At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories

by Kij Johnson

  Mei started a fire that bled thin smoke. From a fitted felt case, she pulled a large silver metal bowl beaten thin as a leaf. She filled the bowl with water and hung it over the flames.

  Once they had their saddle pads and bridles removed, the raiders’ mares mingled with my clan’s horses. There was some fighting, but less than I would have expected. The strange horses stood head and shoulders higher as they all waded into the stream. One of the riders, Ko, patrolled the opposite bank on horseback. As he cantered opposite us, he rubbed his dusty face wearily. My dogs would have guarded better.

  Mara sat on the cracked-mud bank beside Shen. He was making something with reeds he had pulled.

  “Mara.” My voice sounded blurred in my ears.

  She turned slightly, perhaps afraid to look directly at me. “Aunt Katia?”

  “Yes.” Meaning to reach for her, I lifted my hands until the cord stopped me.

  “ ’Tia!” She bolted into my lap and clung to my neck.

  “Are you all right?” I asked her.

  She nodded, and her dusty, sweaty hair scratched my throat. She looked healthy, if tired and drawn. As well as I could, I felt her for injuries. She had a bruise on one shin, but I thought I remembered that from before the barbarians.

  I had never been comfortable with the family’s children. I tended them when it was my turn but never asked to hold them or taught them the small-child things. After my father died, I showed Mara the things he had taught me when I was her size: how to clean the horses’ hooves, how to make a tablet from herbs or powders. I dealt with her best if I remembered my father teaching me, but now I had to deal with her. There was no one left.

  “Where are Mama and Papa?” she asked.

  Dust on Megan’s long-lashed eye; the ragged red gash left by an arrow removed from Daved’s side. “You don’t remember?” I finally said.

  “Shen says they had to go away but that he’ll take care of me.” She frowned. “You’re dirty, ’Tia. You should wash.”

  Dried blood flecked her cheek. “You should wash, too, Mara.”

  “That’s what Shen says but I don’t want to. Shen says that where he’s from is so cold that water is like sand on the ground.”

  “Snow,” I said. “At Dawn. I saw it once when I was smaller than you.”

  “Shen says I’ll see it.” She blinked sleepily. “Why are you tied up like that? Were you bad like a dog?”

  “No. You don’t remember the camp?”

  She shook her head.

  Shen came closer and squatted on his heels. He looked as tired as the rest of them, but he smiled at Mara and held out for her a small shape woven of reeds. “I have a sister her age,” he said to me. “Wulin. She is full of questions, too.”

  “Shen says I may have the straw pony,” Mara said. “He made it.”

  I watched through the smoke. Mara had already forgotten.

  I slept until I was drugged with it. I woke once and staggered to the water’s edge to drink the silty water. My hands were bound in such a way that I could not cup water, so I dipped my face like a dog or a horse. When I was done, I knelt back, and picked at the knot with my teeth as I looked around me.

  Shen and Ko slept nearby. Mara was cuddled against the youth. Mei guarded the horses and the camp; I saw her astride the one-eared mare from my family’s herd. She slowed when she saw me but did not stop. I could go nowhere and I was no threat; Shen and Ko lay with their knives and bows within arm’s reach.

  I heard the murmur of voices, Huer and Suhui talking. They stood away from the herd with a single horse, the gray mare Suhui had first ridden. The gray held her head rigid as though afraid to move it, and barked a single shallow cough. Her halter was hung with prayer flags no longer than my finger.

  Suhui soothed the horse. “Hush, daughter, easy.” The raiders all called one another family words—daughter, sister, father.

  “The lesions and now the coughing,” Huer said.

  “Yes,” Suhui said.

  “Then the mare is already dead,” he said slowly. “I am sorry.”

  “I understand.” Even at that distance I saw how pale she was, her gold-skinned face leached a muddy white. “But the others, the strange horses—they do not have the lesions, do they? They might not have it?”

  “You saw them yourself. You looked in their mouths. No sores.”

  “Every other horse on Ping seems to have them.” Suhui’s voice sounded bitter. “How are these free of them?”

