The last word that came concerning me was a babble of Ettook’s slaughter and my sorcery, and how Seel had matched his power with mine, and bested me, so that I lay tethered and half-dead myself on the hill. Then she knew herself alone indeed.
As once before, it seemed to her the world had gone mad. She must have doubted her grasp of krarl-talk.
Ready to run to find me, she was ready, too, to run away. She had her horse; she could chance the wild, long way westward. Yet, like many a woman, part of her was nailed on her man’s fortunes still. So she hesitated.
Asua was screaming with fright, asking the gods what would become of Tuvek’s household. Moka was trying to comfort her to quiet, knowing ‘clamor would draw trouble quicker than silence. But the babies were squealing, and the dogs, catching fear like sickness, set up their own din.
At midnight the men came. They put Moka and Asua on
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one side, and there was some altercation about whether my miniature sons and daughters should be slain, seeing the evil was in them from their daddy’s loins. However, the braves quickly lost interest in these precautionary measures, being more interested in the war-spoils I had accumulated. Chests were tipped over and ransacked, beer tapped, dogs dragged snapping away and a couple knifed, horses loosed, mounted, and crazily ridden about like a market. With the magiciaa safely subdued, any of his goods were fair game.
Soon, four of them pushed into my hearth tent, and found Demizdor.
The four grinned, and said the things men say at such a moment. One of them was Urm Crook Leg, hobbling on his grudge for me. He unhesitatingly went up to her, for she waited there as if she were frozen. I could have warned him of her tricks, had I been there and his friend. She stabbed Urm in the throat, a clever, swift blow, but she had never killed a man before. She took him by surprise, but herself too. As she stood, letting the weapon go, paralyzed by what she had done, the three others came for her, and she was easy work for them.
Each had her, and would have had her again, for they were lusty that night, but Seel called the warriors to krarl council. Learning of this, they bound her to the tent-pole, and with pegs hammered the rope at her ankles in the earthen floor. They did it with much laughter, for they had enjoyed her company and planned on more of it. Urm they hauled outside and gave a rough woman’s burial, since he was lame and girl-slam into the bargain.
Ettook lay in the painted tent, cold as rotten meat. They were saying that when they made the pyre for him-and killed his dogs and horses to go with him-Demizdor should be strangled, and sent to be the chief’s pleasurer in the Black Place.
That was the first night.
The next day the seer was busy with Ettook’s body, painting it for cremation, and Ettook’s bastards, each hopeful and bright-eyed now that I was from the race, were dressing him, and Seel’s daughter plaiting his beard.
The warriors meanwhile stood death-guard around the tent, though occasionally some would seek me up the hill, or Dem-
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izdor in my tent. The unavoidable intervals between these visits apparently saved my life, and hers.
What went through her head as she Jay there in my tent is all too clear. The men who used her were every one like a facet of myself, and she blamed me-that I had left her to them, that I had grown from their stock. She wanted to die, and expected death. She meant to cheat them if she could. Gradually her mental strivings concentrated only on this, how she might free her hands and steal the knife of some brave as he grunted and jerked inside her, or how she must snatch a blade when they came to take her out.
In the acid sunset of Sihharn she heard the shout as they pulled me down from the hill on the wooden pole. She was glad I should suffer, fiercely glad, yet she was chilled as if with death already.
There was some deal of noise, and no more braves came to pay her court. The sounds kept up for an hour or more.
Then there was a silence.
She lay in the silence, with the dark plastered over her eyes so thick that she could not even see her own bruised limbs, or the dull wink of the iron pegs that held her bindings. Suddenly the tent flap was thrown open.
My wife’s heart lurched, and for an instant she was blinded by an insane weak confusion. When she could see again, she saw the unbelievable: her own people there in the doormouth, one of whom removed his silver skull-mask, showing her the face of her kinsman, Orek.
The skull-masks did not, despite their threat, raze the krarl or slay its women, or even the several warriors who had raped Demizdor.
Truth to tell, their party of reprisal had lost its strength during the months of searching, and was now thirty in number, and they had no cannon and were aware of the neighboring Dagkta campments across the slopes to east and north. Besides, they had me, the only warrior they actually yearned to harm, and they had got their lady back. And plainly, to her, all the faces of the braves who came in her had amalgamated into one face, and that one mine. I, the man who had forced her from her own life into his, and thereby brought the rest to pass on her.
She had lost no honor with her kin. More, they gave her
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back her honor and her pride in minutes. They dressed her in a yellow robe that the younger cousin, Orek, had carried with him all the way from the old city. It was rich, of silk, beaded with crystal. I was to note later that despite the apparently masculine qualities many city women possessed, they were generally treated as fragile and precious by their men. Next, the silver deer-mask was found for her-because it was her own. (I picture Chula, barely conscious with terror, despoiled of that last treasure by a skull-headed demon of Sihharn.)
Thus they remade Demizdor into the goddess-girl I had encountered in the ruined fort. Immediately she knew, intuitively, that the structure of her self-respect depended on her hate and loathing for me. Women are wiser in these matters, or they try to be. A man could not give up his dream so readily. Yet, having shut such a door with a great and tormented effort, be would entirely forget, and Demizdor could not.
Presently, I was brought-or what was left of me.
They tied me on a horse (I was senseless and did not complain), and soon they were riding west along the sloping land, slow for her sake, but fast enough that the krarl was far behind by moonrise.
They halted at midnight in order that Demizdor should rest. She was pale and ill, yet buoyant, feverish with emotion. Orek held her arm. He was a boy, a year or two younger than she, and more than half in love with her, and with more than half a look of her, too, blond and green-eyed, with her slenderness, and not much of the man in his appearance at all. The elder brother, Zrenn, was different metal. His hair was the texture of rats’ skins, and dark, a thing not common among the cities. By contrast his eyes were a porcelain white-blue that looked as if the sight had been burned from them by a pale fire.
I woke when the halt was called, and I saw them both, though not steadily, bending near me, and the silver deer behind. She was the only one of the three confronting me masked, for she was the only one with something to hide.
It was Zrenn who laughed and murmured that it was my bad luck I had not died. His mouth smiled, but his eyes ate, feeding on pain and prophecies of pain.
They were speaking the city tongue and could not guess I grasped it. Only she spoke krarl-talk, wanting me to be aware
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how our lives were altered and our loving done. When she scratched my face, Zrenn laughed again. I was to come to know his laugh perfectly.
2
The krarls take forty days or more to achieve that trek from the mountains to the eastern pasture, or from pasture back to mountains, stopping as they do each sunfall to camp, and many days by water or when they fight their wars, and slow with women on foot, their herds and their bickering. With the fast horses of Eshkir, tough despite their thin bellies, and the short camps and few diversions, we were in sight of the rock walls in thirteen days and climbing them in fifteen, and came to the outposts of the city in twenty.