Raptor (108 page)

“It belongs to me,” I muttered, for she held up the coiled bronze breast guard. She let me take it from her hand, and excitedly went on reporting.

“And he pretended—pedar sukhté!
how
he pretended—but I was not to be deceived by words any more than by disguise.”

I gazed down at Genovefa, who lay supine in the middle of the glade, unconscious, wound all about with rope, tunic torn open to bare the chest. That part of Genovefa looked like the throat of the elk when it was first killed—a grisly purple hash of shredded flesh—except that it was not bleeding, but smoking. Genovefa would never be Genovefa again.

“And then he
pleaded,”
the woman said gleefully, “when I put him to the test. But I refused to be dissuaded. The false kharbuté did not burn away so easily as I had expected. But I persisted and, as you can see, burn they finally did. Also, Madar Khobi, we now have another good horse, the one he was—”

Her mother angrily interrupted. “You did this all by yourself?”

The woman’s happy face fell, and her sisters roundabout were quick to cry accusingly:

“She
did,
Modar Lubo!”

“Roshan did it all
alone,
the selfish sow!”

“She did not call us until the man was limp and senseless!”

“Roshan only wanted us to help carry him in!”

“She had the diversion all to
herself!”

Mother Love glared at the miscreant and growled, “Such rare diversions are to be enjoyed only when I say so, and when I am present, and are to be shared by all.”

The woman looked frightened. “You were not here… and he was. And you said… make a test…”

“You have been greedy. Disloyal. You have cheated not just your sisters but your loving mother.”

Roshan whimpered, “But… but… there can be more diversion still. He is not dead.” She flapped a trembling hand at the bound body. “See? He breathes. He will awaken to plead some Mother Love scowled hatefully down at the captive, then grumbled to me, “It does not look like much of a man.”

I pointed and said, “You can easily verify it.”

Since Mother Love was too dignified and too fat to bend, she gestured to Shirin, who stood with us. Shirin knelt and fumbled at Genovefa’s riding skirt, but the ropes held it wrapped. So she took out her short saying knife, still bloody from the elk. She cut the cloth and parted it, then recoiled slightly at the emergence of the virile organ—not at this moment aggressively virile, but indisputably male. I was glad for the binding ropes; the legs were so tight together that the absence of testicles was not to be noticed.

Mother Love grunted, “Hand it to me.”

Shirin smiled and licked her lips, then plied the knife. Even securely trussed and oblivious to everything else, the body writhed in a spasm of agony. Thor would never be Thor again. In at least some small measure, the murder of sweet Swanilda had been requited—and the needless slaying of the old charcoal-burner, and the dastardly attack on Maghib. Shirin handed the severed part up to her mother, who gave it only a glance of distaste and then tossed it into the nearest campfire.

I said, “Mamnun, Madar Khobi. I am quit of Thor.”

She frowned. “Thor?”

“That is his name. He is so proud of it that he had the Lviv lékar engrave it upon him. Look at his back.”

She gestured again. Ghashang helped Shirin roll the body over, and they cut away the remaining rags of the tunic. All the women’s eyes widened at sight of the Thor’s-hammer scar.

Mother Love, rumbled in admiration, “Bakh! Bakh! I have been wanting a new pelt for my throne. This one will adorn it most elegantly.”

I said, “Why not get some use out of the creature before you flay him? Now that he is no man, make him the tribe’s slave. When you have worked him to death,
then
take his skin.”

She snorted derisively, “We have little work for a merchant to do.”

“Excuse me for saying so, but you could make good use of a good cook.”

“Eh?”

“I told you he affected many womanly doings. He even made himself skilled at cookery. I promise, Mother, you will never have eaten so well as you will when Thor spends the rest of his life cooking for you. For us, I mean.”

She looked disgustedly down at him. “A merchant, a husband, a player at travesty—and a
cook!”
She kicked at the body, and told Ghashang, “Put a brand to his newest wound and sear it shut, so he will heal. Then drag this—this
enarios
—out of my sight. Stand guard and call me when he awakens.” She turned again to me and said crossly, “If you have been so dissatisfied with the provender here, Veleda, you can take your own turn at the cooking tonight.”

