A Woman of the Horseclans

VII

No sooner had a spot been agreed upon for the winter camp, the yurts set up and the most absolutely pressing other necessary things for living done than every nomad not on herd guard set out with sickles and axes to the high-grass areas and the nearest forests to hack down the tough, wiry grasses and fell tree after tree.

An endless parade of carts bore the grasses to central sites within the environs of the camp, where the loads were arranged in thick, high stacks to provide food for the horses when the snows were too deep for the creatures to reach such frozen herbage as might lie beneath. If it seemed that there would be enough, a small amount of the precious grass hay might even go to the cattle and the sheep. But only a few of these were ever expected to survive a winter this far to the north, in any case, herds would be rebuilt through raiding in the following spring and summer months.

The felled trees were trimmed of branches and dragged to the campsite by spans of oxen, while the larger branches were themselves trimmed, piled onto carts and thus trundled back to add to the growing heaps of wood—wood for fuel, wood for strengthening and insulating the yurts against the coming wind and cold, wood for countless other purposes.

And every day the younger children took carts out to the pasture areas to bring them back loaded with dung—cattle dung, sheep dung and horse dung, plus the droppings of any wild herbivores they chanced across during their trips. This manure was set out carefully to dry on racks made of woven branchlets suspended over a very, very slow and smoky fire and all covered by a makeshift, temporary roof. This structure was situated some three hundred yards from the nearest yurts, in a breezy area and well downwind; nonetheless, her every visit to the latrine pits exposed Bettylou to a stomach-churning reek of the curing dung.

Therefore, she remarked to Ehstrah and Gahbee when they met one morning in the steam yurt. “Whoever thought up that abomination of spread-out dung over on the downstream side of camp knows little about manuring. It should be dumped in a pit and allowed to ferment through the winter, covered in straw.”

Ehstrah laughed and shook her head sending a rain of droplets from her streaming face. “Oh, my dear little fledgling Horseclanswoman! Behtiloo, those cowpats and sheep pellets and horse biscuits aren’t for dunging soil; Horseclansfolk don’t plant and reap crops, that’s for the damned Dirtmen.

“No, we gather and dry out dung for winter cooking fires. Hasn’t that damned, conceited, overproud Lainuh taught you anything?”

“But … but … then what are all those trees being felled for?” questioned Bettylou. I thought they were for winter fuel.”

“They are … among other uses,” Ehstrah nodded. “But you can be certain that that wood will not be used for cooking in the yurts so long as, a single dried cowpat is left to be so used.”

“Why?” asked the girl puzzledly. “You and all the others I’ve seen have been using wood as long … well, as long as I’ve been living with you.”

“Yes, that’s true, Behtiloo, but you have only lived with us in good weather, warm weather, when the sides are removed from the yurts and the tops often partially rolled up or at least gapped widely, making dissipation of smoke no problem.

“But imagine you how it would be to cook with a wood fire inside a yurt that not only has sides and top firmly closed, save for a peak-hole of the smallest possible size, but has been reinforced with wood and leather and anything else that’s available to make it as weather- and air-proof as possible. In a yurt like that, you’ll learn quickly to appreciate the true benefits of cooking with dried dung rather than with wood.

“Child, dried dung burns every bit as hot as wood, but it is almost smokeless in the burning, This relative smokelessness makes it far safer, as well, for night-long- warmth-fires in a yurt, for more than a few nomads have smothered to death on wintry nights of the smoke from their fires.”

“Uncle Milo tells the tale,” put in Gahbee, “of nearly an entire clan that died thus, years agone, in a low cave they had walled up with stones and plastered with clay for a winter home.”

Bettylou paused, then asked a question that had for long puzzled her. “Why do you and so many of the others call Chief Milo ‘Uncle’? And why has he no children or grandchildren or any other blood kin?”

Ehstrah answered, “Behtiloo, Milo is called Uncle because that is what he has always been called. Our parents called him that, their parents called him that and their grandparents and their great-grandparents back to the very beginning of the clans. He, Milo Morai, it was in fact who succored the Sacred Ancestors, led them from the Caves of Death and the waterless lands to the high places and showed them how to live a good, free life. Milo it was who forged first the links between us and the cats and, later, our breed of horses.

