“Did she tell you so?”

“No need,” she answered, my astute wife, Finnuk’s daughter. “I have seen her naked. You could never have let her be, my lusty husband.”

I thought of Demizdor in the women’s tent; I thought of her too long. When Chula came creeping to me again, I did not want her.

Part III: White Lynx

1

TO FALL SUDDENLY sick when you have never been ill is a hard lesson. If it teaches anything, it teaches you that you must not trust to the things you know, that it is better to build on shifting sand than the rock which may confound you on the day it shatters.

To fall sick, or to love. There is not much difference when you are unwilling, or untutored, in the fact. For near twenty years you rage about the earth, blinded in one eye, the eye of the heart. Then the eye is torn open.

I had given her to my wives, my Eshkiri slave. I had imagined they would rend her with their claws and she would run to me as her savior. I had never met pride in a woman before, not true pride, or, if I had, I had not known it.

So I fished the spring streams, and played gambling games with the warriors, or shot at a mark, tended my new horses, took my dogs and hunted, lay with Chula or Asua or with another woman or two about the krarl, and presently the tents were struck and we were on the old road of the Snake going east, and there were spears and arrows to be refurbished, and weapons to be got in trim for the season’s battles. And here and there, between these activities and actions of a tribal male, I would catch glimpses of a woman in the black shift and the black shireen, walking with pots to a pool, or bent to wash linen, or at the cook-fire (she was never idle, Chula saw to that), and her hair would fold into the wind of spring like a golden wave.

The krarl had not forgotten my hero’s deed as swiftly as I had supposed they would. When the first war challenge came on Snake’s Road, the five of Ettook’s tents I had got from the fortress crowded around me like old comrades, telling the tale again, vowing I should eat the livers of the Skoiana, who had flung the war spear. Now that I should have some fighting I thought I would work the thorn out of my hide that way. It is not constructive to ponder on a woman’s thighs when you are shoulder to shoulder with a battle-wild brave and a band of his spear-brothers flying up on left and right. But the next part of my lesson was to perceive I had lost my fighting madness, lost my joy in killing, lost my hate, or most of it. It was not that I was afraid. It was that it no longer mattered to me, my strength and my youth and my valor had gone for nothing because I could not take my victories to her.