I thought the lamp was at fault, next, the bronze or my eyes. At length I reasoned the fault was not in any of these.

“Is this so?” I asked her.

“It is,” Kotta said.

I touched the muscular body that belonged to me, comprehending it with my hand, and stared down at myself. Even without the mirror, I could see.

There was not a tattoo on me, not even a scar from the needles, and the colors might never have been.

“Did he trick me then?” I said. “Only pretend he worked on me as the other priests did, and the drug-smoke deceived me?”

“Oh, no. The work was done. Many saw it—the spear-pattern of the krarl and the stag-sign of the tribe, and Ettook’s mark like three rings. But now it has healed and faded from that hard marble flesh that never has a blemish, oh son of Tathra.”

She had predicted well. The hunger had left me.

“Without the tattoos I am not a warrior,” I said.

“Just so,” said Kotta, “you are not.”

3

Once, maybe, the ritual of the Boys’ Rite may have been profound and meaningful. Certain of the priests still murmured of gods who came at such times, and the black people of the marsh-towers were said to worship a golden book that spoke to them. But in Ettook’s krarl, as with all the red peoples—Dagkta, Skoiana, Hinga, Eethra, Drogoi—the rites were just the husks left over from deeper things, no pith remaining and no mystery, nothing to lift up the soul or go to the brain like wine. And, as generally happens, the more truth the ritual lost the more they bolstered it with significance. There is a saying among the Moi: The chief is clad in gold and purple, only the god dares to go naked.

So they made much of the Rite because it was nothing, and I had failed to be marked by it, as if to prove it nothing. They would be against me now with a wall to back them in all their bewildered savage little pride. And there was something else. Their ways had never meant much to me; to be made a warrior was only a form, I felt no honor in it or glory. I had never been kin with them. To myself I claimed Tathra’s blood alone; her obscure krarl, now vanished, I considered mine. Yet to be accounted by the Dagkta as less than the dregs of the pack, less than the youths I had fought and bested all my life and scorned to take as equals, wretches that used certain explicit gestures for my mother’s name—to be reckoned less than these, that I would not bear. I bethought myself at last how I was indeed the chief’s son, Tuvek Nar-Ettook.

When the sun rose I was ready, as I had not been ready for that other thing. I was concerned with my death, that morning of the needles, and here I was, alive, and whole.