Raptor (106 page)

Ghashang tethered my horse and then escorted me, many of her sisters following, through a screen of trees and into an adjacent smaller glade. This was their Modar Lubo’s “palace” in the open air, and it was just as littered with food scraps and other trash, but it did boast two things that could have been called furniture. Over the sleeping pallet hung a roof of ragged deerskin slung between two tree branches. And in the middle of the clearing was a “throne” rudely hacked and adzed out of a tremendous tree stump that weather and decay had begun the hollowing of. Mother Love was imposingly seated on it now, rather overflowing it, in fact. At sight of her, I could readily believe that this oldest of the Walis-karja was indeed the most to be dreaded of them.

Each of her daughters was only as ugly as an úrus, but she was very like what one would conceive the fabled dragon of pagan superstition to have been. Mother Love’s leathery hide had been wrinkled and mottled by age, as any old woman’s might be. But hers had also been lapped into saurian scales and bunched into warts and wens; her flat old breasts looked as hard as two armor plates. Her fingernails and toenails were of talon length, and what teeth she still had were practically tusks. She far surpassed any of her daughters in bulk, and she was hairier, too; besides the scurfed gray mat on her head, she had hairs like fish barbels on either side of her mouth. While her breath was not visible as dragon fire, it was rancid enough to repel any adversary at eight paces.

The other women had regarded me only askance. This one glared balefully as I told her my name and began to repeat the tale I had spun for Ghashang. I had spoken but a few words when she growled at me what sounded like a question:

“Zaban ghadim, balad-id?” When I just looked blankly at her, she demanded in Gothic, “You do not speak the Old Language?”

That puzzled me even more, and I could only say, “I
am
speaking the Old Language. As
you
just did, Modar Lubo.”

She curled her lip contemptuously from her tusks and sneered, “A townswoman,” and imperiously waved a paw for me to get on with my story.

I did, and considerably elaborated on what I had told Pretty, aseribing all kinds of vilenesses to my invented husband. I laid particular emphasis on my having felt
violated
not just the first time but every time he exercised his conjugal privilege. And since I was feigning Amazonian loathing of the copulative act, I took care to keep my head down, so Mother Love should not glimpse the Venus crease about my throat, in case she might have known what that signifies about a woman’s true sexuality. Having depicted my phantom spouse as a veritable monster of brutality and carnality, I concluded:

“I beg haven with you and your daughters, Modar Lubo—and I beg your protection, too, because that odious man will not lightly surrender the vessel into which he has enjoyed pouring his lustful juices. He is very apt to come ravening after me.”

She shifted her bulk slightly on her throne and grunted testily, “No man in his right mind would come here.”

“Akh, you do not know this one,” I said. “He might come in disguise.”

She snorted, very dragonlike, and said disbelievingly, “Disguise? Are you in
your
right mind?”

I hung my head and tried to force a blush. “I am mortally embarrassed to tell you this, Mother. But he… sometimes when he forced himself upon me, he liked to play that he was the wife and I the husband. He would lie passive and make me get atop him and—”

“This is sickening! Desist!” She and all the other women were squirming and making faces. “Anyway, what has this to do with disguise?”

“He became well practiced in travesty, if you know what that is, Mother—what is called in Latin transvestitus muliebris. He would dress in my garments. After some while, he could do that most convincingly. He even had our Lviv lékar cut pockets under his chest skin, in which he could insert wads of wax… here… and here…”

I inhaled deeply to protrude my breasts, and poked them with a finger, dimpling them to demonstrate that mine were genuine. The old dragon’s little saurian eyes widened to almost human size, and so did those of the other Walis-karja gathered about us.

I sighed and added, “He would even go sometimes upon the street in his travesty, and strangers would take him for a woman.”

“We would not! Would we, daughters?” They all determinedly shook their bovine heads. “However womanly he might look or behave, he could not pass the simple test of a campfire brand thrust at him. Wax melts. Wax
burns.”

Her daughters nodded briskly and cried, “Bakh! Bakh!” which I took to be their word of plaudit, so I joined in, “Macte virtute! What a brilliant thought, Mother!”

