They gawped. It was not actually what he had heard at all, only that there was a child. Children were not always a benefit, and from something in the way this one had been gossiped of, it had seemed to fit that category.
“Seven silver Alisaarian draks,” said Katemval. “Providing the brat’s suitable, of course.”
Their women poured babies as their dogs sloughed pups. Too many mouths to feed. And it was easy enough to get more. Then again, sometimes there was an outcry. They yelled about the seed of their loins and set the hounds on you.
Not now, he thought. No.
“Sell you the boy?” said the sly-eyed man. “For what?”
“What do you think? I take for the slave-yards of Alisaar. Not rubbish. Girls for pleasure or show, boys to fight. They live well and sometimes get rich. I don’t He. But it’s up to you. How old’s this son?”
“Eh? He’s—four years.”
That was fine, it tallied with the information.
“The mother,” said Katemval, “where is she?” It was always best to see the sire and dam, too. You learned a lot from that, the sort of clay that had made the child. This man, the father, looked sound enough. The woman was likely healthy—both mother and babe had survived. But then the man said, still hesitating, “She—she’s dead.”
The funeral—that had been coming from this direction. Hers?
“Then you’ll be glad to get the boy off your hands. Bring him out and let me see.”
Abruptly the second man at the back started to make low whimperings. The other rounded on him, and said something rapidly in the gutteral gobbling dialect of the region. Alisaarian, accented in its own fashion, was crystal beside this, which had the smear of Zakoris all over it. Only in the Iscaian lowlands could they halfway speaks the Alisaarian thought.
But for stamina and looks—the city slums were bred out. Here, on these random dungheaps, among the stillbirths and boobies, sudden wild orchids were started.
The first man was now conducting the simpleton roughly inside the hovel, calling over his shoulder: “Wait, ril bring him.”
So Katemval, the slave-taker, waited.
The old woman had died at some moment during the day, while life went on about her. Her quietus was utterly silent. It was this which had alerted them. She had made noises almost constantly, if senselessly, in her final years. Yet, when Tibo lifted the bony antique body, its sphincters relaxing, the corpse had defiantly wet the chair for the very last time.
A woman’s burying was woman’s business. Men were not obliged to attend, and male children actively forbidden.
Tibo had not wanted to leave her son, but there was no choice.
Tibo met female neighbors she had not seen for half a year or more, trudging to the nearest farm, a day’s traveling, with all her chores either side the trek. In turn, these women informed others. Life was cheap, but death an occasion. After six days, the women arrived at the house. They brought sorrow-gifts for Orhn and Orbin, cakes and beer, and a cask of botched wood for the cadaver—each plank or bit of branch was hammered to another by a different woman. There must be enough women at a funeral to have knocked in each part separately.
There was a burial field just outside Ly Village, and to this the remains of all deceased males of the area were taken, where at all possible.
For the females there was another method.
It moved, the procession, sounding its funeral gongs, through the snow, watching all along the uneven dangerous slopes for an appropriate omen. It might be almost anything, vast or minute.
Tibo, moving in unison, watching, sounding the small gong with her hand, thought of her son. Over and over she thought of him. She had not wanted to leave him. But there was no choice.
For almost four years, he had been scarcely from her sight. He slept in the marriage bed, Orhn had not minded. Indeed, Orhn had liked him from the beginning, playing with him, careful of him. And Orbin for Cah’s sake could do nothing, though he set the boy labors almost as soon as he could walk. Orbin had crowed over him, “You’ll be a fine lout, won’t you? You’ll fetch and carry. You’ll earn your keep.” The child was nimble and quick. He did not resist, nor make any mistakes. Orbin only smote him lightly, and not often. Why damage such a potential treasure? The easterner father had not repayed the farm. His bastard should.
During the second year of the child’s life, Zastis came early. In russet moonlight, Orbin pinned Tibo against the wall of the hut-larder. Pulling up her skirt, he rammed himself into her, working and twisting, shaking the flimsy building with his efforts. When he was done, he said to Tibo, “Whenever I want you now I can have you. If you tell tales, so can I. If you get fat in the belly with my boy, well then it’s Orhn’s business again, isn’t it?” Tibo straightened her clothes, saying nothing. The next time, it was the same. But Orbin, having made his point, having satisfied himself, and finding even in this way he could not get a response from his brother’s wife, raped her infrequently and only then in the months of the Star. Tibo did not conceive. He found, too, in the third year, his member became sore and inflamed after he had been with her. He was afraid the easterner had given her some dormant disease, and when the irritation subsided, left her alone. He had forgotten, or did not associate his condition, with her knowledge of—
Tibo had sinned with a lover. But a sin with Orbin was neither lawful nor the wish of Cah. Orbin did not offer delight, and his seed was impotent. But the child—She had called him, not by a king’s title, or a hero’s, but an old name of the uplands, which dialectically she rendered as Raier.
At five, he would become one with the men’s side, in the temple. They would mark him in blood. Other things would happen, of which Tibo did not know. She shunned the thought of this fifth year, and welcomed it. But at the end of his third year she had come on him, free of Orbin for the moment, forming from the rain-wet mud of the pasture slender figurines, Tibo paused, staring, for she had never seen a child do such a thing. The figures were lopsided and bizarre, yet recognizably human or animal, there a pig, and there a woman with breasts and long hair. Humbly, for he was her son, a man, and—she now saw—clever, Tibo collected and brought him tinted stones, to employ as eyes or ornaments. He received them from her patiently, and put them by. He did not need them.
Later Orbin came, struck Raier, stamped on the figures and kicked them over.
The child, like his mother in demeanor as well as looks, walked simply away, and began to clean the yard, unasked. Oh, the child-He did resemble her, it was true. But his father more so. Even by the end of his first six months, the length of his legs gave promise of above average height. His hair came and grew silken-thick and black. His eyes, kohled with dark lashes, would rise up like flowers opening.
And he made figures from mud. He sang in a thin bird’s voice as he toiled for Orbin, melodies from some place beyond the sky—for he had never heard any song but those his mother had sung him at the breast. Once she saw him, riding on amenable Blackness, through the valley. Something in Tibo’s perspective shifted. She beheld a tall man with leaden-blue light on his hair, riding a black beast, a spear in his hand that had been a thistle-stem, and the wind rushed in the mountains like the voice of a colossal crowd.
—She should not have had to leave him.
There were riders on the track, who, apparently understanding custom, removed themselves from the funeral’s path. The mounts they rode were zeebas—once or twice Tibo had seen such things at Ly, if never anything like the other beast, coal black, its strange slim head brightly bridled.
But neither Tibo nor the other women looked aside to dwell on the riders and their mounts. For the omen had occurred. The riders were the omen. It might have been a hare, a ray of sun or gust of snow, a tumbled boulder—something in the way, animate or not.