  “The handler,” Huer said. “Or she has something in her packs. Daughter, she might know how to cure your mare.”

  Suhui’s voice was hopeless. “The pneumonia, maybe. The plague? Not even Earth medicine could cure her of that. It must be luck that her herd has not caught it. It was a mistake to take her, father.”

  “Perhaps,” Huer said. “But it may not be luck. She may know things. Could I leave her behind?”

  She said slowly, “She is too unwrinkled to be a great healer. I think there is more to it than this.”

  “There is nothing,” he said harshly.

  “She might poison her horses rather than see them become ours. Have you thought of that?”

  “We have the child, what is it—Mara. She will not endanger her.”

  “She might not care.”

  The gray mare coughed again, once, shallowly, seemingly afraid of the pain. Huer touched her neck. “We cannot let her give this cough to the others, if she has not already. The handler may something to make this easier for her.”

  “No. I will do it myself, as it has always been done.” The horse shifted at the grief in Suhui’s voice. “Would you trust the stranger if it were your horse dying?”

  “We may all have to learn to, daughter,” Huer said wearily. “Her horses are well and ours are dying.”

  Suhui removed the halter and walked away, singing softly to the mare. The gray’s ears pricked forward, and she followed slowly. They moved out of sight around a curve of the stream bed, Suhui plucking the prayer flags from the halter as they walked.

  “And will you poison them?” Huer’s voice so close to my ear startled me. He stood a bare arm’s length from me, watching me watch Suhui.

  I said nothing. I had thought of it but they were my family’s horses, all that was left of the Winden clan beyond Mara and me and the clan dog—if he lived. And to kill them would take me out of the smoke, to somewhere I did not want to be. “What sickness?” I asked finally.

  “You don’t know.” I started to pick at the knots with my teeth again. “There is a plague. Everywhere on Ping, the horses are dying. The horses get sores in their mouths and then any illness kills them whether it is serious or not. It takes a long while for them to die. A dying mare can foal before she dies. But the foal is dying before it is born.

  “Many leagues south of where I am from, back in Dawn, there were a people with a million horses. We used to raid them, but their horses are all dead now. Dead or dying. The Emperor sent us out, a thousand of us, while our horses were still well enough to carry us. To find information or anything that might help.”

  “And so you killed my family and let me live.”

  “You are an idea I had. That you might be able to heal the horses. Bringing you and the child to the capital may anger the Emperor. He may kill us.”

  “Unless I keep the horses well?”

  “Even then. I broke my orders.”

  “Then why bring me back at all?”

  “Because my death isn’t as important as saving the horses, if you can do that.” He shrugged. “We are horse people. The Emperor rules by the speed of our horses. When the horses die, we also die. I will only die a little faster than my people.”

  Suhui was quiet, swollen-eyed and hard-jawed when she came back. She selected one of the bays from the Winden mares and looked her over carefully; the horse was young, so she danced as the woman did this, tossing her head high. Suhui seemed to like this and haltered her with the gray’s halter, tying a single prayer flag t
o her cheek strap.

  We left the stream and traveled again.

  There were fifty horses in the Winden herd, as well as the ones we rode. The queen mare decided she did not like being pushed so hard and kept moving the herd in other directions, away from north and dawnward. The riders exhausted their mounts trying to stop this. The barbarians’ gray horse that I rode trailed the herd, directed by Huer’s shouted commands. More often than not, Mara rode before Shen. When she did ride with me, she chattered about the strange world of the riders.

  “Shen says we’re going to a city,” she said. “That’s where his family is from and he will introduce me to his sister.”

  “City,” I murmured after her. An unfamiliar word, even in Trade.

  “That is like a bunch of houses, only huge. Shen says that many more than a thousand people live just in that place. The emperor—that’s their group leader, ’Tia, like the Moot-leader—has a herd of a many more than a thousand horses, and they feed them with grain from farmers from all around, instead of eating it themselves. Shen says—”

  “Who are your parents, Mara?” I interrupted.

