Ratha and Thistle-Chaser (The Third Book of the Named)

by Clare Bell

  They reached the sea coast just before sunset several days after departing from the sunning rock. Thakur had begun to think he had gone astray, for the way led him through a forest of great pines whose fibrous red bark and enormous girth were new to him. But when he kept to the deer trail that wound through these hills and brush canyons, the redwood forest gave way to a lighter growth of strong-smelling bay laurel. It ended abruptly at a meadow.

  The grass was high and whipped by a salty breeze. Walking slowly, Thakur left the trees, turning his head to catch the sights, smells, and sounds of this new country. Ahead he heard the muffled crash and sigh of breaking waves. The sound reminded him of some great creature breathing. A bird sailed above him, its underside a dazzling white against the dark-blue sky, its wings constantly shifting to ride the wind that sent it slipping sideways. As the gull winged overhead, Thakur felt Aree flatten against his neck. With a quick nuzzle, he reassured the treeling.

  He walked until the wind was strong in his face and the grass thinning beneath his feet. The meadow ended, tumbling away into sheer cliffs with waves pounding at their base. At first, Thakur thought he should taste the water, but night was coming and he could see no way to climb down. Thakur looked down into the frothing surf until he grew dizzy, then gazed outward.

  Before him lay a shimmering expanse of silver, where the setting sun’s light danced in colors like light from the Red Tongue. At first it appeared to be another land, a vast plain spreading toward the horizon with sunlight painting new trails to lead him onward. The shimmer became the ripple of water, of traveling wave crests that swept toward him.

  The first time he’d seen this great water from a distance, he had thought it must be an enormous lake. But now, standing on the cliff and sweeping the horizon for some glimpse of a distant shore, he sensed that even if he journeyed for a lifetime, he would never be able to travel around it. Many a closed circle of pawprints had he left about the lakes near his home ground, but a circle of pawprints about this expanse of water would always remain open.

  He gazed out over the water, watching its hues and texture change with the sinking sun. He felt the same awe that touched him when he sat gazing into the heart of a flame. Both were things he knew he would never understand, but he sensed they came from the same source and had the same underlying power. It was a feeling that made him want to stay quiet while evening came to this new and almost sacred place. Even Aree remained still, containing her usual tendency to fidget.

  At last the feeling faded into simple loneliness, and the wind began to bite. Thakur got up from the place where he had settled and stretched himself. He padded back through the grass to the edge of the forest and found shelter in a niche between two logs that had fallen across each other. There he and the treeling passed the night.

  When Thakur awoke at dawn, the sound of breakers was fresh in his ears and the sunlight brilliant. The shoreline country now had an exuberant quality that infected both travelers. Frolicking and scratching with energy, Aree pounced aboard Thakur’s back, and they set off.

  With a flick of his tail, he turned from the westward path he’d been on to a northward course that led him up the coast. He hoped to find a way down to the water’s edge, but the cliffs remained too forbidding. He trotted along windblown scarps with Aree munching berries and dribbling the juice on his fur. He crossed wild clifftop meadows and paced over the flanks of hills whose slopes were cut off by the sheer drop of the sea cliffs. He paused to rest in groves of coast pine where the trees leaned the way of the prevailing wind, their shapes stunted and twisted by spray and storm.

  The variety and abundance of birds amazed him. They wheeled about him in raucous flocks or glided silently overhead. Fork-tails hovered in midair by beating their pointed wings into a blur and shifting their tails to balance the wind. Sea gulls swooped so low over him that he had to fight his instinct to spring up and bat one out of the air. Though he forced himself to ignore the birds, his tail twitched, and he could not keep his teeth from chattering in excitement as he trotted along.

  By midday the stark cliffs had given way to friendlier country that hosted river valleys and winding estuaries. As Thakur descended with Aree from the clifftops, he saw sandy shores and mudflats. Droves of stilt-legged shorebirds rested or waded there, probing the bottom with their bills.

  Some of these birds were so odd that he halted to gaze at them. He knew the long, sharp bills of herons and the broad ones of ducks, but here he saw beaks that curved up, down, or even sideways.

