by Robert Adams
“Oh, no, not him again. Bettiloo. Furball there is the most unashamed glutton in the camp. As a nursing kitten, he almost sucked his poor mother dry, going after her dugs whenever the poor cat made to sleep or rest, and as a cub he is half again the size of the rest of his littermates. He will eat anything that he can get his teeth into, and he ranges far out in search of prey, which is good; but what is bad is that he never is sated, and here in camp he will steal food from those too wise for him to cozen out of it.”
She had been mindspeaking, and, still eating, still growling, the young cat replied threateningly, “Beware, two-leg female, do not so slander Killer-of-all-things, lest he tear out your ugly, furless throat! This cat never steals, he only takes that which he needs, as is the right of any clansman.”
Ilsah trilled a laugh. “Call it what you wish, Furball, but you were wise to get out of here before Ehstrah gets back from the sweatbath, else she’ll lay her strap on your fat carcass again, drive you squalling out of the yurt as she did the day she found you hanging by the teeth from that dried brisket.”
“Ugly and vicious as is that abominable two-leg female, she does not frighten this cat!” was the cub’s quick response. but then, of a sudden, he grabbed one more mouthful of the curds, crossed the width of the yurt in two leaps and was out the door.
A few moments after Furball’s abrupt departure, the older woman, Ehstrah, crossed the threshold, every bit as bare as was Ilsah, her unbraided hair dripping water down her back and her buttocks.
“Make certain everything edible is hung high or shut away,” she instructed Ilsah. I’m certain I spotted that roguish cat, Furball, skulking about our yurt as I approached it. I’m going to have to have Milo converse with the cat chief about Furball again. I fear me.
“Well, so you’re among the living again, Bettiloo Hansuhn. Had no trouble finding food, did you? Good, but don’t limit yourself to a bowl of curds, child. You’re welcome to anything in the yurt — milk, meat, tea, berries, honey, whatever we have. No one goes hungry in the Horseclans camp unless all go hungry.”
Despite her protestations thai the curds were sufficient to her hunger, the older and the younger there and then sat the girl down and fed her to repletion and beyond — a handful of tiny hard-boiled birds’ eggs, several joints of a cold roasted wild rabbit, chunks of some sort of a cold gruel, fried to crispness and topped with honey, all washed down with fresh, warm milk.
The two women had not only cooked for Bettylou, but had avidly joined her in eating the meal. With all the bones well gnawed, skillfully cracked and sucked free of marrow, with the last crumbs of the fried gruel and the remaining smears of honey devoured, the older woman addressed Bettylou, saying. “All right, child, you can start stripping off those clothes. After riding for days in them and then sleeping in them for a day and a half, I’d guess they could stand a good soaking and a day of wind and sunlight. Gahbee will be back soon, then you can go with her to the sweat yurt, and when you’ve bathed, you and Gahbee can wash your clothes and Milo’s. It just never ceases to amaze me how incredibly filthy he can get them riding a raid.
“Well, what are you waiting for, child? Undress.”
Then, belatedly recalling Milo’s admonitions and that this new Horseclanswoman-to-be was a scioness of an entirely different, an alien, Dirtman culture, she sent her mind probing into that of Bettylou, who had not yet learned how to shield her innermost thoughts from a telepath.
Ehstrah squatted and, taking the girl’s hand, drew her down beside her on the floor. “Bettiloo, please recall that you are no longer amongst the folk who spawned you and would have cast you out soon. We Horseclansfolk find nothing evil or shameful in the flesh and skin that houses our spirits, no more than do the cats and horses. We wear clothing simply for protection against the elements, for warmth or to prevent chafing by armor or weapons belts. So purge your mind and your heart of these old and most peculiar Dirtman ways. You now are — or, rather, soon will be — one of the freest, most favomd of all women under the domain of Sacred Sun, a woman of the Horseclans. You must set yourself to the task of thinking and behaving like one, child.”
With such trepidation, Bettylou first kicked off the felt boots, then lifted the faded, much-stained and now-filthy scarlet dress over her head. Turning to face the wall, red with shame despite the older woman’s words, the girl untied the waist thong and allowed the dirty, sweat-tacky trousers to fall about her ankles.
