“Did you suppose I should fail?” I asked her. “I thought their sly needles in the dark might injure me, but never their half-wit’s knives. Did you hear all of it?”
“All,” she sobbed. Her breath scalded my neck, and she clenched her hands on the conquest she symbolized for herself in my flesh. “How you broke Distik’s ribs, and let the life from Jork, and that Urm and Tooni will not go hunting again until the moon has thinned to a bow.”
It made me glad to hear her fierceness speak out like this, she was so much more than the other women who could only whine or screech.
“It seems Tathra would defeat the braves of the krarl herself.”
She gazed up at me, her eyes shining.
‘Tathra has made a son who can.”
She put her hand on mine and so she encountered what I had brought in. She had not seen it before, being intent only on me. Now she snatched her fingers away and the brightness in her dulled over.
“What is that thing?”
“The gift of your husband, my mother, the chief’s bounty
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given to his new warrior. He took me into his tent and opened up the chest there, and told me choose what I had a mind to.”
“Why this, of all the treasure?”
“Why not this?”
She turned from me and went away across the tent and sat down where she had been before. She picked up the shireen that lay there and covered herself with it. Although it was the custom, I felt it like the cold.
“You are a warrior,” she said, seeing me frowning, “I must hide my face.”
“I was a warrior when I entered, but you were unveiled then. Is it this you’re hiding from?” And I lifted up the token I had carried here from Ettook’s chest of spoils, and held it out at her.
He had taken me into the tent and pushed open the wooden box with its turmoil of glitter inside. There lay the looting of several hundred raids and battles; as much as give me a gift, he had wanted to show me how many men had had their necks beneath his heel. I put my hand in the heap, and he came up beside me and spilled out quantities on the floor so I should see better what he had garnered. There were cups of bronze circled in bright gold, spear hafts of gray hard iron, brazen bucklers set with water-green gems and arm rings of yellow and white metal, handfuls of stones like fires or blood, and collars of ivory strung with blue carbuncles. I had not guessed him so wealthy, and hesitated, wanting the prize of his collection and not certain what it might be. Then my firsts and his had cleared a path, and I found it.
It was a mask, made for a woman for it was small, all pure scintillant silver: the face of a lynx.
My dream came back to me at once-the black Wolf mating with the white lynx. I moved my hand and touched the mask, and a shock went through my palm clear up into my shoulder joint. It was like grasping lightning. But I did not shift, and the sensation dwindled and was gone. I lifted the mask and showed it to Ettook.
“I will have this, if my chief permits.”
He nodded, sullen as a child whose toy has been stolen. I had got the best from him as I had hoped to. The mask was of value, besides its curious beauty, and obviously it had come from the workshops of the ruined cities. At the back, long
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yellow cords hung down to decorate the hair, and on the end of each was a little perfect flower of translucent yellow amber. It pleased me and set the crown on my combat, for I was still a boy. I had some notion that I might give it to Tathra to wear in place of the shireen, and let the women chew on that.
Now I saw this was not to be. Tathra shunned the mask, shunned it as something known. I recalled the shock from the metal when I grasped it in its sleep, some old magic locked in the silver, some ghost thing.
“I will give it back to him,” I said to her. “Is it cursed?”
“No,” she said. I could no longer read her emotions behind the shireen. “There was an Eshkir woman among the tents; the warriors captured her. She was my slave, but she ran away after you were born. The mask was hers.”
I recollected Kotta speaking of this the night before the Boys’ Rite, and how Tathra had cringed in on herself.
“Did she work you ill, the Eshkir woman?”
“No,” Tathra said, “but the women of the great cities are evil, and where they pass they leave a trail like burning.”
“I will take this object and be rid of it,” I said.
“No, it is what you chose; it was meant for you. The sorcery is long spent; it will not harm you.” Tathra sighed behind her veil as if she had been holding her breath, mistaking it for something that must not escape. “It was meant for you,” she said again. “It will not harm you.”
4
That year, as ever, the winter truce ended on Snake’s Road in the month of the Warrior, and I had my first mans’ battles.
The fighting was haphazard and bloody. Who won took what he liked from the vanquished-metal, weapons, women, drink. Most often there would be a pact made next, squeak-
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ing females returned to their own tents, and vows sworn between the men. Nevertheless, outside truce and pact, krarl fell on krarl indiscriminately. The Dagkta sometimes feuded among themselves and continually with the Skoiana, the Moi, the Eethra, and all the rest. You might barter and share meat with someone winter or summer, and have to shear off his limbs in the spring. This was the custom of the tribes, and perhaps, in the fogs of their past, the scheme had had its reasons. Yet like many of their ways, only the peel remained, the fruit was long gone. I served it-since it fitted my nature, giving me a chance to spend my hate lavishly-but I never thought it noble or wise. Only the black marsh tribes did not fight. It was said they reverenced a book rather than a deity, and they were reckoned strange. Having no horses or wealth, however, they were spoken of with scorn and left in peace.
Naturally, the little wars were dressed up in ritual and significance. War spear challenge was followed by war dance, and invocation of demons, the one-eyed snake and diverse totems. I bowed to none of these, having seen early the vulgarity and impotence of the tribal pantheon. Generally men create gods in then” own image.
Besides, I had already a kind of belief in myself, in my own body and what it could do, which was not amazing after what had gone before. Now I saw braves hang themselves with amulets, leave tidbits for spirits, and still take an arrow in the neck. I, worshiping nothing and bribing nothing with prayers, rode among an enemy unscathed, scything them like summer wheat. It was a virtue among the krarls for the men’s side to glory in butchery, but I outdid them, and I noticed several mark my eyes as I came on at them, and their knees turn to butter.
I had discovered the sweet sharp joy of slaughter. I had not properly known it before. Learning the lesson, I would have fought all year round, season to season. As it was I had killed upward of thirty men by the time we reached the eastern pastures and the summer camping, and got a name among the krarls with whom we had warred. The Dark Warrior of the Red Dagkta, the Unmarked One. It was good to see unease and terror replace the sneers and winks. My own krarl feared me most but, like Ettook, began boasting of me. I would paint myself black and scarlet and white in the stead of tattoos, and ride out like a devil in the morning. I wore my hair
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loose too, it would never keep in plaits for long; let a man catch me by it if he had a mind, and see how I gifted him for his trouble.
In the final battle before the tenting, a blade went in my thigh and broke off there, and when they came to cut it free, the flesh had closed around it, tight as secrets. The seer showed his teeth about the krarl and told Ettook his son would perish of a diseased wound, but it healed clean, to both their sorrows.
Since the Boys’ Rite, Seel had given me his distance, and his words came secondhand. And at the war dance his daughter never offered me her flesh, at which, of course, I broke my heart.