The Coming of the Horseclans

10

Milo snapped into wakefulness, a dagger-point was pricking the flesh, just below the right corner of his jaw. Though Mara was weeping, her dagger-hand was rock-steady.

“Forgive me, Milo, but I must know!” she whispered, then pushed the sharp, needle-tipped weapon two inches into his throat and slashed downward.

As his blood gushed from the severed carotid, Milo rolled and lunged, his hands grasping at her slim nude body. But fast as he was, she eluded him, leaping up and back. She just stood there, her eyes locked on the gaping wound she had inflicted.

“Why, Mara?”

“Poor Milo,” she replied. “Death will come quickly and there will be no more pain if I was wrong, but I don’t think that I,.. ahhh!”

The initial gush of blood had rapidly dwindled to a slow trickle and her sigh announced its total cessation as what should have been a death-wound began to close. Milo’s eyes, too, closed, and he clenched his teeth, saying between them, “I should have slam you, Mara. You guessed, didn’t you, back there, below that hill? Well, now you know! What intend you to do with that knowledge, the knowledge that Milo, the War Chief, bears what your people call the Curse of the Undying?”

She did not answer, but he felt her weight return to the Ehleenoee bed, and he opened his eyes just as she lowered her face on his and pasted her dark red lips onto his half-open mouth. Both their faces then became shrouded from the world in the blue-black luxuriance of her musk-scented hair.

When she at last raised herself, she was weeping again, but now there was joy in her sloe-black eyes and a whole plethora of inexpressible emotions played over her lovely features as she began to speak.

“What do I want? Why, dear dear Milo, all that I want is you. I wanted you, simply as a man, before I was aware you might be aught else. It has been so very long and I have been so terribly lonely, but… you too know of that kind of loneliness, don’t you? Now, we are together and we shall never know of that loneliness again, my love.”

Milo bolted erect, his every nerve tingling. “Mara, you mean… you, too … ?”

The smile never left her lips or her eyes as, again picking up the bloody dagger, she placed that point which had so recently drunk of Mile’s blood in the crook of her left arm. She thrust, slowly; thrust so deeply that steel grated against slender bone and the thick, red richness of her life fluid gushed high, upon the already bloody blade.

Milo jerked a wadded sheet to him and reached for her, but she drew back, still smiling. “Oh no, my Milo. Wait and watch. There is no danger.”

Her bloodflow ceased as quickly as had his and, within a half-hour, both their wounds had become only pinkish-red scars.

Blind Hari smiled to himself, humming a snatch of a bard song, as he fitted a new string to his telling-harp. The tribe should succeed to all the prophecies, now—if prophecies, they truly were—with two “gods” guiding and directing them.

“And our Holy City, reborn shall be,” he sang softly “Ehlai, washed by Wind, beside the Sun-lit sea.”

“Of course,” he muttered to himself as he tightened the new string, “Ehlai, if it was ever aught than a paradisical dream, lies far and far from this place; beyond another range of mountains, higher mountains, with snow forever on them. God Milo has convinced all the others that the key word in the ‘Bard Song of Prophecy’ is wrong, became twisted over the years, but Blind Hari knows better. The march toward the true Ehlai should be the path of the setting, not the rising Sun; but, why should old Hari say aught to gainsay God Milo, for he means the clans no ill. To him, we all—even I, who have seen the coming and going of seven score and seven winters—are yet but his children and he loves us well. He, it was, who succored our ancestors, gave to them the knowledge and skills necessary to sustain life, taught them partnership with cat and horse and instilled in them, and those who came after, respect and regard for Brotherhood and Honor and Law.

“And, compared to him … and now, her, we are as children. One direction is as another to the tribe, so long as there be rich graze for the herds and good hunting for the cats and fighting and loot for the kindred; while He has a purpose which none could fault, he seeks his own kind, fellow Gods, of his sacred clan. This is meet, even Gods should sometimes visit with their own, share the cooking fire of their dear kindred.”

Suddenly, a great and agonizing loneliness pervaded the being of the old, old man. He closed his unseeing eyes and sat back, reliving the happy and joyous days of his youth and young manhood—before he lost his sight, found compensatory “powers,” and became a bard—riding and hunting and wenching with his clan-brothers.

“It is said,” he mused to himself, “that Clan Kruguh came east, along with Clan Buhkuh and a part of the Cat Clan … perhaps, somewhere on this land … ?”

A thought was beamed into his mind. “Not so, wise Cat-brother. All that this land holds of them is their scattered bones.”

“I know not your mind,” Hari mindspoke in reply. “How is my Brother-cat called?”

“You may call me Old-Cat, Cat-brother. For one of my race, I am nearly as old as are you for yours, and it is meet that the name of my prime—given and borne in honor—should be as dead as my kindred and yours, for he of that name fled in dishonor, when the treacherous Blackhairs tricked and slew or enslaved all with whom he crossed the mountains. The pelts of his brothers and sisters, of his females and his kittens, adorn the stone tents of the Blackhairs and, if he had been of honor, his would hang among them.”

“Not so, Old-Cat,” retorted the bard. “Needless death is not necessarily honorable death. If one does not live, how will the dead be avenged, to whom will their killers pay the blood-price?”

“But, he who fled was Cat Chief, wise Cat-brother. He should have died with his clan.”

Old Hari sighed. “To allow pursuit of honor to lead one to a certain death, which does not benefit the clan, is the act of a fool, Old-Cat. The clan which has a fool as chief has no chief at all!”

