The Horsemasters

by Joan Wolf

  The Buffalo party had halted while Rilik was speaking, and Thorn watched Haras take a lamp over to the men with the antlers. One of them courteously lit it for him from their fire. Haras stayed speaking for a few moments, then led the way toward an opening in the rock that Thorn supposed led to the interior galleries. He turned to follow, tripped, and was righted by his father’s strong hand on his arm. “Watch where you are walking,” Rilik said.

  Haras had disappeared, and obediently Thorn followed him into the darkness, “We always camp in the same chamber,” Rilik said from behind Thorn, “It is not far.”

  Thorn stood quietly while the men went about the business of building a fire. As soon as the fire caught and there was light enough to see, Thorn wandered over to inspect the chamber’s walls. He saw no paintings.

  “Come,” Rilik said, “there is time enough for us to take a look around.”

  Eagerly, Thorn followed his father along the passage and back into the main tunnel of the cave.

  The sound of the rushing river was ever-present, magnified by the great stone walls and roof. Rilik and Thorn walked up the steep path beside the booming water, and Thorn could see that every level surface of the tunnel floor was occupied by groups of men with wares to trade. A number of the men wore the long braid that denoted they came from tribes that followed the Way of the Mother, and Thorn’s brown eyes were wide with wonder as he trailed along behind his father, his head swiveling from group to group.

  Rilik knew many of the men from previous gatherings and paused often to exchange greetings and news. Even those who came from a distance seemed to know a rough form of the language spoken by the tribes of the Kindred. Thorn, however, was more interested in the items offered for barter than in talk, and the wares he found most wonderful were the shells. The Buffalo tribe had shells that had been made into ornaments for both men and women, but never had Thorn seen such an array of beautiful, unset shells. There were golden shells, black shells, and pearly textured shells of pink and white and gray. There was one in particular, a fan-shaped, pure white shell that Thorn coveted. He would try to trade some of his own engravings for it, he decided, and he would make it into a pendant for his mother.

  Thorn turned away from the shells and saw that Rilik had sat down on his heels in front of the feather man. Rilik could spend hours choosing feathers. “May I go outside for a little, Father?” Thorn murmured in Rilik’s ear.

  “Mmmm,” Rilik replied absentmindedly, picking up a fine partridge feather and regarding the width of its spread intently. Thorn went.

  It was growing dark outside and Thorn was disappointed to see that the children had stopped their play. Only one little boy was left, desultorily kicking the horse-stomach ball back and forth between his moccasined feet. Thorn regarded his face with interest.

  All the lines of the child’s face went upward except the eyes, which drooped in an intriguing fold at the corners. The nose was particularly delightful, long and thin and outrageously tip-tilted. The mouth was thin-lipped, too, but its irresistible upward quirk made it look both joyous and generous. The hazy blue eyes drooped sleepily, but their expression was not sleepy at all. Thorn smiled. It was impossible not to smile at such a face.

  The child noticed him, hesitated, and then approached. “Would you like to play kick hall?” he asked.

  Thorn grinned. “Sa,” he said. “I would.”

  The two youngsters played together happily until the dark set in and their annoyed parents came to fetch them. The boy was the son of the shaman of the Tribe of the Leopard, and the shaman and Rilik thought their sons should have had enough sense to return to their campfires at darkfall. Thorn and Kenje exchanged unrepentant grins and trailed off after their respective parents.

  * * * *

  Thorn awoke in the middle of the night, sweating heavily. He felt wretched. His nose was so stuffed he couldn’t breathe, and his throat hurt. He sat up and strained to find his father by the light of the single lamp, but all he could see of Rilik was a lump under his sleeping skins.

  The only sound in the chamber was the sound of snoring. No one stirred. Rilik was a heavy sleeper, and if Thorn tried to wake his father he would wake the others as well. They would think he was a baby, crying over a sore throat. Tears stung his eyes and he blinked them back. He wished fiercely that he had not left his mother. He lay back down and steeled himself to endure the remainder of the night.

  Thorn fell back to sleep just before dawn, and he awoke again with the stir of activity around the fire. “I don’t feel well,” he croaked to his father. “My throat hurts.”

