Woman's Work: Shikari Book Four

by Alma T. C. Boykin

  “I was about to make the same statement.” He kissed the tip of her nose. “Was the creature outside the door coming or going?”

  “Witnesses claim it was coming, after breaching the security field. A herd of them moved through overnight and this morning. Yesterday they stirred up the not-a-kitfengs.”

  “We heard about those from the herd-supervisor.” Kor’s other ear flopped into parallel with it’s partner. “In detail. At length, shortly before he commented unkindly about humans who fail to properly care for livestock, including comparing the man’s ancestors unfavorably to tumble-gnaws and stink-pigs.” //Irritation/resignation/exhaustion.// As she studied him, Kor appeared thinner, and his fur lacked its customary healthy sheen—not dusty but dull. Tomás felt thinner as well, and had shadows under his eyes.

  “Most unfavorably,” Tomás agreed. He let go of her and stepped backward. “I need food and a hot bath, love.”

  She’d forgotten to start preparing anything. Rigi’s eyes teared up, and she put her hands to her mouth with dismay. “Oh! I’m terribly sorry, sirs, I failed to think about your needs. I apologize. I think I can—”

  “Makana and Andat went for food. I go to my quarters. Tomorrow is soon enough to speak.” Kor stalked out before Rigi could bow.

  “And I go for that bath. Do not open the door to any human male but me. I will explain later.” Tomás departed as well, leaving her staring at the door, hands still at her mouth.

  What had happened? Could he tell her? Rigi took a deep mental and physical breath. This was not the time for crying. She shook as if settling her fur, patted Martinus, and began cleaning up her pastels and other supplies, making space for the dining table. She also changed the bedding and put on a nicer dress.

  Andat and Makana arrived a few seconds before Tomás’s return. //Unhappiness/anger/frustration// preceded them into the shelter-tent, and they set four food-containers down, then bowed and departed without speaking to her. Rigi heard them growling, and Tomás’s quiet reply before he walked in. “They will be back in a few hours. There is a Staré meeting, one we do not need to attend, something relating to the civilian settlement.”

  He sat. Rigi served the meal. Something about the bread seemed a touch odd—the shape of the small loaves? Tomás chuckled, although she saw no humor in his expression. “This is from the Staré canteen. Major Chang must be most unhappy indeed.” Rigi hesitated and he gestured toward her chair. “Sit, please. I could eat Frisker, Slowth, and a few of the ribs piled outside the back wall.”

  “Yes, dear.” Together they sang the grace before food and ate, taking their time. The bread loaves contained sweet fruit paste inside them, to balance the sharp sauce on the meat. Rigi studied the thick, large grain on her slice of meat before taking a careful bite. It felt done, and looked done, and tasted… She tried a second piece. Darker than forest leaper, if that made sense, with a gamy aftertaste despite the sauce, and a little chewy. Was it from the haunch? No, maybe shoulder. After two slices, she decided that she’d eat it again if the opportunity arose, but only a female or juvenile. If the female were this gamy, the males must be almost inedible without a great deal of preparation and condiments. Tomás devoured four larger slices, along with extra bread and a second serving of yam. They ate without speaking, concentrating on the food. Rigi had been hungrier than she’d realized, and she nibbled a slice of candied ginter to forestall any digestive difficulties.

  “Are you eating enough, dear?” Tomás waved with one hand, taking in Rigi and everything else.

  She tried to recall. “I do not remember. The past two days have been rather more exciting than I had anticipated. Any morning that begins with finding a very large, barely dead mammal outside one’s bedroom wall…” She let the words fade away. She did not want to talk about Mrs. De LaMere. “Yesterday we, Makana and Andat and I, confirmed the gate that Kor thought he’d identified. And located a hot-spring with water channeled away from the wall that Makana suggested might indeed have fed a washing area, although that is theory on my part. I did not feel inclined to wade through the brush in search of the headspring after spending six hours excavating the gate.”

