At noon, with the white caps on the pines sparkling and the snow crunching around us, we heard the first yip. The mare froze in place, her body as tight as a drum. She blew a cloud that crackled in the sunny air.
Another yip answered, ahead of us, and I saw a pale shape bounding through the snow, a hundred yards in front of us. The horse wheeled and almost fell.
I took her spin and made her continue it, until we were aimed back the way we had started. I knew the position of two animals already: one to our right and one ahead, and their intent was clearly to drive us. I had only seen three sets of tracks, but three were enough to drive the mare until she fell, and I with her. I would not be driven.
I have never kicked a horse as hard as I did the gray mare. I think the energy of my heels drove her up and forward without any involvement from her brain. As she leaped, I was drawing my dowhee, which I almost dropped from my clumsy, cold hand.
I was cavalry trained from the age of five. This style of war has been made obsolete in our lifetime by the perfection of powder weapons, but I did not think the wolves had powder weapons.
Had the mare been battle trained? I didn’t even think about it. I threw her at the gray shape in the path before us, and I bellowed like a savage, brandishing my sword.
I don’t think the wolf had prepared for this. Perhaps the human smell had not even reached it when it decided to attack the big prey. It pivoted and ran up the path again, while behind I could hear the other two doing what they did best: chasing something that ran from them.
I had to reach the first before the others reached me. A horse, like a wolf, wants to chase anything that runs from it, and wants to run from anything that chases it. Consequently, the mare was of my opinion in this matter, and she was a very fast horse.
We were only a few yards behind the gray wolf when he bounded off the trail and started breasting his way through the snow sideways to us. Without my urging, the mare leaped after.
The wolf hit a pocket and disappeared down to his neck and ears, and as he floundered, I leaned over the mare’s neck and sliced his throat open. He screamed once, and between that sound and the spray of blood, the mare reared and spun. Had I not had my left hand wrapped in her mane I would have been spilled.
Her front legs came down in the wolf trail, and I used her fear to propel her back toward the other wolves. There were two, as I had counted. One was as gray as the first, and one was dirty white.
They, too, had heard the death scream of their pack mate, and neither hunger nor the thrill of the chase could overcome the fear of the monster they saw before them. They turned tail.
I might have let them go, but something in this experience had made me as savage as they were. The mare was not so happy about chasing this time, but she, too, was afraid of me by now, and she ran at my command.
The wolves did not try to separate; perhaps the sight of what happened to their fellow in the deep snow made an impression on them. Wolves can run, but no wolf could have outrun that mare in a sprint. We caught up with the gray first, and I gave Sabia my heel to swerve her left so that I could take the creature as I had the first wolf, but she did not respond. Instead she did what a horse hates to do—she ran the animal down and trampled over it. I heard the crack of bone and felt the unevenness of her footing, and then it was behind us, and there was only the white wolf, running with a very red tongue dangling.
It made its move to the left, away from my dowhee hand, and when I had controlled the plunging mare and sent her into the snow after it, I found the creature on its back, wagging its tail feebly. It was a male, like the first one, but pissing itself and grinning at me.
I was acquainted with a wolf once, or a dog that was much like a wolf. Or perhaps it was a particularly vile kind of ghost that I knew. I have never known.
The mare was blowing under me. Her heart was a drum and her hide black with sweat. I led her fifty feet away and wrapped the reins once around the branch of an oak. When I returned to the white wolf, it had righted itself and wiggled its way toward me like a puppy, its ruff giving it a very puppy face as well. With a single stroke I cut its throat, and then in a fury I do not understand I hacked the body until there was no way to tell what color the beast had been. I had never done such a thing before to any creature, animal or human.
I dried the mare as best I could with my woolen blanket, and laid it over her to retard the cooling. Both she and I were rosestained from wolves’ blood. I walked through the snow and led her, a long gray furnace, wrinkling the air with her heat and sweat. By the time I got on her again, we had both calmed down.
