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

by Clare Bell

  With a shake of his head, he jolted Aree sideways so he could see again and at the same time flung himself onto his back, bringing his rear claws into play against his opponent’s belly. He felt her scrabble on top of him, lunging for the treeling. With a screech, Aree bounded away and up the nearest sapling, where she clung, swaying as the slender tree bent.

  Now Thakur could concentrate on subduing his attacker. She leaped over him, but just as she landed he rolled over and snagged her hindquarters with his foreclaws, knocking her to the ground. He grabbed her around the middle, hauling himself onto her. Angrily she twisted herself back on him, but she had only one front paw to strike out with. He caught the flailing foreleg in his jaws, biting only hard enough to hold it still.

  Tangled up and twisted around as she was, she could only wriggle and heave beneath him. He loosed one front paw to fend off her attempt to bite him, catching her under the jaw and shoving her head to the side.

  Her jerks grew frantic, and the swirling sea green in her eyes grew stormy. Abruptly her pupils, expanded in rage, contracted to needle size. She fought him with a new and terrifying strength, but her efforts were unfocused, as if she no longer struggled against a flesh-and-blood enemy but against something within herself.

  Thakur could only hold on as tightly as possible, keeping her rear legs pressed to the ground and her foreleg trapped in his mouth. He feared that if she did get free, she would attack him in a savage frenzy. Whatever he had wakened within her, he would have to contain it until the paroxysm passed.

  At last her heaving became sporadic, and her struggles weakened. He loosened his grip, feeling her sag onto her side. He let her forepaw go and watched it flop. Panting, he sat and looked down at her. Once again she lay at his feet, defeated by the strange fit he had caused. This time, however, he didn’t feel as guilty, although he was surprised. He had never thought she would dare attack him, even with the temptation of the treeling on his back. Perhaps Aree’s smell proved too strong a lure. But the stranger was the one who had been caught.

  Her lip twitched back, showing her upper fang. Her jaw trembled and her tongue moved. And then Thakur heard her voice.

  “Stay away... from them....”

  As she spoke the first few syllables, he leaned closer, wondering if he was imagining words in her inarticulate moans. Her voice was harsh and breathy.

  “I won’t hurt you,” Thakur answered, puzzled as to whom she meant. “I held you off from my treeling, but I mean you no harm.”

  She hadn’t heard him. She stared ahead, her gaze milky, shrouded, hissing words in strange disconnected clumps.

  “... hwish they had been born dead... do you want her... she’s witless... why did you do this to me... why... ”

  The sounds were indeed words in the speech of the Named, and he heard in them a pain and an eloquence that made him shiver. Yet the voice that said them was hollow and remote, as if she spoke without knowing what she said.

  Her lips fell back over her fangs and she was silent, but her words still echoed in Thakur’s mind. He paced back and forth beside her in confusion. Who were those she warned him to stay away from? Cubs? He looked at her belly. No, she wasn’t nursing a litter. And what had she said about wishing “they” had been born dead? It made no sense to him.

  But the agony had come through all too clearly. She whimpered deep in her throat, like a cub needing comfort. He lay down beside her, letting her feel his body warmth. Instinctively, she squirmed toward him. Though he wanted to move away because she was ungroomed and smelly, compassion overcame his disgust. He nuzzled her behind the ears. It soothed her, and she sank from confusion into sleep.

  He wasn’t sure how long the stranger lay curled up with her back against him. Aree had gotten over her fright and was starting to descend from the sapling when the lame female stirred, this time into full wakefulness. Again he nuzzled her behind the ears, purring to calm her. She gave a startled jerk but did not scramble away.

  She lifted her head to look at him.

  “You’re all right,” Thakur said softly. “I promise I won’t let anyone hurt you. Do you have a name?”

  The swirling green in her eyes seemed to surround and engulf him with intensity. The fur on her brow rumpled, and he could see that his words only baffled her.

  He repeated his soothing litany, seeing that the sound of his voice did calm her, but the words themselves meant nothing.