“When, long ago, the clans were much smaller and lived all together or, at least, not very far distant one clan from the other, Milo lived with them, guided them, advised them in composing the Couplets of Horseclans Law. Now he travels from area to area, living a year with this clan, the next year with another clan. He and I and Gahbee and Ilsah, we will winter here, then we will move on in the spring and join with another clan for the summer and autumn and winter.

“As to why he has gotten no children of any of us three, well, I—for one—may be just too old to quicken of his seed. But the other two? Well, all that I can say is that his failures are not for lack of trying—heh, heb, at his times, he could put to shame every stallion, bull and ram in all our herds. I’d had two husbands and a full share of other bedmates before I wed Milo, child, and I can honestly say that if nothing else, his tenscore and who knows how many more years of life have rendered him the foremost lover on prairie, plains, deserts and mountains.”

“Two hundred years?” exclaimed Bettylou. “That’s … why it’s impossible, just impossible! He looks to be no more than twoscore years at the most. You’re joking with me, aren’t you, Ehstrah?”

The smile left Ehstrah’s lined face. She became serious to the point of solemnity. “No, I am not joking, child; I am recounting no less than the bald truth about Milo’s past deeds and length of life. Although I doubt that anyone besides him knows exactly how old he really is … it may be, in fact, that even he doesn’t know exactly. At least, each and every time on which I’ve tried to get a straight answer out of him on that subject, he has either evaded the question completely or given some sort of wildly imprecise answer as ‘I’m old as the hills.’ or ‘Old enough to know better’.”

Despite the hot, billowing clouds of steam, Bettylou shivered involuntarily, felt her nape hairs all a-prickle. Her natal people all firmly believed that the total life span which God had allotted to mankind was threescore and ten years. If any man or woman lived as much as a year beyond that Holy Number, it was assumed to be Devil’s Work for certain sure and that man or woman was dragged to the Place of Scourgings and of Death and executed by stoning. If to live a single year over seventy years was symptomatic of the Ancient Evil, how much more so must be a man who was firmly believed to have lived two hundred or more years …?

But Ehstrah had been prying at her still-weak mindshield and now she chided, “Enough, Behtiloo, enough! Our Milo is no more evil than are you, than is that babe in your belly. You must try to purge your mind of those terrible, venomous, antihuman tenets to which you had the misfortune to be born and bred.

“Oh, aye, Milo may be devilish at times—devilish, in the sense of that word as used in the Horseclans dialect of the Mehrikan tongue—but then many folk are, both old and young, male and female, human and feline. Furball is devilish, in that sense; so too is your father-in-law, Djahn Staiklee.”

Bettylou sighed. “I like him, Ehstrah. But Lainuh says he is suicidally reckless, childish and selfish, unfailingly lazy and seldom gives her and her brother, the chief, the respect due them.” She hesitated, then continued, saying, “She drives poor Dahnah, his slave, very hard, almost every day, and waxes most wroth whenever one of us tries to help the woman with whatever chore she has been set at.”

Ehstrah’s face assumed a grim look and she nodded once, brusquely. “Trying to make his concubine too exhausted for any bedsports, come night; sounds just the way her mind would work.

“You are right to like Djahn Staiklee, Behtiloo. You can honestly respect him too, for he is none of the things of which Lainuh accuses him … at east not to the degree she would have you and the rest of her listeners think he is. Let me tell you the tale of Djahn and Lainuh, child. Some of it I know personally, but much I have learned from others since Milo and I and Gahbee and Ilsah joined these two clans last spring.

“I know Clan Krooguh of old, for although I am a Tchizuhm-born, my first husband was a Krooguh, Chief Dik’s younger brother, Gil, in fact. I was living with this clan when first Djahn Staiklee appeared. That was at the big Tribe Camp over a score of years, ago, where he bested every man or maiden or matron with his bow and outrode every horserider in that huge aggregation. The two who came closest to besting him were Dik Krooguh at riding and my husband, Gil Krooguh, with the bow, and they three quickly became fast friends.

“Lainuh then was married to a man named Hari of Clan Rohz, so Dik and Gil got Djahn married to her younger sister, Kahnee. She was a willowy, beautiful girl, that Kahnee Krooguh, but her hips were too narrow for her own good and she died in childbirthing before a year was out, That same winter, our camp was raided by non-Kindred nomads—Mehkikuhns, from the south—and although we did drive them back to whence they came with very heavy losses, we too lost warriors, and one of those wounded unto his eventual death was Hari Rohz, Lainuh’s husband.