  “Hmm.” He leaned back, watching as she stood and tidied everything up, including rinsing the dishes the Staré had brought. She’d send them back the next morning, Rigi decided. She heard her husband standing and moving closer, and turned around. He pulled her close, ignoring her damp hands, and buried his face in her shoulder, then kissed her neck. “I needed you, Auriga Maris Regina. If only you’d been with us—, oh how I needed you, my Wise Eyes and steady right hand.” He shook a little, and Rigi didn’t ask. She held him in turn, trying to be steady and calm despite wanting to turn into a puddle of tears. He smelled clean, tired, but like nothing other than Tomás. Rigi stroked his back and prayed for strength.

  At last he released her. “I’m sorry. We lost four men on the scout. And then to discover that I now own a stud wombow, and that LeFeu pressed his attentions on you and threatened us both…” He sat again.

  Should she tell him what she’d learned? She had to. “Love, I’m not the only wife he’s approached. He assaulted Lieutenant De LaMere’s lady.”

  Pure predator looked at her from her husband’s eyes. “Was he successful with her?”

  “He physically overpowered her and hurt her. Her husband does not know. She’s afraid.”

  The predator’s left hand curled into a fist so tight Rigi saw white bone under the brown skin. “Scout and Huntress as my witnesses, I want to kill that beast. I want to thrash him so soundly that he will never, ever dare to raise his eyes from the dust when a woman walks past. I will not, not without warning, but I heard about the dance, and Capt. Lowen told me the rest.”

  Rigi went to her knees beside his chair and took the fisted hand in hers. “Love, can we just go home, please?” She shouldn't have asked, but the words came before she could stop them.

  The fist uncurled and a warm hand rested on her head as she leaned against his knee. “I want to take you home, with every fiber of my being.” He sighed. “Or even better. I want to take you west of the mountains and discover if I was imagining things or if we really did find something strange. But Kor and I have duties to our men, and LeFeu tarnished our honor, your honor, beloved. That cannot stand.” Fire burned in his eyes, banked but smoldering. “Lowen was not the only one to hear LeFeu when he insulted you. All the men and Staré know, and I have to act or I’ll lose respect. It is not official army policy, but everyone understands and they are waiting for me to respond now that I know.”

  What should she say? “I’m sorry.”

  Tomás looked older than twenty four, fine lines around his eyes and mouth that she’d not noticed before, that touch of white at his temples. “Rigi, love, heart of my heart, there is nothing for you to apologize for.” He stroked her hair with his free hand. “It really is too bad the beast of bones outside the wall didn’t stomp through LeFue’s tent while it toured the camp, but if the Scout and Huntress gave us all we wished, we’d be underwater in a drought.”

  Despite herself, Rigi had to smile at the hoary lament. The Staré had something similar—if everyone got what they wanted, all the wombows would be dead. She shifted onto one knee, then stood. He stood as well and kissed her. She leaned a little against him, then straightened up. “Did you happen to see anything like the beast-of-bones, before it became bones?”

  He wrinkled his nose. “Not exactly. We might have, but at a distance. Could you clear the table, please, so I can project a map?”

  She removed the last bits of this and that off of the camp-table, and opened up four of her larger sketchbooks to blank pages, setting them side by side so they formed a pale grid on the surface. Tomás hung the little projector from the hook under the lamp and turned it on, then found the map file he wanted. Rig stood beside him, orienting herself. She found the tongue of debris under the settlement. Debris? Why had she picked that word, she wondered, then set the thought aside for later
contemplation. The blue spot was the new settlement, still unnamed as best she knew, and the army camp to the south, near the small wetland that came from the warm stream. So the road up into the hidden valley below the mountains was there, the little brown line. Rigi looked south until she found the no-longer-dormant volcano, which had several new red dots on it. She pointed. “Red dots?”

  “Some are sensor locations, and some are either the melted remains of First World sites, or petrified monsters, or truly odd looking rock formations. I’m inclined to believe they are giant frozen lizard-wombeast crosses, myself.” She gave him a firm look. He raised one eyebrow. “What? That is no stranger than some of the other suppositions made about them.”

  “I shudder to guess.” He’d said the scouts were going past the First World site, so she found it again, and saw a lower-looking shoulder through the mountains, a pass of some kind probably, and followed it west, onto rolling lowlands.

