy on a frame to hold off the sun, a conveyance usually reserved for women after childbirth if the krarl was on the move. When camp was made each night, Demizdor would sit outside Kotta’s tent, daring to be idle, as no woman of the tribes would dare to be. Later, when the lamps were lit, I would visit her, for I could not keep away.
Our conversations were slight, our touches few. It was less than a crust to my starvation, and her tongue was still sharp. She chid me for a savage, she mocked me; she damned our ignorance, our lack of books or music, our treatment of our women and ourselves. I bore all this because her eyes denied it. Her eyes were now as I had seen other women’s eyes. One part of me was glad at my restraint, my waiting for her health before I lay with her, for she was waiting too; this much was clear. She wanted me, for all I was shlevakin-city word for barbarian, scum. So I made her wait as she had made me wait, though almost every night my sleep was full of her. And when I was away for a dark or two on some fight or looting, I would think of her, taking no other to my bed-place with me. I had never before, since I began, been celibate so long, but I knew the feast was coming.
Chula, meantime, I left in her father’s tent. I did not formally cast her off before a holy man; after the first rampaging, I had lost interest in the drama. Officially she remained my wife, but not one misunderstood that I had put her aside. Finnuk tenaciously clung to the hope that I would relent, and did not claim the emerald I offered him, though
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he retained the gold. I never saw her about the krarl. I think they deliberately kept her from my sight.
I have said Demizdor was my world in those months. This made me less aware of other things. Even fighting I got more wounds because of it, growing careless, though never feckless enough to let myself be killed. But I was stone-blind to Tathra. Afterward I cursed myself for my stupidity. By then the hour for cursing and for wisdom was past.
I had gone to see her the day following the Skoi raiding, when I had taken Demizdor to Kotta and thrown Chula back at Finnuk.
Tathra sat straight as a spear, but already her body was thickening, ripening with what was in it. I did not like this look, this infection on her which was of Ettook’s making. Her face was hidden by the shireen, and she did not attempt to remove it. Nor did she wear Chula’s emerald, which I had given her those years before. Instead she offered it to me in her hand.
“Have you come for this, Tuvek? Since you have disowned her, she had better have the jewel. It was her dowry.”
“Now, Mother,” I said, “I did not imagine you concerned for Chula’s rights.”
“If you do not come for the jewel, why come to me?” she said.
“Why, to see you,” I said, “to greet you. I have been away, or did you forget?”
“I forget nothing,” she said. “It is the mother’s agony that she forgets nothing. I remember your birth, I remember you at my breast. I remember how you grew to be my pride. And now I am nothing to you. It is the son who forgets.” Her voice was bitter, and old and dry as a husk. I knew the whims of women when they carried a child, and assumed it no more than that.
“Well, I am here. I have come to see you.”
“I was here to be seen yesterday,” she said. “You did not come. You went in preference to your city whore, the witch with lard-pale hair, who ensorcels you. Do you take no heed of my warnings? Am I so little to you at last?”
It was the eternal cry of mother for son. I might have recognized it and dealt differently with her, but her masked face, her wizened voice, her woman’s foolishness angered me.
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I had hoped myself done with this dire prognostication of evil spells.
“Don’t try my patience,” I said. “You know how things are between us, you and me. You know nothing of my way with the Eshkir.”
“I know you will wed her.”
“Thus, you know.”
“Yes, and do you suppose it anything but a witching she has set on you, she a slave and you a warrior, to get you to marry her before the seer?”
“Enough of that!” I shouted. I had never met such foolishness from Tathra, nor such clammy ghost-chatterings. “You also, my mother, were an out-tribe prisoner garnered on a raid, a slave of the spear, Ettook’s whore, till he took you in the fire-ring and made you wife. Did you witch him, Mother? If you did, you made a poor choice. When I am husband to my Eshkiri slave, the women will not dare to slander her, or the men’s side to teach their sons to call her names, as all my life they have done with you. Your red pig praises you as a sow is praised, and tells how he mounts you before the whole tribe, and boasts that he ruts with others besides. Since I could walk, I have been fighting, boy and man, because I was your son, and he gave you no honor and therefore none to me. When Demizdor has sons by me, they shall not have to skin their knuckles to prove they are my heirs.” I broke off, breathing fast, having said too much, and cognizant of it.
She sat there, still straight, still masked. She said, very quietly, “You have punished me enough by ceasing to love me. You do not need to punish me with words as well.”
I was ashamed. The shame did not couple easily with the mood of gladness and victory I had had before. Of everything, it was hardest for me to forgive her that.
“I am sorry,” I said. I was stiff and ungenerous; even I could hear it. “We will say no more of this.”
“Too much has been said,” she answered. I expected her to cry, as once before. Then she had not, and she did not now. If she had wept I would have gone to her. She did not weep, and I did not go.
“There is a hunt at dawn,” I said. “I will bring you something.”
She thanked me and I left her.
After that inauspicious meeting, she was bland and almost
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dumb with me, which got me into a similar habit. I began to think back over the earlier times when she had been odd and difficult. I started to despise her, as I despised the other women who claimed me without my wanting their claim. Yet I did not truly understand that I despised her. She saw it better than I. I spent less hours with her than ever, more with my girl in Kotta’s tent. It no longer bothered me that Tathra kept on her shireen in my presence. I barely noticed. It was Demizdor’s face I hankered to see.
So my mother sat alone, swelling with Ettook’s seed, the fear which had once shown naked in her eyes now sunk to some cellar of her brain. Kotta brought her the medicines and haughtily she would drink them, without a word. Even her husband did not come to lie with her. He did not want her anymore. If she could give him another boy, then her security would spring up like a blossom, but if a girl or a sickly male, there would be nothing for her. Perhaps she saw her own self mirrored in Chula’s fate, and Tathra had no parent to take her in, no friend. As for me, the ties were rent.
In those months of my triumph and my hunger and my fierce anticipation, the shadows must have gathered thicker than Sihharn Night for my mother Tathra.
I married Demizdor in the tribal fashion, in the ring of fire, before Seel. He did not want, but I coerced him. I felt my pride that year, and knew what I could make of it. He rolled his eyes and sputtered his sentences through a snarling mouth, but wed us he did.
I made sure it was not like other weddings. I presented many gifts, and much meat I had slaughtered myself, and a cask of strong crimson drink I had carried off and kept froin the raid on the city palace-fort. I gave Ettook one of my city-man’s horses, too, and he grinned uneasily. Two or three of the mares seemed likely to foal, so it was no great loss to me.