Mistress of Animals

by Myers, Karen

  Khizuwi watched them, but didn’t comment.

  “People stopped grazing their herds there, because too many of the animals went missing and couldn’t be found. Early this summer, two herdsmen and the young woman that was a friend of one of them—they vanished, too. Wolf tracks were found, but no bodies.”

  Jirkat asked, “When, exactly?”

  “In the second week of Jibrim.”

  Ilzay worked it out. “That’s about when we were passing, to the west, on the other side of the ridge. Remember, Jirkat, we stopped and admired that view on our way back, before we swung south of east to intersect the trail to the autumn camp.”

  Jirkat stared at Khizuwi. “What are you suggesting, bikraj?”

  Penrys said, “He’s suggesting you stirred up a hornet’s nest, passing by it unknowing.”

  She gave Khizuwi a hard look. “Aren’t you?”

  He replied, mildly. “Perhaps nothing lived in those caves, those caves that were empty before.”

  Penrys pressed on. “But perhaps this qahulajti appeared there, three years ago, and preyed upon your herds, and finally your people, and then when they passed the place”—she waved a hand at the young men—“near enough for her to hear them,” she tapped her forehead, “she went and found their backtrail.”

  The blood drained from Jirkat’s face.

  “Isn’t that what you mean?” Penrys was rigid.

  Khizuwi just echoed, “Perhaps.”

  The grim lines on Ilzay’s face aged it by a decade. “The timing works, bikrajti. He’s right.”

  Najud told Jirkat, “You didn’t cause this. It’s not your fault. The lightning struck where it would, and you had nothing to do with it.” He glowered at Khizuwi.

  The older man shrugged. “Truly, it is not your fault, barqah, if it happened that way. But it’s best that we understand what she might have done, what might be true, so that we can learn how to stop her, and rescue what’s left of your clan.”

  Penrys thought out loud. “Maybe that is how it happened. It might explain a lot. If that’s where she appeared…”

  She choked, but continued. “Like me… then maybe she never left. Maybe she never found people, only animals. She’s young now, and she’d have been younger then. No memory, no language. What would happen?”

  “A feral child,” Najud said, “Like one that’s lost very young and raised by animals.”

  Khizuwi nodded. “I have heard of this. They never quite become people again, once they’re saved.”

  “And she found your three people,” Penrys said. “And she learned. But what would she do with what she learned?”

  She struck her thigh with her fist. “She became curious. She scanned around her, and discovered…”

  She waved her hand with the shortened finger at Jirkat, and he shrank back in dismay, but she didn’t notice and went on. “More people. Where did they come from, she’d want to know.”

  Najud finished for her. “So she went and looked. And found them.”

  “But why would she kidnap them all?” Penrys asked. “Assuming this is all true.”

  Najud shook his head, and Khizuwi watched them without comment.

  CHAPTER 23

  When the camp had been packed up in the morning and the horses loaded, Khizuwi strolled over to the restive horse in Ilzay’s string that carried the pack with the rainbow marking and the doleful load of pouches.

  Everyone was still dismounted, and they stood in a loose group facing their guest, and watched.

  He lay both hands flat on the pack, and the horse calmed. After a few moments, he turned back to his audience.

  “These people—your friends, your family, your clan-kin—they’ve returned to the dunaq wandim, the world that surrounds. These little mementos they left behind—those are for you, not for them. They have no part in them any more. You remember them by these tokens, and it’s your memories that are light or heavy. It’s for you to make them light again, to think of the pleasant times. They don’t make this pack heavy or this horse uneasy—you do.”

  He looked each of them in the eye as he turned his head. “When you make your cairns, you do it for them—for your memory of them and how you think you would wish to be treated. But I tell you, they don’t care, and neither will you, when the time comes. Do it instead for yourself, to remember by the labor of lifting heavy rocks that the world is as it is and is only changed, if ever it is, by sweat and toil and the desire of everything living to stay alive, as long as possible, before returning to the peace of the dunaq wandim.”