  The shorebirds looked so clumsy and gawky that he was tempted to stalk one. But Aree would be in the way, and there was no convenient tree where she could wait safely until he had finished his hunt.

  At one estuary, there was a place that looked shallow enough to ford. There he tried the water, but gagged at the briny taste. Disappointed, he waded across, the current tugging at his legs, while Aree made wordless treeling noises as to what she would do if he got her wet. Shaking his paws dry on the far side, he found himself behind a line of scrub-covered dunes. He climbed them and stood looking out on a crescent beach that reached to a rocky headland.

  He had set one paw into the crusted sand when a swell of noise rose above the soft wailing of the wind. Abruptly he froze, ears swiveling to catch and identify the sound. It was a mixture of animal cries: grunts, bellows, screeches. What made him turn from his intended path was a faint but unmistakable caterwaul that sounded like one of the Named in a squabble.

  He listened, his ears strained far forward, his muzzle pointing toward the rocky terraces that formed the promontory north of the beach.

  There it was again. Could one of Ratha’s scouts have gone astray and ended up here? He doubted it, but he had to make sure. Rather than follow the sweep of the beach, he decided to circle back behind and climb up the bluff, where he could peer down at the rocks and ledges below.

  Soon he was trotting through the short grass and scrub brush of the headlands, heading for the point. He could hear more clearly the commotion of the fight going on among the rocks below. Screeching, yowling, and a powerful roar made him quicken his pace, but it was the female voice rising in a battle cry that made his whiskers stand on end.

  He broke into a canter, jolting Aree along. Behind an outcropping of sandstone, he slithered to a stop and peered down onto the wave-cut terraces and tumbled rocks that spilled out from the point in a natural jetty. In a cove along the spit, he saw a female of his own kind facing a huge black-and-white-crested eagle. Nearby was a large web-footed creature. Close to the bird lay a smaller animal that looked like a youngster.

  At first he thought the strange female was fighting for her own life against the eagle and readied himself to charge down into the fray. But he saw that the bird hopped toward the small creature every chance it could get, while the female beat it away. When she abruptly turned and nosed the clumsy young animal over a lip of rock and out of the bird’s reach, Thakur realized this was no simple conflict of hunter and hunted. This stranger, whoever she was, fought to defend the young of the sea-beast just as Named herders protected dappleback foals and three-horn fawns.

  Abruptly the fight ended. With a great clapping of wings, the bird lifted and flapped away. Thakur peered hard at the stranger, trying to see if she were clan-born or one of the more intelligent among the Un-Named, but he failed.

  Her rust-black and orange coloration was unlike anything he had seen before. She seemed to be limping. He thought at first that the bird had wounded her, but as he studied her closely, he realized her three-legged walk was habitual, and he guessed that the drawn-up foreleg must be permanently lame.

  Thakur wondered if what he’d seen was only his imagination. Could it be that his training as a herder and his work as a teacher made him misinterpret the stranger’s behavior? Was he seeing only what he expected to see? Well, he could hardly have expected this! He watched the stranger wend her way among the odd, lumpy sea-creatures, their calmness convincing him that they knew her and
had grown accustomed to her presence.

  The stranger’s smell was faint at this distance, but the trace of it he could catch was not clan scent. Curious now, he cast about until he found a scent-mark she had made on the bluff and inhaled the odor. No, she wasn’t from the clan, nor was she of the Un-Named, who left their traces on hunting trails.

  Thakur toyed with the idea of going down to meet this intriguing stranger, but something made him hesitate.

  She must be from the fringes of the Un-Named, he decided, a product of a mating between a clan member and one of the Un-Named, just as he and his brother, Bonechewer, were. If so, she might be friendly, but she also might be dangerous. Though crippled, she had managed to beat off a bird bigger than she was. Thakur wasn’t sure he wanted to confront her directly and certainly not with Aree on his back.

  Instead, he watched her, being careful to keep downwind so she wouldn’t smell him. He noted the trails she took through the terraces and rocks. If he scent-marked a shrub or boulder along her way, then he could announce himself in a casual fashion and see from a distance what her response would be.

