The Birthgrave (11 page)

A stone altar stood there, and I knew it well enough. In the white bowl there was a flickering and a shadow. But I was not afraid.

“So Karrakaz enorr,” whispered the no-voice in my brain, and I knew which tongue it used, now that I had heard the dream ghosts speak it. “I am Karrakaz. The Soulless One. You do not think you know why you are here, but you are here because Karrakaz is here, and we are one thing, you and I. I have grown since the volcano. You have fed me well. I will destroy you, but first we shall be one thing. Let me give you Power to rule these Shlevakin. They are only little things and much beneath you. But how dangerous the little poison ants who will eat you alive. You will not find the Jade, so I will give you a little Power, Princess of the Lost, before your Darak turns from your cursed face, and the jackals tear you.”

It seemed good to me. The word Karrakaz had used—“Shlevakin,” the filthy dregs, the mud and excrement of an inferior people—so right to call them that, they were so far beneath me, what I was and what I might have been. But before I could stretch out my hand and say, “Give it to me,” some elemental thing took hold of me, and shook me. I clung to the stone of the tower before I could be shaken down, and screamed furiously, “Let me alone!”

“Kill it,” the no-voice said.

My hands found a huge loose tile, and I grasped it and thrust it out toward what seemed to be tormenting me.

There was a crash, loud as thunder, in my right ear. The tower disintegrated and I fell.

I seemed to fall, but not far. I opened my eyes, and was lying on the red and green stones of the theater steps. A hand got my arm, and pulled me up again almost immediately. It could be no other hand but Darak's.

His face was pale and angry in the moonlight.

“You woke and followed me,” I said.

“And found you standing here like a block of stone with your eyes wide open. I shook you and you didn't wake up. If you have these fits, you're a fool to walk up so high.”

It was Darak, then, who had kept me from the evil in the tower. Yet I could not have been in the tower after all. The wings were gone for sure.

“You're coming back now,” Darak grumbled. “This place is as safe as the Pit of Death. A tile fell from nowhere just now and nearly brained both of us.”

I could see where it had smashed. He had pushed me clear, and I was bruised to prove it. I felt weak and stupid and afraid. I was glad he dragged me away, across the ruined city, back to the camp.

* * *

The fires were still alight, but mostly men were asleep. A few sentries prowled.

Darak set me on the rug bed, and pulled off my boots.

“I imagine you still have your woman's trouble,” he said to me. I nodded. “So I don't even get a reward.”

He arranged us for sleep with an endearing selfishness, his head on my shoulder.

But I did not sleep. I lay, stiff and cold, waiting for the morning, waiting to be away, yet glad to be awake, for I feared the dreams the city would give me now.

It was near dawn. There is a different scent in the air at dawn; one could tell it blindfold. There came a faint drumming under me. I thought I imagined it, but it grew.

“Darak!” I hissed.

He woke and growled at me. But then the earth moved beneath us.

In another second we were flung apart and together. Weapons in the tent, chairs, the brazier, tilted over, and the poles went too, bringing the hide down on top of us. Spilled coals licked at the rugs, and caught. In a moment the tent was blazing. It seemed incredibly difficult to get free now that there was no longer any obvious opening. The flames on our heels, we hacked and scrabbled a way out. The ground was still sliding sideways. Stones flew by, and bits of paving lifted and went down.

It settled as abruptly as it had begun.

I stood up. A pillar had fallen across the road, crushing three tents, and putting out a fire or two. The tents, for some reason, were empty.

“We have earthquakes in the hills, too,” Darak said. “This wasn't so bad.”

Maggur and Kel came running up, and another man who flung water on the burning hide.

I stared back over the city, and felt a pent-up anger and hatred swelling at me, for the moment impotent.

“Darak,” I said, “we must ride now. Quickly.”

He glanced at me, and nodded. “As you say.”

But he made no great hurry about it, and the men, as always, took their cue from him. Even the nervous dallied. After all, they had spent a night here, and were still unharmed; a little more delay could make no difference.

Finally, the caravan moved, and the sun was up, burning a round white hole in the sky. The horses were restless, frightened by the quake, and still uneasy. Men ate as they rode, throwing back bones to lie among the bones of the city.