  When she monitored Ilzay, it seemed to her that his depression had lightened, that a new element of guardianship had entered his thoughts and squared his shoulders. His hand grasped the tally horn on its thong as if he would protect it, not as if it weighed him down.

  When she turned toward Najud and prepared to mount her horse, she murmured to him, “That was… effective.”

  He nodded soberly. “How long will you ride with us, before you fly?”

  “A while. Doesn’t take long to do my twenty miles, out and back.”

  Once she had adjusted her position, she looked over at Najud. “I wish you’d let me go a reasonable distance. We may lose her if enough snow comes.”

  He shook his head. “Bad enough you have to fly so far beyond the range of your mind-voice. At least this way, if anything happens, we’re only a day away at the most.”

  “It’s not the best way to use your long-distance scout,” she said. Khizuwi’s words might have calmed the rest of them, but she felt a renewed sense of urgency. It was all very well to not over-mourn the dead, but it was the living who needed their help.

  Khizuwi walked his own horse up in time to hear the last of this. The cairn he’d been working on when Penrys encountered him the day before was visible to their left. He indicated it with his head, and said to them both, quietly, “They’ll call this the ‘trail of the dead’ from now on, long after they’ve forgotten who these people were.”

  She noticed that he kept his voice low enough not to be heard by the clan-kin of these dead.

  Then he looked directly at her. “What do you think would happen, bikrajti, if you blunder into the attention of this powerful child, dozens of miles from any of us? Who will you help then? Will anyone find your bones and raise the rocks over what is left?”

  Two days later, Penrys returned from her morning scouting to join Najud for the mid-day rest.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she said, “up there in the cold.” She ate standing, since she’d be sitting soon enough, swapping to horseback for the remainder of the day.

  Najud waited for her to take another bite of her lukewarm beans and sausage bits, unfrozen by the simple expedient of keeping it in a pack nearest to the horse’s warm hide, and then pouring boiling water over it. The result was edible, if not exactly hot. He’d tried to convince her to add some of the wishkaz spices to it, but she insisted on salt and nothing else.

  The food must be terribly bland in Ellech.

  She swallowed, and waved her horn spoon in the air to illustrate her point. “I don’t think this girl is truly feral, not in the sense of having no language.”

  She dipped up another spoonful but paused before lifting it to her mouth. “If she was like me, she no longer had her old language, but that doesn’t mean she never had one.”

  Najud took advantage of her temporary muteness as the spoon reached its destination. “So she knew languages, you’re saying—she just needed one to use.”

  “That’s right,” Penrys said. “And all she found were animals.”

  Khizuwi was close enough to listen to them, but he was silent, apparently occupied with his food. The other three squatted together, discussing something in low voices that he couldn’t make out.

  “For three, long years. What did that do to her? Then she found some people, and all of a sudden…” She chewed another mouthful.

  “But what’s happened to them?” Najud said.

  S
he shrugged. “Maybe they’re still with her.”

  “Not voluntarily,” he protested.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  She glanced over at Khizuwi.

  “What’s she using for power, hmm? None of these people were… are wizards.”

  “What did you use, on Winnajhubr, or the mice?” Najud asked.

  “Well, I don’t know. It wasn’t like fighting against wizards, in the Temple School. It was finicky, and I didn’t do it well, but it didn’t need much strength. Still, it’s a lot of people and animals, and there’s some distance involved—think of reaching up into the High Pass, presumably from the summer encampment. That’s, what, twenty miles? Thirty?”

  She grabbed another bite. “I couldn’t do that, and then maintain delicate control with it, too, especially for so many. And this is all guesswork, anyway. I don’t understand exactly what she’s doing.”

  “Or why,” Najud added.

  “And where’s she going? I’ll say one thing, she’s not in any hurry about it. The track meanders all over the place.”

  Najud lifted his voice and called over to Ilzay. “Didn’t you pick up some more droppings today? How old would you say they are?”

