Chapter 1

My mother is a whore and I do not know who my father is. Nor do my brothers. We all have such different faces that I think we must be fathered by half of the village. We were all born from the same clutch, which I think my mother laid and buried while drunk. She forgot about us. Six months later, we came out of the garden peeping, and she groaned and said, "Gods, gods, what horrible thing is this?"

My mother is a devil, but she is not monster enough to kill us, even though she sat and considered it for two whole days.

My mother was more careful after that. She and her husband would take all of her eggs and throw them at the tree behind the house for sport. When we were very small, my mother's husband would say to us, "You are still small enough to throw at that tree!" He would chase us, and if we were not fast enough he would catch us and throw us with all his strength. But at these times, he was drunk or on the Skooma, and we only landed in the pond. On account of this, we are very good swimmers.

I liked my brothers. There were four of them. I am the only girl; this did not matter. My brothers would say, "Let's go hunt," and I would go hunt fish, frogs, and earthworms with them. Once we fought a big pig with tusks as long as my hand is now. It was my bite that tore his throat out. I was four, I think.

We learned about what to eat and how to prepare it by watching the people from the village. We had to sneak because if they found us they would curse us and throw rocks. The women can't aim well because they spend their time around the home with the hatchlings and the gardens, so we stole from them all the time.

But the men are different. Most of them are good hunters, and they are frightening, especially if they have a sling. They would sling rocks at us all the way home and hit us every time. The third or fourth time they chased us, they came all the way to our house and broke all of our nice glass windows from Cyrodiil. My mother slumped out of the door with a bottle hanging on the crook of her claw and threw it at them, and they called her a whore. She cursed back at them and called them beasts, and when she saw her broken windows she beat us and called us bastards.

At first, we were called "bastards" all the time, and didn't have names at all. If my mother wanted something, she would say, "You, there!" and whoever was closest would have to help her. But she almost never talked to me, and sometimes when she saw my face she would blow up her throat and struggle not to speak. Then she would cry out, "Girl! Get out of my house!" and throw old beer bottles and trash at me. It was only me she hated like this. Sometimes she said, "Why do you have those eyes?" or "That face! That face! The gods hate me, that is why they gave you that face."

When I was old enough to understand her, I wondered, what face was that? I did not know. So I went to a still pool and stared into it. My reflection was like everyone in my house. I had a face like theirs, and eyes like theirs. Like my mother, my scales were a bronze color, and butter-yellow on the palms of my hands and my belly. I had a little crown of horns like a male. I stared at myself a very long time, and examined every part of me. I thought for a long, long time. This is when I realized that she hated me because I was ugly. After this, I would only go into the house if I had smeared mud all over my face.

Then one night when I was underneath a bush thinking, I became embarrassed. I remembered that when the hunters slung rocks at me and my brothers, I was always the one they hit the most, and that when people looked at us they looked at me first and blew up their throats. So I started smearing mud on my face all of the time. This is where I got my name: Mud-on-Her-Face.

For six or seven years—I cannot remember the exact number—I ran wild with my brothers. We learned speech from my mother and her lovers; none of it was good. She took men at all times of day and night. The men were often the hunters who threw rocks at us. We stole their slings if they brought them; this is where we learned to make weapons like theirs. We only stopped stealing from them because my mother threatened to force us out of the house. What did we have if we lost the house? Nothing. We would have been true beasts.

When my mother was entertaining, she was shameless. If she were only a little drunk, she pushed us out of the house and drew a curtain across the door. You could hear everything and see shadows. It was a foul thing. But if she were very drunk she had no care for anything at all and did not draw the curtain. If we were there, we would see everything. That was when I decided I hated all people… all except for my brothers and the traveling salesman.

The salesman was old and tall with dark brown scales that turned a little purple around his throat and the joints and knuckles of his fingers and toes. He sold books and leaves from strange lands, which had been wrapped up in paper packets. I know because I opened his pack when his back was turned. I did not take anything because it was all very strange stuff and I couldn't eat any of it.

After he finished with my mother, he dressed and waited until she was asleep. Then he called us into the house. Only I came in, because I was curious about the paper packets. I was naked and I had mud on my face. I think I was five, maybe six.

First he gave me a blanket from his pack and told me to cover and clean myself, because I was of the People of the Root and not a beast to crawl on my belly in the swamp.

"What People?" I asked, because I was young and very stupid.

He paled and sucked the breath out of his throat. "You don't know?"

"What don't I know?"

So he sat down in front of the fire with me. He took a cup of water and gently washed the mud off of my face. As he did, he told me how I was an Argonian, a child of the People of the Root. We are the oldest people in the world, and we are the wisest, for we are the only ones smart enough to live in the Black Marsh and not die. In fact, we are so smart, that the Imperials (a kind of pale soft-skin whose province is "Cyrodiil," the place where we got our windows) could not take the Marsh by force. Instead it was because some clans signed a paper and gave it away like fools. Now the clans have to give money to the soft-skin emperor. This made me blow up my throat and clench my jaw.

The salesman told me that in the old days we had great cities, although they were not built of stone because we loved the swamps too well. The buildings were of trees, which we trained to grow tall and thick. We lived in the trunks, where we learned great magical secrets and wrote great texts. We have minds for words, which we learn by heart and teach to our children.

