Her words struck echoes inside me. My spine shivered and I bade her be silent. I could still picture how they had kneeled to me in the fortress, the elder men who could remember him, who maybe had looked in his face, and witnessed it once more in mine.

Late in the morning we reached the valley of the spring gathering. There was some smoke rising; it had misled us. We trotted the fine city horses over the upper ridge, and looked down on the aftermath of the great tribal camp, black from old fires and entirely vacated. Not even a hound to welcome us. Only a few flapping, mottled heaps of wings and beaks, where the big birds were dining on dead dogs and horses and on parts of men. The krarls had meant to bury their dead as we had done, but, impatient at the numbers of the slain, had not stayed to tend the funeral fires. These had presently gone out, and left dainty roasted meats for the scavengers. It was not a pleasing sight and turned my stomach. I had seen corpses in plenty, but had not returned to a battlefield when the crows were banqueting there.

She was sitting beside me. In her silver mask, I could not see her mood, but she faced straight down to the valley, and her hands were motionless and nonchalant on the rein.

“The carrion eaters must bless your princes that provide such dinners for them.”

“Do the tribes never kill?” she said, quick as a blow.

“We kill hand to hand, belly to belly. Not with iron phalluses shot from behind a hill.”

“With our cannon we have razed our own cities,” she said. “Don’t think I will pity your little loss.”

“For a slave you set up a strident mewing.”

“I am not your slave,” she said, “though you may play at it. Hang me with shackles, beat me, murder me. I am still no slave of yours.”

“None of this is necessary. I will get you with child. Then we will see how much my slave you are.”

She had no tune to counter that.

The men behind us were sitting also very quietly, sullen and sour at the deserted camp. Against the odds, they had hoped for better. But their chiefs and their kin had reckoned them lost and discounted them, and when the night of the gathering was done, they had turned homeward for the Dagkta tentings. I wondered how many dying men had been helped across the threshold by the priests’ knives. I wondered, too, how Ettook celebrated to himself my death, for he would be sure of my death, knowing where I had gone. I had not sampled this dish before. Too much alive, I could not envisage my alleged slaughter. I visualized instead his bastards squealing for their dues, and widows wailing for their husbands taken captive, and at that I remembered my mother. She also would believe me slain or slave. I had forgotten that.