Hunting Party

by Elizabeth Moon

  Cecelia appeared at her shoulder. “I hate to break this up, but you’ve got that early lesson, and I’m off with the greens at dawn—and there’s a message from the Station.” She smiled at the group around Heris, and they smiled in a way that let Heris know how much clout Cecelia had. She was almost tempted to refuse the suggestion just to see them react, but that would be cheap, so she said good night and followed Cecelia upstairs.

  “Message?” she asked on the way.

  “Nothing much—the ones you left aboard—”

  “The standing watch,” Heris murmured.

  “Whatever. Letting you know that the others arrived safely in Hospitality Bay, and that the new equipment is functioning correctly so far. Did you ask for regular reports?”

  “Of course,” Heris said. “If they didn’t report, how would I know whether things are going well?”

  “Oh. I’d assume they were—but before you even remind me, if it were a stable and not a ship I would be the way you are. When I was off competing, I spent incredible sums checking back with the home yard to see if they’d remembered things—and they always had.”

  “Because you checked,” Heris said. “I’ll call back up—anything else?”

  “Well . . . yes. I hope you won’t be offended—”

  “I won’t.” Although she wasn’t entirely sure. On her home ground—and she treated Lord Thornbuckle’s planet as her home ground—Cecelia had some of the very habits Heris had feared when she first hired on with a rich old lady.

  “Some of them are terrible gossips,” Cecelia said, speaking softly. “It’s not just that they’ll repeat what you said. . . . They’ll embellish it. It’ll be worse because you’re here as my guest; they’ve chewed my past to tasteless mush already, and you’re something new. I know you can deal with it, but don’t be surprised if you hear that we’re lovers or something.”

  “Lovers!” Heris nearly choked. “Us?”

  “Predictable gossip,” Cecelia said. Her cheeks were very pink.

  “I’m sorry,” Heris realized that her reaction could be construed as unflattering. “It’s just—I mean—”

  “We aren’t. I know. But since I never married, they’ve been trying all the theories about why not, one after another until the end and back again. That crowd that rides the blue hunt is the worst—Stef, in particular, would rather talk than ride, as you can tell when you see him mounted.”

  “You know,” Heris said, as they mounted another flight of stairs. “I wouldn’t talk about you—or Ronnie.”

  “I know. It’s not that. I just—I want you to enjoy this, Heris. Not as my captain, but as my guest. And it occurred to me that you might not have their sort of gossip in the military.”

  “Oh, don’t we!” Heris chuckled. “Same both places, I expect. Some wouldn’t touch it, but others can’t wait to guess who’s in bed with whom, using what chemicals or gadgets. Don’t worry; I can be dense when it suits me.”

  “Good.” Cecelia took a few more steps, then stopped to face Heris. “If you pay attention in the blue hunt, you’ll probably be up in green very soon. They’re looking for several things—how solid you are over fences, how done the horse comes back, and whether you interfere in the field.”

  “Do you want me in the green hunt?” Heris asked. It had become clear how much respect the greens had, but not whether Cecelia wanted competition.

  “Of course I do! Heavens, girl, I wouldn’t have brought you if I’d thought you’d be stuck in a lower hunt the whole season. It wouldn’t have been fair to you, or as much fun for me. Go on, now, and get your rest. I’ll be interested in hearing about your day.”

  * * *

  That last visit to the tailor had taken out the slight wrinkle in the back of her jacket. . . . Heris looked at herself in the mirror with a mixture of amusement and pride. Amusement, because the clothing proper to foxhunting still struck her as ludicrous: why wear light-colored tight breeches when you were going to gallop big dirty animals through the mud? And pride, because at over forty she still had the condition to look sixteen or so in those same tight pants, white shirt, and dark jacket.

  Despite the training, and Cecelia’s assurance that she was ready, Heris found the chaos in the blue hunt’s meeting area tingling along her nerves. She looked for Neil but saw only the second level of help. Of course, Neil would be with the green hunt. Surely he’d chosen the mounts, though. . . . She eyed the big red—chestnut, she reminded herself—gelding being led toward her with some concern.