  “You don’t understand me,” he said, dismayed. “You must. I heard you speak.” But the veil of muteness had dropped upon her once again, and only cloudiness moved in those eyes. “It doesn’t matter,” he said softly, feeling her start to tremble. “Just rest here with me.”

  After a little while, she got up and shook herself, but she did not scamper away. She sat watching him while he indulged in a good stretch. A chirr overhead reminded him he still had a treeling to look after. Aree hung by her tail from a branch of the willowy sapling, looking doubtfully at Thakur’s new acquaintance.

  “She’s not going to eat you,” Thakur said, cajoling the treeling, but as Aree started to climb down, the lame female took several eager steps toward the sapling. Gently, but firmly, Thakur blocked her with his body. “Oh no, my hungry friend. Aree’s not going to be your dinner.”

  When the stranger was stubborn and persisted, Thakur put a paw against her breast and pushed her away. “No,” he hissed sharply, emphasizing it with a flash of teeth. She backed away, letting Aree climb nervously onto Thakur’s nape, lying so flat that it felt as though she were trying to bury herself in his fur.

  Again the stranger sidled toward him, but another emphatic negative halted her.

  He knew she didn’t understand him, but the sound of his voice seemed to calm her, so he rambled on. “Look, I came here to learn about you, but since you can’t or won’t talk, why don’t you just prowl around while I watch?”

  She cocked her head at him, then limped a few steps away. He saw how she kept the crippled foreleg tucked underneath her chest.

  “You should try to use that foot,” he said, speaking his thought aloud. He came alongside her and pawed at her foreleg, trying to get her to extend the shrunken limb. Gently he took her foot in his mouth and pulled, testing how far he could stretch the contracted muscles.

  She gave a sharp yowl of pain, wrenched her paw away from him.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I’ll be careful.” He coaxed her into offering her foot again, although she gave a warning growl. Again he took it, pulled gently.

  She tugged back with surprising strength in the wasted limb.

  Stubbornly but gently, Thakur held on, purring to reassure her. “Easy,” he said, talking around a mouthful of furred toes. “I just wanted to see how this has healed.”

  He turned the limb from side to side, also studying the collar of roughened fur that overlay scars from the injury that had crippled her. The scarring ran right down her neck to her breast. It looked like a bad bite, perhaps done to her when she was small. If fangs had penetrated a young cub’s chest near the foreleg, they might have caused such a paralyzing injury.

  But in her case, the part that gave the limb life and motion had somehow begun to heal. He could tell that by the way the leg jerked back against his jaws. The real problem was that her muscles had thinned and contracted while the leg was immobile.

  The healer in Thakur wanted to tell the stranger that she might not have to spend the rest of her life hobbling about on three legs. The practical part of him knew he couldn’t get this across to her without the use of words. Maybe if he could just show her—get her to stretch the leg and try using it.

  But she had already grown impatient. She tugged her paw from his jaws and stalked away.

  Thakur waited before he went after her, fearing she might hiss or try to drive him away, but she didn’t. Considering the start of this encounter, it hadn’t turned out all that badly, he concluded as he followed her. Perhaps she might accept him enough to show him the sea-beasts she guar
ded.

  Winding his way down through the thorny, scrubby brush of the slopes behind the bluff, Thakur kept to the lame female’s track. He could hear her moving ahead of him, stopping and starting nervously. When she halted, he stayed back, not wanting to alarm her by moving too close. He paced himself by the uneven rhythm of her three-legged gait, slowing his own.

  When they emerged onto the beach, she seemed less certain about wanting him to follow. He hung back, showing that he was willing to respect her privacy. After several stops, tail flicks, and doubtful stares in his direction, she let him trail her to a terrace near the seamares’ jetty. She grimaced at him to stay there.

  Obediently, he dropped down on his belly as she disappeared behind an outcrop of sandstone. He feared Aree might grow restive, but the treeling made herself a nest in the hollow between his nape and shoulder blades and was soon snoring lightly. Thoughts of the stranger chased themselves about in his mind. He remembered how her jaws had moved and her tongue formed speech while she lay in the grip of the fit that had seized her. Yet when she recovered, she was as mute as ever.