  Rilik frowned and put a hand upon his forehead. “Your skin is hot.”

  Haras saw the gesture and approached them. “What is the matter here?” He sat on his heels beside Rilik, and both men frowned at Thorn.

  The chief of the Tribe of the Buffalo was an impressive-looking man: tall and broad-shouldered with sand-colored hair and blue-gray eyes. Those eyes were looking at Thorn with a mixture of concern and irritation. Haras did not want a sick boy on his hands during the gathering.

  “The boy seems to have a throat sickness,” Rilik said. “His skin is hot, too. I will give him some sage tea, and he can stay in his sleeping skin this day.”

  Thorn groaned in protest.

  “That is what the shaman would prescribe,” Haras said authoritatively. “If your skin is hot, you must stay quiet and let the angry spirit within become calm. Go back to sleep. Perhaps you will feel better when you awaken.” The chief turned to Rilik. “If his skin does not grow cooler, we shall have to find a shaman to take some of his blood to let out the angry spirit.”

  Rilik brought Thorn the promised tea, and the hot sage-flavored liquid felt good on his swollen throat. Then the men of the tribe hoisted their wares upon their shoulders and went off to bargain for what they needed, leaving Thorn alone. His throat felt a little better from the tea and he went back to sleep.

  He had no idea how long he had been asleep when he awoke again. The gallery was still deserted. To his profound relief, he felt much better. He hated having blood drawn, and with their own shaman not here, it would have to be done by a stranger. Thorn lit the fire from the lamp the others had left burning for him and heated himself some more tea. He drank it thirstily, and when he had finished, he picked up the lamp and went to finish exploring the stone walls of the room.

  The gallery was largely undecorated, but along one wall Thorn found that someone had once scratched two very poor engravings of buffalo. Thorn examined them and curled his lip in contempt at the ineptitude of the work. He went to his pack, took out a graver, and set about engraving a proper buffalo next to the other drawings. Once that was done, he engraved the figure of a horse. Then, without any volition on the part of his brain, seemingly entirely on their own, his fingers began to draw the profile of a face.

  It was a simple sketch, but the long, up-tilted nose and drooping eyelids made perfectly clear whose face it was: Kenje, the son of the shaman of the Tribe of the Leopard.

  Thorn looked at the picture when he had finished, his face bright with pleasure in his own creation. Then he realized what he had done.

  He stepped back from the wall in consternation. Dhu! If anyone saw this picture he would be in very big trouble.

  Thorn bent to pick up a rock, so he could efface what he had drawn. Then he remembered his father’s words. If this picture had indeed captured Kenje’s spirit, what would happen to him if Thorn scratched all over him with a rock? Would something terrible happen to Kenje if Thorn destroyed this picture?

  For the first time, Thorn truly understood the magnitude of what it meant to draw a human face. He had made Kenje vulnerable. I had no right to do that, Thorn thought in horror. What am I going to do now?

  The answer came almost immediately. He would do nothing. He would leave the drawing as it was and trust to the darkness. It was only because he had been confined and bored that he had taken to exploring the walls. Surely no one else would look. Su
rely no one else would ever find this drawing. Surely Kenje would be safe.

  When Rilik arrived back at the gallery an hour later, he found Thorn drinking sage tea and feeling better.

  * * * *

  While the rest of the tribe had been trading, Haras had been meeting with the other chiefs. “There is a fearsome tale being told by the tribes of the Kindred who dwell to the north of the mountains,” Haras said that night when he sat around the campfire with his nirum. Thorn and the other youngsters who had accompanied the party sat together in a small circle behind the men, listening quietly. Haras frowned. “I know it sounds unbelievable, but it has come from more than one source.”

  “What is this tale?” Herok asked.

  “It is said that there is a tribe of people who come from the lands of the frozen north. It is said that they are not settled people, that they are ever on the move, ever seeking out better pastures and better hunting territories. The men say that they sweep down upon a tribe the way a fire sweeps across a summer pasture, destroying all that lies in its way.”

