The Unfinished Song: Taboo (9 page)

“Dindi, don’t worry, you’re fine,” he said. “You passed out at the banquet.” He frowned. “Did you, um, sample the beer?”

“No!” She blushed. “Of course not.” Her blush deepened when she realized the hut and the bed must be his. “Ah, how did I get here?”

Kavio coughed delicately. “I caught you when you fainted. When we couldn’t revive you, I took you here to rest.”

“Oh, mercy.” She stared at him in horror. She could only imagine what he must think of her. “How long . . .?”

“Just a few minutes,” he said quickly. “Don’t worry. Zavaedi Brena has been here the whole time.”

He gestured behind him. Standing in the doorway,
in a spot Dindi hadn’t even noticed
, stood Brena with her arms crossed and her brows arched.

“I’ll walk you back to the Tor of the Initiates,” Brena said.

“Thank you, Zavaedi Brena,” Kavio replied before Dindi could speak. “Don’t worry about your slave. I’ve arranged for the guards to escort him to your quarters and secure him there.”

“Have you?” Brena asked dourly. “I’m still trying to think of the words to express how I feel about your gift.”

“I’m sure it will come to you in time. Could you give us a moment of privacy?”

Brena’s stare grew even more pointed, but she ducked out of the doorway and let the mesh straw door fall back into place.

“Well,” said Kavio.

“Well,” Dindi agreed uncomfortably. She had so many things she wanted to say to him, and no way to say them.

“Initiation went well,” he said.

“Thanks to your help, as we heard.”

“Er.” He shifted in discomfort. “You’re a maiden now.”

“Yes.”

“Not…” he cut himself off, but she surmised his real question.

“Not a Tavaedi,” she finished. “No.”

Disappointment painted a clear pattern on his face before he whitewashed his expression back to polite neutrality.
Like
Gwenika,
a
somebody
like
Kavio could not really keep company with
a
nobody
like her, Dindi realized with a sharp pang.

“I should go,” she said, standing.

“Of course,” he said, standing also. “Perhaps we’ll see each other again.”

“Thank you for your kindness, Zavaedi Kavio.” Dindi smoothed her wrinkled dress to avoid looking at him. “I doubt we will.”

The young men sharing the First Lodge were too rowdy and drunk from the banquet to sleep that night. After the adults retired to their own huts, Tamio and a couple of the other Tavaedi Initiates sneaked out to the back of the longhouse. The young men who weren’t Tavaedies watched them enviously, but most had the good sense—or lacked the nerve—to join them uninvited.

Yodigo nudged Hadi, whose sleeping mat lay next to his. “Why not see what they’re up to?”

Hadi could think of a lot of good reasons not to, but before he could marshal them, he somehow already found himself trotting after Yodigo. Tamio and his cohort formed a knot behind the lodge. As expected, the Tavaedi Initiates greeted the warriors Initiates with scorn. “Go away, babies, no one asked you here!”

“Fa, Tamio, I’m your clan brother,” wheedled Yodigo. “Don’t be a toad. What’s going on?”

To Hadi’s delight, Tamio accepted this appeal to clan solidarity, and once he accepted Yodigo—and by extension, Hadi—the other young men did too. H
adi
even had an excellent view of the center of the circle, where Tamio proudly unveiled two carved sticks, thumb thick, about an arm long, with animal head knobs at one end, an aurochs bull on one and a stallion on the other. The other end of the sticks was sharpened, not as finely as a weapon, more like something
meant to be thrust
into the dirt, which is exactly what Tamio did with them.

“Behold men! The scepters of manhood! These are Conquest Posts. They belonged to my father, who hailed from the Purple Thunder tribe. These are the two kinds of conquests that prove a man’s greatness. See the counts?” He pointed out where a number of notches had been scratched down the length of each stick. “That’s
kills
. This one,” he pointed to the aurochs
bull head
stick, “counts how many enemy warriors my father killed. And that one,”
—
the stallion head
—
“counts girls.”

“Your father killed girls?” Hadi blurted, horrified.

Yodigo jabbed him in the gut with an elbow and other young men all laughed. So did Tamio, but fortunately he seemed to think Hadi had made a deliberate witticism.

“He slew them all right,” snickered Tamio. “That’s why they called him a lady-killer. Men, here is my challenge to you. I am going to continue adding notches on the Conquest Posts where my father left off. I dare any one of you to beat me to the first victory, in battle or in bed, by the end of our training.”

This time Hadi kept his mouth shut, but one of the other young men asked, “But where are we supposed to find enemies to kill?”

“Let’s hope the Blue Waters attack again!”

“Better yet—a revenge raid!”

Tamio held up a hand to silence the clamor of ideas. “Men, men. Why look so far afield when there are enemies already among us? Who is to say the Blue Waters slaves are not dangerous? I, for one, don’t trust them one bit. And if any one of them wants to try anything—well, I’ll be ready. Now as for girls…”

The warriors who delivered Rthan into Brena’s keeping tied him to one of the four support beams around the hearth in the center of the room. His new wife was not present. No fire burned in the hut, so as evening deepened to night, he waited in the dark for Brena to return.

