She did not seem afraid, more stunned, as she had some cause to be.
“Someone warned me,” I said. “It was make believe. I am not poisoned. If you wished me slain, why weep for me?”
She was still crying. The tears ran down into her hair.
“I have been twenty nights nerving myself to it,” she choked out. “I cannot live with you. But when it was done-”
“You did not cry or die for your man in the fortress,” I said.
She shut her eyes. She did not need to tell me. For all her murdering, she loved me, and for all my anger I could not kill her, having stopped her own arm at the work.
I touched her as she lay beneath me, the curves and hollows of her gliding flesh. Her eyes tightened, and her hands fastened on me of their own volition.
“You can live with me,” I said. “You will see.”
I never feared her treachery after. It could have been all too simple for her to finish me in the nights that followed, when desire was slaked or when I slept. Yet she did not, and I knew she would not. There is one sound way a man can bind a woman to him, the same way she will bind him, and
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with the same rope. That hour I had the proof of her liking. I thought the feuding was done forever.
So Demizdor became my wife, though never like a wife of the krarls. It was Asua and Moka who waited on me, who saw to the duties of the tent, the food, the washing and mending. Demizdor did not even carry the jars to the waterfall. Demizdor lived as a brave lives, scorning the women’s tasks, going with me to fish, riding with me to hunt, for she had ridden with her gold-mask on his wars, though never fought in them; so the city women were, it seemed, half man if not warrior. When the krarl saw her mount the black horse I had given her, their eyes expanded and they muttered. Choke it down, I thought. Though the meat is gristly, there are tougher joints to come. I gave her saddle gear of scarlet and the bridle had tassels of white silk. She wore a man’s breeches too, to ride. That caused a stir. She could cast a straight spear at a need, but generally was content to watch me.
I taught her the bone games of the Dagkta; she taught me stranger ones with bits of stone for the pieces, a thing called Castles, which you must play hating and cool to get it right. She marveled elaborately when I learned it straight off, calling me a clever savage. They had some art for the bed also; neither was I a slow pupil at that, nor did she mock me then.
I think she was happy enough at this time, shutting her ears to the inner voice that stung her. I took her through the old white summer towns with their roofs of broken pink tile, and in the mossy courts we would couple like lions, and later she would tie my hair into the grasses and laugh at me, but she loved me then.
I hoped I should get her with child that summer. It was the first child I had ever wanted. It would have been like a pledge between us, another link in the chain that bound our lives. I see from this that even then I felt the shadow brush me.
She told me something of her life among the city clans, though it was a wild, weird tale, and she was reticent, as if the memory frightened her. A prince of the high class of the gold had fathered her on his mistress. Demizdor had the rank of the silver, which was mighty but not mightiest. She had experienced no passion for her lover, a man twelve years her senior, whom she was given to, according to the ways of form and etiquette; yet he was a god to her, so she had been:
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trained to see him. When the wounded silver-mask crawled into the pavilion with his news of Vazkor’s rising, her lover had sent her out. The faces of the princes before they masked them were strange, already deathly. It was as if a plague had entered the fortress. She knew what they intended, but her rank precluded entreaty or even questions. She did not comprehend but she must comply. She stood behind the brocades, listening to the silence of their suicide. It was like the ending of a world to her. The dagger she had thrown at me, she had taken up for herself. Of the legend who caused all this Vazkor-she knew little, only that they feared his name even now. He had overthrown a dynasty and begun the rum of the land. The ancient order crumbled before the tramp of his armies, and he had raised a witch-goddess from her grave to aid him. These garbled accounts were all she possessed, for the people of the cities did not boast of Vazkor the magician, and he had been dead for twenty years or more.
Certain of their customs she retained. She would not eat in my presence, but at the back of the tent behind a curtain, as if such a thing were disgusting or forbidden. I questioned this only once. She looked away, and answered that centuries before her folk had been supernatural, having no need for food, and that they were ashamed to have grown mortal. I consoled her with mortal pleasure, and we did not speak of it again.
We had two months, a little less.
The shapes of the year, the seasons, moved about us, changing their tempo and their forms. The mild summer burned gently into the tinder of autumn. The fruits were harvested, the haphazard grain, the leaves were yellowing, everything drawing to its close.
One night I woke to hear her crying softly. We had gone hunting in the woods, and slept beside the fire, the dogs near us. I took her in my arms, and asked her why she wept, but she would not answer, and that was answer enough. She had taught me also tenderness, with her at least It did not irk me anymore that her pride wounded her because of me, but then I did not properly understand it. I thought it should pass, that all would be well.
So I held her, and I spoke to her of how I had found the statue in the trees, that fall of leaf when I was fifteen years, the marble maiden of the grove on her plinth above the spring.
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Demizdor lay still in my arms, listening. Somewhere an owl called, sailing the moonlight on his broad wings. Sparks burst purple and golden in the fire, and the dogs twitched dreaming tails through the warm ashes.
“One day you will regret me,” she said. On her shoulder the scar of Chula’s spite was growing dim, like a pale, dark flower. She filled her hands with my hair and kissed my throat. “You are not of the tribes,” she murmured. “You are a prince of the Dark City, of Ezlann, Uastis’ citadel.”
As I drew her down, I saw the lynx-mask glint at me acorss the fire where she had left it, like a face watching with black hollow eyes. And, for a moment, those eyes seemed filled by life before the fire sank again among the wood.
3
Moka bore me a daughter in the month of Yellow-leaf. She looked guilty when I came in (it had always been boys before), but I was lighthearted and reassured her. I gave her a garnet to hang on the baby’s basket, for they were reckoned lucky stones, strengthening to the blood.
Three evenings after this, Tathra’s child began to move, some forty days too soon.
There had been one of the little Dagkta tribal councils to talk over this right or that. Generally the warriors met about this time, before Sihham and the preparations for turning west along Snake’s Road. Ettook went and so did I. We were gone two days. When we came back it was to find Tathra already in labor.
A boy brought Ettook the tidings. Ettook showed his teeth and made a great joke of it, saying his son was impatient to get out and be a warrior. He had a gibe for me as well, how I had better leave off riding my yellow-haired man-woman, and remember my brave’s war skills or the babe should best me even from his cradle.
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As for me, my vitals churned. I had kept sufficient of a reckoning to know it was too early, and now it all came borne to me, how I had been with Tathra, how I had neglected her. I recollected she had said, “You have punished me enough by ceasing to love me.” I might have shrank down into a child again. Suddenly I could see her in my mind’s eye, her beauty and its loss, her wretched life, that she had needed me and I had found another. The mother is the boy’s first woman. And no man had ever valued her but me.