  “My mother is Meg Weaver of the Winden clan of the Moot people. My father is Daved Handler of the Leydet clan, crossed into the Windens,” she recited. “When are Mama and Papa coming back?”

  “You won’t forget that, will you?” I asked. “Your clan? Your parents? No matter what happens?”

  She twisted in my arms to look at me. “That’s silly, ’Tia. I have to say that every time we come to Moot.”

  “But if you never go to a Moot again, Mara. Promise.”

  “But—” Her face twisted. “Where’s Mama?”

  “Gone,” I said. I still saw through the smoke; I had no resources on which to draw to explain things gently, or at all, to a child. Meg, Daved: dead, leagues noonward.

  “When will they come back?” I recognized the signs of coming tears in the tension in her body and the tightening of her voice. “You have to tell me.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  She screamed and hit me. “You do know! You won’t let me talk to them. You’re here and they’re not. I hate you, I hate you!”

  At her first screams, Shen and Huer left their places by the herd and galloped toward us.

  “Hush, daughter, hush.” Shen pulled her from my arms and into his own. “Wulin is your size and she never cries anymore. Do you want her to think you are a baby when you meet her?” He met my eyes momentarily over her heaving shoulders; I saw anger that I had made her cry. “Let me show you a marker cairn, how we show a way for the horses to go home.” Still murmuring in her ear, he kicked his horse into a canter toward the front of the herd.

  Huer barked a word; my mare, who had started after Shen’s, stopped in her tracks. “You are all right?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Your face—” He gestured toward his own cheeks. I raised my hands, but they stopped halfway, stopped by the short lead around my waist.

  “Wait,” he said, and pulled free his knife and leaned across. The cords fell from my wrists and waist to the ground beside my horse, a tangle of black. “Now.”

  My arms were stiff when I lifted them. My face was wet. “She is mine,” I said finally. “She is my clan, the only—” My throat closed.

  “No one steals her,” he said softly.

  I knew that; she gave herself away, to Shen and his family I had never seen.

  For the Moot people, finding places is not so hard; we have the sextant to tell us how far north or south we are; and the angle of the sun shows us that we are where we belong, at the center of things. Rivers and hills and lakes and plains all move under us, but we and the sun stay still: n’dau.

  The raiders did not use a sextant, although they had my clan’s as well as their own. Instead, we passed cairns no higher than my ankle, made of gold-pink stones—laid by the advance horsemen finding a route for so many horses. I did not know how anyone saw the cairns on a plain littered with gold-pink stones.

  We ate on horseback. There was more water now, easy to find at the center of the soil ribbons we crossed. We stopped to sleep only when the lead mare refused to travel. Even through the smoke, I remembered to examine the horses of the herd, looking in their mouths for sores, but the Winden mares were healthy, if tired. Amazingly, the foals were all keeping up. The barbarians’ horses were not so well. None had caught pneumonia from Suhui’s mare before it had died, but they were more exhausted than they should be, even for the work they were doing.

  Back with my family, I had always slept in a tent, but I got used to resting as the barbarians did, with a dark cloth thrown over my face to cut the sun’s bite. In the brief time between lying down and exhausted sleep, I looked up and saw the ball of the sun filtered through fabric and the smoke in my head to a hard hot ball. Still too high.

  After a while, we crossed another ribbon of vegetation, this time mixed thorn bushes as high as my chest. Some were from Earth, but here they bloomed and seeded at the same time so that the tangle was filled with tiny yellow-green flowers and brighter wax-yellow berries. A small stream ran along the ribbon’s center. The herd drank there, but Huer said there was more water and better grazing ahead of us, and we did not stop for long.

  They had not tied my hands again but the blazed gray mare I rode still had no reins. Perhaps she was the best trained for voice commands, because I never rode another, even when she was tired and fell to the back of the group. I had memorized one of the words Huer used on her, the command for stop. Her ears flicked back when I tried the word, but she plodded on. At last, impatient, I slid from her saddle and ran to her head, caught the cheek straps of her halter and forcibly halted her.

