Heuradys winced. “Look, he’s going to be gone in a day or two anyway—”
Then Órlaith cut in sharply: “There!”
The Mackenzies and their greathounds were working the brush towards them, and not making much noise about it save now and then a happy yuuurrp from a greathound making close acquaintance with a rabbit. Songbirds rose, yellow-breasted meadowlarks and goldfinches complaining liquidly, bluebirds and many more. Those weren’t proper prey; unless they were a threat to people or crops most Montivallans didn’t kill animals that weren’t eaten, or at least found useful for fur and hides. The reasons given for that differed from place to place—Órlaith thought of it as not angering Lady Flidais and the Horned Lord—but the attitude was fairly general.
Then something flickered along the edge of the scrub, amid a patch of yellow tansy.
“There!” Órlaith said softly, feeling that hot focus that was the hunter’s mind take over, and feeling much better for it. “Fine fat gobblers, to be sure!”
The wild turkeys broke cover and came scuttling out, ready to take to the air—they weren’t great fliers, but they could get off the ground. These were the yellow-legged variety, young males plump with rich autumn feeding on stubble and among the berry-bushes.
“No need to take turns! All at once, then!” Órlaith called to her companions, and raised her right fist in its gauntlet.
The hawk gave its harsh, prolonged, almost whistling irrrrr-irrrrr call in earnest this time, hungrily certain that she was about to be flown at quarry. That was answered by the others, on Heuradys’ wrist and the gauntlets of Morfind and Faramir. They were all female Harris’s hawks, and hers was a big one of about three and a half pounds, two feet long and well over forty inches of wingspan. They were handsome birds with golden legs, dark-brown plumage that shaded to chestnut-red on the shoulders and with white at the tip and base of their tails.
Susan Clever Raccoon had her bow out instead, and besides his recurve Alan had a hunting spear in a tube scabbard on his saddle just in case something bigger than a turkey showed up. Everybody except a few townsmen or clerics hunted, for the pot and sport and to keep the animals off the farms, but Boisean ranchers rarely practiced falconry. Probably that was because it had been so linked to the Protectorate gentry in the old days, but the habit stuck. And it was one of the Mongol customs that Ulagan Chinua hadn’t been able to get his adopted people to take up.
More of the turkeys flushed, and their attention was all behind them, which ought to overcome their impulse to head into cover for a few crucial instants at least. Órlaith reached across and gently removed the hawk’s hood. Its head whipped around to follow the turkeys in a moment of utter focus, and the wind of its first strong wingbeat buffeted her face as she pushed up sharply—letting slip, in the jargon of falconry. It felt more like throwing a living thunderbolt.
Órlaith’s bird overflew the turkeys and came in behind them with a loud raucous cry, and they swayed away from her like tall grass before a wind. The other three hawks spread out smoothly, their wings beating to give them extra speed as they swooped down the slope in curves as graceful as an arrow’s flight, if an arrow had had a mind of its own. Most raptors hunted as individuals; Harris’s hawks were more like wolves of the air, intelligent social beasts who cooperated by instinct. Working with humans came easily for them, and they were even affectionate to their handlers.
A mews-bred group like this reared and trained together acted with the killing unison of a pod of orcas closing in on tunny.
The turkeys panicked, churned about on the ground and in the air, then exploded outward in a starburst with a chorus of frantic cuk-cuk-cuk-cuk sounds. The hawks closed in, flared up and then folded their wings and plunged downward in near unison. There were a series of heavy thumps as they struck their prey in flight with stunning force, bound and tumbled to the ground below.
The turkeys were twenty pounds or better, at the upper limit of size for a Harris to take. One managed to break free in a shower of tailfeathers and the hawk twisted in a complete loop to dive and drive its talons into another, quick and deadly and remorseless as a wasp.
“Now that was beautiful,” Órlaith said as she clucked and tightened her legs to put her horse moving.
