The Horsemasters (23 page)

That had been last fall. A long time ago. He looked again at Nel, devouring her with his eyes.

She had unwoven her braid and was running a comb made from bone through all the shining length of her hair. He watched her, the tension growing inside of him. Her fawn-colored hair reached to her waist and looked as soft and silky as the inside of an acorn. One strand fell like a streamer across the swell of her breast. Ronan had to restrain himself from reaching out to touch it.

In any other girl, he would have seen the hair combing as an invitation. But this was Nel. Incredibly, this soft and beautiful woman, sitting at his side and rousing his blood with such perfect and inviolable innocence, was Nel.

He had never wondered what Nel would look like when she became a woman. He knew he could never have imagined this.

Nel raised her head and shook back her hair, sending the fragrance of herbs drifting to his nostrils. She saw him watching her and grinned. A little girl’s grin in her beautiful woman’s face, “See, you did not even have to tell me to comb my hair!” she said.

Ronan concentrated grimly on controlling his arousal. It was not easy. Her narrow nose was a smaller, less arched version of his own. Her high cheekbones were rosy with the firelight. The teeth exposed by that urchin’s grin were white and even.

“Nel,” he heard himself asking, “if you had stayed to make the Sacred Marriage at Winter Fires, whom would you have chosen as your mate?”

The grin faded. Her face grew almost wary. “I do not know,” she said.

He did not like that wary look. She was hiding something. “There was no one boy you particularly liked?” he pressed.

“Of course not.” She was looking even warier.

“It is not so foolish a question,” he said. Even to himself his voice sounded harsh. He struggled to lighten it. “By the time most girls reach the age of initiation, they have one particular boy that they like.”

“You say that because the girls always liked you!” she retorted.

“Not at all,” he said.

“It is true, and you know it.” She swung all her hair to one side of her shoulder so she could rebraid it.

“We were not talking about me but about you,” he said.

“There is nothing to say about me. On the other hand, there is always something interesting to say about you. Half the women of the tribe went into mourning when you left.”

“To hear you talk, one would think I never did anything but spend my time with girls,” he snapped.

“You certainly spent a lot of your time with girls,” she replied teasingly. “There was Borba and Iva and Cala…”

He was glaring at her now. She had almost finished her braid. He felt savage. “Well, I am telling you now that I have had no time for girls these last three years. I have been too busy trying to keep a tribe together.”

She was tying the thong that held the end of her braid, and her head was bent so that he could not see her face. For a moment her fingers stilled. “You are not married, then?” she asked.

Silence. Nel raised her head and looked at him out of shadowed eyes. “Did you think I might be married?” he asked carefully.

“The thought had occurred to me,” she admitted.

He stood up. “Well, I am not.” And he stalked to the cave door and went outside to look for Nigak.

Chapter Sixteen

Nel was in her sleeping skins pretending to be asleep when Ronan returned. She was not asleep, however, but awake and hugging to herself the news that, after all, Ronan did not have a wife. He might still regard her as a child, but at least now she would have a chance to change his perception.

She kept her eyes closed as he put more wood on the fire, then got into his own sleeping skins. He was annoyed with her for teasing him about all his girls. Strange, she thought sleepily, he had never grown annoyed at that before. She drifted off to sleep.

Shortly after midnight it began to rain. Nel awoke and heard the drops drumming steadily on the limestone rock of the hillside. She had always hated the rain, which was forever associated in her mind with the day her mother had died. She could remember still how wet her father had been when he came into the but where she was staying while her mother gave birth to the new baby. She could remember still the smell of his wet buckskins. She would remember always the sound of the rain beating steady as a shaman’s drum against the skins of the hut. She could not recall what her father’s words to her had been, but she would never forget the sound and smell of the rain.

It had been raining on the day she and Ronan had sworn blood kinship. He had found her huddled in the forest crying, and it was then that he had proposed the bond.

A gust of wind blew a spray of rain into the mouth of the cave, dampening the watch fire Ronan had built. There was no sound of any animals outside, only the sound of the rain.

