West of January (48 page)

Ironically, I should have died had I carried a weapon.

I did now know Trathrak’s name then. I knew only that he had many more woollies than I, with four tents showing, and he had been unfortunate enough to steer his herd near to mine just when my plan demanded its first victim. I soon knew that he was big and quite young, and I quickly came to understand also that he emphatically did not want to talk. He wanted to stamp my corpse into a floor mat. I turned tail and fled before the blizzard. As a lifelong coward, I was good at fleeing.

He gained on me, partly because I let him do so, partly because I was being careful to retrace my exact trail. I had headed straight for the sun on my way in, and therefore my shadow should guide me out, but in long grass at full gallop that is not as easy as it sounds. Trathrak drew closer, his arrows zipping by me much too near. Then, just as I decided that I must have strayed from my path and was about to die, Karrox rose up on one side of him and Kithinor on the other.

It was their first battle, and they were still only boys—they could have been excused a miss or two. They did not miss. With icy deliberation, they each put an angel’s steel-tipped arrow into Trathrak’s ribs.

Aware of an insanely pounding heart, I chased after his mount and caught it. The clammy caress of the wind on my face steadied my nausea as I rode sadly back to where my two young assassins stood in the whispering grass, gazing down proudly at the corpse.

When I slid from my saddle, I almost fell. I felt ill. I have caused many deaths in my life, as you have heard, but this was the first time I had ever planned a deliberate killing and carried it out, and I shivered at a sense of loss. I stared down in shock and disgust at the young giant’s body, wanting to shout at him to rise and stop pretending.

Yet I think I mourned less for him than for myself, and for all the others who must follow him if his death was not to be without meaning. For his sake, now, I must go on. For my own, I must believe that the bloody path I had chosen would lead to a righteous outcome.

The twins would be expecting me to say a prayer for the dead, and I couldn’t force out the words. I wiped my forehead and took a deep breath… I even managed to fake a grin as I raised my head. I was prepared to send Kithinor to fetch their horses, safely hidden beyond a hill. What I saw on Kithinor’s face frightened me much more that anything Trathrak had done. I glanced around at Karrox, and of course his expression was a mirror image of his brother’s—sinister gleam in tunnel-black eyes, faint smile wreathed in dark fuzz.

Finding twins of their age had seemed like a real stroke of luck to me, for twins tend to cooperate more than other brothers. Even herdfolk male twins do. As I had come to know Kithinor and Karrox, as I had trained them to shoot and to ride, I had confirmed that yes, they did have cooperative tendencies. And now they had a perfect chance to use them. We had two herds now. They did not need me anymore.

I smiled broadly, falsely. “Your arrow hit him in the heart, Karrox! It was the better shot, so you get first choice of the women.”

Karrox raised his eyebrows into the dark tangle of his hair and adjusted his grip on the bow. The arrow was pointing down, not at me—not yet—but he couldn’t miss at that range. Not if he closed his eyes and turned around three times, he couldn’t miss.

“You have both done well!” I said heartily. I pivoted to face Kithinor. He had unstrung his bow and drawn his knife instead. The youths were far taller than me now. They could run, too. “Better luck next time!” I added, less certainly.

Kithinor said “Huh?” and gazed inquiringly past me, at his twin.

“Well, we’re certainly not going to stop now, are we?” I said, ignoring the mountain of ice in my belly. “Three herds are better than two—more woollies, more women. And four will be even better than three!”

I could hear dice rolling inside their shaggy heads. Kithinor frowned down at me as if he were inspecting a rug, or something else inanimate and of doubtful value. I am certain that I would have died had I held a weapon in my hand, had there been a knife at my belt or a bow at my saddle. It was the code of the grasslands, the herdsman’s way of thought. They did not need me anymore, but equally I might not need them, so obviously they must strike first, before I did.

But I had no weapons except fingernails, and I was a feeble cripple… Kithinor’s unsubtle features twisted in indecision for a moment and then returned to indifference. He glanced again at his brother and nodded. Obviously they had decided that at worst there was no hurry. “I’ll do better’n him next time,” he agreed.