  Thakur thought too of Ratha’s swift pace and the trails she would be traveling. She and Fessran would soon arrive on the coast, and then others would come, creating a further disruption to the fragile balance of the life his strange friend had made for herself.

  While he was still puzzling over it, he heard her footsteps approaching. He stayed down until she approached, then rose slowly. Again that sea-green stare held him until she swung around and went ahead, letting him follow. He could catch the odor of seamare in the wind, teasing his whiskers, and wondered if the stranger would allow him near the wave-wallowers. To gain the trust he wanted, he had to show her that he would do nothing threatening.

  As he trotted down onto the beach, he saw her rolling on her back in dung that smelled overwhelmingly of seamare. She wriggled around in the mess until she had worked it well into her coat, gave herself a shake, and stood up. He noticed that she had thoughtfully left a pile for him. Obviously this was a requirement for approaching her charges.

  He could see at once that this made sense. The odoriferous stuff would obliterate any trace of his smell, making him seem harmless to the seamares. Some of Thakur’s own herders made a practice of rolling in the manure of animals they kept, claiming that made the creatures less difficult to manage. Thakur himself had never cared for the idea.

  He didn’t much like the idea of it now either. The lame female gave an impatient flip of her tail. When he tried to walk around the dung, she showed her teeth. It was either roll or give up. Thakur decided to roll. But Aree certainly wouldn’t tolerate being smeared with the stuff. Treelings liked to keep themselves clean.

  “If you don’t mind, I’d better find a safe place for my treeling first,” he said, hoping she might understand his intent if not his words. He nosed Aree, then flicked a whisker in the direction they had just come. Quickly he left the beach and backtracked up the trail until he found a gnarled cypress high enough to keep the treeling safe from any ground-prowling meat eaters. Aree clambered up, grumbling a little, and hid in a hollow several tail lengths overhead.

  Thakur found the lame female waiting where he had left her. Though she cast a hungry look down the trail, he was relieved to see that she did not go after his hidden treeling. The seamare dung was as pungent as ever, lying in a heap at his feet. He hoped she might have forgotten, but she hadn’t. He rolled.

  He had assumed that the seamares ate sea grass or other plant fodder, like the herdbeasts he knew. The smell of the manure told him that the creatures had a much more varied diet, possibly including flesh or fish. Herdbeast dung was not repellent to him, but that of meat eaters other than his own kind carried a disgusting tang. He had to force himself to cover his coat with the seamare smell, wondering how he was ever going to clean up before he recovered Aree. And if he met any of the Named while wearing such a wretched odor... well, he decided not to think about that.

  The female took one sniff and then led him to a group of seamares. He kept as close to her as he dared and tried to put his feet down silently. The seamares lay looking like logs washed ashore, but as he approached, ears twitched and heads lifted. The small eyes seemed to grow colder, and the tusks Thakur had glimpsed from a distance seemed larger. He told himself that one who challenged three-horns should have no fear of these clumsy wave-wallowers. But he was grateful for the odor that hung about him and disguised his smell.

  The change in odor seemed to put the lame female more at ease, and he remembered how his scent-mark had triggered her first fit.

  Thakur followed his companion as she limped close to one seamare, who lay at the edge of the herd with a half-grown youngster. With his odd friend standing nearby, he could walk close to the pair and examine them.

  Ratha’s description of these animals as “duck-footed dapplebacks” wasn’t that far off, he decided. Their stout, black toes had scaled skin and a fold of webbing between them. Their bodies looked much the same as those of dapplebacks’, although broader and chunkier. The seamares’ coats were dense and velvety.

  Thakur was startled to see the mother seamare take a large clam from a heap she had gathered, crack the shell, and deliberately lay it aside. With a glance at Thakur, the lame female set about prying the meat out of the mollusk with her good forepaw and her teeth. He thought she would eat it all, but halfway through she lifted her head and stared at him, then brought him a fragment of shell with meat still attached.

