Shadowfire (Birthgrave Trilogy #2) by Tanith Lee | eBook

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Previously published as Vazkor, Son of Vazkor, Shadowfire is the sequel to Tanith Lee’s legendary debut, The Birthgrave!

“A good deal more powerful, emotionally and dramatically, than most heroic-fantasy novels.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Quite remarkable . . . an outstanding novel of strange adventure.”

—Analog (for The Birthgrave)

“The Birthgrave is one of the most beautifully written pieces of fantasy I have ever read.”

—The Drexel Triangle

“Lee paints her scenes rather than writes them; there’s no other way to describe it. Her characters live and breathe off the page, and the reader is drawn into a world of magic and barbarism. It’s not a pretty world. Lee does not write the sweet fantasies of Tolkien, Beagle, or even Cabell. Her fantasy worlds are cruel, painful, dirty, harsh, and frequently depressing. But they are at the same time colorful, real, and absorbing.”

—Critical Mass

“An exciting, feverish, obsession-laden sword and sorcery epic, unlike anything then current—or, arguably, since.”

—LOCUS (for The Birthgrave)

“Marvelously paced and beautifully written.”

—British Fantasy Society Bulletin (for The Birthgrave)

“A quality tour de force not to be missed.”

—Science Fiction Review (for The Birthgrave)

“Vazkor is full of what all Tanith Lee novels are renowned for: lost cities, ancient empires crumbled, savages aping old cultures, violence, vengeance, tragedy, death and gore.”

—Madison Review of Books

DAW Books presents new and classic works of imaginative fiction by multiple award-winning author TANITH LEE

THE BIRTHGRAVE TRILOGY

THE BIRTHGRAVE

SHADOWFIRE

(originally published as Vazkor, Son of Vazkor)

HUNTING THE WHITE WITCH

(originally published as Quest for the White Witch)

TALES FROM THE FLAT EARTH

NIGHT’S MASTER

DEATH’S MASTER

DELUSION’S MASTER

DELIRIUM’S MISTRESS

NIGHT’S SORCERIES

EARTH’S MASTER

THE WARS OF VIS

THE STORM LORD

ANACKIRE

THE WHITE SERPENT

AND MORE:

COMPANIONS ON THE ROAD

VOLKHAVAAR

ELECTRIC FOREST

SABELLA

KILL THE DEAD

DAY BY NIGHT

LYCANTHIA

DARK CASTLE, WHITE HORSE

CYRION

SUNG IN SHADOW

TAMASTARA

THE GORGON AND OTHER BEASTLY TALES

DAYS OF GRASS

A HEROINE OF THE WORLD

REDDER THAN BLOOD

DAW is proud to be reissuing these classic books in new editions, as well as publishing new works from Tanith Lee, beginning in 2015.

Originally published as Vazkor, Son of Vazkor.

Cover art by Bastien Lecouffe Deharme.

Cover design by G-Force Design.

DAW Book Collectors No. 272.

Published by DAW Books, Inc.

375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

All resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

First Printing, January 1978.

First New Edition Printing, September 2015

ISBN 978-0-698-40460-1

DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED
U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES
—MARCA REGISTRADA
HECHO EN U.S.A.

Book One

Part I: The Krarl

ONE SUMMER WHEN I was nine years old, a snake bit me in the thigh. I remember very little of what followed, only being mad with heat and tossing about to escape it as if my flesh were on fire, while time passed in patches. And then it was over and I was better, and running on the green slopes again among the tall white stones that grew there like trees. I learned after that I should have died from the snake’s venom. My body turned gray and blue and yellow from it; a pleasant sight I must indeed have been. Yet I did not die, and even the bite left no scar.

Nor was this the only occasion that I brushed with death. When I was weaned I spewed up everything they gave me except goat milk. Another child would have gone no further, for the krarls generously leave their weaklings as a meal for wolves. Being the son of a Dagkta chief by his favorite woman, my mother’s pleading no doubt saved me. Presently I got over my delicacy and the forbearance of my father was justified.

I survived by fighting and my days were filled up with it. When I was not fighting for my life, I was fighting every other male child of the krarl. For, though I was Ettook’s son, my mother was the out-tribe woman, and I had all the look of her from my very first day in the world. Black-blue hair that was silk on her and a lion’s mane on me and her black eyes, like the blind back of the night sky.