Thus the killing began.

─♦─

I paid off my young henchmen in women, but I took none for myself. I was collecting boys instead.

I combined the two herds into one and angled south until we came across more tracks.

Three herds, then four… The twins cooperated because I was making them rich. With so many women to husband, they soon had no time for plotting, anyway—I had to shout at them to make them even keep up their archery practice. They began to turn dangerous again after the sixth or seventh battle, but by then I had outwitted them. With a dozen young bowmen at my call, and two or three close by me always as bodyguard, I could play them all off against each other, ruling as I had seen Ayasseshas do, and Michael.

So I survived and the killing went on. On all the plains only four or five herdmen agreed to talk, and not one ever settled down as my subordinate. Even if I sent a troop of twelve mounted bowmen against him, a herdmaster’s instinct to fight was still irresistible. Unable to conceive of cooperation, they would inevitably fall into the ambush trap that I had used against Trathrak.

Of course, few herdmen had ever survived to middle age, but my systematic bloodbath washed an entire generation from the grasslands. All herdmen were young now, except me.

Eventually some trader told Heaven what I was doing. But I was undeniably a herdman by birth and so my actions did not class as violence between groups, no matter what drastic changes I had made in the local rules. Renegade angels are not unknown in the records. Many men have used their Heavenly training to seize undeserved power. Their influence has always vanished when they died, and Heaven could take a long view. In my case, after a hot debate of which I did not learn until much later, the angels decided not to interfere. It was too late anyhow, even then.

The younger I caught the boys, the better I could mold them.

Karrox and Kithinor had been adolescent and too old to change much, and so were the few starving loners we had found and rescued. Eventually the twins reverted to type and rebelled, together with some others of my earliest recruits. Thinking like traditional herdmen, they could not see that boy babies and girl babies were produced in equal numbers and therefore the only alternative to ritual murder was monogamy—or if they did see that, then they preferred the traditional solution.

I was running out of women by then and setting limits on the number a man could own. I did not try to take any of the twins’ women away from them; I just stopped giving them more. So they organized the Great Revolt, and even there they were using the cooperative habits I had taught them. They lost anyway. Sadly I made examples of them, and I shared out their women among more loyal supporters. The ants had taught me the value of terror, and so had the spinster. But her sons’ end killed poor Allinoth, and for a while I was so sickened that I seriously considered giving up. It was dear Haniana who stiffened my backbone then and gave me the courage to continue. She can never replace Misi, but without her support I should not have achieved half of what I have done.

─♦─

Studying the grasslands with saint-trained eyes, I saw that woollies, like snortoises, try to hold position with respect to the sun. Although they are controlled more by temperature than by light, they do seek to keep their snouts in shadow; thus, they automatically head west. Obviously, therefore, a woollies natural pace must move it at roughly the same rate as the sun moves. Once I understood that, I withdrew all the herders and watched to see what happened. Soon I had one enormous herd, not quite continuous but almost so, stretching in a north-south line across the width of the grasslands. This arrangement needed very little herding, and another of its benefits was that no one could get lost. Cropped grass lay east of the herd, long grass west of it. People moved north and south along the herd as necessary.

Death by death my power grew. After the Great Revolt, my subjects gave me little trouble. My boys had become my young men, and they roved the grasslands in my name. I rewarded them with women and ribbons and fancy tides.

Long before the last of the independent herdmasters had been tracked down, I was already starting to move against the two other groups that dwelt within my domain.

Gandrak’s horses had been oversized trash, and Trathrak’s no better. I knew how traders joked about their worst beasts being “fit only for a herdman.” So horseflesh was one of my first problems, one I solved by imposing a fine of three horses for every slave discovered in a caravan. I chose which three. The traders screamed about violence between groups and threatened to report me to the angels. I told them to go ahead, please.