  He did his best to rasp off the rubbery clam flesh and gulp it down, though it made a wad in his throat that threatened to choke him. He felt he could tolerate it, though he was grateful she didn’t offer him any more. She watched him while he ate, and he in turn tried to read those odd opaque eyes.

  As he trailed her among the seamares for the rest of the day, he became more and more convinced that the dullness she showed was only on the surface. Beneath lay a sharp and perceptive intelligence, though one that worked in a very different way than his own.

  The question of her apparent muteness rose again in his mind. It wasn’t that she could not make sounds, for he heard her use a wide variety of vocalizations. And her tongue could form words; he had heard her speak as clearly as one of the Named.

  And when he spoke, as he did once in a while to himself, her reaction was more than just irritation or annoyance. Even as she turned her back on his words, he caught a look of longing in her eyes and a movement of her jaws that halted abruptly, as if she had caught herself trying to imitate him. Thakur noticed this but did nothing about it. He was unsure what he could do and was too taken up with studying the seamares to devote much thought to it.

  After he had been on the beach for several days and had satisfied much of his curiosity about the wave-wallowers themselves, he turned his attention to the one who guarded them.

  He spoke, as if muttering to himself, but this time he watched his strange friend, not letting her see his scrutiny. A fleeting look of something akin to despair passed through her eyes.

  “You want to speak,” said Thakur, talking to her directly. “Why don’t you try?”

  He said his name, trying to get her to repeat it, but she only ducked her head and would not meet his gaze.

  “When you fell on your side that day I came, you spoke. Don’t you remember? Or were you just making sounds that had no meaning for you?”

  She crouched, looking away, but he could tell by the way her ears swiveled that she was listening. Her tail tip trembled and began to wag in confusion.

  “You are Named. I know you are.” The fierce conviction in his voice frightened Newt. Her ears twitched back, and the green in her eyes became turbulent, cutting off any sight he might have glimpsed of their depths. He softened his tone, knowing it was useless to force her.

  She stared up at him from her crouch, and a pleading look came into her eyes. Again her mouth opened, her tongue writhed, but no sound emerged. Her eyes grew shuttered as she closed her m
outh, but there was a spark of pain in them sharp enough to penetrate the dullness of her gaze. Thakur wondered if his efforts were adding to her inner torment.

  He could only fall silent once again, wondering if he would ever reach her.

  Chapter Seven

  To lessen the disturbance that arose in his new friend whenever he spoke in the tongue of his people, Thakur tried to use only the instinctive cat-noises and body language of his kind. In gesture he had to be careful too, for the Named had overlaid their natural movements and signals with ones that had added meaning. If he strayed over the boundary, he confused his new companion. Clan language in all its forms had obviously been denied to her, yet he could see she hungered for some means of expression. She was not so much mute as she was trapped, caught between a desperate desire to have language and something that frightened her away from it.

  His intuition urged him to speak to her and coax her to respond, as if she were one whose speech had been halted by sickness or the forgetfulness of age. When he saw the panic that started up in her eyes whenever he spoke, he knew it wouldn’t work; she was too frightened.

  And so for her sake, he too became mute, suppressing his impulses to talk whenever he was with her. It was a strange and difficult thing for him to do. The unsaid words seemed to lie in his breast with a leaden weight, pulling him down. After a day or so of self-enforced silence, his mind rebelled, harassing him with arguments against his choice. When his jaw remained shut, it punished him with a strange weariness that left him feeling dull and draggy. The sound of the wind was muffled and distant, as if his ears were stuffed with fur. He fought to keep himself from falling into a trancelike state.

  His only respite was when he retreated from the beach to find Aree in whatever tree he had perched her and take her on his back to forage. Her chirrs and chattering removed the barrier his will had set up, and he talked to her in a gush of words like a dammed stream suddenly freed to flow again. But once she had been installed for the day in her refuge, Thakur resumed his silence.