“And Mom Two says Harris’s hawks aren’t really falconry!” Heuradys agreed. “I call that Puritanical Peregrine Purism.”
The hunt servant walked from bird to bird snapping necks to put the creatures out of pain, then opened them to drain and removed hearts and other morsels for the estate falconer. That highly-regarded expert swung his lure to bring the hawks in, hooded them and put them on the perches—crossbars on sticks driven into the ground—and went from one to the other feeding them from his hand while he smiled fondly at his charges and crooned soft words.
Órlaith swung down, pulled off her gauntlet, put a finger to the blood and marked her forehead, then took a clod of earth and touched it to her lips. To live was to kill, for human-kind as much as the wolves. But to kill was to acknowledge your own mortality, the Mystery which all who breathed on the ridge of the world were ultimately initiates, whether human-kind or the other Kindreds. Then she murmured the prayer that started by thanking the prey for their gift of life and ended:
“Lord Cernunnos, Horned Master of the Beasts, witness that we take of Your bounty from need, not wantonness, knowing that to us also the Hour of the Hunter comes at last. For Earth must be fed, and we but borrow our bodies from Her for a little while.”
Morfind and her cousin put hand to heart and faced the west to thank Oromë the Huntsman, and Heuradys spilled a libation from her canteen and softly invoked Artemis:
“. . . fleet archer, deer-shooting Goddess, O You of the Golden Bow . . .”
“When Mathun and the others join up, let’s camp,” Órlaith suggested. “Looks like it’ll be a clear night, and there’s nothing better than turkey roasted over a campfire.”
The call of the horn sounded just as she was putting her foot into the stirrup. She looked up sharply; it was a Mackenzie horn, which meant it must be Mathun’s, and it was using the simple three-note pattern.
Alarm, alarm, danger. Alarm, alarm, danger . . .
She continued the motion of swinging into the saddle, on the theory that whatever the danger was it would probably be easier to deal with on horseback.
Her right foot was just reaching for that stirrup when the tigers broke cover. Behind them came the frantic voices of the Mackenzies and the snarling brabble of the greathounds. There were two of the beasts, both young but adult males—unusual among the generally solitary predators, but not entirely unknown. Then the wind shifted, just as one of the animals gave a racking snarl. Her courser was a good-natured beast, but it wasn’t one she’d worked with for years and there were limits to what you could expect of horse-kind. It knew that was the sound and smell of something that wanted to eat it, and it reared, came down with a jarring thump that slammed her teeth together hard, bucked, twisted, kicked its heels high in the air in squealing panic, and bolted as she came loose.
Órlaith felt a moment’s gratitude as her left foot came free of the stirrup rather than twisting in it and dragging her behind the horse, and then the ground came up and hit her like a war-hammer. She’d been curling in the air automatically, with a lifetime’s training in how to fall, but it still knocked the wind out of her, and the pommel of the Sword thumped her under the left armpit with savage force and her head rang as the metallic-salt taste of blood flooded her mouth. The Lady’s gift wouldn’t cut a member of House Artos—she could run her hand down the preternaturally sharp blade as if it were a wooden ruler—but it remained a physical object. More or less.
“Streak!” someone shouted, the hunter’s call for more than one of the big cats. “’Ware streak!”
Wheezing on the ground, Órlaith had an excellent view of the two animals as they slunk into the open.
Unfortunately the first generation had survived mainly by eating humans, a habit never entirely lost even after other game became common again, and Siberian meant big.
This pair were just under four feet at the shoulder and weighed as much as a smallish pony or three large men each. Seen from ground level as they came rapidly forward they looked even bigger, their massive wedge-shaped heads low, bellies to the ground and tails lashing. One snarled, and she had an excellent view of the inches of white fang and the pink-and-crimson gape of the mouth.
