Unicorn Tracks (11 page)

“Very astute,” said Tumelo. “But what will you do once the General finds out?”

Arusei just smiled.

While Arusei turned his attention to studying Tumelo, Kara whispered to me, “We should get water for the horses. I don’t see the moonstone here with him. I don’t know how long this distraction will last. We need to start looking for it. We’ve heard all we need to go to your father.”

Arusei clapped his hands and all of us jumped in our saddles. “But come, let us go to my private tent. Take some refreshments. I have a delightful pair of dancing girls to entertain us—”

I cleared my throat and forced myself to look right into the man’s cruel eyes. “My companion and I must take care of the horses. Maybe one of your men can show us where to water them?”

“Of course,” Arusei said, his lips curled back a little bit too far, almost into a sneer. He flagged over two of the overseers. They were at his side in an instant. It seemed that whatever their position, everybody in the camp obeyed him as if he were a demigod. “Show these ladies where they can tend to their horses, and send laborers with fresh clothes for them to change into.”

The men who approached us easily outweighed a water buffalo between them. They were each over six feet, shoulders padded with flesh and muscle. The first had a scar running the length of his face. The other smiled toward us, revealing a toothless mouth. The color drained from Kara’s face, but she kept silent. I wondered if Arusei had purposely chosen these men to intimidate us.

As we followed the men away, Tumelo turned in his saddle. I’d missed some of the slave’s blood: a smudge remained along his collar. I saw the fear in his eyes as he mouthed, “Hurry.”

ARUSEI’S GOONS
led us into a dingy stable block without windows. Cobwebs hung from the ceilings, and the pungent smell of manure hovered around us so thickly it seemed to drip down the walls. Most of the stalls were empty, but one at the back housed a pregnant unicorn mare. She turned despondent circles in her dirty enclosure, eyes glazed. Unimpressed by the accommodation, Elikia butted my arm with her head and flattened her ears.

Once they provided us with the water and grain their master commanded, the men left us in peace to seek out fresh women’s clothing. They grumbled as they walked away, wondering out loud how they could be expected to find women’s dresses in a camp of two hundred male laborers and guards. But I didn’t think either of them would dare question their leader’s command.

Left alone with the loud clamor of metal, whipcracks, and hoofbeats to drown out anything we said, I still decided to whisper, to minimize our chances of being overheard and reported.

“This is not what I expected,” I said as I removed Elikia’s bridle and rubbed the space between her ears. “We need to find the stone and get out. I don’t know how long even Tumelo can keep this up.”

“They speak Echalende. That’s not good. My father isn’t a good liar.” Kara took a deep breath, her fingers shaking on Brekna’s girth strap. “I’ll never forgive myself if something happens to them.”

“They’ll be all right.” My voice sounded shaky and unsure, even to me.

Finally I allowed myself to reach for Kara’s hand. Her palm was clammy with sweat and humidity, but I pressed it to my cheek anyway. Vibrations traveled up through my fingertips, and I felt her tears begin before I heard her breath hitch.

She let out a single, unrestrained sob. Then, pinching her nose bridge, she glanced around us and choked back the rest of her tears. “Right, we know it’s not in the pavilion. We can guess it’ll be under guard.”

“I think Arusei would keep it around him, where he can be near it most of the time,” I said. “He doesn’t seem the type to trust his followers with something so essential.”

The unicorn mare whinnied urgently, her voice high and melodic like the stallion’s had been. We rushed to over to her, peering inside her stall. The mare lay down in the dirty straw, sweat and foam drenching her white flanks. Kara yanked the bolt to her stable and knelt in the straw beside the mare. Her knees sank in the manure, but she laid her hand across the unicorn’s neck anyway. She soothed her gently with soft, murmured words.

“She’s foaling,” she whispered in wonder. “I thought you said they could choose. Why would she choose now? Choose this place?”