“But you,” she said, fixing me with her lurid stare. “What have you to offer us? Besides your fine horse and your fine Latin phrases?”

“I have not always been a townswoman,” I said. “I am adept at hunting, fishing, trapping…”

“But you lack the good substantial fat that would fit you for the cold work of diving for mussel pearls. You must put some flesh on those spindly bones. See to it. Now, how much do you know of us Walis-karja?”

“Well… I have heard many stories. I do not know which were true.”

“You must learn.” She indicated one of the women. “Morgh here is our ketab-zadan—as you would say, our singer of the old songs. She will sing to you tonight. That will also start your learning of our Old Language.”

“Then I am accepted?”

“For now. Whether you will stay is another matter. Did you leave any children behind when you fled Lviv?”

That took me by surprise, but I said honestly, “Ne.”

“Are you barren?”

I thought it best to lay the blame on that already well-heaped husband. “More probably
he
is, Mother. Considering his perversions and all…”

“We shall see.” She spoke to my captor: “Ghashang, you will be responsible. Send word to the Kutriguri that we wish a Serving. When their man gets here, put this one to him.” To me she said, “If you conceive, then you stay.”

It seemed rather a stiff initiation requirement, to make a woman who had shunned her husband’s attentions take on those of a stranger. And one of the yellow-skinned, verminous, hideously Hun-like Kutriguri, at that. But I said nothing, only bowed in acquiescence.

“Good. Then you are dismissed. Everyone, begone. Your mother would rest.”

She gave a mighty heave and levered herself up from her throne to go stumping over to her pallet. Now that she was off the big chair, I could see that it was draped with a hide daubed with colors, evidently meant to be ornamental. Though the skin was much worn and rubbed thin and frayed at the edges, it was recognizably too delicate and pliant a hide to have come from any animal but a human one.

Ghashang returned to me my belt and sword and knife, and showed me an unoccupied place in the glade in which to spread my sleeping fur and lay my pack. Then I spent what remained of the day being occupied with rope.

My new sisters still seemed uneasy about looking me in the face, and not all of them were fluent enough in Gothic to communicate with me, but they did express curiosity as to why my Velox wore that thick rope encircling his chest. So I vaulted onto him and demonstrated the purpose of it. Then, one after another, they tried it for themselves. Of course, such fat women did not vault to the saddle; they climbed Velox much as they would climb a tree. However, once astride, a Walis-kari could grip the foot-rope better with her prehensile toes than I could. The women were surprised and pleased to realize the utility of that contrivance, and several started to make foot-ropes for their own mounts. It quickly became obvious that none of the Walis-karja knew how to splice a rope, so I devoted some time to teaching them that craft.

I was equally curious about their silent weapon, the sliuthr. One of those was easy enough to make, and the women made the twirling and throwing of the noose end look easy, too. They could fling it and loop it over a tree stump or a crawling baby, and yank it tight about the target. But when I tried, I was so awkwardly inept as to make them all laugh. (That was more than mortifying, it was painful, their laugh being an ear-piercing squawk.) However, I was able to show them how to
improve
the sliuthr—putting an eye-splice in the rope’s end, through which to bend the bight, instead of having a clumsy and impeding knot there. When I made one, and the women tried it, they found that it slid more smoothly, thus could be thrown even more deftly, and they ceased to laugh at me. They even lent me a sliuthr with which to go off and practice by myself, unlaughed-at.

While I played with it, and only
very
slowly got better at wielding it, I reflected on what I had thus far learned about the Walis-karja. They employed the sliuthr as a weapon. Their Modar Lubo draped her “judgment seat” with a hide flayed from a human being. In other words, these women maintained at least two usages of the very earliest Goths. That lent credence to the legend that, long ago, during the Goths’ migration across these lands, certain of their women had proved so intolerable that they had been forcibly expelled from the company. It seemed reasonable to conclude that those women
had
managed to live on their own, had stayed hereabout, preserving the old ways and customs, never learning any of the arts and graces later acquired by the Goths—and these Walis-karja were their direct descendants. If so, I could well understand why the old-time Goths had cast out their great-great-great-grandmothers. According to the story, those original women had been vile haliuruns hags, but they need only have been as unsavory as I found their progeny to be.

