I say, “They’ve no way of going back where they came from.”
“Kill them. So kill them.”
Mounts all yell it, but Wilds don’t.
That’s when my father jumps up yelling, “No,” a whole row of nos.
Then Little Master. . . . I can’t believe it. He walks right down in front by himself and gives a Hoot ho. Not as big as he could, but big enough. One is all it takes. All it ever takes. Except this time I think they would have stopped, just seeing a Hoot walk.
For a minute everybody’s too surprised to do anything, but then they get their wits back, and they—the mounts, not the Wilds—jump towards Little Master and towards me. My father hits the ones in front. Two go flying, right into the ones behind them. Then he kicks the one coming in from the side. He’s shouting his nos again.
I just stand there watching. By the time I think to try to help my father and fight, too, they’ve stopped.
Yes! I must . . . I must . . . learn to fight!
Then there’s gasps—everybody—dozens of gasps all at the same time.
When my father and I turn around, there’s one mount dead, blood all over his fancy mustache. Nobody could have done it except Little Master. I suppose to save himself. I hope that was it. Well, it was. That mount must have tried to grab him. Don’t they know any better? Or did they think because he’s just a young one?
Everybody stands there. Even the mounts look shocked. Nobody moves. It’s Sunrise—comes to check on the dead mount first—of course Sunrise. Then two women and a man carry him into the main lodge. Sunrise goes with them.
Was all this my fault? I mean, because I made the speech better?
Then my father gets up on the roof of the overhang, above all of us. Climbs up the rocks of the walls as if they were the cliffs. His voice is big as mine was, and clear and smooth. He’s like me: When we talk, people hear it. But how come he can speak clearly sometimes, but mostly not? It’s as if it has to be a life-and-death matter.
“To kill, one by one, solves nothing. We will make trouble, but not like this, and only where it counts. We’ll kill as a strategy, to prove we won’t live as they’ve made us live. And we’ll find a way for them to get themselves around that doesn’t involve us. We used to have Ultralites. We had scooters. We had motorized chairs. We can invent such things over again.”
Can we? Can we really?
But now he’s pointing at Little Master and me. “We’re going to need this young Hoot. You must protect him. He’s going to help us.”
Well, he never asked Little Master if he wanted to help. Of course I’m not sure about myself, either. We’ll wait and see what happens. Besides, not many except my father know who Little Master really is. Hoots always seem to know right away. They just look and they know, as if there’s some mark we can’t see, or maybe some overtones in his voice. I’m not going to tell. We’ll just go along and see what happens when the Hoots see who we have here. No matter what my father thinks will happen, it probably won’t. The minute the Hoots recognize their one-and-only Excellent Excellency, Future-Ruler-Of-Us-All, who knows what they’ll do?
Chapter Ten
By now we must be hundreds of miles from where we usually always are. We’re camped on a wide plain. It was full of flowers, but they’re all squashed down. There’s red and yellow torn bits of color tramped into the hard-packed sand. One batch of us is camped where it’s salty. There’s a patch of orange mold over there. That’s where there used to be a lake, but now there’s just a crust of silica and fungus. Hoots didn’t take that water, it’s been gone since way before they came. Little Master and I would like to go over there and see it up close. We’d like to wander all over but they won’t let us. We have to be guarded. We’re special. We’re a little bit scared for ourselves, too. I told Little Master I’ll defend him to the death, and he says he’ll do the same for me. “Cross hearts,” he says. “Cross them six times six.”
“You don’t even know what that is.”
I guess he will now. I see him counting on his fingers and looking puzzled. I know he thinks he hasn’t been learning the things The-Future-Ruler-Of-Us-All should know. Sunrise taught me all that stuff a long time ago.
We’re working on ourselves in a different way—for safety’s sake. He practices walking whenever he can and I practice fighting. To keep it secret, we have to do it in the tent. Except what I need is to fight with somebody. My father won’t help. You’d think a former mount of the guards would want me to know how.
