The Horsemasters (46 page)

Kara heaved a ragged sigh, turned, and went back into the tent.

Chapter Thirty-two

It took Nel a day and a half to get the sledges from the Great Cave to the men’s campsite on the Greatfish River. She used the mares that Siguna told her had been trained to pull, and Siguna showed her exactly how to fashion and attach the harness that attached the sledge to the horse.

Three of the sledges contained the shields that the women had been working on for weeks, and one sledge contained baskets of fruits and berries the women had gathered to supplement the diet of meat which their menfolk, left to themselves, would primarily exist upon. Nel and Siguna and Beki and Yoli led the mares for most of the way, and the sledges were followed by a number of other women who wished to visit their husbands.

Ronan had kept men continually stationed at the Great Cave to bring in meat for the women, periodically changing them to give as many men as possible time with their wives. It was those wives whose husbands had not yet had hunting duty that Nel had designated to accompany the sledges on this particular journey.

Nel herself had not seen Ronan since he had moved the men away from the Great Cave over a moon ago. He had sent her messages by the revolving hunters, but he himself had not felt able to leave the campsite on the Greatfish. So it was with an eager heart that Nel led her sweet-faced brown mare along the path that she knew would open any moment into the homesite of the Red Deer.

Here was the last turn, she thought. The mare, seeming to sense Nel’s excitement, walked more quickly. Around this curve. Now!

Dhu. Nel stopped in her tracks, and the train of people and horses behind her stopped as abruptly to keep from running into her sledge.

Advancing toward Nel and her supply train was a moving wall of spears.

The men in the front line saw her first and checked, still retaining their line formation. With well-drilled balance and discipline, the men behind adjusted their steps and halted also.

A familiar voice, edged with a familiar temper, snapped, “Why are you stopping?”

“It’s Nel,” a man shouted. “Ronan, Nel is here with the shields!”

* * * *

The men whose wives had not accompanied Nel vacated the huts and tents for the night and left them to the more fortunate husbands, who wasted no time in making up for too long a separation.

“It is a good thing the weather is pleasant,” Ronan murmured to Nel as they lay together in his sleeping skins in the tent that he usually shared with Bror and Crim. “If it had been raining, the men might not have been so accommodating about sleeping outside.”

“The weather is always pleasant in summer,” Nel returned tranquilly, her head comfortably pillowed on Ronan’s shoulder. “And the wives I brought with me belong to the men who have not yet had a turn on hunting duty. Fair is fair, after all.”

“I am not complaining, minnow,” Ronan said, and she could hear the smile in his voice. “Believe me, I am not complaining.”

One of the dogs, both of whom were sleeping in the doorway, yipped in his sleep. “In fact,” Ronan said, “it was far easier to get rid of Bror and Crim than it is to get rid of these dogs of yours!”

“They don’t go hunting at night, like Nigak does.”

“That doesn’t mean they have to insist on sleeping with you!”

“They keep me company when you are gone.”

Ronan sighed.

Nel asked, “The shields are all right?”

“The shields are all right.”

“No further news about the Horsemasters?”

“So far as I know, they are still at the homesite of the Tribe of the Fox. I have men watching them, of course.”

“And what of the Tribe of the Squirrel?”

“There is good news from the Tribe of the Squirrel. These last two attacks apparently convinced them that no place is safe. They will join with us.”

“Ronan! That is wonderful news. The Tribe of the Squirrel is quite large, is it not? That should mean many more fighting men for you.”

She felt his chest rise and fall with a deep, controlled breath. “It should, but there is a problem. They hold one of their most sacred yearly ceremonies at the full of the moon, and they will not march to join us until after the ceremony is completed.”

The moon was not yet halfway to its first quarter. “Oh,” said Nel, dismayed. “That is stupid.”

“Very stupid.” Ronan’s voice was bitter. “But there is nothing I can do about it. When the first two messengers came back with that news, I sent more men to try to convince the chief to change his mind. No use. The Tribe of the Squirrel won’t move until after its ceremony.”

“It probably won’t matter,” Nel said, “It sounds as if the Horsemasters are very comfortable where they are. They probably won’t move themselves until after the summer weather is finished and the higher altitudes start to grow cold.”

