A Woman of the Horseclans

by Robert Adams

They were not of much real danger to an armed and mounted Horseclanner, unless they happened to have hungry designs on the horse. And even then a Horseclan steed could outrun the largest of lions with any sort of a lead on the cat to begin. But mere scent of a lion or two could drive cattle, sheep, even the reasoning horses wild with uncontrolled panic, and more than a few nomads had been killed and maimed in trying to turn the leading beasts of stampedes.

  The wolves he discounted; they would be well fed this time of the year and traveling in small, family groups rather than in the huge, murderous, ravenous packs of winter. But the bear could be another question entirely.

  He had never heard of lions turning man-eater and -hunter, and though winter wolves would tear apart any creature they could get at — two legs or four — most well-fed wolves had a strong tendency to avoid mankind and his camps. But the huge prairie grizzlies often — too often, for Milo’s liking — seemed to relish manflesh and would go far out of their usual ways to get at potential victims, even entering clan camps and tearing through the walls of yurts to come within tooth range of the folk within.

  Moreover, they were usually devilishly hard to kill, having immense vitality and continuing to wreak pure havoc even when stippled with so many arrows as to resemble gigantic tailless porcupines.

  “Were we trekking due west only,” he beamed to the other two chiefs, “I’d say that we should angle a bit to the north and thus avoid any trouble with the predators following that herd. But since we needs must head south after a week or so on the move, I say set out southeast and take our chances with the bear and cats and wolves, while living well off game. At least, Sacred Sun be praised, we’re a little too far south here for wolverines or blackfoot beasts.”

  “Wind be thanked for those favors, at least,” nodded Dik Krooguh. “A wolverine it was maimed my hand, you know. We just will have to start beefing up herd guards, day and night on the march — more Cats, more maiden-archers and some good lancemen with heavy hunting spears.”

  “Just so,” agreed Chief Skaht, “and more scouts out ahead of us, scouting in depth, no slipshod stuff. Another thing, too, one that no one is going to like, for all it’s necessary, all things considered: We’d be wise to start keeping enough horses in camp to mount all our warriors quickly, if push comes to shove, because you all know damned well that no lion- or bear-panicked horse is going to respond to a mindcall. This breed of Kindred horses of ours are smarter than the bulk of their ilk and they can even reason, up to a point, but we’d be foolish to not recognize their limitations and guard against the dire results of a panicky herd on a night of need.”

  The cat chief sat up from his crouch and yawned widely agape, carefully curling his long, broad, red-pink tongue away from the winking points of his oversized fangs. “Cat brothers,” he beamed, “as always, you vastly overestimate the reasoning abilities and general intelligence of the horse tribe. Our Kindred race is not all that much more intelligent than many another non-Kindred breed of equine. Most mules, in fact, are far and away the mental superiors of most horses, which is why we prairiecats, if ride we must, would do soon the back of a mule.

  “The horse king will be displeased that you insist on keeping so many of his best fighters in camp, but I think you are right, brother chief; all you two-legs are so slow without horses, and when fighting bears or shaggy cats, speed can be the difference between living and not living. Besides, your chosen mounts will be far less likely not to bolt if they know that most of the prairiecats and a whole camp full of armed two-legs are around them to protect them.”

  * * *

  Bettylou would never have believed just how quickly the large yurt could be broken down to its components of felt, canvas, leather and wood and packed upon the largest of the three carts, which was drawn by four, rather than two, horses.

  As for the chests, most of them were strapped onto packhorses, while the two smaller carts were used to transport sacks and bags, barrels and kegs and water skins, tripods and kettles and odd-sized or -shaped impedimenta.

  The last night on the old campground was slept, what little sleep there was for the adults, under the stars, and with the first light of false dawn, the rugs and coverings of each individual were rolled up tightly, bound into shape, then tucked into odd spaces in the cartloads or strapped behind saddles.

  The slow-moving herds had been started on the trail three days before the scheduled departure of the carts and wagons, which droving took the services of almost all of the older children, for numbers of sheep, cattle and a few goats had been taken in raids on the eastern tanning communities while the clans had camped here and these supernumerary animals would serve to help to feed both folk and cats in the hard, cold days of winter-coming when game was scarce or unobtainable.