  He didn’t know what to make of the grins that flickered on the faces of the three young men.

  Ilzay stood up, and walked over, and the other two strolled along behind. “The horse droppings look only a couple of weeks old now, maybe less. She’s taking her time about it, she is.”

  He reached into one of the pouches slung from his belt. “Maybe you can tell me what you think about this, bikrajti—how old?”

  He held out two frozen brown lumps, and Najud choked as Penrys furrowed her brow, clearly trying to identify the animal.

  Jirkat successfully froze his expression, but Winnajhubr’s attempts to stifle his laughter failed altogether. “I told you she wouldn’t recognize it,” he sputtered to his friends. “Someone that skilled, you know, with her unusual nature… Probably never saw that before. Humans, they’re different from birds, you know…”

  With that Najud joined the other three in whoops as Penrys’s cheeks flamed and she got the joke. Her mouth opened and shut a couple of times as she searched for a retort, but finally she just gave up and lifted her hands in defeat.

  “Is it my fault if everyone’s too polite to decorate the camp with specimens so I can learn for myself?” she said.

  In spite of herself, she grinned broadly, and Najud could feel the warmth of her affection for these friends, comfortable enough with her to make her the butt of a joke.

  As the laughter died down, he noticed Khizuwi smiling quietly as he observed the banter but said nothing.

  CHAPTER 24

  “People coming,” Penrys called back to the others. “Two men, about five miles out.”

  She rode just off the path, as the only one not leading a pack-string, so that everyone else could stay together.

  Najud glanced over at her. *How did you miss them in the morning?*

  *I can only check a trail ten miles wide, with me in the center. If they were coming from east or west and more than five miles away, I wouldn’t sense them.*

  *But you can feel them now.*

  She nodded. “Two bikrajab,” she said out loud, for Khizuwi’s benefit. “And their horses.”

  Khizuwi asked, “From the east?”

  “That’s right,” she said.

  “That’ll be Jiqlaraz and maybe his nal-jarghal, from clan Rashaban of the Dhajtawhaz tribe. Their trail to the Maqurrah should cross this track somewhere around here.”

  Penrys glanced around at the low ridges whose base the track had followed for days. The landscape seemed featureless to her, but Khizuwi clearly knew exactly where he was.

  They stopped to raise one more rock cairn, for an unrecognized man, and that gave the strangers enough time to come up the track and meet them while they were still dismounted.

  Penrys had kept her mind’s attention on them the whole way, glad that this meeting would not find her in the air, flaunting her foreigner status. They all straightened up from their labor at the sound of hoofbeats. Khizuwi walked out to greet them, and welcomed the elder one as an old colleague.

  The wizard in the lead was in his forties, Penrys judged, with a prominent hooked nose, and he wore the small turban that was so characteristic of the Zannib men. Behind him rode a young turbaned man who looked to be Winnajhubr’s age. He led the longer pack-string—four horses, to his master’s two.

  Jiqlaraz finished speaking with Khizuwi, and he surveyed their group from horseback, until his eyes fell upon Penrys and he glimpsed the chain she wore around her neck.

  “Good,” he said. “I see you’ve caught her already and put her to work.”

  Without hesitation he launched a mind-probe which she effortlessly repelled by raising her shield. She smiled coldly at his surprise.

  “You’re mistaken, bikraj,” she said. “There’s more than one of us.”

  Behind him, the eyes of his apprentice widened.

  Khizuwi interposed himself between them and began speaking rapidly to his colleague, in tones too low for the rest of them to hear.

  A pressure at her back told Penrys that Najud had stepped up behind her, and she realized she was still focused on Jiqlaraz, poised for his next attack. She made herself relax again, though she kept her shield up. As her shoulders dropped, Najud’s placed his hand on one of them.

  The other three were puzzled, but they moved in closer together and took their cue from Najud.

  Khizuwi stopped talking, and Jiqlaraz considered her again. Then he dismounted and Winnajhubr ran up to take his reins and the lead rope for his string. Penrys watched him exchange a nervous grin with the as yet unnamed apprentice as they waited on their elders.

