Robert Adams: Horses of the North

Although not really closely related, this boy was of Karee’s own clan and, at sixteen summers, was already a proven, blooded warrior. On the second raid he had ridden in the summer just past, he had slain a foeman with spear and saber in single combat, capturing his victim’s horse and most of his weapons and gear. The Skaht clan bard, old Gaib Skaht, had even added a new couplet about the exploits of Rahjuh Vawn of Skaht to the Song of Skaht.

Karee only glanced briefly at Rahjuh, however, then turned the gaze of her blue-green eyes back to the Linsee boy, who had finished wringing out his own long, thick hair and now was sending up sprays of water each time his broad palm slammed down on his sopping shirt and breeches and the thick-woven squares of woolen cloth which the Linsees, the Morguhns, the Danyuhlzes, the Esmiths and some few other clans had of recent years taken to lapping over and around their feet and ankles before donning their boots.

For an absent moment, Karee wondered to herself just how and why so strange a custom had commenced and persisted, wondered too how it would feel to wear a set of the outré items of apparel. But these were only fleeting thoughts, and her mind and gaze quickly returned to the main object of her attentions and present interest.

No one of her own clansfolk had hairso darkly lustrous as that of this Linsee boy. The rays of the westering Sacred Sun now were bringing out dark-red highlights from wherever they touched upon that so-dark hair. She also found somehow satisfying the rippling of the muscles of his back and his thick shoulders as he slapped dry his wetted and rewetted clothing.

The Skaht girl caught the fringes of a narrow-beam, personal-level mindspeak communication—the telepathy practiced every day by the roughly three out of five Horseclansfolk so talented—this directed to the big Linsee boy.

“Gy, the stag is now all skinned and butchered. Since it was your kill, the heart, liver and kidneys are yours by right, and the tenderloin, too, if you want it. Do you want them raw or cooked?”

Still pounding away at his sopping clothing, the boy replied silently, “Stuff the heart with some of those little wild carrots and some sprigs of mint; I’ll cook it myself, later on. I’ll have the liver raw … shortly. But let the kidneys go to Crooktail, for her it was first scented the stag and flushed him out of heavy cover that I might arrow him, then ride him down.”

Behind Karee, Gy and Rahjuh, a prairiecat—larger than the biggest puma, with the sharp, white-glinting points of fangs near a full handspan long depending below the lower jaw and with the long, sinewy, slender legs of a coursing beast—clambered up from out of the pool, claws scraping on the rock. At some time in her life, the cat’s tail had been broken a third of the way between tip and body and, in healing, had left the final third canting at a permanent angle from the rest of the thick, furry appendage.

When at last fully upon the rock, the big cat shook herself thoroughly, showering Karee and both boys impartially with myriad droplets of cold river water.

“You half-dog eater of dung! Walking flea factory!” Rahjuh shouted and broadbeamed all at once, turning and shaking a clenched fist in the prairiecat’s direction. “I was almost dry, too, you coupler with swine!”

Serenely ignoring the outburst of insults and the shaken fist of the angered boy, Crooktail paced with dignity over to where Gy Linsee squatted. Her big head swept down and then up, running her wide, coarse, red-pinktongue the full length of his spine. Then she seated herself beside him, her crooked tail lapped over her forepaws, mindspeaking the while.

“Two-leg-called-Gy, you remembered how much this cat loves kidneys. You will be as good a friend of cats as is your sire. You will be as good a hunter, too, and as good a warrior. You will be a mighty warrior and long remembered by your get and by theirs as the bards sing of you.”

The big, dark-haired boy gripped his clothing with one hand that the currents of the pool might not bear them away. His other brawny arm he threw about the cat, squeezing her damp body firmly but with the self-control of one who knows well his considerable strength.

A few yards upstream from this tableau, on a higher, moss-fringed rock, three adult warriors sat abreast, sending up into the clear skies clouds of blue-gray smoke from their pipes. Even as they observed the cavortings in and about the pool below, they chatted, both aloud and silently.

Farthest upstream sat Hwahltuh Linsee, youngest full brother of the present chief of that Kindred clan, a permanent subchief in status and a subchief of this hunt, as well. He had seen more than thirty summers come and go; beast-killing and man-slaying were both old stories to him. It had been a knife—near on fifteen years agone, when he had been but a younker—that had deeply gashed and left a crooked scar across his blond-stubbled cheek. The hard-swung sword of a Dirtman—one of the farmers who worked the lands fringing the prairie, despised by and regularly preyed upon by the Horseclansmen, themselves fearing the always costly raids and intensely hating the nomads who attacked them—had cost him the most of his left ear, while his canted nose had been smashed flat in a long-ago running battle with non-Kindred plains rovers when his opponent—his last dart cast, his swordblade broken—had bashed him in the face with the nicked and dented iron boss of his targe.

Spouting blood, blind with agony and barely able to breathe, Hwahltuh had closed with the rider, dragged him from out of his saddle and throttled him with his bare hands. But the nose and the damaged jaw below had not healed properly, and as his speech was sometimes difficult of understanding, he had for years communicated principally by mindspeak, where possible.

Farthest downstream on the mossy-grown rock sat Tchuk Skaht, five or six summers Hwahltuh’s senior. He was but a middling warrior; however, he was known far and wide as a true master hunter and tracker, so since this was a hunt and not a raid, he was chief of it. Not that he was not a brave and strong man; at the age of twenty-odd, on the high plains, he had fought and slain a wounded bear armed with only his dirk—a rare feat of skill and daring of which the bards of many a clan still sang on winter nights around the lodge fires.

The black-haired man who sat between them was taller and heavier of build—though not with fat, of which there was none upon his body. His name was Milo Morai, but his two present human companions, like all the Horseclansfolk—male and female, young and old—called him Uncle Milo. No one knew his age or just how long he had ridden with and among the Kindred and their forebears. He would live a year or two with a clan, then ride on of a day to the camp of another … and still another; possibly, he would return a score of years later, unmarked, unchanged, with no slightest sign of aging.

And there existed nowhere any Clan Morai, only the one man. Uncle Milo, peer of any chief. The most ancient of the bardsongs mentioned him, the rhymed genealogies of almost every clan told of his exploits in war and the chase; indeed, if some few of the oldest bard songs were to be believed in entirety, he it was had succored the Sacred Ancestors after the Great Dyings and truly set what were to become the Kindred on their path to their present near mastery of plains and prairie.

But there was no denying, for believers and non-believers alike, that Uncle Milo or someone exactly like him had been present in one clan camp or another, had ridden with the Kindred on hunts and raids and treks, for tenscore summers and more, for such a presence was mentioned in the songs—history-genealogies—of clan after clan, and clan songs of this sort never contained aught save bald truth.