Órlaith managed to take a quick glance to either side. Her friends were spread out in exactly the wrong way—a semicircle so the tigers couldn’t get past without charging directly at a human; and with the best of motives the Mackenzies were keeping up their shouts and horn-blowing and crashing through the brush as they came on at speed, ensuring that the animals wouldn’t be turning back.
Órlaith managed to suck in a whooping breath and started to shout everyone together!
The tigers were running from a threat, not hunting. They wouldn’t try to hunt an alert group of humans in the open anyway unless they were utterly starved, and these were glossy with health; just to start with they were usually perfectly well aware of what bows could do. If she could get everyone in one clump shouting and waving things, they were likely to dash past and then go looking for somewhere to hide.
No time.
Even a tiger moving away from a threat was very dangerous; they didn’t like being frightened, and they had top-predator reflexes towards anything that got between them and where they wanted to go. The big cats’ tails stopped lashing and went rigid. They were staring at her with fixed glares, and she was on the ground and looking vulnerable. That was . . .
Bad sign.
Then the claws on the tigers’ forepaws came out and retracted again, and they worked their hips to settle their hind feet into the earth.
Oh, very bad sign.
Once while she was hunting in a swamp near the ruins of Eugene she’d seen a tiger leap fifteen feet up into a big oak . . . with the body of a fair-sized yearling boar in its mouth. Ground-to-ground they could cover thirty feet in a bound. And these two were only about fifty or sixty yards away, albeit downhill.
Heuradys spent a moment fighting the terror of her horse out of the reflex of someone virtually reared in the saddle, then flung herself off and landed crouching, her sword coming out in a silver flash as she dashed towards her liege. It was very swift, but it seemed to take forever. There were only . . .
Seconds, Órlaith thought. Seconds before they reach me.
She shoulder-rolled, sprang to her feet and drew. The shock of holding the Sword of the Lady ran through her; everything was there, balance and breath and muscle in cool harmony. She fell into the nebenhut position: knees crooked, left foot forward, blade back and point down and edge angled for a rising strike, with the right hand just at the guard and the left on the lower lobe of the hilt firmly up against the pommel.
She knew she was very accurate and very quick; yet nothing human could out-quick a tiger. But cats could be predictable—
Motion slowed. Her own with it, but she could see it all with crystal clarity, as if she was watching everything including herself from a distance through a powerful telescope. The cat-brothers leapt almost in unison but not quite, long low arcs like the stave of a strung longbow, landing with all four paws together and back curled in a horseshoe shape and then springing off the hind legs again. Dust and fragments of grass and dirt spurted back explosively as they launched into the second leap. The third began the same, but both animals spread their forepaws in the air, and the dagger-length claws slid out as their mouths opened for the killing bite.
Órlaith stepped forward into the leap just as the lead tiger left the ground towards her. Her right boot slid forward, gliding sure-footed over the tussocky grass. The Sword came up in the long diagonal cut with the same motion, rising and then sweeping across with a snapping twist that put the strength of gut and back as well as arms and shoulders into swinging the not-steel.
The Sword of the Lady could do many things; her father had thought it wasn’t matter at all, really, but instead a thought in the mind of the Goddess made material enough to touch. Órlaith believed it—when it had passed to her she’d noticed with a prickle of awe that it unobtrusively became the ideal length and weight of a longsword made for her.
When you wielded the Sword as a sword, as a thing meant to cut and stab, three things were important and very different from ordinary steel, however fine. It was sharp as an obsidian scalpel, able to cut a drifting hair that merely touched it, far sharper than battle swords were ever made or even could be made. The blade was a thin-sectioned and utterly rigid shape invulnerable to all harm, unlike the surprisingly fragile nature of a war-sword. And it was completely frictionless, smoother than wet ice, incapable of jamming or binding in anything whatsoever.
The rising blade moved in a blurring arc and struck the tiger’s right forelimb just above the elbow-joint. It was thicker than her own thigh; she felt the jarring thud of impact, and then a harder cracking shock through her wrists as the edge met bone. Then something struck her and sent her spinning to the ground again, harder this time, and the Sword flew out of her fingers as her elbow rammed down and numbed her right arm.
