Raptor (107 page)

Morgh screeched on and on, telling how the combined Gothic and Scythian women were from that time free and independent and self-sufficient, and how they thereafter utilized an occasional man, at their own convenience, purely as an inseminator for the purpose of propagating their race. However, along about this point in the saggws, I ceased straining my ears and started conjecturing some more, because the song had already explained much to me.

For one thing, I realized why the women’s native Old Language of Gothic had been mixed with and corrupted by what
they
called the Old Language. That was obviously the Scythian tongue and, for all I knew, it was older than the Gothic. At any rate, these Walis-karja were clearly hybrids, descendants of those earliest mingled Gothic and Scythian women, not to mention the men they had “utilized” for fertilization, who might have been of any number of other races. Frankly, I felt genuine relief at knowing that these awful women were at least not
full-blooded
sisters to me.

And Morgh’s saggws told me something else, though it was not explicit in the words she sang. It told me the reason for the Walis-karja’s physical unattractiveness
and
their total indifference to sexuality and femininity. From old history books I knew that the Scythians, once a handsome, intelligent and energetic people, had in time become fat, flabby and apathetic. Men and women alike became virtual eunuchs, losing all interest in sexual pleasures. And, according to the history books, that woeful combination of their loss of vigor and their failure to breed was what caused the Scythians’ downfall.

It seemed clear to me, therefore, that these Walis-karja had not so much
decided
to become fat, ugly, stupid, languid and sexless; they had simply inherited those characteristics when they intermingled with the Scythians. I remembered how I had long ago taken special note of one word of the Scythian language—enarios, meaning a “man-woman”—because I then assumed that it signified a mannamavi like myself. But now I had to suppose that it referred only to a mannish woman. It must have been the Scythians’ word for a Walis-kari.

In setting out from Lviv to pursue the perfidious Genovefa, I had thought that I was wantonly digressing from my historical mission. Instead, I had fortuitously found worthwhile information that I might never had found otherwise. Akh, I did not flatter myself that I had divined the sole source of the age-old Amazon legend, because I was aware that the Greeks had been discoursing on Amazons hundreds of years before the Walis-karja came into being. But I was satisfied that I
had
fathomed the Gothic contribution to the Amazon legend.

Genovefa did not find her way to the Walis-karja until three days later. In the meantime, I pretended to be doing my utmost to become an acceptably awful Walis-kari.

As Mother Love had commanded, I made a great show of eating voraciously of every wretchedly cooked meal that the rotating cooks set before us, though I would usually slip away afterward and regurgitate most of it. Now and again, I would even emulate my sisters in sticking my head under a fire hood and inhaling just a little of the hanaf smoke, enough to make my eyes as glazed and my mouth as slack as theirs, but never enough to make me lose my wits. And I learned a smattering of their Scythian language.

In some respects, it was not too different from Gothic. The women might say “Madar Khobi” instead of “Modar Lubo,” and “na” instead of “ne,” and “dokhtar” instead of “daúhtar,” and those words were easily comprehensible. Others were more like those of the Alan tongue—and the Alani, I believe, originally came from the Persian lands—so those words were foreign to my mouth. But I learned to address each woman as “khahar” instead of “svistar,” and to call the looped throwing rope a “tanab” instead of a “sliuthr,” and to refer to a woman’s breasts as “kharbuzé” (the word means “melons,” and it very well described the other women’s breasts, though not mine). So I acquired enough Scythian to be able to converse more easily, but, in truth, the sisters had little more of interest to tell me.

They would bid me, “Khahar Veleda, mind that you make offering,” whenever I brought down a rabbit or an auths-hana with my sling, or caught a pike-perch with my fishing line. So I would, as they instructed, cut off the thing’s head and lay that on an otherwise undistinguished cypress stump that served as altar to both of the women’s female deities. And that was the only recognition or service that I ever saw anyone pay to Tahiti and Argimpasa. As best I could discern, Tahiti was equivalent to the Roman pagans’ Vesta, goddess of the hearth, and Argimpasa was the same as Venus, goddess of love and beauty. Inasmuch as the Walis-karja had only the crudest sort of hearth, and had nothing whatsoever of love and beauty, I thought it no wonder that their devotions were so scanty and offhand.