  He put his plan into action the following day. After spraying several shrubs and rubbing his chin on a boulder, he sent Aree to safety in the branches of a wind-gnarled cypress and hid himself above the path.

  Soon he heard footfalls in the rhythm of his quarry’s three-legged gait. He peered from his hideaway for the first close-up view of the stranger. He was not prepared for the odd little face that appeared around the edge of a boulder. None of the Named had anything like her markings in orange and rusty black. An inky band across the lower part of her face emphasized the lightness of her eyes.

  Thakur had never seen such eyes. An iris of milky green swirled about each slit pupil, giving the stranger a gaze that seemed distracted and diffuse. Yet her stare had an unsettling quality. The cloudiness at first made him think she might be blind, but the sharp definition of her pupils and the way she made her way without using her whiskers to touch things convinced him she could see.

  The stranger’s ears flicked back, and her neck extended as she caught his scent. He saw her upper lip curl back, revealing short, sharp fangs without signs of wear. She took one limping step toward the bush he had sprayed and then went rigid. A look of terror and rage shot through her eyes. Reeling backward as if she’d been struck, she crumpled into a whimpering heap, her good forepaw shielding her face. Shudders racked her, throwing her on her side, where she fought and thrashed against some unseen enemy.

  Thoroughly bewildered, Thakur crept from his hideaway. He had seen and smelled many reactions to his scent-marking, but none as dramatic or frightening as this! An irrational sting of guilt hit him for daring to place his mark in her path.

  The young female lay on her side, pedaling weakly with three feet as she stared ahead. Her head arched back and she stared without seeing. As the paroxysm spent itself, her limbs stilled and her eyes closed. She lay limply. When Thakur pawed her, she wobbled like a freshly killed carcass.

  Numbed by astonishment and disbelief, he went to her head and stared down at her. Part of him insisted that it was coincidence; she had sniffed his mark just as the fit struck her. No. He had seen too clearly the shock and fright that had flashed through the cloudiness of her eyes in that instant before she fell.

  She took quick, struggling breaths that jerked her rib cage. Thakur himself took a sharp breath of relief. As her breathing steadied, he felt his panic drain away. Whatever the cause of this attack, it would run its course. Unable to sit still, he paced around her.

  The stranger’s face resembled those of the Named. She had a delicate muzzle and a well-defined break from the line of nose to forehead that Thakur found attractive. But what made him start when he saw it was a line of reddish-tan flame that licked up her forehead from the top line of her eyes to the crown of her head. Against the background color of rusty black, the strange marking stood out. It seemed to waver and flicker in his gaze, as if he were looking once again at a windblown line of fire. In his memory, the Red Tongue made its march through the forest.

  Suddenly Thakur felt angry with himself. Yes, she had strange markings, but there was nothing that should disturb him about the patterns on her face. There were little touches of white at the corners of her lips and a narrow cream blaze on her nose. In a Named female, the effect would have been one of disturbing ugliness, or perhaps beauty....

  If her smell had matched the unsettling attractiveness of her face, Thakur might have found it harder to break off his close examination of the stranger. But his nose continued to remind him that she was ungroomed, filthy, and so full of the pungent stink of the sea-creatures that he couldn’t make out her underlying scent.

  She swallowed. The abrupt movement of her throat startled him. Soon she would wake. Should he stay or go? Was it his scent that had thrown her into this fit, and would it happen again if he stayed?

  He looked down at her crippled foreleg. Along her shoulder from nape to breast ran a half-collar of rumpled fur that, he guessed, might hide a ridge of scar tissue. The foreleg itself, though shrunken, didn’t appear deformed. He had seen a similar injury in a herdbeast, caused when one creature kicked another in the breast. Whatever made the leg move gradually died, until the creature could no longer use its limb. He remembered that herders had soon chosen the animal for culling.

  He saw the stranger’s eartip tremble. Her lips drew back, exposing her fangs as she swallowed again. He noted the shade of her gums to check if she had lost blood or had the paling sickness. No.

