Shadowfire (Birthgrave #2)

by Tanith Lee

“It is the mother’s agony that she forgets nothing. I remember your birth, I remember you at my breast. I remember how you grew to be my pride. And now I am nothing to you. It is the son who forgets.”

It was the eternal cry of mother for son. I might have recognized it and dealt differently with her, but her masked face, her wizened voice, her woman’s foolishness angered me. I had hoped myself done with this dire prognostication of evil spells.

Since I could walk, I have been fighting, boy and man, because I was your son, and he gave you no honor and therefore none to me.

“You have punished me enough by ceasing to love me. You do not need to punish me with words as well.”

After that inauspicious meeting, she was bland and almost dumb with me, which got me into a similar habit.

She walked like a chief’s daughter into the circle of fire to me. But behind the open eye-holes of the mask, her green eyes glittered with contempt.

I was glad I had made her wait, given her the space to burn a little, as I had burned.

I have many essences in my place, liquors and banes. There is a little stone jar in the chest; a drop or two out of it is good for the old men’s pain in the limbs, but more than a drop or two and the heart stops. Your Eshkir has questioned me about these things and, since she is to be the wife of the chief’s son, I have answered her.” The dark had grown sharp edged, and the wine sour in my throat. “Well, Kotta?” “The stone jar has gone with your bride,” said Kotta. “She took it.

I did not swallow anything of what was in the cup, but made believe I took some. It had a strange smell, very faint. I should never have noticed it if I had had no warning.

If she had been calmer, she would have recalled that the hearts of dead men do not pound as mine was doing, that you can see a man breathe, however shallowly. Yet she was so certain she had killed me, she looked for nothing else.

“What’s this?” I said, my voice hoarse as if I were half-dead indeed. “Kill me, then die with me? That would be a fine marriage night.”

If you wished me slain, why weep for me?”

For all her murdering, she loved me, and for all my anger I could not kill her, having stopped her own arm at the work.

There is one sound way a man can bind a woman to him, the same way she will bind him, and with the same rope.

So Demizdor became my wife, though never like a wife of the krarls. It was Asua and Moka who waited on me, who saw to the duties of the tent, the food, the washing and mending.

she had ridden with her gold-mask on his wars, though never fought in them; so the city women were, it seemed, half man if not warrior.

Choke it down, I thought. Though the meat is gristly, there are tougher joints to come.

I think she was happy enough at this time, shutting her ears to the inner voice that stung her.

It was the first child I had ever wanted. It would have been like a pledge between us, another link in the chain that bound our lives. I see from this that even then I felt the shadow brush me.

She had experienced no passion for her lover, a man twelve years her senior, whom she was given to, according to the ways of form and etiquette; yet he was a god to her, so she had been trained to see him.

She did not comprehend but she must comply.

The dagger she had thrown at me, she had taken up for herself.

She had taught me also tenderness, with her at least.

“One day you will regret me,”

“You are not of the tribes,” she murmured. “You are a prince of the Dark City, of Ezlann, Uastis’ citadel.”

Tathra’s child began to move, some forty days too soon.

We were gone two days. When we came back it was to find Tathra already in labor.

I had kept sufficient of a reckoning to know it was too early, and now it all came borne to me, how I had been with Tathra, how I had neglected her. I recollected she had said, “You have punished me enough by ceasing to love me.” I might have shrunk down into a child again. Suddenly I could see her in my mind’s eye, her beauty and its loss, her wretched life, that she had needed me and I had found another.

The mother is the boy’s first woman. And no man had ever valued her but me.

“Listen, warrior. That is how you came.”

“Scream,” I said. “Let the krarl hear you, and be damned to them. You are bearing another son, one who will treat you better than I. Come, tear my hands if you want. Let me feel your pain.”

Accordingly, for an hour I held my mother, and Kotta aided Ettook’s son into this world. For it was a son. There was hair on its head, red hair as his had been, and it was dead.

I wondered why she should lie, but Tathra’s unmasked face was showing me. Shrunken and colorless, it had acquired a silent inward look, as if she had begun listening to some music in her brain. The look gradually settled on her like a snow, like dust. It was the look of death.

The blood fled from my mother as if it would be free of her.

I felt only emptiness. I thought, Long ago I came from this agony, into this tent. Now I have let her go back through the same gate. It is hard or impossible for a warrior to weep; the ease of it is never taught him, rather he must consider it a failing, a weakness. Therefore I could not, though my body was racked. There was no release for me, no purging of my anguish in grief.

“It was his seed that killed her,” I said, “his red seed.”

There are words that must be said. I have promised Ettook’s wife, before you came, to say them.”

not because of any interest or reasoning in me, but because it was some road to take, some destination to achieve.

I thought how they wailed, and how they must be smiling as they did it. Seel’s daughter, who would lead the chant for Tathra at moonrise, would barely keep from laughing as she tossed the autumn flowers on my mother’s body.

she had lived several lives in one, it seemed to Kotta, as the snake wears and sheds several skins.

Tathra was yet my mother. Though not my flesh, though I had not been shaped in her body, still it was so. Her breasts had fed me, her arms rocked me before ever I knew it. The other, though she had carried me and given me my life, was less mother to me than the beast who eats her young.

“I am done with this place. I thank you for opening the cage.”

I stood on the somber earth, and I sensed him go from me, the man I had been, the warrior, the chief’s son, Tuvek Nar-Ettook. Even my bones and flesh seemed changing, and my brain rang.

This putrid nonsense was volleying out of him like foul air as I opened the flap. When he saw me, he jumped, in the usual manner; then he analyzed me more closely, and he grew very nervous.

I said, “Stand up, you bloody hog, and get on your feet. If you cannot live as a man, you shall at least die as one.”

I had meant to knife him, to fight him and knife him if he rose to fight. Then I would cut down any others who came at me. I never dreamed I could not do it.

I knew there was another, better way to kill him. I felt it come, like a slow wave, through my brain. It was his, my father Vazkor’s, skill. He was guiding me as on the fortress rock. I could kill a man by wanting him dead.

Ettook lunged from his cushions, impaled on a sword of slim lightning, screaming louder even than Tathra had screamed dying of his cockerel’s work. I let him sample it to the full.

As I had always recognized, they had only been waiting for the chance to take me. I had built my own pyre and, for good measure, climbed onto it.

Thus even my hero-deed was used against me.