Sometime in the middle of the afternoon we found a road, unmistakable even under the coating of snow. The good thing about it was that it led the sinking sun back over my left shoulder. The bad thing was that it was not an engineered Rezhmian road, nor even one of our handcrafted Velonyan thoroughfares. It was packed earth that twisted around trees, with only the most wheelbreaking stones removed. It was a happenstance sort of herders’ road, and I was doubtful concerning the herders that might have made it. Yet it would be worse to find no people at all in this northern wilderness, for the wind blew from the north, out of Sekret, and it had all the way from the eternal ice to build its malice.
When cowpats were seen dotting the snow and human and horse tracks multiplied, I thought it better to pull Sabia wide, hoping to scout the settlement or camp before they had a look at me. The mare disliked this; having found the road, she was satisfied with it. We were plunging in place when a boy trotted our way on a pony as thick and furry as the dust under a bed. He had a broad face, like the children of the Naiish, or for that matter like most children in the world. He watched the battle for some moments as the mare swung her head and neck with such force she threatened to break her skull against a tree, or against my skull. Then his pony trotted its tiny steps toward us, the boy flicked out a rope, caught Sabia over the nose with it, and dallied her to the horn of his pony’s saddle. She reared once and the wide pony lightened on all four of its feet, but if there was any response in its face, the hair hid it.
“She is too green for you to be out here alone,” he said tome chidingly, in Sekret. I barely understood him. Then he added, “She has hurt herself. And you, too.”
I looked at the rawhide rope over her nose and found no damage, and then I realized what we looked like, the mare and I. I pulled together what Sekret I remembered and answered, “No. Three wolves we killed. Not we hurt.”
He gave a bass grunt he must have learned from an older relative, pivoted his pony, and began to lead us along the road. Since this was the way Sabia had insisted upon going, she made no demur. My reins were locked against her head by the noose around her nose, so I went along like a sack in a pack train.
I smelled smoke. It made my stomach growl. I was reasonably glad the boy wasn’t Naiish, though I have more experience with the Naiish culture than the Sekret. Experience does not always build fondness, yet I reminded myself I might be as easily killed by strangers as by old enemies. Still, my stomach growled.
I tried the language again. “She is not green,” I said, or hope I said. “Nor is she fresh. We have ridden from Ceion this morning.”
The boy turned his face to me and succeeded in hiding his expression as well as the pony had done. Still, he stared at the gray mare for a count of five before starting off again. “I have not yet been to Ceion,” he called over his shoulder. “Is it as great as they say?”
“I liked it,” I answered with perfect honesty. “I was warm there.”
We turned past a stand of coated pines and the smell of cows hit me—of cows and latrines. The camp had probably begun the day under the same white pall as all the countryside, but the activities of a few dozen humans and at least a hundred cattle had turned the earth to cold muck.
Still, it was interesting. Despite my weariness, my frozen state, and the dried blood that stuck to me everywhere, I gawked and stared. In a way it was like Bologhini, the domed city, t
hough here the domes were built of blocks of snow. In another way it might have been one of the winter camps of the Naiish, with its cattle palisade of sticks and dry briar. The stone fire-wells were like the camps of my own people, and in this land of trees they were blazing even in daylight.
The cattle, though, were like nothing else. They were scarcely larger than goats, and wide as the boy’s pony, and furrier. Their horns rose up and then forward in a businesslike manner, though many of them had the ends sawed, and some were blunted by balls of painted wood. All of the beasts were fox-red.
We came to the middle of the camp, and people began to gather around us. Leaning forward, I slipped the noose off Sabia’s nose. She snorted, and immediately started to shiver. I got off.
The blanket I had covered her with was now frozen stiff. I could not even unfold it. I looked around me at the curious, sunburned faces of the herders, and because I could not remember the Sekret word for blanket, I shouted “Shirt! Shirt for the horse!”
