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birth basket a child, as strong and sound as bronze.” Kotta leaned toward me. The brazier shone in her veiled face. Her hair was bound in a blue and scarlet cloth, and her sightless eyes, catching the glow, gleamed dully the same blue, the same scarlet from the flames. “Kotta is blind,” she said, “but Kotta sees, in her own fashion. The child in the basket might pass for Tathra’s child. A son, and healthy; it would bring her honor. But it was not Tathra’s child. Her boy was gone; the Eshkir took it. I think it died when I was from the tent. The Eshkir left her living baby and stole the dead; it was her gift to Tathra, the fruit of her own womb, which she did not want. You are that fruit. The Eshkir was your mother. Any might see it now. You have her beauty in you, and the man’s beauty of your father, too, that your mother loved and hated and slew.”
I began to feel as if I would strangle. My brain was alive with pictures and half-formed words, and my hands shook, but not from weakness.
“If I am to swallow this, then give me the bitch’s name, this wild cat who sloughed me, and left me behind like excrement.”
“She gave no name to me,” Kotta said, “but something of her past I heard two nights before she bore you. Her living had been a rare jumble, not as a woman lives among the tribes; a maze of death and battles and men she had companioned-she had lived several lives in one, it seemed to Kotta, as the snake wears and shed several skins. And in the cities of the mask-faces she had been worshiped as a goddess. The man that got you on her was a king.”
“So she would say, no doubt,” I answered sharply. “Goddess bedded with king. Yet she was not a gold-mask-the lynx is silver. More probably she was some captain’s doxy and he cast her off.”
“No. She was no man’s doxy. For all she walked bowed among the tents, for all the woman’s burden in her womb, she was unlike any women you have seen. Think of the Eshkir you have put by your hearth. She has surprised you. But your mother was to her as the moon to the star. And your father was not a red chieftain but a black-haired lord, master of cities. You have your darkness from him.”
“This is very fine,” I said. “Why spill the beer now?”
“The one whom it served to keep silent has died. Though,
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indeed, Tathra knew her changeling almost from the beginning. Do you not recall how she altered to you when you took the lynx-mask from Ettook’s spoil chest? The mask your city wife wears, which was her mask who was your mother.”
I put my hand to my face to wipe the cold sweat from it.
Kotta said, “That summer we were late traveling, near two months late to reach the Snake’s Road, for there was great fighting over the mountains, the beginning of the wars that toppled the cities down, and now and then the braves would go looting ruins. Presently Seel learned of a fallen tower, the tower of an Eshkiri fort to the west, where it was said a king had died with his treasure around him. The warriors rode there, but came back with only one thing, the white-haired woman, your mother. They said she was a witch, or had claimed to be, but they did not believe it in truth, nor did she prove cunning in that way. Ettook let Tathra have her as her slave, and so she journeyed with us till that dawn she ran away, into the wild lands. I think no one ever saw her face but Kotta, and Kotta is blind.”
“This king, then,” I said, “do you have a name for him?”
“Yes. She named him. She was wife to him, yet she had slain him, for he was cold and cruel, and she thought him a sorcerer.”
“So do jealous bitches ever,” I said. “It is the sum of myth and story. Still I do not have his name, this miraculous father you gift me with.”
The name she gave me then seemed to come up from the coals of the fire and set the tent alight. I had not looked for such a thing, and while I had not, I had kept her words at bay, holding them from me. Having his name, my father, it cracked me wide, and let in all the rest like white-hot water.
For she told me I was the son of Vazkor.
4
My life was altered in a moment.
I remembered everything, each of the portents, the signposts that had been there for me, I, who was so unlike the tribes, different in all things, an outcast in the midst of my folk.
I thought of my boyhood dream-the white lynx mating with the black wolf, of the lynx-mask I had chosen, and the shock that had numbed my arm when I set hand to it. There had hung her frigid witch-spell on it still, that cat-goddess, Uastis, who wanted none of me.
I thought of my father, what he had been-the red pig, gross, stupid, snorting at his pleasure, my enemy from a child-and of my father as I found him-noble, a king, my own image painted on the history of all the land. I was back on the fortress rock where I had taken Demizdor. Who but my magician father had risen in me then, given me a portion of his Power, the ability to speak the city tongue as he had spoken it? The masked men had fallen on their knees, seeing his face in mine, hearing his voice in my voice. I remembered, too, the dream I had had before, the knives in the icy water, and the blindness, and waking to say aloud, “I will kill her.”
She had betrayed him, my mother, so much was clear; betrayed and murdered him, and next been rid of me because I was his seed. It was a wonder she had deigned to let me live at all.
Suddenly the female noise outside the tent rose to an abnormal gray keening. The moon was up, and the women were going to Tathra’s dead-couch to make the chant.
And between me and the vision of the dark glory there came the omen of her sunken lifeless face.
Tathra was yet my mother. Though not my flesh, though I had not been shaped in her body, still it was so. Her breasts
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had fed me, her arms rocked me before ever I knew It. The other, though she had carried me and given me” my life, was less mother to me than the beast who eats her young.
I got to my feet and the tent seemed to have shrunk about me; I felt taller than the roof of it.
“Kotta,” I said, “I am done with this place. I thank you for opening the cage.”
She said nothing, and I went out into the night.
It was the amber moon that follows the ripeness of the year, and the sky was cobalt blue about it, veiled at its horizons by the smoke of many hundred krarl fires. I stood on the somber earth, and I sensed him go from me, the man I had been, the warrior, the chief’s son, Tuvek Nar-Ettook. Even my bones and flesh seemed changing, and my brain rang.
I turned and walked toward the painted tent of Ettook. I, Vazkor’s son.
He was sitting among his elder warriors, and Seel was there in a corner, his eyes like spikes.
Ettook was mourning in his own way, not the death of his wife, but the death of his redheaded son.
“She was too old,” he said. “I was too amenable. I should have had done with the mare long since and taken a younger one who would not lose me sons. He was a fine boy, well made, but she killed him. They have little enough to do, these animals of women. Can they not even give us our sons alive?”
This putrid nonsense was volleying out of him like foul air as I opened the flap. When he saw me, he jumped, in the usual manner; then he analyzed me more closely, and he grew very nervous.
“Come, Tuvek,” he said. “Share the loss with me. She was a good wife for all that. She shall have a bangle or two to take with her into the earth. A good wife.”
The light of the lamps flickered over his face and over the yellow patterns on the blue walls.
I said, “Stand up, you bloody hog, and get on your feet. If you cannot live as a man, you shall at least die as one.”