The partition of hides gave on to a cave, and the air turned abruptly dank and white-cold.
There was a light here. I became aware of it in stages. They had dropped me on my back on a hard bed and the chill pierced up through it like teeth. Water wept down walls and someone grunted and someone cried out and the drums muffled and blurred as my eyes were doing.
I was confused enough to imagine I was getting back my senses, and began to shudder with the cold and struggle weakly, for I had discovered they had tied me. I was desperate to be afraid now, for I felt it was my only defense and somehow had been taken from me, but all the mundane images and details-scent, sight, sound-got in the way. Finally death leaned down, black-faced with eyes like bleached iron, and I recognized Seel. This was the time and the place of the tattooing. They were going to make the scars of manhood on me, and I should die.
I think I bit him. He struck me in the face, and I felt the blow and did not feel it. Then the bronze claw scratched me, a delicate smarting itch. It spread across my breast and ribs and arms, preceded by the lascivious lick of the wool tuft, making the pattern. Bronze needle and needle of bone and rasp of the wool thread drawn through under the skin. To begin with it seemed nothing. Next it became unbearable, that incessant twitching-kissing followed by scratching silver pain. I had forgotten biting him, and only recalled after. I had forgotten who he was. I stared into the ebony face, the eyes where the vague glow caught them, and writhed and twisted at each deft stroke.
But from being unbearable, the sensation became stealthily pleasing. I shut my eyes, and a girl was gently raking her
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nails over me trying to wake me up, and she was waking me in every way, but when I reached for her she was up in a second and running off laughing down a tunnel in the mountains.
I ran after her, but I did not catch her. Instead I came to an area where the walls hugged close toward each other, and I made out a warm light shining ahead in an oval cave. I felt a need to reach the cave, but the way was very narrow. And suddenly a woman’s voice flashed clear as diamond in my head. I did not know what she had spoken, but it was a rejection, a command. It brought an agony with it that curled and shriveled me like a burned leaf. I shouted aloud then because, of all things, I had not expected death in such a form.
I was only ill a day or so, but I had some strange dreams. The idea of the ancient cities had got into my fever, masked men and women and one symbol more curious than the rest, a female lynx, salt-white, with a black wolf mounted on her back. Also I had some notion the tribe was stoning me because I had turned a spring of water into blood, to make them afraid.
Eventually I opened my eyes with a mouth full of bone dust, my body like stones, and looked around. I was in the hut of sticks and mud near the boys’ tent where the sick ones went. It had been dark, but now a light had come close to me. Behind the light I made out a skinny shadow and recognized its smell as Seel.
By the trembling of the lamp I could tell he was in an ugly humor. He would sometimes froth at the lips and scream like a woman birthing, a thing that alarmed the warriors, who feared his magic. Seeing me conscious, he started gobbling out some curse over me, calling me worm’s dung and other tender things. Now and then a fleck of his tepid spittle hit my face. I remembered biting him.
“Greeting, Seel,” I said. “Was it your dirty needles that poisoned me, or your dirty flesh?”
He gave a squawk straight off, and some of the hot oil tipped out of the clay lamp onto my chest. I would not have been so forthright with him had I been quite well, I think, for he was a bad enemy and I had unfriends enough. But it seemed funny at the time.
Then I heard Kotta’s voice in the far corner of the hut.
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“He speaks nonsense, seer, it’s only his fever. Take no heed. Such ravings are beneath you.”
Seel flung around and the lamp showed her. She was at some healer’s work, intent as if she could see all she did.
“He has no fever, woman,” Seel rasped. “It is the out-tribe blood in him. He does not bow to the ways of the red krarls. Tomorrow dawn he shall come to the painted tent and I shall judge him, and the One-Eyed.” And his gnarled hand crawled around the snake-carving on his breast.
“As you decide, seer,” Kotta rejoined politely, “but he is the chief’s son.”
Seel dashed down the lamp, and strode out like a thin evil wind.
“It is a clever boy,” said Kotta, “to enrage Seel.”
“Don’t lesson me, Kotta,” I said. “Tell me how long I’ve been here.”
“The afternoon of the Rite, the night following, the day just gone.”
This scared me a bit. It seemed a good while to lose from your life. I said, “Am I better?”
“Better or worse. You, and others, shall reckon it.”
“Women always speak in riddles,” I said. I sat up and my head rang a little, but quickly cleared. I felt near enough myself, and I was hungry. “Get me some food,” I told her.
“I will get you a mirror first,” she said, “then see if you still hunger.”
This irritated me, for mirrors were women’s toys. I did not blame Tathra that she might want to gaze in one, for there was something worth observing, but I hardly knew my own face. Still, Kotta brought me a bronze mirror and held it where I could take note. It was not my face she was showing me but my breast and arms, where the claws of the tattooing needles had patterned the sigils of tribe and krarl.
I thought the lamp was at fault, next, the bronze or my eyes. At length I reasoned the fault was not in any of these.
“Is this so?” I asked her.
“It is,” Kotta said.
I touched the muscular body that belonged to me, comprehending it with my hand, and stared down at myself. Even without the mirror, I could see.
There was not a tattoo on me, not even a scar from the needles, and the colors might never have been.
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“Did he trick me then?” I said. “Only pretend he worked on me as the other priests did, and the drug-smoke deceived me?”
“Oh, no. The work was done. Many saw it-the spear-pattern of the krarl and the stag-sign of the tribe, and Ettook’s mark like three rings. But now it has healed and faded from that hard marble flesh that never has a blemish, oh son of Tathra.”
She had predicted well. The hunger had left me.
“Without the tattoos I am not a warrior,” I said.
“Just so,” said Kotta, “you are not.”
3
Once, maybe, the ritual of the Boys’ Rite may have been profound and meaningful. Certain of the priests still murmured of gods who came at such times, and the black people of the marsh-towers were said to worship a golden book that spoke to them. But in Ettook’s krarl, as with all the red peoples-Dagkta, Skoiana, Hinga, Eethra, Drogoi-the rites were just the husks left over from deeper things, no pith remaining and no mystery, nothing to lift up the soul or go to the brain like wine. And, as generally happens, the more truth the ritual lost the more they bolstered it with significance. There is a saying among the Moi: The chief is clad in gold and purple, only the god dares to go naked.
So they made much of the Rite because it was nothing, and I had failed to be marked by it, as if to prove it nothing. They would be against me now with a wall to back them in all their bewildered savage little pride. And there was something else. Their ways had never meant much to me; to be made a warrior was only a form, I felt no honor in it or glory. I had never been kin with them. To myself I claimed Tathra’s blood alone; her obscure krarl, now vanished, I considered mine. Yet to be accounted’by the Dagkta as less than
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the dregs of the pack, less than the youths I had fought and bested all my life and scorned to take as equals, wretches that used certain explicit gestures for my mother’s name-to be reckoned less than these, that I would not bear. I bethought myself at last how I was indeed the chiefs son, Tuvek NarEttook.