They’ve already rescued Merry Mary and her nobody baby. It was easy even though they had less than half the Sams and Sues we have now. I haven’t seen her yet, and I’m not sure I want to, but I didn’t dare tell my father that. They’re going to take her up to the village. I guess I’ll have to see her sometime. He thinks I still care about her. She’s a big disappointment. Why did she do something like that, especially after she’d had me?
The funny thing is, she named the baby for me. Both its names! And even though it’s a girl! I mean, its Hoot name is Smiley and its person name is Charlotte. And—I can’t believe it, but I guess I have to—my father says she calls her Charley for short. Does she think that will make it a somebody? When my father told me, I didn’t have my wits about me. I couldn’t say a word. I didn’t even ask why.
Here it’s Sams and Sues as far as you can see. You can’t see the end of us or the beginning. (Just like those little red flowers.) And every single one of us, no matter that my father keeps saying and saying otherwise, is here to get rid of Hoots. There’s freed guards’ mounts, and civilized Sams and Sues rescued from their stalls, but mostly it’s Wilds from the mountains. You can always tell them by their homemade clothes and their hair. They don’t have hairdos at all. They just cut it short and let it lie whichever way it falls.
Little Master is the absolutely only Hoot around. Our guards’ mounts keep near us all the time to guard him. I guess me, too. The mounts don’t fight among themselves so much when they have a job to do. And they’re glad of a job where the boss isn’t a Hoot and there’s nothing in their mouths. I still have that fancy bit with the chains on the sides. (They call that thing in the middle a spade.) I was worried when my father found it in the lean-to, but he said—even though it makes him throw up to look at it, I can tell—he said to bring it along and keep it handy.
There’s something I never thought of before. I don’t know why I didn’t, because you’d think I would have, if I had any sense at all. That is, that there’s a Present-Ruler-Of-Us-All, a grand (as they say) “Magnanimous, Munificent Excellent Excellency Ruler-Of-Us-All.” All of us are saving me and Little Master for when we meet him . . . or maybe it’s a her. We never can tell what sex they are, so maybe we’ll never know, and anyway it doesn’t ever seem to matter to them.
They say the Hoots, when they first came, caught us by surprise. They say they were surprised, too. First, that they were here at all, crashed, and, second, that we were here. They didn’t know what to do with us. They didn’t know if we were trainable or not. It took a long time to get where we are now. Now it’s all coming undone.
There were swarms of them then, all bunched together and sparking their poles. Their spaceship was two miles long, and, since Hoots are small, it held a lot of them. Some little ones were snoozing inside their mothers. They swarmed out (of the ship and of their mothers) and jumped on us right away. Odd things happened. A strange virus got a lot of us. Their sounds could drive us crazy. Sounds could even kill. The Hoots say they didn’t know that then, or they never would have sung those sounds, but some of us think they did know it.
Those poles were part of their ship’s drive. They’ve lasted a long time but they won’t last forever. Recently we found a big pile that had given out.
They always say they never killed—neither us nor our dogs—but they set a lot of fires, and they must have done something—must have found a way for things to happen, accidents and diseases and a lot of dangerous mistakes.
But we like flat places, too. Some of us here have bicycles. I had heard of them, but I never saw any until now. There’s lots. Some of those bicycles have motors. Little Master likes the look of those. I like them, too. They keep saying we have a secret weapon. I wonder if those are it.
But then other things come by . . . in the sky. There’s this sound above us. Little Master and I and everybody look up. There are fliers. Like the bicycles with motors and with wings. They have a Sam or Sue driving them, waving down at us.
Little Master yells. “Oh, oh, oh, yes! Yes!” He reaches up with both hands as he does when reaching for me to take him.
