I was all teeth. “What did we tell you about an attack? You run and when the gunfire starts you flatten. What did I say! What did I say?”
Gunsmoke drifted; the dry grass sparkled with shot, our nostrils shivered from the smell of burning.
Cats prefer to pounce first, get one of us down, and have the rest of us gallop away. They know if they fire first, they’re more likely to be shot themselves.
The fire from our women was fierce, determined, and constant. We soon realized that the only gunfire we heard was our own and that the Cats had slunk away.
The children still wailed, faces crumpled, tears streaming. Their crying just made us grumpy. Well, we all thought, it’s time they learned. “You stupid children. What did you think this was, a game?”
Grama was as hard as any granny. “Do you want to be torn to pieces and me have to watch it happen? Do you think you can say to a Cat very nicely, ‘Please don’t eat me,’ and that will stop them?”
Leveza was helping Alez to stand. Her old groom-mother’s legs kept giving way, and she was grinning a wide rictus grin. She looked idiotic.
“Come on, love, that’s it.” Leveza eased Alez toward Pronto’s cart.
“What are you doing?” Pronto said, glaring at her.
“She’s in no fit state to walk.”
“You mean, I’m supposed to haul her?”
“I know you’d much rather leave her to be eaten, but no thanks, not just this once.”
Somehow, more like a goat than a Horse, Alez nipped up into the wagon. Leveza strode back toward us, still on her hind legs.
The children shivered and sobbed. Leveza strode up to us. And then did something new.
“Aw, babies,” she said, in a stricken tone I had never heard before. She dropped down on four haunches next to them. “Oh, darlings!” She caressed their backs, laying her jaw on the napes of their necks. “It shouldn’t be like this, I know. It is terrible, I know. But we are the only thing they have to eat.”
“Mummy shouted at me! She was mean.”
“That’s because Mummy was so worried and so frightened for you. She was scared because you didn’t know what it was and didn’t know what to do. Mummy was so frightened that she would lose you.”
“The Cats eat us!”
“And the crocodiles in the river. And there are wolves, a kind of Dog. We don’t get many here, they are on the edge of the snows in the forests. Here, we get the Cats.”
Leveza pulled back their manes and breathed into their nostrils. “It shouldn’t be like this.”
Should or shouldn’t, we thought, that’s how it is. Why waste energy wishing it wasn’t?
We’d forgotten, you see, that it was a choice, a choice that in the end was ours. Not my Leveza.
The Head Man came up, and his voice was also gentle with the colts and fillies. “Come on, kids. The Cats will be back. We need to move away from here.”
He had to whinny to get us moving; he even back-kicked the reluctant Pronto. Alez sat up in the cart looking cross-eyed and beside herself with delight at being carried.
“Store and dry cud,” Fortchee told us.
Cudcakes. How I hate cudcakes. You chew them and spit them out on the carts to dry and you always think you’ll remember where yours are and you always end up eating someone else’s mash of grass and spit.
Leveza walked next to the Head Man, looking at maps, murmuring and tossing her mane toward the east. I saw them make up their minds about something.
I even felt a little tail-flick of jealousy. When she came back, I said a bit sharply, “What was that all about?”
Leveza sounded almost pleased. “Don’t tell the others. We’re being stalked.”
“What?”
“Must be slim pickings. The Cats have left their camp. They’ve got their cubs with them. They’re following us.” She sighed, her eyes on the horizon. “It’s a nuisance. They think they can herd us. There’ll be some kind of trap set ahead, so we’ve decided to change our route.”
We turned directly east. The ground started to rise, toward the hills, where an age-old trail goes through a pass. Rocks began to break through a mat of thick grasses. The slope steepened, and each of the carts needed two big men to haul it up.
The trail followed valleys between high rough humps of ground, dovetailing with small streams cut deeply into the grass. We could hear the water, like thousands of tongues lapping on stone. The most important thing on a migration is to get enough to drink. The water in the streams was delicious, cold and tasting of rocks, not mud.
My name means water, but I think I must taste of mud.
