by Robert Adams
The Memories of
Milo Morai
The Horseclans
Book XV
Robert Adams
ISBN: 0451145488
Pub. Date: August 1986
Content
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Epilogue
Prologue
Still and unmoving as two statues, the men sat, waiting for one of the browsing, slowly shifting herbivores to wander within range of the short, powerful bows with which they were armed. The spring was now far enough advanced for the beasts to have begun to fatten, and so, even after they had been dressed out, two of them should provide food for all of the party for which the men were hunting this day. Slouched forward over the necks of their grazing horses, in constant telepathic contact with their mounts and with each other, the two ignored the flies that crawled upon them, the sweat that poured from them under the hot sun and the reek of the fresh deer dung with which they had liberally smeared their hands and faces to cover the smell of predatory man from their prey.
The herd they stalked was mixed—shaggy, feral cattle, shaggier bison, an assortment of deer and an even wider-ranging assortment of antelope, a few gazelles, a few wild horses and burros, even the occasional wild goat or two. The progenitors of the animals making up the herd had been natives of widely separated habitats on four continents, and a few hundred years before that spring day on the prairie of North America, no one of the billions of humans then living would ever have seen a like herd on any of those four. But those billions of humans died long ago, precious few of them living long enough to breed and leave descendants, and the species of mankind now was the rarest of creatures upon the grassy lands, moving only in small, scattered bands with his domestic herds among the tumbled, overgrown ruins of his brief hegemony, gathering and hunting for the bulk of his food, taking only milk and blood and fiber from his precious herds save in the direst of emergencies.
Heads well down, giving every appearance of doing nothing more than grazing the fetlock-high grasses, the brace of telepathically controlled hunting horses slowly moved closer to the mixed herd, drawing little if any attention from the wary, chary prey of the motionless hunters, who had steeled themselves to not even wince at the bites of the flies, for the meat that they sought here was of importance to those back in camp.
But although they made no slightest sound, still they conversed. “Gy,” beamed the elder to the younger, “what is the nearest animal to me? Can you see?”
“Yes, Uncle Milo,” beamed back the younger, who was a bit more slender than the elder, though seemingly as tall and strong-looking, with rolling muscles. “A white, brown-faced ridged-horn … a big one, a buck. A few more yards and you’ll be at the right range. And me?”
The elder blinked the sweat away to clear his vision slightly and silently replied, “A yellow deer and two spotted ones, close together. The yellow one looks to be best; he’s young and seems a little fatter than the other two. No antlers, of course, but I’d bet that he’s a spike buck. You are within range of him already.”
At his rider’s unspoken urging, the stallion bearing the elder of the two men moved farther forward, closer to the fringes of the widely scattered aggregation of grazers and browsers. Obligingly, the antelope that was his quarry finished stripping the leaves and shoots from a tall weed and chose that moment to move toward another plant, this one even closer to the hunger.
“Now, Uncle Milo, now!” came the imperative message from the younger man’s mind to the elder’s.
Within the bare space of a breath, the two men straightened, brought up the bows with the already-nocked arrows, drew, aimed and sent the shafts thudding into the two beasts. The shaft of the younger man sank into the eye of the deer and penetrated the brain, and the stricken beast dropped without so much as a sound or a movement. The loosing of the elder man went in behind the near shoulder of the whitish antelope and skewered lung and heart, yet the mortally wounded animal would have fled had not the man brought his horse close enough to lean from his saddle and take firm grip of one of the pair of sharp-tipped horns, lift the heavy beast almost clear of the ground and hold it against its struggles until it went limp.
Within the herd, pandemonium raged unchecked. Joining forces as they often did in the face of danger, the feral cattle and the bison drew into a tight formation, their vulnerable calves in the center, the wicked horns of the bulls and cows on the perimeter. But all around this defensive grouping, the smaller beasts fled madly in every direction, some of them in aggregations of their species, some as individuals.
Watching a band of graceful impala leap impossibly high in their flight to land and immediately leap again took the elder man’s mind racing backward over the intervening centuries to his days of soldiering in Africa. So, too, did the rapid departure of a group of fast if ungainly-looking wildebeests.
“All that’s missing,” he thought, “are the zebras and the lions.”
Not that both of those had not adapted over the years to life on portions of the vast, endless-seeming prairies and plains of the North American continent, but there were none of the stripped equines running with this particular portion of the great herds, and the lion prides did not hunt every day.
The two men, younger and elder, cooperated in roughly, hurriedly field-dressing the two slain beasts, then took the carcasses up in front of them on the withers of their mounts and set off for camp before the smell of fresh-spilled blood drew to the spot predators and scavengers too big or too numerous for them to handle. As they rode away with their booty, they left behind a section of prairie now host only to the close-packed formation of bison and long-horned cattle, all of the other beasts of the former mixed herd now having become but dots, some still moving, in the far distance.
Nearly two hours of easy-paced riding brought them within sight of their camp—four round felt yurts and as many high-wheeled carts, some threescore horses wandering, grazing around the edges of the campsite, standing belly-deep in the shallow lakelet near which the camp had been made or sipping water from the chuckling stream that issued from it.
