Horses of the North

  Horses of the North

  Horseclans

  Book XIII

  Robert Adams

  ISBN: 0451136268

  Pub. Date: June 1985

  Content

  Prologue

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  The prairies and high plains, huge and vast and always awe-inspiring they lie. To the untrained or inexperienced eye, they seem mostly empty, devoid of the life with which they really, truly teem. The grasses—grama grass, blue grama grass, side oats grass, screw grass, tickle grass, buffalo grass and hundreds of other grasses—seem to roll like the waves of some endless sea with the gusts of the untrammeled, ever-blowing winds. These hardy, long-acclimated wild grasses quickly choke out tender grasses loved by man as well as the frail, alien grain crops he was wont to cultivate when still his kind ruled this land.

  Moving slowly across these grasslands, following water, graze and the dictates of the changing seasons, as did the bison before them, roam scattered herds of wild cattle. Each succeeding generation of these descendants of feral beef and milch stock is become longer of leg and horns, less bulky and more muscular. In a few areas, they have interbred with surviving bison. Privation has rendered both strains rangy and more hirsute than their domesticated ancestors, while constant predation has favored the survival and breeding of the quicker-tempered, incipiently deadly bovines.

  Foremost among the predators preying upon these herds—as well as upon the herds of wild sheep on the high plains—are the packs of wild dogs that are metamorphosing into wolves a little more with each new litter of pups, being shaped by the demands of survival in a savage, merciless environment. Already become big, strong, fleet of foot and as adept at killing as any pureblood lupine, these packs follow the herds of wild cattle and bison hybrids in the long migrations from north to south, just as the long-extinct prairie wolves followed the huge bison herds that once roamed these same lands. The packs do the new herds the same service that the prairie wolves did the bison. They weed the herds of the old, the injured or maimed, the spindly or sickly, taking too the occasional calf.

  Of course, the cattle are not the only prey of the packs. The dogs feed on any beast they can individually or collectively run down and dispatch—deer, antelope, wild swine, horses, goats, elk, hares and rabbits or rodents of any size and kind, nonpoisonous reptiles and amphibians, other predators and, in an extreme case of hunger, each other.

  For long and long, the packs had been the largest predators upon the plains and prairies, but now their hegemony was ending. Monstrous grizzly bears were descending from the mountains and emerging from the remote areas in which their species had survived the brief reign of firearm-bearing man. There were southerly-straying wolverines, too, and another race of outsize, exceedingly voracious mustelid, big as the very largest bear, though long-drawn-out and lighter in weight. Moreover, moving onto the prairies from the east were small prides of lions, as well as the occasional specimen of other big cats—all or most descendants of zoological garden or theme-park animals, as, too, were the tiny to large ruminants that had been breeding here and there and sometimes moving with the cattle herds in the warmer, more southerly reaches of the range.

  In the wake of mankind, the grasslands had expanded apace and were still so doing. The roots of grasses and weeds and brush were helping water, sun, freezes and lack of maintenance to crack and sunder and bury macadam and concrete roads and streets, while rust, corrosion and decay ate away at railroad tracks. Spring floods first weakened, then tore away the bridges not destroyed by man in his terminal madness, and they also scoured the vulnerable floodplains of the deserted, ghost-haunted ruins that once had been thriving cities and towns.

  Of the trees loved by man—peach, apple, cherry, walnut, pear, pecan and other crop trees and oaks, elms, maples, poplars, pines, firs and spruces—precious few have survived in the dearth of man's incessant care. Now, once more, as it was before man strove to bend the land and all upon it to his will, hickories, burr oaks, scrubby hazels, chokecherries, wild plums and dogwoods, cottonwoods, basswoods and red elms are swiftly proliferating to fill their rightful niches.

  Only circling hawk and soaring eagle now can see the lines that once delineated the grainfields, gardens, orchards and pastures of the reasoning, but arrogant and unwise, primate who so briefly ruled over this rich land.