The tiger was five yards away, thrashing and biting frantically at itself and giving an earsplitting and piteous high-pitched squeal. The limb hung by a tiny shred of hide . . . and then came free. For an instant the glass-smooth surface of the wound simply glistened meat-red and bone-white and gristle-yellow, and then disappeared in a gout of blood as the momentary shock that squeezed the veins shut vanished. The copper-salt odor was overwhelming, vanquishing the musky-sour-vinegar tomcat stink of the beast itself.
The second tiger landed with an audible thump where she would have been; no matter how broad and soft the paws and resilient the legs, it did weigh something like six hundred pounds and it had been expecting to land on her, not the ground. Even lying stunned before it, some remote corner of Órlaith’s mind still felt a mad impulse to giggle at the I-meant-to-do-that look that flickered across its face for an instant, exactly the same as that a household moggie wore when it missed a leap from a sofa to a windowsill.
Sure, and it’s more sympathetic to mice I’m becoming, by the moment!
Then the tiger whirled in a way that ought to have been impossible for something so big, a twisting S-curve through space that left it towering over her with its paws raised to pin and rend. She tried to reach for the hilt of the Sword; it was only about a foot away. For a moment she was chiefly conscious of an agonizing frustration as her right arm refused to do what she told it. Then something gray shot by in a galloping blur; Macmaccon, leaping in a frenzy of silent effort for the tiger’s belly with his jaws gaping. The tiger hop-jumped backward, drawing in its stomach and batting with one immense paw; there was a thud and yelp and the greathound pinwheeled away.
Two arrows flickered over her head, amid a rippling hammer of hooves. Susan Mika ha
d managed to get her horse under control and rode by shooting. The shafts thudded into the animal’s breast and shoulder, but only sank in a handspan or so, which meant they’d struck bone. The Lakota girl’s bow was too light in the draw for the sort of smashing power that could crack armor, or ribs and shoulder blades. But the tiger felt it, giving a coughing roar and shaking itself and looking around with a bewildered rage as attack piled on attack and things stung and hurt it. The smell of its littermate’s blood would be priming it for battle too.
Órlaith’s hand closed on the black staghorn hilt of the Sword, and she was in command of her body once again. She rolled up to one knee, but Alan Thurston was between her and the tiger now, the hunting spear braced in his hands. The head was a twelve-inch blade with a crossbar welded at the base, but the shaft was only seven feet long. That meant getting within range of murderous paws that could gouge you open like so many flensing knives, or break a bison’s neck. Alan’s face was gray-pale beneath his natural tanned olive, but there was no hesitation as he ducked in crabwise and jabbed the point forward with hard precision.
“Yaahhhhhhh!” he shouted. “Heee! Yaaaaahhh!”
The tiger snarled again, batted at the spearpoint, backed a little and then lunged. Alan went to a knee and frantically butted the spear into the ground. It held for a moment, the point sinking into the beast’s shoulder, but then the tiger bit the shaft and shook it savagely. It snapped across and Alan went tumbling, his hundred and eighty pounds lifted off the ground and tossed by the tiger’s neck-muscles and his own death-grip on the ashwood shaft. As he did Heuradys d’Ath darted in behind the beast and swung her longsword down two-handed across the animal’s spine in a shining arc of speed, just behind the shoulders.
The tiger screamed, a high-pitched sound, and whirled on her in a blur. But its hindquarters went limp and it collapsed for a moment as it tried to charge. She backed carefully, a little crouched with her sword up in the Ox, the two-handed guard position. Locking eyes with the dying beast and leading it away from Órlaith as it dragged itself along on its front paws, moaning and snarling at the same time. Her face was pale beneath its tan, but set in a mask of concentration.
Prince of Outcasts Page 24
