Shadowfire (Birthgrave #2)

by Tanith Lee

Few savage things need to go after men in the warm months; even the wolf is fat.

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 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.

Hearing her tone, I was sorry. I had no quarrel with my mother.

“Do you think one of their red gods will strike you if you disobey? Obey me.”

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.

supposing they might then fight among themselves and blunt their claws before they came complaining to me.

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.

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.

I wished to say to her, “Let him go, and good riddance. I have my own tent, my own wealth, I can keep you safe.” But somehow the words would not come. It embarrassed me to speak of his rutting with her. Besides, she was nervous for me, too, as Ettook’s heir.

The krarl feared me in battle, but did not like me.

Being slow and stupid and intent on enjoyment rather than thought, he too had got no workable plan to be shot of me.

We had a fight in a narrow gully where the spines of mountains clawed up on three sides, bottling us all in with each other. The white ground was soon red, and next morning there were forty or so red heads staked up along the Dagkta camping line, each with its Skoiana tattoos to warn off any others of like mind.

The summers were always hotter and the winters colder in the days of their strength, and the air thick with epic dramas and portents.

There was no hunting to be had it seemed from one end of the valley-chain to the other.

“Peace,” I said. “It is the law. Your brats die anyway.” “This one will live,” she cried. “I swear she will live. She will grow fair and bring you honor by marriage—oh, Tuvek, never take her from me!”

Presently, great avalanches began over on the huge slopes to the north; you heard their thunder day and night. One morning the blizzard eased, and I shot a couple of scrawny hares foraging among the trees. Their ribs showed as men’s ribs were showing, but I was glad enough for what I could get.

the women only went to Kotta’s tent when they were in need of help, or ill.

She is carrying another son for Ettook.”

“All is well, Tuvek,” Tathra said, smiling at me. “It will do me credit, for I thought myself beyond the age.”

“He has a loose tongue, the fine warrior, when he lets his wits off the leash.

Tathra’s eyes were wild with fear and misery, and she smiled again and told me how happy she was.

That is how the world is. Even the man had better look behind him; the wolf may be near, or another man, or fate, the hungriest hunter of them all.

Moka’s eldest brother was Urm, the man I had thrown in my proving fight as a warrior. I had broken his leg and it had never healed straight, so he had no great cause to bless my name.

The chiefs of the krarls would cursorily meet here, clasp hands, exchange tokens. Families would pay off Blood-Prices, and fresh feuds begin. Presently the warriors would get drunk and stab each other in the guts as they were making water up against the trees.

There was nothing in the land or in my mind to tell me how my life should alter through that day, to warn me of the hunter with his shaft aimed at my back.

I put my hand between my face and the sun’s face. So I made out horsemen riding from the west, sixty, seventy, eighty of them, and the sparks were springing from the gems they wore, and the gems on the bridles of their tall horses. The gems and the horses spurred my brain, and countless stories came back to me.

This was not the manner in which to give him my tidings. I was too riled to care.

For six months his brow had been level with my shoulder, which did not suit him. He swung his sweaty paw at me, and caught me a blow in the face. I did not bother to avoid it, though I could have done so; he was slow as treacle. It never even rocked me—the red pig was simply padding now, no muscle—but my own hand was answering on a reflex.

“My chief, there are riders coming up on the valley. I doubt if they approach in peace, whoever they are, but from their ornaments I think they may be city raiders.”

I had known nothing before of city cannon, or the great iron shot that was expelled from them. This initial lesson was thorough. It was the first occasion true terror laid hold on me.

I became aware I was lying on a mattress of cinders and twigs and blood, others’ or my own.

It was a savage madman’s raid. Indiscriminate, wasteful, irresistible.

There are two clever tricks men know. One is to make much of nothing. The second is to make nothing of much.

a good many curses were minted in the firelight.

The dismembered dead were left in a pile with their weapons to be burned like the rubbish in the morning.

I was dishonored in my own eyes, for what that was worth, for abruptly I had choked down the awareness that the enemy were only men.

I had lain on my face in the spring mud, and they had ridden over me, as if they had some right to confiscate free men, and barely a hand had lifted against them, and even that hand had not been mine.

“It is good of you, my father, to tell no one. I am grateful. I shall never forget your own bravery. The priests should make a song of it.” It was too delicate for him, but he labored at the problem and shortly he had puzzled it out.

A small piece of an hour later, I was out of the valley and riding west, on the trail of the slave-takers.

My plan was very simple when I should come up with them. I meant to steal in by night on their camp, and unbind and rouse the Dagkta men they had captured. I and they should then appropriate weapons and fall on the mask-faces, taking them unawares, for they would never expect such treatment, proud and crazy as they were. It did not occur to me either that this plan of mine was nothing if not as proud and crazy as anything of theirs. I never thought to question it. I felt I could do no other thing but what I did, as if the road had been especially paved for me, and I had only to walk on it.

And I was not as I had thought, not angry, fierce, or filled with old hatreds, not even beset by enemies. I had never been so cool in my life.

I snatched some sleep at moonrise and had a dream I had gone blind. Being blind, I had fallen into an icy water, a pool or river, and the liquid was biting like a million knives. I came awake to find myself saying, passionless and clear, “I will kill her.”

With wary fascination I had realized I would climb the rock and move among the fires, confront the city raiders, looking into the glass eyes of their masks.

Sometimes, if the power of a god is considered needful, certain priests will offer themselves to him, open their souls for him to enter if he will. One does not always believe in the god who comes. Too often he looks like drunkenness or sham. What came to me that night I had not invited, but I never doubted it.

He died in gaunt bewilderment, as the krarl men in the valley had died.

As he was going into the Black Place, I thought, he would be asking them there who had slain him, but he would get no Blood-Price off me for his grave.

finding, as I had, his language ready in my mouth. It was as if I read the stones and learned the tongue from them.

it was a remote greed, like a memory.

It was as though I had come into the court of Death, skeletons in bright armor and wormwood in golden cups to drink.