  “Tiger II,” said the groom, a thickset woman even darker than Heris. “Need a leg?”

  “In a moment.” Heris went through the drill Cecelia had taught her, checking the bridle and girth herself, then accepted a leg and swung into the saddle. She hoped the beast’s name did not reflect his temperament.

  “He pulls, sometimes,” the groom said. “But he’ll answer a sharp check. Keep him back, and calm, and he’ll go all day. Get in a fight with him, and you’ll wish you hadn’t.”

  Great. She had a problem horse for her first hunt, her first performance in front of everyone. She looked down at the groom, expecting to see sly satisfaction, but the woman’s smile was friendly. “Don’t worry,” the woman said. “He’s not a bad ’un for a first time out; he can jump anything, and will—the only thing is don’t let him go too strong till he’s worked himself down a bit.”

  “Thank you,” Heris said. “Any other advice?”

  This time the woman’s face creased in a broad grin. “Well—I wouldn’t let him slow down in water . . . he likes to roll. If you come to a stream, get him over in a hurry.”

  The horse snorted and shook his head; Heris firmed her grip on the reins. “I’ll be careful,” she said. The groom stepped back. Heris looked around and saw that about half the riders were up. She had room to walk the red horse—Tiger—in a small circle, and did so, first one way then the other. As the minutes passed, she calmed down. It was just another horse, and they were going out to ride over just another field. She had told herself that same lie in other situations, and it always helped. So did “tonight this will be over.”

  Chapter Ten

  The hounds led the way, their long tails—Heris couldn’t make herself call such a biologic ornament a stern; ships had sterns—whipping back and forth or carried high, eager. She got only a glimpse of them before the rest of the field passed out the gate and blocked her view. She intended to make sure Tiger understood who was in charge while they were still at a walk.

  As they came around the end of the stable wing, Heris could see both the other hunts moving away to the east and west. The beginners (so Cecelia had called them) would hunt the flat, open country to the east, where the fences were lower and the pseudofoxes lived in brushy thickets. The green hunt had the western hills, with long open slopes and timber at the top and bottom. And they, the blue hunt, had a mixed country, rather like lumpy potatoes in a kettle. Little hills with little creeks between them, little patches of woods and others of brush, odd-shaped fields bordered with stone walls or ditches or both.

  Verisimilitude, Cecelia had explained, influenced only some of Lord Thornbuckle’s eccentricities. That rather lumpy country had been the first colony settlement on this world, bought out by one of the present owner’s ancestors. They had tried to make a quick profit out of open-pit mining to pay off their initial investment, then botched the mid-level terraforming that was supposed to convert the area into something their heirs could live on and from. Instead, they went broke, and left behind ugly pit mines, irregular heaps of spoil, ponds and wandering streams fouled with acid and heavy metals. Now, some hundreds of years later, the area was still unsafe for use in any food chain humans would use, but it could support hardy plants, animals with a tolerance for heavy metals and acid water, and recreation. Wool and leather and sport were its crops.

  Tiger yanked on the bit, and Heris brought her mind firmly back to the immediate moment. Someone had trotted past—she found it hard to recognize,
in the plain black coats and hats, the people she had met at dinner the night before—and the red horse wanted to follow. She refused, and met his attempt to sidle out from behind the horse in front with a firm leg. He tested her in the next few minutes, as they rode to cover, with a curvet here, and a pretense at a shy there; she was reminded of certain troublemakers she had known, and had no problem keeping him under control.

  “Ah—Captain Serrano!” The grinning man next to her was the tall lanky blond Cecelia had said liked talk better than riding. He was on a horse which looked like a stuffed caricature of the animal Neil had shown Cecelia: large, dark brown, but this time coarse and bulgy instead of powerful and sleek. And he rode sloppily; even Heris could tell that. “Lovely morning, isn’t it? Are you ready for Tiger? Did they tell you?”

  “That he pulls, yes, and to keep him out of the water.” Heris glanced around. They were near the tail of the group, and she could tell from the tension in the reins that Tiger wasn’t happy about it.

  “You don’t have to stay back here,” the man said. Stef, his name was. “Mid-field’s enough; just keep him away from the leaders.”