They had anticipated my mare’s need, and two women were already scurrying through the foul snow with wool rugs padded with horsehair. I tried to strip off the saddle, but found my fingers had lost all feeling, and so even that was done for me. Sabia was covered from poll to tail and led broadside to one of the fire-wells. She took it all as her due.
I, too, was blanketed, and in friendly fashion was prodded into one of the snow houses. Inside, the light was blue.
There was a fire going within. It was a very small fire, but still I wondered. “Why doesn’t the house melt?” I asked the woman who knelt beside it, but she giggled and scooted out the leather door flap.
“It will melt in the spring,” said my boy guardian gravely, and he took my hands in his and regarded them. There were two grown men in the hut with us. He spoke to one of them so quickly I could not understand, and the man followed the woman out.
“How many wolves did you say you killed?”
I repeated for him that I had killed three, by driving them into deep snow.
“And that horse let you do that?”
I felt a need to defend my mount. “She is not usually as you see—as you saw her. I was trying to avoid your village and she wanted to stay on the road.”
“She has good sense,” he pronounced.
The people were as kind as any I have met. They fed me and the mare. They gave us a little snow house of our own, with a leather roof. The mare, with her fine, short coat, needed it as much as I. They asked no more questions, not even where I was going. Perhaps my inadequacy with their language made them think the effort hopeless.
I was more curious, or perhaps just less polite. I asked questions of everyone I met: the woman who brought me water to wash, the girl who brought me dinner, and above all the pony boy who had adopted me and—at least as he thought—saved me from a wild horse.
I found out they were northerners, whose practice it was to come this far south when the freeze made the ground impassable to the wagons of the Naiish, their enemies. The scrubby cattle could get sustenance from lichen on rocks. The people’s boast was the cattle made some use of the rocks themselves, and as I myself noticed stones and gravel in the ever-present cowpats, they may have been right. The main home range of the people was hundreds of miles north of here, but in the winter even Sekreters could not make a go of it. Hence these tropical latitudes.
I asked the girl what her people called themselves, and she told me her name was Etha. I asked the older woman the same question, and she pointed to herself and said, “Two sons, one daughter.” The boy merely shook his head and made a dismissive gesture. Perhaps the herders did not have a name for themselves. Perhaps the name was secret. Perhaps I had asked an entirely different question by error.
In the middle of the night I was wakened by a man clapping to announce himself outside my hut. I pulled the flap and he came in, accompanied by viciously cold air. “I am Horlo, and I have been seeking strays. I came from the morning side. I found your three wolves. One was no good from hoof damage, but here are the others.”
He handed me two pelts, stiff as boards from the cold. “Horlo, I thank you, but I abandoned these. What is abandoned belongs to him who finds it.”
He shrugged, but what a shrug means to these people was not entirely what it means to a Velonyan. “You had no choice but to leave them. Your horse was wet. I heard the story.” He forced them into my hands almost belligerently. I thought fast.
“Still, I cannot take them, my friend. I travel fast tomorrow, and the smell will frighten my difficult horse. You would do me a favor by making use of them.”
This gave him pause. “I will give you something for them, then,” he said and went through the leather flap before I could object.
My friend the boy returned, blinking sleepily. “So you told the truth,” he said. “You killed three wolves from a horse, in deep snow.”
I felt overly praised. “It was the deep snow that made it work.”
He nodded. “Yet it is an uncommon thing. Your horse is uncommon too. I shall have to apologize to her for my rope.”
He stood in dignified manner until I realized I was supposed to leave him alone with the mare. I went through the flap myself and frozen air assaulted my nose. The sky was clear and the stars crackling. After a minute, he came out again, and I felt the urge to confide. “I am from a northern place, too,” I said.
He gave me that precocious stare. “Anything you say, I will now believe,” he said, and he walked away through the snapping snow.
