Dave Duncan - West of January

Oh, my beloved Haniana!

AND SO I HAVE TOLD YOU WHAT YOU WANTED TO KNOW—of Heaven and the angels, of my early life, and of how I returned to the grasslands in middle age. Surely you will not also have me tell of my greater shame, of the killing time and the crimes I committed when I was old?

You will? Ah, you youngsters are callous…

ALWAYS I HAD KNOWN that what I planned must shed much blood. Always I had hated the thought. I would like to think that a little more than pure cowardice kept me procrastinating so long in Heaven, and if so, then it was the hatred of bloodshed.

And even after I had taken over Gandrak’s family—even as I worked to bend the twins to my purpose—I still clung to a faint delusive hope that perhaps the herdmasters would be willing to negotiate.

Ha! The first one certainly wasn’t. His name was Trathrak, and he came out at full gallop, with arrows flying like hail. I was riding slowly toward his camp, through billowing grass high as a man’s belt, heading downwind so my voice would carry. I was unarmed, and I held my hands up to show I came in peace. Michael, had he been there, would have screamed that I was being a suicidal fool. He would have accused me of insane delusions of inadequacy that required me to prove myself now because I had gained my herd without killing for it. Sometimes too much insight can blind a man, and he would have been completely wrong in this case, of course—I went unarmed only because I wanted to talk.

Ironically, I should have died had I carried a weapon.

I did now know Trathrak’s name then. I knew only that he had many more woollies than I, with four tents showing, and he had been unfortunate enough to steer his herd near to mine just when my plan demanded its first victim. I soon knew that he was big and quite young, and I quickly came to understand also that he emphatically did not want to talk. He wanted to stamp my corpse into a floor mat. I turned tail and fled before the blizzard. As a lifelong coward, I was good at fleeing.

He gained on me, partly because I let him do so, partly because I was being careful to retrace my exact trail. I had headed straight for the sun on my way in, and therefore my shadow should guide me out, but in long grass at full gallop that is not as easy as it sounds. Trathrak drew closer, his arrows zipping by me much too near. Then, just as I decided that I must have strayed from my path and was about to die, Karrox rose up on one side of him and Kithinor on the other.

It was their first battle, and they were still only boys—they could have been excused a miss or two. They did not miss. With icy deliberation, they each put an angel’s steel-tipped arrow into Trathrak’s ribs.

Aware of an insanely pounding heart, I chased after his mount and caught it. The clammy caress of the wind on my face steadied my nausea as I rode sadly back to where my two young assassins stood in the whispering grass, gazing down proudly at the corpse.

When I slid from my saddle, I almost fell. I felt ill. I have caused many deaths in my life, as you have heard, but this was the first time I had ever planned a deliberate killing and carried it out, and I shivered at a sense of loss. I stared down in shock and disgust at the young giant’s body, wanting to shout at him to rise and stop pretending.

Yet I think I mourned less for him than for myself, and for all the others who must follow him if his death was not to be without meaning. For his sake, now, I must go on. For my own, I must believe that the bloody path I had chosen would lead to a righteous outcome.

The twins would be expecting me to say a prayer for the dead, and I couldn’t force out the words. I wiped my forehead and took a deep breath… I even managed to fake a grin as I raised my head. I was prepared to send Kithinor to fetch their horses, safely hidden beyond a hill. What I saw on Kithinor’s face frightened me much more that anything Trathrak had done. I glanced around at Karrox, and of course his expression was a mirror image of his brother’s—sinister gleam in tunnel-black eyes, faint smile wreathed in dark fuzz.

Finding twins of their age had seemed like a real stroke of luck to me, for twins tend to cooperate more than other brothers. Even herdfolk male twins do. As I had come to know Kithinor and Karrox, as I had trained them to shoot and to ride, I had confirmed that yes, they did have cooperative tendencies. And now they had a perfect chance to use them. We had two herds now. They did not need me anymore.

I smiled broadly, falsely. “Your arrow hit him in the heart, Karrox! It was the better shot, so you get first choice of the women.”

Karrox raised his eyebrows into the dark tangle of his hair and adjusted his grip on the bow. The arrow was pointing down, not at me—not yet—but he couldn’t miss at that range. Not if he closed his eyes and turned around three times, he couldn’t miss.

“You have both done well!” I said heartily. I pivoted to face Kithinor. He had unstrung his bow and drawn his knife instead. The youths were far taller than me now. They could run, too. “Better luck next time!” I added, less certainly.

Kithinor said “Huh?” and gazed inquiringly past me, at his twin.

“Well, we’re certainly not going to stop now, are we?” I said, ignoring the mountain of ice in my belly. “Three herds are better than two—more woollies, more women. And four will be even better than three!”

I could hear dice rolling inside their shaggy heads. Kithinor frowned down at me as if he were inspecting a rug, or something else inanimate and of doubtful value. I am certain that I would have died had I held a weapon in my hand, had there been a knife at my belt or a bow at my saddle. It was the code of the grasslands, the herdsman’s way of thought. They did not need me anymore, but equally I might not need them, so obviously they must strike first, before I did.

But I had no weapons except fingernails, and I was a feeble cripple… Kithinor’s unsubtle features twisted in indecision for a moment and then returned to indifference. He glanced again at his brother and nodded. Obviously they had decided that at worst there was no hurry. “I’ll do better’n him next time,” he agreed.

Thus the killing began.

I paid off my young henchmen in women, but I took none for myself. I was collecting boys instead.

I combined the two herds into one and angled south until we came across more tracks.

Three herds, then four… The twins cooperated because I was making them rich. With so many women to husband, they soon had no time for plotting, anyway—I had to shout at them to make them even keep up their archery practice. They began to turn dangerous again after the sixth or seventh battle, but by then I had outwitted them. With a dozen young bowmen at my call, and two or three close by me always as bodyguard, I could play them all off against each other, ruling as I had seen Ayasseshas do, and Michael.

So I survived and the killing went on. On all the plains only four or five herdmen agreed to talk, and not one ever settled down as my subordinate. Even if I sent a troop of twelve mounted bowmen against him, a herdmaster’s instinct to fight was still irresistible. Unable to conceive of cooperation, they would inevitably fall into the ambush trap that I had used against Trathrak.

Of course, few herdmen had ever survived to middle age, but my systematic bloodbath washed an entire generation from the grasslands. All herdmen were young now, except me.