The Gates of Tagmeth (Chronicles of the Kencyrath Book 8)

by P. C. Hodgell

  “Hold, hold, hold!” cried others, apparently to encourage the hound who still had the beast’s head pinned to the ground as much with pain as with its slight weight.

  A man jumped onto the black, bristling back. With a falchion-thrust, he severed its spine at the base of the neck. The monster jerked and made a whining sound that was its last breath escaping. Then it lay still. The Merikit cheered.

  “That’s one down, at least,” murmured Cheva.

  Jame saw that it was Chingetai who had made the kill. Looking up, he saw the Kencyr and shouted to them, “Don’t let any pass!”

  “And now we have our instructions. Lady, stay here.”

  “But . . .”

  “You have neither horse nor weapon. Besides, you are Tagmeth. Stay.”

  So spoke the master of the hunt, whom even the lord of the keep must obey in the field.

  “Tiens, loose!”

  Direhounds leaped forward, the two Molocar roaring on their heels like an avalanche. Horses backed a step as if to cock themselves, then launched after them. The hunters’ cries rang through the woods, and battle was joined.

  Jame had been left standing on the river bank, next to what seemed to be the only dead tree in the entire forest. Behind her, archers and other folk on foot blocked the road at the mouth of the gorge. The Caineron yondri were there, as well as the Randir refugees. Some, like Must, had gotten their hands on bows. Others wielded pitchforks or scythes fixed to the end of stout poles. All looked determined and purposeful. Jame shivered. As the only person stranded in the middle ground, unarmed, on foot, she felt both vulnerable and useless.

  Fool, fool, fool, as if you have to be at the heart of everything . . .

  From here, she could only see the forefront of the clash. The dead tree leaned out over the water, providing an easy path upward. Jame settled in a fork some fifteen feet up. From here, she could see that above the falls the Riverland did indeed present a bottleneck into which the Merikit had driven their intended prey.

  Not all could fit. The bulk of the herd milled about at its northern end, hacking at each other in a frenzy of irritation. Dust boiled above them, and uprooted trees crashed over. Enough had entered, however, to fully occupy the hunters.

  It was a melee, involving one yackcarn to five or more combatants with dogs, ponies, and horses assisting. The cows made short charges, slashing with tusks and horns, then, unable to break through, reared back on their hocks and tried again. One caught a pony and slit it open from groin to chest. It fell, tangled in its own bowels, further ripping them out with its dying kicks. A dog yelped in pain. Someone screamed. Jame anxiously followed Cyd’s flaming hair as she threaded between conflicts, lending her spear where needed. Her housebond Chingetai was there somewhere too, no doubt where the battle raged the fiercest. The man might be an idiot, but here he was in his element. As for the Kencyr, although they had never fought such foes before, they were quick learners and fearless in their attacks. Dust eddied around more and more black mounds as the yackcarn fell, and blood trickled between the torn gold of fallen leaves to pool in the forest’s hollows. The rest of the herd began to withdraw. Some charged up the valley’s slopes, either achieving the heights or falling back. Others retreated the way that they had come, no doubt to find more accessible inclines. Most would find their way south into the high mountain pastures, but they left behind enough dead.

  One fight continued. Jame climbed higher to watch as a massive cow held off a growing horde of hunters with shrewd swipes of tusk and horn. The dead and dying lay trampled under her hooves, mostly dogs but some hunters as well. One Merikit, slashed open and tossed, hung from the branch of a nearby tree, drizzling gore on the combat below.

  The beast’s calculated moves suggested that she was older and wiser than her comrades—a true matriarch of the herd—but she was also more stubborn than they and more thoroughly enraged to find her way blocked. A Molocar lunged for her throat. She knocked it aside, nearly impaling it. Its mate seized her haunch. She squealed and spun in a circle, swinging the huge dog as if it were a pup. Horses reared. Hunters scrambled back. The Molocar flew off, a chunk of her flank still gripped in its jaws. For a moment, the circle of predators broke, and the yackcarn plunged through their ranks.

  She was charging straight at Jame.

