The priest came up and looked us over. He prodded and pried at the boys. I was still angry; I had had the company of my anger all night. I thought, If he puts his talons on me, I shall strike his eyes out through his skull’s back. But he must have sensed me on the boil, for he left my body alone. Then shortly, naked as we were, he herded us up along the valley, running to keep ourselves warm enough to live, past the pool under thin ice that generally the women came to smash for water—though not today, no woman being permitted to take this route on the morning of the Rite—and over the ridge. Beyond lay pines and cedars, black as gashes in the dim flaring yellow of the rising sun. Our path struck through the trees, through the dark shadows to the loom of the great tent of many hides, like death’s own house, into which we must run.

Inside the tent it was pitch-black. We fell down gasping where unseen hands pushed us. The floor was rough with rugs, and the air close and hot after our short freezing journey. There were others there ahead of us, and others behind, panting like dogs after the hunt. The darkness seethed with bodies, breath, and terror. I was not the only apprehensive one among them, yet none of them had my fury to season it.

There must have been near sixty youths crushed into that pavilion, males of several Dagkta krarls, while all through the winter valleys the tribes would be holding the rites of this Day of Initiation, each subtly different from the rest.

Soon there rose an odor of smoke, like sweet wormwood.

You took a breath or two of this and half began to choke, but instead the swirling stuff burrowed into the lungs and stilled them. It was a magic incense of the priests. The head seemed gradually to loosen from the body, and float off in the air. My head and I were up in the roof, yet somehow aware of my belly below, with a pit to it as hard and acid as the nut found in a peach.

Next drums started up, either from the corners of the vast tent or in my body, I was not sure. There was a murmuring sound and a sort of disturbance in the blackness, and something squealed out like an animal, but I did not really care.

I lay a long while in the smoke, not caring and at the same moment knowing I should care, should keep hold on my anger, it was all I had.

Suddenly hands fastened on my arms; I was lifted and hauled across the rugs, over the bodies of boys lying in their stupor. I suppose they had been dragging the young males through this way for some time, maybe they had even trodden on me as I now drunkenly trod on others. I had noticed nothing and no one noticed me.