To Ride a Rathorn

by P. C. Hodgell

  Someone was shouting. The words were broken by distance, water, and tree, but they were coming closer. Again came the cry, clearer now:

  ". . . rathorn! There's a rathorn in the woods!"

  The second Caineron plunged out of sight—from the sound of it, into a thorn bush—but Gorbel had turned and now stood as if rooted to the spot. Then he began, slowly, to retreat backward toward the rock's slippery edge.

  Jame and Timmon jumped to their feet.

  "Watch out!" Timmon shouted, but too late: Gorbel's foot came down on vacant air. He tottered for a moment, arms wind-milling wildly, then fell. He landed with a great splash and immediately sank. The water turned red. Trinity, if he had hit the ledge . . .

  Timmon dived in after him. On the verge of following, Jame froze.

  Something white had emerged on top of the rock; something like a horse, but clad underneath in bands of ivory armor from throat to loins. Ivory also masked its face like a battle helm, and out of it grew two horns, the smaller between flared nasal pits, the larger, wickedly curved, between deep-set ruby eyes. It stared down at Jame, and bared its fangs with a long, soft hiss of satisfaction.

  Jame felt her jaw drop. The last time she had seen the rathorn colt, it had only been a foal. Time passes: it had grown.

  Timmon surfaced with a thrashing, sputtering Gorbel. The back-flop had apparently saved the latter's neck, but not taught him how to swim.

  "Help!" Timmon shouted, and flinched as Gorbel's flailing fist caught him in the nose. Then the weight of sodden clothing dragged them both down again.

  Rathorn be damned. Jame dived in.

  Again, the shock of cold water, again the glimmering depths, with two figures sinking into them. Their struggle had taken them out beyond the ledge. Timmon was trying to strip off the deadly coat, which seemed to have developed a dozen extra arms, while Gorbel clutched at him with a drowning man's panic. Jame swam after them. Her ears throbbed in time to her heart-beat and her lungs ached by the time she caught up. The Caineron, mercifully, finally went limp. She hooked her nails in the coat and ripped, releasing a fresh cloud of red dye. They wrestled the remains off a now unconscious Gorbel and struck out for the surface, taking him with them.

  Far below in the rock shadows, eyes as large and unblinking as dinner plates thoughtfully watched them go.

  Gasping, Knorth and Ardeth dragged the Caineron ashore. Gorbel made a gurgling sound. Timmon turned him on his side as he began to vomit water and what was left of his lunch.

  They were on a spit of rock between the upper basin and the first of a series below, with water thundering down through the narrow throat of a chasm at one end. The noise covered the sound of approaching hooves. Jame had no doubt, however, what had just breathed down the back of her neck. She turned and found herself eye to eye with the rathorn colt. His nasal tusk came up almost gently under her chin, lifting it, obliging her to rise or be impaled.

  Something red flew out of the water with a wet sound—p-toot!—as if it had been spat. Gorbel's coat whacked the colt in the head and flung its dismembered arms around his neck. He squealed and reared, fore-hooves flailing, rear slipping on the wet rock. Over he went, backward, to a shout of alarm from Timmon and a squawk from Gorbel.

  Jame ran.

  Below Breakneck Rock, a wall of thorns kept her beside the river as it snaked down the mountain side from wide pool to narrow rapids, from outthrust rock spit to cleft gorge. The roar of water deepened as more streams joined it, covering any sound of pursuit, and she must watch where she placed her bare feet rather than look back. There was no turning to fight such a thing anyway, no chance at all except either to lose it or to reach safety before it caught her.

  Jame paused on top of a boulder the size of a small house. Rubble spilled precipitously down its far side to a narrow rock ledge. Beyond that gaped the mouth of Perimal's Cauldron with the river thundering down into it and mist billowing out. From here, she could see no way out below. She was turning to back-track when a stone shifted under her foot and suddenly she was falling.

  There are probably worse things than tumbling, naked, down a steep, rocky slope, but at the moment Jame couldn't think of any, unless it was the abrupt stop at the end. Bruised and breathless, she found herself sprawling on the stone ledge at the cauldron's smoking rim, amazed that she hadn't broken anything or gone over the edge.

  But she wasn't alone.

  Kinzi-kin.

  On the far landward end of the ledge stood a figure wreathed in mist, haloed with thorns. Long white hair—or was it a mane?—stirred in the updraft. Ears pricked through it. Jame wondered if in her fall she had cracked her skull without noticing it. As the mist shifted, at one moment the other's form appeared to be that of a thin, pale woman; the next, that of a spectral horse, and yet not quite.

  Trinity. Was it a Whinno-hir? A name came back to her: Bel-tairi. The missing White Lady.

  One dark, liquid eye regarded her warily.

  My lady Kinzi bade me find you.

  Jame sat up, wincing.

  "Your lady . . . my great-grandmother Kinzi . . . is dead. Sorry. It was a long time ago."

  The dark eye showed a white rim.

  How long?

  Jame thought fast, doing sums. "Er . . . thirty-four years."

