Robert Adams - A Woman of the Horseclans

The haggling went on for some hours, but at length Chief Milo and the trader, Flaivin, reached an amicable agreement. For a total of six of the golden discs, Behtiloo received two steel-on-leather scale shins and enough loose scales to make another for Buhd Krooguh when his time of warring came, enough sheet steel and brass for thirty helmets, five pounds of brass tacks, two chests of fast-dyed threads and yarns (each chest also containing an assortment of eighteen steel needles), seven twenty-gallon barrels of hwiskee, two twenty-gallon barrels of wine and a bolt of the smoothest, softest, most sensorially pleasing cloth that Behtiloo had ever seen or touched.

As she walked back toward the Krooguh enclave to fetch in strong men and a cart or two to transport her booty, Milo touched the bolt under her arm, saying. “This is true, first water silk. I not only cannot imagine where a gaggle of plains traders came by it, I cannot imagine why they wagoned it hundreds of miles to try to sell it to nomads who mostly are dirt-poor. But it arrived here, and you now have it. Use it as cloth, if you wish, but silk makes superlative bowstrings also, and the threads too short for such could always be used in embroidery.

“Now you know the value of those golden discs, so guard them well. Cut a couple of them into four pieces and never show more than one piece at the time would be my advice, especially when you’re dealing with traders or the southern Dirtmen, For unlike other metals, gold has the hoary repute of driving men and women mad; to acquire it, they have been known to sacrifice everything they otherwise held dear—possessions, relatives, honor, even life itself. If I did anything right and proper, I pride myself that I was able to breed that particular form of insanity out of the Kindred. To you and all the other clansfolk, gold is but another decorative metal, perhaps more favored only because it is easier to work than copper or silver or brass or the antique metals.

“When you return from your camp, bring your clan smith and have him check every last scale and piece of sheet metal. See that Flaivin’s men broach every last barrel, and taste the contents yourself. Make him weigh out that sack of tacks again, too. Go through the sewing chests and see that nothing has been removed or changed about in them. If you find he is trying to cheat or delude you in any way, even the most piddling, remind him of the name Steev Koorhohm and ask if he recalls just how the clans dealt with that trader, years agone. Thought of that incident should drive all ideas of chicanery from his mind.”

“Steev Koorhohm, Uncle Milo?” Behtiloo asked. “I don’t understand. Who is Steev Koorhohm?”

Milo smiled grimly. “Steev Koorhohm was a plains trader, back before you became a clanswoman. He brought his wagons to the prairies full of diseased slaves and poisonous hwiskee. When two warriors died and more went blind after drinking his goods, a war party rode after his train, took him and brought him back.

“With all the other traders looking on, they bound his yard tightly with wet rawhide, poured water down his throat until his bladder was nigh to bursting, then slit off his eyelids and buried him neck-deep in an anthill. He only lived about a day.”

Chief Tim of Krooguh died in the fifty-second year of his marriage to Behtiloo, covered with scars and glory. He left children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren behind him, four living wives, three concubines, and one of the largest, strongest, wealthiest Kindred clans resident anywhere on the prairies or plains.

During his thirty-seven years of full tenure. Clan Krooguh had waxed in size, in wealth and in renown. When his husk had been decently sent to Wind, the sixty-three Krooguh waniors gathered and invested the eldest son of their late chief’s eldest living daughter.

Even in her grief, Behtiloo Hansuhn of Krooguh felt her old heart swell with fierce pride as she watched her sons, Hwahlis and Buhd, lace and buckle their nephew into Tim’s aged, nicked, but brilliantly burnished scale shirt for his formal presentation to the clansfolk at the chief feast.

Later, at that feast, listening while the young clan bard, Bili, sang the Song of Krooguh, Behtiloo’s gaze strayed often to Chief Sami.

“So like my Tim, he is,” she thought. “With his flaming red hair and green eyes, the same snub nose, an almost identical splash of freckles across his face.”

She noted that from time to time this new-made chief, her grandson, used gestures that had been peculiar to Tim. But, she reflected to herself, such might easily be expected, since his grandfather had been training him and grooming him for the chieftaincy of his clan for some twenty years or more. And if Sami Krooguh lived and proved as good a chief as his immediate predecessor … ?

At Chief Sami’s side sat his wife of twenty-two years, Alis Krooguh of Krooguh, flanked by her eldest living son. Alis and Sami were of an age: they had played together as children, shared together their herding duties and war training, and shared the wonders and pleasures of each other’s bodies from puberty.

Every soul in Clan Krooguh had accepted the fact that they two would someday wed long before the day Sami rode back into camp after three years of service as a hired guard for plains traders, married Alis and brought her into his mother’s yurt and household.

When, about two years later, his elder brother died of a broken neck while chasing after antelope on horseback, Sami, Alis and their two children had been summoned to live in the household of Chief Tim, that the younger man might begin to learn the art of chieftainship.

Upon Tim’s death, which came suddenly and unexpectedly though not in any way violently, Behtiloo began to move her effects to the yurt of her son Hwahlis. But Alis would not even hear of such a thing, for all that she had not tried to stay the departures of the late chief’s three younger wives or his concubines when they moved in with grown children and those children’s families.

“No, Mother, please stay here with us. This is your home, it has always been your home for as long as I can remember, and … and I cannot imagine living here, in your home, without you in it. Father Tim spent twenty years in teaching our Sami to be a proper chief; now you must teach me and watch over me and so see that I behave as becomes the proper wife of a chief. Besides, who but you can so brew the herbs so that children drink the broths without making those terrible faces and rude noises, eh?”

Skilled in compounding herbal tonics. nostrums and remedies Behtiloo Hansuhn of Krooguh assuredly was. She had been for many years, ever since Lainuh Krooguh, Chief Tim’s long-dead mother, had first taken her youngest son’s captive-wife under her wing and begun to impart her own considerable, in-depth knowledge of the curative properties of wild prairie plants. After Lainuh’s death, Behtiloo had learned more from Tim’s father’s concubine, Dahnah. Then, too, her years of practicing the herbal arts had taught her mightily.

But none of her encyclopedic knowledge availed her in saving the life of Alis Krooguh, who died during the fifth winter after Sami became chief. Sami took Alis’s untimely death hard, bitterly hard. He would hear no words of any remarriage from clansmen, subchiefs or even his immediate family, and soon, on the heels of a succession of heated outbursts from the long-grieving man, all the Krooguhs gave up.

All save Behtiloo, that is. She and Sami’s daughters-in-law and granddaughters had no trouble among so many willing hands in properly maintaining the chief yurt and household as it always had been, of course; but Behtiloo knew that the very honor of Clan Krooguh lay at stake in this matter. For the chief of so large and wealthy a clan to live without at least one wife would be considered by the other clans odd, to say the least.