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The dogs were good. I had them at a Dagkta gathering a couple of springs before, two high-legged, tassel-tailed devils, the color of gray sand; you could scarcely tell them apart.
The compunction I had felt on my last boy’s hunt, when I had shot the deer by the winter pool, had left me. I had seen death for what it was that day only because I feared myself on the verge of it. Since then I had lived and killed men, unsparing of their blood and pain.
The dogs quickly found the trail of a buck, and ran grinning down the avenues between the trees.
The forest was burned to the ambers, golds, and reds of autumn, and the paths clotted with old magenta leaves already down. The smell of smoke left from the fires and torches of Sihharn had caught there, like the smell of the year itself, smoldering out.
The dogs’ feet tacked among the leaves. Presently my rage cooled under the crimson boughs.
We never took the buck. It was a rutting trail, fierce but not fresh, though there was small game in plenty. I lost the day in the forest as easily as I had lost my ill temper. At sundown, having no mind yet for my wife and my tent, I made a fire with flints and scorched the meat from the kill. I ate sparingly as ever, giving the best bits to the dogs to growl over.
The dusky sky glowed and poured away like wine through the trees, leaving the forest serene as a lake, just the fall wind to speak in it. I kept my knife to hand, but was not wary to lie down in the open. Few savage things need to go after men in the warm months; even the wolf is fat. If anything came near, the dogs would rouse me.
As I stretched there for sleep, I felt cleaned and cleared, and only what I was, a boy, with no one to answer to, and no squabbles to hinder me. I had a notion of striking off alone at sunup, leaving hearth and tent and krarl and tribe behind, leaving custom and pride, my scratchy wife, and the sneering words and the battle-lust and all the rubbish of my past. Yes, even leaving behind my mother with her black-robed face. It is good to dream, though you feel the anchor hold you back, root-deep in the seabed of your life.
I woke at midnight.
I sat up and looked around, but the dogs lay quiet as gray bolsters with their noses on the meat bones. The sky was
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many starred and the trees slimly mantled in shadow. Nothing seemed abroad to wake me, yet it was like a charm. I got to my feet and took a step or two, and the dogs slept on, and the forest, and I was left alone with whatever drew me.
I walked light but with no sense of danger. I had gone about eighty paces and had a plan of returning, when I came suddenly on an older part of the wood where the trees were massive as pillars and the air heavy with their craggy scent. Maybe it was the scent that woke me, that stagnant muttering of soil and bark and centuries, on the crisp air.
Among the trunks was an open place, and at its center, something white.
For a minute I had a wild thought or two, recalling stories. Then I made it out. A stream bubbled from the earth here, and some thousand or so years ago they had built a basin to receive it, and put a marble girl on the plinth above. I think she was the goddess of the stream, or of the grove.
The basin was green and growing weeds and the water only a trickle now, hardly that. A briar bound the plinth like dark rope. But she, the goddess-girl, was pure as morning under the moon, which still rained on her between the leaves.
She was just human size, not tall but slender, with sweet secret breasts and a waist that narrowed like the waist of a dancer, and her carved gown gliding like serpents on her thighs. Her face had weathered but was still beautiful, like no woman’s face I had ever seen. And her stone hair rayed like a stiff flame outward as if some stony wind lifted it yet.
I had never come on a girl I wanted for more than an hour or so. It was strange to find her like that, locked in marble. It must have been the time and the oldness of the wood, but I half got an idea I should have her, that she Would come off the plinth and put on flesh for me.
Then I heard the dogs begin barking as if a bear had roused them. I turned and ran back, cursing, with the spell broken in bits. I guessed they had only been looking for me; nothing else was about, and they rushed forward, wagging their tails like fools, smiling and panting.
I did not retrace my steps to the grove, nor in the morning. I knew what I should find, a ruinous scabby statue with a chipped face and moss sprouting inside its lips. She would have a piece missing from her shoulder or her breast. I did not want to see it
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Going homeward to the krarl, I remembered the emerald in my belt.
I seemed to have been away years; something about the night had refashioned time. I partly expected new faces, Ettook and Tathra and Chula long in their graves. A boy’s dream indeed. Coming along the slopes I soon observed the smoke of the central fire, and farther off, the smokes of other fires, where other krarls were settled.
I went to Tathra’s tent and she was alone, unlike the day before.
I was not inclined to be subtle. I let her see Chula’s gem. ”Take this, and wear it. I have told her she’ll be sorry if she insults you again.”
“No,” she said, hesitating, “I don’t want her jewel.” So I threw down the emerald by her mirror and her cosmetic pots, and turned to leave.
“Wait,” Tathra said, her voice so full of pain, I felt it too. “Oh, Tuvek, do you hate me for what she said?”
I waited with my back to her. When I could master myself, I said, “The girl is brainless. Must I have the same silliness from you?”
“Tell me what I must do. I will do it,” she said. “How can I bear your anger? You are all I have.”
“I told you what you should do. You will wear her jewel.” “Yes,” she said.
Hearing her tone, I was sorry. I had no quarrel with my mother.
“When I come here next,” I said, “leave the veil off your face.”
“The law of the krarl-”
“Do you think one of their red gods will strike you if you disobey? Obey me.”
I listened to her movements, knowing I had got my way. She came to me and touched my arm, and she had unmasked herself.
I had not been shown her face for several months. It was not as I recalled. I could not fail to see her age this close. The light seeped through the flap of the tent, and revealed to me the chiselings about her eyes and mouth. Her beauty was dying like a flame. I could have wept for it. I put my head down into her hair like a child so I should not see. She thought it was only love. It made her glad.
PART II
The Warrior
1
Time went by; I never felt it go. The seasons slunk past like people in a mist.
My tent was rich with plunder, and my wives shone and glittered with it. In four years I had wed two more girls in the fire-ring, supposing they might then fight among themselves and blunt their claws before they came complaining to me. Chula before me sons three summers in a row, but Moka let two out of the gate in one night, and the next winter another two, though Asua seemed intent on sickly girls, most of whom died. At nineteen I had seven legal sons and two bastard boys in Ettook’s krarl, with three or four more farther afield.
I had killed so many men in my battles, I had lost count. The magic ritual number in the krarls was forty, meant to appease any spirits who might be listening with its modesty. To say you had killed forty men was to say you had slain legion. Thus Tuvek Nar-Ettook, slayer of forty, master of three women, breeder of thirteen sons, was the creature men hailed when they hailed me, the creature the women looked at so intently, the creature warriors ran from or came at with a spear. Inside the creature, I was. If you put a leopard in a cage and cover the cage against the light, you will never know the leopard is there. It will sleep and pine and die. This is how it was with me, and I never knew it, a beast in a covered cage, asleep, half-dead, and silent.