She did appear at last, carrying a torch, which she used to light a fire in the hearth. Though she must have noticed him immediately, she didn’t speak to him or look at him until after she selected several tubers and nestled them in rocks near the fire. Finally, she faced him with her hands on her hips. From the wrinkles of her nose, she didn’t like rooming him in her hut. He did smell rather feral at the moment. A week spent in the bottom of a bear pit left him with a shaggy chin and a patina of dirt that coated skin and rag into one continuum of grime.

She unlaced the rags from his waist, leaving him naked. He met her eyes. It gave him grim pleasure to see her blush.

It didn’t take her long to find a suitable revenge. Still without speaking to him, she filled a shallow bowl with soap and water. Using a scratchy ball of straw instead of a sponge, she began to scrub every inch of him. The abrasive motion hardly seduced, yet within a few strokes, he humiliated himself by an obvious display of desire. If she had blushed again, teased, giggled, given any girlish notice at all, he might have turned it back around on her with some lusty joke, but except for a spiked eyebrow, she continued her rough scrub bath without banter.

“I’ll poke you, if that’s what you
’
r
e
after.” The crude words crushed the silence, the only mask for his shameful need he could find. “But I’m not your husband.”

“You have it backwards,” she said flatly. She moved to scrub his back, so he couldn’t see her, only feel her palms kneading the muscles along his spine. She took special care to clean the grime from the open lash marks, though somehow, despite her seeming roughness, she did not aggravate any of the wounds. Her touch soothed, even if her words stung. “You’re my slave-husband by the law of light and shadow, but I owe you no access to my bed, nor to my
body
.” She reached lower and scoured his buttocks. “Don’t mistake this for intimacy, Blue Waters. I would do the same for a boar, if I had it sleeping in the same room as me.”

The breath of her words, unyielding though they may have been, only hardened him further.
Unlike him, she smelled wonderful, musky, sweet,
feminine
.
He hadn’t had a woman since …
well
,
it had been a while
. His body didn’t care if she was his owner, not his slave. It wanted her as much as it had when she’d been
his
captive.

Stupid body.

“So I’ll be sleeping inside?” he asked. He’d expected she would
make him sleep outside, in a kraal.
Or a cage.

“That depends on you.” The bath appeared to be over.
She shuffled through her belongings until she found something else. A knife.

Perhaps his kraal notion was overly optimistic. She seemed to have in mind a more pointed revenge. Rthan eyed the stone blade with wary defiance rather than fear.
She grabbed his tail of braids and yanked his head back roughly, so that his throat was exposed. Every braid she held represented one of her people he’d killed. She balanced the stone knife against his neck and paused. He tensed.

“Do you expect me to beg to be your husband, just for the right to live?” he snarled. “I may be your captive, but I refuse to give my allegiance to your filthy tribe.”

“
You
wooed
me
with the knife, didn’t you?” she asked, tightening her grip on his hair. “You were willing to take me as your slave-wife. Funny, you feel differently when the positions are reversed.”

“No one expects a wife to forget her birth clan, or to face them in battle. A true husband must be prepared to kill his own kin in defense of his wife. I’ll not defend a Yellow Bear against my own blood.”

“I don’t need a man to fight my battles for me,” she said coolly. She lifted the knife—he tensed again—lathered his jaw with soap, and scrapped the edge of the knife along his cheek.

He
suffered
a moment of disorientation before he realized
,
She’s shaving me
.

Without a word, she scraped the blade over his cheeks, chin and throat in smooth, careful strokes.  The muscles in his neck and back did not
relax ,
though her touch was gentle.  In fact, he was all knotted up by the time she finished and brushed her fingers across his cheeks to make sure they were smooth.  He was breathing hard and he could not look at her.

“You have lice in your hair,” she informed him crisply, putting aside the shaving things and finding a comb on the shelf against the far wall. Deftly, she released his hair from the braids. He shivered each time her fingers stroked his hair.  She shook the lice she collected on the comb into the soapy shaving water to drown them.

“I’ve hardly dented the lice population in that haystack,” she said scathingly as soon as she finished.  “When I have time, I will have to comb it again.”

She washed her own hands, tidied up,
then
she took out legwals of fine quality, neatly folded in the depths of one of her travel packs. She dusted them out in front of him, and he saw the leather strips had been cut for a man, though they’d still be somewhat short on Rthan.

“These belonged to my husband,” she said. “Before he was killed.”

“You still carry your dead husband’s clothing? How recently did he die?”

She faced him with crossed arms and pursed lips. “
You have no good choices.
We’re both clear this isn’t some dreamy love match spun from moonlight and faery song.  You hate my people, you hate me, I know. You’d slit my throat if you could, but you know if you do, your own life won’t be worth twice-chewed goat cud. And you know damn well you didn’t get into this fix because you’re such an innocent puppy either.

“So.” She took a deep breath. “How do you want to do this? If you give me your word that you won’t try to hurt me—or my daughters—I’ll untie you, let you dress yourself with what little dignity you have left, let you sleep on a mat and feed yourself, treat you like a human being.
A slave, maybe, but not an animal.
If you won’t give me your
pledge
, you can stay tied to a pole outside, naked, like a goat on a feast day. Is that what you want? To be an animal, tethered on public display?”