  No time to jump down and run. Jame scrambled farther up, dead branches snapping underfoot. The cow hit the trunk and the tree swayed. Jame looked down into those small, red-rimmed, canny eyes, and realized that this was no accident: one queen had sighted another across the battlefield.

  “Now, now . . .” she said.

  The cow shook her head, backed up, and charged again. The tree tipped. Its roots began to tear free from the bank, slowly at first, then with a groaning rush. One moment Jame was in the air, the next underwater. Branches held her down like so many dead, brittle fingers. She thrashed, snapping them, desperate for air, and surfaced, only to be hit in the face by the Silver’s rushing water. The swift current was bearing her downstream, toward the falls and the drowning cauldron that seethed at their base. Something smashed into her side. She scrabbled at it with her claws as the current tore her past and found herself clinging, breathless, to a boulder.

  Water spilled over it as something enormous surged up its far side. Once again her eyes met that mad, porcine stare: the yackcarn had followed her into the river.

  “Huh,” it said, and began to haul itself up over the rock.

  Jame noted in passing that its breath was unbelievably foul and that its upper tusks sharpened the lower, while both were backed by strong, grinding molars. This beast could bite off her head with one snap. Moreover, she couldn’t let go of the boulder to defend herself without being hurtled down over the cataracts.

  An arrow sprouted from the beast’s shoulder, then another one. Blood trickled down through the matted hair and was borne on in streamers by the current. On the bank Jame saw the Caineron and the Randir, those who could with bows raised. Must drew and shot. A red-fletched arrow pierced the yackcarn’s left eye. The right blinked, as if in surprise, then widened, and that fearsome mouth gaped. The next moment, its entire black mass seemed to melt down into the river and tumble past, revolving, with its hooves in the air.

  Jame continued to cling. The water was very cold and had numbed her fingers. It also rushed into her mouth, eyes, and nose whenever she raised her face, so that she felt half-drowned. Hands plucked at her clothing. The boulder, she dimly realized, was on the tip of a spit of land that thrust out into the river. Now she was being dragged, then carried over rocks, and finally lain down on the shore. Swallowed river water surged up her throat. Gagging, she turned on her side to vomit.

  When she lay back, it was to observe a circle of concerned faces staring down at her.

  “Did we fill the larder?” she croaked.

  “I think so,” said one, not sounding very sure.

  “Good,” Jame said, and fainted.

  II

  RUE PAUSED IN THE DOORWAY. “You have a visitor,” she said, almost making it a question: D’you want another one?

  Over the course of a busy morning, it had seemed as if everyone in the keep had made an excuse to see Jame, as if needing to reassure themselves that she was neither dead nor dying.

  “No, just bruised and battered,” she had told Brier, and then had gone off into a spasm of coughing that felt as if she was trying to disgorge her lungs. That, in turn, had loosened Kells’ poultice so that he had had to come back with a fresh pad of comfrey leaves.

  “Bruise-wort, we call it, as well as knit-bone.”

  Jame had looked down as her blackening side disappeared under Kells’ deft touch and a fresh bandage.

  “D’you think I cracked a rib?”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me, nor that you may have also punctured a lung. I’ll bring you something for that later, just in case. Hold still.”

  Jame tried not to fidget. The comfrey leaves might smell nice, like freshly cut cucumbe
rs, but they were also studded with short hairs that prickled.

  “Serves you right,” Kells grumbled, addressing her side and his task. “Good little girls do not get themselves chased by berserk cows roughly the size of small continents, much less scare everybody else half to death in the process.”

  “With me, things tend to happen all at once. I didn’t mean to fall out of a tree, into a river, onto a rock either.”

  “I should hope not,” he had said sternly, and taken his leave.

  Now Jame heard footsteps on the stair behind Rue, who belatedly, reluctantly stepped aside.

  “Cyd!” Now, here was a guest whom she was pleased to greet. “Come in.”

  The Merikit queen ducked under the low mantle and entered, smiling. She had washed off the muck of the hunt, re-dressed her glowing hair, and donned a golden doeskin tunic beaded with amber.