  Accustomed as she was to farm wagons, Bettylou was still mightily impressed by the four ponderous wagons each of which bore the effects of a chief (including the cat chief) and his immediate family. Each of them cleared almost two cubits off the level ground, the high-sided bodies riding on wheels six feet or more in diameter. Like the carts, the bodies were close-joined and chinked watertight and, she had been informed, could float across rivers just like boats when necessary during treks.

  Three of these wagons were each drawn by eight span of huge, lowing oxen, The other. Chief Milo’s, had as motive power six pairs of brawny mules.

  As the Sacred Sun’s first rays emerged from the pinkish eastern haze, whips cracked and the wheels began to turn on the axles of wagons and carts. Bettylou Hanson turned in the saddle of her mare to look back at the bare, trampled, dusty stretch of ground on which the camp had stood and thought of how much had happened to her there, of how much had changed, changed for what was assuredly the better.

  Farther on, she turned and looked back again, shading her eyes, wondering if she would ever again see, would ever again be upon this patch of prairie.

  Although she could not then know it. she was to see, to be upon that patch of prairie again. But it was to be many, many years later, and the woman who would then look out of those blue eyes would be changed past anything that the girl, Bettylou Hanson, could have imagined.

  Chapter VII

  No sooner had a spot been agreed upon for the winter camp, the yurts set up and the most absolutely pressing other necessary things for living done than every nomad not on herd guard set out with sickles and axes to the high-grass areas and the nearest forests to hack down the tough, wiry grasses and fell tree after tree.

  An endless parade of carts bore the grasses to central sites within the environs of the camp, where the loads were arranged in thick, high stacks to provide food for the horses when the snows were too deep for the creatures to reach such frozen herbage as might lie beneath. If it seemed that there would be enough, a small amount of the precious grass hay might even go to the cattle and the sheep. But only a few of these were ever expected to survive a winter this far to the north, in any case, herds would be rebuilt through raiding in the following spring and summer months.

  The felled trees were trimmed of branches and dragged to the campsite by spans of oxen, while the larger branches were themselves trimmed, piled onto carts and thus trundled back to add to the growing heaps of wood — wood for fuel, wood for strengthening and insulating the yurts against the coming wind and cold, wood for countless other purposes.

  And every day the younger children took carts out to the pasture areas to bring them back loaded with dung — cattle dung, sheep dung and horse dung, plus the droppings of any wild herbivores they chanced across during their trips. This manure was set out carefully to dry on racks made of woven branchlets suspended over a very, very slow and smoky fire and all covered by a makeshift, temporary roof. This structure was situated some three hundred yards from the nearest yurts, in a breezy area and well downwind; nonetheless, her every visit to the latrine pits exposed Bettylou to a stomach-churning reek of the curing dung.

  Therefore, she remarked to Ehstrah and Gahbee when they
met one morning in the steam yurt. “Whoever thought up that abomination of spread-out dung over on the downstream side of camp knows little about manuring. It should be dumped in a pit and allowed to ferment through the winter, covered in straw.”

  Ehstrah laughed and shook her head sending a rain of droplets from her streaming face. “Oh, my dear little fledgling Horseclanswoman! Behtiloo, those cowpats and sheep pellets and horse biscuits aren’t for dunging soil; Horseclansfolk don’t plant and reap crops, that’s for the damned Dirtmen.

  “No, we gather and dry out dung for winter cooking fires. Hasn’t that damned, conceited, overproud Lainuh taught you anything?”

  “But . . . but . . . then what are all those trees being felled for?” questioned Bettylou. I thought they were for winter fuel.”

  “They are . . . among other uses,” Ehstrah nodded. “But you can be certain that that wood will not be used for cooking in the yurts so long as, a single dried cowpat is left to be so used.”

  “Why?” asked the girl puzzledly. “You and all the others I’ve seen have been using wood as long . . . well, as long as I’ve been living with you.”

