The Horsemasters

by Joan Wolf

  Slowly Ronan crossed the space that lay between them, stopped, and then he too looked down. The baby yawned, showing an impressive expanse of pink gums.

  “Morna told me a week ago that she was going to do this,” he said.

  Nel tore her eyes away from the baby. “You never told me that!”

  He shook his head. “It was an ugly scene.”

  “Ronan.” She was holding on to the baby as if she were drowning and he was her only chance to keep afloat. “I will not try to tell you anything good about Morna. She did this for revenge, I can see that well enough. But…sometimes…sometimes good can come out of evil, Ronan. I have been thinking, you and I made the sacred marriage together in the Mother’s holy place, and I begged her for a baby. And now…so soon after…this baby has been placed in my arms.” She drew in a deep, ragged breath. “Do you not think that perhaps it is the Mother’s wish that we take him?”

  Ronan looked at Nel’s face, looked at the stain of bluish shadow under her eyes. She seemed to him now just as small and as defenseless as the baby in her arms. His eyes went once more to the baby. It did not look at all like Morna.

  I do not believe that babies can be evil. He had said that, and it was true.

  He heard himself saying firmly, “I think you are right, minnow.”

  Nel gazed up at him, not daring to believe what she had just heard. He was suddenly angry that this should mean so much to her. It made him feel that he had been pushed out of the center of her life. “I am not a monster,” he said. “Did you think I was going to rip him out of your arms?”

  She shook her head vehemently. He could see her fighting back tears. That made him feel like a monster in truth, and he reached forward to put his arms around her. To do that, he had to put his arms around the baby as well.

  Nel leaned against him and began to sob, deep, wracking, wrenching sobs. She cried so hard he was afraid she was going to drop the baby, so Ronan took him from her. Then the baby began to cry.

  “Dhu,” said Ronan. “If you keep this up, Nel, I warn you I will change my mind.”

  At that she laughed. It was a husky, quivery, watery sound, but definitely a laugh, “Give him to me,” she said. As soon as she took him, the baby stopped crying.

  “You seem to have the same touch with babies that you have with horses and wolves,” Ronan said.

  Nel’s smile was wet but radiant. She lifted her face and pressed a kiss along his jawbone. “I love you so much,” she said. “There is not another man in the world like you.”

  Ronan looked at his tiny rival. “Just see that you remember that,” he said, and he was only partly joking.

  * * * *

  The day after their devastating defeat in the gorge, Fenris gathered his anda around his hearth. These were his captains, the warriors whom he had given command over the other horsemen of the tribe. The day before yesterday they had numbered eight. Today their number was six.

  As the somber-faced men took their places around the hearth in the kain’s tent, they were joined by two new faces: Vili, the kain’s eldest son, and Bragi, his friend. The boys seated themselves in the places left empty by those who had died in the gorge, lowered their eyes deferentially, and waited.

  Fenris rested his big hands on his knees. “So,” he said, “it seems we have an enemy.”

  Growls came from six throats.

  “Cowards,” Surtur spat out. “They are afraid to come out and fight like men.”

  “That is so,” grunted another man.

  The kain disagreed. “It was a clever trap,” he said coldly. “Cleverly thought out and cleverly executed.” His wintry gray eyes circled the faces of the men before him. “It has been many years since we have been opposed by force, but these mountainmen are obviously ready to fight to keep us out of their hunting grounds.”

  “They surprised us once,” Surtur growled. “They will not surprise us like that again.”

  The rest of the men began to talk all together. Only Fenris and the boys were silent. At last the voices ran down, and faces turned once more toward the kain.

  In the silence, Fenris took up his spear and stabbed it deeply into the bare earth beside him. The men looked with fierce anticipation at the quivering shaft. This was what they had been waiting for. The spear was the sign that the kain was about to speak words of war.

  Fenris said, “I have lost six handfuls of my finest warriors, and I say to you now that I will avenge them, I have called upon the Thunderer, and he has answered me.”