The day after those fliers come by . . . (We tried to count them. I say thirty-five and Little Master says thirty-eight.) . . . my father calls me and Little Master to a special secret tent. Jane has to lead us there. I don’t know how she knows which one. They all look the same to me. Here my father isn’t the only person in charge. There are six Sams and two Sues. Some of them aren’t even Seattles. Only three Sams and the two Sues can speak properly. They all have scars, some quite nicely painted over. Not a single one of them has a decent hairdo or decent shoes, even the ones who are clearly Tame.
It’s an old scarred Sue who speaks to us, not my father. She looks at us really hard, but I can tell that not even she can see who Little Master really is, and I don’t think my father told anybody.
“We’re sending you in by yourselves. You’ll be in no danger. The Hoots have no malice. And they’re partial to young things. Who ever heard of a Hoot being cruel just for the sake of it? You won’t need a weapon. It’s safer if you don’t have one.”
So I get to have the bit in my mouth in a real way, the two little etched pictures of leaping Sams at my cheeks, and silver chains hanging down on each side, and shiny black reins.
We practice first. With Little Master pulling on the reins, the bit doesn’t feel so good. Every time that spade turns up against the roof of my mouth, it hurts, and it kind of gags me. I’m worried maybe I won’t be able to talk so well myself pretty soon. I try to explain that it hurts, but the only way I can get him to understand is to have him put it in his mouth and me pull on it. It doesn’t fit on him very well, but after that, he knows. Except he’s not used to reins, so when we change back, he can’t help hurting me lots of times anyway.
My father frowns and winces when he looks at me with that bit. He leans over with his hand on his forehead a lot, covers his eyes a lot, too, but then he gives Little Master a lesson. He acts like a trainer, tries to get him not to put his weight on the reins at all. He doesn’t yell, though. Just whispers. “Loose elbows. . . . Loose. Loose.” And to me, “Keep the back of your tongue high.” But I don’t think either of us is going to get good at this for a long time. I hope there’s not going to be any long time about it. I’m going to have scars in and around my mouth. I guess it doesn’t matter since I already have that long one all across my body, top-to-bottom. When this is over, I’ll bet I’ll have as many as my father. Mostly, though, I hope I can talk.
Chapter Eleven
It’s a long way. We start before dawn and expect to go till night. But the road is straight and exactly made for us long-distance runners.
We head off, just the two of us trotting along. It’s like old times. I like everything about it. I haven’t felt so good since I got rescued. I like the breeze, the sound of my feet crunch-crunching on the road. I like my new boots, and silk against my chest. I could keep going forever. Especially if there was a nice stall and good food waiting for me after, and Little Master giving me pats on my shoulder before climbing down, and after, too.
I tell Little Master how it feels to move along like this, legs pumping. Maybe he couldn’t do it as I do, but he could do some. I know he hasn’t ever felt this kind of good, but he says he thinks it feels even better up where he is.
Out of the corners of my eyes I can see the tips of his ears moving back-and-forth. He pats me more than I want to be patted. He sings: “Oh, trot me, trot me, say me. . . . Tell me all the things there are to tell. Oh, go, go, go.” That last go goes up so high I can’t hear it. It’s just a vibration. “But go,” he says, “just don’t you sing.”
“I know.”
I’m feeling for my mustache, and it’s there. Coming along.
We don’t have anything that looks at all Wild on us, so we no longer have our knitted vests. I have pieces of the harnesses from the guards’ mounts. I was glad to exchange my leggings for red shorts. There’s no brush on the roads, anyway. Besides, it’s hotter down here on the plains. We have a heavy canteen. I’m loaded like a Seattle usually is. I don’t mind. It shows how strong I am. I’m a little thin for a Seattle but I know I look pretty good. I trot like our trainer always said to, chest out, chin in. Everything about me is just exactly right.
Little Master is wearing his best whites. We hid the new ones back there in the cliffs with his doll and Merry Mary’s picture and picked them up on the way down. With the sun on him, he glitters. I do, too, what with all this silk and silver. I have black guards’ mount’s boots and thin, black, guards’ mount’s gloves. I don’t care if we ever get anywhere, I’d like to keep going just like this, and dressed like this, forever, except with maybe a little bit more of a mustache.