We found ourselves in a new world, looking out on waves of earth, rising and falling and going blue in the distance. On the top of a distant ridge a huge rock stuck out, with a rounded dome like a skull.
Fortchee announced, “We need to make that rock by evening.” It was already early afternoon, and everyone groaned.
“Or you face the Cats out here on open ground,” he said.
“Come on, you’re wasting breath,” said Leveza and strode on.
The ground was strange; a deep rich black smelling deliciously of grass and leaves, and it thunked underfoot with a hollow sound like a drum. We grazed as we marched, tearing up the grass, and pulling up with it mouthfuls of soil, good to eat but harsh, hard to digest. It made us fart, pungently, and in each other’s faces as we marched. “No need for firelighters!” the old women giggled.
In places the trail had washed away, leaving tumbles of boulders that the carts would creak up and over, dropping down on the other side with a worrying crash. Leveza stomped on, still on two legs, gun ready. She would spring up rocks, heel-hooves clattering and skittering on stone. Sure-footed she wasn’t. She did not hop nimbly, but she was relentless.
“They’re still here,” she muttered to me. All of us wanted our afternoon kip, but Fortchee wouldn’t let us. The sun dropped, the shadows lengthened. Everything glowed orange. This triggered fear—low light means you must find safe camping. We snorted, and grew anxious.
Down one hill and up the other: it was sunset, the worst time for us, when we arrived at the skull rock. We don’t like stone either.
“We sleep up there,” Fortchee said. He had a fight on his hands. We had never heard of such a thing.
“What, climb up that? We’ll split our hooves. Or tear our fingers,” said Ventoo.
“And leave everything behind in the wagons?” yelped one of the men.
“It’ll be windy and cold.”
Fortchee tossed his head. “We’ll keep each other warm.”
“We’ll fall off. . . .”
“Don’t be a load of squirrels,” said Leveza. She went to a cart, picked up a bag of tools, and started to climb.
Fortchee amplified, “Take ammo, all the guns.”
“What about the foundries?”
He sighed. “We’ll need to leave those.”
By some miracle, the dome had a worn hole in the top full of rainwater and we drank. We had our kip, but the Head Man wouldn’t let us go down to graze. It got dark and we had another sleep, two hours or more. But you can’t sleep all night.
I was woken up by a stench of Cat that seemed to shriek in my nostrils. I heard Leveza sounding annoyed. “Tuh!” she said. “Dear oh dear!” Louder than a danger call—bam!—a gun blast, followed by the yelp of a Cat. Then the other afriradors opened fire. The children whinnied in terror. Peering down into milklight I could see a heaving tide of Cat pulling back from the rock. They even made a sound like water, the scratching of claws on stone.
“What fun,” said Leveza.
I heard Grama trying not to giggle. Safety and strength came off Leveza’s hide like a scent.
She turned to Fortchee. “Do you think we should go now or wait here?”
“Well, we can’t wait until after sunrise, that’ll slow us down too much. Now.”
Leveza really was acting like Head Mare, and there had not been one of those in a whil
e. She was climbing into the highest status. Not altogether hindered by having, if I may say so, a high-class groom-mate.
The afriradors sent out continual shots to drive back the last of the Cats. Then we skittered down the face of the rock back toward the wagons.
At the base of the cliff, a Cat lay in a pool of blood, purring, eyes closed as if asleep. Lindalfa scream-whinnied in horror and clattered backward. The Cat rumbled but did not stir.
Muttering, fearful, we were all pushed back by Cat-stench; we twitched and began to circle just before panic.
Leveza leaned in close to stare.
“Love, come away,” I said. I picked my way forward, ready to grab her neck and pull her back if the thing lunged. I saw its face in milklight.
I’d never seen a Cat up close before.
The thing that struck me was that she was handsome. It was a finely formed face, despite the short muzzle, with a divided upper lip which seemed almost to smile, the mouthful of fangs sheathed. The Cat’s expression looked simply sad, as if she were asking Life itself one last question.
Leveza sighed and said, “Poor heart.”
