by Clare Bell
“I know that look,” said Fessran. “Don’t tell me you think we can use that broken piece of the wave-wallower pen.”
“Didn’t you see what happened? It carried me and Ratharee over the water. We didn’t have to swim. I think it could carry more than one of us. Come on, Firekeeper. Let’s both try.”
Gingerly, Fessran made her way aboard, grimacing when Ratha joined her in a gleeful bound, making the raft bounce. “You, clan leader, are still a cub sometimes. Yarr, this thing makes my stomach feel queer.”
“We can ride down the river on it,” Ratha argued.
“You can ride down the river on it. I’ll stick to burning my whiskers with the Red Tongue.” Fessran disembarked, waded to the bank, and shook her feet. “Anyway, we need the sticks to fix the hole you made.”
Reluctantly, Ratha gave up her new discovery, but as she watched the other Firekeepers pull it apart, she fixed the idea in her mind, resolving to build another raft once the pen was finished.
Chapter Nine
Thakur’s worry about Newt’s reaction to the taking of her seamares by the Named soon proved true. Shortly after the incident with the two yearling herders, he learned that other herders had laid out bait trails to lure more seamares. But they had been scattered or trampled into the sand. There were reports that someone seemed to be hiding in the rocks, watching the herders, even if they stayed on their own beach. And one of the young herders who had been involved in the seamare stealing had been attacked by night. Though he was able to drive his assailant off, the ferocity of the attack frightened him. Thakur decided he had better find Newt.
He discovered her in the lagoon where she swam. When she saw him, her ears pricked forward, and she bounded out of the water. He saw, to his mixed delight and dismay, that her foreleg looked stronger and that she made attempts to use it, even on land. He felt a pang of guilt, wondering if his attempt to help her regain the use of her leg had led to her retaliation against the Named.
As soon as she had limped up to him and touched noses, he found she had worked on her speech as well as her leg. She greeted him with the words he had taught her. “Thakur come. Good. Newt swim with him?”
“No,” he said carefully, “talk.” In simple language he explained that the Named herders had been told to leave her and her seamares alone. In return, she was to keep to her territory. Any further ambushes would be looked upon with great disfavor by the leader of the Named.
“If there is another fight, and our clan leader knows I helped you heal your leg, there will be a bit of my fur flying as well,” Thakur said.
“Fur fly,” Newt echoed.
“I promise that no one will take any more of your seamares. If you do see Named herders on your ground, come and get me instead of fighting. You could get hurt.”
Newt looked at the ground, growling. She made a noise like a seamare.
“No fights,” Thakur said, “or we’re both in trouble. My clan leader will stop me from helping you. Understand?”
She looked up at him and hissed a soft yes.
“Good. Now that’s settled, what do you want to do?”
She hopped around him. “Teach. Words.” Thakur grinned, unable to refuse her eagerness. She made a scrubbing motion with her good paw against her face. “Word,” she said again.
“Wash,” he said, licking a forepaw and performing the action. “I wash my face. You wash your face.”
“Splash, wash, face place,” Newt crowed.
Thakur flicked his tail. He didn’t know what to make of her playful rhyming with sounds. He tried to recall if clan cubs did it. If so, they went through such a phase with their mothers before he got them to train.
“Stop being a pest and pay attention,” he said severely. “I’m washing my chest, see, like this.” He tongued his ruff.
“Wash chest, best for pest,” was her response.
He wondered where she had picked up some of the new words. Perhaps she had learned them from shadowing the Named herders, although not all the rhyming sounds she made had meaning. The fact that she had been able to pick up words and figure out their meanings indicated that her intelligence might be higher then he had first thought.
Even so, he wondered if anyone other than himself would understand her singsong garble. There was something oddly lyrical about the way she put sounds together.
He sighed. “You are strange.”
“Strange, change, mange. Thakur talk, stalk. Newt swim,” she said, and with an impatient toss of her head, she trotted back into the lagoon.