  “Yes, that’s true, Behtiloo, but you have only lived with us in good weather, warm weather, when the sides are removed from the yurts and the tops often partially rolled up or at least gapped widely, making dissipation of smoke no problem.

  “But imagine you how it would be to cook with a wood fire inside a yurt that not only has sides and top firmly closed, save for a peak-hole of the smallest possible size, but has been reinforced with wood and leather and anything else that’s available to make it as weather- and air-proof as possible. In a yurt like that, you’ll learn quickly to appreciate the true benefits of cooking with dried dung rather than with wood.

  “Child, dried dung burns every bit as hot as wood, but it is almost smokeless in the burning, This relative smokelessness makes it far safer, as well, for night-long- warmth-fires in a yurt, for more than a few nomads have smothered to death on wintry nights of the smoke from their fires.”

  “Uncle Milo tells the tale,” put in Gahbee, “of nearly an entire clan that died thus, years agone, in a low cave they had walled up with stones and plastered with clay for a winter home.”

  Bettylou paused, then asked a question that had for long puzzled her. “Why do you and so many of the others call Chief Milo ‘Uncle’? And why has he no children or grandchildren or any other blood kin?”

  Ehstrah answered, “Behtiloo, Milo is called Uncle because that is what he has always been called. Our parents called him that, their parents called him that and their grandparents and their great-grandparents back to the very beginning of the clans. He, Milo Morai, it was in fact who succored the Sacred Ancestors, led them from the Caves of Death and the waterless lands to the high places and showed them how to live a good, free life. Milo it was who forged first the links between us and the cats and, later, our breed of horses.

  “When, long ago, the clans were much smaller and lived all together or, at least, not very far distant one clan from the other, Milo lived with them, guided them, advised them in composing the Couplets of Horseclans Law. Now he travels from area to area, living a year with this clan, the next year with another clan. He and I and Gahbee and Ilsah, we will winter here, then we will move on in the spring and join with another clan for the summer and autumn and winter.

  “As to why he has gotten no children of any of us three, well, I — for one — may be just too old to quicken of his seed. But the other two? Well, all that I can say is that his failures are not for lack of trying — heh, heb, at his times, he could put to shame every stallion, bull and ram in all our herds. I’d had two husbands and a full share of other bedmates before I wed Milo, child, and I can honestly say that if nothing else, his tenscore and who knows how many more years of life have rendered him the foremost lover on prairie, plains, deserts and mountains.”

  “Two hundred years?” exclaimed Bettylou. “That’s . . . why it’s impossible, just impossible! He looks to be no more than twoscore years at the most. You’re joking with me, aren’t you, Ehstrah?”

  The smile left Ehstrah’s lined face. She became serious to the point of solemnity. “No, I am not joking, child; I am recounting no less than the bald truth about Milo’s past deeds and length of life. Although I doubt that anyone besides him knows exactly how old he really is . . . it may be, in fact, that even he doesn’t know exactly. At least, each and every time on which I’ve tried to get a straight answer out of him on that subject, he has either evaded the question completely or given some sort of wildly imprecise answer as ‘I’m old as the hills.’ or ‘Old enough to know better’.”

  Despite the hot, billowing clouds of steam, Bettylou shivered involuntarily, felt her nape hairs all a-prickle. Her natal people all firmly believed that the total life span which God had allotted to mankind was threescore and ten years. If any man or woman lived as much as a year beyond that Holy Number, it was assumed to be Devil’s Work for certain sure and that man or woman was dragged to the Place of Scourgings and of Death and executed by stoning. If to live a single year over seventy years was symptomatic of the Ancient Evil, how much more so must be a man who was firmly believed to have lived two hundred or more years . . .?

  But Ehstrah had been prying at her still-weak mindshield and now she chided, “Enough, Behtiloo, enough! Our Milo is no more evil than are you, than is that babe in your belly. You must try to purge your mind of those terrible, venomous, antihuman tenets to which you had the misfortune to be born and bred.

  “Oh, aye, Milo may be devilish at times — devilish, in the sense of that word as used in the Horseclans dialect of the Mehrikan tongue — but then many folk are, both old and young, male and female, human and feline. Furball is devilish, in that sense; so too is your father-in-law, Djahn Staiklee.”