“I hope so, Nel. Dhu, I hope so.”

“I have missed you so much,” she murmured, deftly changing the subject to one more pleasing to both of them. She raised herself to rain feather-light kisses all along his smoothly shaven cheek and jawbone. She had taken her hair out of its braid earlier, and it streamed forward over his throat and bare shoulders, a mantle of palest brown.

He lay motionless on his back and let her kiss him. The single stone lamp on the floor behind his head threw its muted light upward, illuminating Nel’s face, and he said softly, “You are very beautiful, Nel. Motherhood becomes you.”

She stilled. Their faces were very close, and they looked gravely into each other’s eyes. Except for a perfunctory initial inquiry, it was the first time he had mentioned the baby.

“Always in my heart there has been this one empty place,” she said to those familiar, those beloved dark eyes. “Now it is empty no longer.”

“I am glad.” His face was very serious. “I have been thinking about this, Nel.” A flash of humor came and went in his grave eyes. “That is, when I have not been thinking about the Horsemasters.” He reached up and closed his fingers around her wrist. “And I know that I can be a father to Culen. It may take me a little time to grow accustomed to him, but it will be all right. You don’t have to worry anymore.” He moved his thumb up and down on her wrist. “It will be all right.”

The eyes looking back into his were very green. “I won’t cry,” she said at last in an unsteady voice, “because I know how you hate it. But I want to.”

“Nel,” he said, “you can do better things for me than cry.” And he levered her downward until she was once more lying beside him on the furs.

She sniffled. “Of course I can.” A spark of indignation colored her voice. “In fact, I already have.”

“Once?” Now he was the one to sound indignant. He raised himself on his elbow and stared down into her face. “You came all this way, for once?”

She smiled up at him. “I thought you were tired.”

He spent a good part of the night demonstrating that he was not.

* * * *

Siguna’s night was different from the other women’s, but in its own way, it was exciting. Arika was in an unusually garrulous mood, and she and Siguna sat up by the light of the stone lamp and talked for hours. The Mistress was particularly interested in the details of Siguna’s life with the Horsemasters.

“He is a terrible man, your father,” Arika commented when Siguna had finished an anecdote. “Hard and merciless. Yet you care for him.”

“I suppose he is those things,” Siguna said unwillingly. She rested her chin upon her updrawn knees. “But he can be more tender than any woman. He was so to me, often. Perhaps it was because my mother died, and in his own way he tried to make that up to me, but he let me do things that none of the other girls were allowed to do. And he wouldn’t let Teala pick on me.” She smiled. “Once, when I fell and cut my leg badly and had a fever”—she ran her forefinger up and down the place on her calf where the old scar was—”he even let me sleep next to him, and he told me funny stories to cheer me up.”

Arika said, “Perhaps he favored you because he saw that you were like him.”

“Na,” Siguna said, misunderstanding. “I am said to look just like my mother.” She ran her finger once more over the place on her leg where the scar was. “Do you know,” she said thoughtfully, “I have sometimes thought that if my father had been reared in the ways of the Red Deer, he would have been like Ronan?”

Arika reached out and carefully repositioned the single stone lamp. She said, “And I have sometimes thought that Ronan could be like your father.”

The eyes of the two women, old and young, met and held.

“But he is not,” Siguna said.

“He is not,” Arika agreed. “That he is not, I attribute principally to Nel.”

Siguna smiled a little sadly. “I have never seen a man so entwined with one woman as Ronan is with Nel.”

Arika’s eyebrows lifted in a gesture that was purely ironic. “I think I can safely say that at one time or another Ronan was ‘entwined’ with every unmarried girl in his age group. He was not always so exclusively attached to Nel.”

For some reason, Siguna suddenly remembered the sounds that would come from her father’s sleeping space when he lay with one of his women, Then she remembered the way Ronan had once looked at her, and her stomach fluttered.

Arika was going on, “Although I will admit that Nel influenced him even when she was yet a child. In taking care of her, he learned tenderness.”

Siguna bent her head, afraid of what Arika might read on her face. When the Mistress changed the subject, Siguna was at once both relieved and sorry.