This time he did not join her but sat on a low dune overlooking the water and watched while she swam. Something had been plaguing him, and he decided that now was the time to sort it out. Ever since she had first spoken, the question had arisen within Thakur’s mind: Had she come from the lineage of the Named?
Herding animals wasn’t easy. Thakur knew how many of his own students, whose eyes were far brighter than Newt’s, had struggled to learn how to judge a creature’s mood or behavior. How could Newt think fast enough to outwit a beast?
She can plan, thought the herding teacher to himself. She can think ahead and plan. I’m convinced of that.
And the more he became convinced, the more a new certainty began to arise in his mind. She has done this because she was born with the talent, ability, and need to manage other animals, he decided. That conclusion could only lead to another: Somehow, this castoff from the ranks of the Un-Named had clan blood in her.
But how? Thakur thought of his own parentage, of his mother, Reshara, who took a male from outside. Such pairings were forbidden, and his mother was driven out. Hers was the last such mating until Shongshar’s coming showed what a tragedy they could be.
No, Reshara was not the last clan female to dare an outside mating. Thakur sat up suddenly, his ears swiveling forward. Ratha and Bonechewer. She hadn’t spoken much about it, but he remembered she had said something about having had cubs and having lost them. He’d assumed by her words that they had all died, but perhaps not.
Suppose one had survived, had somehow managed to scratch a living from the unfriendly world outside the clan. Without any of her own people to learn from, of course such a cub would be mute. But Newt looked too small to be a product of a mating several seasons past. Perhaps it was struggle and privation rather than age that had stunted her. And that crippling injury.
Everything was falling into place in Thakur’s mind, but he knew that one piece of the picture still needed to be found, and that piece was in Ratha’s keeping. His ears flattened slightly as he thought about asking her. Raising painful memories like that would not earn him favor. But if the outcast was indeed her daughter, the cub might well have talents needed by the clan. Especially now, when it appeared that Ratha would bear no cubs by any clan male.
He tried to argue himself into putting off questioning Ratha. But the more he pondered it, the more inevitable a confrontation seemed, and he knew it would grow larger and more intimidating the longer he waited.
With a sigh, he got up and went in search of Ratha.
He found Ratha on a high dune overlooking the river bend where the Named kept their seamares. She faced into the wind, her whiskers blown back along her muzzle. In her profile, etched against the sky, Thakur saw the same break in the line of forehead to nose that he had noticed in the outcast. A worry line creased the fur between her eyes as she stared down at the herders and their new charges.
Instead of questioning her about her cubs by Bonechewer, he asked what was troubling her.
“Our duck-footed dapplebacks aren’t doing as well as I expected. They just lie around in the mud all day or slosh in the river. We dig clams for them, but they won’t eat very much.”
“Perhaps this isn’t the best place to keep them,” Thakur answered.
“Maybe.” Ratha looked away. “I keep a watch on that bunch of seamares on the jetty where your odd little friend stays. You know, you may be right about the way she manages them. Hers are doing better than ours.�
� Her ears flicked back. “She may just have better stock.”
“I don’t think that makes much difference.” Thakur chose his words carefully, not wanting Ratha to go back on her promise to leave Newt’s seamares alone. “She doesn’t so much manage the creatures as live with them. If we had patience, we could do the same.”
Ratha’s tail tip gave an annoyed twitch, then she yawned and stretched herself. “Dear herding teacher, you speak the truth even when you don’t mean to,” she said. “What you really meant is, if I had patience. And I don’t, do I?”
Thakur decided not to make things more awkward by agreeing that patience was not one of her strengths. Instead he said, “I know that soon new cubs will be coming and you have to be sure there is food for the mothers.” He paused. “This is one way.” He indicated the penned seamares below with a downward jerk of his head.
“It will do for this season, but I’m not sure about the next,” Ratha said moodily. “You know, Thakur, I keep thinking about that outcast. Where could she have come from? How can she do what she does if she is one of the witless Un-Named?”
