In the end, I was sop enough for their vengeance, since another value had been added to me. Somewhere a red man had spoken of the fight in the ruin, mentioning the bizarre name the city men cried out as they offered themselves to my knife. The Moi had caught this chat, or even the Eshkiri themselves had heard it. They knew the name, of course. It was not bizarre to them. And, in the prosaic daylight, unenamored of their deities as they were, they never reckoned me, as the dead men did, a risen god-magician.

Even before I had learned my origin, they had been piecing it out. They determined the black-haired man was the bastard of Vazkor, a by-blow on some tribal she-goat, wrought in the last months of his life.

They hated Vazkor. I was to discover how faithfully they hated him.

Eshkorek had been the first city to shatter at his fall. He had pulled her after him, for the shadow of his ambition had lain dark on her. His tokens still crammed her, to keep the Eshkiri to remembrance. Even the silver skull-masks had been the sigil once of Vazkor’s own guard.

They could not reach the dead; he had cheated them, dying. But they had me, my father by proxy trapped in the hide of a subhuman barbarian.

I can reconstruct Demizdor’s part, for she told me after, during the last hour we ever spent together.

While I had attended the Dagkta council, Demizdor had been alone in the krarl. Boredom was her enemy at such times; scorning the women’s tasks, yet with none of the books or music or game-pieces of her own people to hand, she would sleep through the day to be done with it, or else take the black horse and go riding. Intent on my own business, I had not thought she might be afraid, alone in the warren that had treated her ill before. Certainly, she never let me see it, or them, I imagine. The braves mocked her on her horse, but she rode better than they. The women muttered and stared, but none dared harm her, now that she was the chief’s son’s wife. My other two wives, Moka and Asua, had not loved Chula. They waited on her successor like handmaidens, the same way they looked after my gear and war-spoil. Embroidering my shirts and brushing the hair of Demizdor were all one. Yet they would giggle behind their veils at her mannerisms, or gape open-mouthed. She was rare and curious, like a brightly colored singing bird I had brought back from a raid.

Two days Demizdor bore this, perforce. The third day she looked for me home. Maybe she had some word that Tathra was in labor; certainly she had heard later that I had gone to Tathra in preference to her. The day passed, the sun went down. She would have heard the death-wail of the women. No doubt she asked Moka, and Moka told her what it was, that Tathra had died. For sure, Demizdor looked for me after that, afraid, perhaps, how I should be. But still I did not return to my tent.