The Horsemasters (17 page)

Everyone watched Berta as she loosened the leather ties that supported her babe on the cradleboard. “That is how things have always been with us,” Beki said finally.

The last tie had been unfastened and Berta lifted her whimpering child into her arms. “This child that you carry,” she said to Beki, “will you give Kasar the right to make all the decisions as to what will be good for it and what will not?”

Instinctively, Beki placed a hand upon her swelling stomach. “I will not.”

Berta undid the thong on her shirt and put her babe to the breast. The fussing immediately ceased. “If Tabara had belonged to the People of the Dawn she would never have had her children taken away from her,” Berta said. “That is a barbarous thing to do to a woman, worse even than what was done to Yeba.”

“That is so,” Berta’s sister, Tora, agreed.

Thorn did not remember being introduced to a woman named Tabara, and indeed, from the behavior of the others, it was clear to him that she was not present.

It was Eken who spoke into the suddenly somber silence. “Tabara was found in adultery. For us of the Kindred that is a serious matter. It strikes at the very heart of the family, Berta. It cannot be passed over lightly.”

Berta’s babe hiccupped loudly, and all the women smiled. “The family is a mother and her children,” Berta said, her hand gently patting her child’s back. She looked at Thorn, the only male present. “The man is not important.”

Thorn looked back into those challenging brown eyes. The women were quiet, waiting to hear what he might say. “It’s not true that the man is unimportant to the family,” he said indignantly. “My father was very important to me. It was he who taught me all the skills I need in order to be a man. How can that not be important?”

“Any man can teach those things to a child,” Berta said dismissively.

“That is so,” her sister agreed. “In our tribe that kind of teaching is done by the mother’s brother. A father is not necessary.”

Thorn stared at the two of them in amazement. So this was the thinking of women who followed the Goddess! Thorn was very glad he himself came from a tribe that understood the importance of men.

“Is your tribe led by a Mistress, like the Tribe of the Red Deer?” Thorn asked.

Berta shook her head. “The People of the Dawn are led by a chief. A woman has too much responsibility at home to have the time to assume responsibility for others who are not of her family. But the matriarchs of each family sit on the chief’s council and give him their advice.”

Thorn thought of his shy and gentle mother, who would never think of gainsaying a word that dropped from his father’s lips. He shook his head in astonishment.

A little silence fell as Eken filled the cups with more tea. Then a very pretty girl named Yoli said to Thorn, “When you were at the Spring Gathering did you hear aught of a marauding tribe from the north that rides upon the backs of horses?”

“Sa,” Thorn said, glad to have the subject changed. He was not accustomed to dealing with such forthright women as Berta and Tora. “My chief, Haras, spoke to us about it. It seems that the tribes to the north were spreading this news around the gathering. The men of the Buffalo found it hard to believe.”

“Ronan took it seriously enough to send Bror and Lemo north to learn what they could,” Fara told Thorn.

“He did?” Thorn looked bewildered. “I do not understand. Even if the story is true, this tribe is from the Land Where the Ground Stays Forever Frozen. They can have nothing to do with us.”

“That is what my husband says,” Yeba agreed. “Cree told Ronan he was wasting the men’s time by sending them on such an errand.”

“Ronan knows what he is doing!” Eken glared at Yeba.

Yeba shot a look of amusement around the circle. “Sa,” she said with deliberate mildness, “we all know what you think of Ronan, Eken.”

Several of the women laughed and Eken flushed. Berta got to her feet. “It is growing close to suppertime,” she announced. “The men will be returning soon from the hunt. It is time to light the cookfires.”

“Sa, sa.”

“That is so.”

One by one the women arose and began to return to their own huts. Thorn looked with puzzlement toward the peacefully grazing herds and wondered where the men had disappeared to. They did not appear to be hunting in the valley. The women of the Wolf were certainly a strong-minded lot, he thought a little nervously, as he turned back toward Fara’s tent. The conversation he had heard this afternoon was definitely not the sort of idle gossip about children he was accustomed to hearing from his mother’s friends at home.

* * * *

The men had not been hunting in the valley. A half an hour after the cookfires had been lit, a large group of them returned through the narrow passage carrying three dead reindeer. Thorn wandered down to the slaughtering grounds, where the men were skinning and butchering the carcasses.

