It was the mid of the afternoon, warm and lazy, only bees and crickets buzzing in the grass. I went to Kotta’s tent. As a rule the warriors kept away at such a season. A decrepit grandmother or two hovered near, crackling in their old woman’s voices. Their teeth were black, their sour hair gray. They played with beads in their fingers and said it was a long while to be waiting, and mentioned gore and pain. Then they noticed me and tutted, drawing aside.
As I came up to the flap, an animal screamed inside the tent.
The blood ran out of my heart. I gripped the flap in my fingers and stood rooted there.
The old women nodded approvingly.
One said, “Listen, warrior. That is how you came.”
And Tathra screamed again, and the old women chuckled, and congratulated each other on then predictions of a hard, prolonged travail.
Close to the flap, I heard her pleading now, pleading to her gods, pleading with the pain to let her be. The sweat broke out all over me. I thrust open the flap and was hi Kotta’s tent.
The old women shrilled with outrage and interest. Inside it was red-dark from the burning brazier, and stank of blood and terror. Then Kotta came between me and the light.
“No, warrior,” she said. “This is no hour for you. Men sow and women bear. That is how it is.”
“Let me by,” I said.
And from the rugs behind her, Tathra called frantically, with her voice broken up by panting and hurt, “Tuvek-go out. Don’t stay to see my shame. You must not-stay-** Then she caught her breath and tried not to cry aloud.
I put Kotta aside and kneeled down where my mother lay. Her eyes were sunken but starting from her face and mois-
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ture streamed into her hair and a frenzied whining came from her throat. When she saw me so near, she tried to beat me away. I caught her wrists.
“Scream,” I said. “Let the krarl hear you, and be damned to them. You are bearing another son, one who will treat you better than I. Come, tear my hands if you want. Let me feel your pain.”
She fell back gasping.
“No,” she said. “You must go.”
But the vise seized her again. She drove her nails into my hands and shrieked.
“Good,” I said. “It will be easier soon.” But she shut her eyes and scarcely breathed. Kotta was bending near.
“How long?” I asked her.
“Too long,” she said, having forgone dissuading me. “A night and this day already. It is like the last.” But next she said quietly, “I cannot turn the child. It may die.”
“Let the thing die. Save Tathra.”
“Hold her, then,” Kotta said, “if you are for helping her.”
Accordingly, for an hour I held my mother, and Kotta aided Ettook’s son into this world. For it was a son. There was hair on its head, red hair as his had been, and it was dead.
Tathra lay in my arms as Demizdor had lain not so many nights before.
“Is it well?” she whispered.
“It is,” said Kotta. “You have borne a warrior.”
I wondered why she should lie, but Tathra’s unmasked face Was showing me. Shrunken and colorless, it had acquired a silent inward look, as if she had begun listening to some music in her brain. The look gradually settled on her like a snow, like dust. It was the look of death.
Kotta meanwhile moved about us, doing what she could. The blood fled from my mother as if it would be free of her. We wrapped her in blankets but she was cold. The coals of the brazier reflected hi her open eyes, which presently ceased to blink, and thus I knew she had died.
I could not even tell in the end if she realized who held her. Since her remonstrance she had spoken no further word to me, not even my name.
I felt only emptiness. I thought, Long ago I came from this agony, into this tent. Now I have let her go back through the same gate.
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It is hard or impossible for a warrior to weep; the ease of it is never taught him, rather he must consider it a failing, a weakness. Therefore I could not, through my body was racked. There was no release for me, no purging of my anguish in grief.
At length I laid her down, and went to stare at the child. That pulpy small mess of life with its badge of Ettook’s siring.
Kotta came to me with a wooden cup.
“Drink,” she said, but I put the cup from me. “You must leave,” she said. “There are things to be done here.”
“That object is not like me,” I said of the dead baby. I scarcely knew what I said.
“Tuvek,” Kotta said, “go out now. Go to your woman.”
“It was his seed that killed her,” I said, “his red seed.”
Kotta contemplated me with her blind eyes. She took up a salve and applied it to my hands where Tathra had torn me. I let her do this as if I were an infant.
“On the night of your birth,” Kotta said, “the Eshkiri woman gave her hands to Tathra and Tathra bit and clawed them. The Eshkir was young, and she was not as other women are. Her hair and her skin were white, and her eyes like white jewels. She carried also, but she was small. I did not guess she would bear so soon, but she bore, here in this tent, at sunrise, when I was off among the warriors to tend their wounds after the battle. She did not leave much trace of it, but Kotta is a healer, Kotta knew. When I returned, the Eshkir and her baby were gone.”
I took a dreary interest in her tale, but she had pushed me to the door flap.
“Go,” she said, “Return at sunset. There are words that must be said. I have promised Ettook’s wife, before you came, to say them.”
Abruptly I was outside. The daylight seemed too strong, and I did not see who might be lingering there; it was like trying to gaze through milk. I did not seek my tent or Demizdor. I walked away across the hill, past where the white stones ran, under the face of the low-burning autumn sun.
I came back at sunset, not because of any interest or reasoning in me, but because it was some road to take, some destination to achieve.
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It was the night before Sihharn, and the watch-fires were being built through all the krarls across all the green-brown slopes in the dusk. But from Ettook’s tenting there came a dismal low ululation, the noise the shireens made at the death of a chief’s woman. I thought how they wailed, and how they must be smiling as they did it. Seel’s daughter, who would lead the chant for Tathra at moonrise, would barely keep from laughing as she tossed the autumn flowers on my mother’s body.
I did not want to meet any of them, Ettook least of all. I climbed in, therefore, like a thief over the stockade, avoiding the central cook-fire, and reached Kotta’s tent in the first thick shadows of night.
I called her name, and she replied immediately, bidding me enter.
The tent was much changed, different rugs on the ground, the brazier bright with fire, and the lamp burning, which Kotta lighted for others, not needing it herself. I glanced everywhere before I could stop myself, searching for my mother, but she had been taken to her own place. “Sit, warrior,” Kotta said.
Having no more tempting pastime, I sat and waited. “What I am to tell you,” Kotta said, “Tathra, the wife of Ettook, has charged me to say. Kotta has known these things some while, Tathra, too, in the dark of her heart. Now. Shall Kotta speak straight out to the warrior, or would he rather she went slowly to the matter?”
“What matter? Speak as you wish,” I said. Kotta said, “Tathra was not your mother, Ettook not your father, the krarl of blue tents not your krarl, the Dagkta not your people.”
It was like a sword-flash in my brain; my lethargy ran away. I stared at her and said, too surprised to feel it yet, “Is this some riddle you are making?”
“No riddle. Do you remember I spoke of the Eshkir, the white-haired, white-eyed woman who was brought as a slave into the camp, and fled when her child was born?” “I remember it.”
“Tathra also bore that dawn, a male, but it was sickly. I could gauge from my craft it would be dead within the day. When I left the warriors and came in the tent again, I found this: Tathra sleeping, the Eshkiri woman gone, and in the