  A gold dot appeared not far from where she’d been looking. “We got this far and found a few odd things, nothing that leaped up and proclaimed itself to be First World, but not really what one would expect to find in that sort of grassland. It’s quite lush, by the way, well watered, not too many trees.”

  “Is it as lush as the grass at The Happy Wombow?” The restaurant in NovMerv had a sign depicting the fattest wombow on Shikhari grazing on the greenest grass the painter could imagine.

  “Almost. I suspect it is what Slowth and Frisker dream of, if wombows dream.” He chuckled. “And well watered. Very well watered, with lots of gnats and biting flies and other water-born insects.”

  That did not sound so much like paradise to Rigi’s way of thinking.

  “So. Odd things here, and patterns under the grass, almost straight lines with different plants growing on top of them, much like the wall you observed here.” The little gold dot moved out, into the plains, then north to a river that flowed west before bending north. “We went this far. Found a smoking hole, and a few natural sink-holes.” She saw a small red dot marking the former First World site, and almost on top of it, symbols for caves or sink-holes. “I wanted to send in a remote explorer, but before we could, trouble found us.

  “Two of the scouts, a private and a fifth Stamm Salnar, drank from a mineral spring. To be blunt, Rigi, it killed them.” She rested one hand on his shoulder, not certain what else to do. “Kor found the headspring and we brought back samples for analysis. The water didn’t smell bad, it didn’t look bad, but something in it first made them sick, then their hair fell out and they died before we could get them to a site for medical evacuation. As if that were not bad enough, as we were coming back, through this way, we met Shikhari’s biggest predator." He shuddered. "That is, I hope it is the biggest land predator, because I have no desire ever to share a continent with anything that might be able to eat this monster, unless I have artillery and can call in a kinetic strike on the remains.”

  “I, I suppose that answers my question about what eats the beast-of-bones.”

  “It might. It had the teeth and claws of a big-animal hunter, or something that eats carrion from very large, tough animals. Not teeth, let me correct that. A short, strong beak with serrations like teeth, strong enough to break a wombeast’s leg with one bite, because it did. It chased a dozen wombeasts through our vehicle laager, smashed one of the scout-transports in the process, and killed a private and one of the Kortalas, ate just over half of him, and barely broke stride. Our shooters irritated it more than actually hurting it, as best I could tell. Kor got a better look at it. I was trying to relocate everyone and look for a second one. Huntress be praised, but it was alone.”

  He shook his head, closed his eyes for a moment, then reopened them. “The feathers were dull green with brown stripes. Enormous legs, smaller tail, wide and flat, and the fore-limbs have claws on them, flat, and it moved on all-fours. Thick neck, with a bright red ring around it, more feathers, and the beak was I think grey. The feet are this big across, four toes with a hind-spur.” He spread his arms and she ducked out of the way. “Sorry.”

  Rigi found her small sketchpad and a bit of pencil and quickly drew what she thought he’d described. “Like so?”

  “No, more hunch-shouldered, as if the front legs had been wings that became legs again. Flatter tail, like a steering paddle. Yes,” he peered over her shoulder. “Longer, more pointed head with the ring here,” he pointed a little closer to the head than Rigi had been thinking. “Three meters at the shoulder, feet like,” she ducked again.

  “One point seven meters,” she converted. If it was three meters at the shoulder, and a wombow stood about half that, a little smaller if it was a female… Rigi lightly outlined a wombow for scale, then gulped. “I was right when I said I did not care to meet whatever ate beast-of-bones.”

  “I do not care to ever see another one, unless I am in low Shikhari orbit, or looking at it from several tens of kilometers away. We may have to rename the terror-birds the ‘mildly scary birds’ and call this one an ‘unholy-terror-bird.’”

  “And it broke a wombeast’s leg in one bite?”

  “Crunch, gulp, ate the entire back leg in two bites, held the wombeast down with one hind foot while it killed and ate it. It has rather messy dining habits.” He looked pale under his tan, and Rigi noticed a tremor in his hand. For Tomás to be scared spooked Rigi. She initialed the drawing and took his hand. He squeezed hers. “I think you and Kor would have seen or sensed it coming in time to warn us, or Martinus would have. Kor was trying to sort something else out and the sergeant who was supposed to be on look-out had his head up his— ahem. His fundament.”

