Клэр Белл - The Named - The Complete Series

“Is that all you want from me, Bonechewer?” she asked, trying to suppress the sudden grief that welled up inside her.

“If your fangs would help me toward the dark trail, I would not resent it,” he answered. “Or if you cannot kill me, tell another to do it.”

Ratha swallowed, barely able to speak. She looked toward Thakur. He rose and came toward Bonechewer. Her flank brushed his as the two passed.

“Away, herders!” she cried at the two still sitting and staring. “There is no need for you here.” They whirled about and dashed away. She followed at a trot then slowed to a walk, watching her people dragging the Un-Named corpses into the dirt clearing where the fire burned. Fessran and theothers who helped her were piling fuel on the flames, making them bright and hot, eager to consume the bodies. At the other end of the meadow, the dapplebacks grazed peacefully, showing no sign of the night’s terrors. Ratha let her eyes rest on that scene and turned her back on the fire.

Grass rustled behind her and a familiar smell was with her. Not until Thakur was beside her did she turn her head.

“I held my brother’s throat until he was still,” he said softly.

“Did he say anything more?”

“Only that clan leaders are not forbidden to grieve.”

Ratha’s jaw dropped. “That arrogant mangy son of a scavenger! He thought I would cry for him? He thought … I would … cry … for….” Her voice broke into a keening wail as her sorrow escaped at last. She stamped, lashed her tail and flung her head back and forth. All the rage, hate and sorrowshe had felt and kept hidden now took her and shook her until she was left panting and exhausted. She stumbled to Thakur and laid her head against his chest. “I am even more a fool,” she muttered, her sides still heaving. “A clan leader should not bawl like a cub.”

“No one was watching,” Thakur chided gently.

At last she lifted her head and gazed across the meadow. There the dapplebacks grazed, with the herders around them. Soon there would be three-horns and other kinds of beasts, for Thakur and others in the group were good at catching and taming them.

My people will survive,Ratha thought. They have changed, even as I have, but they will survive. That is what matters.

“I left my brother under the pine,” Thakur said. “Is that what you wished?”

“It is. His bones shall lie there and those who pass shall honor them.” Ratha drew a breath. “Once I hated him. Now there is nothing left to hate. He was my mate, Thakur, with everything that it meant. I will not soon forget him.”

“Nor I, Ratha.”

She turned to Thakur, to the green-eyed face that echoed the one whose amber eyes were closed in death. No. He was not Bonechewer, and he too evoked memories that, if anything, were more painful. She would take no mate until the raw memories were soothed and healed by time. But, she sensed, he would be a wise and comforting friend and would run beside her on the rough new trail that lay ahead of her and her people.

It would not be an easy path, and the dangers that lay there might be beyond her capability to face. Yet ragged and weary as she was, she lifted her muzzle in voiceless challenge to those things still unknown.

She was Ratha, she-cub, herder of three-horns, tamer of the Red Tongue and leader of her people.

Whatever came, she would meet it with all the strength and wit she could command. One thing she knew; as long as she and the Red Tongue lived, her people would survive.

Triumph overcame her weariness. She lifted her tail and trotted after Thakur as he walked across the meadow toward the rising sun.

To my friends, Dorothy and Donya,

who were there at the beginning.

The gathering was to take place in the older part of the meadow, about the flat-topped stone the herders called the sunning rock. Thakur, the herding teacher for the clan, arrived first. With a glance over the meadow to see if anyone else was coming, he bunched his hindquarters and leaped up on the gray stone, then stretched out to catch the sun’s last warmth. Insects droned about his ears and a rock lizard hissed at him for taking the best spot. He flicked his tail at the lizard once, then ignored it.

Thakur shifted himself in the slight hollow worn by the many who had lain there before him and felt the sun-gathered heat of the stone through the fur of his belly. He folded his forepaws beneath him and let a soft purr flutter in his throat as the evening breeze ruffled the fur on his back. Then the breeze died away and only the twilight stillness and the scent of the sunning rock rose up about him.

The stone he lay on had its own scent. One couldn’t smell it when there were other, stronger odors in the air or a wind blowing, but at other times, one could catch the faint scent of ancient rock baked by sun and beaten by rain.

Thakur’s purr grew softer until it faded. He felt slightly ill-at-ease sitting here where Ratha, the clan leader, would be when the clan assembled. He thought of the Firekeepers and the dance-hunt that was soon to come. The sunning rock seemed to cool beneath him and he shivered.

The dance-hunt had begun as a story, a retelling of the clan’s battle against the Un-Named Ones who preyed on the herd and drove the clan to the edge of destruction. Bearing a strange new creature called the Red Tongue, a young female led the fight, striking such fear into the raiders that they trampled their own wounded as they fled. Few of the Un-Named had been seen near clan ground since the final battle. By her courage and wit, Ratha had gained clan leadership and the tale was begun to honor her.

The herding teacher was old enough to carry the scars from that fight and to recall how the story had been first told. He also remembered how it changed in the telling. Those who told it added movements to their words and the words themselves became a chant to which the tale-tellers swayed.

In the first cycle of seasons after Ratha’s victory, anyone could be chosen to tell and act the story. Later, the Firekeepers, who had been given the duty of keeping Ratha’s creature, claimed the honor as theirs. They enlarged it, adding more individuals to play the parts of enemies and defenders. They added more motion, until it changed from an acted tale to a dance.

Much less to Thakur’s liking was the way the story changed from triumphant to vengeful and the dancer’s motions from joyous to frenzied. Somehow Ratha didn’t seem to notice, or, if she did, she thought the change was unimportant. Each season Thakur disliked the dance-hunt ritual more, for it kindled in him a strange fear, one he couldn’t put a name to.

Perhaps he felt the fear because his own ties to the Un-Named were too close. Though born of a clan female, Thakur and his brother Bonechewer were sired by an Un-Named male. Clan law forbade such matings and for good reason: they often produced young who lacked the intelligence and self-awareness necessary to a people who called themselves Named. Though Thakur’s mother had been exiled for violating that law, the old clan leader had seen the light of the Named in the cubs’ eyes and had tried to keep them within the clan. In the end, Thakur had stayed behind, while Bonechewer was taken by his mother to join the Un-Named. Because of his parentage, Thakur had never been fully accepted in the clan until Ratha’s ascendancy gave him the status to which his abilities entitled him.

The high grass parted far across the meadow and he heard the noise of other herders and the sound of herdbeast carcasses being carried and dragged. The clan would feast well before the dance-hunt. They had chosen a three-horn doe and a big stag, one almost too heavy for the jaws that held it.