I shook my head. Maybe the moonstone was affecting her. Who knew what its constant presence around the unicorns could cause? Maybe it forced the foals to come forth. If Arusei knew that, he would guard it all the more closely. The mare’s sides heaved, her eyes rolling with fear and pain. Kara’s hands moved to her head, massaging the stump of her horn. I crouched beside her, wincing as the smell of manure and urine intensified. The mare quieted under Kara’s touch.

I glanced up toward the stall’s door, terrified that the men would come back and see us touching one of their prized beasts. We had to get going. If we couldn’t find the moonstone, then the entire trip would be pointless and we’d endangered ourselves for nothing. Tumelo and Mr. Harving needed us to hurry. The mare groaned, body shuddering with pain. I couldn’t just leave the animal like this.

“You haven’t picked your time too well, girl,” Kara said, reaching under the mare’s long, matted mane to scratch her neck. “You don’t want to have your baby in this place. Keep him inside you, shelter him from what this will be like for a little bit longer.”

The unicorn looked into my eyes, and I saw something I’d never expected to see in the eyes of an animal: understanding. She held eye contact in a way no horse would and rested her head against my calf. In that moment, I felt entirely connected to her by an invisible force. The mare’s body convulsed.

“Here, swap places with me and stroke her head,” I said. I had some experience in delivering horse foals. My family raised many types of animals, and I’d grown up running through the fields after the playful foals and baby goats. I remembered assisting my father with the broodmares in the early hours of the morning, holding the torch close so he could see. If I could align the foal’s legs inside her, I could help the mare in her delivery.

“Yes, Doctor,” Kara said with a mocking salute. “Nurse Kara Harving reporting.”

I chuckled, kneeling behind the mare’s hind legs. The squelch of manure and the fluids from the mare’s womb was enough to make my stomach churn. I gagged but forced the bile back down. I stroked the mare’s flank gently to relax her. No creature should have to give birth in filth like this.

Wincing, I slid my arm into the unicorn’s tight birth canal. This foal was definitely her first. The mare groaned. I could feel the sharp edges of impossibly tiny hooves brush against my fingertips. The baby was too small. The hooves felt smaller than a dog’s paw.
Why now?
I questioned the mare in my mind.
You could have held him for another year if you had to.

I pulled gently on the foal’s limbs as the mare pushed against me. Her contractions were so strong—I feared she would shatter my wrist—but I maintained the pressure anyway. The foal slipped downward, his hooves and ears sliding out of the mare.

With a final heave, the mare pushed her baby out onto the dirty straw. I immediately snatched him up, pulling the placenta off over his head and rubbing his coat to stimulate the blood. He was the size of a mountain dog puppy, too small to even reach his mother’s udder if she stood up. But every other part of him was perfect, from his white, bearded face and inquisitive ears to the tip of his blunt baby horn. The delicate foal took his first breath, and I pressed his mouth to his mother’s teat, letting him guzzle the nourishing first milk.

The mare lifted her head to look at her foal while he suckled. She whinnied at him and the baby gave a soft nicker in reply. Her eyes met mine again for a split second. Then she groaned again. Her head dropped into Kara’s lap, but her eyes stayed open, unblinking. The foal shivered in my hold. The mare had known exactly what she was doing when she decided to give birth now. She had chosen the only moment she could to give her baby a chance at escape.

“She gave him to us,” Kara said, echoing exactly what I was thinking. She leaned down and kissed the mare’s dusty forehead. Then, without a hint of squeamishness, she reached for my blood-covered fingers and squeezed them.

“Do you have a shawl in your saddlebag?” I asked. She nodded and rose to fetch it. Her linen pants were stained with blood. I looked down at myself. I was drenched in red from my chest down, bits of gooey placenta stuck to my trousers. The blood had started to dry on my arm, sticking to the hairs and forming a crust. Together, we’d look like a pair of roadside murderers.

I wrapped the foal tightly in Kara’s wool shawl, fashioning a sack to drape over my shoulder so that I could carry him easily. How we could look for the moonstone now, covered in blood, carrying a newborn unicorn, I didn’t know. But when I was a child, and my grandfather succumbed to palsy, the Mkuu told me that the last wish of the dying gave special powers to the living that watched his soul depart. We could only pray that the unicorn’s last wish would see us and her baby safely back home.