My scheme ought not to have worked, of course. Had the traders simply spread the word to ignore loners and avoid transporting slaves across the grasslands, then that would have been the end of it. But I knew how the traders hated to lose an advantage or do favors for one another. By the time the news got around, there were no more wandering loners anyway, and my cavalry could run down anything on the plains.

I allowed no one else to deal with the traders, and I drove up the price of yarn until I could afford some simple luxuries to reward loyalty.

Herdmen, I discovered, were not born stupid—it was their wasted, barren culture that made them so. Under my guidance, the next generation grew up smarter. I founded singing schools and provided suitable songs of instruction. I created a corps of dedicated couriers, because a strong runner can travel long distances faster than a horse can in that climate. It also gave the youngsters more to do.

Even from the first, the women were inclined from habit to obey me without question, and they raised their children to do so, too. When they saw that their sons were not dying at puberty, when I halved the birthrate with a decree that babies must be breast-fed—then I had their souls forever. Now meek little herdwomen will denounce their own menfolk to me if they as much so suspect a disloyal thought. I hate that! It is only Haniana’s unflagging support that gives me the strength to do what I then must.

Eventually I was able to stop using women as rewards, but all marriages still required my approval, and I made sure that the woman was content. In an astonishingly short time, young maidens were expressing opinions on all sorts of subjects, and young herdmen were displaying interest in bathing, combing, and paring.

As Michael had long ago predicted, I never found any sign of Anubyl, nor of my family. They must all have perished in the great dying beside the March Ocean.

I was ready by then to realize my dream of revenge on the ants—and yet I had already come to realize that it would be a hollow satisfaction. I had once thought that I would destroy Heaven if it tried to block me. Now I saw that it could not block me and I needed it, an ironic situation indeed. Thus, as soon as I felt I had the power required, I issued a decree banning angels from the grasslands. Heaven and I must deal eventually, and I knew how long Heaven took to decide anything. My impertinence was sure to gain its attention. Besides, my troops enjoyed the sport of chasing chariots even more than roo hunting.

Mineral deposits can occur anywhere on Vernier, but they are more common in Wednesday than in any other day, because Wednesday is bigger. Many mines pass through the grasslands.

As a slave in the ants’ nest, I had dreamed of escaping and returning with an avenging army, riding on great ones. That was because the seamen had taught me to hunt that way, and it was the only form of cooperation between men that I then knew.

The spinster taught me much more. She had used an army to kidnap recruits to build her army. Admittedly she had enslaved her victims in a way I never could, but thereafter she had rewarded mostly with ribbons and titles and fine words.

The traders and the ants, the tribes of jungle and desert, and finally the angels—I had learned from all of them. Gradually I had refined my original muddled dream into a workable plan. Heaven can never throw enough men against the ants. My eager young warriors are armed with only bows and spears—no guns—but their shadows darken the hills. They worship me and they will die for me.

Traders will always part with information, for a price.

I located the nests. I learned the size of each tribe and its slave workforce and the name of its minemaster—and one of those names was Krarurh. It might not be the same one—a son, perhaps, or even that very grandson whose birth had resulted in my being given to Hrarrh—but I knew which nest I must attend to first.

That was a very bloody business, for my troops were inexperienced and the cats spooked the horses. Fortunately the mine was an open trench rather than an underground complex of tunnels. Thus it was not easily defended, and the ants were no more accustomed to battle than my herd-men were. Many slaves died in the carnage, but so did all of the cats and every adult male ant and many of their women, also. One body I identified with joy as that of the smith who had mashed my knees. Of Hrarrh there was no sign. He was either dead already or merely absent.

A man can’t have everything, I suppose.

And yet I almost hope he is still alive, for I probably had taken his family. All the women and children were distributed among my men, along with the rest of the booty. So I had my revenge.

All news reaches Heaven eventually, and this time the debate was fiercer. I was already very unpopular with the angels, and I expect that the archangels considered using force against me. In the end they wisely decided to negotiate, as I had known they must.