The King

CHAPTER 14

The horse put its head down, its long hair whipped by the wind. It drew against the traces, and stumbled to its knees in the snow.

It turned in the traces, snorting, wildly, in pain, tilting the sled, and threw its head to the side, its round eyes rolling.

Its body was already half covered with snow.

The man, wrapped in the fur cloak, with the staff, who had been struggling at the side of the sledge, thrusting at it, lifting it, waded to the beast’s side. The horse’s mighty lungs heaved. It gasped. The freezing air seared its nostrils. The wind and air, too, tore at the side of the man’s face, and stabbed his lungs. The breath of the horse whipped away from it, like a lace of fog, broken and splintered. There was ice caked about its jaws.

The man looked down at the animal, bracing himself against the wind.

He could see little, even in starlight reflected from the snow, for the blasting wind and ice.

This was the third night of storms.

Already the stirred, whirled snow was deep on the plains of Barrionuevo, or, as some have it, the flats of Tung. In places, by morning, it would drift to heights of fifty feet.

Tangara is bitter in that place, in the month of Igon. Only once had the Heruls raided in that month, and that was years ago, when they had crossed the Lothar on the ice.

It was then that they, fresh from their defeat of the Otungs, had carried war to the related folk, the Basungs.

It was after this that the plains of Barrionuevo had become, for many, the flats of Tung.

On them the Heruls, a hardy, merciless, slave-keeping folk, in the summer, grazed their herds.

The man knelt in the snow beside the horse. He opened its eye, which had closed, with his mittened fist. It was still alive, gasping.

He drove the staff into the snow, and removed from the sledge a great sword, one which must be wielded with two hands. He lifted it, with both hands, and then smote the horse’s head away. He then, kneeling beside the beast, trembling with cold, cut it open, and cut himself bits of meat, thrusting them, fumbling, into his mouth, his beard crusted with ice. The blood from the horse froze as it entered the air, forming almost instantly rivulets, and breakages, of thick, dark ice. The man cut through the rib cage, and pulled away tissue. He tore with his mittens, and then, as they sopped, and crusted, and might have broken, he dug with his sword, holding it near the point, at the ventral cavity of the beast, emptying it, pushing its contents away, and he then crawled, freezing, huddling, within the body, which, for moments would be warm, but might provide, for days, shelter and food.

It is a trick known to Heruls, and others, for example, to those of certain festung villages, such as that of Sim Giadini, nestled at the foot of the heights of Barrionuevo.