Not long ago my father asked me what I wanted out of life. I’d never thought beyond a couple of years at the most. I always only think about how to be a good mount to The-Future-Ruler-Of-Us-All. I thought it would do my father good to hear the moral thing, so I told him that. Then my father asked, what did it mean to be a human being? I wasn’t sure that was a proper question, but I went along with it and said I didn’t know. He didn’t tell me. How am I supposed to know if nobody tells me? It’s just like six times six and dinosaurs. You don’t go out and discover those kinds of things for yourself. Somebody has to start you off in the right direction. I wonder if Little Master knows the answer to being human. But he’s been away from his Hoot lessons a long time. He and I mostly only know the same things now.
And then there’s the other question: Do I need to know what it means to be a human being? Actually, when it comes down to what’s practical, I’d rather know how to fight.
What I think about doesn’t have much to do with any of the things my father was asking. I guess most of all I want to do something really, really hard. Back home I always wanted to rescue Little Master and have our trainer see me do it. (I did get myself poled saving him, except nobody important was there to see it.) I wanted to do whatever it takes to make things go back the way they used to be, all comfortable, but they aren’t ever going to be back that way, what with things like those fliers and bicycles and all those crowds of us primates milling about. And all the good stuff has probably been done already, but not by me. I hope this will turn out to be really hard. Some of it, anyway.
But right now this trotting along is the best thing I’ve done in months and months. Why didn’t my father ask what was I born for instead of all those other questions, because I know this, right now, is it.
By evening Little Master is still singing and humming off and on. I can tell by what I see of his ears that he’s looking all around. But then his ears prick forward and stay that way. All this time he’s kept the reins hanging slack, but now he picks them up and holds them one-handed, low, and at the proper angle and the proper tension. His cheek isn’t next to mine and his chin isn’t on my head, so I know he’s sitting up straight.
“What is it?”
“Them.”
Pretty soon I hear them myself, and I see the dust they’re making blow up and out towards the west. When we get closer, I see their Sams are like the guards’ mounts, only dressed in blue and gold, not red and silver, no mustaches but a
little black beard mark in the middle of the chin. That looks good, too.
When we get close to the first ones, they stop and line up on each side of the road and wait. Little Master gives me a squeeze, I pick up speed and we trot down the whole line.
Just as I thought, all the Hoots know who Little Master is right away. They make an odd kind of cooing sound I’ve never heard them make before. It’s the opposite of their ho. Instead of making you feel jittery and as if you can’t think or even stand it for one second more, now you feel warm and loving and loveable.
“Tell, oh tell,” they say. All of them say it. They turn their heads sideways so as to look at Little Master straight on, with just one eye, and their ears go at attention, straight up. “And tell. Another time and way. Has it come? Has it come to this?”
I think to speak, but it’s not me they’re asking. I’m just the mount. A little pressure on the bit is all it takes to remind me to keep quiet.
“It has come,” Little Master says.
I admire his dignity. He’s stepped right in and taken over exactly the part he’s supposed to play. When did he grow up? When did he learn all this? Or did he remember from before? Except I never saw any of this back when we were training together. He was always as much a child as I was. Even more.
They follow us into the town. First past masses of white wires. This is the biggest town I’ve ever seen. Little Master, too. His ears are swiveling all around. They take us past their fountain and their pond. In the center of it, as usual, the statue of a Seattle, one of the best I’ve ever seen. Of course he looks exactly like my father. (The best ones always do.) The mount is right in the middle of a leap. (I like that kind of action-statue the best.) The mounted Hoot raises both his arms, fingers spread, but not the thumb, because, as they say, of the four corners of the world. The Seattle holds him by his knees to keep him from falling off. I’ve done that for Little Master during leaps, lots of times.
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