  Bettylou sighed. “I like him, Ehstrah. But Lainuh says he is suicidally reckless, childish and selfish, unfailingly lazy and seldom gives her and her brother, the chief, the respect due them.” She hesitated, then continued, saying, “She drives poor Dahnah, his slave, very hard, almost every day, and waxes most wroth whenever one of us tries to help the woman with whatever chore she has been set at.”

  Ehstrah’s face assumed a grim look and she nodded once, brusquely. “Trying to make his concubine too exhausted for any bedsports, come night; sounds just the way her mind would work.

  “You are right to like Djahn Staiklee, Behtiloo. You can honestly respect him too, for he is none of the things of which Lainuh accuses him . . . at east not to the degree she would have you and the rest of her listeners think he is. Let me tell you the tale of Djahn and Lainuh, child. Some of it I know personally, but much I have learned from others since Milo and I and Gahbee and Ilsah joined these two clans last spring.

  “I know Clan Krooguh of old, for although I am a Tchizuhm-born, my first husband was a Krooguh, Chief Dik’s younger brother, Gil, in fact. I was living with this clan when first Djahn Staiklee appeared. That was at the big Tribe Camp over a score of years, ago, where he bested every man or maiden or matron with his bow and outrode every horserider in that huge aggregation. The two who came closest to besting him were Dik Krooguh at riding and my husband, Gil Krooguh, with the bow, and they three quickly became fast friends.

  “Lainuh then was married to a man named Hari of Clan Rohz, so Dik and Gil got Djahn married to her younger sister, Kahnee. She was a willowy, beautiful girl, that Kahnee Krooguh, but her hips were too narrow for her own good and she died in childbirthing before a year was out, That same winter, our camp was raided by non-Kindred nomads — Mehkikuhns, from the south — and although we did drive them back to whence they came with very heavy losses, we too lost warriors, and one of those wounded unto his eventual death was Hari Rohz, Lainuh’s husband.

  “Poor Hari’s ashes were not cold before Lainuh had set her eyes upon Djahn Staiklee. Chief Zak, Dik’s uncle, was a dying man even before he went out to fight half-naked in the midst of a
blue norther, so everyone in that three-clan camp knew that Dik would assuredly be Chief Krooguh well before the spring thaw, and so it was not as if Lainuh suffered any dearth of suitors — sons and brothers of chiefs, famous warriors, good providers, all. But she would have none save her dead sister’s widower.

  “Now Djahn. too, could have had any unmarried, nubile female who happened to take his fancy in all that camp. Behtiloo. He was a well-formed, very handsome young man, a consummate rider and bowman, no mean hand with saber and spear and riata or bola, a valued warrior and hunter.

  “He failed to respond to Lainuh’s most unsubtle overtures, and this drove her near-mad. She always has been very close to Dik, her brother, and has ever been able to slyly manipulate him, so she set him to win over his friend, Djahn, pointing out that if he just rode off, Clan Krooguh would lose a rare bit of human treasure. And so, between the persuasions of Dik and my Gil and Lainuh herself, Djahn was inveigled to stay on as a permanent member of Clan Krooguh. I think he married Lainuh more as a means of staying around his cronies, Dik and Gil, than for any other reason.

  “But the poor man made a bad choice, whatever his real motives, child. Although in the first five years of their marriage, while still I was with Clan Krooguh, I can say that she behaved the good, loving wife, seemed to appreciate the exceptional man, warrior, hunter that now was hers.

  “But then my husband, Subchief Gil Krooguh, did not come back from a raid he had led against a settlement of Dirtmen. Chief Dik offered to marry me as his third wife, and I must admit that I considered it . . . for about ten minutes’ time.”

  Ehstrah smiled. “But I simply was not born to be at the beck and call of a younger woman for the rest of my life, so I married a widower of Clan Morguhn that autumn and went with my new clan to the high plains in the following spring, while Clan Krooguh trekked off due north, following the main herds of game, and I did not again see a Krooguh camp until we arrived here with Milo.