To Ride a Rathorn

by P. C. Hodgell

  So did little wooden figures, cunningly carved.

  A monster that played with toy warriors?

  One of them held a little knife as if it were a sword, firelight flickering red on the blade. She wriggled across the floor as quietly as possible, picked it up, and fumbled to lay the edge against the rope securing her legs. She had almost sawed through when the figure on the bed yawned and stretched.

  Jame rolled under the bed. Her legs came free as she moved, but she lost the little knife, and her hands were still bound. The leather web of straps above her groaned and sagged. Big, bare feet hit the floor in front of her face. Overgrown toenails extended and flexed, rasping against the wood. Trinity, now what? Could she hide here until someone came to feed the brute?

  Now it . . . no, he was pissing in a nearby corner. Jame edged back from the spreading puddle. Did the man have a wine vat for a bladder?

  At last, the waterfall ceased.

  "Hmmm?" said a deep voice, rusty from lack of use. He was sniffing the air. Surely he couldn't smell her over the room's other assorted stinks.

  "Huh!"

  The bed upended against the wall with a crash. Jame rolled to her feet and plunged for the panel at the base of the door. It flipped open at her touch, but he caught her by the hair and jerked her back. She kicked at his face. He flicked aside her foot, grabbed her by the shirt, ripping it, and threw her into the wall.

  Play dead, she thought, sliding down the wall and lying still. Indeed, she was too shaken to do much else.

  Big hands picked her up and dropped her into the chair before the dying fire. The chair sagged, exhaling a sharp breath laced with dead mice. She curled up in its hollow, knees to chin, behind the veil of her long black hair. He bent and sniffed her all over, muttering deep in his throat. Instinctively, she raised her hands to protect her face.

  There was a moment's silence.

  She felt his hot breath snuffling on her wrists, and then his teeth bit down on the cords that bound them.

  Jame opened her eyes.

  He was kneeling before her, turning her freed hands over in his own. He had claws as big as a cave bear's, three inches long at least and too large to retract. Her own ivory nails, unsheathed, were delicate in contrast. She could make out little of his face in shadow, behind its wild mask of beard. He snuffled at her fingertips, then folded them in on themselves so that the nails were hidden and cupped within his own huge claws as if in a cage of polished bone. His touch was surprisingly gentle, almost protective.

  "D-d-d-d . . ."

  "Don't? Don't what?"

  "T-t-t-t . . ."

  "Tell? Don't tell?"

  The door burst open. In a blaze of torchlight, Jame saw the man's face, the savage cleft in his skull into which his wild graying hair tumbled. Something long ago had cleaved him half way down to the eyebrows. No one should survive such a blow, but this man had. He sprang back as a swung torch roared past his face, over Jame's head. His beard sparked as if infested with fireflies. The room stank of burnt hair. As he backed away, beating at his face, a big hand reached over the chair's back, grabbed Jame by the arm, and jerked her up. The room seemed to be full of giants, although there were only two of them. The one with the torch propelled her out the door into the hall and slammed the door after them. Something very big hit it on the other side. The wood shook, but held.

  Harn Grip-hard backed away. The torch, unnoticed, still flared in his hand. He was shaking, his broad face white beneath its perennial stubble. From inside the locked room came strange sounds. The captive was crying. Harn dropped the torch and blundered away. Jame picked it up before it could start a fire, noting that it was wet with blood where Harn had gripped it. With a last glance at the door, she followed him.

  Someone rounded a corner, fast, and almost knocked her off her feet.

  "Where have you been?" demanded Graykin fiercely, grabbing her by the shoulders. She noted that he was liberally festooned with cobwebs. He also looked angry enough to kill her, presumably for still being alive. "Everyone is looking for you!"

  "Tell you later. Damn. Where did he go?"

  They tracked Harn by the blood drops on the floor, Graykin hissing questions to which Jame had no answers. She was touched that her peculiar servant really had been worried about her, although he hid it well behind an affronted air: How dare she upset him like that? She had no idea at first where they were, the inner halls of Old Tentir being dark enough even by day to require candles.

  "What time is it?" she asked Graykin abruptly.

  "Late afternoon."

  "Good. What day?"

  He stared at her, then looked quickly away. She became aware that her shirt was hanging in tatters over bare skin.

  "The same," he said, not very clearly, but she understood.

  "Very good."

  Here at last was a hall slotted on one side with narrow windows. They had emerged at the northeastern corner of the third floor, near a door that opened to one of Tentir's four watchtowers. Jame recalled hearing that during his stint as commandant Harn had made his quarters in this out-of-the-place. She set the torch in a wall sconce.

  "I need clothes," she told Graykin. "Go back to the barracks and tell Rue. She'll find me something. Bring it here."

  When he had gone, radiating irritation that his mistress needed help from anyone but him, Jame climbed into a rush of sweet air.

  On the first of two levels, windows opened to the north and south onto the sweep of the Riverland. Below, the Silver threaded through gathering shadows under as yet sun-crowned heights. It took Jame a moment, blinking against the light, to make out two large chairs drawn up before a cold fireplace. Someone slumped in the one with its back to her.

