There was a girl I had had in leaf-fall. She was a year or so older than I, and had led me on and then vehemently regretted it when I took her teasing for earnest. She had been at me to shame me, for the women hated Tathra most and passed on their hate to their daughters. The girl thought me unready, no doubt, but she was mistaken. She screamed with pain and anger and bit my shoulders to try to dislodge me, but the shireen—her woman’s veil-mask—blunted her teeth, and I was enjoying things too much to let her go just then.

When I was done and found her bleeding I was sorry a moment, but she said, “You out-tribe vermin, you shall bleed too, and yelp when the needles go into you. I hope they may kill you.”

Generally the women feared and revered the males of the krarl, but she had some spirit for me because I was Tathra’s son. I held her by the hair until she whimpered.

“I know about the needles. That is how the warrior-marks are made. Don’t think I shall be squeaking under them like a maiden with the key in her lock.”

“You,” she spat, “you will writhe. You will swell up and die of it. I shall ask Seel-Na to put a curse on you.”

“Ask away. Her curses stink like her person. As for you, you should thank me. I have done your future husband a service, for you were a difficult bitch to get into.”

She tried to poke out my eyes then and I struck her a blow to make her reconsider. Her name was Chula, my first wife, as it turned out later, so the rape was in some ways prophetic.

Still, her words oppressed me. The tattooing, which was part of the Rite, troubled me. I think it had been troubling me a long while and she had only brought the trouble out. My body was strange, so much I already knew, from the snake, and other things. I darkened from the sun. I paled in winter as did all the people, yet there had never been a blemish on my skin and nothing left a scar. As if to balance this, my system showed intolerance to any foreign thing taken in, even food. The rich roasted meats of the kill had me sick if I ate more than a shred or two; their beer was like bane to me. I came to wonder at last what the bright inks of the priests would do, and the needles pushed through my arms and breast. It occurred to me eventually that I should probably die of it as the girl had said, and this filled me with a raging anger. To perish for something I held in contempt, and to leave my mother alone in Ettook’s tent, was gall for me to swallow. And I could say nothing, having created of my fourteen-year-old self a being of iron.