He said to me, "This is why you must love wisdom. Books contain wisdom, and can live far longer than we do, so you must love them more than yourself and treat them well. Learn to read and you can unlock all of the secrets of the world. Bring this wisdom back to your clan and build up your People. But do not give wisdom to the soft-skins. We taught the soft-skins about the plants and how to hunt, and they repaid us by enslaving us and stealing our land. There is only one soft-skin you can trust. That is a Khajiit. They look like cats and are covered in hair. Have you seen a cat?"

"I ate one once. It was orange."

"Ah. You must never eat cats. In fact, you must be kind to them, for they are the little cousins of the Khajiit. Sometimes they are only checking on us to make sure we aren't getting too friendly with the soft-skins."

"A soft-skin? You say this over and over but I don't understand."

"A soft-skin is anything that walks on two legs, speaks, and has no scales. You can only trust the cats. All else, you should approach with caution. In fact, there is one soft-skin you must not only distrust, you must hate."

"Which one is that?"

"The Dunmer, the Dark Elves. They have skin that is gray like the bark of a willow tree, and red eyes like a devil. They are so evil that they will take us away from the Black Marsh and chain us up in Morrowind, a dreadful land where they will work us until we die." He leaned down very close and stared me in the eye. "You must never trust a Dark Elf and you must never, ever go to Morrowind."

Even though I had never trusted a man in my life, I leaned forward and said, "All right." I have remembered his words ever since, and experience has taught me that those words were wise.

After that, he opened all of the packets and brought out plants and powders. He told me all their names and what they could be used for. He gave me some seeds to sow and told me how to tend them. Then he opened a book. He showed me a map of the Black Marsh and pointed to its heart. "This is where you live," he said. "You are of the Marsh-Heart Clan." Then he read me a story about our People and their clans.

"The soft-skins think we are stupid and do not know about our great history," he said. "They think if a building is not made of stone, it isn't a building worth having. Ha! If they were born Argonian in the long-ago days, in the City of Trees, they would know better!"

He sat beside me all night and never stopped talking. I drank all of his words like my mother drank saltrice wine. My brothers lingered at the door at first, but then they grew bored and went off to catch frogs. I was the only hungry one in the morning, but it didn't matter, because my head was full of good words.

The salesman's last words to me were, "Do not be like your mother." Then he set his hand on my head and he said something in another tongue.

I like to think that man is my father. I look for him everywhere so I can ask him what he said when I was little. I would like to ask for the honor to call him Father and care for him in his old age.

Because of him, I was changed forever. I started a garden in the swamp. I learned about the roots and the mushrooms and how to make fire, which is not easy in a land where the ground and tinder is always wet. I found the old schoolhouse at the edge of the village where all the children from the clan go for lessons. I sat in the back of the class, where everyone ignored me, and I learned how to read. Reading was very hard because the teacher would not lend me books. So I would practice on signs, and when my mother entertained travelers, I would go through their packs for books. Only one man had a book, but that book was a prayer-book to soft-skin gods, so it had no wisdom in it. I threw it in the pond.

When I was eight, I grew very brave and went into the town square with the old blanket around my shoulders. I went to the Priest and said, "You, teach me all about the plants."

"Get out of my sight, bastard," he said, and threw dirt at me.

So I went to the doctor and I said, "You, teach me all about the plants."

"Begone and be drowned," he said, and slammed his door. He had a house like the soft-skins, although I did not know this at the time. Later I would hate him for it.

When my brothers heard I went into the village and talked to the people there, they said, "Are you mad? Have you become sick?"

"No," I said. "But I must not be like our mother."

"Of course you aren't like our mother," they said. "Come on, we have to hunt. It is not the same without you, sister."

"No," I said. (It was hard to say this.) "I must learn. It is the only way. If you were wise you would come with me."

But they were not wise.

So I continued to learn without them. When the doctor and the Priest would leave their houses, I sneaked in and read their books. I memorized everything I read. The books were full of words and pictures I did not understand, but I would say the words over and over and remember them. One day I found a word I could not figure out, although I thought about it for days and days. So I went to the doctor's house. He was in his yard tending to his garden, because he was old and could not hunt. He was useless, like a wife.

"Hey," I said. "What is the meaning of the word 'vivisection'?"

He stood up and blinked at me, and then he leaned forward (for he was very old and his eyes were gray with cataracts), and he said, "You! Are you the one whose muddy handprints are all over my books?"

"Yes," I said. "I read them every time you and your useless servant leave."

"Gods! I lock my door!"

"I don't go through your door. I go through your window."

He looked at me very closely, and did not speak. For a minute, we stared at each other.

Then he said, "I have an apprentice already, so I cannot pay you anything if you work for me. I can only feed you a little."

I said, "I will do anything for you if you will teach me about plants."

"Very well, come inside," he said. "You will start by cleaning my books."

And that is how I came to live in a proper house with proper people, how I learned to write and read very well, and how to speak and eat in a manner that is pleasing. I left my mother's house and my brothers, too. Sometimes I saw my brothers running naked through the reeds, with chickens under their arms and angry husbands chasing them with sticks and slings. Two of them were killed in this way when I was eleven. I am sure the other two are still out in the mud, living like beasts. I was a little sorry at first, but not anymore. After all, they did not listen to me.