As if the dousing of the fire had sounded a silent warning, Ronan sat up.

“I’ll get it going again,” he said when he saw that Nel was awake also. She crawled out of her sleeping skins, knelt shivering on top of them, and watched as Ronan put on fresh wood and fed what was left of the embers with dry leaves. The leaves caught, and the flaring flame illuminated and bronzed the skin of his face and throat. The thong at the neck of his buckskin shirt had come loose in his sleep, and the shirt hung open, baring his throat and chest. He had taken off his headband earlier, and his black hair was slipping over his forehead. He pushed his fingers through it and looked at Nel. “Are you all right?” he said softly.

Her eyes moved beyond the fire to the arch of the cave’s entrance, the darkness, and the rain. “It’s raining,” she said stupidly. There was the faintest of tremors in her voice.

He grasped his sleeping skins with one hand and dragged them over to where hers were spread. Then he dropped down beside her and reached for her with his left hand as his right hand pulled his skins over the two of them for warmth. He drew her to lie beside him, his arms gathering her close. “It’s all right, minnow,” he said. His breath was feather soft on her temple. “Nothing bad is going to happen. You’re with me now.”

The air smelled of smoke and of rain. Nel turned her face into the smooth, bare skin of his throat and breathed deeply the scent that was Ronan. His arms held her fast, secure, safe. She snuggled closer to him, closed her eyes, and went back to sleep.

* * * *

When Nel awoke the next morning, she was alone. She put her hand on the skins next to her where Ronan had lain, but they were no longer warm from his body. She felt oddly desolate.

It was gloomy outside, but the rain had stopped, and water in a skull container was hung over the fire, heating for morning tea. Ronan had probably gone to check the bird snares he had set last night. Nel sat up slowly, sighed, and set about brewing the tea.

Ronan returned a short time later, pausing for a moment in the frame of the cave opening, two willow grouse in his hands. Nel’s head jerked around instantly, and their eyes met. He smiled, but it was not a smile that Nel recognized. It was the sort of smile he would give to a stranger. “Breakfast,” he said lightly and came into the cave.

Nel plucked the feathers from the birds in bewildered silence while Ronan collected rocks and arranged them on the fire to heat. When the birds were plucked, she braised them on the hot stones. They were delicious, but the food stuck in her throat.

What was wrong? she wondered, watching Ronan’s aloof face from under lowered lashes. He had been so good to her last night, so comforting, and this morning he was behaving as if she were someone he had just met.

“Douse the fire,” he said in the cool, efficient voice she was coming to hate. He had not called her “minnow” once all morning, she thought in dismay. Obediently, she doused the fire, shouldered her pack, and trudged behind him down the game track.

The second day of their journey was much like the first. They kept to forest game trails and made camp in the late afternoon in a cave. Ronan got a boar for supper in much less time than he had anticipated, and consequently there were still several hours of daylight left once they had finished their meal.

They sat together around the fire, and for the first time in her life, Nel wondered what she and Ronan could find to talk about. She chewed on her lower lip and watched him out of the corner of her eyes. He was staring into the smoking fire, a thin sharp line between his black brows. He was deeply burned from the sun, and she could see the shadow of a beard under his skin. Like most of the Red Deer men, he shaved his beard with a flint razor every morning, but by nightfall it began to come back.

What was wrong? Nel wondered desperately. Why was he treating her with this distant courtesy? What had she done? Was he sorry that he had come for her? Was he angry because she had been such a baby last night?

The measure of her uneasiness was that she was afraid to ask him what was wrong.

“Tell me about this tribe of yours,” she said abruptly. “I know only the little that I have heard from Tyr.”

He narrowed his eyes against the smoke and looked at her with surprise, as if he had forgotten she was there. “All right,” he said. “But first let’s find someplace else to sit.”

The cave they were occupying was set midway up a hillside, affording it a good view of the surrounding country. Ronan propped his back against the rocky face of the hill and gestured Nel to sit at a little distance from him. There had been no sign at all of a pursuit, but Ronan’s vigilance was for more than the merely human. They had seen more leopard tracks during the course of the day.

