Клэр Белл - The Named - The Complete Series

She closed her eyes, feeling Thakur’s tongue soothe the ache from her leg. “Herding teacher, perhaps you won’t need to go away when the next mating season comes.”

He lay down next to her.“Would you be willing to accept another cub like Thistle-chaser?”

“What she might have been like if I hadn’t turned on Bonechewer and bitten her… ” Ratha sighed.

“She still has that chance,” Thakur answered. “You know, Ratha, I sensed something about her that I don’t understand. To us she seems slow, but I think she understands certain things in a way we don’t. It’s not just cleverness; it’s something else. You know that our cubs take longer to grow up than the young of those creatures who don’t think or speak. If Thistle-chaser and cubs like her grow even more slowly, perhaps it is not because they are less than we, but more.”

Ratha rolled on her back, letting Ratharee scramble onto her chest.“That is an uncomfortable thought, Thakur.”

“That seems to be the way of the Named, to think uncomfortable thoughts, to do uncomfortable things,” said Thakur slowly. “But our feet are set on this path, and we can’t turn aside. Nor would I want to.” He stretched himself, groomed his back.

Ratha lay with her treeling on her chest between her raised forepaws. There had been two other cubs in the same litter that produced Thistle-chaser. Could either one of the siblings have survived? If so, what would they be like? Perhaps one day she would search for them and find out. It would be, as Thakur said, a difficult thing to do. But such an effort could bring its own reward, such as the quiet joy she felt now.

At last the old memories and pains could gradually be put to rest. The Dreambiter would fade away, for both Thistle-chaser and herself. A part of her life was passing behind now. She felt as though she had finished shedding an old coat and now wore clean, new fur. The weight of guilt from her past had slipped from her, making her feel airy and light.

The Named now had two homes: their old territory and this new place by the sea. And though their efforts to keep and tend the seamares had not turned out as well as they’d hoped, still the experience had enlarged their skills, allowing more choices. When the drought broke, some of the Named might return to clan ground, others might stay.

She thought about the future, what might happen with Thistle-chaser and Mishanti. Would the cub grow up as Fessran’s vision had foreseen, to carry a torch burning brightly in his jaws and be a leader of the Named? Or would it be Thistle-chaser, scarred, but strangely gifted, who took over leadership when Ratha grew too feeble to guide the clan’s way?

All this didn’t matter now. What mattered was that she had found both a daughter and a wiser, better part of herself. The times to come might not be certain, but neither would they be shadowed with pain and guilt. She lay on her side, listening to the promise in the pattering rain. It was enough.

Clare Bell says:

“Thistle-chaser. Stubborn, scrappy, mentally and physically crippled, sullen, prickly, can barely speak, not pretty, hot tempered, yet she rivals Ratha in the affections of readers. Thistle originated inRatha’s Creature, as the cub Ratha rejected and injured. Her appearance came from a portrait of my mother’s calico cat, Jenny. Into crippled and abandoned Newt, I poured feelings from a time when despair tore my life. The cloud around her mind comes from the slowed thinking of clinical depression. Her rage at the Dreambiter is my rage at the “blaming the victim’ attitude before people recognizeddepression as a treatable illness.

“Throughout the series, Thistle’s limitations and suffering bring her unexpected gifts of insight and empathy. Her fits and visions of the Dreambiter prepare her to understand the strange mental ‘Song’ of the menacing face-tail (mammoth) hunting tribe inRatha’s Challenge. Reconciling with Thistle may be the real‘Challenge’ for Ratha, but in that book Thistle also becomes Ratha’s conscience, asking the Named to look beyond the harm done to them by others: to reach out in friendship rather than strike back in fear.”

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To Donald V. Steward

former Mississippi Freedom Rider

believer in nonviolence

computer scientist and mathematician

peace activist and conflict-resolution researcher

father of my ideals

and

To Edna Kathleen Steward

voyager into a strange new world

singer and survivor

believer in the power of the human soul

and the beauty of the written word

who asked the Named to reach out

mother of my heart

Both have made the dream real.

Stones flew over Thakur’s head and rattled against the bark of a tree behind him. The steep-sided gully in which he and his companions were trying to capture a shaggy young mammoth had become a trap for them instead of for the mammoth. Thakur crouched, flattening his fur and ears. The beast before him raised its trunk in a trumpeting blast.

Thakur drove his claws into the ground and bared his fangs in a feline hiss before he could stop himself. As herding teacher to his people, the Named, Thakur knew and taught the young ones all the skills that had been developed to manage dapplebacked horses and three-horn deer. He told his cub-students never to show fear to a herdbeast. Now he had broken his own rule, though this woolly tusker wasn’t one of the clan’s herdbeasts. Not yet.

The ground vibrated beneath Thakur’s paws as the mammoth stamped its massive front feet and bellowed. The gully resounded with the brassy roar. His head ringing from the noise, Thakur glanced at his young fellow stalkers, Khushi and Bira.

Khushi, a herder, and Bira, a Firekeeper, had come with him on this scouting expedition far from the clan’s seacoast settlement. Khushi was a seasoned herder and not easily intimidated. This creature had him bristling all over. The usually calm Bira had a line of raised red-gold fur down her back.

This was their second attempt to catch a mammoth. And this one wasn’t even fully grown — that was why they had chosen it.

Thakur and Khushi made another sharp rush at the beast, trying to back it into a narrow corner of the gully. Bira joined in. The quarry tossed its head, flailing its trunk and spearing the air with its tusks. Thakur’s nose was filled with its heavy smell and the faint but sharp odor that told him that his two companions were fighting fear of their own. The beast’s red-rimmed eyes glared from behind a thicket of orange hair. Its trunk swung down and coiled like a snake in the loose gravel. When the trunk whisked up again, another barrage of rocks hurtled at Bira.

She dodged, but several struck her ribs and back. Thakur heard her grunt in surprise and pain. Herdbeasts weren’t supposed to throw rocks.

“You said this would be easier than herding three-horns!” Bira yowled at Khushi.

“I … thought … it would be since … these face-tail things … don’t have horns!” Khushi puffed.

“They don’t need them!”

Thakur glanced at Khushi. Every hair of the young herder’s dun-colored fur was standing on end. Still, Khushi advanced on the quarry, trying to trap its gaze with his own. The stare-down worked on deer and dapplebacks, but this mountain of hide and flesh was having none of it.

With an enraged roar, the beast charged Khushi. Thakur and Bira both leaped at the same instant, snarling, to turn it back before it trampled him. They broke the face-tail’s attack, but it would not be deprived of its quarry. Again the trunk swept down, but instead of gathering and flinging stones, it curled around Khushi’s middle.