  “I’m fine,” Heris said. “I like to watch the others.” Cecelia had told her to stay well back, even this far back, and she trusted Cecelia’s advice more than someone who sat his horse like a jellied custard.

  “Come on, Stef!” someone called from ahead, and he shrugged and kicked his horse into a trot. Heris anticipated Tiger’s attempt to lunge forward, and rehearsed for the hundredth time what Cecelia had told her, and what she had read.

  The hounds would be turned loose to find the smell—the scent—of one of the pseudofoxes, and then they would “give tongue.” Now that Heris had heard them, from a distance, she agreed that “barked” was inadequate. With the hounds following the scent, the field would follow—cautiously—because pseudofoxes, like their Old Earth predecessors, were tricky beasts. More than once they’d popped into view in the midst or even rear of the field, causing a wild confusion of horses and hounds and usually getting clean away. One had to give the pack time to work the scent, to untangle the maze the prey left, and push the fox into the open. Only when the fox was sighted did things move faster—eventually very fast.

  They came to a scrubby wood bordered on one side by a tangle of two-meter brush. Riders gathered in a clump; the few who spoke did so quietly, and most checked girths and stirrup leathers, and kept quiet. Heris put a leg forward cautiously and found that Tiger’s girth could come up another notch, just as the groom had said. She drew in a long breath of cold, moist morning air, on which the smell of horse and dog and wet clay hung suspended in a fundamental cleanliness utterly unlike ship’s air. Planets felt so spacious; there always seemed to be room, somewhere beyond—although she knew very well they were as tightly limited as any ship, just larger. Somewhere ahead and to the left, she heard the noise of the pack, the busy feet pattering on leaves and twigs, the coarse, eager panting, an occasional muffled yelp. Something small and gray and bouncy—not a pseudofox, but something it probably ate—shot into the clearing and two horses shied away from it. Tiger threw up his head, but Heris held him firmly and the little animal scuttered through the field without causing any real damage. Another animal—Heris got a good look at this one, and it was a small, black tree-climber with a bushy tail—clung to a nearby tree and made angry chattering noises at them, flipping its tail as punctuation.

  Heris had just begun to wonder if anything would happen when one of the hounds gave a sobbing moan, and another joined in. She had lost track of their movements; they now sounded ahead and to the right, and she could hear crackling in the brush. Around her, the riders gathered up reins, and edged into position. Some began moving, at a walk, in the direction of the noise. Then a horn blew a signal she didn’t know, and everyone set off after it.

  For a long time they seemed to move at a walk or slow trot, making their way through the woods and through a lane in the brush beyond it. Tiger tossed his head a lot, but otherwise gave Heris no trouble. At the end of the brush a low stone wall offered the first chance to test jumping skills in the field. Heris, at the end of the field, had to wait a long time while others scrambled over, some with difficulty. By the time it was her turn, stones lay tumbled at the foot, and the wall was scarcely a half-meter high. Tiger bounced over it with contempt, ears flat, and kicked up on the far side. Only those who had had refusals and turned aside to wait were behind her now. She could see the backs of the first riders rising as their horses leaped an obstacle across the field she’d just jumped into.

  Tiger fought the bit all the way across the field, took off late for the rail fence on its far side, and whacked it with his forelegs. Heris had no trouble staying on, but she could tell her shoulders would hurt if he was this stubborn all day long. The fence seemed to have settled him, though, for he followed the field along a track through sparse trees without trying to race ahead. Heris couldn’t see exactly where they were headed next, but she felt more confidence in her ability to survive this odd ritual.

  Tiger’s strong trot brought the field back to her, as most of the riders chose to squeeze through a gate at the end of the track rather than jump another, higher wall. Some of those who had tried the jump hadn’t made it; Heris saw one woman climbing back onto her horse, and a man stalking a loose horse which was slyly moving off just too fast to be caught. Beyond the gate, they faced a sluggish stream, well-muddied by recent crossings, and a steep slope across it up one of the small irregular hills. Remembering the groom’s advice, Heris took a firm contact, and gave Tiger a smart tap in the ribs. With a snort, he plunged into the water, and lurched up the far bank. Heris couldn’t remember if she was supposed to avoid trotting up hill or down (someone had said something about it, she thought) so she walked sedately up, trusting that she could see where everyone was from the top. Tiger’s ears were no longer back; apparently he’d given up the fight.

