«Ukush,» said Chudo briefly.
«Your home?»
«Yes.» He turned to the warriors behind them. «Take the heavy things from the horses. The Blade and I will enter Ukush riding. Let whoever has a pipe play a death-tune for Urgo, for we must give his spirit what it deserves.» He winked at Blade as he said this.
Blade slowly and carefully mounted the horse Chudo offered him. The horse was not skittish or hostile, fortunately. It had been starved into apathy and was so gaunt that Blade was more worried about its collapsing under his weight. It had obviously been a fine gray once, small but extremely sturdy and with a high proud head, probably a mount of one of the Riders of Death. Now Blade was glad he did not have to ride it more than a few miles or faster than the gentlest of trots.
Chudo also mounted up and two of the warriors pulled out short pipes and began playing a tune that was either improvised or something they knew very badly and played even worse. Blade gently urged his horse into motion and the little procession of returning warriors tramped out across the plain toward Ukush.
They began to see herds of gaunt piebald cattle. The herders and guards waved to them as they passed. Beyond the cattle were fields, the rocky soil dark and bare now, surrounded by walls of loose stones piled just high enough to discourage the half-starved cattle. Under the darkening sky, with the bloody glow in the west, it was a grim, dreary sight.
As they moved closer to Ukush, Blade saw thin trails of smoke smudging the sky above the town as small fires tried to make headway against the chill winds. Dung fires, no doubt, or perhaps peat if the Scadori were lucky. Blade hadn't seen a tree since they reached the plateau, and damned few in the hills below the pass!
Around the base of Ukush's hill rose another wall, this one of earth mounded ten feet high and covered on the outer face with stones. They passed through a gap in the wall flanked with massive boulders perched on top of the wall to either side.
«When another tribe fights us we bring the cattle and the people inside the walls. Then strong men push the big rocks down into the open space. No one can get in easily as long as our warriors stand on the walls with weapons in their hands.»
«Are such wars common?»
«You would like to fight, Blade?»
«I am a warrior. It is my way of life to have enemies and fight them.»
«Good. But we in Scador do not fight much among ourselves now. I think you will be among us many years before you help defend the walls of Ukush against other Scadori.»
«But it will not be long before I fight the Karani, I hope?» Blade did his best to seem eager almost to the point of being bloodthirsty.
«You want to fight beside us, do you?»
«You have taken me in among you when you might have thought I killed Urgo by trickery and sent my spirit to join his.»
«It is so. Then you will share in the next battle with the Karani, and all the battles with them after that until there are no more to fight.»
«Or until I die,» put in Blade. «No warrior can be certain that will not happen.»
«No,» said Chudo. He grinned. «But I do not think it will happen to you. I think you will fight the Karani and kill so many that in three years you will have five Karani women all to yourself. And you will also have Tera.»
«Who is Tera?»
«She is Urgo's woman. She is seventeen, and so beautiful that I think the light of the Watcher of the Day Sky must be in her. But she bore Urgo no children, and has a stronger spirit than is right in a woman. So he had to beat her often, and it twisted her spirit. Beware of her, for all her beauty. She might try to stick your own sword in your guts some night if you are not careful.»
«Thank you for the warning,» said Blade. He was about to add, «I will start off by not beating her for a while, to see if that untwists her spirit.» Then he realized that Chudo would hardly understand the idea. He might not think Blade a coward, too weak to treat a woman as she deserved. But he might think that the new warrior who had come among the Scadori was a madman, and say so. That could cause talk, which Blade did not need. Anything that could make him a suspicious character would make it harder for him to slip quietly off toward the lowlands and the Karani.
The lower slopes of the hill inside the wall were empty, the earth trampled bare and hard in many places. Above it was a ring of shops. Smoke and clanging sounds rose from what was obviously a forge. Farther around the circle was a butcher's shop, with a horrible pile of bones and entrails beside it. Blade was glad that the weather was cold and the wind blowing from him toward the pile. He hoped he could get out of Ukush before hot weather came, and with it a host of frightful smells.
Part of the ring of shops was given over to stables. Like all the other buildings they were built of stones and turf, thickwalled, low, with roofs of hides sewn together and stretched over frames of bone. As Blade dismounted, a warrior nearly as large as Urgo stepped out from between two stables. He wore only leather breeches and a knife at his waist, and the hair of his beard and his massive chest was gray.
«Where is Urgo?»
Chudo pointed at Blade. «We found this warrior named Blade from a distant land traveling in the hills to the south. Urgo said too much, as usual. He thought the warrior Blade would be easy and pleasant to kill because he was naked and unarmed. But Blade fought Urgo naked with only his hands, and killed him. Now he leads our band. His customs are strange, but he is a mighty warrior, so they must not be bad customs.»
The gray-haired warrior's broad face split apart in an even broader smile. He stepped forward and threw both arms around Blade, pulling him against his barrel chest until Blade felt that his own ribs would crack. «That great maker of loud noises is dead! Praise to the Watchers! Now perhaps my daughter will no longer be called barren, to the shame of my family. It cannot be that she was barren. It must have been that Urgo could not do what a man does, and threw the shame down on her like a rock from a high place. But now he is dead, dead, dead!»
Blade didn't follow this, but the man's bear hug had squeezed all the breath out of him. The man noticed Blade's confusion.
«Ah, Blade, I see you do not know. Tera, the woman who was Urgo's and will now be yours, is my daughter. My name is Degar.»
They clasped right hands and placed their left hands on the hilts of each other's weapons. In Scador that was the gesture of greeting between men who were not only friendly toward each other, but did not expect to ever become enemies.
Degar said, «It is good that Urgo is slain, for now my daughter will go to a man who will see that she bears a child and takes away the shame from my house.»
Chudo said farewell to Blade and promised to come to his house tomorrow to tell him more of what he must know to be a warrior of Scador. Then he turned back to the rest of the band, while Degar led Blade through the alley between the stables and up into the streets of Ukush. The streets were hardly wider than the alley and nearly as dark and smelly. Only occasional dim flickers of light crept around the hides drawn across the low doors of the huts and houses, to fall on the worn and age-blackened stones underfoot. Blade heard drunken singing, children crying, the sound of someone being violently sick. Above everything rose the continuous faint moan of the chill wind. Blade realized that in winter Ukush must be a grim stony hell of shrieking wind and snow flying like shotgun pellets.
Degar stopped before a house with red checker patterns painted on stones on either side of the doorway and a white diamond painted on the bleached and cracking hide of the door itself. «This is the house of Urgo.» He drew his knife and rapped smartly on one of the stones by the doorway with the hilt. «Ho, in the house of Urgo! I bring the new master, the warrior Blade, who has slain Urgo and will claim his rights on this house and all in it.»