“Poor Hari’s ashes were not cold before Lainuh had set her eyes upon Djahn Staiklee. Chief Zak, Dik’s uncle, was a dying man even before he went out to fight half-naked in the midst of a blue norther, so everyone in that three-clan camp knew that Dik would assuredly be Chief Krooguh well before the spring thaw, and so it was not as if Lainuh suffered any dearth of suitors—sons and brothers of chiefs, famous warriors, good providers, all. But she would have none save her dead sister’s widower.

“Now Djahn. too, could have had any unmarried, nubile female who happened to take his fancy in all that camp. Behtiloo. He was a well-formed, very handsome young man, a consummate rider and bowman, no mean hand with saber and spear and riata or bola, a valued warrior and hunter.

“He failed to respond to Lainuh’s most unsubtle overtures, and this drove her near-mad. She always has been very close to Dik, her brother, and has ever been able to slyly manipulate him, so she set him to win over his friend, Djahn, pointing out that if he just rode off, Clan Krooguh would lose a rare bit of human treasure. And so, between the persuasions of Dik and my Gil and Lainuh herself, Djahn was inveigled to stay on as a permanent member of Clan Krooguh. I think he married Lainuh more as a means of staying around his cronies, Dik and Gil, than for any other reason.

“But the poor man made a bad choice, whatever his real motives, child. Although in the first five years of their marriage, while still I was with Clan Krooguh, I can say that she behaved the good, loving wife, seemed to appreciate the exceptional man, warrior, hunter that now was hers.

“But then my husband, Subchief Gil Krooguh, did not come back from a raid he had led against a settlement of Dirtmen. Chief Dik offered to marry me as his third wife, and I must admit that I considered it … for about ten minutes’ time.”

Ehstrah smiled. “But I simply was not born to be at the beck and call of a younger woman for the rest of my life, so I married a widower of Clan Morguhn that autumn and went with my new clan to the high plains in the following spring, while Clan Krooguh trekked off due north, following the main herds of game, and I did not again see a Krooguh camp until we arrived here with Milo.

“I have been told or admitted into old friends memories in regard to all or most of the information that now I am going to impart to you, child.”

“Lainuh had two sons by Hari Rohz; they were both mere toddlers when their sire was slain and Lainuh married Djahn Staiklee. Dikee and Djahnee and Tim and another son, Gaib, were all born, one after the other, before I was widowed and married out of Clan Krooguh.

“Lainuh doted on the two Rohz boys and early began to groom the eldest of them, Zak, to someday succeed his uncle, Chief Dik. She succeeded in turning both of those boys into spoiled brats, both dead certain that Sacred Sun rose and set, Wind blew, only for them and their personal pleasures. His arrant insubordination got the eldest Rohz boy killed along with several of his cronies in their first raid. Lainuh could not or, more likely, would not recognize her own culpability in the matter and laid full blame for the boy’s death at the feet of her husband, Djahn Staiklee, who had been the senior subchief on that particular raid.

“Then, less than a year later, the one surviving Rohz boy, Hari insisted on riding up into the mountains with a party of seasoned hunters after wild sheep and elk. As you know by now, Djahn Staiklee is a superlative horseman, possessed of an easygoing courage that seems completely natural and supremely unconscious, and has lightning-fast reflexes—a combination which is the more precious due to its true rarity.

“Anyway, in hot pursuit of a wounded sheep. Djahn Staiklee rode his horse down a very steep, shaley slope up in those mountains. Young Han Rohz, disobeying orders from his stepfather and all the other hunters, made to follow, then lost his nerve halfway down and tried to turn, whereupon his mount lost its balance and feet, fell head foremost and rolled full-weight upon the boy. The mishap killed the both of them. boy and horse, then and there, outright.

“No one of those returning hunters was at all anxious to be the one to tell Lainuh Krooguh of the death of her second son by Hari Rohz, but all of them finally did, many going so far as to fully open their minds and their memories to her that she might know that the words spoken were nothing less than the full, unembroidered truth and that no one of the hunters was or could be held in any way—legal or moral—responsible for that headstrong boy’s death.

“Lainuh apparently heard them all out, delved into every proffered mind’s memories … then placed full blame upon the undeserving shoulders of Djahn Staiklee, her husband and the stepfather of the dead boy, Hari.