One of my earliest memories is of my mother as she sat combing my hair over my scalp, neck, and shoulder blades. She drew the wooden comb through and through those whips with the sensuous possessiveness of all mothers. She was proud of me, and I was proud to have her pride. She was beautiful, was Tathra, and she was like me. I leaned on her knees as she combed me, and even then, I recall, my knuckles were cut open from some battle, someone’s teeth I had loosened because they had called her names. 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. My mother Tathra shone like a dark star in among the red and yellow people. It was clear, even to the child I was, they hated her for her glamour and her position, and me they hated as the symbol. When I fought them, I fought for her. She was the rock at my back. My ambition was that I must better all of them so that I should uphold her rights and keep her approbation. My father was not exempt from this ambition, nor my dislike.

Ettook was a coarse red man. A red pig. When he came in the tent, then I was put out. 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.”

Besides, I had no look of him. Somewhere in him, ignored by the pig that ruled his brain, festered the half-suspicion that Tathra had got me from one of her own folk, before he burned their krarl and took her as spear-bride. He had sons by other women, but Tathra he prized. I have seen him stand and look at some plundered bangle he meant to hang on her, and his cock would push out his leggings just from that. I could have killed him then, that red pig grunting for my mother’s white flesh. Supposedly it is the oldest hate of man for man, but always new. Truly, Ettook and I were not friends to each other.

The Boys’ Rite came due for me when I was fourteen. It fell always in the month of the Gray Dog, the second of the Dog months, during the winter camping.

In spring the tribes went to seek the fertile lands beyond the Snake’s Road; in fall of leaf they came back and moved up into the mountains. The high valleys, contained and sheltered between jagged peaks, escaped the worst of the bladed winds and snow. In certain areas the valley bottoms plunged below the snow line; here grass flourished and evergreen, and waterfalls spilled smashing down, too fast to freeze. In these spots the deer and bear came to browse, sluggish, easy prey for hunters’ arrows.

Ettook’s wintering was shared with other krarls than the Dagkta, with red Skoiana and Hinga and yellow-haired Moi not five miles distant, everyone under a sullen truce. It was too bitter cold for war at that season. The men built long tunnels of packed snow, stone, hide, mud, and boughs, and the tents crouched under them, or in the ribbed caves below the mountain shanks. There was little to do in winter. Storytelling, drinking and gambling, eating and sex were the major pastimes. Sometimes a skirmish between rival hunting bands relieved the monotony. If one man killed another under truce, he must pay a Blood-Price, so the warriors murdered each other carefully and seldom. Krarl ritual was the only other solace.

The Boys’ Rite was one of the mysteries of the men’s side. No male became a warrior without he had undergone it. Since I could remember, I had known it was ahead of me, 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.

There was a girl I had had in leaf-fall. She was a year or so older than I, and had led me on and then vehemently regretted it when I took her teasing for earnest. She had been at me to shame me, for the women hated Tathra most and passed on their hate to their daughters. The girl thought me unready, no doubt, but she was mistaken. She screamed with pain and anger and bit my shoulders to try to dislodge me, but the shireen—her woman’s veil-mask—blunted her teeth, and I was enjoying things too much to let her go just then.

When I was done and found her bleeding I was sorry a moment, but she said, “You out-tribe vermin, you shall bleed too, and yelp when the needles go into you. I hope they may kill you.”

Generally the women feared and revered the males of the krarl, but she had some spirit for me because I was Tathra’s son. I held her by the hair until she whimpered.

“I know about the needles. That is how the warrior-marks are made. Don’t think I shall be squeaking under them like a maiden with the key in her lock.”

“You,” she spat, “you will writhe. You will swell up and die of it. I shall ask Seel-Na to put a curse on you.”

“Ask away. Her curses stink like her person. As for you, you should thank me. I have done your future husband a service, for you were a difficult bitch to get into.”

She tried to poke out my eyes then and I struck her a blow to make her reconsider. Her name was Chula, my first wife, as it turned out later, so the rape was in some ways prophetic.

Still, her words oppressed me. The tattooing, which was part of the Rite, troubled me. I think it had been troubling me a long while and she had only brought the trouble out. My body was strange, so much I already knew, from the snake, and other things. I darkened from the sun. I paled in winter as did all the people, yet there had never been a blemish on my skin and nothing left a scar. As if to balance this, my system showed intolerance to any foreign thing taken in, even food. The rich roasted meats of the kill had me sick if I ate more than a shred or two; their beer was like bane to me. I came to wonder at last what the bright inks of the priests would do, and the needles pushed through my arms and breast. 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. And I could say nothing, having created of my fourteen-year-old self a being of iron.