  Rigi considered what Uncle Eb or Aunt Kay would have said and found the likely words in her mental “proper ladies do not use except in emergencies” list.

  Tomás shook his head, and the golden dot on the map projection moved again. “We came back this way, found a decent route that wouldn’t need too much improvement to be usable for heavy-duty vehicles or wombow-wagons. From here,” a point in the hidden valley, “we picked up the road. We got in, oh, two hours before Mr. Jonko sent a message that I needed to come to pen number three. I assumed something had happened to Slowth and he did not want to upset you. Instead Kor and I were presented with a form to sign acknowledging receipt of one fully male wombow and were informed that the previous custodian of said animal couldn’t tell wombow feed from wormholes.”

  Rigi pushed a stray curl back behind her ear. “The man admitted that he’d forgotten to water Frisker, and then had raced him several kilometers to get into the camp when the large-animal warning sounded. He drank, oh, half the water Makana had loaded for Slowth, in case we did not find any. Slowth had eaten well and had slurped up as much of the stream as he could. Apparently wombows like warm water.”

  “Huh.”

  “Frisker was gasping for air, had bloody foam on his jaws when we got into camp, almost collapsed. His ear was paper thin when I touched it, and he sounded terribly out of condition. Slowth seemed like a racing wombow in her prime compared to Frisker.”

  “Apparently he is out of condition because of poor care and feeding.” Tomás turned off the projector and started to say something, then stopped. He turned to Rigi and she saw a mischievous gleam in his eyes, and a wicked little smile starting to bend his lips. “Love, my lady, what is Kor always threatening to do whenever his brother insists that he ‘act his Stamm and station?’”

  She blinked, trying to remember. She’d heard several ideas. Could he mean—? No, that wouldn’t make sense. A mental picture of Kor surrounded by two dozen wombows popped up, and she put her hands to her mouth. “No. Kor open a wombow dairy? Tortuh would shed every single strand of his haircoat in a single hour from pure horror at the very idea.”

  “Why not? He now owns half of a stud wombow, and a dozen or so first-clutch females wouldn’t be that hard to manage. A challenge to clean up after, true, but not hard to manage once he got the fences built, and the pens built, and learned how
to work the milking equipment, and learned how to doctor them, and found a location for the hutches for their young, and Nahla taught him how to prepare the milk, and…”

  Rigi’s giggles exploded into laughter, and Tomás’s more than matched hers. The image of Kor trying to deal with a herd of milk-wombows all wanting to be first in line was too much. Tomás hugged her and they laughed until Rigi forgot the day’s woes. “You do realize,” she managed at last, trying to catch her breath. “You do realize that I am not going to be able to look at Kor for quite some time without giggling?”

  He kissed her nose. “Good. I like the sound of your giggles.” He stroked her back and she closed her eyes, savoring his scent and having him home. Tomás was home, and Kor as well. They could fix everything fixable.

  Tomás and Rigi fell asleep before Makana and Andat returned. For once Rigi woke earlier than her husband, and since she happened to be on the open side of the bed, she slipped out from under the blankets, trying not to yelp when her feet missed her slippers and found a chilly draft at floor level. She dressed quietly, used the necessary, and started making tea. The air in the shelter-tent felt more than just chilly, and she unlocked the door, turned down the dissuader field, and poked her nose out. White fuzz coated the ground and her breath steamed. Rigi retreated into the comparative warmth of the shelter-tent and fastened the door. The hot tea felt good when she cradled the mug in her hands.

  As usual Tomás growled, grumbled, and drank his tea black and so hot it made Rigi’s throat hurt to watch him swallow. Then he kissed her good morning. “How are you feeling?”

  “Half-awake, with cold toes. It is below freezing outside.”

  “Really?” He lowered one of the window covers, looked, and raised it again. “The frost is quite thick. I suppose that means winter has arrived, or will come soon.”

  Rigi had not thought about winter, true winter like books described and not the cool and wet season on Southland. “Dear, do I need to find or make ear-covers for Makana and Andat, for the cold?”