still.
The krarl was seeing them also.
The clamor had died on the wind, just the sinking fire spattering now, the striking of shod hooves on the ground as the riders came between the tents, and the faint jingle of bells from their bridles.
Like figures in a tapestry, the braves and their women kept motionless. Only those nearest to where the skull-heads passed drew aside, walking backward as if half asleep. Somewhere, about a mile off over the hill, the dogs of a neighboring camp had set up a howling. It was in another world, that noise.
Near me, Seel breathed raucously through his mouth, and out of his stench came the sharp new stench of his urine,
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spilled from him in terror. I could have laughed at that, if I had had the health for it. I had already grasped who the riders were, and where they hailed from. Not the pit, but Eshkir. Their black was tawdry, and the skulls were masks.
The foremost of the horsemen held up his black gauntleted hand, and halted the column. Then he spoke, in the language of the tribes but arrogantly, as if it soiled his mouth to use it.
“You have one fettered there, on the ground, the blackhaired. You will give him to us.”
It was not a request, nor even a demand. It was an assumption. The krarl merely rustled and quivered, and Seel’s body clattered, his teetk and the teeth of his robe rattling With his fright.
“You have also a gentlelady of Eshkorek among your tents. You will bring her. If she has been harmed, your krarl shall be burned. If she is dead, we shall kill your women and your children.”
The horseman’s voice was like dry silver. I wanted to answer him.
Before I could form a sentence or get it to my lips, the wooden pole was heaved suddenly upright.
Sky ran together with land. I slid the length of the wood before the thongs bit and held me, and it was as though a tower crashed downward into my head.
The sky raced, and then the sky was still. I had been stitched into a sack of pain. When I breathed, a knife between my ribs gored at my life’s blood,
‘Tor all his spear-brothers’ kind attentions, he will live till Eshkorek,” one said.
“That is his misfortune,” another answered, and laughed gently. “See, Demizdor.”
And, against the sky that just then was still, I discovered the face of a silver deer with eyes of green glass, and behind, a fall of hair like golden frost.
“Yes,” she said, “I see him.” Her tone was not as I recollected.
“He shall sing a new song in Eshkorek,” the man said.
“He shall die there,” she said.
There was blood in my mouth and I could not have spoken, even if I had had words. But I had no words, for they
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were speaking in the city tongue, and somehow I could follow but not use it.
Then she leaned near, the deer-faced woman who was no longer quite Demizdor, and she raked my face with the nails of her hand.
“Be happy, oh king,” she whispered. “You shall have a sweet welcome in Eshkorek Arnor.”
Book Two
PARTI
Yellow City
1
Demizdor had warrior kin among the Eshkiri; she had never told me of them, and I had never considered it. Her former life had seemed to die from her when she entered mine. That was my blindness, as well as hers, for which both of us would pay, and heavily.
Her mother, the gold-mask’s mistress, had also a sister, and the sister two sons, the cousins of Demizdor, like her of the silver rank, and proud and jealous of the much or little they had.
The raid on the Dagkta spring gathering to get slaves had been a wild notion-a bet between princes, for so they did things in the cities, gambling with men’s lives and liberty. A force of eighty mask-faces set out on the sport, and, with the cannon, they expected no hindrance, and indeed received none to begin with. Having captured their slaves, they camped at the ruined fortress, but eighteen men rode on ahead to Eshkorek, traveling light, to bring the news home. When the bulk of the force did not follow, presently, some went back to seek the missing princes and their soldiery. Going to the ruin, the searchers quickly found all that I and the Dagkta braves-and after us, the ravens and the foxes-had left of them. Then there was an uproar. It had never before been dreamed that the dregs of the world, the inferior clay of the tribes, should master gold and silver lords and feed them to carrion eaters.
At length they formed a vengeance party, and in the party were the male cousins of Demizdor. That a high-woman of their blood should become the drab of a krarl had them in a hot and cold rage.
It took them most of the summer to achieve their goal. They greatly demeaned themselves to do it, sometimes journeying as ordinary humans among the trader Moi who, blond
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as they were, had ever been close with them as sheath with sword. Going about in this manner, they eventually imbibed the myth that had sprung up, as tall stories do, from a small grain of truth. The myth said that one warrior alone had taken the fort-camp of the Eshkiri slavers. He slew them all, and left them unburied and took away a city woman as his whore. The warrior of course was black-haired, and without tattoo, unique among the red tribes. I had occasion to recollect, when I learned this, how Moka had babbled to Moi traders of her handsome husband and his new flaxen slavewife. There were no Eshkiri in the Moi band, but gradually the word ran through the yellow krarls and reached the right ears.
In the end, I was sop enough for their vengeance, since another value had been added to me. Somewhere a red man had spoken of the fight in the ruin, mentioning the bizarre name the city men cried out as they offered themselves to my knife. The Moi had caught this chat, or even the Eshkiri themselves had heard it. They knew the name, of course. It was not bizarre to them. And, in the prosaic daylight, unenamored of their deities as they were, they never reckoned me, as the dead men did, a risen god-magician.
Even before I had learned my origin, they had been piecing it out. They determined the black-haired man was the bastard of Vazkor, a by-blow on some tribal she-goat, wrought in the last months of his life.
They hated Vazkor. I was to discover how faithfully they hated him.
Eshkorek had been the first city to shatter at his fall. He had pulled her after him, for the shadow of his ambition had Iain dark on her. His tokens still crammed her, to keep the Eshkiri to remembrance. Even the silver skull-masks had been the sigil once of Vazkor’s own guard.
They could not reach the dead; he had cheated them, dying. But they had me, my father by proxy trapped in the hide of a subhuman barbarian.
I can reconstruct Demizdor’s part, for she told me after, during the last hour we ever spent together.
While I had attended the Dagkta council, Demizdor had been alone in the krarl. Boredom was her enemy at such times; scorning the women’s tasks, yet with none of the books
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or music or game-pieces of her own people to hand, she would sleep through the day to be done with it, or else take the black horse and go riding. Intent on my own business, I had not thought she might be afraid, alone in the warren that had treated her ill before. Certainly, she never let me see it, or them, I imagine. The braves mocked her on her horse, but she rode better than they. The women muttered and stared, but none dared harm her, now that she was the chief’s son’s wife. My other two wives, Moka and Asua, had not loved Chula. They waited on her successor like handmaidens, the same way they looked after my gear and war-spoil. Embroidering my shirts and brushing the hair of Demizdor were all one. Yet they would giggle behind their veils at her mannerisms, or gape open mouthed. She was rare and curious, like a brightly colored singing bird I had brought back from a raid.
Two days Demizdor bore this, perforce. The third day she looked for me home. Maybe she had some word that Tathra was in labor; certainly she had heard later that I had gone to Tathra in preference to her. The day passed, the sun went down. She would have heard the death-wail of the women. No doubt she asked Moka, and Moka told her what it was, that Tathra had died. For sure, Demizdor looked for me after that, afraid, perhaps, how I should be. But still I did not return to my tent.