The day before the Rite fell due I went hunting on my own, up and down the snow-clotted sides of the valleys, in the grinding wind. Even at fourteen there was no one better with arrow or spear.

There were two brown does by a pool. I got them both within a second or so of each other. When I went up to let the blood from them to lighten them, something happened inside me like a stone clicking off from the mountain into the air. It was the first time I had ever killed a thing and realized I had taken its life, something that belonged to it. The deer, slumped in the snow, were heavy as lead and flaccid as sacks from which the wine had been emptied. I wished I had not done it then; we had meat enough. Yet I was trying for something, and soon I got up and, going back with the kill, saw a hare and shot that too, and carried it with me to the tents.

The men stared resentfully at what I had got, and some of the younger women exclaimed. A few of the girls’ side were coming to like me a little. Since Chula there had been others, more willing, yet ready to screech and complain after. Still, I had noticed they came back for more.

Ettook was away with various chiefs of the Dagkta drinking on the south side of the camp. He would not be visiting my mother till he returned for the evening meal, or till he was roaring drunk, or both. Tathra sat in her dark blue tent, weaving on a loom got in barter from the Moi. They said they had it from the city peoples west of the mountains, where the great wars had come and gone, leaving only ruin after them.

There had always been war between the ancient cities from time immemorial, but it was a stately war, with rules like a dance. Then someone came who changed things. The tribes had it from scraps and stories blurted by refugees who crossed the mountains to escape the fighting. 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. In the first five or six years after my birth, the cities fell on each other like dying dragons, and were torn in pieces. Thereafter the survivors roamed in packs, pirates of their own places, bitter, insane, and bitterly, insanely proud. There were a thousand or more of these bands, each with a different loyalty, under some crazy captain or prince. Sometimes you heard tales of their raiding over the peaks and men of the tribes taken for slaves. The cities’ lords had always considered themselves remarkable; no human was their equal. The Moi, however, traded with them, by a burned ruin the krarls called Eshkir. The city warriors were strange, by repute, their faces always masked like the faces of our women, yet in bronze, iron, or even silver and gold, while they wore the pelts of animals and rags on their bodies. From the frayed reins of their horses would drip precious jewels, while the ribs of the horse itself thrust starving through the hide. There was a fable, too, that they never ate, these city men, and they had magic powers. They were never seen in winter, the passes being thick with snow, and seldom far east at any time.

On the Eshkiri loom my mother was weaving a scarlet cloth with an intricate border of black, maroon, and yellow. It would be for him. 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.

Her hair was unbound as she worked, damson-black, her skin winter-white, like a warm snow. Once I was a warrior, by tribal law she would have to cover her face before me, as before all other men except her husband. But that was not yet. She had been old for a tribal bride, she had borne me in her twenty-ninth year; yet she looked no more than a girl in the shadowy tent. Her eyes were half shut from the rhythm of the loom. Only the bracelets chattered faintly on her arms as she moved them.

I stood and watched her a long while and did not think she saw me, but then she said, “I hear he has been hunting, Tuvek my son, and made a kill to last this tent many days.”

I said nothing, so she turned and regarded me in a way she had, her head down, gazing up, half laughing. Even when she stood higher than I, by this look she had made me seem the taller. And when her eyes came on to me, they lit up, which was not playacting. You could see to the roots of her when this happened, how she was all pleasure in me.

“Come,” she would say, holding out her hand, “come here, and let me see this child of my body, like a god. Can it be I that housed you?”

And when I came close to her, she would put her hands on my shoulders, light as a leaf, and laugh at me and her delight in me, till I laughed too.

No other boy of the krarl would have stood for this from his mother, and there were several extra names they discovered for me because I did. From seven years on, the boy is his father’s. He apes his father’s ways, eats with the men and sleeps in the boys’ tent, and scorns the women at their cooking and sewing. If a woman touches him, he brushes her off scowling as if she were the mess of a bird dropped on him from the sky, unless he is eager to take the road between her thighs. However, the other women were not Tathra, their scrawny, clutching paws not her light ones, their faces without the shireen surely not like hers, and their stale female smell rank as a she-cat’s. Tathra’s scent was always fresh and sweet, augmented with perfumes. Even after the pig had been with her she was clean as clear water.