“When, some year or more later, he won the slave girl Dahnah, while gambling with men of Clan Pahrkuh, and made it abundantly clear to all of his yurt that he meant to keep her as a concubine, Lainuh did her utter damnedest to turn her brother. Chief Dik, against his old crony, Djahn Staiklee, but in that particular instance she failed miserably, which failure to continue to exercise a measure of control over her brother in no way improved her general disposition or her attitude toward Djahn Staiklee and his new acquisition.

“And so matters still stand, Behtiloo,” said Ehstrah, then adding, “Your mother-in-law, Lainuh Krooguh, hates and utterly despises your father-in-law, Djahn Staiklee. She is vindictive and conniving and can be violent, so would likely have murdered him long since—though of course using her wiles and exercising her considerable intelligence to be certain that his demise appeared natural—were it not that, according to clan customs, his death would considerably lower her personal status in the camp and vastly lower it in the yurt, making as that circumstance would the first wife of her eldest living son the mistress of everyone and everything in the household. A woman like Lainuh would be unable to abide such an abrupt descent although I and a goodly number of others would dearly love, would give our very eyeteeth, to see such a thing, see the arrogant and overproud Lainuh humbled once and for all.”

Ehstrah stood up and said, “Well, I for one have enough steam for today. You and I, Behtiloo, can go into the other yurt and wash while Gahbee goes out to roll around in the snow, as is her peculiar wont. I watched her once, but never again; it fairly raises the hairs on the neck. Tepid water is more than enough of a sensory shock for me, after the heat in here.”

Back in the yurt of Tim’s family, Bettylou found that affairs looked tranquil enough. Neither Tim nor Djahn Staiklee was about, of course; Tim spent as much time as he could find or make at the side of his sickly uncle, Chief Dik, absorbing the host of things he would need to know when he became chief. Djahn Staiklee, who could not for long abide inaction, had left before dawn with the best hunters of the clans to sweep wide about the area of the camp and search for signs of predators, raiders or any large game animals.

Even before she got really close to the yurt, Bettylou had caught the reek of mutton. Inside, it was all but overpowering, rising from the bubbling pot of sheep fat which Lainuh and Dahnah were using to soften and dress the cured skin of the big brown bear that Djahn Staiklee had killed during the autumn trek from the summer camp to this winter one.

And suddenly in an eyeblink of time, she was again witnessing the events of that terribly terrifying, terribly exciting day.

Hunters had killed three larger screwhorns—beasts each as big as a draft-ox and otherwise looking very much like domestic cattle, save for their twisting horns and peculiar color—field-dressed them all and brought them back to the night camp of carts to be properly flayed, butchered and apportioned out.

The bear had come in from downwind and, with all the hubbub of unhitching teams, offloading carts and otherwise making to set up a camp, no man or woman or child, no cat or horse or mule or ox had seen or scented the great, furry, hungry ursine until, with a roar, he had tried to hook a maiden of Clan Skaht from where she was standing atop a loaded cart with a swipe of his broad, long-clawed forepaw.

The maiden screamed shrilly, mindcalled a broadbeamed plea for help and leaped from off the safer side of the cart all at once … and then the campsite was pure pandemonium for a few moments, while the stubborn bear, still trying to get at his originally chosen meal, vaulted to her former place atop the loaded cart.

This action served to stampede the draft horses still hitched to the cart, and the pair raced out across the darkening prairie, vocalizing their terror, with the bear hanging on for dear life and thunderously roaring out his own concern and displeasure, which roars only pumped larger amounts of adrenaline into the team, and the speed of the rocking, bumping, toothjarringly springless cart increased appreciably.

In the wake of the runaway cart came pounding half the folk and all of the cats who had been at the campsite—warriors, maidens, matrons, slaves, everyone who had still been mounted or could quickly get astride a mount—and in their wake came more folk racing on foot, armed with whatever had come easiest to hand at the moment.

The bears portion of the journey had ended when the much-abused cart lost a wheel and he was pitched rolling and roaring onto the hard ground. The mountainous beast lay for a moment, apparently stunned, while the team raced on, still screaming, finally dragging the cart to pieces. By the time the shaken bruin had regained his feet, he was ringed about by snarling prairiecats and the mounted warriors were close upon him.

