He had meant to ask what girl to solicit next, but was glad to know the identity of this helpful woman.
'Go back to your home-camp, where they know you,' she said. 'Tyl doesn't like you, and that also prejudices your case here. I'm sorry to spoil your big night, but that's the way it is.'
Now he understoodc He wasn't wanted here. 'Thanks,' he said
'Good luck, Warrior. You'll find one who's right for you, and she'll be worth the wait. You have lost nothing here.'
Var walked out of the tent.
Only as the cooling night air brushed him did the reaction come. He war not wanted. At the Master's camp he had been kindly treated, and no one had told him he was ugly. He had seemed to fit in with human life, despite his childhood in the wilderness. Now he knew that he had been sheltered-not physically, but socially. Today, with his formal. achievement of manhood, he was also exposed to the truth. He was still a wild boy, unfit to mingle with human beings.
First he was embarrassed, so that his head was hot, his hands shaking. He had been blithely offering his shiny virgin bracelet....
Then he was furious. Why had he been subjected to this? What right had these tame pretty people to pass judgment on him? He tried to accommodate himself to their rules, and they rejected him. None of them would survive in the badlands!
He took out his shiny metal sticks and hefted them fondly. He was good with these. He was a warrior now. He needed to accept insults from no one. He stepped into the circle, the same one in which he had won his manhood earlier in the day. He waved his weapon.
'Come fight me!' he cried, knowing the words came out as gibberish but not caring. 'I challenge you all!'
A man emerged from a small tent. 'What's the noise?' he demanded; It was Tyl, the camp chief, dressed in a rough woollen nightshirt. The man who, for some reason, did not like Var. Var had never seen him before, that he recalled-though the man could have been among the crowds of people that had gawked at him when the Master first brought him from the badlands.
'What are you doing?' Tyl demanded, coming close. A yellow topknot dangled against the side of his head.
'Come fight me!' Var shouted, waving his sticks threateningly. His words might be incoherent, but his meaning could not be mistaken.
Tyl looked angry, but he did not enter the circle. 'There is no fighting after dark,' he said. 'And if there were, I would not meet you, much as it would give me pleasure to bloody your ugly head and send you howling back through the cornfields. Stop making a fool of yourself.'
Cornfields? Almost, Var made a connection.
Other people gathered, men and women and excited children. They peered through the gloom at Var, and he realized that he was now a far more ludicrous figure than he had been in the tent.
'Leave him alone,' Tyl said, and returned to his residence with an almost comical flirt of his topknot. The others dispersed, and soon Var was standing by himself again. He had only made things worse by his belligerence.
Dejected, he went to the only place he knew where he could find some understanding, however cynical. The isolated tent of his traveling companion: the Master's wife.
'I was afraid it would come to this,' Sola said, her voice oddly soft. 'I will go to Tyl and have him fetch you a damsel. You shall not be deprived, this night.'
'No!' Var cried, horrified that he should have to be satisfied by the intercession of a woman going to his enemy. Human mores were not natural to him, but this was too obviously a thing of shame.
'That, too, I anticipated,' she said philosophically. 'That's why I had my tent set up away from the main camp.'
Var did not understand.
'Come in, lie down,' she said. 'It'd not- as bad as you think. A man doesn't prove himself in one day or one night; it's the years that show the truth.'
Var crawled into the tent and lay down
