Robert Adams - Horseclans' Odyssey

Just as he felt the mechanism of the padlock begin to give under his efforts, there were footsteps beyond the door and a key grated in its lock. Then the door swung wide to admit three men—the two trader sub-chiefs and a tall, plumpish stranger.

Lord Urbahnos rapidly gained a grudging respect for the grubby, smelly little barbarian, Custuh, and could easily See just why the injured Trader Stooahrt had appointed the man his senior deputy. Behind the facade of his talented theatrics, his country-bumpkin-fresh-off-the-farm demeanor, the Ehleen could sense now and again the real Custuh—the born merchant, driving straight for the jugular, thinking on his feet, out to and usually able to squeeze out the best price the traffic would bear.

And Urbahnos just as rapidly came to hate the junior deputy, Hwahruhn, who had not made any effort to disguise, by word or by action, the fact that he despised the Ehleen merchant and detested all for which he stood. Had it been Hwahruhn’s decision alone, Urbahnos knew that he would never have been able to purchase the boys. As it was, the junior deputy’s barrage of attempts to scuttle the deal had made the eventual purchase price inordinately steeper than Urbahnos had anticipated. For, naturally, the shrewd, cool, calculating Custuli—having sensed that these little Horseclans boys were unnaturally important to the man he was stalking—feigned to seize upon each of Hwahruhn’s well-meant objections and points and take them as yet another way to jack the price several thrakmehee higher.

But after the two traders had abruptly retired outside to have loud and heated words on the gallery, they had returned for Urbahnos to close the deal with Custuh alone. Hwahruhn simply sat silently beside the other trader and stared at the seller with soul-deep disgust and at the purchaser with murderous hatred and bottomless loathing.

The leathern money belt that Urbahnos lifted from the table and handed back to Nahseer was but a bare shadow of its former, well-stuffed self, but Urbahnos had two copies of each bill of sale. He had been surprised to notice that both of the barbarian traders could write their names—not in civilized Ehleeneekos, of course, but that would have been an unadulterated phenomenon in this benighted land.

Lord Urbahnos was, of course, wrong in his belief that he and he alone was the sole civilized and cultured man from the western slopes of the Blue Mountains to the Great River and beyond.

On the prairie, many and many weeks’ hard ride to the west of that river, sprawled the largest camp ever seen by any of its inhabitants. No less than a score and a half of Horse-clans made up that camp, and all with their warriors, their maiden archers, their wives, their children, their concubines, yurt wagons, carts, tents, oxen, cattle, sheep, a few clans with goats and dogs, and huge, eddying herds of those mindspeaking horses that were equal partners with these folk rather than their chattels. And even above the incredible tumult of the camp, every day the screams of the clan stallions pealed forth as, with teeth and hooves, they went about settling the question of which was to become the king of this tribal herd.

Present also were more than a score of septs of the Cat Clan. Mindspeakers, like the horses and a majority of the humans, and like the horses equals, these prairiecats were ancient allies of all Horseclansfolk. Had Lord Urbahnos ever confronted a specimen face to face, he would likely have died of fright Huge they were, adult males standing nine hands and more at the heavily muscled shoulders, and adults of both sexes bore fangs three to four inches long. The predominant colors of these mighty felines were a tawny brown or a mouse gray, but there were more than a few examples of other hues among them—pure white, jet black, ruddy brown, blue-gray, many shades of yellow and, among the cats of the more southerly clans, traces of the dark spots and rosettes that testified to long-ago breedings with the wild teegrais.

In the very center of this vast assemblage stood a yurt the likes of which few had ever seen before. True, the latticework sides were only half again as high as those of the average yurt—six feet as compared to four—nor did the top tower overly high, but the circumference of the circular dwelling was stupendous to the clansfolk camped about it. Four hundred and eighty and one half hands was its outer measure; more than sixty-five paces might a man take around the yurt’s perimeter before returning to where he had begun. This great yurt was home to Blind Hari of Krooguh—for seventy and more years, the tribal bard—and to his slaves, to the men and women from various clans who had freely joined his household and to one other, the newly chosen war chief of all the Kindred clans, Milo of Moral There was, on the surface, nothing too unusual about this man. True, he was taller than the average clansman, with the heavier bones, larger hands and feet and black hair-shot-with-silver of a dirtman (Lord Urbahnos might have taken this new war chief for a Northern Ehleen, what with his aquiline nose and olive skin tones), but a large minority of clansfolk varied—mostly through concubine mothers captured in raids on the dirtmen—from the short, slender, wiry, blond norm to make Milo of Morai’s physical appearance pedestrian. In other ways, there could be no doubt that he was Horse-clans born and bred. His mindspeak was superlative with human, horse or prairiecat; he sat his golden-chestnut stallion as if they two were but one creature; his heavy, ancient saber was clearly an extension of his arm, and he was just as clearly a master bowman. And that he was a natural leader of men, a chieftain in every sense of that word, was clear to everyone who met him. Some sixteen to seventeen winters’ agone, he had ridden up from the far south on his palomino stallion, accompanied only by two female prairiecats and a packhorse or two. He had wintered over with Clan Morguhn, where Blind Hari also was wintering that year, and with the rebirth of spring he had ridden north with the aged tribal bard.

The story he told—that he was the only survivor of a clan destroyed by a sudden and deadly pestilence—was tragic but easily believable, for a few clans had been extirpated in just such horrible a fashion over the centuries. Other clans had drifted away—to north, south, east and west—never to be heard of again. The Clan Krooguh, Blind Hari’s own clan of birth, had disappeared in such a manner ten or fifteen winters past Blind Hari himself was an incredibly old man. To the best reckoning of the clansfolk he had weathered at least one hundred and thirty winters, yet still he rode hither and yon, reciting the centuries of the history of the Kindred in rhymes to the plucking of his fingers upon the strings of his harp, collecting the new vital statistics from each clan on his years-long circuit—notable births, heroic deaths, mighty deeds of war or raiding or hunting, ascensions of new chiefs’ and the like—then weaving the news into his endless rhymes. But these were not the sole functions of the bard. As he was clanless, he was the full equal of any clan chief, while being but very distantly related to any of them or their folk, and as he knew all of the hundreds of Couplets of Horseclans Law, he was often called upon to break off his circuit in order to serve as mediator between clans on the brink of a feud. And for so many years had he served in this role when called upon to do so that he was the one being upon whom every living member of the Kindred freely lavished true reverence. Too, there was a mysterious, almost magical quality about the frail-appearing, white-haired and bearded old man. Blind for as long as any could remember, yet it seemed that often he could see more clearly than any sighted man present, and none knew how this was accomplished. Eerie too was his control over the actions of men. On one notable occasion, he arrived to mediate too late. A vicious little melee between the fully armed warriors of Clans Danyuhlz and Muhkawlee had already commenced; Blind Hari had surveyed the carnage from the back of his weary horse—or so it had seemed to those who watched—then he had dismounted, removed his leathern helmet, his saber and even his dirk and eating knife. And, unarmed, unprotected, accompanied only by his prairiecat companion, he had walked slowly and deliberately into that pitiless maelstrom of whetted steel and deadly hate.