by Paul Chafe
Across the platform Pouncer fanned his ears up. It was a question he’d wondered about himself but hadn’t raised.
Kr-Pathfinder stretched on his prrstet and rolled over to face her. “It depends on the tuskvor. Once around the Hunter’s Moon, perhaps more.”
Ayla nodded. Once around the Hunter’s Moon was a month, more or less. It would be a long time to spend on a tuskvor’s back. At least she now understood the design philosophy behind the prrstet hammock/couches that were kzin-standard furnishing. They served to smooth out the constant jolting of the tuskvor’s heavy gait.
A pack of grlor joined them on the second day and dogged their passage, hoping to pull down a straggler. There were seven or eight in the pack, enough to be dangerous, but the mazourk kept the big grandmothers on the outside of the herd and the predators couldn’t get close enough to take any of the smaller animals. They tried though, making feint attacks in pairs or threes, their rumbling hunt-calls echoing over the steady, rhythmic thudding of the tuskvor’s heavily padded feet. She saw a herd grandmother kill a grlor then. The predator had made a feint at one of the juveniles who’d wandered from the center of the herd, then shied away from its mother as she came to rescue her progeny. The distracted grlor didn’t see the grandmother accelerating around the edge of the herd, and it didn’t angle away fast enough. The grandmother swung her massive head and that was all it took. Her tusks stabbed the beast in the flank. It roared in pain and turned to snap at her, but stumbled. The grandmother plowed over it without stopping, leaving it crippled and thrashing in her wake, to be crushed lifeless by the oncoming herd.
Their own grandmother seemed inclined to charge as well, but Ferlitz-Telepath hauled on the mazourk harness lines and kept it moving with the main body of tuskvor. To Cherenkova’s surprise the other predators in the pack ran to their fallen comrade, snapping and roaring with enough vehemence to discourage another grandmother that seemed about to charge them. As the scene disappeared behind her the grlor were nosing at the body. They understand death. They have more intelligence than I thought. She had been fooled by their reptilian appearance. The grlor didn’t return until the next afternoon, and they were more circumspect. There were no more attacks.
They left the shade of jungle for the savannah on the fourth day and the grlor fell back. The kzinti put up tuskvor-skin canopies to keep the sun off the tsvasztet and spent most of the day napping. Ayla spent her time reading books on her beltcomp, titles she’d been meaning to read for years and never quite found time for. Wide-spreading grove trees dotted the sun-baked landscape on the higher ground, their shapes oddly unsettling to her Earth-raised sense of rightness. Here and there she could see other tuskvor herds moving in the same direction as theirs. The migration was picking up steam. Rivers appeared in their path, water rushing and splashing as they grew closer and the tuskvor ahead broached the current, then the tilt as their own beast came over the bank and the crystal water churned muddy far below to run as thick and dark as chocolate downstream. Far ahead on the horizon the distant line that marked the Long Range Mountains grew inexorably larger.
On the seventh day she began to get bored. The kzinti were content to nap the day away and tell stories in the cooler evenings. She would have liked to be able to move around, but there was no way she could leap from tuskvor to tuskvor as the kzinti did. Even with skillful maneuvering the tsvasztet never got closer than three meters. Her ancestors might have swung happily from tree to tree over similar distances, but Ayla Cherenkova, she decided, was going to make this entire journey on the same tuskvor she had started it on. She slept well that night, lulled to sleep by the rhythmic rocking of her mount, with Pouncer’s haunch for her pillow. When she awoke the sun was high and warm, but the air was noticeably cooler and drier. They had climbed into the foothills in the darkness, and the Long Range was no longer a distant blur on the horizon. Now the peaks loomed like a jagged fortress wall, and another day would see them into the passes.