“Gladly,” I said, and I meant it, for I had planned to offer to do just that. “Will you wish me to cook a meal of the elk meat, Mother? It really ought to hang and age for a week or so before being—liufs Guth!”

The exclamation was of surprise, because she had turned from me, drawn her own belt knife and plunged it into the bulging bare belly of Roshan. The woman’s eyes widened for the last time, then she toppled over backward and fairly jarred the ground when she hit it.

“Disloyalty must be punished,” said Mother Love, without the least emotion, and her remaining daughters made no least outcry of protest or lament. “Now, Veleda, pay heed.” She fixed her dragon glower on me again. “Your coming here—the relieving you of your Thor—has cost us one of our sisters. You had
better
conceive from the Serving, and it had
better
be a daughter born, to provide us with a replacement.”

I only nodded. This was no time to make any insolent remark about whether such things could be done on command.

And Mother Love was not finished with giving imperious commands. To Shirin she said, indicating Roshan’s still-twitching remains, “Take off her head and put it reverently with the elk’s head, on the cypress altar.”

Shirin unflinchingly set about doing that, and there was still no outcry from any of the other women. But Mother Love must have disliked the expression she saw on my face, for she snarled, “Have you some
other
complaint to make?”

“Ne, ne. It is just… I had thought that the offerings we made to the goddesses were only… like the elk’s head… cut from the game for our table.”

“So they are. Roshan will be our meal tonight. That is what you will cook for our nahtamats.”

Whatever expression now came over my face, it at least induced the old dragon to take the trouble to explain.

“Ja, we consume our departed sisters. Someday I—and you—will be consumed in our turn. That is how we make sure that each departed Walis-kari is helped on her way to her happy afterlife in the company of Tahiti and Argimpasa. Obviously, the quicker the dissolution of her mortal remains, the more quickly she makes that journey into immortality. And being digested accomplishes the dissolution much sooner than simply being buried to await decay. Also it assures that no dead sister’s body will ever be dug up from a grave to be violated by some man.”

Well, I thought, I should by now be impervious to surprise at any new depravity the Walis-karja revealed to me. But, in truth, they had some precedent for the practice of anthropophagy. I remembered old Wyrd’s having told me that certain of the Scythians did the same thing. Doubtless that was where these women’s forebears had learned it. And everyone knows the story of Achilles and Penthesilea: how that hero of the Trojan War, after besting and slaying that Queen of the Amazons, further dishonored her by having sexual intercourse with her corpse. I was inclined to suspect, though, that Penthesilea had been more of a temptation to venery, even dead, than was this Roshan, even alive.

“I suggest you get started, Veleda,” said Mother Love. “From past experience, I know that such a meal can take a good while to prepare. And look—the children are already eyeing it hungrily. Shirin, when you finish what you are doing, help Veleda with the butchering and brittling.”

I will refrain from telling in detail what the preparation of that meal entailed. At least I was spared having to dissect the head. But when I would have thrown away the great gobs of yellow fat from the belly and buttocks, my assistant Shirin was appalled.

“Vái, Veleda, that is the tastiest substance of all. The red meat you will find very tough and stringy. Besides, the fat further pads our own bodies. Roshan would be pleased to know that her fat lives on in her sisters.” And a moment later Shirin chided me, “Na, na! Do not throw away those bits either. When cooked, they are pleasantly chewy morsels.”

I decline to say what those bits were. But all I
was
allowed to discard was the unquestionably inedible matter like toenails and armpit hair and the filthier entrails. Then Shirin showed me the pit in which were kept the tribe’s few vegetable stores and their supply of dried hanaf. To the chopped and sliced meat I added wild onions and river cress, and some laurel leaves to give flavor. Of course, I had no intention of partaking of this ghastly refection—not just because of what it was, but because, when we had it stewing in cauldrons over the fires and Shirin had left me to stir it, I added some other ingredients.