  A deep murmur came from the men.

  Fenris spoke again. “I will take these mountains, my brothers. I will descend like lightning upon the land of my foes, and to you will go their fairest women and their highest-stepping horses. The beasts of their hunting grounds will fall upon your spears, and their children will serve at the doors of your tents.”

  This time it was a roar that arose from the throats of the listening men, and Vili’s teeth gleamed in a great white grin.

  It was Surtur who made the ritual response for the anda. “You are our kain, and wherever you lead, we shall follow. If ever we should fail you, it is for you to abandon us and cast us out, solitary, to the forsaken earth.” This was the tie that bound together kain and warrior in the tribe of the Horsemasters, and a reverent silence fell around the fire as the men cherished the words in their hearts. From the edges of the tent could be heard the soft murmurs of women shushing children: “Be quiet, my child, be quiet. Your father is meeting with his anda. You must be quiet.”

  “I wonder how they learned to tame horses,” Vili murmured at last.

  Fenris said, “How they got the horses is not important. What is important is that they have them.” He set his mouth in a way that made the cleft in his chin more pronounced. “I have said that I will go after these mountainmen, and I will. But no more will I ride like a blind man into mountains that I do not know.”

  The faces of the men were somber. They nodded.

  Fenris said, “We shall continue along this River of Gold as we had planned. Our scouts have gone before us and we know the land is open. There are tribes dwelling upon this river. Horseless tribes. My scouts have seen them.”

  “That is so,” spoke up Skoggi, who was the chief of the scouts.

  “We will attack these tribes,” Fenris said.

  Pleased grunts greeted this remark, and then an expectant silence.

  “We will make such a slaughter that the mountains will run red with blood,” Fenris promised.

  Grins.

  “I will make these mountainmen come to me,” Fenris said, “and then I will cut them to pieces.”

  * * * *

  A noisy group of children were playing in the small clearing near the Great Cave that had been allotted to them by the adults. Thorn had been told that Siguna was minding the children, and he had come in search of her.

  The happy scene in the clearing betrayed no signs of the imminent conflict facing the adults of the gathered tribes. At the one side of the clearing, a group of children were taking turns using the swing that Neihle had made for them. He had done this by lashing a vine first to the ends of half a log, and then to the sturdy lower branch of a birch tree that had edged into the clearing from the surrounding forest.

  Another group, mainly boys with a few of the Red Deer girls mixed in, were playing a game with hoops made of peeled wood and small spears. It was a game Thorn remembered well, and he watched the children with a smile of faint nostalgia.

  The game was simple in concept, more difficult in execution. One child would roll a series of hoops one after the other across a length of ground, and as they passed, another child had to hurl the spears through them in such a way that the spear stuck into the ground with the hoop spinning on it. As the hoops were rolled with full force, they bounced high and erratically, but even so, Thorn was pleased to note that the children with the spears did not often miss.

  He turned away from the game and saw Siguna walking toward him, the sun
glinting on her silvery hair. As Thorn watched her approach, he felt a familiar ache in the region of his heart. She was so beautiful, he thought. He wanted desperately to draw her picture, but there was little chance for solitude these days. Nor did he want to draw her face on the walls of the Great Cave. He wanted her in his own special cave in the valley; he wanted her among the pictures he had made of the rest of the tribe. In truth, it was more than Siguna’s picture he wanted. When this conflict was over, he wanted to bring her home with him.

  She gave him a fleeting smile as she came up to him. “What are you doing here, Thorn?”

  “Looking for you,” he replied. The hours they had spent in the gorge had been grisly in the extreme, and though Siguna had persisted stoically in her search, Thorn knew that the experience had been devastating for her. It certainly had been devastating for him, and he had neither known nor cared about any of the men who had been transformed by death and scavengers into such horrifying carrion.

  He looked now into Siguna’s eyes and was relieved to see that the shadow that had been there for the last few days appeared to have lifted. He smiled at her. “I have never seen Nel so happy,” he remarked easily.