WE SQUEEZED
the remainder of the unicorn’s milk from her teat into Kara’s canteen. It felt wrong to milk her like this, like we were violating her body by prodding and gripping her still warm udder while she lay dead beside us. But we had nothing else to give her baby. After dipping my fingers into the warm, opaque liquid, I let the foal suckle drops from my fingers while Kara held him. His toothless gums tickled my hands, but the baby seemed to know he was tiny and fed greedily, butting into the soft flesh of Kara’s bosom whenever we stopped feeding him.

“It’s gotten quiet outside,” Kara observed. I pulled my fingers out of the foal’s mouth and listened. She was right. The sound of men’s work had dwindled to a low murmur, and I could no longer hear the shouts of the overseers or the cracks of their whips.

A gunshot fired. The sound ripped through me, and the terrible image of Tumelo lying facedown, bleeding in the mud forced its way into my mind. I pushed the foal fully into Kara’s lap and scrambled to my feet.

Stumbling out of the stable block, I peered around the corner into the yard. Rows of slaves lay facedown in the mud, the overseers walking around them, counting. Several of the poachers raced toward an enormous black velvet tent with thick red silk hangings. My stomach sank. That tent could only belong to Arusei.

I stepped back into the stables, motioning Kara to stand up. We had to get out quickly, before any of the other men came for us. There was no way we could know if Tumelo or Mr. Harving had just been shot. But if they had been discovered, our only chance to save them now was to find the moonstone and get to my father as fast as we could. If we failed to get the moonstone, Arusei could lure dozens more unicorns in the time it would take us to return. If we managed to escape, Arusei might become desperate. Who knew how many more of the creatures he would capture in order to speed up the building process. Only General Zuberi would have the forces to take on Arusei’s men. We had to get the moonstone, because once he completed his iron highway and brought in whatever he planned from the North, even the General might not be able to stop him.

“We have to go,” I hissed. “They’re all running toward a huge tent on the ridge. It has to be where Arusei took your father and Tumelo.”

Kara cradled the foal against her chest. “We can’t just leave them here! We don’t even know if the gunshot is related to them. It could have been a slave running away, for all we know. Get your gun. Let’s go. We’ll go see what’s happened and take them with us.”

I shook my head. “If the stone isn’t in the pavilion, I’d bet it’s in the tent. Maybe one of them found it and that’s why this is happening. We need to make a distraction, get the stone and go. But we don’t have time to saddle all the horses, and even if we did, how far could we ride before they caught us? We have to bring my father.”

“How can we leave them? Especially if one of them just got shot? How can you think about stealing the damn stone right now?”

“If someone shot them, they’re already dead. There’s nothing we can do for them now if that happened.” My jaw tightened. The image of Tumelo lying dead flashed through my mind again, and I fought to stay focused while everything about the new life I’d been building seemed to crumble away. My training in how to stay calm during an attack on safari took over. I focused on what we had to do. I looked through the bars of the stables, at the unicorn mare’s lifeless corpse, and an idea formed.

Kara stared at me disbelievingly. “How can you say that?”

“Tighten Brekna’s girth and get on him,” I barked, racing out of the stable block again. I knew she would resent me for belting out commands, but there was no time to explain.

I whistled toward the remaining overseers. “The unicorn!” I called, waving my arms about, demanding their attention. “She’s foaling. Come quick! I think the baby’s stuck. If we don’t do something now, the birth will kill both of them!”

The overseers exchanged glances, seeming to deliberate whether it would be worse for them to disobey whatever orders their leader had given them or to let two of Arusei’s prized unicorns die. In the end a throng of them sprinted toward the stable block as I ducked back inside. Though Elikia wasn’t wearing her bridle or saddle, I’d ridden her enough times to know she would look after me without them. I threw open her stable door and vaulted onto her back. Kara sat on Brekna, as I’d asked, but her arms were crossed over her chest and angry tears spilled down her cheeks.