“Ah, my son,” she said now, “my fine son. Tomorrow you will be made a warrior.”

I would not even swallow the constriction out of my throat in front of her. I answered, “Yes,” as if I had given the matter little thought.

“There is none like you,” she said. She tangled her fingers in my hair which had long ago unraveled from its boy’s plaits. 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. The knot in my throat was growing; I glanced at the cloth on the loom to get my anger back and ease it. She saw my glance. “This is your warrior’s cloak I am making.”

That undid me.

“Mother,” I said, “maybe I shall not be needing it,” then bit on my tongue, I was so vexed with myself.

“Tuvek,” she said softly, “now we have the truth. What do you think will be done to you?”

“No woman knows the Rite,” I said.

“True. But she knows the men survive the other side of it. And am I to think you less than them? You, better than any?”

“I flinch from none of it,” I said arrogantly, because she expected too much of me at that moment, “but I think I may die. So be it.”

Then I saw that she also was uneasy, that she had only spoken as she did because she was frightened. Her hands tightened on me.

“Kotta,” she said, “do you hear this?”

I jerked around, angry again certainly at this. I had thought we were alone in the tent. Now I saw the shadow beyond the loom, the blind healer-woman, resting her great arms on her knees. It was an odd thing with Kotta, though her eyes were sightless, she seemed to see everything there was, as the boys learned early when they tried to steal from among her things. Near big as a man, raw-boned, her blind irises shone blue as slate from her shireen. She was often to be found where you did not think her to be. She helped the women bear, and healed ills and wounds, and she was frequently with my mother. It was common women’s talk about the krarl that Tathra would have died of her brat, and the brat too, if Kotta had not aided the birth. I had arrived on a morning of victory after some battle between Ettook’s Dagkta and a Skoiana krarl, but Tathra fought harder than any warrior to get me born. She had conceived no other child and some said this was also Kotta’s work, as a second bearing would be fatal to Ettook’s out-tribe bitch-wife.

Kotta’s enamel earrings clinked when she shifted and stared right at me as if she saw every feature.

“You distrust the tattooing,” she said.

“I distrust nothing,” I said, furious and cold as only fourteen can be.

“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.” I did not understand. I was about to throw some harsh sentence to her, and leave the tent, when Kotta added, apparently for no reason, “That loom is from Eshkiri city. There was an Eshkir woman once among the tents.”

I would have made nothing of this except that Tathra stiffened into a curious immobile grayness.

“Why do you speak of her?” she presently said. “She was a slave the warriors stole, and she ran away. What more is there to know?”

“True,” Kotta said, “yet she saw him come,” nodding at me. “She kneeled behind you and held you, and you had torn her hands in pain. She was young and strong but she, too, had her child to shed. I wonder how it went with her in the wild.”

This was all obscure to me. It held me only because I could see the drawing of my mother’s face, like skin about a wound.

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

She had put some sort of spell on me, too. The day’s troubles had altered as a shadow alters when the sun goes over the sky.

I went outside to clean my deer, and later, when the cloud roof on the mountains turned all the red, purple, yellow, and black of the warrior’s cloak my mother was weaving me, I secured a place by the fire and ate my last meal as a boy.

You sleep in a new and isolated place that night, alone with other boys who are to be made men the next day.

At dawn the krarl priest comes to wake you, his face freshly coated with black. He wears a robe tasseled with the tails of beasts and jinking from bronze disks and ivory teeth, the dentition of wild cats, wolves, bears, and men. I had not slept, and I heard him coming before he cuffed me. If he had crept in softly I should yet have known him from his stench.

Seel was the seer of Ettook’s krarl. His father had been seer before him, and had slunk in from the forests with only his sorcery to recommend him. Seel’s god was the one-eyed serpent, the Treacherous Beguiler, for whom the twists and turns of Snake’s Road had been named centuries out of mind. 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. She had one son, a year younger than I, Fid, and she would have liked to claim him as Ettook’s, but did not dare. Red Fid had a squint in his left eye, and Jork was the only other krarl warrior who squinted; Ettook’s eyes were set straight. It must have rubbed her raw.