Crim took Thorn in hand and introduced him to the men he had not yet met. To Thorn’s surprise, about half of the men wore the single long braid that distinguished the followers of the Goddess. They were not from the Tribe of the Red Deer, however. Their accents told Thorn that much.

Mait, the brother of Berta and Tora, grinned at Thorn happily when Crim introduced them. “I am very glad to see you,” he said, “At last I will have an agemate!”

Thorn smiled back. Mait looked very like his sisters; he had the same long glossy braid, the same large brown eyes, the same flat nose and broad cheekbones.

“We must get Ronan to give you boys a hut to yourselves,” Crim said good-naturedly. “It can be our initiates’ hut.”

Mait’s eyes sparkled. “I will ask Ronan tonight if we can do that.”

“Where is Ronan?” Thorn asked, looking toward the passage.

“Up the valley, I expect,” Crim replied. He squinted against the rays of the sinking sun. “Sa. Here he comes now.”

Thorn followed the direction of Crim’s eyes and saw in the distance what looked like a man and a dog walking together through the thigh-high grass that grew near the valley wall. “Is that Nigak with him?” Thorn asked eagerly.

“Sa.”

Thorn noticed that the man carried nothing. “They do not look as if their hunt was successful.”

“They have not been hunting.” Crim’s voice was stolid. He put a hand upon Thorn’s arm, “Come along, youngster. If you are going to join the Tribe of the Wolf, you are going to have to work for your keep. You can help me finish butchering the hindquarters of this reindeer.”

With a quick smile over his shoulder at Mait, Thorn went.

Thorn ate his supper with Crim’s family, but sleeping space was tight within Crim’s hut, which had to accommodate not only his wife and sister-in-law but the twins as well, so Thorn slept that night in Bror’s vacant place in a hut that also housed Dai and Okal. Both young men carried a handful more years than Thorn did, and would have been nirum, or full-fledged hunters, in their own tribes. Thorn treated them both with respect and had the sense not to ask them too many questions.

One question he did ask, as he was spreading out his sleeping skins. “How long has Bror been gone?”

“Almost one moon now,” Dai said. He too was smoothing out his skins. “I am thinking he will be away for another moon, at the least.”

“Sa,” said Okal. He was already lying down, his arms crossed behind his head. “There will be plenty of time to build a hut for you and Mait.”

“Where does Mait sleep now?” Thorn asked.

“He sleeps with the other unmarried men of the Goddess.”

Thorn silently noted this segregation along religious lines. “Is it…difficult…sometimes,” he dared to ask, “trying to live in harmony with people whose ways are so different?”

“Sometimes,” Dai admitted. “It is the taboos that cause the most trouble. So far, though, Ronan has always managed to smooth things over.”

“So far,” Okal said.

Dai got into his sleeping skins. “Aren’t you ready, yet?” he asked Thorn impatiently.

“Sa,” said Thorn. He crawled hurriedly under his buffalo robe and Dai blew out the saucer lamp that had been lighting the tent. Within a short time the breathing of the two older men told Thorn they were asleep, but still he lay awake. His body was tired, but his mind was relentlessly active, going over again and again all of the things that he had heard during the course of the day.

There were so many questions he wanted to ask! Why had the men left this rich, animal-stocked valley to hunt? What terrible deeds had the other men of the tribe done to cause their expulsion from their tribes? Was there discord in the tribe between the followers of Sky God and those of the Goddess? And finally, what was Ronan doing alone up the valley?

The night passed and Thorn was still awake when he heard a sound outside his hut. Very carefully, he got out of his sleeping skins, crawled to the door flap, and peered outside. The moonlit night was bright enough for him to make out the figure of a man leaving the hut area and walking toward the ground-level rock shelter where the tribe’s few dogs slept. Thorn immediately recognized the walk as Ronan’s.

Slowly and silently, Thorn dropped the flap and returned to his sleeping skins. He closed his eyes and, finally, he slept.

* * * *

The following morning Thorn learned that Alos, the female dog brought to the tribe by Yoli and bred by Nigak, had had her puppies. Everyone was delighted with the healthy, active litter. Ronan sent the boys up the valley, giving Mait instructions to show Thorn around. Mait was thrilled at the prospect of a holiday, and he was equally pleased to find himself in the role of leader, a position which, as the youngest member of the tribe save for the babies, he rarely achieved.

