Tanith Lee - Birthgrave 2 - Vazkor, Son of Vazkor

VIP免费

2024-11-29 0 0 832.82KB 86 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

"YOU ARE TO CALL ME VAZKOR,"

I said. "Did I not tell you?"

Her hair was like a bright smoke in the dawnlight and she said:

"There is the rubble of a tower near Eshkorek. That is the grave of Vazkor. Twenty years ago he took

up the cities in his hands and ground them to his will, and smashed them. He wed a goddess-witch; she

was called Uastis. There is some child's legend that she was slain but recovered from death, that she took

on the form of a white lynx, and fled before the soldiers came for her. They say she is living yet, in

another land, Uastis Karnatis. But Vazkor is dead."

My spine shivered and I bade her be silent. I could still picture how they had kneeled to me in the

fortress, the elder men who could remember him, who maybe had looked in his face, and witnessed it

once more in mine.

"You are to call me Vazkor," I said.

DAW BOOKS BY TANITH LEE

THE BIRTHGRAVE

DON'T BITE THE SUN

THE STORM LORD

DRINKING SAPPHIRE WINE

VOLKHAVAAR

VAZKOR, SON OF VAZKOR

QUEST FOR THE WHITE WITCH

NIGHT'S MASTER

DEATH'S MASTER

ELECTRIC FOREST

SABELLA

KILL THE DEAD

DAY BY NIGHT

LYCANTHJA

DELUSION'S MASTER

VAZKOR, SON OF VAZKOR

Tanith.

Lee

DAW BOOKS, INC.

DONALD A. WOLLHETM, PUBLISHER

1633 Broadway, New York, NY 10019

PUBLISHED BY

THE NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY OF CANADA LIMITED

FIRST PRINTING, JANUARY 1978

456789

DAW TRADEMABIC REGISTERED U.S. PAT. OFF. MAKCA REGISTKA1JA. HECHO EN U.S.A.

PRINTED IN CANADA COVER PRINTED IN U.SA,

Book One

PART 1

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 shel-

tered 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 into 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, then" 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 die 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 yon?"

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 trou-

bles 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

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

"YOUARETOCALLMEVAZKOR,"Isaid."DidInottellyou?"Herhairwaslikeabrightsmokeinthedawnlightandshesaid:"ThereistherubbleofatowernearEshkorek.ThatisthegraveofVazkor.Twentyyearsagohetookupthecitiesinhishandsandgroundthemtohiswill,andsmashedthem.Hewedagoddess-witch;shewascalledUastis.Thereissomechild'slegend...

展开>> 收起<<

Tanith Lee - Birthgrave 2 - Vazkor, Son of Vazkor.pdf

共86页,预览5页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Tanith Lee - Birthgrave 2 - Vazkor, Son of Vazkor

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: