Demizdor I instructed to wear the silver lynx-mask, with its amber flower-heads turned almost red in her topaz hair. The Moi had come by with their eternal barter, and I had got cloth from them, a fine white linen striped through with lines of green and bronze. Moka, selecting the cloth, gabbled to them of Demizdor, proud of the attributes of my new bride as, she would have been of a new bronze caldron. Moka was
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content with what she had, a share of a man, children and hearth and home. Demizdor was a spoil of war, something to increase my prosperity and status. To Moka, maybe, Demizdor was not even human, just another rich possession to grace the tent.
Demizdor’s arms were bright with bracelets of bronze and silver and her neck with rings of gold. She walked like a chief’s daughter into the circle of fire to me. But behind the open eye-holes of the mask, her green eyes glittered with contempt. And then again, when I took her hand it trembled, and her breast rose and fell inside the moth-wing cloth as if she had been running. She knew well enough what was coming to her.
I was glad I had made her wait, given her the space to burn a little, as I had burned.
The wedding feast is for the men’s side, about the central krarl fire. Long before it is finished, the bride goes to the tent and soon the groom gets up to follow.
The jumping firelight, the shouts and toasts and passing cups, had been a meaningless interlude between the departure of my woman and my going in to her. When I rose, the night seemed to gather around me, my head sang, and there was only one road on the whole earth, that which would lead me’ to her.
The tent lines were dark and empty save for the occasional red glow of a brazier, or a scurrying woman late about her chores. Only Kotta’s tent showed a light outside, and she was sitting there by her lamp. When I passed, without hesitation, the blind woman called to me.
“Tuvek, before you go where you are going, it is best you learn something.”
I laughed, I was a little drunk-with sex rather than wine.
“Do you think I don’t know my task?”
“I think you know it well enough,” she said. “It is another thing you do not know.”
“What, then? Come, Kotta, I have waited some days for this. A night has only so many hours, and I don’t want to waste them here.”
She got up and drew near me.
“In my tent,” she said, “the Eshkir spoke to me somewhat, as women will speak to women at a need. Her folk were noble, warrior men and consorts of their kings. She was bed-
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mate to one of the gold-masks who fell on their blades in the fortress: a prince. She counted that honorable, and you took her from it.”
“That is the past,” I said. “The future is now.”
“Maybe. The bird in her breast beats its wings for you, yet her brain rebukes her. I have many essences in my place, liquors and banes. There is a little stone jar in the chest; a drop or two out of it is good for the old men’s pain in the limbs, but more than a drop or two and the heart stops. Your Eshkir has questioned me about these things and, since she is to be the wife of the chiefs son, I have answered her.”
The dark had grown sharp edged, and the wine sour in my throat.
“Well, Kotta?”
“The stone jar has gone with your bride,” said Kotta. “She took it. She understands Kotta is blind, and reckoned Kotta would not observe what she was at. But Kotta has her own way of seeing.”
I stood still, made idiotic by her news. A white surge came and went across my eyes.
“So she will poison me,” I said. “It is she who shall die.”
“The stream runs deeper than you think,” said Kotta. “I have warned you so you can be wary, but try her before you act.”
I was already striding away up the path.
My blood beat like a drum in my head. A million strategies came and went like pigeons flying around in my skull. About six paces from my tent, it came to me how I should find her, that she would change even murder with her looks. And then I knew my scheme as if I had been planning it a month.
I opened the flap of the tent.
The light was soft within. Her hair and her flesh seemed woven from the light. She was masked-it was for me to unmask her on this marriage night-but she had removed her robe, and waited there for me, lying on her elbow, clothed in her body with no need for more. It was a city pose, a courtesan’s pose for a prince to come in and find. It showed all, yet made it secret, a mystery. The shadows ran and draped between her thighs; the dip of her waist, accentuated by her stance, was girdled with silver from the lamp. Her hair hid her breasts and did not hide them; as she breathed, the glis-
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tening strands parted like plants beneath the sea. In her other hand, curved back to rest upon her hip, she balanced the silver cup, the bride-drink she must offer me, symbol of herself.
“You see, warrior,” she said, “I have obeyed your customs.”
If I had walked in there, tipsy with desire, perhaps I should not have questioned it. Yet now I recognized it was too saccharine a fruit, the web too certain to catch me.
My knife rested against my side. Now we shall see, I thought, my lust gone to black night in me. But I went to her, hot-eyed and eager as she had meant me to.
I did not swallow anything of what was in the cup, but made believe I took some. It had a strange smell, very faint. I should never have noticed it if I had had no warning.
“Your city wine is bitter,” I said to her. “I have never found it so before.”
Her eyes in the mask were steady. She had schooled herself for just such a scene.
“Then drink no more,” she said.
“And waste good liquor?” I pretended again to quaff it down. Then I reached and drew the mask from her face.
She was very white, that she could not conceal, and her mouth flinched. Her eyes had become wide, expectant.
“Demizdor-” I said, as if something had surprised me. Then I let the cup fall, so the doctored wine ran out onto the rugs.
She drew herself into a knot and shrank from me.
I had watched men die enough times to be able to mime it. If she had been calmer, she would have recalled that the hearts of dead men do not pound as mine was doing, that you can see a man breathe, however shallowly. Yet she was so certain she had killed me, she looked for nothing else.
I gazed at her beneath my lids, wondering with a crawling cold what she would do now, and my hand lay dead but ready, next to my knife.
She did not move at first. When she did, the light disturbed a flash of white on her cheeks. She was weeping; I had never witnessed her tears before, even when her lover slew himself, even when I took her as a slave, or Chula raked her with the comb.
She came creeping to me, slowly, on her knees.
Women had told me, once or twice, my lashes were thicker
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than a girl’s. Certainly the thickness did me a service then, for I could watch Demizdor through them with no great effort, and she not guessing it.
She began to speak in her own tongue, yet my name was mingled in it. She rocked herself to and fro, as the shireens did above their dead men, the lamp catching her, so beautiful that another part of me would have betrayed to her presently that life still lingered in the corpse. But suddenly she leaned and snatched my knife, too quick for me to stop her.
For a moment I supposed she had reasoned out my deceit, and meant to kill me again and be sure of it. But in a splinter of a second so brief that I had barely come up with myself, I saw the direction the knife was going.
I moved at that. She did not anticipate it, assuming me dead. I seized the knife and threw it away, and pulled her down and turned her so she was under me.
“What’s this?” I said, my voice hoarse as if I were halfdead indeed. “Kill me, then die with me? That would be a fine marriage night.”