Indomitus Est (The Fovean Chronicles) (6 page)

    
Oh, for the love of god, I had no
coffee
!  I had always been a three-cup-in-the-morning, two-during-the-day and a-couple-cans-of-soda caffeine junkie with
no
desire to change.  I dreaded the caffeine deprivation headache that I knew would be coming.

    
I went to the lake and stuck my fingers into it.  It felt warm.  I rubbed my hands together and felt no foreign objects in it.  I couldn’t see any fish, nothing living in it.  If it was foul, it could make me sick, even kill me.  It made no sense that there would be absolutely nothing living in it. Yet why would my God leave me to die on my first day?  Without water I wouldn’t last until nightfall.

    
I touched the water to my lips and the end of my tongue.  I tried to taste an acid, or a salt, or a sting or bitterness.  It surprised me that it tasted salty, but not terribly so.  It reminded me, on tasting it again, of tears.

    
Yes, I thought.  Tears.  The water tasted like tears.  I drank again and, though I felt thirsty, I didn’t want any more.  Drinking what tasted like tears made for a sickening experience.

    
I ate one of the wafers instead.  It refreshed me and I felt neither hungry nor thirsty.  I smiled.  Maybe my God had not forsaken me after all!  I immediately shied from the thought and waited a breathless second for that pain to return.  It didn’t and I sighed, almost embarrassed to have felt this way, though at the same time, grateful.

    
I stretched and tried to work some of the kinks out of my back. I considered bathing in the lake and reconsidered immediately.  It would be better to stay dirty, at least for now.  I picked up the sword and swung it experimentally in a figure eight.  It felt very natural, like an extension of my arm.  Again I marveled at the balance.  It made a whirring sound in the air that felt reassuring, telling me that the blade was true. 

    
The nickering in the air behind me took me by surprise.  I turned to see a huge white stallion watching me.  It wore no saddle or bridle and its mane and hooves were long. 
It must be wild
, I thought.  It came alone, no herd of mares near, which made it a rogue, either driven off by an even larger stallion or separated from its herd by predators.  I had a hard time imagining a larger stallion; the brute stood at the height of a Clydesdale, but had a body more like an Arabian, noble and strong, a cheek like a saucer and a nose like teacup.  He watched me, pawing the sand, unafraid.

   
If I could tame him I would make better time.  I had never broken a horse in my life, however.  He didn’t look like he would give up easily.

    
I had no rope, and I didn’t see myself running him down or trapping him against anything.  Even if I did, one huge hoof would likely brain me.  Because I had nothing else, I took out one of my wafers and held it in my hand toward him.  I could see him trying to smell it.  He took a cautious step toward me but when I leaned forward he shied, stepping back several more feet.

    
“So you
are
hungry,” I said to him.  He pricked up his ears.  I spoke more to him, saying nonsense things, letting him hear my voice.  Even though he didn’t run he drew no closer.

    
I sighed.  “Well, big man, I can’t stay all day.  If you are hungry you will come around, and if not, there is nothing I can do to catch you.” With that I turned my back on him and started walking.

    
I walked about three hundred yards before I heard his hooves on the ground behind me.  I turned and saw him several yards back, his ears pinned back, telling me to come no closer.  I continued walking and he kept following.  For the rest of the morning we played this game, me talking to him, him trying to figure out how to get the wafer.  I watched him try to get a drink of water but he shied from the lake after barely dipping his lips and shook his mane with no less distaste than I had. 

    
“Fit for neither man nor beast, hmmm?” I asked him.  He nickered angrily.  I could see he felt thirsty.  I had started to feel the same, and took a bite of the wafer. This got his immediate attention.  He came almost close enough for me to touch him then, craning his neck to the wafer, but he still didn’t trust me.

    
On a whim I backed away from him.  He arched his proud neck and stepped up after me.  I retreated further and he pressed me.  I backpedaled now; sword in one hand, wafer in the other, retreating as quickly as I could. I had him almost trotting when I turned and ran as fast as I could, the giant, white stallion beside me.  We ran together side by side, the wafer half-forgotten, just running.

    
I put my hand tentatively on his shoulder.  His skin flickered and he watched me from his left eye, but he kept running.  I already felt winded, the sword putting me off balance and making it hard to run, but I had made my point.  Finally, before I left myself so winded that I would have to sit down, I slowed to a walk.  It worked; he slowed with me.  I fed him the wafer, fingers back and palm open, then dropped the sword so I could stroke his mane as he ate.  He had a fine, powerful neck and a huge muscled barrel; he would have to have a saddle specially made to fit him.  That is, unless stallions were normally this size on this world.

    
I continued to rub his neck and shoulders, or
whithers
, scratching him behind his ears and at the base of his neck as he watched me.  He had long since finished eating, so I assumed that he must be waiting to see if there was more.  When he stomped his front hoof, making me believe that he had finished with me, I held out the leather pouch and let him smell it.  He bit at it immediately and I had to pull it away before I lost it.  Clever animal – he had almost robbed me of my food!  I smiled as he pushed his nose after it, tucking it back into my belt, and ran again. 

    
This time he ran right next to me, going for the food source.  We ran farther this time.  My hand on his shoulder let me lean for balance and got him used to my touch.  I could run farther with him, when he could share some of my weight.  We ran and walked as before, going much farther than I had the previous day.  By the time dark came this time, I felt thoroughly winded and, from what I could tell, I hadn’t impressed him, not even left him lathered.  I fed him another of the wafers.  Seeing that I had about ten left, I also ate one.  He licked the crumbs from my hand with a rough tongue.  I knew to keep my fingers from his teeth, having read once of a woman who had lost all of her fingers that way to a Clydesdale.