Despite the broken bones, the crippling injuries that the huge plains grizzly was later determined to have sustained even before the fight commenced, he did put up a fight, enough of a fight to kill two full-grown prairiecats and maim another, so that finally Chief Milo and a half-dozen others started in to settle the bear with wide-bladed wolf spears.

The cats were dancing about, making mock rushes, then springing back to hold the bear in place. His movements never slowed to less than lightning-fast for all that he was so quilled with arrows, his fur all tacky with blood and the ground about him splattered thickly with it.

It was while the seven spearmen were positioning themselves for their deadly-dangerous task that Djahn Staiklee rode upon a lathered horse, In a trice, he had strung his bow, nocked, and sped a shaft that flew straight and true the seventy-odd yards to strike the beast’s eye and sink deeply into the brain beyond. And the fearsome bear dropped, crumpled bonelessly to the blood-soaked ground he had so well defended.

Lainuh had been working at the bearskin off and on ever since. She had skillfully sewn up each and every hole and tear and puncture from the flesh side with fine sinew, she had painstakingly stretched and cured it and now was hard at work making it supple before she put it to use as her winter bedcovering.

As Bettylou began to shed her outer garments in the warm interior of the yurt, Lainuh looked up and smiled at her, mindspeaking, “You were long at the steam yurt, daughter mine.”

Bettylou returned the smile and beamed, “Yes, I met Ehstrah and Gahbee and we … talked, for a while.”

A frown flitted across Lainuh’s face. “Gossip, no doubt. That Ehstrah, she is never happy unless her sharp tongue is employed at the telling of slanderous tales. Who was she maligning this day, daughter?”

Bettylou thought fast and lied glibly, “Oh. some story about a woman in Clan … ahh, Morguhn, I think. It all was long ago, she said.”

Lainuh wrinkled her brow in puzzlement. “Why would she tell you about such old gossip, I wonder? You’re certain that she made no allusions to folk in this camp? To me, perhaps? She owns a completely senseless dislike or me, you know.”

“Well,” said Bettylou, slowly, feeling her way through these treacherous footings, she had begun by telling me of Horseclans customs and the reasons for them …?”

Lainuh’s frown disappeared and she nodded, chuckling. “And so our Ehstrah dredged up a choice bit of slime from her cesspit of a mind to illustrate the point as well as joy her soul in the retelling, I’d assume.

“Well, my dear, here’s a bit more education for you. Come and help me with my bearskin, then Dahnah can go down to the end of the camp and fetch back a load of dung for our night fire.” She had been smiling, but the smile completely vanished as she turned to the other woman, snarling, “You heard me, you slave slut! Get up and go do my bidding. Take the biggest bag and come back with it brimful, if you know what’s good for you! And when you’ve brought the dung back and stowed it as is proper, as you know I like it, you will begin to grind grain for the day. Now, get about it, damn you!”

The two women worked at the bearskin until midday, scraped it with dull wooden spatulas to remove excess fat, then rolled it, and Lainuh laid it atop her bedding rugs. After instructing the widows of Tim’s two dead brothers and seeing them begin preparations for the daily meal, she lit the largest of the fat lamps and took out the cloth and the colored threads and the needles to commence Bettylou’s continuing lesson in the art of Horseclans embroidery.

Then another two hours were spent at the task of stretching fresh sheepskins on the frames, defleshing them and giving them an initial treatment with whey.

Djahn Staiklee returned quite early, well before dark, with his saddle over his shoulder and his other hand and arm filled with his weapons. He moved stiffly, looked to be half-frozen and had concern writ deeply on his weathered face.

After dumping saddle and gear, he stalked over to stand by the firepit, stripped off his mittens and flexed his fingers in the heat beating up from the smoldering dungfire.

Lainuh ignored him, did not even look up from her work. At length, Bettylou levered her swollen body to its feet, took a horn cup from the stack and, after pouring it brimful of herb tea, proffered it to the man.

A concerted hissing gasp of apprehension came from Dahnah and the two widows; all expected a torrent of verbal abuse to spew from Lainuh, but the mistress of the yurt ignored this tableau, too, until Staiklee spoke.

“I thank you, Behtiloo, I thank you kindly.” Then he raised his voice a trifle so that all might hear clearly. “It could get bad, very bad, for us and our beasts. A tremendous pack of wolves is roaming out yonder, fivescore, at the least, probably more. We found a deer yard the devils had visited; there were only scraps of hide, broken antlers and a few well-gnawed hooves left of what had been a sizable number of deer.

