But the animal would have none of it. Snorting furiously, it backpedaled several paces, then whirled in a circle, prancing on its taloned feet as the smaller arms on its shoulders made random clutching motions, as if instinctively grasping for the plants he held.
“Take it easy, boy,” Reza murmured, standing absolutely still. Be patient, he told himself. Take your time. “It’s all right. I won’t hurt you.” He continued to hold his arm out, the light breeze carrying the scent of the plants to the magthep. Again, it came closer.
Closer. Craning its neck so far that Reza could hear its vertebrae popping, the magthep stepped forward just close enough for its prehensile upper lip to tug the shoot out of Reza’s hand. Instantly, the plant was sucked into the animal’s mouth. It backed away again, but not as far as the first time, and not quite as fast, while it enjoyed its treat.
Slowly, Reza took another shoot in his hand, holding it out to the animal. Again, the ritual was repeated, the beast slowly coming forward to take the offering. And again. And again.
By the time the shoots in his hand were gone, the magthep no longer backed away, but stood towering over Reza, patiently waiting for its next treat as Reza spoke to it quietly, calming it with the sound of his voice. After the animal had swallowed the last of the plants, Reza held out his empty hand. The magthep leaned down, smelling the scent of the plants, and began to lick Reza’s hand, then tried to grasp it with its questing lip. As it did so, Reza slowly raised his other hand to the animal’s muzzle, and then slightly higher, stroking the front of its head very gently.
“Good boy,” he whispered softly as he moved his hand around the beast’s head, scratching lightly, trying to show that he meant it no harm. Taking it very slowly, he began to run his hands through the animal’s fur, scratching and petting it, letting it get used to him. He moved his hands over its head, neck, and shoulders as high as he could reach, then across its flank and back toward the tail, always maintaining eye contact with the animal as it turned to watch him, careful not to make any sudden moves.
Sometimes the magthep would get unnerved and dart away from him, but it always came back. It was not accustomed to such attention, and it seemed to be intrigued by Reza’s smell, something it had never been exposed to before, and the taste of his skin.
The salt, Reza thought to himself. Esah-Zhurah had explained to him once about how precious salt had been in the ancient times. Reza remembered how he used to sweat in the fields, and how the white salt crusts would form in his boots around the ankles and in the wrinkles of the clothes pressed tight to his skin. Here, when the days were hot, he would sweat so much in his leatherite armor that parts of it would turn gray and then white with salt from his sweat before the armorers insisted on remaking it.
He let the magthep lick his hands with its coarse black tongue as much as it liked, pulling his hand away only when the beast became overzealous and reached out for him with its grinding teeth. Then he began to pet and scratch the magthep again.
His shoulders burning from holding them high enough to scratch or touch the animal everywhere he could, Reza made his way back once more to the magthep’s front and then down the opposite flank, choosing not to try and cross around the animal’s rear and the powerful legs. Then he started all over again.
“There,” he murmured, unconsciously switching back to the Kreelan tongue as he finished the third and last go around. He was filthy from the dust and dirt that had spilled from the beast’s coat, and his hands were dark brown with oil and grime. But when he looked up into the animal’s face, he saw that he had accomplished something. The ears seemed to be poised in a posture of attentiveness, rather than fear, and the animal’s eyes seemed to look at him with curiosity rather than mistrust. “Well,” he said to the magthep, “what now?”
For lack of any better ideas, Reza walked back to where he had left the saddle and bridle, and was pleased to hear the magthep’s quiet footsteps close behind him. It was so close, in fact, that its head was poised almost directly over Reza, the massive skull blocking the hot sun like an umbrella. Looking at the bridle, Reza considered his chances for any further success. He had never ridden any animal, let alone one of these alien creatures, and had no idea how it might behave if he tried to control it. He felt that the magthep no longer really distrusted him, but he knew that could change very quickly if he did the wrong thing at the wrong time. The scars on the animal’s back attested to its willingness and ability to rid itself of unwanted cargo, and Reza did not want to push things too fast. But how fast was that, exactly? How long should it take to turn one of these things into a riding animal? An hour? A day? A whole cycle? He just did not know.