  “So this is Tagmeth,” she said, looking around curiously. “I have never been here before. Granny Sit-by-the-fire tells an old story about this place, how that in our ancestors’ time a race of small, gray people traded magical fruits for the right to live here. Those are said to be their runes carved over the arches below, though none can read them now. Then one day they simply disappeared.”

  “How peculiar,” said Jame, remembering Granny’s tales of the desert gods, told at a campfire in the Southern Wastes.

  “I tell truth you’ll remember,” she had said with her skull’s-head grin, “even if I have to lie to do it. My lies carry truths that fact’s spindly legs cannot.”

  Most people seemed to have stories of other unearthly races occupying their land before they came to it. If so, the remote past must have been a very strange time indeed.

  “Have a seat,” she now told her guest. “Tell me what everyone is doing.”

  “Oh, a lovely time we’re having of it,” Cyd said with a chuckle, settling down into a chair and stretching out her long legs. The soles of her boots still bore traces of blood and mud. “First, we had to sort out who owned what carcass. My dear housebond at first was tedious about it, as you may well imagine, but then he suddenly turned generous. Perhaps he realized that he was surrounded by heavily armed Kencyr, on their own ground. Perhaps he remembered how much meat we already have to dress and carry back to the village. We’ve been hunting and killing all down the River Road as it is.”

  “And I was thinking of the larder when I should have remembered the size of our smokehouse,” said Jame ruefully. “Also, we have a limited supply of salt.”

  Cyd produced a packet. “That occurred to me. These spices and herbs will help preserve your meat. Add them sparingly to your salt; they are quite potent.”

  Jame accepted the gift gratefully. Such ingredients must be virtually priceless.

  “As for what everyone is doing now, unmaking the yackcarn. Unless the meat is field-dressed immediately, it goes bad. The dogs have been given such a feast of entrails that some can barely walk.”

  Jame fiddled with the packet, then looked up. “Cyd, I have to ask: is Chingetai still determined to hunt our bull?”

  “Alas, yes.”

  “Then why has he waited so long?”

  The Merikit sighed and fingered an amber bead. Jame had never seen her look so troubled.

  “We have fought, he and I,” she said softly. “You may remember that his mother came from a different tribe and taught him different ways. He thinks that men should lead in all things. We laughed at him at first, but some of our men, especially the young ones, have started to listen. It creates discord. The yackcarn bull has become the symbol of their would-be power and the hunt the expression of their will. I confess, I have hindered him. Not without reason, however. Do you remember the equinox you spent with us in the hills? That year the yackcarn were so late in their migration that we feared we could face starvation that winter. I sent Chingetai out to find the herd. Instead, he raided southward into Caineron lands.”

  “But the yackcarn were still to the north, blocked in a valley by a pit of volcanic ash.”

  “As we now know. And when rain solidified the dust, they came south in a rush. Well, you were there. You know how close the village came to destruction. Could Chingetai have prevented that? Perhaps not, but he could have warned us. Instead, you did, barely in time.”

  “What did you do this year?”

  “I shamed him. His arrogance and neglect had nearly destroyed us once. It must never happen again. So I told him in front of the entire tribe. The women hissed him down when he protested that, then, the yackcarn stampede might be more than half a season away. Time enough, he said, to hunt the bull first. Perhaps there was. However, I gave him no choice but, this time, to go north early. Two moon cycles has he been cooling his heels on the edge of a glacier, waiting. To be fair, it gave him time to devise this drive, with the result that we have more than enough meat to last the winter. But never forget: I have rubbed his nose in the fact that you saved the village instead of him. Even before that, that the Earth Wife should choose a female favorite at all was, to him, nothing but a joke.”

  “This is a nice mess,” said Jame, “but about that bull . . .”

  “More company,” said Rue, sticking her head in the door, then dodging out of the way as Lyra and Prid charged into the room, the latter carrying a toddler.

  Lyra threw herself into Jame’s arms, ignoring her grunt of pain.

  “Oh, they said that you were dead . . . or maybe that you ought to be . . . but I’m so glad to see that you aren’t!”