It took an hour to get through the length of it, and all that time I felt some menace on every side, and it seemed we were going so slowly. Overhead the light turned gradually yellow as a rotten peach. The horses tossed their heads, and drew back their lips silently.

Suddenly the threat was very close. I seized Darak's arm.

“Ride fast now, or we will die here!”

He did not take his orders from me, but this he took. He knew me now. He turned and gave the jackal's sharp bark which was their signal for danger and speed, then dug in his spurs, and struck my horse across the flank.

The horses needed little encouragement. They bolted, and the others behind bolted too. The wagons ground and roared after us.

And at that moment, the city rose against us. Or against me alone, perhaps.

They called it the “earthquake” afterward, but it was not. The earth drummed and rumbled, it is true, but nothing fell—except the last wagons, because the paving heaved up and tilted them. At first there was stillness, and then a wind came screaming across the city toward us from both sides, and the wind never blew two ways at once that I had seen before. Stones whirled up from inside the city, pebbles and little chips, and then big blocks and gigantic tiles, and all of them were caught up in that wind, and hurled at us. The tops of the pillars seemed to fly off and fling themselves too, and huge pieces of roofs. The horses screamed and reared and plunged, the wagons leaped and went over. Metal chests of weapons crashed on the road, and knives and daggers fell out in a silvery rain. I bowed my head against my horse's neck. Behind me, Kel squealed as a missile struck straight through into his brain and killed him. The yellow light ran past us like water, and I thought I should be dead in an instant, but I did not understand death, only the pain, and so I thought of it with terror. Flying stuff nicked my face and hands with stinging chisels.

But we were on the outskirts of that place of bones, Kee-ool, the Evil One. Suddenly the ghastly hail dropped back. I heard the prolonged rattle of it as it settled. Our horses stopped still on their own, sweating. I turned and looked.

Behind us, the way was littered with bits of smashed stone. Two wagons were down, dead horses stretched out in front, and dead men and spilled knives scattered about them, like broken flowers on their graves.

Darak wiped the blood from his face.

“Gleer, Ellak, get your men and come back with me. Bring your horses.”

“No,” I said, “no, Darak.”

He ignored me.

And the city ignored him. This, then, had been for me. Or perhaps it was over.

He and the scared looking men cut the dead horses free, got one of the wagons up, and bundled new horses into the shafts. New men got onto the box. The other wagon was completely wrecked, and so the stuff in it was unloaded into other wagons, and onto spare ponies and horses. Nothing was left at last, except the dead. I could see Kel, lying only a few yards behind, among the last columns. I did not dare go back to him. Maggur left me, and went to Kel, and picked him up. He carried him down to the wagon, and there he was burned with all the rest.

After that Maggur was very silent, and Darak, when he came back and mounted beside me, looked grim and angry. It had been a long and unpleasant task. The sun was high above the yellow cloud.

“There's a burnt offering for your fellow gods, goddess,” he said, jerking his hand at the black smoke.
“Another
burnt offering. They'd like a libation, too, perhaps,” and he spat, then rode away from me.

4

There were three days more before the day which was an owl, and I recall them very well: the cat, the dromedary, the ape. On the day of the cat, the blood stopped flowing from me, and the other symptoms of fever and weakness cleared with it. On that day, too, Darak had ridden on, ahead of the caravan and away from the road, with a few men. He was gone before I woke. I did not see him that day, nor at night. The day of the dromedary, the caravan, too, wound off the road, the charge of Ellak now, and we made toward the distant mauvenesses I had seen on the eastern horizon since Kee-ool. To leave the road was a relief to me. The dreams stopped; but I had other nightmares now, things I could never properly remember when I woke in terror from them.

The evening of that day, Darak came back. He had been to light the beacon signal which would summon the tribal chieftains. He spent that night with his men, at some dice game, and later with one of the women. That night I dreamed too, in his tent, and I thought it was another of the old dreams, but it was not. I was beautiful then, my white hair roped around my head, and falling in five great plaits wound through with emeralds. I recollect this so clearly, but the rest not so well. I know they brought me Darak, and I had them flay him, and when I woke from this I was afraid and struggled to forget it.