  Here and there lie tumbled, overgrown ruins-large and small, vast to almost nonexistent—most still showing the blackened traces of ancient fires, others only aggregations of weather-washed stones, broken bricks, rotted wood and pitted, red-rusty iron. In the long absence of those who built them, the ruins now provide home or lair or shelter to the multitudinous rodentia of the land, to the gaunt, rangy, feral cats, to snakes, lizards, toads, bats, nesting birds and hosts of insects and arachnids and worms.

  Even in those places that hold no ruins more substantial can be found the windmill towers, all sagging and rust-pitted or gray-weathered and leaning a little farther from off their rotting footings with each season, like the few sorely wounded survivors on some vast battlefield.

  But wait!

  Speak not too soon of the utter extirpation of man. His kind is not entirely missing from prairie and plains, although nowhere can he be found in his formerly huge numbers.

  See, there, as the prairie sky begins to darken toward the encroaching night, one, two, three, many fires are becoming visible along the banks of a small, rushing stream. One could not see them earlier because, fueled by squawwood and sun-dried dung, they are all but smokeless. Bipedal figures move to and fro about these fires. Some are tending a small herd of whickering horses, while others prepare carcasses of deer and hare and other beasts for cooking, pick through baskets of gathered edible roots and plants or bring out saddle querns from the tents and begin to husk and winnow and then grind the painfully garnered wild grains.

  Still others are laving their bodies in a sheltered backwater of the stream or washing their clothes on its banks.

  Chapter I

  Karee Skaht, her bath done, squatted on a flat, sun-warmed rock at the riverside, letting the ever-constant wind dry her bare, sun-browned body. She wrung out her long red-gold hair, then set about laving the sweat and dirt from her shirt and breeches—alternately soaking them with river water, then pounding them against the smooth surface of the rock with the calloused palms of her hard little hands.

  In the wide, deep pool that spring floodwaters had excavated, others of the boys, girls and some of the leavening of slightly older warriors who went to make up this autumn hunting party bathed and swam, frolicked and rough-housed, while an equal number worked along the banks and awaited their own turn at the cooling, cleansing, soul-satisfying comfort of the water.

  After a few moments, Karee was joined on the rock by Gy Linsee. At fourteen summers, he was only some half-year her elder, but he already overtopped her by nearly two full hands, and a wealth of round muscles rippled beneath his nut-brown skin. It was these round muscles, the big bones beneath, along with his almost black hair and dark-brown eyes that attested to the fact that one or more of his ancestors had not been born of Horseclans stock, but rather had been adopted into Clan Linsee—one of the original clans descended of the Sacred Ancestors.

  Noticing the two on the rock, another boy swam to where he had left his clothing, then came over to squat on Karee's other side ...
a good bit closer than Gy had presumed to squat. This one was a much more typical Horseclansman—small-boned, flat-muscled, with hair the hue of wheatstraw and pale-blue eyes, his weather-darkened skin stippled with freckles.

  Although not really closely related, this boy was of Karee's own clan and, at sixteen summers, was already a proven, blooded warrior. On the second raid he had ridden in the summer just past, he had slain a foeman with spear and saber in single combat, capturing his victim's horse and most of his weapons and gear. The Skaht clan bard, old Gaib Skaht, had even added a new couplet about the exploits of Rahjuh Vawn of Skaht to the Song of Skaht.

  Karee only glanced briefly at Rahjuh, however, then turned the gaze of her blue-green eyes back to the Linsee boy, who had finished wringing out his own long, thick hair and now was sending up sprays of water each time his broad palm slammed down on his sopping shirt and breeches and the thick-woven squares of woolen cloth which the Linsees, the Morguhns, the Danyuhlzes, the Esmiths and some few other clans had of recent years taken to lapping over and around their feet and ankles before donning their boots.

  For an absent moment, Karee wondered to herself just how and why so strange a custom had commenced and persisted, wondered too how it would feel to wear a set of the outre items of apparel. But these were only fleeting thoughts, and her mind and gaze quickly returned to the main object of her attentions and present interest.

  No one of her own clansfolk had hair so darkly lustrous as that of this Linsee boy. The rays of the westering Sacred Sun now were bringing out dark-red highlights from wherever they touched upon that so-dark hair. She also found somehow satisfying the rippling of the muscles of his back and his thick shoulders as he slapped dry his wetted and rewetted clothing.

