Robert Adams - A Woman of the Horseclans

“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.