The beast moaned, a low miserable sound that shook the earth. “You . . . need . . . predators.”
“Like cat-shit we do,” said Leveza, and stood up and back. “Come on!” she called to the rest of us, as if we were the ones who had been laggard.
The Cats were clever. They had pulled out far ahead of us so we had no idea when they would attack again. Our hooves slipped on the rocks. Leveza went all hearty on us. “Goats do this sort of thing. They have hooves too.”
“They’re cloven,” said one of the bucks.
“Nearly cousins,” sniffed Leveza. I think the light, the air, and the view so far above the plain exhilarated her. It depressed me. I wanted to be down there where it was flat and you could run and it was full of grass. The men hauling the wagons never stopped frothing, eyes edged white. They were trapped in yokes and that made them easy prey.
We hated being strung out along the narrow trail, and kept hanging back so we could gather together in clumps. She would stomp on ahead and stomp on back. “Come on, everyone, while it’s still dark.”
“We’re just waiting for the others,” quailed Lindalfa.
“No room for the others, love, not on this path.”
Lindalfa sounded harassed. “Well, I don’t like being exposed like this.”
“No, you’d far rather have all your friends around you to be eaten first.” It was a terrible thing to say, but absolutely true. Some of us laughed.
Sunrise came, the huge white sky contrasting too much with the silhouetted earth so that we could see nothing. We waited it out in a defensive group, carts around us. As soon as the sun rose high enough, Leveza triggered us to march. Not Fortchee. She urged us on and got us moving, and went ahead to scout. I learned something new about my groom-mate: the most loyal and loving of us was also the one who could most stand being alone.
She stalked on ahead, and I remember seeing the Lump sitting placidly on her back, about as intelligent as a cudcake.
A high wind stroked the grass in waves. Beautiful clouds were piled up overhead, full of wheeling birds, scavengers who were neither hunters nor victims. They knew nothing of ancestors or even speech.
Then we heard over the brow of a hill the snarl of Cats who have gone for the kill and no longer need stealth.
Leveza. Ahead. Alone.
“Gotcha!” they roared in thunder-voices.
We heard gunfire, just a snapping like a twig, and a Cat yelp, and then more gunfire and after that a heartfelt wail that could not have come from a Cat, a long hideous keening, more like that of a bird.
Fortchee broke into a lurching, struggling gallop. He triggered me and I jumped forward into a gallop too, slipping on rocks, heaving my way up the slope. It was like a nightmare where something keeps pulling you back. I heaved myself up onto the summit and saw Leveza, sitting on the ground, Fortchee stretching down to breathe into her ears.
She was staring ahead. Fortchee looked up at me with such sadness.
Before he could speak, Leveza turned her heavy jaws, her great snout, toward the sky and mourned, whinnying now a note for the dead.
“They got the Lump,” said the Head Man, and turned and rubbed her shoulders. Her saddle-pack was torn. The baby was gone. Leveza keened, rocking from side to side, her lips forming a circle, the sound coming from far back and down her throat.
“Leveza,” said Fortchee, looking forlornly at me.
“Leveza,” I agreed, for we knew that she would not forget Kaway soon.
The rest of us, we lose a child, we have another next year; we don’t think about it; we can’t afford to. We’re not strong enough. They die, child after child, and the old beloved aunties, or the wise old men who can no longer leap away. We can hear them being eaten. “Remember me! I love you!” they call to us, heartbroken to be leaving life and leaving us. But we have to forget them.
So we go brittle and shallow, sweet and frightened, smart but dishonest.
Not Leveza. She suddenly snarled, snatched up her rifle, rocked to her feet, and galloped off, after the Cats.
“She can’t think that she can get him back!” I said.
“I don’t know what she can think,” said Fortchee.
The others joined us and we all stood haunches pressed together. None of us went to help, not even me, her beloved groom-mate. You do not chase prides of Cats to rescue anyone. You accept that they have been taken.
We heard distant shots, and the yelping of Cats. We heard hooves.