  The other flinched. Jame saw her clearly for a moment as a small, painfully thin mare who pawed the ground in denial and tossed her head as if to dislodge those words that threatened to shatter her already tottering world. The hidden half of her face emerged briefly from the veil of silvery hair. Something about it was terribly wrong.

  Then she was a woman again, with trembling hands clasped over her ears as if to hear nothing more.

  No, no, no. Dead? And for so long? Oh, Kinzi, for me it was one endless night full of terrible dreams. Kinzi-kin, my lady bids me warn you . . . but my lady is dead, yet she summoned me, spoke to me. In a grove. Under the eyes of so many silent watchers.

  That must have been the stand of trees where the Tishooo had left the Knorth death banners hung as if in some aerial hall, Jame thought.

  "Kinzi's banner called to you, lady?" she asked, to make sure.

  Yes, yes. Oh, her blood must have trapped her soul in the weave of her death.

  Damn. Jame had suspected as much with Aerulan. The wider implications appalled her, but there was no time to consider them now.

  "You said my great-grandmother sent you to warn me. About what?"

  Rocks rattled down, followed a moment later by the rathorn like a bolt of white lightning, all horns, hooves, and fangs. The Whinno-hir screamed and vanished. Where she had stood was a gap in the cloud-of-thorn bushes. Jame bolted through it, the rathorn roaring on her heels. The path ended in a wall of thorns. Beneath them was a dark hole, a burrow leading to some animal's lair. Jame dived down it. Wet skin and damp soil turned it into a slick, muddy chute, with a quick glimpse at the bottom of furry hindquarters scuttling for dear life out the back door.

  The rathorn crashed down on the bush. Thorn and dry branch snapped against his armor and between the twin scythes of his horns. Jame started up, but her loose hair caught on the brambles. Trapped, through a fretwork of thorns she saw something white eclipse the darkening sky like a falling moon. Then the rathorn smashed down again, and she scrambled free.

  Her wild flight ended abruptly against a pair of legs. There was a crescent of them, and a spiked ring of spears leveled over her head at the bush. In its ruin, the rathorn reared and screamed his defiance. His sides and flanks were bloody from the bite of thorns and his red, red eyes glared into hers.

  Come away from them, said his voice in her mind. Come away with me and let us be done.

  A hand on her shoulder stopped her.

  The colt snorted. If not today, then tomorrow, or next week, or next year. Wait. Then he turned and plunged away.

  Captain Hawthorn grounded her spear with a sigh. "One thing about having you around, lady," she said to Jame. "Life is never dull."

  I
I

  They all ended up in the Commandant's office, which turned out to be adjacent to the Map Room.

  Timmon had found his pants. Jame was shivering naked inside a borrowed jacket. Gorbel, in his pink-stained shirt, was throwing a tantrum.

  "You have to let me hunt it!" he raged, leaning over the Commandant's desk and fairly shouting in his face. "No one has ever bagged a rathorn before! When am I ever likely to get another chance like this?"

  Gorbel, obviously, was an avid hunter. Jame had never seen him so animated or less like the miniature version of his father that he always tried to be—not that Caldane didn't hunt too, she thought, remembering the Merikit skins, scalps still attached, strewn about his bedroom at Restormir.

  No one had mentioned the pale Whinno-hir. Jame began to wonder if she had imagined their strange conversation. Great-grandmother Kinzi's soul trapped in the web of her death? A warning never quite delivered?

  "You've got to let me hunt him!" Gorbel cried, adding in a rising note of triumphant, "Father would insist!"

  The Commandant regarded him thoughtfully.

  "Something does have to be done about that beast, sir," said Hawthorn, regretfully. "I've never seen its like, all white and red eyed—magnificent, in terrible a way—but it's clearly a rogue. A death's-head. No rage will let it join, and they're social creatures, rathorns, for all their filthy tempers. On its own, it will go mad, if it hasn't already. It's dangerous."

  The other randon murmured agreement.

  "At least we know now why the herd has been acting up," said the horse-master. "Of course it would, with something like that on the prowl."

  "Yes, but why here? True, some of them are man-eaters, but to attack so close to a keep and with such determination . . ."

  Everyone looked at Jame.

  She glared back through a tangle of wet, muddy hair with enough broken thorns in it to build a respectable bird's nest and wished she could stop shivering. It wasn't just that she was cold and wet, or that under the coat her body was laced with stinging scratches. The colt had been inside her mind. She could still taste his fury, but beneath that the grief and aching loneliness. She had taken away the only thing he had ever loved. Now she was all he had left, and he wanted her dead only a shade more fiercely than he wished for his own death.

  "Indeed," said the Commandant, "something must be done. But not by cadets."

  Gorbel looked stunned, then furious. The Commandant ignored him.

  "Organize a hunt. Take randon and sergeants, war-hounds and hawks. The Falconer will be our eyes, as usual. See to it. Dismissed."

  And they all found themselves trooping outside, including a stunned, stammering Gorbel. "B-b-b-but the Commandant is a Caineron!" he said with genuine, almost hurt bewilderment.

  Timmon shrugged. "Perhaps Daddy's reach isn't as long as you supposed. Perhaps Sheth will let you kill something later. Something small."