  Rilik was rubbing the tip of his nose, a sure sign he was skeptical. “I do not see how this can be true, Haras. Even if these ravagers are large in number, why do not the other tribes unite and put them to flight?”

  “They cannot” came the answer. “Men of the Buffalo, this is the strangest thing of all.” Haras lifted his leonine head. “It is said that these men sit upon the backs of horses.”

  Stunned silence. Then came the cries of disbelief:

  “Impossible!”

  “That is a shaman’s dream!”

  “I do not believe it!”

  Finally Haras held up his hand for silence.

  “Has anyone you spoke to actually seen these men?” Rilik asked into the sudden quiet.

  Haras shook his head. “They are yet to the north of the place where the River of Gold flows to the sea. The tribes who are at this gathering have not seen them, but in the gatherings to the north they have spoken to men of the Kindred who say that they have.”

  “What are these riders called?” Herok asked.

  Haras said, “The tribes are calling them the Horsemasters.”

  “If they are to the north of the River of Gold, then they are safely distant from us,” Herok pointed out.

  “That is so,” the rest of the men concurred, and after a while the talk turned to other things.

  Men sitting on horses? Thorn thought. Can it be possible?

  * * * *

  The following morning Thorn was much better, and since the tribe was not leaving the Great Cave until the following day, it seemed he would have time to see the gathering after all. The first person he sought out was the shell trader, whom he asked for the white fan-shaped shell that he had so admired two days before.

  The shell trader laughed at his ignorance and told him the white shell was long gone. “Let that be a lesson to you, youngster,” the man said officiously. “Do not wait to make up your mind, but take what you want while yet you can.”

  Shoulders drooping, Thorn was turning away from the trader’s buffalo skins, which were considerably less covered with shells than they had been two days before, when he heard a child’s voice say, “Thorn! I have been looking for you.”

  Thorn turned, and at the sight of Kenje’s irrepressibly tilted nose, he felt a sharp pang of guilt. “I was sick yesterday.”

  “I know. I asked your father where you were. Do you mind if I come around with you today?”

  The sight of Kenje put Thorn in mind of that other face he had so illicitly drawn. “Do you know if there is anyone here from the Tribe of the Wolf?” he asked the shaman’s son.

  Kenje looked first startled and then suspicious. “Why do you ask?”

  “A friend of mine joined them last year,” Thorn said, surprised by the boy’s reaction. “I would like to ask after her welfare.”

  “Oh.”

  “Is there something wrong?” Thorn asked.

  “Na,” said Kenje airily. “Nothing is wrong. They are here, as a matter of fact. Five of them. They brought some fine reindeer skins to trade.” He gave a pleased smile. “I got a beautiful white belly for my mother.”

  Thorn immediately became gloomy, remembering the white shell he had not gotten for his mother.

  Even though all the tribes in the mountains hunted reindeer, it was not unusual for fine skins to be in demand at a gathering. It took many reindeer skins to provide a sizable family with skins enough for the rugs, bedding, tents, and clothing it needed to survive. Seventeen full reindeer hides, three white bellies, and thirty legs were necessary for a woman to make a fur tunic, boots, and a sleeping skin. This did not count the other fur, like wolverine, which was used for trim. The reindeer skins from the Tribe of the Wolf had been a welcome addition to the gathering, even though the men themselves were regarded somewhat dubiously.

  “I can show you where they are,” Kenje said to Thorn. “Just don’t tell my father I was talking to them. He says the men of the Wolf are all outcasts from other tribes, and he does not want me to associate with them.” Kenje’s smoky blue eyes were solemn. He lowered his voice. “One of them murdered his own wife.”

  Thorn’s mouth dropped open in shock. “Is it so?”

  Kenje nodded. “I heard the men of my tribe talking about it. The man’s name is Bror, and he is the one who had the beautiful white belly I traded for.”

  “He murdered his wife?” Thorn could not take it in. “But why did her relations not kill him if he did such a thing?”

  “She was from another tribe, and they did not find out right away. He did not mean to do it. He loved her, the men said, but he became angry with her one day and he struck her on the jaw. She fell down, and then she died.”

  Thorn thought of his mother and folded his lips.

