Read Online The Birthgrave by Tanith Lee - Free Book Online Page A

with a knife in her hand. It was
her
swift moment this time. The blade slit my shoulder, and blood spilled fast as wine into the stream, turning the lavender flowers purple, the red flowers scarlet. I got her throat in my hands, my knee against her side. Fool, she might have thrust me off a thousand ways, but she stabbed again, into my arm, and with the impetus of pain, I thrust her body one way, her head another, and snapped her neck.
    It was too quick to think:
This is Death I am giving!
The impulse came from the depth of me, irresistible.
    She lay in the flowers, and my blood dripped on her face.
    â€œYou never fight like a woman,” I heard Darak say. “She’d have done well to remember that.”
    I felt sick, but I said: “She is taller than me, and weighs more, but fire is a great leveler. Take her body down a little way, then burn it. Show them what is left, and I will go my own way. Do not fear I will betray this place. I have nothing to gain in doing so.”
    â€œYou,” he said.
    His hand came onto my shoulder. He turned me to face him, and his eyes looked in at mine through the mask-holes of the shireen.
    â€œI can’t see you,” he said. “What are you feeling, now that you’ve killed? Nothing?”
    His hand slipped downward from my shoulder onto my left breast, and the heart under it leaped and leaped as if it would burst free of me to lie against his palm. Then his hand slid away. His face was tight and concentrated.
    â€œListen to me,” he said. “I’ll take her down to the pool. There’s a place near there we use for it. I’ll burn her. And show them. But you’ll stay here. If they catch you on the track they’ll pull you down like a wolf pack. Don’t worry that they’ll come for you here.” He pointed toward the leaning stones across the stream. “That place,” he said casually, “an altar of sacrifice—old as the ravine itself. I’ve heard them say some black god or other still broods here, but that’s tales for children. Good luck for you, you picked this place. Or perhaps you heard them talking.”
    â€œThen I wait here. What then?”
    â€œTonight we ride south. You’ll come with us.”
    â€œAnd you will let me free when we are away from here?”
    He picked Shullatt up. Her disjointed head joggled over his shoulder. He grinned at me, a grin hard and white as the teeth it showed.
    â€œNo. I’ll not let you free, goddess-woman who fights like a man.”
    He swung away, and down the path, and was gone.
    * * *
    I waited. The day was red as blood, or so it seemed to me as I lay in the flowers beside the streams, the scarlet bells brushing my eyelids. I was afraid now, aware that I had killed, and did not care much. He blunted all the edges of my guilt, but I felt guilt at lack of guilt. Karrakaz, and already evil was upon me. I thought,
Run down among the tents and they will kill you, and end all this.
The clouds above me formed the shape of the Knife of Easy Dying. But I was alive as I waited for him.
    I did not even smell the smoke, nor hear them come to see the burning thing, though they came. They came.
    He touched my shoulder, and I started back across the sparkling darkness. I had slept, I thought, but he looked at me strangely. Had Darak, too, seen me stiff and still and un-breathing? It was cool, and twilight.
    â€œGet up,” he said, “and put these on.”
    A heap of clothes lay by me on the grass—man’s clothes, but small enough that they would fit me.
    I turned my back to strip—because it was before him I would be naked.
    â€œWhere did you find these things?”
    â€œA boy’s,” he said.
    The boots were hard on my thighs, the leather belt cut my waist. He must have been a small-footed boy, with a girl’s waist too—the belt holes ran far around the band. Perhaps Darak had let women ride with him before. Still, there