Shadowfire (Birthgrave #2)

by Tanith Lee

Another child would have gone no further, for the krarls generously leave their weaklings as a meal for wolves.

From the beginning I was conscious of being unique and out of the herd. I never lived an hour without it. It made me sharp and hard and taught me to keep my thoughts in my head, which was all to the good.

With others he would say, “Here is my son,” boast of my height and the muscle growing in me, boast because he had made me, like a good spear. Yet when I displeased him, he beat me, not exactly as a warrior beats his son to tan sense into his hide, or out of it, as the case may be; Ettook beat me with pleasure, because I was his to beat, also something more. I came to see later in my life that each of those blows was saying, “Tomorrow you will be stronger than I, so now I will be stronger than you, and if I break your back, well and good.”

Supposedly it is the oldest hate of man for man, but always new.

this milestone of my life, and I dreaded it, and did not positively know why. But I would rather have eaten my tongue than said so. Even my mother I did not tell. I could not let her see me weaken.

Her name was Chula, my first wife, as it turned out later, so the rape was in some ways prophetic.

my system showed intolerance to any foreign thing taken in, even food.

It occurred to me eventually that I should probably die of it as the girl had said, and this filled me with a raging anger. To perish for something I held in contempt, and to leave my mother alone in Ettook’s tent, was gall for me to swallow.

It was the first time I had ever killed a thing and realized I had taken its life, something that belonged to it.

One tale, discredited at once, was of a goddess risen on earth. More to the tribal taste was the notion of a powerful and ambitious man who drove the old order in to battle for his own ends, was slain, and so left the war to blaze on by itself like a fire, unchecked and leaderless.

From the frayed reins of their horses would drip precious jewels, while the ribs of the horse itself thrust starving through the hide.

It made my anger worse to see her thus working for Ettook during my last hours in the world. I felt she should be exclusively mine, for I was sure tomorrow meant an end for me, and I was trying to cram today full of deeds.

She could never leave my hair be, a thing I have found in other women since, as if the color or the texture magnetized their fingers.

“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.”

“You won’t die tomorrow, young buck. Never fear it. If you are sick, Kotta will see to you.”

If he had crept in softly I should yet have known him from his stench.

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.

I think I bit him. He struck me in the face, and I felt the blow and did not feel it.

But from being unbearable, the sensation became stealthily pleasing.

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 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.

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.

the more truth the ritual lost the more they bolstered it with significance.

only the god dares to...

So they made much of the Rite because it was nothing, and I had failed to be marked by it,...

I had never been kin with them.

To myself I claimed Tathra’s blood alone; her obscure krarl, now vanished, I considered mine.

He had an expression I had seen before, uncertain whether my trouble angered or pleased him.

as sudden as it lit, the white light in my head went out.

And not for the first time, I wished I had a friend, a single man I could trust my back to.

I had been thinking of my life and not Jork’s death when I slew him.

“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.”

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.

Generally men create gods in their own image.

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,

“If it’s mine, she’ll bear before the month is run. If she’s made me a son, I’ll have her.”

I could foresee wild times if we wed. “I’m surprised she’s willing,” I remarked. “She lost a tooth in my shoulder on the previous occasion.”

A priest of another Dagkta krarl joined us, for Seel would not since there was bad blood openly between us. I imagine he meant to shame me, but he failed.

there were plenty of other holy men to choose from over the hill. It needs only a few words spoken inside a ring of fire to make a woman a warrior’s property.

I was your first woman, and that can never be altered.”

Ettook’s un-love had not taught me a particular worth in sons.

once I glimpsed a big cat, as white as milk, which made me think of the dream in the fever, and the silver lynx-mask. I had taken plenty of plunder since then, but nothing finer than that. Even Chula’s emerald I valued less.

there had come a sort of silence over us, dark as the veil she wore now always in my presence. I considered my marriage was to blame, but in my heart I knew it was the silver lynx that pushed between us, though she would not speak of it.

Chula was sitting among the torches with the child at her breast, brooding that I had recently found another I liked as well, for she had thought she might tether me like a steer.

I do not know what words Chula used, but the substance of them was that I would rather lie on my mother than on my wife, and had done so many times.

There are always tongues happy to tell any news.

shireens,

calling women by the mask they must wear.

“Speak once more to my mother as you did at Sihharn,” I said, “and you will be silent thereafter, for I’ll break your neck.”

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.

I lost the day in the forest as easily as I had lost my ill temper.