When Seel had roused us, we went into the open beyond the tent. Here we stripped and scrubbed our bodies over with snow. The place was far from the other tents under the tunnels, and there was no sound to be heard in all the valley but the sounds we made, shivering and balking at the cold. The shireens must hide and even the braves keep quiet at this hour of initiation.

The priest came up and looked us over. He prodded and pried at the boys. I was still angry; I had had the company of my anger all night. I thought, If he puts his talons on me, I shall strike his eyes out through his skull’s back. But he must have sensed me on the boil, for he left my body alone. Then shortly, naked as we were, he herded us up along the valley, running to keep ourselves warm enough to live, past the pool under thin ice that generally the women came to smash for water—though not today, no woman being permitted to take this route on the morning of the Rite—and over the ridge. Beyond lay pines and cedars, black as gashes in the dim flaring yellow of the rising sun. Our path struck through the trees, through the dark shadows to the loom of the great tent of many hides, like death’s own house, into which we must run.

Inside the tent it was pitch-black. We fell down gasping where unseen hands pushed us. The floor was rough with rugs, and the air close and hot after our short freezing journey. There were others there ahead of us, and others behind, panting like dogs after the hunt. The darkness seethed with bodies, breath, and terror. I was not the only apprehensive one among them, yet none of them had my fury to season it.

There must have been near sixty youths crushed into that pavilion, males of several Dagkta krarls, while all through the winter valleys the tribes would be holding the rites of this Day of Initiation, each subtly different from the rest.

Soon there rose an odor of smoke, like sweet wormwood.

You took a breath or two of this and half began to choke, but instead the swirling stuff burrowed into the lungs and stilled them. It was a magic incense of the priests. The head seemed gradually to loosen from the body, and float off in the air. My head and I were up in the roof, yet somehow aware of my belly below, with a pit to it as hard and acid as the nut found in a peach.

Next drums started up, either from the corners of the vast tent or in my body, I was not sure. There was a murmuring sound and a sort of disturbance in the blackness, and something squealed out like an animal, but I did not really care.

I lay a long while in the smoke, not caring and at the same moment knowing I should care, should keep hold on my anger, it was all I had.

Suddenly hands fastened on my arms; I was lifted and hauled across the rugs, over the bodies of boys lying in their stupor. I suppose they had been dragging the young males through this way for some time, maybe they had even trodden on me as I now drunkenly trod on others. I had noticed nothing and no one noticed me.

The partition of hides gave on to a cave, and the air turned abruptly dank and white-cold.

There was a light here. I became aware of it in stages. They had dropped me on my back on a hard bed and the chill pierced up through it like teeth. Water wept down walls and someone grunted and someone cried out and the drums muffled and blurred as my eyes were doing.

I was confused enough to imagine I was getting back my senses, and began to shudder with the cold and struggle weakly, for I had discovered they had tied me. I was desperate to be afraid now, for I felt it was my only defense and somehow had been taken from me, but all the mundane images and details—scent, sight, sound—got in the way. Finally death leaned down, black-faced with eyes like bleached iron, and I recognized Seel. This was the time and the place of the tattooing. They were going to make the scars of manhood on me, and I should die.

I think I bit him. He struck me in the face, and I felt the blow and did not feel it. Then the bronze claw scratched me, a delicate smarting itch. It spread across my breast and ribs and arms, preceded by the lascivious lick of the wool tuft, making the pattern. Bronze needle and needle of bone and rasp of the wool thread drawn through under the skin. To begin with it seemed nothing. Next it became unbearable, that incessant twitching-kissing followed by scratching silver pain. I had forgotten biting him, and only recalled after. I had forgotten who he was. I stared into the ebony face, the eyes where the vague glow caught them, and writhed and twisted at each deft stroke.

But from being unbearable, the sensation became stealthily pleasing. I shut my eyes, and a girl was gently raking nails over me trying to wake me up, and she was waking me in every way, but when I reached for her she was up in a second and running off laughing down a tunnel in the mountains.

I ran after her, but I did not catch her. Instead I came to an area where the walls hugged close toward each other, and I made out a warm light shining ahead in an oval cave. I felt a need to reach the cave, but the way was very narrow. And suddenly a woman’s voice flashed clear as diamond in my head. I did not know what she had spoken, but it was a rejection, a command. 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 was only ill a day or so, but I had some strange dreams. The idea of the ancient cities had got into my fever, masked men and women and one symbol more curious than the rest, a female lynx, salt-white, with a black wolf mounted on her back. Also I had some notion the tribe was stoning me because I had turned a spring of water into blood, to make them afraid.