Thakur said quietly, “Remember that not all those outside the clan lack the light in their eyes or the need to give themselves worth.”
He could see that he had stirred some old memories. Her eyes went opaque for a few instants, as if she were turning inward. Their green became murky, turbid, reminding Thakur of the colors in Newt’s. Perhaps the lame female’s gaze was turned permanently inward, causing the cloudiness in her eyes.
“Ratha,” he began, “I need to ask you something. You told me once that you had a litter by Bonechewer. I didn’t ask you anything more about it, but now I must. Did any of those cubs live? Were any given names?”
Her upper lip quivered, jerked back, baring a fang. He saw a shiver pass along her sides. “I don’t know,” she said tonelessly. “He said... he said... ”
Suddenly she whirled, almost pouncing on Thakur, her eyes bright with pain. “Why are you making me remember this? Wasn’t it you who said let dead things be buried?”
“Are they dead, Ratha?”
She answered distantly, “I don’t know. I fought with Bonechewer. He struck back. I told him he could keep the empty-eyed cubs he sired on me. Thistle-chaser got in the way....”
Her voice grew faint as she began speaking not to him but to herself. Thakur’s ears swiveled forward, straining to hear her better. “Who?” he asked.
Ratha was still off in the past. “It wasn’t a real name,” she said softly. “Not like the names we give ourselves in the clan. But I needed something to call her by. I hoped that she was something more than just a little beast wearing the skin of our kind.” Her belly heaved as she tried to swallow her grief. “She was always jumping at thistles and getting thorns in her nose. She would never learn. Bonechewer didn’t like it when I called her a thistle-chaser, but he never liked what I called him either.”
“So that was her name? Thistle-chaser?”
“What does it matter?” Ratha’s fangs flashed again in anger as she spoke. “Names are for those who know what names mean. My cubs didn’t and never will.” She was trembling now.
Thakur rubbed his cheek against her. “I’m sorry, Ratha. I didn’t know how much it would hurt you to remember. Leave it behind.”
“I didn’t claw Bonechewer because he lied to me,” she said. “He just didn’t tell me the truth. And in the fight... she got in the way....”
Thakur put more firmness into his voice. “Leave it behind, clan leader. You have other things to think of now. ”
She gave a weak grin. “Such as lazy lumps in the mud and other people’s cubs, I suppose. All right, herding teacher, you don’t have to look so worried. I’m all right now. ”
Thakur caught himself. He had been thinking hard, but not about Ratha as she stood here before him now. His mind was on the story she had told him. When she realized the truth about her cubs, she must have turned on Bonechewer in a savage, bitter fight.
And the words she had said repeated themselves in his own mind: “She got in the way.” Then what had happened? Was the cub struck or bitten, perhaps more severely than Ratha intended? Enough to cripple and stunt the young body?
Ratha was staring at him with an odd look on her face. “I can also put footprints together into a trail, Thakur. You are thinking that odd outcast who lives with the seamares might be my cub. Well, that’s impossible, because she’s clearly a cub born in the last birthing season. If Thistle... if my daughter had lived, she would be several seasons old by now.”
The herding teacher knew better than to try arguing. Ratha had a stubborn set to her jaw and a tang to her smell that told him she had made her decision, reasonable or not, and would not be budged.
This bothered him a little. When Ratha was this obstinate, she usually had a good reason. But this felt more as if she were fighting because she was afraid, because she feared the outcast might be the daughter she had abused and abandoned.
He suppressed his impulse to ask her more questions and turned away, leaving her staring out over the beach. He had gotten what he came for. Not only did he know more about Ratha’s split from Bonechewer, but he now knew the name of the female cub. Though, as Ratha said, it wasn’t a real name, perhaps it had been used enough so that the cub might remember what the word sounded like, if not its meaning.