“When we reported of it all to the chiefs, they decided that we’ll bring in as many horses as we can fit inside the stockade tonight and we’ll keep watchfires going here and out at the herds, too, all night long.

“Then, tomorrow, as soon as it’s light enough to see, every man, maiden, stripling and matron who’s well and able will hie to the wooded areas and start felling, trimming and dragging or carting back more trees.

The stockade will be enlarged or added on to so that we can protect not only the horses, but the cattle and the sheep, too.

“The herd guards are all exempted, of course, as are the ill, the very young or aged and women close to foaling; therefore, this yurt will furnish one man and four women to the work party, at dawn, tomorrow.”

“One man and one woman!” snapped Lainuh in a voice colder than the icicles festooning the eaves of the yurt. “If you and your stinking, lazy slave slut want to freeze in those damned woods tomorrow, I care not; but I am the mistress of this yurt and, as such, I have a day’s work to do every day here within it and I need the help of my dear daughters-in-law to aid me in performing my many chores. Moreover, I am the eldest sister of a chief and thus the mother of a chief-to-be—unless you, Djahn Staiklee, manage to get Tim, too, killed before his uncle dies … as you got all his brothers and half brothers killed!”

Lainuh’s low voice had risen to a contralto shout that fitted the yurt and must surely, Bettylou figured, be easily audible well beyond the felt-leather—and-wooden walls. Nansee, the widow of Djahnee, went softly, hurriedly, to comfort her babe, who hung in her harness and wrappings from the roof frame and just now was shrieking, Lainuh’s angry shouts having awakened the infant to terror.

Djahn sighed deeply and, ignoring the slanders, said tiredly, “It’s not my choice to make, Lainuh. If you want to argue a case, I suggest that you go over and do so with your brother and the others, although I seriously doubt that such argument will do you a scintilla of good this time, for this work is just too important to every man and woman and child and cat and horse in the camp. They have already refused to excuse nursing mothers, so why do you think they’d excuse a hale, healthy woman who just simply feels herself to be too busy, not to mention too exalted, too highborn, to swing an axe?”

“you superilious, mongrel Tekikuhn!” hissed Lainuh. “You go too far. We all know just what you truly are. What do you think yourself to be? I, at least, am pure Kindred by birth.”

Staiklee threw back his head and laughed. “Pure Kindred, hey? You? Lainuh, it is time, I think, to apprise you of the fact that I knew that yarn of yours to be a wholecloth lie even before I foolishly married you—you, with your airs and laziness and tantrums.

Dik Krooguh’s mother never bore a daughter who chanced to live to maturity, so when one of her husband’s concubines bore a baby girl who proved to be of his likeness and of decent mindspeak aptitude, she raised her as her own daughter. Now, my first Krooguh wife—your half sister, Kahnee—was by your sire on his second wife and was of pure Kindred stock.

“But your dam, Lainuh, was nothing save a Dirtwoman slave, and that is why most of the camp laughs at your pretensions, either behind your back or to your face. Were your half brother not chief and deeply attached to you for various and sundry reasons, you’d have not a friend in this camp. You are more or less tolerated by so many because of the love and respect that all bear for Dik Krooguh, and that is the only reason.

“Now you do as you will, wife. But I much fear me that if you are so unwise as to not heed the summons to work tomorrow for the common weal, not even Chief Dik’s stature in this camp will save you the shunning and overt censure of your peers, your betters and even your inferiors.”

Lainuh leaped to her feet, kicked off her embroidered yurtboots and began quickly to don her heavier outside clothing. “We’ll just hear exactly what my brother has to say about this … this outrage, Djahn Staiklee! Nor do I think that he’ll be one bit happy or amused to hear that you chose to humiliate and degrade his only living sister before her daughters-in-law and your slave. And I’ll not be back under this roof until I hear your full, abject and public apology to me and my dear brother, too!”

Djahn just grinned. “That is a promise, I hope. In that case, wife, you had better take your bed rug and coverings, plus all of your clothes—winter and summer—for horses will sprout horns and oxen will climb trees before you hear me recant what was only truth.

Squatting, her face working. she began to roll her bed for easy carrying, but when she made to include the bearskin, he roughly jerked it from her grasp.

“Give it back, damn you!” she shouted hotly. “It’s mine, mine!”