“She’s coming back,” whispered Grama and glanced at me. It was as if the hills themselves had stood up to stretch to see if things looked any different. A Horse had been hunting Cats.
Leveza appeared again at the top of the hill and for a moment I thought she had wrought a miracle, for her child dangled from her mouth.
Then I saw the way she swayed when she walked, the dragging of her hooves. She baby-carried a tiny torn head and red bones hanging together by tendons and scraps of skin. Suddenly she just sat on the ground and renewed her wailing. She arched her head round and looked down at herself in despair. Her breasts were seeping milk.
She tried to make the bones drink. She pushed the fragments of child onto her dugs. I cantered to her, lost my footing, and collapsed next to her. “Leveza. Love. Let him be.”
She shouted up into my face with unseeing eyes. “What am I supposed to do with him?”
“Oh Leveza,” I started to weep for her. “You feel things too much.”
“I’m not leaving him!”
You’re supposed to walk away. You’re supposed to leave them to the birds and then to the sun and then to the rains until they wash back into the earth.
To come again as grass. We eat our grandmothers, in the grass. It shows acceptance, good will toward the world to forget quickly.
Leveza began to tear at the thin pelt of ground that covered the rocks. She gouged at it, skinning her forefingers, broke open the sod, and peeled it back. She laid the scraps on the bare rock, and gently covered what was left of him as if with a blanket. She tucked him in and began to sing a soft milklight song to him.
It simply was not bearable. If a child dies through sickness you take it away from camp, and let the birds and insects get to it. Then later you dance on the bones, to break them up into dust to show scorn for the body and the heart to accept fate.
The Head Man came back, and bumped her with his snout. “Up, Leveza. We must keep moving.”
Leveza stroked the ground. “Good night, Kaway. Sleep, Kaway. Grow like a seed. Become beautiful Kaway grass.”
We muttered and murmured. We’d all lost people we love like that. Why should she keen and carry on, why should she be different?
“I know it’s hard,” said Lindalfa. Unspoken was the “but.”
Love can’t be that special. Love must not cost that much. You’ll learn, Leveza, I thought, like all the o
thers. You’ll finally learn.
I was looking down at her in some kind of triumph, proved right, when Leveza stood up, and turned everything upside down again.
She shook the tears out of her eyes and then walked away from me, shouldering past Fortchee as if he were an encumbrance. Tamely we trooped after her. She went to a wagon and reloaded her gun. She started to troop back down the hill in the direction of the rock.
“That’s the wrong way, isn’t it?”
“What’s she doing?”
Fortchee called after her, and when she didn’t answer, he looked deeply at me and said, “Follow her.”
I whinnied for her to wait and started to trot down the hill.
Her determined stomp became a canter, then, explosively a kind of leaping, runaway gallop, thundering slipshod over stones and grass, threatening to break a leg. I chortled the slow-down cry but that checked her only for a moment. At the foot of the Rock she slid to a halt, raising dust.
She leveled her gun at the head of the wounded Cat. A light breeze seemed to blow her words to me up the slope. “Why do we need predators?”
The Cat groaned, her eyes still shut. “The Ancestors destroyed the world.”
I reached them. “Leveza, come away,” I nickered.
The Cat swallowed heavily. “They killed predators.” All her words seemed to start with a growl.
Leveza went very still, I flanked her, and kept saying, leave her, come away. Suddenly she pushed the gun at me. “Shoot her if she moves.”
I hated guns. I thought they would explode in my hands, or knock me backward. I knew carrying a gun made you a target. I didn’t want the gun; I wanted to get us back to safety. I whinnied in fear.
She pushed on back up the hill, “I’m coming back,” she said over her shoulder. I was alone with a Cat.
“Just kill me,” said the Cat. The air was black with her blood; everything in me buzzed and went numb. Overhead the scavengers spiraled and I was sure at any moment other Cats would come. Climb the Rock! I told myself, but I couldn’t move. I looked up at the trail.
Finally, finally Leveza came back with another gun and a coil of rope.
“Don’t you ever do that to me again!” I sobbed.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction Twenty-Sixth Annual Page 71