Eventually I opened my eyes with a mouth full of bone dust, my body like stones, and looked around. I was in the hut of sticks and mud near the boys’ tent where the sick ones went. It had been dark, but now a light had come close to me. Behind the light I made out a skinny shadow and recognized its smell as Seel.

By the trembling of the lamp I could tell he was in an ugly humor. He would sometimes froth at the lips and scream like a woman birthing, a thing that alarmed the warriors, who feared his magic. Seeing me conscious, he started gobbling out some curse over me, calling me worm’s dung and other tender things. Now and then a fleck of his tepid spittle hit my face. I remembered biting him.

“Greeting, Seel,” I said. “Was it your dirty needles that poisoned me, or your dirty flesh?”

He gave a squawk straight off, and some of the hot oil tipped out of the clay lamp onto my chest. 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. But it seemed funny at the time.

Then I heard Kotta’s voice in the far corner of the hut.

“He speaks nonsense, seer, it’s only his fever. Take no heed. Such ravings are beneath you.”

Seel flung around and the lamp showed her. She was at some healer’s work, intent as if she could see all she did.

“He has no fever, woman,” Seel rasped. “It is the out-tribe blood in him. He does not bow to the ways of the red krarls. Tomorrow dawn he shall come to the painted tent and I shall judge him, and the One-Eyed.” And his gnarled hand crawled around the snake-carving on his breast.

“As you decide, seer,” Kotta rejoined politely, “but he is the chief’s son.”

Seel dashed down the lamp, and strode out like a thin evil wind.

“It is a clever boy,” said Kotta, “to enrage Seel.”

“Don’t lesson me, Kotta,” I said. “Tell me how long I’ve been here.”

“The afternoon of the Rite, the night following, the day just gone.”

This scared me a bit. It seemed a good while to lose from your life. I said, “Am I better?”

“Better or worse. You, and others, shall reckon it.”

“Women always speak in riddles,” I said. I sat up and my head rang a little, but quickly cleared. I felt near enough myself, and I was hungry. “Get me some food,” I told her.

“I will get you a mirror first,” she said, “then see if you still hunger.”

This irritated me, for mirrors were women’s toys. I did not blame Tathra that she might want to gaze in one, for there was something worth observing, but I hardly knew my own face. Still, Kotta brought me a bronze mirror and held it where I could take note. It was not my face she was showing me but my breast and arms, where the claws of the tattooing needles had patterned the sigils of tribe and krarl.

I thought the lamp was at fault, next, the bronze or my eyes. At length I reasoned the fault was not in any of these.

“Is this so?” I asked her.

“It is,” Kotta said.

I touched the muscular body that belonged to me, comprehending it with my hand, and stared down at myself. Even without the mirror, I could see.

There was not a tattoo on me, not even a scar from the needles, and the colors might never have been.

“Did he trick me then?” I said. “Only pretend he worked on me as the other priests did, and the drug-smoke deceived me?”

“Oh, no. The work was done. Many saw it—the spear-pattern of the krarl and the stag-sign of the tribe, and Ettook’s mark like three rings. But now it has healed and faded from that hard marble flesh that never has a blemish, oh son of Tathra.”

She had predicted well. The hunger had left me.

“Without the tattoos I am not a warrior,” I said.

“Just so,” said Kotta, “you are not.”

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. And, as generally happens, the more truth the ritual lost the more they bolstered it with significance. There is a saying among the Moi: The chief is clad in gold and purple, only the god dares to go naked.

So they made much of the Rite because it was nothing, and I had failed to be marked by it, as if to prove it nothing. They would be against me now with a wall to back them in all their bewildered savage little pride. And there was something else. Their ways had never meant much to me; to be made a warrior was only a form, I felt no honor in it or glory. I had never been kin with them. To myself I claimed Tathra’s blood alone; her obscure krarl, now vanished, I considered mine. Yet to be accounted by the Dagkta as less than the dregs of the pack, less than the youths I had fought and bested all my life and scorned to take as equals, wretches that used certain explicit gestures for my mother’s name—to be reckoned less than these, that I would not bear. I bethought myself at last how I was indeed the chief’s son, Tuvek Nar-Ettook.

When the sun rose I was ready, as I had not been ready for that other thing. I was concerned with my death, that morning of the needles, and here I was, alive, and whole.