  “Sa,” Siguna agreed.

  “Ronan is the only man I know who would have allowed her to keep that babe,” he said next. “No one thought that he would.”

  Siguna regarded him curiously. “What would you have done, Thorn?” she asked.

  Thorn stared at her in surprise.

  “Would you have let her keep the babe?” Siguna persisted.

  “Well…” Thorn ran his fingers through his brown forelock, pushing it off his forehead. “I suppose I would have,” he said.

  Siguna smiled. “I thought so.”

  Thorn looked wistfully into her lovely face. He wanted very much to tell her how he felt about her, but he knew that this was not the time for such words.

  “Aiiiyee!” The high-pitched shriek rose above the quieter babble of peacefully playing children. Both Thorn and Siguna whirled around to see what was happening.

  A group of boys had collected handfuls of acorns from the forest floor and were throwing them at each other. As Thorn watched, one of the boys advanced boldly on the enemy, flinging his acorns with deadly accuracy. The returning missiles bounced harmlessly off the reindeerskin vest that he was holding out in front of him.

  “Dhu,” Siguna exclaimed and started forward to halt the battle.

  “Wait.” Thorn’s hand shot out to grab her arm.

  She halted, surprised by the strength of his grip, and looked at him angrily. “Someone may lose an eye, Thorn! I must stop them.”

  He did not seem to hear her. He was staring at the boy with the vest, an expression of intense concentration on his face. At last, slowly, his fingers opened, and he released her.

  After Siguna had halted the fight and gotten the boys involved in a more peaceful activity, she returned to where Thorn was standing. “Why did you try to keep me from stopping the fight?” she asked him curiously.

  “It was nothing.” He looked at her, but his expression was abstracted. “I must go, Siguna.”

  “Where?” she demanded.

  “I need to talk to Ronan.” Without further comment, he turned and strode away.

  * * * *

  Ronan sat staring thoughtfully at the spear in his hand. He had sat thus for the last few nights, and neither Bror nor Crim, who shared his tent, had dared to ask him what he was thinking.

  It had been a half-moon since the battle at the Volp gorge, and word had come to the tribes that the Horsemasters had packed up their camp and were once more traveling down the River of Gold. Ronan had responded to this news by announcing that he would move the men of the Federation to the Red Deer homesite on the Greatfish River within the next few days.

  In the meantime, he sat and looked at the spear. At last Bror could stand the suspense no longer. “What do you see in that spear, Ronan, that you should regard it with such fascination for two straight nights?”

  Ronan did not lift his eyes from the weapon in his hand. “It is not one of our own spears. It is one we took from the bodies of the Horsemasters in the gorge.”

  “Sa,” Bror said patiently. “I can see that.”

  Finally Ronan focused his brilliant dark gaze on his friend. “How do you see that?”

  Bror blinked. “The wooden shaft is not so long as is the shaft of our spears.”

  Ronan grunted and held the spear out to Bror, who was sitting across from him by their small hearth. “What else is different?”

  Bror regarded the spear thoughtfully, then lifted it to a throwing position. “It is lighter,” he said.

  Ronan gave a pleased smile. “Sa. It is shorter, and it is lighter. All of their spears are like that, Bror. We look enough of them from the gorge for me to be certain that they are all alike.”

  “I am thinking they make them like that because they go on horseback,” Crim said. “A longer, heavier spear would make it harder to keep one’s balance.”

  “Exactly.” Now Ronan was grinning.

  Bror put down the spear. “All right,” he said resignedly. “We give up. What does it mean?”

  “It means that our spears, being longer and stronger, will wound the enemy before theirs can wound us,” Ronan said.

  The two men stared at him in dumbfounded silence. “Ronan,” Crim finally said, his voice carefully reasonable, “it is true that that would be an advantage if men on foot were fighting men on foot. But they will be on horseback. And we do not have enough horses to counter the numbers they can bring against us.”