  "You stink," growled the unseen occupant, "like a tavern latrine. Bathe. There." A large hand waved toward the northern window, under which Jame now saw a large tub of rapidly cooling water, undoubtedly brought here for the randon's solitary ablutions. She hesitated only briefly, then stripped off what was left of her now decidedly rank clothing.

  He threw her a sharp look, as if still not entirely convinced that she wasn't Blackie in disguise.

  More like black and blue, she thought wryly, but bruises only hurt for a while, turned interesting colors, and then went away. She was used to them.

  "How did you know where I was, ran?" she asked, gratefully sinking into the tub. Harn would have overlapped it on all sides, but it fit her slender limbs nicely.

  He grunted. "I heard a rumor that you'd had the good sense to leave Tentir. I should have known better. Anyway, I went to check."

  On the way, he had encountered the Randir Tempter helping a colleague back to their quarters.

  "Proper shredded, his legs were. I knew your cat's work when I saw it."

  Harn had found the ounce racing about the Knorth barracks, bouncing off walls, scratching anyone who tried to stop him. Vant was shouting that the cat had gone mad and calling for archers. When no one moved (except to get out of Jorin's way), he had grabbed a bow but then inexplicably tripped, nearly impaling himself on the arrow. By then, Captain Hawthorn had arrived, looking for Jame. She and Brier had thrown a blanket over the ounce as he hurtled past and bundled him off, all teeth and claws, to a vacant room. There they had left him, from the sound of it, careening off the walls, floor, and ceiling.

  Harn had put together bloody legs, an hysterical cat, and a lost Knorth. Then he had gone off to storm the Randir quarters.

  Here, he fell silent.

  Jame ducked to rinse soap out of her hair, then rose and slid, dripping, into the enveloping folds of Harn's gray dress coat. She picked up a shirt to dry her hair, hoping belatedly that Harn hadn't meant to wear it that night, curled into the chair opposite him, and waited.

  The burly randon slumped in the over-sized chair, staring blankly at the previous winter's ashes, his arms limp on the chair's rests. The knuckles of his left hand were broken and crusted with drying blood. Finally he spoke in a low, hoarse voice, as if to h
imself.

  "So I go to the Randir. They know I'm coming, plain enough, because the door is shut. I knock. Inside, I think I hear someone snicker. Then they begin to chant, oh, so softly, 'Beast, beast, beast,' and I knock louder, to drown them out."

  As he spoke, he began unconsciously to beat the wooden arm of his chair with his clenched fist, harder and harder, reopening the cuts on his battered knuckles.

  Jame slipped out of her chair, knelt beside him, and wrapped her own hands around his fist as it descended. She wondered, biting her lip, if she was about to add broken bones to the day's other mementos. Harn didn't seem to notice her grip, but his blows faltered and stopped. His fingers unclenched and his big hand, relaxing, hung over the chair's arm. Blood dripped from it onto the floor. Jame cleaned the cuts with the shirt, still damp from her hair.

  "I think I must have beaten down the door," he said slowly, "because the next thing I know I'm inside, surrounded by a ring of spears. No one was laughing then.

  "They say, 'Leave, or we'll kill you.'

  "I say, 'Bring me your bitch temptress or you'll have to.'

  "So finally she comes, and I ask her where the Highlord's sister is. She says . . . she says, 'Look in your future lodgings.' And smiles."

  Jame considered this as she ripped strips of cloth to bandage his wounds. That done, she wadded up the torn, bloody shirt and threw it into the back of the cold grate. Then she resumed her seat across from him. Sunk deep in his chair, Harn reminded her of a large, wild animal flinching away from the light, drawing back into self-imposed, self-destructive isolation.

  "Become the beast that you know you are . . ."

  "The man in the locked room is definitely Shanir," she said, "but I don't think he's a berserker. That needn't happen to you. Who is he, ran? What happened to him?" A sudden thought struck her. "Don't tell me I've stumbled across the long-lost Randir Heir!"

  "I won't because you haven't," snapped Harn, rousing. "Besides, Randiroc isn't lost. He just doesn't want to be found. Neither would you if the Witch of Wilden and Shadow Guide assassins were after you."

  In fact they were, but she wasn't hiding. Yes, and look how that had worked out so far.

  Harn raised a hand to rub his eyes and frowned at the bandages, clearly surprised to find them there. "We call him Bear," he said.

  " 'We'?"

  "Every commandant knows about him and attends to his needs. Since we command Tentir by rotation, that means all the senior randon, not to mention the sergeants and servants. He was one of us. The best. Until the White Hills when a war axe did . . . that."

  Thirty-four years ago, thought Jame, just after the slaughter of the Knorth women when her father's misguided revenge against the Seven Kings of the Central Lands had led to such carnage and to his own exile. So much pain led back to that time, to those events.

  "It must have been an awful wound," she said, involuntarily imagining it red and raw, white shards of skull and gray, spattered brain. "Why wasn't he offered the White Knife?"

  "His lord lay dead on the field and his heirs were already squabbling over the spoils. No one had time for the dying."

