by Kij Johnson
“Or what? You will kill me? Mara?”
A horse galloped up. Its rider dismounted and pushed through the gap in the thorns with the first of my parfleches.
For a moment Huer’s eyes glittered. He looked away before I did. “No,” he said. “The child learns our tongue from Shen. She is already loved as a sister by one of us. We will not kill her. Or you.”
My clan was gone: my dogs, my family. Even Mara, forgetting it all. But I still had the parfleches and my knowledge. And somehow his admitting he would not kill me freed me to do what I was meant to.
“Bring me the parfleche with the red beads.”
“You will save her?” he asked.
She began heaving beside me. “I told you. No one can. But I can kill the pain, and help her deliver even though she dies.”
She was thrashing again, and I had retreated to the path before he got the parfleche to me. I laid it out quickly. I knew what Huer saw, leaning over my shoulder: a horsehide packet filled with small cloth- or leather-wrapped bundles, each tied with dyed cord hung with beads. But I saw the contents instead: boxes of powdered leaves and roots and molds and earths, stoppered jars of honeys and tinctures, knives and threads and needles, splints and bowls; a waxed sack filled with clay dust, for casts.
“When she relaxes again, cut her in the neck, a slice this long.” I showed him the first joint of my thumb. “And then hold her.”
I mixed water and tincture, sucked them into a bamboo straw cut to a point at the bottom, and stoppered the top with my tongue, which instantly went numb.
When she stopped thrashing for a moment, he dug the point of his knife in, just above the shoulder. She flinched and prepared to fight, but she was tired and in pain, and I was faster: I jammed the straw’s sharp end into the hole he had made and blew hard, then jumped back before she could knock my teeth out with her tossing head. Blood sprayed from the cut.
“That will work?” Huer said, panting.
I nodded. “I was in muscle. She will calm.”
Which she did. Tired and drugged, she writhed less and less, until she died.
We cut the live foal from her belly. While Huer and Ko wiped him clean, I milked the dead mare out. Ko took the waterskin filled with milk and cut a tiny hole in a leg, which he thrust into the tiny colt’s questing mouth. He drank greedily.
“Look how healthy,” Ko said. Tears fell down his face. “He will father many foals.” Huer sent him back to the herd, colt and milk laid over his mare’s neck, to find a milk-mother as soon as possible.
I still knelt with my hand on the mare’s sagging, empty belly. I began heaving. It was a while before I realized this sickness was sobs. I cried for a while. When I was done, Huer gave me water and rode with me back to the herd, now far ahead. I heard a feral dog howling at a great distance. It was a lonely noise and I was grateful for the first time for the company of the barbarian.
We rode. My numbness was over, replaced by a raw ache. The sun scarcely moved in the sky. I watched my short shadow and cried steadily.
Shen’s dark bay got sick: a runny nose and fever, then influenza. By the time we noticed it was more than her usual exhaustion from the early stages of the plague, all the other horses had it, as well: the raiders’ horses and the new colt worst, my herd no worse than they ordinarily would be in influenza, coughing and staggering their way through the disease’s course.
We were passing a drying lake that stretched dawnward to the horizon. Far to the south, a group of small buildings stood where the lake’s shore had once been, not much more than dark blots on the horizon. People had lived there when this place was closer to Dawn, then abandoned their village as the lake withdrew and the mud bed cracked.
“We will stop here,” Huer said. He slid from his mare’s back and laid his hand on her neck. Her coat was flecked with foam, though the air was cooler than it had been. Mucus hung in a thick rope from her panting mouth. “She has suffered enough. They all have, our horses. No. We will let them die in peace here. When they are gone, we will put saddles on mares from the Winden herd.”
And so we stayed for a while.
For the first time, the raiders set up a true camp. There was a single tent, which Huer used for his own purposes, and a regular fire, fueled with dried Ping-moss and the branches of the soft-wooded trees that grew and seeded and died in a single dog’s lifetime. Mei gave me a jacket, a short version of her quilted riding coat, to keep away the chill of the steady wind that blew across the lake from Dawn. The felted wool smelled like my father’s sleep tent had. Its warmth was comforting after the steady despair of working with the dying horses.
The outriders came in once, a grim-faced man and a tiny woman with eyes that might once have been merry if they had not been so weary. They slept through a full sleep-and-wake cycle, and into the next sleep cycle; when they woke they left their dying horses with me, and took six Winden horses before heading off northward along the shore of the dried lake.
Even after I sent Huer’s mare to death, there were still seven of the raider’s horses alive: Mei’s, Shen’s, and Ko’s riding mares; one horse with a misshapen hoof that they had used for carrying supplies; and the three left by the outriders, two mounts and one baggage mare. There were still forty-three Winden horses, and eleven of the foals had survived, the losses all being normal to a large herd traveling hard. The Winden horses showed no signs of the disease that killed the others, though several were tired from the journey and a couple of them still struggled through the last of the influenza. Perhaps my mares truly were resistant to whatever killed the tall horses of the barbarians. But the other horses died, one after the other, and I gave them what medications I could to ease their passing.
