Perhaps that was why the prince had talked more than usual last night. Everyone knew that he was restrained in his speech; sometimes he only opened his mouth to welcome his guests, and usually it was other people who kept the conversation going. But last night, to everyone’s astonishment, he had broken his custom. And in whose presence? A woman’s. Not a woman — a witch. Beautiful as the fairies of the high mountains, but evil. The first mistake was to have allowed that woman to enter the men’s chamber, against all custom. The Kanun knew what it was doing in forbidding women to enter that room. But recently, worse luck, fashion had grown so powerful that one could sense the diabolical spirit even here, in the very pillar of the Kanun, at Orosh.
Mark Ukacierra felt again the nauseous hollow in his stomach. A secret spite contributed to that sick sensation, and it wanted to vent itself, but finding no proper outlet, it turned inward to make him suffer. He wanted to vomit. In fact, he had noticed for some time now that an ill wind blowing from afar, from the cities and the low country that had long ago lost their virility, was trying to stain and infect the high country too. And it had started with the appearance in the Rrafsh of these women dressed to kill, with chestnut or auburn hair, who stirred up a lust for life — even without honor; women who traveled in carriages that rolled along swaying from side to side, carriages of corruption, accompanied by men who were men in name only. And the worst of it was that these capricious dolls were brought right into the men’s chamber, and at Orosh, no less, in the cradle of the Kanun. No, all that wasn’t just chance. Something was blighted, something was rotting away visibly around him. And he was the one who had to account for the decline of the number of killings in the blood feud. Last night, the prince had said — rancorously, looking sidelong at him—“There are some people who would like to see the Kanun of our forefathers softened.” What had the lord of Orosh meant by that look? Was it Mark Ukacierra who was responsible for the fact that the Code, and especially the blood feud, had shown signs of weakening recently? Couldn’t he smell the stench that rose from those androgynous cities? It was true that revenues from the blood tax were smaller this year, but he was not the only person responsible, any more than the fine corn crop was solely to the credit of the bailiff. If the weather had not been in our favor, then he would have seen what the harvest was like! But the year had been good and the prince had praised the bailiff. But blood was not rain falling from the sky. The reasons for its decline were obscure. Of course he had some share of responsibility for all that. But not everything was his doing. Well, if they had given him fuller powers, and if they had let him manage things his way, then, certainly, they could take him to task about the blood tax. Then he would know how to go about it. However, while his impressive title made people tremble, his powers were limited. That was why the blood-feud and everything connected with it was in jeopardy. The number of killings had fallen year after year, and the first season of the current year had been disastrous. He had sensed that, and had awaited anxiously the accounting that his assistants had drawn up for him a few days before. The results had been even worse than he had feared: the monies collected were less than seventy percent of the revenue of the corresponding period in the preceding year. And this at a time when not only the bailiff in charge of croplands but all the other managers in the Prince’s service, the bailiff for cattle and pastures, the bailiff for loans, and most of all, the bailiff for mills and mines, who attended to all the trades that required tools, from looms to forges, had payed large sums into the general treasury. As for himself, the chief bailiff (for the sums realized by the others came solely from the holdings of the castle, while his were levied upon the whole of the High Plateau) who at one time used to collect sums equal to the total of all other revenues, he now brought in only half the amount of those monies.
That was why the look that the prince had given him at dinner last night was harsher than his words. That look seemed to say, you are the steward of the blood, and therefore you ought to be the chief instigator of feuds and acts of vengeance; you ought to be encouraging them, stirring them up, whipping them on when they flag or falter.
But you do just the opposite. You don’t deserve your title. That was what that look meant. O Lord, Mark Ukacierra groaned as he stood by the window. Why didn’t they let him alone? Didn’t he have enough trouble?
He tried to put aside his troubled thoughts, bent down to the lowest shelf of the bookcase, and pulling open the heavy door, took out a thick, leather-bound ledger. This was The Blood Book. For some time he leafed through the stout pages filled with dense script in double column. His eyes took in nothing, merely skimming coldly over those thousands of names, whose syllables were as alike as the pebbles of an endless beach. Here were detailed descriptions of the feuds of the entire High Plateau, the debts of death that families or clans owed to one another, the payment of those deaths by the parties concerned, the cases of vengeance not yet satisfied that would keep the feuds alive ten, twenty, sometimes one hundred and twenty years later, the unending accounts of debts and payments, of whole generations annihilated, the blood-oak (the male line, or the line of inheritance), the milk-oak (the line of the womb), blood washed away by blood, so-and-so for so-and-so, one for one, one head for another, four brace killed, fourteen, eighty, and always blood that was still to be shed; blood left over that, like the ram that leads the flock, draws after it new multitudes of the dead.
The book was old, perhaps as old as the castle. It was complete, and it was opened when people came to consult it, people sent by their family or their clan who had been living in peace for a long time, but who suddenly — because of a doubt, a supposition, a rumor, or a bad dream — felt their tranquility shaken. Then the steward of the blood, Mark Ukacierra, like some dozens of his predecessors, would open the thick pages of the book, searching page by page and column by column the spread of the blood-oak, and stop at last at one place. “Yes, you have blood to settle. In such a year, such a month, you left this debt of blood unpaid.” In a case of that kind, the expression of the steward of the blood was one of stern reproach for the long period of forgetfulness. His eyes seemed to say, your peace has been a falsehood, unhappy man!
But that seldom happened. Mostly, the members of a family remembered from generation to generation every failure to avenge blood with blood. They were the living memory of the clan, and forgetting such things could only occur because of quite extraordinary events with long-lasting effects, like natural catastrophes, wars, migrations, plagues, when death was devalued, losing its grandeur, its rules, its loneliness, becoming something common and familiar, ordinary, insignificant. In some such flood of death, drear and turbid, it could happen that a debt of vengeance was forgotten. But even if that happened, the book was always there, under lock and key in the Kulla of Orosh, and the years might pass, the family flourish and put out new shoots, and then one day the doubt would arise, the rumor, or the mad dream that would bring everything to life again.