And the women showed me how they did their dokmé-shena, or pearl-diving. Their thick sheathing of fat made it possible for them to endure the coldest water, but it made them too buoyant to sink under that water unaided. So, stripped naked and carrying a withy-basket, a woman would slide into the river taking along also a rock heavy enough to sink her down to the bottom mud where the mussels were burrowed. Once she got below, she was able to stay there for much longer than I would have thought humanly possible. Behind those melon breasts must have been capacious lungs, because any one of the women could hold her breath down there long enough to fill her basket brimful of the blue shells. Then, on shore, she might have to open many hundreds of the things before she encountered a pearl. It would have taken me half a day to open that many with a knife, but she could do it speedily, prying them open with her horny thumbnail. She briskly flipped away those that contained only mussel meats, which might be every one in the basket—and in basket after basket—before she found a single pearl worth keeping.

The pearls were not so beautifully tinted as sea pearls, nor as lustrous, and only a very few were round. The majority were irregular blobs, some as small as a fly’s eye, a few as large as my fingertip, most of them of varying sizes between those extremes. I doubt that the women could have traded them for much of value if the women had not been the Walis-karja, feared by the merchants of Lviv.

On the afternoon that I watched the pearl-diving, some other things caught my eye, plants growing along the riverbank. I borrowed one of the mussel baskets and collected enough of the plants to fill it. The women looked suspicious of that, so I said, and truthfully, “Flavorings for our meal, when it comes my turn to do the cooking.”

During the time that I was with the Walis-karja, they made no assault on Lviv or any other inhabited place, so I did not get to see whether they really were such terrible marauders as legend and rumor painted them. However, on my third morning there, I did accompany them on a hunting foray. We were all just waking that morning when one of the night’s sentries, a woman named Shirin, rode in to report having seen a prime bull elk in the woods during her watch. Mother Love grinned like a hungry dragon and declared that we would add the good elk meat to our larder. She pointed and named a dozen other women to go with Shirin and kill it—then thought to add my name.

“But do not interfere with the hunt,” she warned me. “Only observe and learn how we do it.” Another thought struck her. “I too will go along. A good opportunity to try our new horse.”

She meant my Velox, but I made no protest. I was interested to note that, for serious work like this, the women did not ride bareback. They put my good Roman army saddle on Velox, and put their old and dilapidated ones on the woebegone little horses that they and I were to ride. It took four of the women to hoist and heave their massive mother onto Velox—and he groaned lugubriously when they did—but she managed to stay firmly astride him, because we rode only at a cautious and quiet walking pace.

We came to a rise of ground where we overlooked a clearing in the forest, a long open swale of high grass, and there Shirin silently signaled that we were near the place where she had seen the elk. So we halted and Mother Love waved her tree-limb arms to direct the huntresses. They rode quietly off in different directions, and the old woman and I just sat our mounts and waited. The Walis-karja did not hunt as I would have done, dismounting and creeping up to within arrow-shot of the game. Evidently several of them rode wide around and well beyond the elk, then came galloping back at him, because after a while I heard the distant sound of many hoofbeats. And shortly the elk, fleeing those riders, broke from the woods at the far end of the clearing, frantically pounding this way.

Halfway down the swale of grass, though, the great animal abruptly interrupted his run. Though I saw no arrows loosed, the elk balked as if he had hit a wall, made a violent sidewise bound, and another, and then stayed where he was, still on his feet, but convulsively leaping left and right, twisting and flopping like a hooked fish. The rest of the women had, while their sisters rode on, stopped their horses at intervals among the trees on either side of the clearing, but I did not even see them until after the elk had halted, when their horses sidled skittishly out of the woods. Little though I esteemed the Walis-karja, I had to be impressed by their skill with the sliuthr. From their concealment, sitting their saddles, they had flung those rope loops—silently, almost invisibly, each throwing from a distance that must have been a good forty paces,
and at a target moving at a headlong gallop.
I would have deemed it impossible, but they had accurately snagged the elk’s antlers—and on both sides, so he could do nothing
but
stop and struggle furiously.