  "Ah!" Gorbel snarled and stalked off, squelching loudly in his wet boots.

  "I'll see you back to your quarters," said Timmon to Jame, sounding a shade too pleased with the situation.

  "No, you won't," she snapped, shrugging off his solicitous arm.

  "Don't you at least want this?" he called after her, holding up the borrowed coat which had come off in his hand.

  "No!"

  Cadets stared, aghast, or dived for cover as she stormed down the arcade. One, his arms full of armor to be cleaned, fell with a great clatter head first over the rail into the training square.

  Rue met Jame at the Knorth door. The cadet's jaw fell. "Lady, you . . . you're . . ."

  "Wet, cold, muddy, and in a foul temper. Just get me some hot water before I kill somebody. And stop staring at my ribs!"

  Chapter XII: Unsheathed

  Summer 43-44

  I

  Jame woke with a start, heart pounding, tangled in sweat soaked bedding. Trinity, when would these nightmares stop? But this one had been different. No hot, close room, no drunken laughter or unholy hunger. They had been chasing . . . someone. Her, she thought. In pain. In despair. How her face had throbbed.

  Was that me? Jame wondered, touching her cheek, surprised to find the scar so slight.

  In her dream, it had sprawled across half her face, and she had been running very fast on all fours.

  There had also been terror.

  They would finish what he (who?) had started or, worse, they would give her back to him.

  Oh, Kinzi, is this all that honor has come to mean?

  And he hunted with them in his gilded armor, as avid for blood as the hounds that bayed on her trail.

  "Ho! So ho! Hark, hark, hark!"

  There were voices below in the training square, in the predawn glimmer.

  Jame scrambled out of her disordered bed and crossed to the inner window, snatching up clothes as she went. The square seethed with subdued, purposeful activity. Horses, dogs, randon and sergeants . . . of course. This morning they would set out to kill the rathorn colt.

  Downstairs, she found most of the college's cadets lining the rail, watching and chattering excitedly.

  "I reckon they've called up every hound in the college except Gorbel's private pack and Tarn's old Molocar," Dar was saying as Jame slipped between Brier and Vant to a place at the rail.

  "Tarn is as mad as fire about that," remarked someone from Vant's ten. "He won't admit that old Torvo isn't up to it. Anyway, the lymers are already out casting for the scent."

  "They'll start at the pool," said Quill wisely. "I hear it crashed through the thorns, so there'll be a blood trail, at least at first. Once the direhounds catch sight of it, well, that will be that."

  Not far away, the Commandant was checking the tack on his tall, gray stallion Cloud. The horse wore a coat of iron rings interlaced with strips of rhi-sar leather, protecting his chest, sides, and flanks with skirts long enough, hopefully, to foil a rathorn's upward thrust. His rider wore corresponding light armor, designed for the hunt. Man and horse had the same sheen of misted steel, the same chill of purpose.

  Two direhounds, impatient for the chase, turned on each other snapping and snarling. They moved almost too fast for the eye to follow, a blur of lean, white bodies, black legs, and square, black heads. Huntsmen grabbed them by their spiked collars and wrenched them apart, but not before one had caught the other's foreleg in its powerful jaws and snapped the bone with an audible crunch. The hunt-master knelt to assess the damage. The hound whined and was licking his face as he slipped a blade between its ribs.

  "First blood of the hunt," said Erim uneasily as the randon cradled the dead hound, "and it's ours."

  There would be more, thought Jame, eyeing the array of swords, boar-spears, and bows.

  "I wish," she said to no one in particular, "that they would just leave him alone."

  Vant gave her a sidelong glance. "Now, lady, we can't have a brute like that on the loose, can we? Or were you thinking you'd like to ride him?"

  That caused a ripple of laughter; Jame's poor horsemanship was fast becoming the stuff of legend. The horse-master swore that she had found every way to fall off known to man or beast, and then invented a few more.

  "Look," said someone.

  They all leaned over the rail, craning to the left to watch as Gorbel entered the square. He was dressed in hunting leathers and carried a boar-spear as if he knew how to use it. The hunt-master stroked the hound's head one last time, lowered it to the ground, and rose to meet the Caineron Lordan.

  What they said was inaudible to the onlookers, but Gorbel's growing anger spoke for itself. He turned, blustering, to the Commandant.

  Sheth shot a sidelong smile at Harn Grip-hard, who stood stone-faced by the rail, watching, clad in his everyday, rumpled clothes. "Since the Highlord's commander does not deign to hunt down and kill the . . . er . . . emblem of his house," the Commandant announced in his clear, light voice to the college at large, "he stays here, in charge during my absence. Ask him."

  Even as Gorbel turn
ed, speechless and baffled, Harn was shaking his massive head. No.

  Vant laughed as Caineron lordan stalked back to his barracks.

  "Better luck next time, Gorbelly!"

  "Be quiet," said Brier.

  Vant turned to her from his haughty height although, indeed, he was slightly shorter than she. "What was that, five?"

  Jame spoke without looking at either of them. "She meant, 'Shut up, ten.' It's tacky to gloat."