Nel sat in the place he had indicated, hurt that it was so far away from him, and drew up her knees. “Tell me first how you found the valley,” she said.

Evidently he was as happy to have a topic of conversation as she, for he answered readily. “I found it shortly after I left the Tribe of the Buffalo.” As he spoke, his eyes were moving over the scene before them in a hunter’s endless vigilance. “The men of the Buffalo told me about the tribes of the Mother that inhabit the plain beyond the Atlas,” he said, “and I decided I would try to find them. None of the tribes of the Kindred would risk incurring the Mistress’s curse, and I thought it would be wisest to go to a place where the Tribe of the Red Deer was unknown. So Nigak and I set off to cross the Altas.”

There was a movement among the trees a little way down the hillside, and Ronan stopped talking to watch. When he was certain it was only a deer, he picked up his tale. “I followed the Atata, as the men of the Buffalo had told me to, and, after a two-day climb, we reached the summit.”

He paused again, as if reliving in his mind that particular moment. Once he had started speaking the tension between them had disappeared, and he said, now naturally, “It is amazing, Nel, how different the land is on the afternoon side of the mountains. Our side is narrow and steep, with only small pastures for grazing, but the far side is wide and sloping, with great wide valleys that in summer are thick with grass.”

“Are there tribes dwelling in the mountains there?” she asked.

He shook his head. “There are summer camps, but no permanent dwelling places. There is snow for seven moons out of the year, and the animals descend into the lower levels once the snow begins to fall. As with us, the men follow the herds.”

Ronan was scanning east now, his face turned slightly away from her. “I had decided before I left the Buffalo tribe that it would be better to present myself as a man from one of the other tribes of the Kindred,” he said. “I did not think that tribes that follow the Mother would be overly hospitable to one of her castoffs, so I cut off my braid and pretended to be a follower of Sky God.”

His rueful voice did not entirely disguise his underlying bitterness. Nel was tensely quiet. “The tribes of the Mother wanted no part of a man of the Kindred,” Ronan said. He shrugged. “But they would not have wanted me if I had told them the truth, either, so I really cannot say that I made a mistake.”

Nel felt building within her an anger so great that she thought her chest would burst with it. She pictured his rejection, his isolation, and her heart burned with fury. How could Arika have done this to him?

“…that is when I found the valley,” he was saying. “I was so confused, Nel; I did not know where to go.” He was talking to her now the way he always had, and Nel blinked hack tears. He said, “Nigak and I climbed back up the Altas, and Nigak found it.” He turned his head to give her a swift smile. A real smile. “That is why I called it the Valley of the Wolf, Nigak began to chase one of the horses from a herd we came upon, and right before my eyes the horse disappeared into a wall of solid rock! When I investigated, I found the path into the valley.”

The light was beginning to grow dim. Night was coming on. Nel said gruffly, “Tyr told me that they said at the gathering you had named the valley for yourself, the lone wolf.”

He quirked one black brow. “Did they? Well, they were wrong.”

“And what is it like, Ronan, Nigak’s valley?”

“It is beautiful, minnow,” he replied simply. “I cannot say for certain that no one else has ever been there, but there are no signs of human life, no old shelters or hearthplaces. Only the herds of horse and antelope. The ibex. The sheep. The eagles.”

Nel did not speak, only drew in a long slow breath. His teeth looked very white in the slowly gathering dusk. “You will love it,” he said.

She nodded.

“When I first saw it I thought: I can survive in such a place. Nigak and I, we can survive.”

At the starkness of his words, Nel’s nails bit into her palms so deeply they drew blood. Ronan was once more scanning the hillside. “I lived there alone for several moons,” he said, “and then I met Bror.”

She said through the pain in her chest, “Who is Bror?”

“One of my men. The Ibex tribe had expelled him, and he had decided to aim for the tribes of the plain. They gave him the same welcome they had given me, however, and, since he did not have a clever wolf with him, he was reduced to wandering the pastures of the high Altas.”