  Jiqlaraz approached and nodded to the group now concentrated around Penrys. “I beg forgiveness for my mistake, jarghalti, but all the messenger said was female, foreign, and chained around the neck. Perhaps you can understand the error.”

  “I do understand,” she said, warily. “No harm done.”

  Najud stepped around her and greeted him genially. “We’re very glad to have help with us as we pursue this qahulajti who has caused so much grief for our friends, the Kurighdunaq. I’m Najud, son of Ilsahr, of the Zamjilah, and this is Penrys.”

  Penrys held her face expressionless. I need parents and clan just for these introductions, if nothing else. Sounds too simple this way.

  The strange wizard tapped his chest. “I’m Jiqlaraz, son of Ghayrbarsh, of the Rashaban of the Dhajtawhaz. My nal-jarghal here is Munraz, my brother’s son.”

  Penrys thought Najud froze for just a moment at that announcement, but he continued as if nothing were the matter.

  Jiqlaraz turned to Khizuwi. “My friend tells me he has been sharing your kazr, Najud. No need for that any more. We two have room for another.”

  Najud said smoothly, “We will be sorry to lose such a pleasant and distinguished guest, of course, but he must do as he thinks best.”

  Penrys kept her face expressionless. Something’s wrong here. I won’t be sorry to get my privacy back, but what’s going on?

  Jirkat stepped forward boldly and spoke to Najud directly, ignoring Jiqlaraz. “We should keep going, zarawinnaj, we have a lot more ground to cover today.”

  Ah. That’s part of it. These two wizards are much older than Najud. That’s why Jirkat gave him the migration leader’s title, to reinforce his authority.

  “Twelve more miles at least,” Najud said cheerfully. “We’re catching up—no time to lose.”

  Khizuwi threw his weight behind him. “I’ll fill you in as we go along, Jiqlaraz, and you can tell us all about your journey when we stop tonight.”

  After building four more cairns, the mood in the camp that night was subdued. They set up the three kazrab and dispersed for their separate meals.

  Penrys found Najud quiet and inattentive while she was cleaning up the cookware they’d
used, until she finally threw a wet dish cloth at him.

  “Explain what’s going on,” she said. “This has you worried and I don’t understand all of it.”

  He picked up the cloth and used it to clean his low worktable for the leather work he would do after the evening meeting. “Sorry. I’ve been chewing on it all afternoon.”

  He paused to order his thoughts. “It’s several things, all at the same time. First, it’s the issue of leadership. For a normal journey— a caravan, the taridiqa, even just a few friends visiting someone else—there is always a leader. It doesn’t mean much when it’s just a few people, but even so, someone bears the title. Someone must be the leader. It’s an important day when a young man first takes that responsibility for a group of his friends, like the day when another man first calls him lij, like a true adult.”

  He hung the cloth over a rope near the stovepipe to dry.

  “Umzakhilin set me this responsibility for the five of us, and made it easier for them to accept me with the clan adoption. That’s why Jirkat called me zarawinnaj today.”

  “I understand that part,” Penrys said, as she looked around to check that everything was in order.

  “But the thing is, when bikrajab band together to restrain a qahulaj, that’s different. There’s usually no one in their group who isn’t a bikraj, at some level, and it’s almost always the eldest who leads. We have stories about what happens when there’s a dispute about it. It doesn’t end well.”

  Penrys said, “And until Khizuwi came along, you were also the oldest wizard in this group, more or less.” Her own age was unknown, but she looked about the same age as Najud.

  “But not any more,” she finished. “What’s going to happen?”

  “That’s part of what we must talk about tonight.”

  He sat down in his customary spot to the right of the stove and patted the rug next to him in invitation.

  “It not an easy question. I’ve never joined others in a hunt like this.”

  “Nonsense,” Penrys said, as she crossed her legs and made herself comfortable. “That’s exactly what you did going against the Voice.”