The herd had transformed itself too. More pods, hundreds more pods, had joined them in the darkness and the migration had become a vast, roiling river of flesh. The males had joined the herd too, more immense than the largest herd-grandmother, bulking out of the torrent here and there like living islands. Quicktail, who used her to practice his storytelling, told her that at the far end of the migration there would be mating, and the males would fight then for females. That would be a sight to see, from a distance. With the other pods came other prides of czrav, and the flow of visitors increased as pride leaders came to pay their respects to V’rli. She thought that Pouncer, deposed son of the Patriarch, might become a center of attention, but except for Czor-Dziit of Dziit Pride, who asked his story and listened while he told it, he seemed to draw no special interest.
While the sun was still low C’mell leapt over to teach Pouncer the art of mazourk, guiding the ponderous beasts with the heavy wooden harness bar connected to the network of reins that controlled them. The harness bar, Ayla learned, and in fact the whole travel platform, were built of aromatic myewl wood timbers. Evidently the leafy bush could grow to a tree as well, and it served to suppress the scent of predator enough to keep the tuskvor from attacking their riders.
“Can I try it?” Ayla asked after the lesson.
C’mell looked questioningly at V’rli, who growled her assent. And Cherenkova took the harness bar under the kzinrette’s tutelage. The harness bar levered the harness lines. Pushing forward lowered them to pull the beast’s head down and slow it, pulling back raised its head to speed it up, pull left to turn left and right to turn right. In theory it was simple; in practice, it was a lot more difficult. She was barely strong enough to haul the bar back and forth, and it took some understanding of the tuskvor’s mood and personality to make it work. Even a kzin couldn’t exert enough strength to force a tuskvor’s head around against its will, but an even steady pressure would induce it to turn, and its body would eventually follow. Jerking the bar or trying to turn the tuskvor too far out of the tide of the migration would make the creature balk, and then it would pull back against the harness hard enough to slam the bar across its guideposts, and break an arm in the process if the mazourk weren’t quick about getting out of the way. A balky tuskvor had to be calmed by gently pulling the harness one way and then the other, convincing it that the pressure it felt was perfectly normal. It took a lot of muscular effort and she began to wish she hadn’t asked for the privilege.
C’mell rippled her ears every time the tuskvor threw Cherenkova around. “You look like a vatach challenge-leaping a grlor,” she said, after a particularly nasty balk. Ayla clenched her jaw and hung on grimly, determined not give up before she’d shown she could handle the basics. She was exhausted and soaked with sweat by the time she was finished. She napped with the pride while the sun was high, and when she woke up she discovered a whole new set of muscles, all of which ached from their unaccustomed use. Fortunately the beasts just followed the herd when left to themselves. On the migration the harness bars were only necessary if you wanted to guide your tuskvor next to another one so you could talk to someone. There was no need for her to take regular steering shifts.
The trackway beneath them was pounded into dust, and behind them, where the foothills flattened into the plains, the living river broke up into a network of gray tributaries, fading into invisibility against the backdrop of the jungle verge, now barely visible as a green mist on the horizon. She could see now that the trackway path itself was actually recessed, worn into the landscape after countless generations of migration over this exact route. The migration was an awesome sight, a primeval force of nature, as vast and inexorable as the tides. If a comet were to strike in the middle of it tens of thousands of tuskvor would die, incinerated in a fraction of a second, but, she had no doubt, the tens of tens of thousands more who survived would continue inexorably on their genetically programmed course, implacably negotiating the still steaming crater rim, traveling across the scorched, sterilized landscap
e until they struggled out the other side, indifferent to everything but the compulsion to move east and south with the change of the seasons.
The next day saw them to the Long Range, and the rolling savannah that covered the foothills gave way to alpine forests, and then high meadows dotted with wildflowers. Higher still, the grasses came only in tufts on a landscape built of rock and crags. The way became steep and their tsvasztet tilted alarmingly as their tuskvor took the grade. For a time Cherenkova feared it would slide free, or she would slide free of it, but the straps held. Frost appeared and the air grew chill, and soon the world was white, with snow-capped mountains rearing above them. The chill became bitter cold, and their waterskins slowly froze solid. Cherenkova slept that night huddled between Pouncer and Quicktail, as warm as any kitten cuddled close to its siblings.