  “We turned back their horses in the gorge,” Ronan said.

  Bror slammed his hand against the ground. “That was because of the gorge!”

  “That is so. But there is no reason we cannot use the same tactics again. True, we will never have so perfect a location as the gorge, but there are several places along the Greatfish where an oncoming host might be halted. We would have to spread our line much wider than we did in the gorge, of course.” He narrowed his eyes. “Picture it, lines of spearmen several deep, shoulder to shoulder, holding the line at the place where the Red Deer valley would open out behind them.”

  “It is not possible,” Crim said.

  “The Horsemasters would have to attack uphill,” Ronan pointed out.

  From outside the tent they could hear the distant voices of the men on firewatch talking.

  “It does not matter. Men on foot cannot stand against horses,” Crim said.

  “I think we can hold out for long enough. Remember, Fenris does not know our numbers. If we can hold on for long enough, I think he will turn back.”

  Silence fell as the men contemplated the picture Ronan had painted with his words. A sudden roar of laughter came from the men on firewatch.

  “They could use javelins and arrows against us before they attacked,” Bror said.

  Ronan smiled with genuine pleasure. “Thorn has come up with a defense against that.”

  Bror and Crim stared at him in amazed expectation.

  “He has designed something to protect our men against enemy weapons.”

  “What?” Bror demanded.

  “It would look like this.” Ronan picked up a rock and sketched a rectangular shape in the dirt. “We can make them of wood and attach some kind of a hand grip on the inside. Do you see? A man would hold it before him, so, and it would keep him from being struck by his enemy’s weapons.”

  “Dhu,” Crim breathed, “I do see.”

  “This was Thorn’s idea?” Bror said.

  Ronan grinned. “It came to him while he was watching a group of boys pelting each other with acorns.”

  Bror grunted.

  “These ideas will take time to put into practice,” Crim said. “The men will need to practice keeping their formation. We will have to make these shields.”

  Ronan raised his head. “I know.”

  “Do you think the Horsemasters will allow us the ti
me?”

  “If they don’t,” Ronan said, “we shall have to distract them.”

  Chapter Thirty

  “Do you want to bring some of the mares with you?” Nel asked. “There are two handfuls of them who are trained to be ridden.” It was a hot summer afternoon, and Nel had gone out to the men’s camp to see Ronan. They had ridden into the next valley, picketed their horses, and found a comfortable spot for themselves on the thick grass.

  “I would have to build a corral for them and keep them separated from the stallions. It’s not worth the trouble, Nel, for only two handfuls of horses.”

  Nel sighed. “I suppose that is true.”

  Ronan was lying on his back in the grass, his hands behind his head, his eyes narrowed against the brilliant summer sky. “I’m sure you can make use of the mares here,” he said in a voice that sounded almost sleepy. “Use them as packhorses to send us the shields that the women are making.”

  Nel, who was sitting cross-legged next to him, nodded. “I have been thinking I would have Siguna show me how her tribe uses horses to pull. Besides the shields, we will have to be sending you greens and grain and fruit. Men have little skill in gathering, and you must have something to eat besides meat.”

  “Mmmm,” Ronan said. His eyes had closed.

  Nel looked down into his relaxed face with a mixture of tenderness and annoyance. On the one hand, she worried that he was driving himself too hard. On the other hand, she had not sought him out just to watch him sleep.

  She said, “You are outnumbered by these Horsemasters. Siguna says there are more than two of them to every one of us.”

  His lashes lifted. “I know that, Nel.”

  Nel bit her lip. A long strand of silky hair, loosened from her braid, had fallen across her face. She blew it back, and Ronan smiled faintly. He crossed an arm over his eyes to shade them and asked, “What is the matter, minnow? You did not come out here just to tell me things I already know.”

  Nel said with great determination, “I want to come with you, Ronan.”

  For a long moment he did not answer. Then he sat up. “You can’t. I am not even taking the women of the Red Deer this time.”