  She had imagined a hill like an overturned bowl, with a definite top, from which she could see all sides. As soon as the slope flattened, she realized her mistake. She might as well have assumed that being at the top of a loading platform or the flight deck of her carrier would let her see everything going on below. From the irregular and unlevel top of the hill, the downward slopes were mostly invisible. Some fell off steeply, and others were hidden in clumps of trees or brush. She looked around for a clue. The ground had plenty of hoofprints, but she was no tracker to know which were recent. Far off in the distance, tiny horses stretched across the slope of another hill—but that couldn’t be the hunt she was following, it was too far away. A fresh breeze made just enough noise in the nearest trees to cover the sound of the hounds . . . although she hadn’t heard it for some time, she realized. She’d just been following the tail-end riders.

  She felt stupid, and bored, and suddenly very irritated with Lady Cecelia. Surely this was not what riding to hounds was supposed to be like, dawdling along at the end of a group of people who fell off and got lost. How could they call it hunting? Only those in the front of the group were actually hunting, and they were just following the hounds, who were chasing a fake fox, an artificial animal designed to be quarry. The whole thing was a fake—a pretense of historical accuracy, modified for modern convenience.

  A quiver beneath her reminded her that she wasn’t standing on a machine, or a fake animal, but riding a real, living animal with its own initiative. Tiger’s ears were forward, pricked, and he stamped the ground with a forehoof. She looked in the direction of his gaze. The little horses had disappeared into a wood, too far away still, she was sure . . . but Tiger didn’t think so.

  She muttered a curse that was thoroughly untraditional on the hunting field, being born of things you could do with weapons found only on spaceships, and nudged Tiger into motion. “You like to hunt, they told me,” she said to the horse’s ears. One of them flicked back, as if he understood. “Find the damned hunt, then.” Tiger picked up a trot, and as the downhill slope
steepened, he lunged into a gallop. Heris had just time to think she shouldn’t have let him do that. Then they were in the trees, and she was too busy keeping her head off limbs to worry about it.

  Out of the woods, into a field bounded by more woods: Tiger took the fence from trees to grass in an easy bound, crossed the field in five strides, and rolled over the wall at the far side into a track Heris had not noticed until they were in it. No trees . . . a long curving ride up and around the shoulder of another hill, through an open gate, down across a grassy field. Tiger, wiser than she, skirted the rock-edged sinkhole in the middle and made for a gap he evidently knew well. A downward rocky slope, where even Tiger slowed to a walk, and Heris got her breath back as they slithered through some spicy-smelling trees toward another creek. That had been fun, if scary: she began to think that whether it counted as hunting or not, it was more fun to ride fast than slow.

  By this time Heris had no idea where they were, but the horse’s ears still pricked forward. He minced across the little creek and into the woods on the far side. Suddenly Heris heard the hounds again, and from this distance had to admit they sounded almost like horns themselves. They were ahead through the woods, moving left to right. . . . She gathered herself just in time, as Tiger sprang upward, dodging through trees with no regard at all for her legs. She could steer him, she found, and even moderate his speed; she pulled him to a solid canter rather than a headlong gallop.

  The belling of hounds rang out nearer; at the top of the wood, they came out of the trees to find the hounds strung out on that hill’s bald top, with the field close behind them and the fox in view before. Heris managed to swing Tiger around behind the front runners, though he fought her. Then they were in with others, galloping over short grass toward what looked like a pile of rocks. The leaders swerved around it, and poured over a wall just ahead of Heris. Tiger rose to the wall, and she got a quick glimpse of where they were going—the hounds, the streak of red-brown that must be the fox, the huntsman in red—before they were into the next field, this one draped across the shoulder of its hill like a shawl. Tiger flattened beneath her, passing a gray horse and a black, and jumping the briars and stones that separated that field from another.