My theory might validate the old songs as true history, but there was a question remaining. What could account for the women’s commitment to total sexlessness? Those original outcasts might have been, as the legend said, so indignant at their expulsion that they swore to get along without men forever after. But the descendants of the present day had not just forsworn men and shed their own female sexuality; they had rid themselves of every other feminine instinct and attribute as well.

Bad enough that they were content to be fat and ugly, they also seemed deliberately to have cultivated disagreeable voices. I had heard many men speak with the hard clangor of iron, and most of the women I had known spoke in the sweet tones of silver, but these Walis-karja, young and old, spoke stridently in harsh voices of brass. Equally unfeminine was their sloth and slovenliness. They lived in a squalor that would horrify any normal woman. They let their children go dirty and stinking, even with the river water at hand. They dressed in skins because they had forgotten or never learned the feminine arts of spinning, weaving, sewing…

And now, when they summoned me to join them at nahtamats, I discovered that they did not even know how to cook. I was given a portion of some unidentifiable animal’s viscera, so tepidly warmed as almost to be raw, and a mess of unrecognizable greens, the meal ladled onto a plane-tree leaf, because the women did not know how to make bread or bake a trencher. I muttered that even I could cook better than this, and Ghashang overheard me. She said I would get my turn, as every woman did, because none of them relished the job.

When we had all finished eating, the women next indulged in the one and only luxury they possessed. It was an indulgence I had seen before. Onto the embers of the cooking fires they sprinkled dried hanaf leaves, and then draped skins over the rude hearths, and took turns sticking their heads under those canopies to inhale the smoke. Even the young children did that, and some of the women lifted the tiniest infants so they could partake, too. The hanaf intoxication took the women in various ways, none of them dignified. Some women reeled giddily about in the dark, others danced bulkily about, others talked incoherently at the top of their brazen voices, others just fell over and snored. It did not elevate my opinion of the Walis-karja to see them behaving so. Only a few of us eschewed the indulgence: I because I did not care to get drunk, four or five others because they were to be that night’s sentries perched in treetops roundabout, and the woman Morgh because Mother Love had bidden her sing to me.

The name Morgh means Bird, but she was no more birdlike in utterance than she was in size. If listening to a brass-voiced woman’s speech was unpleasant, hearing one sing was excruciating. Nevertheless, the old song that she rendered was enlightening to me. Though it was of course sung in that welter of mixed Gothic and alien words, it was so interminably long that I could catch enough to comprehend its content. It was a saggws recounting the origin and early history of the Walis-kari tribe, and it most gratifyingly supported the conjectures I had been making only a while before.

It began by telling how, long ago, a number of women had left the main body of Goths—
left
it, mind you, not been thrown out of it. In this version of the story, there were no foul haliuruns witches being banished. The women were all chaste Gothic widows and maidens, and they were constantly having to fend off the Gothic men’s lecherous attempts on their virtue. Finally wearying of that, the women sought refuge in flight, in voluntary exile. They departed into the wilderness, and wandered about in it. Even while suffering hunger, exposure, terror and all manner of other miseries, they somehow still found the leisure and composure to take an oath that their little band would remain in perpetuity all-female and staunchly misogamic.

Eventually, said the song, the women came to a splendid Scythian city, for in those days Sarmatia was not known as Sarmatia but as the nation of Scythia, and the Scythians were still a mighty people. The women of that city sisterly received the travel-worn Gothic women, and fed and clothed and pampered them, and wished them to stay. But the Gothic women resisted the temptation to settle down as city dwellers, for they were determined to survive and thrive on their own. They did learn certain Scythian customs, such as the intoxicating use of the hanaf smoke. And they did adopt from the Scythian religion two female deities, Tahiti and Argimpasa, to be their own matron goddesses. And they did accept from their Scythian sisters the gift of various things they would need in the wild. But then they departed, to go and live in the forest forever after. And when they left the city, they were accompanied by numerous of the Scythian women whom they had converted to man-haters like themselves.