As they approached the lakeside camp, the elder of the hunters—a man called Milo Morai or Uncle Milo —tried to picture in his mind’s eye a memory of the map of this country as it had been so many long years in the past. He thought that they were probably in northern Oklahoma now, possibly southern Kansas, surely not far enough west to be in Texas still. They had wintered in Texas, camping, with Kindred Clans Staiklee and Gahdfree, and now they were headed northeastward.
Milo meant to strike farther east than usual in hopes of finding ruins from the world before this one that had not been so thoroughly picked over and picked through as had those along the central migration routes of the game herds and the Kindred clans. Usable metals and singular artifacts gleaned from such ruins were not only valuable in their own right, useful to the nomads of the clans, but they also could be bartered for other useful things with the wagon-borne eastern traders who ventured out upon the prairies each spring and summer from the more populous areas beyond the great waterway of the Mississippi River.
As the well-laden horses ambled nearer to the camp, a very pretty, very pregnant blond girl kneeling before one of the yurts looked up from her chore of grinding grain and awkwardly rose to her feet, shouting, “Myrah, Gy and Uncle Milo are back with two kills.”
A mindspeak answered her, beaming, “Aha! Two men, two kills, that should cl
yster some of the overweening pride out of that gaggle of silly Staiklee and Gahdfree boys, I should think. They were out all morning with their yapping spotted dogs and draggled in with nothing more than a half-dozen scrawny rabbits.”
“But they did find a ruin, Myrah, quite a large one, too. And you know how anxious Uncle Milo and Bard Herbuht have been to get to a ruin that has not been looted before. That should count for at least something,” the pregnant blonde beamed back. “The Staiklee and Gahdfree boys mean well, you know. You are too hard on them—you fault them too much for their high spirits and their tale-spinnings.”
“Meaning well never yet filled a stewpot,” was the silent reply. “Nor did bragging, out-and-out lying and the taking of stupid chances of the like of juggling sharp knives while standing on one’s head in the saddle of a galloping horse; little children sometimes do things like those, Karee, but remember these are supposed to be young, proven warriors, all blooded and ready to take their places in the warrior-councils of their clans after they have ridden out as guards with the traders for a season or two. My father, the Skaht of Skaht, would have—”
Karee Skaht Linsee had had enough, however. “Your father, Myrah, owns all of my respect as the good chief he has been, but every one of us clansfolk knows and has long known that where it concerned you, he had a large soft spot in his head. You are and have always been a spoiled brat. You’re dead certain that only your desires, only your beliefs, should have any value. You had better thank Sacred Sun that our Gy is a basically gentle man, for you’ve richly deserved a sound thrashing for months … and he still may tan your hide, if your intemperate beamings and outbursts continue to embarrass him and Uncle Milo and Bard Herbuht.
“Now, get your lazy, slugabed self out here and do some real work, for a change!”
But only Karee, Bard Herbuht’s two wives—the middle-aged Mai and the slightly younger Djinee— and his nine-winters-old daughter, Kai, were on hand when the two hunters led their horses into the flat area on which the yurts fronted. Gy frowned and sent a private beam, and presently his other wife, Myrah, stepped sullenly out of the yurt.
As she helped the elder hunter to untie the stiff carcass of the whitish antelope, Karee remarked, “Uncle Milo, the young warriors have found a ruined place, a large one, they say. And although they all say they have hunted in this area before, they also say that none of them had ever come across this place or even suspected that one lay hereabouts. They didn’t get much game, though, only a few rabbits. And another of their spotted dogs disappeared last night, too.”
“Good.” He nodded. “Thank you for telling me of it, Karee. But where are my wives, Djoolya and Verah?”
She waved an arm to indicate general direction. “Away over on the other side of the little lake, I think. They went out shortly after you and Gy rode off. They are looking for roots and greens. Two of the Staiklee warriors are with them, looking for any traces of the missing dogs.”
“What of the other Staiklees and the two Gahdfree boys, Karee?” inquired Milo.
She shrugged. “Downstream somewhere, with hopes of arrowing or spearing or catching fish or frogs, they said.” Then she wrinkled up her brows and said, “This is another of those peculiar deerlike things, Uncle Milo—what did you say the folk of ancient days called them? I’d never before seen any of this kind until we came into this country.”
“They were called addaks, Karee. And, no, they never seem to be found here anywhere north of southern Kansas, and they’re none too common even here, but they’re good eating and their hides make good leather. With this one and the big young buck that Gy dropped, all of the camp will eat well this night, at least, even the cats. Where are the cats, anyway?”
“Out guarding the horses, I suppose, Uncle Milo. None of them has come into camp today, all day long, although I’ve seen Snowbelly and Spotted One both drinking from the lake at various times, since the nooning.”
After a nod of thanks to the young woman, Milo sent a mindcall ranging out and was immediately rewarded by the answering beamings of all three of the cats. “The twoleg Gy and I both killed fourleg grasseaters,” he informed the felines. “So there will be offal for you all, shortly, as well as some odds and ends of rabbit and maybe fish and frogs.”
