That undid me.
“Mother,” I said, “maybe I shall not be needing it,” then bit on my tongue, I was so vexed with myself.
“Tuvek,” she said softly, “now we have the truth. What do you think will be done to you?”
“No woman knows the Rite,” I said.
“True. But she knows the men survive the other side of it. And am I to think you less than them? You, better than any?”
“I flinch from none of it,” I said arrogantly, because she expected too much of me at that moment, “but I think I may die. So be it.”
Then I saw that she also was uneasy, that she had only spoken as she did because she was frightened. Her hands tightened on me.
“Kotta,” she said, “do you hear this?”
I jerked around, angry again certainly at this. I had thought we were alone in the tent. Now I saw the shadow beyond the loom, the blind healer-woman, resting her great arms on her knees. It was an odd thing with Kotta, though her eyes were sightless, she seemed to see everything there was, as the boys learned early when they tried to steal from
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among her things. Near big as a man, raw-boned, her blind irises shone blue as slate from her shireen. She was often to be found where you did not think her to be. She helped the women bear, and healed ills and wounds, and she was frequently with my mother. It was common women’s talk about the krarl that Tathra would have died of her brat, and the brat too, if Kotta had not aided the birth. I had arrived on a morning of victory after some battle between Ettook’s Dagkta and a Skoiana krarl, but Tathra fought harder than any warrior to get me born. She had conceived no other child and some said this was also Kotta’s work, as a second bearing would be fatal to Ettook’s out-tribe bitch-wife.
Kotta’s enamel earrings clinked when she shifted and stared right at me as if she saw every feature.
“You distrust the tattooing,” she said.
“I distrust nothing,” I said, furious and cold as only fourteen can be.
“You do well to distrust it,” she said, making an idiot of me. “As you say, it may be bad for you. Nevertheless, I hazard you will recover from it, as from the snake’s bite. But I wonder if they will waste their ink.” I did not understand. I was about to throw some harsh sentence to her, and leave the tent, when Kotta added, apparently for no reason, “That loom is from Eshkiri city. There was an Eshkir woman once among the tents.”
I would have made nothing of this except that Tathra stiffened into a curious immobile grayness.
“Why do you speak of her?” she presently said. “She was a slave the warriors stole, and she ran away. What more is there to know?”
“True,” Kotta said, “yet she saw him come,” nodding at me. “She kneeled behind you and held you, and you had torn her hands in pain. She was young and strong but she, too, had her child to shed. I wonder how it went with her in the wild.”
This was all obscure to me. It held me only because I could see the drawing of my mother’s face, like skin about a wound.
Then Kotta said to me, “You won’t die tomorrow, young buck. Never fear it. If you are sick, Kotta will see to you.”
She had put some sort of spell on me, too. The day’s trou-
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bles had altered as a shadow alters when the sun goes over the sky.
I went outside to clean my deer, and later, when the cloud roof on the mountains turned all the red, purple, yellow, and black of the warrior’s cloak my mother was weaving me, I secured a place by the fire and ate my last meal as a boy.
2
You sleep in a new and isolated place that night, alone with other boys who are to be made men the next day.
At dawn the krarl priest comes to wake you, his face freshly coated with black. He wears a robe tasseled with the tails of beasts and jinking from bronze disks and ivory teeth, the dentition of wild cats, wolves, bears, and men. I had not slept, and I heard him coming before he cuffed me. If he had crept in softly I should yet have known him from his stench.
Seel was the seer of Ettook’s krarl. His father had been seer before him, and had slunk in from the forests with only his sorcery to recommend him. Seel’s god was the one-eyed serpent, the Treacherous Beguiler, for whom the twists and turns of Snake’s Road had been named centuries out of mind. Sometime Seel had taken a wife and got a daughter on her. Shortly, the woman died, which did not surprise me. The daughter, meanwhile, grew up into a bitch. She was her father’s handmaid at his conjurings, the lay of half the tribe besides, but her status was mighty. Seel-Na-she had no other name than Seel’s daughter, this being the mark of her glory-was ever looking to be Ettook’s wife in Tathra’s stead. She had one son, a year younger than I, Fid, and she would have liked to claim him as Ettook’s, but did not dare. Red Fid had a squint in his left eye, and Jork was the only other krarl warrior who squinted; Ettook’s eyes were set straight. It must have rubbed her raw.
When Seel had roused us, we went into the open beyond
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the tent. Here we stripped and scrubbed our bodies over with snow. The place was far from the other tents under the tunnels, and there was no sound to be heard in all the valley but the sounds we made, shivering and balking at the cold. The shireens must hide and even the braves keep quiet at this hour of initiation.
The priest came up and looked us over. He prodded and pried at the boys. I was still angry; I had had the company of my anger all night. I thought, If he puts his talons on me, I shall strike his eyes out through his skull’s back. But he must have sensed me on the boil, for he left my body alone. Then shortly, naked as we were, he herded us up along the valley, running to keep ourselves warm enough to live, past the pool under thin ice that generally the women came to smash for water-though not today, no woman being permitted to take this route on the morning of the Rite-and over the ridge. Beyond lay pines and cedars, black as gashes in the dim flaring yellow of the rising sun. Our path struck through the trees, through the dark shadows to the loom of the great tent of many hides, like death’s own house, into which we must run.
Inside the tent it was pitch-black. We fell down gasping where unseen hands pushed us. The floor was rough with rugs, and the air close and hot after our short freezing journey. There were others there ahead of us, and others behind, panting like dogs after the hunt. The darkness seethed with bodies, breath, and terror. I was not the only apprehensive one among them, yet none of them had my fury to season it.
There must have been near sixty youths crushed into that pavilion, males of several Dagkta krarls, while all through the winter valleys the tribes would be holding the rites of this Day of Initiation, each subtly different from the rest.
Soon there rose an odor of smoke, like sweet wormwood.
You took a breath or two of this and half began to choke, but instead the swirling stuff burrowed into the lungs and stilled them. It was a magic incense of the priests. The head seemed gradually to loosen from the body, and float off in the air. My head and I were up in the roof, yet somehow aware of my belly below, with a pit to it as hard and acid as the nut found in a peach.
Next drums started up, either from the corners of the vast tent or in my body, I was not sure. There was a murmuring
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sound and a sort of disturbance in the blackness, and something squealed out like an animal, but I did not really care.
I lay a long while in the smoke, not caring and at the same moment knowing I should care, should keep hold on my anger, it was all I had.
Suddenly hands fastened on my arms; I was lifted and hauled across the rugs, over the bodies of boys lying in their stupor. I suppose they had been dragging the young males through this way for some time, maybe they had even trodden on me as I now drunkenly trod on others. I had noticed nothing and no one noticed me.