  Her head hung as she labored for breath. She was sweating too hard for the work she was doing, as I am small and she was a big horse. Her coat was stained dark. When I laid my ear against her side I heard her heartbeat, too fast. Looking for a sign of the fever I already knew she had, I peeled her lip back. Her gums were pale.

  But the inside of her lip and her gums were also covered with weeping sores, some the size of my thumb. The flesh around them was hot red, inflamed. She flinched when I touched her mouth, even with cool hands, even a finger’s length from the sores.

  I heard a shout from the herd: Ko’s voice, calling for Huer. Perhaps he had seen me off my horse. But where would I go afoot? To the ribbon behind us, to squat among thorns? No: Ko galloped past me, back toward the ribbon.

  Huer rode up. “The mare,” he said harshly. “The pregnant sorrel. She’s left the herd.”

  I stared at him. “Bring her back, then.”

  “Have you been watching? She’s shedding, drinking a lot. It is her time. Mount.”

  I looked at my heaving horse. “I don’t think mine can carry me.”

  “Behind me, then,” he said impatiently, and leaned over, his hand outstretched. I laid mine in it; he heaved me up in front of him. He pivoted his mare and we followed Ko, back the way we came.

  Ko had found her almost immediately, and we followed his shouts to a place in the thorns just south of where we had crossed the water. We stopped where Ko’s horse stood. Ko paced beside a gap in the thorns. Huer pulled me down, caught my wrist, and dragged me down a short path.

  The sorrel stood in a small clearing, pawing at the blossom-dusted ground. When she noticed us, she charged a step. Huer and I stepped back into the path’s mouth and silently knelt to watch. Perhaps this was distance enough, for she ignored us there.

  Something was wrong. She acted as any mare delivering would: shimmied her huge bulk as though uncomfortable, then laid down with her legs tucked under her like a crouching dog. And then up again and then down, twisting restlessly.

  “No,” I said, realizing.

  “What?” Huer said behind me, his breath warm on my ear.

  “She’s not eating,” I murmured. “She should be eating everything she can reach.”

  He left me and moved back. I
heard him say in a low voice, “Get her medicines.” Ko mounted and left at a gallop.

  When Huer returned, I said without looking back, “Wasted effort.”

  “What?”

  The sorrel was rolling on her back, heaving her huge torso from side to side. “It’s colic. I can do nothing.”

  “Is this the plague?”

  I turned to look at him. “No. The mare is damaged internally somehow: the foal kicked her intestinal wall or has been lying across a vein in her belly. Or she’s eaten something strange.”

  “Did the plague make her susceptible?”

  “No,” I said impatiently. “There have always been difficult deliveries, colics.”

  Her neck was stretched straight out, her throat muscles working. Her legs thrashed as she tried to shift her bulk. The coppery coat was streaked dark and light with sweat and foam. The eye I could see was rimmed with panic-white. Huer said, “You must do something.”

  The spasms stopped and she lay on her side, heaving. The hard drying mud of the clearing was spangled with tiny fallen green-yellow blossoms. I moved to her and stroked the long bone of her face.

  “There’s nothing I can do,” I said without looking up.

  He crossed the clearing in two strides and pulled my face to his, until his gold eyes were a flat angry glow a hand’s width from mine. “You can try, Katia. You can fight for her life.”

  “Why?” I said wearily. He had never called me by my name before. None of them had. “So that she can bear foals for you?”

  “Better that she bear foals for someone,” he said grimly. “Yours is the first pregnant horse I have seen in six of Suhui’s menstrual cycles. If they cannot be infected, your horses, their foals, will save us all. You will not let her die of colic.”

  “Important? Nothing is so important that you had to kill Ricard and Jena. Meg. Daved. The boys. The dogs.” My words came as croaks. My eyes felt pressured by poisonous, unshed tears.

  “Do you think I do not have a family, Katia of the Winden Clan? That I do not have brothers, a sister married to a book-saver in the city? A son, too young to leave his mother and join me? I have family and I fear for them. Without horses we will die. There will be no way to communicate, no way to gather tribute. We will starve. Save this foal.”