Ehstrah hissed softly between her teeth at the sight of the new scars furrowing Bettylous back from neck to knees. At that moment she came to feel real hatred for the particular brand of Dirtmen who would do such to a pretty young girl for the “crime” of being quickened. So it was that, not waiting for Gahbee, she gathered up the clothes herself and, after having Bettylou step back into her boots, led her by the hand out of the yurt and toward the sweat yurt. She felt very protective of this young woman who had suffered so much and must now be feeling so alone here. Besides, a second bath this morning could do no harm.
Chapter IV
The hunters had returned with a full bag of assorted game, and parties of young boys and girls under the leadership of certain of their elders had ridden far out into the stretches of prairie beyond the camp environs and brought back travois after heaped-high travois of roots and tubers and herbs and wild grains and berries and other fruits. Children fanned out into the nearer grasslands with slings and snake sticks, baskets to hold eggs and bags to carry snake carcasses or whatever other small game they were able to down. The planned celebratory feast was becoming a reality.
A long pit was dug straight through the dusty middle of the encampment, piled high with wood and dried dung and twisted bundles of dried grasses, then set ablaze, while a horde of the women and slaves readied the various viands to cook as soon as a suitable bed of coals was available. Precious metal racks and tripods were brought from the various yurts and laid by ready for use in preparing the food.
Bettylou Hanson was set to grinding a mixture of wild grain and seeds into a coarse meal in a stone quern. Each time she filled a waiting bowl. Ilsah took it away and replaced it with an empty one, then made dough, kneaded it and fashioned small, flat cakes, setting them beside the door. Periodically, Gahbee collected them and took them to the verge of the blazing firepit, where they and others prepared in other yurts were being baked in a reflector oven.
At one end of the camp, those adult men not engaged in tending the firepit worked at skinning and butchering the field-dressed game. Most of them were completely nude and blood-splashed and -streaked from head to boottops. Older or infirm men sat or squatted close by keeping the knives and cleavers sharp, framing the hides on wooden racks while they still were fresh and pliable, swatting at flies, smoking their pipes and chatting endlessly.
No sooner was the bulk of the large-game butchering done than the children came trooping in with their bags of headless, writhing snakes, some dozens of rabbits and hares, a silver dog-fox, a brace of fat groundhogs, a porcupine, a large spotted skunk and a rare prize which brought all the men gathering about it and the tiny girl who had downed it with a single, shrewdly cast slingstone. then manhandled it back to where bigger children could take over.
Most of the men — all of those under forty winters — had never seen an antelope so small. The little beast weighed about twenty pounds and might have been the young of a larger species, save for fully developed scrotum and the pair of short, slender, needle-pointed black horns that adorned its now-cracked skull.
“Well, I’ll be dipped in dung!” exclaimed Milo, “A dagger-horn, it is, or I’m the king stallion. I’ve seen a dozen bowmen loose a cloud of arrows at a herd of these without hitting a one, and here’s a prime buck downed by a girl of six with a damned sling! Will wonders never cease?”
Big Djahn Staiklee of Krooguh, whose clan of birth usually ranged farther south, where the minuscule dart-horns were more common than this far north on the prairie, grinned through a sticky, blood-crusty
light-brown beard. “I’m no mean bowman, as any here can attest, but I’m here to say that I’ve missed more than one of those lightning-sprung little antelopes. If the girl has the kind of eye-hand coordination that such a feat required, think what a maiden-archer she’ll make in a few more winters’ time.”
One after the other, the more important of the men solemnly praised the hunting prowess of Teenah Skaht. Then the animal was hung up, and opened, and the liver and heart given to the little girl to either eat on the spot or bear back to her family’s yurt. When she trotted out of sight, she was munching happily while dribbling blood down her chin and onto the bare chest of her nut-brown body.
The other children received such praise as their accomplishments merited, then were invited to watch the cleaning and skinning and butchering of the varied assortment of small game they had killed and fetched into camp, with the older ones being urged to help and thus learn more of the necessary skills of survival on the prairie.