Pleased and pleasantly anticipatory beamings came from the two prairiecats, but the “tame” jaguar, Spotted One, replied, “This cat killed and fed last night, twoleg cat friend Milo, so let the other two cats come in to eat—Spotted One will keep watch over the herd.”
Milo had had his doubts about just how well the wild-born and -bred jaguar was going to work out living with the Horseclans, for all that she had voluntarily joined with the prairiecat Crooktail in fighting off a pack of hyenas that had killed a mare, a foal and a boy farther north in the previous year, but the wild feline had laid his fears to rest; she had never once made to attack any horse, bovine, sheep or goat or their young. She usually kept a sizable physical distance from twolegs, which was understandable enough, though she was civil and very cooperative when mindspoken and, more important, she was carrying a litter sired by Snowbelly, which last meant to Milo that the singular race of prairiecats—the result of a succession of breeding experiments ended by the nuclear and biological warfare that had all but extirpated mankind worldwide—was more Leo than Felis. Now if the kittens she bore proved to be fertile, rather than mere sterile hybrids, there never again would be any need to subject the race to possibly deleterious inbreeding.
The skinning had been accomplished, the cleaning and butchering were underway, and the two prairiecats were crouched feeding on the tender, bloody offal before the four Kindred warriors rode up from the southwest, whooping exuberantly, bearing strings of assorted fish and a brace of sizable writhing, decapitated vipers.
A short time later, five horses, four of them with riders, were seen to crest the low rise of ground on the opposite side of the lake and head around the water toward the campsite. The led packhorse bore two bulging sacks and a huge caldron, discolored with thick verdigris and with bits of loam still adhering to it. As the party drew closer, it could be seen that, though clothed similarly, two were adult women and two, young warriors.
Arriving in the central space, the elder of the two women—an auburn-haired, green-eyed, stocky woman of between thirty-five and forty winters—slid easily from her saddle, strode back to the packhorse and began to loose the big caldron from its load, mindspeaking the while.
“Milo, love, this lovely pot came from a place about three miles northeast of here. It’s either copper or brass and so big, you could feed a whole clan out of it. And the pot’s not all, either—wait until you see what else Verah and I found.”
The next morning, while Bard Herbuht rode out for his day of hunting with Little Djahn Staiklee and Djim-Djoh Staiklee, Milo took Gy Linsee, the four remaining Teksikuhn Kindred warriors and a cart and they all followed his premier wife, Djoolya, to the place where she had found the large copper caldron. In addition to their normal, everyday weapons, they bore along spades, axes, a wooden maul and assortment of wedges, a wagon jack and some hardwood pry-poles, strong ropes and a hand-carved wooden pulley.
First sight of the place from the crest of a low hill was most disheartening, however. Although patterns of vegetative growth gave indications of where the edges of fields and pastures had been so long ago, nothing resembling a building remained. Up close, the clearing away of vines and brush and bushes revealed fire-blackened stones and crumbly concrete. Between the walls of what had once been a large, rambling structure, beneath several centuries’ worth of soil and decomposing vegetation, was a jumbled layer of cracked and shattered sheets of slate, and below that layer, ancient charcoal that had once been thick beams and joists.
Early on, they disturbed two rattlesnakes, but quick slashes of sabers took off the reptiles’ heads, and, tied together by the tails over a tree limb, the bodies were left to thrash and drain and later become part of the daily meal of t
he camp.
Bits and pieces of rusted iron and steel and corroded, discolored other metals were scattered all through the charcoal layer—nails, screws, hinges, doorknobs and locks, wire lengths, piping lengths, little solidified pools of copper and brass and lead. In one room they unearthed a sizable chunk of solid silver protruding out of which were several rusting, pointless knifeblades. This find and the other melted nonferrous metals went into the cart, along with the copper and brass and any hardware items not too rusty or deformed to be of further use. Another find that brought a smile to Milo’s face was a complete, relatively undamaged set of hearth tools of heavy, solid bronze. More treasures were dug out of a room close to the one wherein the chunk of melted silver had been found—more than a dozen pans and pots of copper with brass handles, some plates and utensils of brass and of pewter, including a magnificent pewter mug that looked to Milo as if it would hold at least two quarts of liquid. That these finds had not melted of the heat of the long-ago fire verged on the miraculous. Most of the steel cutlery had become only lengths of flaking rust, but a few blades still were found sound, along with a sharpening steel and a dozen tinned skewers, a large, two-tined fork and a copper ladle.
Apparently, not one item of glass or china or earthenware in that room had remained whole, and shards of them littered the subsurfaces. Such pieces of plastics and aluminum as turned up were brittle and useless.
A hump in the center of this space proved, upon clearance, to be a large, rust-flaking double-door refrigerator-freezer unit.
“We’ll take this apart,” said Milo, adding, “The amounts of copper tubing and wiring will make it worth the effort.”
It was when Milo, Gy and the two Staiklees raised the thing up from its centuries-old grave that they found what lay beneath it.