Looking away from the animal for a moment, he saw that the fence behind him was lined with his would-be peers, three or four deep, as they watched one animal try to tame another. He saw Esah-Zhurah, her face caught in something between a grin and a sneer. She knew how badly he wanted to get away from the kazha for even a little while, to see something other than the hundreds of blue, hostile faces that greeted him each day as he learned how to fight and kill. And bringing this magthep to heel was the only way he could do it, the only way he could escape this great cage for a day or so. He felt a wave of anger boil up as he swept his eyes over his unwanted spectators, and channeled it into determination. He reached down for the bridle.
The magthep suddenly snorted and began to back away, and Reza stopped. He straightened up, the bridle still on the ground.
So, he thought with resignation, it seems we will have to do this the hard way. He knew that the beast had probably been tricked more than once into wearing the bridle, and would not fall for it again. He stepped toward the beast, palms out. It did not back away, but stood to sniff at his hands, then lick them tentatively, attuned for any trace of the hated bridle. Reza scratched the magthep’s ears, and once again, it seemed to accept him.
Moving again down the beast’s flank, Reza started to lean against its side, patting it, stroking it, then pulling on its hair, lightly at first, then harder in hopes of sensitizing the magthep to his presence. He found a particularly good spot to scratch, and the magthep elongated and twisted its neck in pleasure, its upper lip reaching out to flip at the air.
Holding on tightly to thick hanks of the animal’s fur, Reza suddenly leaped up. Twisting his right leg over the animal’s back, he planted himself in the wide, shallow valley between its shoulders and hips. His hands curled around the longer hair further up on the animal’s neck with a grip that bled his knuckles white, anticipating the pounding he was going to get when the animal reacted.
Esah-Zhurah held her breath as Reza mounted the animal. Around her, the other tresh gasped, waiting for the beast’s savage twisting and bucking that would send the human flying.
But nothing happened.
Reza watched, wide-eyed with surprise, as the beast’s head slowly turned toward him on its graceful neck. It blinked its eyes twice as if to say, “Oh, it’s only you.” Then it turned away and began to amble toward the shelter that housed its water trough, Reza clinging to its back like a confused tickbird.
“In Her name,” Esah-Zhurah heard someone beside her whisper, an oath that was repeated many times up and down the rows of onlookers.
“How is it possible?” someone else asked, and she felt a tug at her arm. “Esah-Zhurah,” asked Amar-Khan, the most senior among the tresh of the kazha, “what trickery is this? Is it so that one animal may speak to another? How can the human do this, when our best riders and trainers have failed?”
“I…” Esah-Zhurah began, her gaze torn between the tresh’s angry eyes and the sight of Reza, scratching the magthep’s shoulders with both hands, seemingly oblivious to any danger of being thrown. “I do not know. I do not understand their Way.”
Amar-Khan let go her arm, baring her fangs in a grimace. “Their Way,” she hissed. “You give animals a great deal of credit, Esah-Zhurah. Perhaps you, too, would speak with the magtheps?”
Esah-Zhu
rah felt a surge of fire in her blood, and the rational thoughts of her mind boiled away as her hand sought the handle of her knife.
“Enough!”
The tresh parted before Tesh-Dar, who came to stand beside Esah-Zhurah, dismissing Amar-Khan with her eyes.
“Offense was given, Esah-Zhurah,” the priestess said quietly, “but I bid you pay it no heed. Neither Amar-Khan, nor the others – myself included – understand the life you have accepted as Her will, and you will encounter such ill-conceived notions from time to time. Your blood sings to Her, but your mind must control the fire in your veins.”
“Yes, my priestess,” Esah-Zhurah said, grateful for the older warrior’s understanding. She sheathed her weapon, feeling a chill run through her body as the fire faded from her veins.