Of course, even such hefty women as these could not long have held captive a maddened and thrashing bull elk. But they had snubbed their rope ends around their saddle pommels, and their mounts took the strain. Those horses were clearly accustomed to this work, because they leaned back against the ropes and adroitly shifted their weight or position as the elk flailed about. Small though they were, the horses kept the ropes from slacking and the nooses from slipping off the antlers, and thus held the elk where it was. The three or four women who had not thrown ropes rode closer to their quarry, dismounted and dashed in and out, dodging the elk’s kicks and plunges, swinging their swords at his throat. By the time Mother Love and I rode down to join them, the beast was dead, its tremendous body prostrate on the grass but its head propped up by its big soft snout and one immense palmate antler.

The mother did not congratulate or thank her daughters for their success in the hunt, but only gave orders: “You and you, do the removal of the head for presentation to Tahiti and Argimpasa. You and you, start gutting the creature. You and you, commence the skinning.”

Without waiting to be told, I got down from my horse and pitched in to help. The swordswomen had not killed cleanly; their hasty hacking had made of the elk’s throat a gory purple hash, as if it had been ripped and worried and chewed by wolves. But they had at least confined their slashing to that place, so the rest of the handsome hide was unmarred. With saying knives, I and my sisters peeled it off intact, and finished that job even before some others of the women had managed to hew and saw and sever the massive head from its neck.

Of the tripes, we saved only the liver; that alone was a sufficient load for one woman to carry. And merely to have quartered the giant carcass would have made pieces that would have staggered our horses. So we brittled it right there into manageable chunks and slices, keeping only the best meat, leaving the remainder for the forest scavengers. When, some while after noon, we finally rode homeward, it required two women and two horses to transport the trophy for the goddesses, the women carrying it between them by the antler tips, the head dangling midway between their horses. And when those carriers were fatigued by the weight, they were spelled by others.

When we got to the river, not far from our destination, we met Ghashang, who came riding from the east. She kneed her horse alongside Velox, at the head of our column, and spoke to Mother Love. Then the two of them dropped back to where I was riding.

“Ghashang has been to the Kutriguri,” said our mother, “to tell them that we require a Serving. They will choose a man to do it. That sometimes takes a while, because of course those goatish savages all clamor for the honor. But the chosen man will be here in a day or two.”

Not at all graciously, I muttered, “Mamnun,” which is “thags izvis” in the Scythian tongue.

“And I command you, Dokhtar Veleda,” she went on, “strive to conceive in the Serving. You are to repay our hospitality by proving fruitful.”

Then she was gone, back to the head of the column, before I could ask sardonically whether one
can
conceive on command. Ghashang, still at my side, said in her ponderous way:

“Curious. Modar Lubo is mistaken. Those men usually quarrel over the choosing, ja, but clamoring not to be chosen. I have never known why.”

I might have suggested that the Kutriguri, however savage, must have good sense, but I refrained.

“Still more curious,” said Ghashang, “this time they are not being reluctant, although I told them frankly that you are a newcomer, a stranger, not at all fat, unwomanly soft and scrawny and pale.”

Probably I should have commended the savages for having good taste, too. But still I made no reply, because I heard loud shouting up ahead. We were approaching the Walis-karja’s place of habitation, and some of the women who had stayed behind were hailing us. They were not just crying a welcome-home to us hunters triumphant; they were calling urgently, and among the shouted words I could hear my name:

“Madar Khobi, come quickly!… Khahar Veleda, come and see!”

They were excited because Genovefa had arrived.

“Is that the man?” Mother Love asked grimly, and I nodded.

“He rode directly under my sentry tree,” said the woman who was proudly displaying her catch to us. “I had only to drop the tanab loop. And he was in disguise, right enough. He even wore
this
over his woman’s clothes.”