The next morning I was fed again, and so was the mare. The people looked at the coins I offered them as though they were so many buttons, but that may have been pride as much as ignorance. Horlo had found his payment for the hides: a rough woolen jacket padded in the chest and back with channels of cow hair. It turned out to be the warmest garment I have ever owned.
When I was on the mare again, he stood in my path and said, “You should know that one wolf still follows you.”
I stared down at him. “Why? How do you know?”
“I know because I tracked you. Why? I don’t know the mind of a wolf. They have good hides, but their souls are a defilement.”
I thanked him for his information, and I left the camp not knowing its name.
The mare was not so sprightly today. Perhaps the Sekret fodder disagreed with her, or perhaps even she had her limits. We trotted on at a good rate, but on this leg of the journey we would break no records. The sky remained clear but the air was no warmer, and the light had my eyes weeping by midday.
My Sekret jacket had mittens attached, as we at home will provide for small children who lose their gloves. These mittens had no thumbs, but a slot in the palm for the reins to enter. I wrapped my blanket around my legs and the mare’s barrel, keeping us both a little warmer. She pulled no nonsense on me today.
By afternoon the horizon had changed shape. There was a bulge ahead and over my right shoulder. It did not look like mountains, but rather as though the earth itself had a swollen bruise far away. I recognized it as the beginnings of the highlands of Norwess. From now until our journey’s end, we would be climbing.
I failed to find a road that would lead us by a more direct route, though there may have been one under the snow. Sabia seemed inured to the work and I myself was numb, body and mind. We passed another herder’s camp, but this one was deserted: a congeries of humps in the snow. Before sunset we came to the border.
First there were hoofprints marring the white surface perpendicular to our path. There were a number of them, going in both directions, but there was nothing else to be seen. Next came a road marker, cut in granite like a gravestone. I almost didn’t get off to wipe it clean of snow, because I wasn’t sure I would be able to climb back on, but I had to know where I was.
The side I cleaned was unmarked, and I stared at it dumbly for some moments before it occurred to me the writing might be on another face. I cleaned the whole block, to find that on the south side of the thing was wri
tten ekesh territory and on the opposite side norwess province. As I squatted there, a man on a laboring horse trotted up and used his animal’s legs to press me against the stone.
“Where are you going and where did you steal that horse, peasant?” said the soldier in uncultured Rezhmian. I reached fingers through the slot in my mitten and pinched the heavy bay’s foreleg skin, causing him to dance back. I stood slowly.
“Though you did not ask me my name, fellow, I will give it to you. I am the Aminsanaur Nazhuret, grandson of the Sanaur Mynauzet, and nephew of the present Sanaur’l Maigeret. The mare was the gift of Maigeret and my business is my own.”
I have so much the look of the reigning family of Rezhmia, along with its lack of size, that this has been an inconvenience to me at times. This man, however, was not the sort who looked at faces, but at clothes. “You’re going to die for that impudence, pig!” he shouted.
He drew his saber as he pressed his horse sideways to me. I darted under the animal’s neck, drawing my dowhee as best I could in the mitten. The horse danced back from me again, and I sliced upward between its front legs and severed the girth.
The soldier, who had been leaning heavily in an effort to reach me under the horse’s neck, suddenly heaved with the saddle and hit the ground shoulder first. The saddle hung sideways between breastplate and crupper, and the beast, with its nasty cut between the legs, bucked screaming away.
Before the man could rise, I jumped with both legs on his chest and put the edge of the dowhee to his throat. “Now do you believe me, you son of a slave? Could a peasant have done this to you?”
He was not thinking, not even of his own survival. He pulled a good-sized poignard from his belt and stabbed twice at my ankle, causing me to dance on his chest. I kicked him in the chin, but I was so clumsy from the cold I could not knock him out. I took my dowhee from his throat and sliced his hand off. Red blood pumped into the snow and my mare, tied to a pine, looked at it with only remote, weary interest.
The Lens of the World Trilogy Page 67