I crumbled and sprinkled into the bubbling pots those plants I had collected from the riverbank and let dry. I had long known the stupefying effect of bugloss, and old Wyrd had once told me that ragwort will make a horse go mad, so I used them both, and lavishly. I might have hesitated to inflict those weeds on anybody of normal palate, because they are of bitter taste, but I had no apprehension that these omnivores would notice anything amiss. Indeed, they all lounged about the darkening glade in lip-licking anticipation; the young girls and infants visibly drooled. And some of the women, voluptuously sniffing the aroma rising from the cauldrons, exchanged witty remarks and stridently laughed over them—comments on how their sister Roshan, so recently reviled by one of them as a “sow,” now smelled very much like good boar pork being cooked.

About the time the meal was ready to eat, Ghashang came to report to Mother Love that the new slave had awakened from his swoon, but was too delirious to be talking any sense.

“All he says is ‘between my legs… look between my legs.’ I do not care to look between his legs.”

I realized what Thor was trying to tell her, but Mother Love did not. She only laughed her brass laugh and said, “Misses his svans, does he? Best keep him bound, Ghashang. However, let us assist his recuperation with some nourishment.” So I ladled out some of Roshan onto a plane leaf to be taken and fed to him.

Then I heaped the leaves of all the others as they filed, toddled or were carried past the cauldrons. This being a ceremonial night, every tribeswoman was here, none having been sent out on sentry duty. Still, I should have thought that a carcass as big as Roshan’s would have sufficed for at least two nights’ nahtamats for twenty-some women and half that many children and infants. I was in error. They wolfed down their first portions and called for more. I emptied every pot, then gave them the boiled-clean bones to gnaw and crack, and finally I scraped out and served them the very last residue of congealed yellow grease. In all that gorging, no one paid any attention to whether I ate or not.

When every bit had been devoured, they all sat about and belched for a while, and one or two commended me on my cooking. Then Mother Love ordered me to bring out and scatter on the fires the night’s ration of hanaf—and to bring more than usual, because the sentries were still with us. I had some ragwort and bugloss left over, so, just to make sure that I was giving the Walis-karja no parsimonious dose of those weeds, I mixed them in with the hanaf leaves. Then I sat back in the darkness to wait, and I did not have to wait long.

The women who were usually the more susceptible to the smoke—and those included the infants—fell over and began snoring after only a single inhalation. Those who on other nights had raucously sung or lumpishly danced did so again, but their songs got louder, the dancing more frenetic, until they were baying and bounding about, almost as furiously as I had once seen the Bacchantes do. The women who on other nights had only sat and talked nonsensically now raised their voices—to yammering, then to bellowing—and their exchanges became foam-lipped quarrels, and the quarrels became vicious contests of punching, wrestling, clawing and hair-pulling. Mother Love at first tried to quell the fights with indulgent scolding, but before long she was in the thick of a five-woman fray, screeching and kicking and gouging better than the best of them. Here and there a woman got knocked down and did not bother to get up again, but only lay where she fell and began to snore. Others simply lost interest in dancing or fighting, and reeled from the center of the glade to lie down and begin to snore…

I trusted that they all would be snoring before much longer, but I did not wait to see. They were already clearly incapable of noticing or caring what I did. If the bugloss and ragwort worked as warranted, the Walis-karja would probably still be demented and addled all day tomorrow, if not for many more days. Meanwhile, there were not even any sentries to try to stop me or cry the alarm of my escape. I went leisurely to change from my Veleda garb into my hidden Thorn clothing—and I did so gratefully; the nights were getting chilly for going about bare-breasted. I stowed all my belongings and rolled my packs. I got Velox from among the tethered horses and saddled him, and took also the newly arrived horse to carry my packs. Then I mounted and slowly rode away.

No, I did not go to speak any words—either of gloating or of farewell—to that one who had been Thor and Genovefa, and was no longer. True, I had earlier intervened to save that one from being immediately slain or flayed alive. But
akh,
I had not done it out of mercy or remorse or forgiveness, or in memory of what that person—those persons—once had been to me. I had done it in the realization that there could be no more hideous punishment for any malefactor than having to spend a lifetime as a slave of the abominable Walis-karja.

What else might happen to that one, I could not predict. When the women recovered from their derangement, they would assuredly be irate at what I had done, and they might well vent their fury on their remaining captive. Or if the captive was not summarily butchered, the women would eventually discover what
was
between its legs, and there was no guessing what they would do then. Nor was there any guessing what would happen when that man from the Kutriguri tribe arrived to perform his Serving…