Thorn added to his feeling of importance by plying him with questions. The first one was “Where do the men of the tribe go to hunt?”

“This time of year the first herds of reindeer have reached the lower pastures of the Atlas,” Mait said. “That is where the hunters go. You saw how they came back yesterday with three fine kills.”

“I saw,” Thorn agreed. “Then it was reindeer in particular you wanted? It is true that I have not seen reindeer within the valley.”

“We rarely hunt within the valley,” Mait said simply.

Thorn stared in astonishment. “Why not?”

“It is Ronan’s rule.” Mait smiled at the look on Thorn’s face. “Ronan says that we cannot afford to frighten away the animals that dwell here. He says that if we hunt them all the time, they will learn to fear us and will leave. It is better to hunt outside the valley and keep friends with the animals within.”

“You never hunt in the valley?”

The boys had stopped by the river, and Thorn’s eyes were on a mare and her foal drinking peacefully only a few yards from where he and Mait were standing. The mare was almost white; the foal was dark brown.

“We hunt the horses in the autumn,” Mait replied, his eyes also on the mare and foal. “We herd the horses into a corral and kill the ones who do not look likely to withstand the winter. That way we have meat for the winter, and, since we do not bother them again, the rest of the horses soon forget their fright. We do the same with the rest of the animals in the valley; we cull the old and the ill and the injured and leave the sound.”

“What of the horses I saw outside the walls of the cliff?” Thorn asked. “Where do they come from? They cannot winter on the open slopes, surely?”

“Oh, they are the young males that Impero chased from the herd,” Mait explained.

“Impero?”

“Impero is the name Ronan gave to the herd’s stallion. There he is now.”

Thorn looked at the magnificent white stallion that was moving among the main herd of mares, which was grazing not far from the river. Even at this distance, Thorn could see how thick and muscular was his neck. The valley horses were unlike the horses Thorn was accustomed to seeing portrayed on the walls of caves. These horses had long, arched faces and long, flowing manes and tails. And they were mostly gray.

Mait continued: “Impero will let the yearlings stay within the valley, but the two-year-olds he drives out. The batch you saw were the ones he drove out this spring, when the mares began to drop their new foals. They will move lower as the weather worsens, and by winter they will have left the Altas altogether and gone down to the plain.”

“Why doesn’t the Tribe of the Wolf go down to the plain in the winter also?” Thorn asked. “It must be bitter here in the valley.”

“We are too small a tribe to establish our own hunting grounds on the plain,” Mait explained. “There are many tribes dwelling there, and they would not welcome us. We will have to become much larger and more powerful before we can hope to carve out a hunting territory for ourselves on the plain.”

The morning slowly advanced as the boys made their way up the valley. By midday they were hungry, and they climbed up to a rocky ledge to dangle their feet, watch the small herd of sheep below them, and eat the food Fara and Berta had packed.

“Are all of the men of the Wolf outcasts from their own tribes?” Thorn asked after they had finished eating. He had one leg drawn up for support and, absentmindedly, he picked up a small flat stone and began to scratch on it with a sharp pebble.

“Sa,” Mait said. “They are.”

“At the gathering, one of your men said Ronan had called them a tribe of rapists and murderers.” Thorn squinted his eyes to look at the sheep.

“He said that when Heno objected to keeping the twins,” Mait said immediately and grinned in remembrance.

“Heno is the big man, is he not?” Thorn asked. “The one with the pale blue eyes?”

“Sa.”

“What tribe is he from?”

“He is of the Fox tribe, from beside the River of Gold. I know I should like him better,” Mait confessed. “He is married to my sister, and if it were not for him, I would probably have died. He was the one who brought us to the valley. But…I do not like him. He is always complaining—the twins were just one example.”

“Why did the Fox tribe thrust him out?”

“He was blamed for the death of the chief’s son,” Mait said. “The Fox tribe has a very strict taboo against their hunters having sex for three days before a great hunt. Heno lay with his wife the night before the hunt, and the next day the chiefs son was killed by a buffalo. Someone had heard Heno and his wife and accused him of breaking the taboo. The chief expelled him from the tribe.”