He said the name softly to himself when he was far enough away to be beyond Ratha’s hearing. Thistle-chaser.
Chapter Ten
Ratha tried to bury the feelings that Thakur had raised by indulging in something she had wanted to do ever since the section of wall had fallen into the river and transformed itself into a raft. The following day she turned over the seamare-watching duties to other herders and went off by herself with Ratharee on her shoulder.
Again she gathered sticks, bark, and brush. The task was easier this time, for she didn’t need to use thorn-wood. Ratharee was eager to show her skills once again, and soon the two were well launched on their project.
At the end of the day, Ratha hid her materials and the beginnings of her raft and returned to her clan-leader duties. But things seemed well enough settled that she could afford some time to herself, and she took advantage of the lull.
The following afternoon, Ratha crouched with her head bent over Ratharee’s back as the treeling wove the sticks and brush together with twisted bark cord. The raft was half-finished when she caught the scent of seamare mixed with that of the clan’s herding teacher.
She stood up as Thakur came forward with Aree on his back. Half-embarrassed, half-proud, she showed him what she and Ratharee had made. She couldn’t help a backward flick of her ears and hoped he wasn’t going to question her again about her lost cubs.
He said nothing about them. Instead, he circled the half-built raft, eying it judiciously.
“You might try adding some bundles of dry reeds near the water,” he suggested, and offered to go collect them. Ratha, suspecting that the offer was an apology of sorts for upsetting her, readily agreed, and after that the two spent all the time they could spare at the task. Sometimes, Ratha noticed, Thakur didn’t come, or he would arrive late from an unexpected direction, reeking of seamare. Not wanting to ask or answer any questions, she made him work downwind of her until finally the raft was finished.
Triumphantly she dragged it from the construction site to the brackish estuary. With Thakur and the treelings helping, she got the raft floating. As he steadied it, with Aree riding nervously on his shoulder just above the waterline, Ratha and her treeling clambered aboard.
The craft floated, but it rocked alarmingly, and she found herself shifting her feet continually to keep from tipping. When Thakur released the raft, it did tip, spilling both her and Ratharee off into the shallow water.
“It’s too narrow,” she said mournfully, after enduring an excited scolding from Ratharee. She licked herself and the treeling, trying to press the water from both soggy coats.
&nbs
p; Widening the raft and giving it more support in the form of bundled-reed outriggers helped solve the tipping problem, but Ratha soon found there was something else she had overlooked: She had no way to control the thing, to make it go where she wanted.
After riding weak but malicious currents to disaster several times in a row, she hauled her drenched self and her recalcitrant boat ashore and glared at it. Ratharee, who had abandoned her for Thakur in the interests of staying dry, made an insincere attempt to comfort her and backed away from the water streaming from her coat.
Irritably, she shook herself, growling that she should have known better than to waste effort on such a useless thing.
“It isn’t that useless,” Thakur observed. “It does keep you out of the water when you walk on it.” He added that if she tethered her raft to shore at both ends in a narrow part of the river, the Named wouldn’t have to wade or swim to get across.
That idea mollified Ratha somewhat. Instead of wrathfully shredding her treacherous construction, she followed Thakur’s advice, tethering her raft among the reeds at a narrow spot, where it served as a floating footbridge.
Having satisfied her urge for raft building, Ratha devoted her attention once more to things that had begun to worry her. One of these was the Firekeeper leader.
Ratha thought at first that Fessran was keeping away from her and Thakur because of the seamare smell they wore. Fessran balked at taking on the same scent. She pointed out that her work ruined her odor enough with the harsh stink of ash. And, as Firekeeper, she didn’t have much to do with seamares once the herders had settled into their duties.
Ratha accepted that. Those of the Named who had adopted the practice of disguising their scents had done so willingly. They saw the advantage when Thakur showed that it made the wave-wallowers less restive. But she didn’t want to force anyone into it; scents were strongly personal issues among the Named, and some had more sensitive noses than others.