  “He buried her all by himself,” Kenje was going on, clearly relishing the bloody tale. “He could not ask her relations to help him; they would have killed him had they known. And his own tribe was horrified by what he had done and would not go near him. So he took a digging stick and a shovel and he worked all day and all night to dig her a grave. He was full of grief and remorse,” Kenje said, obviously parroting an adult’s words. “Then all alone he buried her and when it was done he took the track up the mountain and there he met and joined with Ronan to form the Tribe of the Wolf.”

  Thorn let out his breath in a long sigh. It was a tale that held all the terror of true tragedy.

  “Come along,” said Kenje, “and I will show you where they are.”

  The men of the Wolf were packing to leave when the boys approached them. “The one in the middle is Bror,” Kenje breathed softly.

  Thorn looked at the man who was kneeling over his hide sack, working in what looked like somber silence. Bror was black-haired with a strong-boned face and thick, muscular neck. He looked like a man who carried the burden of wife-murder on his shoulders, Thorn thought. Kenje hung back, letting Thorn move closer to the men by himself.

  “I am Thorn, son of Rilik of the Tribe of the Buffalo,” Thorn said politely. “I wonder if you could tell me if Fara is well?”

  One of the men straightened up from the flints he was packing and looked at Thorn. He was a large man, with short brown hair and small pale blue eyes. He said to Thorn with obvious irritation, “Your chief already asked us about her,” and turned back to his stones.

  Dismissed, Thorn still stood in place, shifting uncomfortably from one foot to the other. He felt Kenje plucking at his shirt, trying to get him to leave. Thorn ignored Kenje and said to the top of the man’s head, “Did she have twins again?”

  Once more the man looked up. His blue eyes were hard. “Why do you want to know?”

  “Fara was a friend of mine,” Thorn answered.

  “She had twins again,” the man said, his voice as hard as his eyes.

  Thorn’s heart was heavy. Poor Fara, he thought. Six babes had she born, only to see them… “Did Ronan let her keep one of them?”
he asked anxiously.

  This time it was the man Kenje had identified as Bror who answered. “He let her keep them both.”

  Thorn’s heart lightened, lifted. “Oh,” he said with soaring joy, “I am so glad!” He smiled all over his face.

  Now the five men were looking at him curiously. “Glad?” Bror asked. “Why should you be glad? It was your tribe that exposed her other twins.”

  Thorn bit his lip. How to explain without seeming disloyal to his tribe? “It is only that it was a terrible thing for Fara, to have her babes taken away,” he said. “It is in my heart that it would have killed her to lose them again.”

  “Twins are evil,” the blue-eyed man said flatly.

  “Well, if the babes are evil, they are in the right company,” the redheaded young man on the giant’s left said with a wry smile. “As Ronan pointed out to you when you objected to keeping them, Heno.”

  “What did he say?” Thorn asked in fascination.

  The redhead, who looked to be about Ronan’s age, answered with his eyes on the one called Heno. “He said that the evil two small babes could bring to a tribe of rapists and murderers was distinctly negligible, and we might just as well add to the general wickedness and go ahead and keep them.”

  Thorn and Kenje laughed, then stopped and stared at the rapists and murderers, hoping they had not been offended.

  “Not to mention the fact that he wanted to keep the women,” the blond-haired young man farthest from the boys murmured.

  “He was right,” the redhead said firmly. “We need the women.”

  All of the men grunted their agreement with that statement. Then Kenje surprised Thorn by stepping forward. “Please,” Kenje said, addressing himself to Bror, whose bearing subtly indicated that he was the party’s leader, “would you give this to my sister for me?” And he held out the exact same white shell that Thorn had wanted for his mother.

  Thorn stared at the shell; then he lifted his eyes to stare at Kenje. The boy’s eyes were fixed on Bror. The big man nodded to the blond. “Take it from him, Dai.”

  The blond young man came forward, and Kenje put the shell into his hand. “I wanted to give this to you yesterday,” Kenje said, “but my father was always around.” He glanced nervously over his shoulder, as if he felt someone watching him even now. “How is she?” he asked.