The day of the ape, I did not attempt to ride with him. Maggur and I rode off alone into a few miles of thin woodland, where Maggur shot a deer, after crawling on his belly behind it for hours. I do not like the death of animals, and it sickened me then. But it was fresh meat for him and them; we were well received when we rode back in the dusk.

“Darak and I do not lie together now,” I said to Maggur. “Find me a tent away from his place; he may want to take a woman there.”

Maggur looked uneasy, but he found me one, and this was where I slept that night of the ape. There was the kind of misery on me that seemed only a numbness. I did not know what I would do, but it did not seem to matter. I slept deep, and did not recall my dreams when I woke.

* * *

The day of the owl, the caravan, at its slower pace, reached the beacon. Rocky hills rose ahead, and here there was one great rock, marooned like an island in the brown sea. On the crown of the rock the fire was smoldering up its thick red smoke. Around the base the tribal warriors and their chiefs waited. I supposed all these here were friendly to one another, in an alliance against other tribal enemies. Mostly they were naked to the waist, their bodies hard and dry-brown. Red and blue tattoos encircled their arms and necks, but on the breast was the symbol of the tribe. I could pick out six different emblems: a wolf, a lion, a bear, a tree done in green, an arrow with a red tip; but the strangest was a round disc, like the moon in an ancient picture, with a five-pointed star fixed in its center. They wore dark clothes and hard leather boots, no jewels except perhaps in a metal armlet. Maggur had said they believed jewelry to be a hindrance in battle; an enemy might catch a man by it, or by the hair—and this they wore very short, or else bound in a club at the back. The chiefs were not so different from their men. They had their standard-bearer near them, a sash of scarlet cloth or green or blue at the waist, and one or two wore some plain ring or armband which was a mark of their little kingship. The chief of the star tribe wore a gold circlet around his head with a white glassy gem, probably quartz, set in it. He seemed to be overlord of them all, and rode forward on his big brown horse to salute Darak like a fellow prince.

They spoke the same language I had heard in the village and the hills, but with a different accent and many corrupted or abbreviated words.

It was very formal, this talk between two kings. It was difficult to see if Darak were amused at all, for his face was iron-hard. I was not standing near but some way off, by my horse, yet suddenly the star chieftain's eyes flicked around to me. He looked for a moment, then raised his right hand, incredibly saluting me too.

“Honor to you, warrior-woman,” he called, and he was not using the same tongue now. This was something older and more complex. I saw Darak's head snap around to me. He would laugh at my embarrassment if I did not know how to reply, but I did. As with the villagers, I understood at once every pattern of the Plains speech, without thinking.

“And to you, my father,” I said clearly.

The chief nodded. He looked back at Darak, who seemed surprised.

“I did not know Darak Gold-Fisher had a tribal woman in his guard, and a warrior too. We have not had such a one born into our krarls for many years.”

I had realized they might think me one of their stock because I wore the shireen, and I wondered what they would make of my man's clothes and the knives I carried. Apparently they held women who fought in high esteem, and treated them as men, which was a unique honor in such a society. It would not even be essential for a woman warrior to go masked; that I did only increased their respect for me.

It was etiquette now that Darak and his men ride to their encampment or krarl, and feast with them. Only then could any business transaction take place. As the chief and Darak began the procession, two of the star warriors came riding toward me. They gave the salute the chief had given.

The elder said: “I am Asutoo, the chief's son. You will bring joy to us if you will ride by our side.”

I could not refuse. Besides, there was bitter enjoyment in me that I was receiving as much attention, if not more, than Darak. Maggur looked anxious as I went away between them, but I was safe enough.

They were both light-haired, handsome, younger than Darak, solemn in a way only the young can be solemn, yet matured by the hard life of the plains, and the battles they had fought. They carried many scars. Asutoo spoke courteously to me as we went along, the other was silent. He was a younger brother, it seemed, and as such must keep quiet. Asutoo asked me my tribe, and how I had spent my life, and what battles I had seen. I lied that my mother had left me for the hill wolves when I was born because I was sickly, as I knew that the tribes exposed their weaklings. Later, villagers had taken me in, and I grew miraculously stronger with the years, and finally adopted the shireen, and rode with Darak, not knowing which was my tribe.