Robert Adams - A Woman of the Horseclans

Behtiloo laughed throatily. “Hardly, child Leenah. We Horseclanswomen can care for ourselves in most ways and in most times. No, I bought you to be the concubine to my dear grandson, who is chief of this clan.”

Noticing the black eyes in the olive-skinned face cloud, while the surface thoughts of the girl’s mind boiled with the old, bitter memories of rapes and sodomies and other enforced degradations, Behtiloo added hastily, “No, little one, do not fear. Our Sami is a tender man, a gentle and a loving man. He has been grieving these last years for the loved wife who was his only wife for above twenty-five years.

“But you will completely replace her, we will see to it, just wait. At first you will replace her in his bed, then in his great heart. I vow to you, my child, as soon as your belly swells with Sami’s good seed, will see you a free woman, formally adopted into Clan Krooguh and honorably wedded to our chief.”

And so it came to be. At the wedding feast, Behtiloo foretold that Leenah and her get by Chief Sami would bring newer and greater glory, thrice greater glory to Krooguh.

That is why when, four months after the wedding, the new bride was delivered of not one, not two but an unbelievable three sons at a single birthing, clansfolk began to treat their chiefs grandmother with far and away greater respect than ever before, that awe-tinged respect accorded the proven seer.

A few days after the triple birthing. Behtiloo sat on the steps leading up to the wagon-mounted chief yurt. enjoying the bright, warm rays of Sacred Sun, when a female prairiecat approached and seated herself respectfully some two yards distant.

“Greet the Sun, two-leg female of powers.” beamed the cats strong mindspeak. “Do you guard the den of this first sensible two-leg female in memory, who bears her young in litters?”

Behtiloo smiled and replied. “Yes, cat sister. Do you wish to enter and see her and the babes now?”

Behtiloo and the cat—who was called Blackback and was obviously a recent mother herself, to judge by her heavy and thickened dugs—soon reached the rear area of the yurt. There Leenah reclined while nursing two of her little sons. while Chief Sami—almost bursting with his pride—held the other, The cat immediately bespoke the two women on a narrow, personal beaming.

“It is just as I had thought it would be. You two-legs have but two dugs, so you will never be able to properly nurse all of your litter at once and so one will most assuredly die … or all will become weak.

“Now, I bore my litter on the same day you bore yours, female-of-our-chief, but two of mine were born unbreathing, so I have milk and to spare, as well as dugs enough to feed yours and mine together, at the same time.

“I already have broached this matter with the cat chief, Steelclaws. and he says that if his brother, Chief Sami, approves, I may bring my two kittens here to the Clan Krooguh chief yurt and share with you the nursing.”

When the matter was put to Sami, he threw back his graying head and laughed uproariously. “Why not, I say, wife? Why not? Its never before been done, so far as I know, in any Kindred clan, certainly not in this one. But then neither has any clanswoman in the memory of the Kindred, right back to and including the Sacred Ancestors, borne a clansman three Sons at once. You and I, my dear little Leenah, have already set one all-time precedent. So why should we not set another, hey?”

Then, switching to mindspeak. he beamed gravely. “Cat sister, my yurt will be most honored by the presence of you and your fine cubs. Who was their sire, may I ask?”

“Steelclaws himself,” Blackback replied proudly. “My kittens, too, are the get of a chief.”

Shortly, Behtiloo and Blackback came back through the camp to the chief yurt, the cat carrying one struggling beastlet in her jaws and Behtiloo cradling the other blind, down-furred kitten in her arms. In months after, it was not at all unusual for visitors to the yurt to see Chief’s-wife Leenah nursing a pink-skinned baby boy on one breast and a gray—and-black-furred prairiecat kitten on the other, while beside her lay Blackback on her side, giving suck to the other kitten as well as to two little Krooguhs. Many a cat and human came for the expressed purpose of viewing this most singular sight.

Two years later, at one of the infrequent clan gatherings, all of the Krooguhs walked tall and proud, though none so tall and so proud as Chief Sami. The Krooguh of Krooguh strutted in his fierce pride, and other chiefs were quick to afford an almost reverential deference to this peer of such unmatchable potency of loins that he was capable of siring sons in threes.

So many chiefs and humbler clansfolk flocked to the Krooguh enclave to briefly watch the little triplets wrestling, playing with and making to ride upon the two big-pawed, big-headed sons of Cat Chief Steelclaws and Blackback, each visitor leaving behind a gift of some nature, that Sami had to buy two new carts to carry all the loot away when at long last Clan Krooguh was allowed to quit the gathering.

When leave they finally did, there was not a nubile clans girl or boy of Krooguh remaining unmarried. Further, right many a prepubescent girl or boy or even a babe in arms was by then already promised in marriage to clans anxious to share out among their own folk even a few drops of this suddenly precious Krooguh heritage. As for the triplets themselves, the eldest was promised in marriage to the largest, richest and most powerful of all the Kindred clans, Clan Kambuhl. The second-eldest was pledged to the family of the chiefs of Clan Kabuht, while the third little boy would wed into Clan Esmith, another matrilineal-succession clan.

Nor had old Behtiloo Hansuhn of Krooguh been at all left out of the general hullabaloo following Clan Krooguh’s arrival at the gathering. Not only were the live births of the three boys a new, a novel, and a noteworthy occurrence, but that a clanswoman had so accurately forecast their births was purely the stuff of which legends were woven.

All the clan bards and the three or four traveling bards were not content until they had closeted with the grandame, heard her personal history, then retired to compose new songs and new verses to older ones. These were to be the first mentions of Behtiloo Hansuhn of Krooguh in any Kindred histories outside the Song of Krooguh. But they were to be neither the last nor the most glorious.

The triplets remained amazingly similar as they grew from infancy, though they were not and had never been identical. Of them all, only the eldest, Tim, had their father’s red hair and green eyes; both Peet and the youngest, Djim, had fair skins and dark-blue eyes, but these were in them coupled with hair as raven’s-wing-black as their mother’s.

Like all Horseclans children, they were riding almost before they could walk, and they quickly acquired a deadly proficiency with their slings, bolas and light bows, capable of bringing down flying birds and scurrying small game with consistency.

The mindspeak talents of all three were powerful and exceptionally far-ranging. Far-ranging too were their hunting and foraging expeditions, for they seemed utterly fearless; but as they were always accompanied on these expeditions by Kills-elk and Whitepaws—their former “littermates,” now grown to mature size and weight, both proven in battle and in the hunt—and sometimes by Blackback, their feline foster mother, as well, no one thought of fearing for their safety away from the clan camp.

In the tenth summer of the triplets’ lives, Clan Krooguh chanced to roam farther east than usual and went into camp around a small grove of trees guarding a largish spring from which debouched a rill of sparkling, ice-cold water. As Sacred Sun crested the horizon on the very next morning. Tim and Peet and Djim Krooguh were ahorse, armed for the hunt, and trotting off toward the east with a half-dozen of their two-leg peers, Kills-elk and Whitepaws in search of game and adventure.