“Why did you ride into the forest on the day that you were captured?” Arika asked.

Siguna gathered her thoughts. “I don’t know. I just felt that I had to get away from the other women.” She frowned in an effort of memory. “I felt…suffocated.”

“What led your steps along that particular path?”

“I don’t remember. I think I just let my mare wander.”

Arika smiled, as if satisfied by the response.

Silence fell in the Mistress’s hut. Arika made no movement toward her sleeping place, however, so Siguna said tentatively, “May I ask you a question, Mistress?”

“Sa.”

“How does the Tribe of the Red Deer differ from the other tribes that follow the Mother?”

Arika settled herself more comfortably on her buffalo rug. “Mother-right reigns in all the lands of the Goddess,” she explained, “but only the Tribe of the Red Deer has a woman chief.”

“I do not think I understand what you mean by mother-right,” Siguna said. “I know that Berta comes from a tribe that is ruled by a male chief, but I do not understand how a tribe that is ruled by a man can be said to follow mother-right. “

“Mother-right means that the blood of a Family, as well as its goods, is passed on from mother to daughter, not, as in your tribe and in the tribes that follow Sky God, from father to son,” Arika said, thus neatly explaining the system of living that would one day be called matrilineal.

“You mean a family’s belongings…the household goods…the tools…the horses even…belong to the women?” Siguna asked incredulously.

The Mistress smiled faintly at the look on Siguna’s face. “Surely, this is only sensible if you want to keep an inheritance within the family,” she said reasonably. “Motherhood is certain; fatherhood is not.”

Siguna blinked.

“In the tribes of the Goddess,” Arika continued, “it is the woman who is head of the family. A mother will share her home with her daughters, her daughters’ husbands, and her daughters’ children. And it is the mother, the matriarch, who will have the final word in all family affairs.”

Siguna thought of the men of her tribe and could not imagine them consenting to live in such a way. She said, “But what of the sons?”

“When a son marries, he goes to live in his wife’s home with his wife’s family.”

“And the men of the Goddess consent to do this?”

“Why should they not? The authority of the mother is as natural to them as the authority of the father is to your people.”

A little silence fell as Siguna digested this idea. Then she asked, “But even under the law of mother-right, you said most tribes are ruled by a chief?”

“Sa.”

“Why is that, I wonder?” Siguna asked.

“I have often wondered that myself,” Arika confessed. “I had a long discussion recently with Berta, and she said that it was because so much of a woman’s life is spent in the bearing and nursing of children. When the cares of the immediate family are so physically demanding, it is difficult for a woman to take upon her shoulders the rule of the entire tribe as well.”

“It is certainly true that men spend less time and effort on children than women do,” Siguna said, half-humorously, half-ruefully. She clasped her hands around her knees and looked at Arika’s lamplit face. “But the Tribe of the Red Deer is different.”

“Sa. For as long as people remember, the Tribe of the Red Deer has been ruled by a woman.”

“Why is that, Mistress?

“I do not know, Perhaps somewhere in the past a matriarch decided she would not marry, that she would take the rule into her own hands, and it has remained that way ever since.”

“Is it a law that the Mistress may not marry?”

Arika gave Siguna a sharp look. “Why do you ask that?”

Siguna looked with grave attention at the tips of her moccasins. “I had heard somewhere that Nel was to be the next Mistress, but that she gave up her chance when she married Ronan.”

Silence.

“I think it is true that Nel is beloved of the Mother,” Arika said at last. “But she does not have it in her to be the Mistress.”

“Why?” Siguna asked.

“It is as you said earlier. She is too entwined with Ronan. The tribe would never come first with her.”

“I see,” Siguna said slowly.

“The Tribe of the Red Deer is very close to the Mother,” Arika said. “I feel that deeply. And the Mistress of the tribe is the closest of all. The Mistress can have no husband to divide her loyalties or to divert her power into his own hands,” Arika’s hand lifted instinctively to touch the pendant she wore always around her neck. “This is why it is so important to me to preserve our matriarchy. Something unique and sacred will be lost if ever the Red Deer comes to be ruled by a man.”