Read Online The Unfinished Song: Taboo by Tara Maya - Free Book Online Page A

After the adults retired to their own huts, Tamio and a couple of the other Tavaedi Initiates sneaked out to the back of the longhouse. The young men who weren’t Tavaedies watched them enviously, but most had the good sense—or lacked the nerve—to join them uninvited.
    Yodigo nudged Hadi, whose sleeping mat lay next to his. “Why not see what they’re up to?”
    Hadi could think of a lot of good reasons not to, but before he could marshal them, he somehow already found himself trotting after Yodigo. Tamio and his cohort formed a knot behind the lodge. As expected, the Tavaedi Initiates greeted the warriors Initiates with scorn. “Go away, babies, no one asked you here!”
    “Fa, Tamio, I’m your clan brother,” wheedled Yodigo. “Don’t be a toad. What’s going on?”
    To Hadi’s delight, Tamio accepted this appeal to clan solidarity, and once he accepted Yodigo—and by extension, Hadi—the other young men did too. H adi even had an excellent view of the center of the circle, where Tamio proudly unveiled two carved sticks, thumb thick, about an arm long, with animal head knobs at one end, an aurochs bull on one and a stallion on the other. The other end of the sticks was sharpened, not as finely as a weapon, more like something meant to be thrust into the dirt, which is exactly what Tamio did with them.
    “Behold men! The scepters of manhood! These are Conquest Posts. They belonged to my father, who hailed from the Purple Thunder tribe. These are the two kinds of conquests that prove a man’s greatness. See the counts?” He pointed out where a number of notches had been scratched down the length of each stick. “That’s kills . This one,” he pointed to the aurochs bull head stick, “counts how many enemy warriors my father killed. And that one,” — the stallion head — “counts girls.”
    “Your father killed girls?” Hadi blurted, horrified.
    Yodigo jabbed him in the gut with an elbow and other young men all laughed. So did Tamio, but fortunately he seemed to think Hadi had made a deliberate witticism.
    “He slew them all right,” snickered Tamio. “That’s why they called him a lady-killer. Men, here is my challenge to you. I am going to continue adding notches on the Conquest Posts where my father left off. I dare any one of you to beat me to the first victory, in battle or in bed, by the end of our training.”
    This time Hadi kept his mouth shut, but one of the other young men asked, “But where are we supposed to find enemies to kill?”
    “Let’s hope the Blue Waters attack again!”
    “Better yet—a revenge raid!”
    Tamio held up a hand to silence the clamor of ideas. “Men, men. Why look so far afield when there are enemies already among us? Who is to say the Blue Waters slaves are not dangerous? I, for one, don’t trust them one bit. And if any one of them wants to try anything—well, I’ll be ready. Now as for girls…”
Rthan
     
    The warriors who delivered Rthan into Brena’s keeping tied him to one of the four support beams around the hearth in the center of the room. His new wife was not present. No fire burned in the hut, so as evening deepened to night, he waited in the dark for Brena to return.
    She did appear at last, carrying a torch, which she used to light a fire in the hearth. Though she must have noticed him immediately, she didn’t speak to him or look at him until after she selected several tubers and nestled them in rocks near the fire. Finally, she faced him with her hands on her hips. From the wrinkles of her nose, she didn’t like rooming him in her hut. He did smell rather feral at the moment. A week spent in the bottom of a bear pit left him with a shaggy chin and a patina of dirt that coated skin and rag into one continuum of grime.
    She unlaced the rags from his waist, leaving him naked. He met her eyes. It gave him grim pleasure to see her blush.
    It didn’t take her long to find a suitable revenge. Still without speaking to him, she filled a