Tathra lay in my arms as Demizdor had lain not so many nights before.

“Is it well?” she whispered.

“It is,” said Kotta. “You have borne a warrior.”

I wondered why she should lie, but Tathra’s unmasked face was showing me. Shrunken and colorless, it had acquired a silent inward look, as if she had begun listening to some music in her brain. The look gradually settled on her like a snow, like dust. It was the look of death.

Kotta meanwhile moved about us, doing what she could. The blood fled from my mother as if it would be free of her. We wrapped her in blankets but she was cold. The coals of the brazier reflected in her open eyes, which presently ceased to blink, and thus I knew she had died.

I could not even tell in the end if she realized who held her. Since her remonstrance she had spoken no further word to me, not even my name.

I felt only emptiness. I thought, Long ago I came from this agony, into this tent. Now I have let her go back through the same gate.

It is hard or impossible for a warrior to weep; the ease of it is never taught him, rather he must consider it a failing, a weakness. Therefore I could not, though my body was racked. There was no release for me, no purging of my anguish in grief.

At length I laid her down, and went to stare at the child. That pulpy small mess of life with its badge of Ettook’s siring.

Kotta came to me with a wooden cup.

“Drink,” she said, but I put the cup from me. “You must leave,” she said. “There are things to be done here.”

“That object is not like me,” I said of the dead baby. I scarcely knew what I said.

“Tuvek,” Kotta said, “go out now. Go to your woman.”

“It was his seed that killed her,” I said, “his red seed.”

Kotta contemplated me with her blind eyes. She took up a salve and applied it to my hands where Tathra had torn me. I let her do this as if I were an infant.

“On the night of your birth,” Kotta said, “the Eshkiri woman gave her hands to Tathra and Tathra bit and clawed them. The Eshkir was young, and she was not as other women are. Her hair and her skin were white, and her eyes like white jewels. She carried also, but she was small. I did not guess she would bear so soon, but she bore, here in this tent, at sunrise, when I was off among the warriors to tend their wounds after the battle. She did not leave much trace of it, but Kotta is a healer, Kotta knew. When I returned, the Eshkir and her baby were gone.”

I took a dreary interest in her tale, but she had pushed me to the door flap.

“Go,” she said. “Return at sunset. There are words that must be said. I have promised Ettook’s wife, before you came, to say them.”