His reply was cold, “You seem to forget—conveniently misremember, as is your wont—just who killed that bear and then skinned it out, woman, By custom as well as by the law of the Horseclans, I can give this prize to whomever I wish, It is not automatically yours simply because you chose to lay claim to it, as you have claimed or made shift to claim everything of beauty or of value that ever has come into this yurt.”

“But … but …” she stuttered, too angry for a moment to talk properly. “But me it was who cured that skin, me it was who stitched up the tears of fang and claw, the holes made by the arrows, It has been long and hard, it has taken me months of daily work on it. You can’t just rob me of it now!”

He just shrugged, saying. “You cannot be robbed of something you never really owned, Lainuh. And as for the vast amounts of work you claim to have put into the curing and repair of this bearskin, I am certain that our son and his new wife here will thank you in winters yet to come, for I have decided to give it to them.”

Lainuh did not return that night. The four women and Djahn Staiklee ate the stew and the fried bread, then sat for a long while around the dungfire, nibbling on hard cheese and chunks of dried fruit and sipping tea, while Djahn spun tales of hunting and of his youth on the arid southern plains, where more than a few of the bands of nomads still were neither Kindred-born nor even allied with the Horseclans by marriage.

All the while he talked, in the near-darkness Staiklee’s big, capable hands were busy. First, he fitted a new string to his powerful hornbow, then rubbed every inch of that string well with a lump of beeswax. That done, he unstrung the bow and thoroughly dressed it with sheepsfoot jelly before wiping off the excess and returning it to its weatherproof case of wood, felt and oiled leather.

Then it was the turn of the arrows. He lit a small fat lamp and dumped out the contents of both quivers, checked each shaft for straightness, tightness of head and horn nock, then subjected the feather flights to a painstaking scrutiny, before replacing them in precise order in the two quivers—one, the larger, for hunting arrows, the other for war arrows.

Having found a couple of places on his saber edge that happened to be less keen than he thought proper, Staiklee took that weapon and a stone and began to carefully hone the blade.

Looking directly at Bettylou. he remarked, “The bruin that once wore that skin I gifted you and Tim, well, he wasn’t the first of his breed I came up against, you know.

“Now down Tehksuhs way, we hunt more with packs of dogs than with prairiecats. Of course, the most of our dogs are each as big as or bigger than a full-grown prairiecat, some of them as big as lions, to tell the truth: but they have to be, because the bears up here are just puny little critters compared to the bears we hunt in Tehksuhs. Why, the flayed hide off a Tehksuhs bear would cover the whole top of this yurt and hang partway down the sides.

“And the hides on Tehksuhs bears is so thick and tough you can blunt down the edges of a whole beltful of skinning knives a-trying to skin one of the critters, even if you was able to kill him afore he killed you, that is.

“I recollect an old boar bear that my daddy sent me out to kill when I was about fourteen, fifteen winters. Well, that was a bad-luck hunt from start to finish for me, but a damned good day for the bear.”

He paused for a moment to rub a fresh application of sheep fat and spittle into the grain of the hone stone, then went on with his tale, “Anyhow, two days out, my horse turned up lame, and I hadn’t brought but the one, so I had to throw my saddle on Brootuhs, the biggest of my tooth-hounds.”

“Your pardon. Honored Father,” Nansee interjected, “but what is a tooth-hound?”

Djahn nodded, smiling, and answered, “I keep forgetting, you Horseclanners don’t hunt with dogs. Well, honey, there are three kinds of hounds that go to make up a pack of hunting dogs. The ‘nose-dogs’ are the ones that find and follow the scent trail of whatever critter it is you’re hunting. The ‘leg-dogs’ or ‘runners’ (as some folks call them) don’t have much of a nose, but they’ve got keen eyesight to spot the critter, the speed and stamina to run him to earth and enough ferocity to hold him in place until the tooth-hounds get there.

“ ‘Tooth -hounds’ are bigger, heavier and meaner than the other two kinds of dogs. Their job is to bring the critter to bay and, if necessary. to go in and kill him, rather than let him get away before the hunter gets there.”

“But they truly are big enough to saddle and ride?” asked Dikees widow, Ahlmah.

“Of course they are … down Tehksuhs way.” replied Djahn Staiklee emphatically.