While her body moved rhythmically at milling the wild grains, Bettylou Hanson thought of all the things she had learned in this last seven-day. She had always heard that the horse-nomads were a filthy people who never bathed deliberately and wore their clothes until they rotted off. What she had learned here was that they were all of them more cleanly than were most of her own people; where folk at the Abode of the Righteous washed face, hands and arms several times each day, they washed the rest of their bodies once or twice a month in good weather, far less frequently in cold weather. Horseclansfolk, on the other hand, seemed to make almost daily use of their commodious sweat yurt — steaming in the damp darkness, then emerging to rinse with sun-warmed water and going about their various tasks nude until sun and the ever-constant wind had dried their hair and skin, since they did not consider sight of a naked human body offensive or sinful as had the Righteous. Bettylou was beginning to become accustomed to the sight of naked women or girls, but she still could not help blushing and turning her gaze away at the naked boys or men.
Her mindspeak abilities — both in reception and sending — were manifesting themselves by veritable leaps and bounds through dint of practice and the patient tutelage of her mentors, Chief Milo Morai, Ehstrah, Gahbee, Ilsah and most of the other men, women and prairiecats with whom she came into contact. Everyone seemed to be more than happy to take or make the time to help a newly discovered mindspeaker to develop her inborn ability.
In addition to folks, cats and horses, MiIo had told her that a really adept mindspeaker could enter the minds of and converse after a fashion with such diverse creatures as wolves, bears, members of the weasel clans, treecats and other wild felines, dogs, swine and even the occasional wild ruminant — domestic cattle and sheep being basically too unintelligent to do much real thinking, being ruled by instinct, mostly.
Milo had also averred that mindspeak ability ran in families, and, thinking on that, she thought she could puzzle out now a riddle that had perplexed her all her life, since first she had heard it — the tale of her mother’s granduncle, Zebediah the Pig Man.
They had said that Zeb Alfredson had been little older than Bettylou now was when the present Elder Claxton’s father had assigned him the task of herding the score or so adult and juvenile pigs that the Abode then owned. Sometime during the first year that he headed the detail of pigboys, a sow died in farrowing, and the only piglet that survived her did so because Zeb took him up and nursed him with pig milk he somehow obtained from other sows. This piglet grew into a vastly oversized boar, and Zeb announced that his name was Nimrod.
Zeb persuaded the Elder and the Patriarchs not to butcher Nimrod but to retain him as a stud boar. He also persuaded them to allow the swine to run free in the woods and outer pastures and fallow fields, rather than keeping them cooped up in the filthy, malodorous pens so much of the time, demonstrating his ability to ride out on a small mule and bring them all in at the end of each day. Since his method of handling the swine freed a half-dozen boys for more of the endless tasks of farming and stock-raising, Zeb quickly became a very popular young man with the Elder and the Patriarchs and there was even speculation that he might someday be a Patriarch himself.
Then, of a crisp autumn day, he rode out to fetch in the swine, but he did not ride alone, for bear tracks had been seen at several spots in the hinterlands. He rode along with one of his younger brothers, each of them armed with a rifle, a bear spear and a long, heavy-bladed knife. They rode not the familiar mules, but a brace of fine, tall hunting horses, less likely to become hysterically unmanageable at the sound or smell of a bear or other predator.
What happened after the two rode out of sight of the Abode of the Righteous, that long-ago day, no man knew for certain. The reports of two rifles were heard and some thought to hear human screams and bestial roarings, all muted with distance. The son and heir of the then Elder led a party of mounted men out at the gallop, but the woods were then more extensive and by the time they came across the proper clearing, it was all over.
Zeb Alfredson’s younger brother lay dead, throat torn out and lower face bitten off. Zeb himself had been terribly savaged by the bear and survived only bare minutes past his rescuers’ arrival. Both rifles had been fired, and Zeb’s spear was covered in blood from point to crossbar.