Some time before dawn she awoke to realize that the tilt of the tsvasztet had leveled out. She stood up to see the migration forging its way through a glacier-carved pass between two vast, craggy peaks. The Traveler’s Moon was overtaking the Hunter’s Moon overhead, both nearly full and casting a soft, mystical light that made the entire scene seem unreal. The air was crystal clear, thin enough that breathing was hard, and cold enough to burn her skin, erectile tissue stiffening to raise wispy hairs no longer capable of providing insulation. She rubbed her arms against the goosebumps but didn’t dive back to the warmth of her living fur blanket. The stars were out, the Milky Way spilled across the sky as a familiar background to alien constellations that blazed with an intensity she had seen nowhere except a warship’s bridge. It was a moment, she realized, that would never occur again in her life, that no other human had ever experienced and, almost certainly, no other human would ever experience again. She watched until she could not watch any longer, until she was shivering uncontrollably, until she could no longer hold her eyes open. By then the tsvasztet had tilted downward again as the tuskvor found the downgrade, and she slid back between the two kzinti to let their body heat melt the chill from her bones. As a little girl she had dreamed of going to the stars, of seeing sights that no one else had ever seen before, of discovering things that no one else had even imagined might exist. There had been a time when she had nursed an unearthly fear that she might die before she could make that a reality. That fear had long since faded as she earned first her wings and then command rank, acquiring a record that any officer might envy. Still, this was something unique, something to tell her grandchildren, if she ever had any, and she fell asleep with the knowledge that she had satisfied a hunger she had almost forgotten she had had.
She dreamed then, of a kill drop, a cliff five thousand feet high, with the tuskvor herd surging blindly toward it. Those at the front balked, rearing back, and the herd began to pile up on the cliff’s edge. For a moment the vast migration paused, and then the unrelentingly building pressure of the following beasts began to push those at the front forward. A mid-sized adolescent skidded, stumbled and pitched over the edge, bellowing in uncomprehending fear, and then suddenly the river of flesh became a living waterfall, as tuskvor after tuskvor dropped over the edge to die on the jagged rocks far below. The kzinti leapt from back to back to escape in desperate bounds, but Ayla could not make such leaps, could only watch helplessly as her beast was pushed ever closer to the precipice. She looked across to the next great gray back, a good ten meters away, looked down an equal distance to where walls of flesh pressed together above heavy, trampling feet. It was death if she stayed, and death if she leapt, but if she leapt she would die trying to save herself, and that made all the difference. She gathered herself, and then suddenly Pouncer was there, lifting her like a rag doll and leaping himself, just as their tuskvor slipped and fell over the edge. They were airborne for an eternity, and then the kzin landed, claws finding purchase in the thick, tough coat of another herd grandmother, his muscles straining as he fought his way up its back, only to gather himself and leap again, as that beast too stumbled and plunged over the edge. The dream became a nightmare, with Cherenkova hanging on desperately as Pouncer leapt and leapt, tiring steadily but never gaining ground against the tide of the herd. She knew she should let go, should sacrifice herself to allow him to save himself, but her fingers were locked in his mane in a death grip and she couldn’t have let go if she tried, and they were both going to die, and then they were airborne again, this time falling as the tuskvor they had just landed on pitched forward and over.
And she was floating, falling weightless and surrounded by two-hundred-ton beasts that bellowed in panic and flailed as they fell. And she remembered the first time she was weightless, eighteen years ago now, a cadet pilot in a Rapier trainer on her first familiarization flight, and the instructor had boosted them ballistic and then cut the power and handed her control as they dropped into freefall, just to see what she could do. And she had found at that moment that she could fly. She had dreamed of it all her life, studied hard every night to make the academy, learned the drills by heart, flown the simulators until she could do it blindfolded, dreamed every night of the time she would make it real, but nothing, nothing had prepared her for the feeling of flying as she had then, as she was now.