“He again surprises me,” Tesh-Dar murmured thoughtfully, stroking the scar over her left eye as she watched Reza begin to communicate his wishes to the magthep in an as-yet uncoordinated signaling of hand and foot. “Already the beast acknowledges his commands,” she said. “And without a bridle, without a saddle.” She paused for a moment, cocking her head, as if listening. “He speaks to it.”
“I hear nothing, my priestess,” Esah-Zhurah told her. She could see Reza’s mouth moving slightly, but they were many strides away, far beyond Esah-Zhurah’s hearing. “What does he say?”
“I do not know,” Tesh-Dar replied, shrugging. “It is in the human tongue so many of them use.” She sensed Esah-Zhurah bristle at the knowledge. It was one thing about which she had been adamant: Reza was to speak only the language of the Empress. To speak any human language was to summon fast and furious punishment. “Allow him this one day to speak as he would,” Tesh-Dar suggested, commanded, sensing Esah-Zhurah’s reaction. “If he can tame such a beast with this,” she tapped her foot at the base of a mound of yezhe’e plants, “and alien words and thoughts, then he has earned such a privilege. Our own ways fared not nearly as well.”
They both looked up at the sound of the rhythmic pounding of clawed feet in time to see Reza bring the magthep to within a meter or so of the fence and stop. The beast flared its nostrils and bared its flat, grinding teeth at the Kreelans. The young human warrior sat erect on the dirty back of his mount, his hands resting on his thighs, arms shaking from the exhaustion of his intensive acquaintance with the animal. But his eyes did not waver as he looked over the crowd. His gaze lingered on Esah-Zhurah, making sure that she saw and understood the contempt in his own eyes before he sought out the priestess’s gaze. He bowed his head to her.
“This,” he said proudly, “is Goliath.”
Nine
After a hasty breakfast of barely cooked meat and a handful of small fruits, Reza and Esah-Zhurah joined the hundreds of other tresh who were making their way from the kazha to wherever they had chosen to spend their free time. Some would go to the city, many to the forests and mountains, and still others to places Reza did not yet even know of. Only the priestess and some of the more senior warriors would remain behind.
The weather that morning was magnificent, the sunrise breaking over the mountains to fill the valley below with the promise of a warm day under a clear magenta sky. The cool air was crisp and filled with a cornucopia of scents that Reza had come to subconsciously accept as the smell of home.
As he rode beside Esah-Zhurah, towering above her on Goliath’s back, he found that he could hardly wait to get away from the suffocating closeness of the peers. They treated him with more respect than they had when he had first come among them, but he was still the lowest form of life on this planet, lower even than the simpleminded animals raised for meat. Ironically, it was Esah-Zhurah who had consistently proven the most difficult to sway, her arrogance virtually undiluted from the day he had first awakened to her scowling face.
Yet, he was increasingly unsure if her behavior was entirely sincere. Sometimes he awoke to find her staring at him, her eyes flickering in the glow of the low fire they kept to ward off the night’s chill. The look on her face was always thoughtful, contemplative, rather than the perpetual sneer he was used to seeing during the day. But always, as soon as she realized he was watching her, a cloud passed over her eyes, and she would roll over, turning her back to him.
The way he had seen her interact with the tresh also made him wonder. As the months had come and gone, she had become less and less tolerant of the other tresh making derisive comments about Reza or bending the rules in the arena just far enough to try and do him serious injury, something he had thus far managed to avoid. For just a moment he would think – or at least wistfully hope – that she was acting on his behalf. But the hope died as soon as he saw the look of conceit on her face or heard the arrogant tone in her voice, and the anger and loneliness that were his heart and soul would pierce him like a white-hot knife. Hot and cold, hard and soft, she was at once one thing and yet another, gently applying a bandage to a wound one minute, brutally punishing him the next.
“What are you thinking?” She asked, eyeing him closely. “I have learned that expression you now wear, that tells of your mind contemplating alien thoughts.”
Her thigh brushed his as they rode side by side, and he felt a sudden rush of heat to his face. He reflexively guided Goliath on a slightly divergent path.