Of the huge silvertip bear, precious little remained other than a gashed and bloody hide full of torn flesh and splintered bones. Nor was the bear’s nemesis difficult to guess, for the clearing was full of agitated pigs, pigs of all ages and sexes and sizes, a few of them with hides scored by long, sharp claws, but all with bloody snouts and two of the boars with tatters of gory bearskin hanging from their tushes.
The men had gotten nothing meaningful out of Zeb; he was just too far gone in pain and loss of blood to make any sense. But it was said that just moments before the life left his battered body. Nimrod shouldered his four hundred pounds through the gathered group of men, stood looking down on Zeb’s torn, blood-streaked face, and, as the single, remaining eye began to glaze over, raised his snout and fearsome tushes skyward and voiced what could only have been called a howl, a sound such as none of the farmers had ever heard any swine make before or since.
The two bodies were borne back to the Abode of the Righteous, and it was not until morning that anyone thought to go out and bring in the herd of swine, and by then they all were gone. The hunters tracked the herd with hounds and did catch a few, but found that the only way to bring them back was to kill them. Nimrod was sighted on two occasions, but no one ever was able to get a clear shot at him — he seemed to know just what the rifles were and the capabilities and limitations of them. On another occasion, the hounds cornered him, but by the time the hunters arrived, the monstrous boar was long departed and the ground was littered with dead and dying hounds. At that point, the hunters gave up the pursuit.
“Could he have been a mindspeaker with the pigs, Chief Milo?” Bettylou asked after recounting the old tale. “He was my mother’s father’s brother, after all.”
Milo nodded. “He almost certainly was, Bettylou, judging on the basis of your tale. Swine are very intelligent, you know, much more so than dogs, for instance, and the boar Nimrod must have truly loved your ancestor to have been willing to lead his herd against a full-grown bear to protect him. You clearly come of good stock, girl. It pleases me that you’ll bear Horseclans children.”
Bettylou had heard in the Abode that the prairie was virtually swarming with hordes of horse-nomads, that their gigantic camps covered square miles of grasslands, but such assertions could never be proved by what she had seen to date.
In addition to the sweat yurt, there were thirty-four other yurts in the camp — eighteen for Clan Krooguh. fifteen for Clan Skaht and one for Clan Morai. Among these dwelt forty-eight males of an age older than thirteen, which added up to nothing near a horde, in Bettylous mind. Of course, both men and women could and did fight if attacked, and both sexes hunted even the most dangerous game animals. Also, Chief Milo assured her th
at there existed Kindred clans much larger — perhaps as many as threescore adult males in a clan — and there were more than fourscore Kindred clans on the prairies, deserts and high plains, all drifting hither and yon, following the grass and the water.
Chief Milo opined that if the Abode-spawned tales were more than whole-cloth exaggerations, the square-miles-covering camp might be the recollections at third or fourth or fifth hand of someone who had seen or heard of one of the rare tribal camps — conclaves of scores of clans planned for years in advance and at which there might be as many as ten thousand, briefly, until the graze became insufficient to maintain the herds of cattle, sheep and horses.
“All of the clans assemble at such times, then, El . . . uhh, Chief Milo?” Bettylou inquired.
Flashing his white teeth in a brief smile, he shook his head. “No, child, at most perhaps half of the Kindred clans at any one time and place.”
“But why not get all of the clans together at once, Chief Milo?” Bettylou probed.
Patiently, he answered, “For one thing, it is a really impossible thing. Yes, there are some fourscore or more of he Kindred clans, but those clans are spread over something like four million square miles or more of territory — ranging generally farther north in spring and summer, farther south in autumn and winter, and seldom in one place for more than a moon. Nor can I think of any area that could support such a vast number of folks and herds and cats for any meaningful length of time; the camp would needs have to be moved before many of the clans could reach the predetermined location, for although a party of picked raiders can move very fast, cover fantastic numbers of miles in a few nights’ ride, you will soon learn that a clan on the march proceeds no faster than the slowest of its members or wagons or cattle . . . and that can be snail-slow at times.”
“Where do you usually meet, Chief Milo?” she asked. “When? I mean what time of year?”