The cat licked at the snow white fur of his muzzle. “Wise Cat-brother, you mindspeak words of comfort to one long years in need of such. If I can but live a bit longer, long enough to wreck vengeance upon the murderers of my kin and yours….”

Hari placed his harp on the floor at his feet and extended a hand. “Come, Old-Cat, let our bodies touch and mayhap I can tell something of what is to come for you.”

The cat advanced toward the proffered hand, awed reverence in his mind. “You are older than I’d thought. I know you now, Kin of Power. You are Blind Hari of Kruguh. I’d thought you long years in the Home of Wind, yet still you live. Are you then an Undying God?”

Hari touched the shaggy head, then placed his palms on either side of it. “No, Old-Cat, I am but a man, though an exceedingly old one. By men who have not the Power, the Undying God is called Milo Morai, he is our …”

“War Chief.” The cat finished the thought. “Yes, I fought beside him and your Cat Clan yesterday. We slew many Blackhairs, he and I and the Blackhair-female-who-mindspeaks.”

Hari nodded. “She, too, is of the Race of the Undying Gods; and now She is mated to our God. Nought but good for all the clans can come of such a union.”

Raising the old cat’s head and bending to it, Hari placed his lips just above its eyes. After a long long moment, he sat back and stroked Old-Cat’s grizzled neck.

“Never fear, Brother-Cat, you will live to revenge your murdered clan. More, you will beget kittens and, when they are as old as you, still will they be filled with pride that their sire—a Cat Chief, of fame and honored memory—bore the name of Dirktooth.”

Though barely eleven years, Aldora Ahpoolios’ little olive-skinned body was as well developed as that of any Horseclan girl half again her age, and this had saved her life on that terrible day Theesispolis had fallen. Huddled with the other women and girls and boys in the south wing of the citadel, she had watched in horror as the methodical mercenaries coldly cut down her father—grown so stout that he’d been unable to buckle his hauberk properly—and her uncle and both her brothers. Then rough hands had torn her, screaming, from Aunt Salena—her dead mother’s older sister—and she had become the property of Djo-Sahl, he of the brown beard and the rotten teeth who, when she had told him her age, had wept drunken tears and humbly apologized for having deflowered her; then had traded her for an older woman to a trio of less discriminating soldiers. Aldora could not call to mind one of the men’s names; as for their faces and bodies, they all ran together into a one who had brought only a dayless, nightless time of constant pain, shame, and terror. When, at the end of the week, she was dragged to the slave mart, stripped and placed for sale, the girl had been certain that the worst must now be over, but she had been wrong.

Her nomad purchaser—Hwahlis Linsee, a natural brother of the Chief of Linsee—was not a cruel man, and he treated Aldora as he treated his other two concubines—possibly even a little better, for she was new and novel and as dark as the others were fair. Hwahlis had chosen his wives well and the two women saw to it that the work was equally divided amongst Aldora and the two older bondswomen, one of whom was a girl called Neekohl. Of brown-red hair and blue eyes, she spoke the trade language with an odd accent and sang strange songs in an unknown tongue and had been taken on a raid in the distant north. The other was a more recent captive, a blond, mountain barbarian named Bertee. Among three, the work was neither long nor hard. Though the food was strange to Aldora, it was plentiful; all shared the contents of a common pot, morning and evening, and if one hungered at other times, milk or curds or jerked meat was always available. The clothing too was strange and rough, but practical and serviceable—a loose shirt which pulled over the head and tucked into a pair of equally loose trousers, tightened by a drawstring, and a pair of ankle-length boots. Aside from the iron cuff on her leg, her alien hair and skin were all that indicated her not to be of the Horseclans.

As Hwahlis took good care of his possessions, he expected good service of them. Still in his prime and lusty, he waited but precious few hours to begin making use of his latest possession—long and strenuous and frequent use. She cried, but that was to be expected, captive females always cried the first few times they were used. Also, the chit seemed to be trying to tell him something, but he spoke no Ehleeneekos and her command of trade language was almost non-existent, so he ignored her; when she learned Merikan, she’d tell him whatever it was. Despite his fascination, Hwahlis lived by clan customs and had never been accused of tight-fistedness. He willingly shared his latest acquisition with his two oldest sons, his brothers, nephews, and cousins. None could say he had been denied the sampling of Hwahlis’ new Ehleenoee girl!

Aldora tried once to kill herself; but apparently she failed to cut her wrist deeply deeply enough, for the blood soon ceased to flow, and she couldn’t bring herself to try again. Then, with the onset of her time of the moon, she gained a brief respite.

Several hours after Old-Cat left Hari Kruguh, he lay hidden in tall grass, some hundred yards from the outermost tents of the encampment. Tired of playing with kittens and cubs not his own, he had loped to this spot to snooze. Beyond, at the foot of a hillock, a small brook chuckled over worn stones between mossy banks; and, under the near bank, he sensed life as he awoke. Hoping to perhaps cozen some unwary wild creature within reach of tooth or claw, he opened his_mind.

The unexpected shock caused him to sit up sharply. An inchoate mass of thought-messages smote his receptive senses—a compound of sorrow, fear, shame, and helpless resignation; of hopeless terror and abysmal loneliness. These would have been terrible enough for an adult mind, but Old-Cat realized that the sufferer’s mind was that of a cub, a female, two-leg cub.