Ettook’s painted tent stood higher than the tunnels, in the mouth of a vaulted cave. The land ran down from the mountains here on the eastern side to the winter byres of the goats and horses. There were always a few men moving about there to guard their livestock from the neighboring krarls of the campment, since any krarl would thieve from another when stores got low. Today I could spot only two guards, though the horses were out in the field, chewing the bark from the pines.

I soon found where the men had gone.

The slope below the painted tent was thick with warriors leaning on their spears, their faces, sneering and laughing, I could see even as I came up from the tunnel ways. They had scared the women off from the assembly, but big eyes had been staring all along my route, and fingers pointing me out. If I went unrecognized today, my life henceforth would not be easy. I should have the vixens on my back as well as the foxes’ teeth in my throat. I had no mind to be a joke for the women’s side.

A fire gemmed red on the lip of the cave. Ettook was by the fire, scratching his plaited beard. He had an expression I had seen before, uncertain whether my trouble angered or pleased him. Seel was at his elbow and, at his back, crouching to heat beer for them, Seel’s bitch-daughter. That whetted my mood, to be sure. Her hands glowed from the heat of the flames, but she was eager to warm herself at the blaze of my shame. She was younger than Tathra but thin and stringy except for her breasts, which were heavy, shapeless, floundering things, not tempting to me in the least; her faded hair was the color of sour apricots.

I raised my arm to Ettook.

“Greeting, my chief. Your son salutes you.”

He looked down at me, glad, no doubt, of the cave’s elevation. Already he was no longer able to look down on me when we stood foot to foot.

“Greeting, Tuvek. I hear you are in a wasp’s nest once again.”

“Wasps are easily disturbed, my chief,” I said as sweetly as I could for the feel of vinegar in my guts.

Seel shouted something at me. He was often unintelligible in his rages, though his intentions were transparent enough.

“Seel says you have something to answer for,” Ettook said. “He suggests to me you have profaned the Rite, the thing which must not be spoken of.”

The Rite was usually given this extra title, implying some mystery that must once have belonged in it. I became aware that Seel had not told Ettook precisely what was wrong. It was to be a grand shock and show for them with me as the focal point.

“My chief,” I said slowly and clearly, “maybe the seer forgets I am your son, and that your honor is touched by mine.”

Ettook swallowed this down. His eyes narrowed and he stared at me, calculating. I said, “The seer shall say what I have done, then I shall reply, and then you, my chief, shall judge.”

“Very well,” Ettook said. He looked at Seel. “Say then.”

Seel drew himself up and quivered all over. He hawked and dislodged his phlegm in the fire, and cried, “I myself marked him as a warrior is marked. He was not willing, speaking oaths and struggling. When the other boys rose up men, he was groaning and insensible. The herb woman must tend him for a fever. Then I came and witnessed him bare, and saw the One-Eyed had punished him for his cowardice and weakness.”

I was dressed in winter gear like the rest, shirt laced and a cloak over it. They would see nothing yet. Seel leaned forward, scrabbling through the air at me.

“Take off the garment. Strip, strip and show your wretched shame.”

The warriors were rock still, waiting. Ettook grinned and scowled at once. Seel-Na’s eyes sparkled through their shireen eye-holes. I made no move and Seel’s attitude exploded into a hopping, frothing dance on the ledge.

Having incensed him before, there seemed nothing to gain by holding out any longer.

“Be careful, grandfather,” I said to him courteously. “Your old bones must be brittle, you should be more gentle with yourself.”

“What is this shame?” Ettook snapped finally, impatience wiping his face over like a cloth. “You must answer, Tuvek.”

“Very well. I answer. The old madman there did his work so poorly with the needles that my flesh healed without a sign.”

I opened my shirt and showed them, and they grunted and jumped down the slope to get a better view, save for Ettook, Seel, and the fruit of Seel’s loins.

They were puzzled, the warriors. They prowled around me, lowering under their ginger brows, then went back toward the cave in a bunch. One said, “He is not warrior.” That was all that was needed. Everyone took up the howl.

At this, even though I had been waiting for it, the fury came up in me like a flood tide. My voice had broken early; from my twelfth year I spoke like a man. I filled my lungs and I roared loud enough to drown the lot of them.

Shadowfire (Birthgrave Trilogy #2)

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Shadowfire (Birthgrave Trilogy #2)

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