I did not retrace my steps to the grove, nor in the morning. I knew what I should find, a ruinous scabby statue with a chipped face and moss sprouting inside its lips. She would have a piece missing from her shoulder or her breast. I did not want to see it.

Going homeward to the krarl, I remembered the emerald in my belt.

I seemed to have been away years; something about the night had refashioned time. I partly expected new faces, Ettook and Tathra and Chula long in their graves. A boy’s dream indeed. Coming along the slopes I soon observed the smoke of the central fire, and farther off, the smokes of other fires, where other krarls were settled.

I went to Tathra’s tent and she was alone, unlike the day before.

I was not inclined to be subtle. I let her see Chula’s gem.

“Take this, and wear it. I have told her she’ll be sorry if she insults you again.”

“No,” she said, hesitating, “I don’t want her jewel.”

So I threw down the emerald by her mirror and her cosmetic pots, and turned to leave.

“Wait,” Tathra said, her voice so full of pain, I felt it too. “Oh, Tuvek, do you hate me for what she said?”

I waited with my back to her. When I could master myself, I said, “The girl is brainless. Must I have the same silliness from you?”

“Tell me what I must do. I will do it,” she said. “How can I bear your anger? You are all I have.”

“I told you what you should do. You will wear her jewel.”

“Yes,” she said.

Hearing her tone, I was sorry. I had no quarrel with my mother.

“When I come here next,” I said, “leave the veil off your face.”

“The law of the krarl—”

“Do you think one of their red gods will strike you if you disobey? Obey me.”

I listened to her movements, knowing I had got my way. She came to me and touched my arm, and she had unmasked herself.

I had not been shown her face for several months. It was not as I recalled. I could not fail to see her age this close. The light seeped through the flap of the tent, and revealed to me the chiselings about her eyes and mouth. Her beauty was dying like a flame. I could have wept for it. I put my head down into her hair like a child so I should not see. She thought it was only love. It made her glad.

Part II: The Warrior

1

TIME WENT BY; I never felt it go. The seasons slunk past like people in a mist.

My tent was rich with plunder, and my wives shone and glittered with it. In four years I had wed two more girls in the fire-ring, supposing they might then fight among themselves and blunt their claws before they came complaining to me. Chula bore me sons three summers in a row, but Moka let two out of the gate in one night, and the next winter another two, though Asua seemed intent on sickly girls, most of whom died. At nineteen I had seven legal sons and two bastard boys in Ettook’s krarl, with three or four more farther afield.