  Jame remembered Tori the previous autumn, wandering alone through the bloody shambles at the Cataracts, drawn by his Shanir power (if only he realized it) to those bound to him who lay mortally wounded, bringing them honorable release with a white-hilted suicide knife. A true lord cared for his own—in life, in death.

  "There was so much loss, and confusion, and pain." Harn leaned forward, elbows on knees, big hands tightly clasped, fresh injuries forgotten for old. He spoke to the ashes as if to those distant dead, as if still trying to understand. "I was there. I saw it all, until the Highlord's madness took me, and then—ancestors only know what I did, and to whom. We fought our own kind, you know, Kencyr against Kencyr, the Host against our own kindred hired out as mercenaries to the Seven Kings. It was . . . terrible."

  "And Bear?"

  "His younger brother found him on the third day, under a pile of the slain. Oh, he was strong, was Bear, to have lived that long with blood and brains leaking onto ground already too sodden to drink in any more. At first we thought he was dead and put him on the pyre, but then he moved in the flames and we pulled him out. Better if we had let him burn alive. However, his brother wouldn't let him go. After all, our kind have recovered from worse and so did he—in body, at least. In mind—well, you saw. The new lord of his house didn't want him shambling around his precious keep, so the college took him in. After all, he was . . . is . . . one of us. For awhile, he even taught the Arrin-thar."

  "The what?"

  "A rare, armed combat discipline, based on clawed gauntlets. Originally, only Shanir like Bear practiced it. You saw his hands."

  Jame folded her own into Harn's jacket. She had completely forgotten about them while tending to his injuries. Her gloves were with the rest of her clothes beside the tub.

  "There are many Shanir here," the Randir had said.

  Highborn Shanir like her cousin Kindrie were often sent off to the Priest's College at Wilden—in a sense, thrown away. It occurred to her now that Tentir would be a logical place for Kendar Shanir to gather.

  "Are there other Shanir-based fighting skills, ran?"

  "Many, but seldom practiced. Most Highborn don't approve of them."

  That made sense. Given the disaster of the Fall and the Shanir role in it, Tori was hardly alone in his hatred of the Old Blood. Most lords didn't even know that they were Shanir. All must be, however, in order to bind Kendar to them. The greater their power, the larger their house, except that some like Caldane added the Kendar bound to their established sons. In the old days, these new lords would have gone off to set up their own minor houses as the Min-drear had, often near the Barrier. Now, however, all nine major houses held their people close, at the most sending them out as mercenaries to support those at home here in the barren Riverland.

  "But why is Bear caged, ran? To be forced to live like that, even to spread rumors of a monster to keep cadets away. . . . It's cruel. It's intolerable."

  Harn rounded on her, so fiercely that she shrank back into her chair. "Don't you think we know that? He was confined because he mauled a cadet to death. Never mind that the fool had been taunting him all winter, as we found out later."

  He paused and gulped. "I . . . ripped the arm off someone once myself. One of Caldane's cousins. In a berserker fit. Because he taunted me. Blackie had moved north to the Highlord's seat by then. With him nearby, I can control myself. Without him. . . . I would have used the White Knife, but Blackie forbade it and sent me instead to Tentir as commandant. That's why I set up quarters here, to protect the rest of the college."

  He shook himself. "Anyway, seclusion turned Bear even more savage. Somewhere in that broken head, he knows who he is and what honor is due him. We all know it. But what can we do? He can't be allowed to roam free, to savage the next cadet stupid enough to make fun of him. We gave him a White Knife. He picked his toenails with it. Some would poison his food or rush him with spears like a cornered boar, but God curse anyone who takes the life of such a man without a fair fight."

  He beat the chair's arm again in time to his words, making Jame flinch: "We don't know what to do."

  Jame had no idea either, but she was going to think about it.

  "Tell me why the Randir hate the Knorth."

  The question jolted him from his personal nightmare and reminded him to whom he spoke. "That's Tentir business."

  "So, presumably, is Bear. That didn't stop the Randir from trying to feed me to him."

  He looked hard at her. "You aren't going away, are you? You should. This making you lordan is madness. Blackie won't hold to it. He can't. One way or the other, it will destroy him."

  Jame considered this. "It might. I'm not stupid, ran, nor am I some willful, spoiled brat hell-bent on playing soldier. You know that. You've watched me fight. I was blooded long before Brier Iron-thorn made me a present of my own front tooth, or M'lad
y Kallystine gave me this." She almost touched the scar on her cheek, but remembered in time to keep her hands hidden.

  The burly randon regarded her almost with amusement. "How long ago, then, child?"

  Jame frowned, thinking. "Honestly, I don't remember. It feels as if I was born blooded, but then so is everyone. The point is, what I don't know, I will learn, whatever it costs. The one thing I can't afford is ignorance. So, tonight I become a cadet. Tell me what I need to survive until then."

  He gave an explosive snort of laughter. "I think you'll survive us all. Whether we survive you is another matter. All right. When your father Ganth was a cadet here, he was present at the death of a Randir named Roane—a cousin and favorite of the Witch of Wilden, as it turned out."

  Jame remembered the stain on the floor of the Knorth apartment. "Was this in Greshan's quarters?"