And she was flying, not falling, she had control, and she could save herself, but Pouncer was falling too. She dove then, stooping like a falcon on its prey through air churned violent by the huge thrashing beasts. She dodged flailing tusks, lost sight of him for a moment, then all at once she had caught him. She strained upward then but he was heavy and whatever it was that gave her the buoyancy to fly wasn’t powerful enough to arrest his downward momentum, and what she should have done was abandon him but she would not, could not, because he had given his life trying to save her and she could do no less for him, and they plunged down to die together on blood-slick stone amid the shattered bones of the tuskvor.
She awoke with a start, and shook her head to rid it of the unsettling images. It was the mountain climber’s rule. Thin air brings strange dreams. It was one thing to understand where her dream had come from, another to let go of the uncomfortable feelings it gave her. The air was warmer than it had been, and soon 61 Ursae Majoris was rising to show the mountains already receding behind them, the air parched and dusty as they descended to the broad desert plateau opening up in front of them. It would take days to cross it, and already the migration was showing the cost of the march. There were dead tuskvor by the wayside, at first rarely, then more often. They were mostly youngsters or small mothers who had entered the migration without the reserves to finish it, occasionally a huge grandmother or male grown too old for the journey. Stragglers tended to be forced to the edges of the migration stream, and when they died the first to arrive were the circling hrhan, soaring scavengers with fifteen-meter wingspans and long, snaky necks, who tore at the bodies with razor fangs. Later the wralarv would appear, lumbering, shaggy and savage; they looked small in the vastness of the scene, but the smallest of them would have feared nothing from a polar bear. It occurred to her to wonder what it was that drove the tuskvor to undertake such an arduous journey. Even the jungle in the dry season was a more forgiving environment than the burning desert.
The sun was high on the second day in the desert when a tuskvor slid alongside hers with ponderous grace. Cherenkova was developing an eye for the delicate art of tuskvor handling. The mazourk was C’mell, and Ayla put down her beltcomp and watched with some envy at the kzinrette’s casual skill at her task. A kzintosh leapt from its back to their own travel pad. It took her a moment to recognize him. Sraff-Tracker.
V’rli was lying languidly on her prrstet, half napping, half keeping an eye on the harness bars while the tuskvor strode along. Pouncer and Ferlitz were gone, having leapt off to socialize early in the morning.
V’rli turned her head. “Sraff-Tracker. Welcome.”
Sraff-Tracker made the gesture-of-abasement, although to Cherenkova’s eye it seemed sloppy. “Honored Mother. I come with a question.”
V’rli rippled her ears. “I am
here with an answer. Perhaps it applies to your question.”
“Honored Mother, the Traveler’s Moon is well past its cusp.”
“That is true, Sraff-Tracker. What is the question?”
“The time of sanctuary is over. Why do we still shelter this outcast and his pet?” He gestured at Cherenkova without looking at her. “We have fulfilled our obligations, and more.”
“Pouncer fought with us. His sister died to defend our den. Even the Cherenkova-Captain played its part, and played it well.”
Sraff-Tracker snarled. “The kz’zeerkti, whatever tricks it can do, it is prey, nothing more. Provisions on some of the tuskvor are running low.”
“And Pouncer?” If V’rli noted the threat to Cherenkova she ignored it.
“His time of sanctuary is over.”
“It was not over when we began the migration. Would you have him jump into the herd now?”
“If we had not taken him in, the Tzaatz would not have come at all.” Sraff-Tracker avoided the question.
“Are you saying we should have ignored the tradition of Sanctuary?”
“I am saying that his presence here puts us all at risk.”
V’rli snarled. “Did you know a Black Priest led the enemy? He will be seeking more than the heir to the Patriarchy, depend upon it. The world has changed, Sraff-Tracker. The Tzaatz remain a danger.”
“Honored Mother! What of tradition? We gave him sanctuary, now that is done. He must leave.”
“What of honor? Does Ztrak Pride toss out Heroes who fight our fight beside us? His sister died for us, Sraff-Tracker. He has earned his place at our pride circle.”
“He has no name!”
“When we reach the high forest den he can take a namequest.”
“You must compel him to leave. Tradition demands it.”
V’rli let her fangs show. “I will not. Migration began before his sanctuary ended.”