  Jame detached herself. “I’m glad to see you too, Lyra, and you, my lodge-wyf. And this is . . .?”

  Cyd took the child from Prid. “Have you forgotten our daughter so soon?”

  “Of course not. It’s just that you never told me her name.”

  “Tirresian. It means ‘between’ in Merikit.”

  More confusion ensued on the stair, this time as Rue tried to stop someone. Hatch burst into the room, wearing a jacket, the red pants of the Earth Wife’s Favorite, and a thunderous expression.

  “There you are,” he said roughly to Prid, who recoiled a step. “Didn’t I tell you not to make a nuisance of yourself?”

  Prid rallied. “You are not my housebond. Even if you were, by what right do you give me such orders?”

  “Chingetai says . . .”

  “Ching, ching, ching,” chanted Lyra.

  Jame noted that she had used her time in the hills to learn passable Merikit, as Prid had Kens.

  “What is he but this lady’s lodge-wyf?” Lyra continued. “Ah, I meant housebond. Anyway, who is he to give orders?”

  Hatch turned red in the face. “He is a man.”

  “Ha!” said Prid. “A thing with three legs, only two of which are useful.”

  Lyra tugged her sleeve. “Come, I have something wonderful to show you. It has been my secret, but now it shall be yours too.”

  They departed, whispering and giggling, leaving Hatch still asputter.

  “This is all your fault!” he shouted at Jame. “You brought that unnatural chit into our midst. Now she and Prid goad each other to become war maids together. Prid should have long since been my wyf.”

  “Not, however, while you still wear those pants. I’m sorry, Hatch, but you are the Earth Wife’s Favorite with duties of your own.”

  He glared at her. “Then I’ll go exercise them, shall I?” And with that he stormed out.

  “Small luck he will have with the war maids who accompany us,” Cyd noted. “Worse with your women folk, I should think.”

  “So I should hope. Still, poor Hatch. No wonder he listens to Chingetai.”

  The Merikit sighed. “Others do too, with less cause. But here, see how your daughter yearns toward you.”

  The child with hair the color of pale smoke was indeed leaning out of her mother’s arms, reaching for Jame. Jame took her gingerly. Silver eyes laughed up into her own and small arms tightened around her neck.

  “Sit,” said Cyd. “It will be easier, given
your injuries.”

  Jame sank gratefully into a chair. The child cuddled in her arms and began to suck her thumb while keeping her heels away from Jame’s bruised side.

  “Look there, now,” said Cyd softly. “She knows that you are hurt and would not cause you further pain.”

  Jame regarded the infant, feeling an unaccustomed sensation as if their bodies were melting together. She didn’t want ever to let go.

  “Is such sensitivity usual at such a young age?”

  Cyd laughed. “Hardly, but then much about this child is unexpected. You felt it when you first saw her, did you not?”

  “I was startled that I couldn’t tell if she was a boy or a girl.”

  “I still have my doubts and an opinion that alters from day to day—yes, even I, her mother. I call her ‘she’ because I have always wanted a daughter. Such changelings are sometimes born to us. We call them Tirres and value them highly.”

  “But not Chingetai.”

  “No. He sees her as a freak, a . . . a monster. I watch him closely when he is around her, which is not often.”

  “Cyd, if you mistrust the man so much, why don’t you divorce him?”

  The Merikit queen smiled sadly. “He is not always so . . . unpleasing. Perhaps one day you will understand.”

  Jame shrugged this off. It probably had something to do with love, or lust, or both, neither of much interest to her.

  “What about her sisters?” she asked.

  “Ah, definitely girls, but special nonetheless.”

  Some slight sound made Jame turn, then start as she saw Must standing in the doorway, staring at her and Tirresian.”

  “That child has your eyes,” said the Caineron yondri.

  “So I’m told.” Jame got her nerves back in order. After all, this guest she had summoned.

  “The Merikit consider her my daughter. I suppose I do too. Anyway, I wanted to thank you for saving my life this morning. That was a fine shot.”

  “I do have some worthwhile skills.”