Bettylou truly liked this man so she kept her own doubts to herself. The Abode of the Righteous had kept many canines—both hounds of several varieties and herding dogs—but she had never seen one, even the biggest of these, that stood much over knee height at its shoulders.

“Anyhow,” Staiklee went on, “Brootuhs didn’t care too much for the saddle and he was downright upset about the bridle and bit, but I gentled him down some before we’d been many more days on that bruin’s trail. And we were many a day on that trail, too. Why, I doubt not that me and all the dogs would have plumb starved to death, if I hadn’t been able to kill a couple of middling-size rattlers every day.”

This last was just too much for Bettylou to take in continued silence. “Father, please tell me how a couple of rattlesnakes a day could feed you and your entire pack of dogs.”

Again, he smiled. “It’s all just a matter of size, Behtiloo. All critters seem to get bigger or stronger or smarter down Tehksuhs way; even plants do, too. You’ve seen these scrubby little smidgens of cactuses on the plains hereabouts? Well, in Tehksuhs, they gets tall as twenty lances end to end would be, that tall and as thick through the middle as Chief Dik’s wagon is long, too. And …”

“Your pardon, Father,” Bettylou interrupted again, “but we were talking of two snakes big enough to provide enough meat to feed you and all your dogs for a whole day.”

“Yes,” he agreed in a dead-serious tone of voice, “they get every bit that big down in Tehksuhs, honey. Big enough to coil all the way around the outside of this yurt and grab their tails in their mouths, was they of a mind to do such a thing. More than a foot thick in the body Tehksuhs rattlers get, some of them nearer to two feet. That’s a powerful lot of meat.”

“It certainly is.” Bettylou agreed, then asked, “But you give the impression that these plains are very dry, near deserts, so what creatures are there of a size to sustain such huge serpents in such a wasteland?”

Djahn Staiklee regarded her shrewdly for a long moment, then he mindspoke quickly and personally, “Child, you are far more intelligent than you seem outwardly. Tim has more of a prize than I think he realizes yet in you. But let be, here, tonight. This is a long-drawn-out mocking tale I spin; don’t question it too closely. I mean but to bring a little merriment into this yurt which has seen so many years with little or none.”

While beginning to stroke the stone on the next portion of saber blade he felt due his ministrations, he went on with the story.

“So, anyhow, riding Brootuhs and living on snakemeat and cactus water, we trailed that bear for more than half a moon. We trailed him through country so dry that the creeks and the rivers, even were none of them running with water but running with coarse gravel and rocks, instead—all grinding away, those stones were, as they flowed along.

“But, then, one day, we heard the leg-hounds give tongue—that’s how they let you know they’ve spotted the critter they’re trailing—and the tooth-dogs commenced doubling their pace … all except Brootuhs, of course, since he was carrying about twice his own weight or almost that. For you see, I was nought but a younker then, and though I was big for my age, like most men or boys in Tehksuhs, two weeks of hard riding on nothing save snakemeat had fined my body down to just whipcord muscle and sinew over my bones.

“Well, by the time Brootuhs and me got up to where the others had brought that old boar bear to bay, he had killed or near killed most of my pack of dogs. Well, I jumped off old Brootuhs and slipped his bridle so it wouldn’t hinder his teeth and jaws. Then I slung my lance over my back and took my bow out of the case to string it.

“At that very second, poor, brave old Brootuhs took it in his head to bore in after that bloody-clawed bruin like a weasel after a swamp rat, and as luck would have it, the very first swipe of that bears forepaw not only broke the poor dogs back like a rotten slick, but simultaneously snapped every shaft in my arrowcase and flung Brootuhs’ body—saddle, gear and all—so hard against a big old boulder that the impact snapped the blade of the sheathed saber I had been carrying slung from the pommel.

And so there I was, all alone, all of my dogs dead or dying or run off, with only a lance and my dirk against two tons or more of hopping-mad Tehksuhs plains grizzly bear … and he had finished off the last dog and was coming for me!”

Staiklee took the last stroke of the stone on his saber blade, meticulously wiped off the cursive length of burnished steel, then sheathed it, yawned mightily and looked on the point of arising from his place in the circle.

“But … but what happened, Father Djahn?” demanded Nansee, almost bouncing up and down in her excitement. “How did you kill the bear?”

Staiklee looked surprised at the question. “Oh. I didn’t kill that bear, honey. He killed me! Ate me, too.”