“I will do it now,” she said, “while she feels nothing. You are a strong one. If she wakes, you must hold her still.”
I put my arms around Tathra’s arms, and grasped her. Kotta came, and I looked away from what she did, abruptly squeamish and faint, despite the death I had seen and been the cause of. After a moment, I felt Tathra’s body quicken. She came awake in one frightful lunging effort.
“Hold her,” Kotta cried out, and it was very hard. My bones seemed snapped by her frantic twisting—and then she jerked twice, and she screamed as she had not screamed before, a mindless, unpremeditated scream, which was all one surprised, unbelieving accusation. Between the copper crab pincers of Kotta’s birth tongs, lay the body of a child, which had come from the womb feet first in its hurry to be out. So tiny, this thing which had caused such great distress.
“Ettook has a son,” Kotta said.
“Is it over?” Tathra sobbed, her eyes fast shut. “Is it finished?”
“All over, all finished,” Kotta said. She cut the cord with her knife.
I let Tathra onto her back, and presently Kotta pressed gently on her body and the afterbirth left her.
Then into that new soft silence rang another noise, a commotion that came from the forgotten world beyond the tent.
“They are back,” Tathra said dreamily.
“Back or not, you will rest now. Ettook can wait to see his child.”
“His son,” Tathra said. She had not even opened her eyes to look at it, yet she knew herself safe now, held fast by that symbol of her worth. A bearer of warriors.
I slipped out of the tent to watch them come up between the rocks, and I felt a heady contempt. They were drunk and bloody, tattered like hawks from a sky fight, tipping back their red-plaited heads to drink from leather beer-skins. After them came a string of valley horses loaded with stolen gear: weapons, food, jewelry, and a train of out-tribe women, whimpering from the rough treatment they had already suffered and premonitions of further rough treatment to come. They were redheads, too, a krarl half kin to this one, yet still fair game.
They jumped over their own stockade, knocking stones out of it, and bawling with laughter. Soon the krarl women would come forth from their hiding place to tremble, admire, and feast the heroes. The camp, from being dry and empty, was now one fluid red riot of motion under the sun-broken sky.
Kotta came out beside me.
“I must go and see to their wounds,” she said.
“Their wounds?” The scorn was very bitter in my mouth.
“Either I go to them or they will come for me. Take care of her in my tent.”
“You had better tell Ettook he has a son. He will need telling; it has cost him nothing that he should otherwise know it.”
“Not even that perhaps,” Kotta said. “The child is small and weak. I doubt it will live through the day.”
I went back into the tent and kneeled by Tathra. She was sleeping, drained but peaceful, yet there was a dead look to her; part of her beauty was wrecked on the night, and the rebuilding might never come now.
The boy lay at her side, in the wicker basket they used for their newborn. I looked at him for a long while, but then I went away and sat at the back of the tent. My belly and spine were all one continuous throb of hurt, and I had known for some time now that my womb was near to emptying itself. I did not feel afraid, perhaps because I was too tired. Besides, Tathra seemed to have borne for both of us, her trouble was so terrible. I could not believe whatever was in store for me could be as bad.
Outside the noise increased, thudding angrily. I heard women’s voices and the sizzle of meats on spits. It was full daylight.
After a while a sharp knife came and pierced me, and red liquid ran free. I curled over and thrust against the thing inside me, my torn hands tight around the pole of the tent. If you will to be free of me, then go, I thought at it. There seemed a response, very swift and hard. This thing is too big for me and will never get out, I thought, but I thrust again at it, and my muscles cracked, complaining, and I felt it move. There was a brief interval then, but I felt the shifting pulse, and knew, and finally I pushed down at it with every ounce of my strength and rejection. I seemed to thrust a great stone forth from a cliff, saw it hang, ovoid and bloody, in my brain’s eye. Then a new pain answered, and I cried out, shocked at it, a long cry that ended differently in triumph, for I knew I had at length succeeded, and was rid of my haunting forever.
Away from me, but still chained, rolled the image of my hatred, the curse Vazkor had put on me. I reached for Kotta’s knife, and severed that final bondage, knotting it close to the child, then crouching and dispelling the afterbirth from me. “It was with as little trouble as this that my child was born.
My child, the son of Vazkor.
After I had sponged myself clean, I washed it in the brazier light, looking at it, yet not seeing. It was very small, as Tathra’s son had been, yet perfectly formed, compactly healthy, despite the time I had given it in Belhannor, and the other times circumstances had tried it with since then. It had a pale skin, pearly in the half-dark tent, unfocused black eyes, a wisp of black hair, the legacy of its sire. (I cannot say father; he mated us as another man would mate horses.) I felt no stirring of emotion, not even triumph or dislike now. I removed Tathra’s dead baby from its wicker tomb, and replaced it with my own. I did not even stop to think. The act seemed logical, precise, and very neat.
It waved its small hands at me, and rubbed its restless head on the soft lining of the basket.
When she was stronger, Tathra would wake and give it milk, and it would grow to its manhood among the tents of Ettook, dark-haired, dark-eyed, pale-skinned for its out-bride mother, possessing—what gifts? I could only guess at that. What a viper I might have left them—what a serpent to bite them long after I was gone. Would Kotta guess? Perhaps she who seemed to see might see this difference too—but who would believe her? Tathra would not dare.
I wrapped Tathra’s dead baby in one of the filthy rugs, picked up my bundle and went to the tent flap.
The feast was merry some way from this place, fire smoke, noise, movement, singing.
I slipped between the rocks, reached the unmanned stockade, and got over it.
I felt neither weakness nor remorse of any kind. My decision had been too quick, too abrupt, and yet I think I had known it long before, without realizing. There was no surprise in me at what I had done, what I did.
It was a steep treacherous way down from the krarl. After about half an hour’s scrambling, I became aware of weariness and physical pain. Out of sight and sound of the camp, I crawled into a deep crevasse, hung over by yellow, sun dried bushes, and slept.
Pitch-black night hung in the entrance when I woke.
I eased a way out, and stiffly took up my walk again, still clutching my morbid bundle. At last there was a waterway, very narrow and brown, but here the ground was softer underfoot. I made a mud grave for the thing I carried, then worked downstream, my feet in the cool water.
I came to trees under a high moon. The light was transparent indigo, and the trunks stood up like dim dark pillars irregularly carved, and supporting moonlight on their latticed arms. Mosses, stones, leaf-growths struggling beneath my feet. A warm, a silent night.
I had not considered, even, that they might come after me. They were too busy with their victory, and besides, I was of little worth. I lay to sleep again in the open, not thinking of men, or of animals hunting.
Not thinking of anything at all.
And waking, with the thin gold of morning pouring through rents in the sky, it occurred to me not only that I was free, but also that for the first time since I had come from the Mountain, I had acted alone. No external motivation, no influence of another, but an action sprung from, executed by my own brain.