Huer watched me often as I moved among the horses. He seemed to be brooding, but when he spoke to me, it was only to ask about my treatments.
His sick mare lingered. We had separated her from the others, more for her comfort than from any hope of preventing anything, and Huer spent much of his time with her, weaving paper flags into her halter, talking in the universal wordless language between men and horses. After a time she stopped responding, and instead hung her head and hacked out streamers of mucus that trailed from her cracked lips onto the dust. I watched him watch her, remembering the pain of my first horse’s death, remembering my father’s death, remembering Meg and Ricard and the rest of my clan, dead.
“Please,” I said finally. “Let me help her.”
“No.” Huer’s face was expressionless. “It is not yet time.”
“I’m not going to kill her. I just want her to suffer less.”
“No,” he said. “We do not do things this way.”
“Your people have allowed me to help their horses. You thought I might do some good for the horses! Are you too proud of your ways to prevent her pain?” The anger I felt was welcome: it made a change.
“No,” he said. “Proud is not the word.”
Shen’s mare fell at last, still heaving but no longer able to stand. “Shen! Oh, Shen!” Mara cried, and then something in the raiders’ tongue. She threw herself sobbing into his arms. Shen cradled her in one arm, tears glittering on his face.
“May I help?” I asked.
“Your medicines have made it easier for her,” Shen said, “but now it is my turn.” He pulled his knife free.
“Mara?” I asked. “Come with me. This isn’t going to be nice.”
Mara looked at Shen, who watched her in silence. “No,” she said finally. “Wulin would stay.” She did not flinch when the knife bit into the mare’s throat.
I turned on my heel.
“Stop.” Huer strode across to me. “What are you doing?”
I pointed southward, to the distant turf houses. “There may be flitterlass nests there. I need their honey.”
“Take Suhui.” I glanced at her where she leaned against a dead Ping-tree rebraiding a leather rein. The woman shrugged.
“If Mara does not come, alone.”
“No,” he said. “It is not safe.”
“What does that matter?” I snarled. “If anything happens to me, you will still have Mara and the horses.”
He looked at me for a time. “Take this then.” He handed me his knife.
“Wait!” Suhui straightened. “You cannot—”
He held up his hand to silence her. “Protect yourself. There are wild dogs around.”
They had not let me use knives before. Even eating, Huer or one of the others had cut anything that needed to be cut. I took it in silence and left on one of my horses before he could say more.
I stopped my horse just beyond the ragged ring of turf houses. She was exhausted already, her coat smeared with pale gold froth, her nostrils pulling hard at the air. Too hard. I knew what I would find but I looked anyway. Inside her mouth was a single sore, the size of my fingertip.
The turf houses were dried and empty as husks, hardly more than humps of dead grass and dirt. Plumes of dust like dark veils tore from their corners and stung my eyes. I looked in one doorway and saw light where the turf roof had crumbled into the single room. Low benches ringed the space; a stone-lined fire pit squatted in its center. There was a gleam in one corner. When I crouched to look at it, I found a tiny medal such as a child might wear made of gold-colored metal, forgotten in the room’s gloom when its inhabitants had abandoned their homes and turned back to Dawn to build anew.
So much work, all abandoned to dry into dust. When I was a child, my family had seen a few of these places, where people settled only to move half a lifetime later, as the planet dragged their sturdy little houses toward Noon. Even then it had seemed nonsense when one could move so easily with tents and horses and dogs. The only stable things on Ping were the sun at n’dau and us: my family at the still center of things. Except that my family was dead and the sun had been a long time from n’dau.
There were no flitterlass nests. I had not expected them, after all: flitterlasses lived among the ruehoney bushes that only grew farther dawnward, but I knew the raiders would not know that.
I stepped into the next house. I was thirsty and tired of walking. I sat on the bench that ringed the wall and drank from my waterskin, warm and flat as the liquid was. The roof was intact and the doorway small. Inside was darker than anywhere I had ever been. It seemed darker than a sleep-tent’s interior, darker than the insides of my eyelids, darker than all the legends of Night.
I could kill myself. I touched the thought with my mind, like feeling a strange fabric at the Moot. Everyone else was dead. I tried to remember them as they had been alive, but all I saw was Stivan with the arrow in his breastbone, Daved curled like a child around the arrow in his gut.
I looked at the knife Huer had given me, a dim gleam in the darkness. It would be easy enough. Huer thought I was past this cold place or he would not have given me the knife. Well, he would be wrong. He would still have my horses and my medicines, useless though they were against this plague. I was irrelevant.
I do not know how long the breathing went on before I noticed. It had been so silent but now I heard it, steady if rasping, in the doorway. It was not a human’s breathing.
I knew suddenly that I wanted to live despite everything. I did not want my bones to follow my family’s, baked in Noon and lost at last under the ice sheets of Evening. Anything was better than that. Even slavery. Even sorrow. I stood, prepared to fight.
A single whine, familiar to me as Mara’s sleep-noises. “Dog?” I asked in wonder, and softly whistled: everyone, and come in from wherever you are.
A lone dog moved shakily into the doorway, a black outline. One of my males, the rangy red one with the white ear. Here. Alive. I scrambled toward him.
