On the Eshkiri loom my mother was weaving a scarlet cloth with an intricate border of black, maroon, and yellow. It would be for him. It made my anger worse to see her thus working for Ettook during my last hours in the world. I felt she should be exclusively mine, for I was sure tomorrow meant an end for me, and I was trying to cram today full of deeds.

Her hair was unbound as she worked, damson-black, her skin winter-white, like a warm snow. Once I was a warrior, by tribal law she would have to cover her face before me, as before all other men except her husband. But that was not yet. She had been old for a tribal bride, she had borne me in her twenty-ninth year; yet she looked no more than a girl in the shadowy tent. Her eyes were half shut from the rhythm of the loom. Only the bracelets chattered faintly on her arms as she moved them.

I stood and watched her a long while and did not think she saw me, but then she said, “I hear he has been hunting, Tuvek my son, and made a kill to last this tent many days.”

I said nothing, so she turned and regarded me in a way she had, her head down, gazing up, half laughing. Even when she stood higher than I, by this look she had made me seem the taller. And when her eyes came on to me, they lit up, which was not playacting. You could see to the roots of her when this happened, how she was all pleasure in me.

“Come,” she would say, holding out her hand, “come here, and let me see this child of my body, like a god. Can it be I that housed you?”

And when I came close to her, she would put her hands on my shoulders, light as a leaf, and laugh at me and her delight in me, till I laughed too.

No other boy of the krarl would have stood for this from his mother, and there were several extra names they discovered for me because I did. From seven years on, the boy is his father’s. He apes his father’s ways, eats with the men and sleeps in the boys’ tent, and scorns the women at their cooking and sewing. If a woman touches him, he brushes her off scowling as if she were the mess of a bird dropped on him from the sky, unless he is eager to take the road between her thighs. However, the other women were not Tathra, their scrawny, clutching paws not her light ones, their faces without the shireen surely not like hers, and their stale female smell rank as a she-cat’s. Tathra’s scent was always fresh and sweet, augmented with perfumes. Even after the pig had been with her she was clean as clear water.

“Ah, my son,” she said now, “my fine son. Tomorrow you will be made a warrior.”