    
I took off my shirt and rubbed him with it, which he seemed to enjoy.  I then dipped the shirt in the lake to get the horsehair out and left it out to dry.  I immediately noticed that he wouldn’t go near it and hoped that the smell of the lake would be out of it by morning.  Though I didn’t think it would hurt me to walk or run with no shirt (the day felt warm) I didn’t want to have to abandon it completely.

    
I sat and the stallion nosed me, wanting me to keep scratching him.  I did, talking softly to him.  He behaved too friendly for an entirely wild horse, and yet I saw no evidence of him ever having worn a saddle or felt a bit.  He could just be hungry or lonely.  My knowledge of horses came from shoveling out their stalls for two dollars an hour at age fourteen.  That meant I knew how to keep them and I knew a few of the breeds.  Likely that had nothing to do with those of this planet.  As darkness fell and he stood out as a glimmering, white monster against the starlight, I wondered if he would be there in the morning.  I really didn’t dare hobble or picket him, not that I had anything to do that with, anyway.  Stretching out on my back, the sand digging into my shoulders, I watched him standing still as a statue over me.

    
I awoke after another dreamless sleep and found him still there.  He had also relieved me of both my store of wafers and a good portion of the bag they were in.  I swore to myself but I didn’t want to explode at the stallion.  All that would accomplish would be to scare him off, and now I had no leverage on him.

    
I stood and he sniffed me and rubbed on me from top to bottom.  His coat quivered with energy as I scratched his ears and the back of his jowls. 

    
He had screwed me now, of course.  I didn’t think he would let me ride him yet, though I would have to try.  If he threw me and bolted I would be dead if I didn’t find food or water in about two days, and from the look of the terrain, people were nowhere near here.  I held his head and looked into his brown eyes.

    
“Well, big man, you came into my life, and you were my friend for a few hours, and you robbed me,” I told him.  He looked at me and batted his eyelashes.  “Now, are you still going to be my buddy, and let me sit on your back long enough to go someplace where people are?  And when we get there, are you going to turn people-shy and refuse to go further?”

    
He didn’t say anything, and on my third day in this strange place I half-expected him to.  I continued to rub him down his neck and to his barrel, moving my hands to his shoulders.  The top of my head rose even with the top of his withers, meaning that I couldn’t just leap onto his back from right next to him if I meant to hang on.  I gently guided him to a natural low-point in the beach by the lake, where I could see over his back, and I took a breath. When he didn’t move away from me, I took a fist full of his mane and leaped up onto his back, kicking high to get a leg over him.  I held him tight with my thighs, and curled the fingers of my left hand into his mane as I balanced the sword in my right.

    
He turned and looked at me.  I saw his wide, right eye regard me with something between surprise and indignation, and I thought for a moment: “Oh, he is left brained.  I think that means he is creative.”  Then he took off.

    
No horse born on Earth ever galloped so fast.  I clung for dear life, my thighs on his barrel with my knees bent, my fingers in his mane, my back as straight as I could keep it and my heels back against the softness of his stomach.  I tried to balance the sword I had been forbidden to lose in one hand.  I’d ridden bareback before (thank God, which one I don’t know) so I knew how to adjust my weight to the moving animal.  The sword must have made me look like a charging knight or a complete idiot.

    
His muscles rippled like snakes under a bed sheet beneath me.   The stallion’s power almost radiated from him.  His hooves beat the sand like a drum.  I wondered after several minutes of just trying to stay alive that he hadn’t tried to buck or roll on me.  I had all I could do to keep my breathing adjusted so that I could catch gulps of the passing wind as he ran on.

    
It had to be over an hour later before he slowed even marginally, switching from an all-out gallop to a loping canter.  Still he pounded on, following the shoreline.  My legs were cramping from holding onto him, my groin and stomach aching, my fingers stiff on the sword and in his mane and losing their hold on both, my shoulders burning.  Because I had no way to stop him I tried to tune it out, watching the terrain, looking for some change or indication of civilization, but I saw none.

    
There’s something about riding a huge horse which is entirely different from normal ones.  A horse is a powerful animal – a stallion especially.  Riding him, you learn to move with him, to be one with him – sometimes, I think we’ve given up something of our humanity when we left horses for cars.  Even while I still dwelled on my encounter with War, on the pain, on the fear of being here, not knowing what I had to do next, not knowing what would become of me, I found release in that ongoing ride, that powerful animal surging across the plain beneath me.

    
For a while, I thought to myself that, with him on my side, I had a good chance of accomplishing whatever it was I had to do. 

    
The shore had turned more toward the west and I could see some sort of change coming up, either a river flowing from it or just a bend in the shoreline. 

    
As we approached, he finally slowed to a walk.  Now I saw a river mouth flowing south from the lake and that the ground had become hilly.  I also saw a little scrub grass that the horse would likely want.  The sun had fallen past the apex; we must have been running for four hours or more.  It amazed me – I couldn’t guess how far we had come.  With such animals for their mass-transit, the civilization here would advance strangely.  Commerce could develop more quickly than industrialization and countries become more far-reaching as distances could be traveled more quickly.  The stallion was lathered now and would likely need a rest.  I wondered if I could make a bridle from my shirt for him when he slowed to a stop.