The warriors sprang up instead, cursing. But they were like dogs without a master. My mind went back to how I had bested grown men when I was fourteen years, and I smiled.
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Ettook sat quite motionless.
“What is this?” he said stupidly, sweating, knowing too well.
I had meant to knife him, to fight him and knife him if he rose to fight. Then I would cut down any others who came at me. I never dreamed I could not do it.
But, looking at him as he cringed there, showing his dirty teeth, his dirty mouth still sweet from his praise of Tathra, I knew there was another, better way to kill him.
I felt it come, like a slow wave, through my brain.
It was his, my father Vazkor’s, skill. He was guiding me as on the fortress rock.
I could kill a man by wanting him dead.
There was a pain in my skull, a splitting, slender, golden pain. And then a pale blotting of light over the painted tent.
The yellow patterns danced and united, the lamps guttered and smoked.
Ettook lunged from his cushions, impaled on a sword of slim lightning, screaming louder even than Tathra had screamed dying of his cockerel’s work. I let him sample it to the full.
Then, with no warning, the vital force in me became too great. I could not hold it. I felt my brain seared and bulging, and the arteries of my body were alive with molten heat. I was a man who had devoured fire, and was now devoured by fire from within. Everything seethed in light and vanished in it.
And the light folded into blackness like the turning of a page.
There were no dreams in that blackness, and no guide.
I swam up from the pitchy river to discover myself lying on my back, and over my face a broad sultry sky was swirling.
Not recognizing where I could be, only partially recalling the sequence that had gone before, I tried to raise myself. At once I was capsized by strengthlessness and nausea. Dragging myself over onto my side, I brought up everything that might have been in my belly and, so it seemed, half my guts into the bargain.
This done, I fell back wishing for death.
I ached and hurt as if I had tumbled to the bottom of a
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cliff and yet survived it. While I was unconscious, plainly someone had been paying me court with his feet; I had been pulled over the ground to this open place and left all night, tied only by my legs and a long halter at my neck to a thing of wood I could not properly make out. There were besides a host of amulets, little beads and pierced bits of metal knotted into the cords that bound me. And on my breast the leather was ripped open, and the one-eyed snake was daubed there in charcoal.
Then I remembered, and fathomed, too, what they were at. And I recollected also Demizdor.
I was stirring in earnest now, and abruptly a bunch of warriors came around me, and gathered where I could watch them. There were about fifteen of them. They seemed afraid and working to hide it, joking and poking at me with their spear-butts. One spit on me. I had no powers of any kind to answer him; he saw as much and spit again, into my eyes.
The other thing, which had put me here, was like a fever I had had. I could not get it straight in my mind-Kotta’s tale, the name of Vazkor, the unleashing of energy. Still, I had come to realize I had slain the chief of the krarl and, from, the amulets, that they considered me a magician and strove to protect themselves. No doubt imagining these symbols kept me tame, they began shortly to invent new sports. I was suffering this helplessness on the ground, trying sometimes to lurch aside from the tether and the bindings and the wooden pole, and come at them-though it was useless-when, unexpectedly, the warriors left off their play.
I rolled sideways, and looked. I lay on the hillside above the krarl. I could make out the smoke below from the big cook-fire, now that I had leisure, and the length of the shadows told me it was late in the day. Up along the spine of the hill was coming Seel the seer in his robe of beast-tails and teeth. The wind twitched the tails and clinked the bronze lozenges together. I could not see his face against the vinegar light, but I could guess.
He drew near and stood over me, jabbering softly, and fingering his black-painted jaw.
Certainly he would have avowed that it was spells that had overthrown me in Ettook’s tent, those spells which subdued me now; but, like the warriors, he meant to be sure. He
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leaned down, made some ritualistic pass at my forehead, then darted back, quick as a lizard.
I could do nothing. I was weaker than a sick puppy, and he took note of it.
He clutched the snake symbol on his breast and chattered his fangs at the warriors, telling them to hoist me up and bring me into the krarl again. I suppose they had tethered me for the night on the slope, to keep themselves a safe distance from violent magic.
I was hauled down the hill as they had got me up it. It was no easy journey; the clouds wheeled and the hard ground stabbed, dropped, and slammed the breath from me. Someone had cracked my ribs for me, and presently I managed the girl’s trick and fainted. I returned into myself among the crowding tents and the tall stacks of the unlighted fires of Sihharn Night.
They judged me by tribal rule.
In Ettook’s stead, Seel presided, and there were very many who spoke against me. In fact, for every enemy I had in the krarl there was found an orator standing in his garments.
As I had always recognized, they had only been waiting for the chance to take me. I had built my own pyre and, for good measure, climbed onto it.
I lay on my back, clenching my teeth and swallowing down my vomit, listening, and catching glimpses of fire and men, with Seel’s stink always in my nostrils.
Even Chula slunk by, and whispered to Seel-Na, who in turn whispered to her father. I had been practicing sorcery some while, it seemed, and this was why I had turned Finnuk’s daughter from my tent, preferring one of the witchbred city women. How else indeed could I have overcome the mask-faces in their fort, save by oblique conjurings? The tribes knew well that city raiders were not to be beaten by men, being magicians themselves. Thus even my hero-deed Was used against me.
I surmised they would punish me soon and had decided on the way of it, having the clue of the wooden tethering pole. It was a measure of my state that I had no fight left, and scarcely cared what they did. Yet Demizdor had furnished the real horror in my confused thoughts, and their accusations drove me into a turmoil of uncontrollable struggling, at which they were much amused. They would doubtless kill
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her, too, but kill her by the immemorial practice of men with women, raping the life out of her, and they would hang me upside down from the pole to watch, until my brain burst.
It was already twilight, the sun fallen-I had missed its going, a pity, since it was the last sunfall I should see. Now it was Sihharn Night, when the undead went hunting. The men’s side should be mounting the ghost-guard, the watchfires and torches be lighted, but nothing was done. I wondered that they had not thought it unlucky to leave this business off for mine but, like all their customs, even the darker ones were shallow cups.
I had no gods to pray to. I felt the lack of them then.
I had begun thinking of Tathra, too, my mother-I could not call her otherwise-whose body they would have thrown into the cavity of earth, for there was no bright burial of flame for the women, and that done while I lay on the hill.
Gradually, all of it became a great chaos of lights and sounds to me, my mother’s corpse and Demizdor’s imagined spread-eagled body, the actual fire gusts and the black sky, the yells and bawlings of the krarl. And into this dream came riding the ghosts of Sihharn Night, because no man had kept watch for them.
Of everything, they were the most clear. Black as the Black Place they came from, mounted on horses black as themselves or white as bone, and their faces silver skulls from which the pale hair still grew. I recall I knew myself dreaming at this point, never having credited this legend of Sihharn’s undead, and I jerked myself awake. And saw them