KEETHRO

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I do not have the mind of a warrior, as I am just a woman. Perhaps you can explain to me then, why we remain huddled in our homes with winter approaching while the Dogmen and their treasures lie to the south, ripe for the taking.”

Keethro looked down at his curving forearm, its muscles rippling as he clenched his fist, knuckles cracking—a ritualistic reminder to himself of who he was. He was Keethro son of Leif, second in status among his people only to Titon, and second to none with an axe. He was the man whose affections young women had clamored for above all others in his youth. And his affections he did give to them, one after the other. If only those days had never ended, he mused.

Yet for all his raids on the Dogmen, all the bloodshed with rival clans, and all his prowess with women, it seemed he fought most of his battles within the pine walls of this bedroom.

“You still follow that big fool. He was a great man once perhaps, but he now sits in his home with his simple wife while we starve year after year.” Kilandra’s words threatened to ignite his fury, and she spoke them with full knowledge of this. Keethro let the wave of heat pass over him before speaking.

“I warn you—not for the first time—do not speak that way of Titon or his wife, even in private. It only serves to undermine my plans to one day lead our clan, united with the others, not only to raid the South but to take it for our own.” Keethro replied with the coolness of a man poised for violence. He had long since grown tired of this argument.

“Your plans? I thought I married a man of action. What good are your plans to me now? I sit here in squalor, eating the same dried old leathery goat, hoping that one day a true leader from another clan will come and unite us. I see no hope of it from any man in our own.”

This was her nature. Her emasculating words had no effect on his pride; he’d heard worse from her before. And by now her motives were transparent: to test and provoke. He was not particularly fond of her methods, but he played along nonetheless. The end result of this charade was not without its benefits.

He looked at his irate and beautiful wife. Her near thirty years and bearing of their child had seen no ill-effect on her appearance. If anything they had merely intensified her vibrant defiance that he still found so alluring. Her hair was of the deepest brown but had in it streaks of violet, artfully applied with dye from tinder berries. Her eyes were large and obstinate, the type lesser men would find challenging to gaze into for fear of the embarrassment of having been caught staring at a woman above their station. Her tight-fitting furs hugged the frame of her slender body—slender but not lacking ample curvature.

But whereas he could find no flaw in her appearance, he found, it seemed, less and less to appreciate otherwise. He had won her with his looks, his charms, and his wits, but none could ever hope to tame so wild a spirit. She stood with her shoulders tall and did not have the look of a woman claimed, nor did she dress it. It was certainly not common among Galatai women to have the inner sides of their breasts bare during winter, and though it irked him, he was not fool enough to try to shame her into covering herself. “A supple grip holds twice as strong,” his father had taught him. Keethro found this to apply to many things, women most of all. He knew she dressed as she did not only as an exercise of her own pride, but as a subtle if not subconscious test for him as well. A woman who knows her lover fears her leaving is far more inclined to do so. Keethro had seen it time and again in his youth. More often than not, he had been the one for whom the women had left.

Keethro scruffed his wife by the hair and held her in place as the two exchanged glowers. Then he kissed her forcefully.

This was the game they played. She would provoke him, and he would answer as expected with a certain violence. But as he held her down and took her, he could not help but be distracted by a recurring concern. He watched her hair of deepest brown, once tinged of faux blue but now of violet, as it bounced around her shoulders and down her gracile back, and wondered how it was that their daughter, in her youth, had come to have hair of such brilliant red.