His coat was caked with dark mud. It took a moment to realize the mud was made of blood and dirt. I felt him with frightened fingers and found a great jagged tear along one flank where he must have ripped free of an arrow, but the wound was cool to the touch and crusted over. A scab: he was healing. His footpads were hot and rough and cracked. He had tracked me all these weary leagues.
A small dark circle appeared on the dust of his back, then another. It was a while before I realized they were my tears.
I cried for a time and fell asleep just inside the doorway to darkness with my face pressed against his flank.
“Katia?” Huer’s voice awakened me. He was moving through the circle of huts. He had not seen me; I lay close to the ground, dirt-colored in my stained clothes, hidden in the constant Night of the hut.
I fingered the knife. I had a waterskin, a knife, a horse—at least until she died—and now, incredibly, a dog. I could travel to the Moot, reopen the Winden scrolls, train new dogs, start a new horse herd if it was possible to stop the plague. Huer was all that stood between me and this. He knew about the knife but not about the dog, nor about my awakening from the smoke and the sorrow. It would be a small thing, a simple thing, to kill him. There would be a long while before they realized what had happened and came after me—if they did; they might assume he and I were lost, killed by dogs perhaps. They might continue on north and dawnward, back to their Emperor with my horses and Mara, who was barely Winden any more.
“Where are you?” he said. His voice sounded weary. “Please.”
I do not know why I did not kill him and leave. The leagues between me and Moot; the fact that no reclaimed clan would be my family; the gentleness in his voice then and there—I do not know. I only know that I walked from the doorway, the dog beside me.
He saw the dog as soon as he saw me. He had not replaced the knife he had given me. He said nothing, did nothing, stood empty-handed. I had nothing to say. The balance between us shifted like Dawnlands in earthquake, the river uncertain which way to go: the old channel where the way was already cut, or the new channel which might lead nowhere.
“How did you get here?” I asked.
His face was a mask. “I rode.”
“But your mare—” I began.
He cut me off. “She is suffering too much. I asked this one last thing of her, that she would bring me here. Perhaps you will be merciful and send her to rest.”
“You are planning to walk back?” It was too far, unless the other raiders meant to ride down and meet him here.
“No,” he said. “I have no plans for returning. Suhui knows what I do. She takes the herd and your medicines on to the emperor’s city. I will stay with you.”
I shook my head violently. “I can’t save the horses. I think they will all die. I don’t know how the disease transmits, but now mine have it too, and they’re going to die too. I can heal a rash, soothe a fever, splint some leg breaks. I can help a mare deliver. But I can’t cure this plague. I don’t think anyone can.”
“So there will be no more horses.”
“No more,” I said.
Silence fell again. I could hear my dog’s breathing; the soft wheezing of the horses; the hushing nose of the Dawn winds.
“Your family,” he said finally. “I am sorry. I was wrong. I should have asked aid first.”
I said nothing.
“You were a tool to me. A new knife, a magical medicine. But you have not been able to help, and still I—find I value you. Esteem you. I was wrong to kill. Even to save my people it was wrong.”
There was anger in me, and pain. But surprisingly I had no wish to speak of these things. “Your people will survive,” I said. “They will find another way. They will heal the horses or they will learn another way, a way without horses.”
“No,” Huer said. “There is no way without horses for us. We are an empire spread across a thousand leagues.”
“Then you will become a smaller empire. But you will survive.” I knew this. I had survived.
“How?” he said bitterly.
“For them, I do not know. But watch.” I whistled and my red dog shook and launched upright. I whistled dance and he performed an odd little step, crossing paws as he moved sideways, first one way, then the other. I whistled hold, a
nd he stopped, one foot still lifted in the step, his eyes shining with happiness.
“What—?”
“He hunts. And used to herd for us. Takes messages. Watches when we sleep. And he has been trained to defend. To guard. I had a dozen dogs like him before your people killed them. I can breed and train others.”
“Dogs can do so much.”
I ruffled the fur on my dog’s head. “Yes. And haul and run. I cannot ride a dog but they allow us to stay in touch, my people.”
“Ah,” Huer nodded once. “Perhaps such a thing is possible.”
“Where is your horse?” I asked.
When it was done, Huer pulled free one of the prayer flags from his mare’s halter. I turned it over: it was of vellum, stained dark gold with wear, still warm from his dead mare’s skin.
“Tie it to the dog’s collar,” he said. “All animals need prayers.”
“I am leaving,” I said.
“I will come with you,” he said. “I owe you a life. A dozen lives, but I can only repay one.”
The river dropped into its new course. He never asked for the knife back.
We turned to the south. If we walked far enough, we would be able to pass the lake and then head north again, toward where the Moot should be.
I had not noticed the sun, my shadow. But it was closer to n’dau and soon it would be entirely there. Huer had made a mistake, had slipped from the right center of things. It was a terrible thing, and my family died for it. The horses die for another reason, but they die. But life continues, and I and Mara and Huer and my dog are the proof of that. The sun hangs where it should in the sky, and I walk beneath it in my right place, n’dau, which never stops moving, which is eventually everywhere.
Dia Chjerman’s Tale