  He drew back, then changed his mind. If the fit left her weak or ill, she would need help. But his reason for staying was more than that. What he had seen her doing with the sea-creatures might be valuable to the Named.

  At last, after many preliminary stirrings and twitchings, she blinked and moved her head. Thakur sat down where he was, letting her gaze find him. Her nape fur rose, and the pupils of her milky-green eyes shrank. Despite her lame foreleg, she moved so fast that she was a rust-and-black blur in his eyes. In the next instant, she faced him, body displayed broadside, head twisted, fangs bared. The upturned tips of her flattened ears signaled fear as well as anger.

  Thakur slowly got to his feet, lifting his tail in the greeting gesture common among the Named. He gave a rising purr.

  The other stiffened her defensive posture, her back legs doing an angry little dance of their own that tended to swing her hindquarters toward him. He watched her tail. If it relaxed and curved into a hook, that meant he might have some chance of reaching her.

  “I won’t hurt you,” he said slowly. “Please. I want to talk to you. My name is Thakur.”

  He faltered on the last word. There was no understanding in those milky-green eyes, not even curiosity. He might as well have tried to speak to a herdbeast! She spat at him and made a pitiful wrenching motion with her stunted foreleg, as if hoping to use it to claw him. He lowered his head and tail. How could this be? How could she have established that unusual relationship with the sea-creatures if she was as dull as this? Herding wasn’t a simple task; that he knew well. You had to outthink the creatures you wanted to control; you had to plan ahead.

  He stared at her in dismay, his tail sagging. She backed away in a three-legged crab walk, growling deep in her throat.

  “Go then,” he said sadly, more to himself than to her. Deliberately he broke eye contact, looking away. When he looked back again, she was gone.

  Once Thakur had recovered Aree, the treeling cheered him, but he still remained puzzled about his encounter. He walked along the low bluff above the beach with Aree on his back, airing his thoughts aloud to his small companion as he often did.

  “She doesn’t speak. I’m sure of that,” he said over his shoulder to the treeling. “And her eyes are those of a witless Un-Named one.” He stopped, remembering the swirling milky-green irises. Were those eyes indeed empty, or did the opacity hide the spark of intelligence that the Named valued? What about her
led him to brood this way? Her companionship with the sea-beasts, part of him answered, but another, more honest part said no, that is not all.

  He needed to find forage and a steady supply of good, fresh water for the clan and its herds. He had already noticed several estuaries and inlets that cut into the coast-line, but most that he sampled were too salty or brackish, even when he moved upstream. Sparse rainfall had dried up the rivers that fed the bays and inlets, allowing seawater to intrude.

  Finally he found a creek that fed a lagoon. Though the lagoon water was briny and mixed with the sea, the stream itself, when he tasted it, was fresh. He followed the creek inland until he came to its source. At the base of a second tier of cliffs set far back from the ocean, a spring ran steadily from a cleft in blue-gray stone, collecting in a pool beneath. Shaded by the rock walls and watered by the spring, trees grew at the base of the cliffs with an open meadow beyond. Seepage from the spring moistened the ground, and fresh grass sprouted amid the dappled patterns of sun and shade.

  Here, near the sea coast, morning and evening fogs muted the heat that blistered areas farther inland. Thakur drank from the pool, then stood on its margin, letting the feel of the place seep into him.

  Several small pawprints in the moist earth near the pool told him that the stranger too knew of this spring. And seeing her prints made Thakur wonder what would happen if the Named did choose to come. She could always drink from the creek that spilled out of the overflow from the spring-fed pool instead of from the pool itself.

  His belly gave a twinge: not true hunger, but a warning that he should eat within the next day or so. His time here was drawing to an end; the other scouts that Ratha had sent out would be returning with descriptions of their discoveries. He too would tell his story to those assembled before the sunning rock. This place, with its oasis of fresh growth and unfailing water, appeared ideal for the clan and their herd animals. In addition, the sea-beasts might be the answer to Ratha’s quest for another source of meat. If a lame Un-Named one had formed a protective relationship with one of them, surely the herders of the Named could do more.