“I was thinking about you,” he said.
“Oh? And what great thoughts are these, human?”
“I was wondering,” he said, “if you really care as little for me as you would like me to think? Is all of your conceit and arrogance genuine, or just a façade to conceal your true feelings?”
He suddenly found himself talking to empty space. He turned around to find the girl and her magthep stopped, her hands clutching the bridle tightly, her face as still as the eye of a hurricane.
Touché, he thought.
She was quiet for a long moment, her expression completely unreadable to Reza, who had never before seen her like this. Had she been a human, he thought, she might have been about to cry.
“I applaud your powers of deduction, human,” she told him quietly. “But what I feel, and for whom, is not the business of an animal whose existence is measured in terms of the charity the Empress has chosen to bestow upon you. Never will there come a day when you shall be privy to the workings of my heart and mind.”
With a less than gentle kick, she started her magthep walking again.
Reza bowed his head to her, bringing Goliath alongside her mount, reining his beast in slightly to match the smaller animal’s slower pace. He claimed the round as a tactical defeat against himself, but a strategic victory of sorts. Despite her emotional screen of anger and, perhaps, embarrassment, he knew that he had touched on a nerve, and could not resist one final thrust. “Among my people,” he said, “there is a saying: Never say never.”
“My eternal thanks for the wisdom of your people,” she replied acidly, kicking her magthep in the ribs and pulling away from Reza and Goliath at a gallop. “Follow if you can, animal!” she shouted.
Reza took up the chase, disappearing into the cloud of dust behind her as the two of them raced away from the thinning caravan of tresh, heading toward the distant mountains.
* * *
The sun had just passed its zenith by the time they departed the great plain on which the city and most of the forests stood, and began to move into the range of mountains that lay beyond. Reza had never imagined he would find such color or beauty here. When viewed from the kazha, the mountains always seemed shrouded in darkness, their details lost in the distance and an ever-present crown of water-laden clouds that obscured the jagged peaks for all but a few precious minutes of nearly every day. But the deep purple granite around him sparkled and shimmered as the rock’s tiny facets reflected the sunlight like millions of tiny diamonds. The ancient canyon walls, severed and shifted by eons of irresistible pressure from beneath the planet’s crust, revealed bright mineral veins that wound their way through the host rock like glittering rivers. The ground that passed beneat
h the magtheps’ feet was virgin soil, for all Reza could see, the hard earth revealing no signs of any previous traveler’s passage.
As they rose higher through the canyons toward wherever Esah-Zhurah was leading him, Reza saw tiny oases of startling violet flowers whose petals waved in the air, beckoning to the insects that hovered and flitted near the ground, that they might bring life-giving pollen to the flowers.
Still higher, the violet flowers gradually became a seamless background to the other species that began to appear. Reza saw everything from tiny lichens clinging tenaciously to rocks, to enormous ferns that towered above the two riders on their animals, their house-sized fronds waving ponderously in the light breeze that swept up the mountainside.
“How much further is it?” Reza asked, his eyes wide with wonder at the sights that surrounded him.
“Not far,” Esah-Zhurah called back as she maneuvered her magthep through a particularly dense stand of vines and ferns. Behind them, Goliath plowed straight through the plants, his muzzle snatching occasional mouthfuls as he went, a bad habit that Reza had not yet figured out how to cure.
“Here!” she called at last, reining her beast to a stop and smoothly dismounting onto a carpet of iridescent orange moss that had appeared like a welcome mat.
Reza nudged Goliath to a stop as he gawked around him. They were on a ledge, halfway up one of the mountains of the range that ringed the plain. Through the ferns and moss-covered boulders he could just make out the shimmering spires of the city far in the distance, and the forest in which lay their kazha. To the other side, a mountain lay very close by, like a wall that rose straight up as far as he could see, disappearing into the clouds that danced in the winds. Everywhere the purple granite had disappeared, replaced by the vibrant greens and oranges of the plants and mosses that were dominant here.
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