  The Skaht girl caught the fringes of a narrow-beam, personal-level mindspeak communication—the telepathy practiced every day by the roughly three out of five Horseclansfolk so talented—this directed to the big Linsee boy.

  "Gy, the stag is now all skinned and butchered. Since it was your kill, the heart, liver and kidneys are yours by right, and the tenderloin, too, if you want it. Do you want them raw or cooked?"

  Still pounding away at his sopping clothing, the boy replied silently, "Stuff the heart with some of those little wild carrots and some sprigs of mint; I'll cook it myself, later on. I'll have the liver raw . . . shortly. But let the kidneys go to Crooktail, for her it was first scented the stag and flushed him out of heavy cover that I might arrow him, then ride him down."

  Behind Karee, Gy and Rahjuh, a prairiecat—larger than the biggest puma, with the sharp, white-glinting points of fangs near a full handspan long depending below the lower jaw and with the long, sinewy, slender legs of a coursing beast—clambered up from out of the pool, claws scraping on the rock. At some time in her life, the cat's tail had been broken a third of the way between tip and body and, in healing, had left the final third canting at a permanent angle from the rest of the thick, furry appendage.

  When at last fully upon the rock, the big cat shook herself thoroughly, showering Karee and both boys impartially with myriad droplets of cold river water.

  "You half-dog eater of dung! Walking flea factory!" Rahjuh shouted and broadbeamed all at once, turning and shaking a clenched fist in the prairiecat's direction. "I was almost dry, too, you coupler with swine!"

  Serenely ignoring the outburst of insults and the shaken fist of the angered boy, Crooktail paced with dignity over to where Gy Linsee squatted. Her big head swept down and then up, running her wide, coarse, red-pink tongue the full length of his spine. Then she seated herself beside him, her crooked tail lapped over her forepaws, mindspeaking the while.

  "Two-leg-called-Gy, you remembered how much this cat loves kidneys. You will be as good a friend of cats as is your sire. You will be as good a hunter, too, and as good a warrior. You will be a mighty warrior and long remembered by your get and by theirs as the bards sing of you."

  The big, dark-haired boy gripped his clothing with one hand that the currents of the pool might not bear them away. His other brawny arm he threw about the cat, squeezing her damp body firmly but with the self-control of one who knows well his considerable strength.

  A few yards upstream from this tableau, on a higher, moss-fringed rock, three adult warriors sat abreast, sending up into the clear skies clouds of blue-gray smoke from their pipes. Even as they observed the cavortings in and about the pool below, they chatted, both aloud and silently.

  Farthest upstream sat Hwahltuh Linsee, youngest full brother of the present chief of that Kindred clan, a permanent subchief in status and a subchief of this hunt, as well. He had seen more than thirty summers come and go; beast-killing and man-slaying were both old stories to him. It had been a knife—near on fifteen years agone, when he had been but a younker—that had deeply gashed and left a crooked scar across his blond-stubbled cheek. The hard-swung sword of a Dirtman—one of the farmers who worked the lands fringing the prairie, despised by and regularly preyed upon by the Horseclansmen, themselves fearing the always costly raids and intensely hating the nomads who attacked them—had cost him the most of his left ear, while his canted nose had been smashed flat in a long-ago running battle with non-Kindred plains rovers when his opponent—his last dart cast, his swordblade broken—had bashed him in the face with the nicked and dented iron boss of his targe.

  Spouting blood, blind with agony and barely able to breathe, Hwahltuh had closed with the rider, dragged him from out of his saddle and throttled him with his bare hands. But the nose and the damaged jaw below had not healed properly, and as his speech was sometimes difficult of understanding, he had for years communicated principally by mindspeak, where possible.

  Farthest downstream on the mossy-grown rock sat Tchuk Skaht, five or six summers Hwahltuh's senior. He was but a middling warrior; however, he was known far and wide as a true master hunter and tracker, so since this was a hunt and not a raid, he was chief of it. Not that he was not a brave and strong man; at the age of twenty-odd, on the high plains, he had fought and slain a wounded bear armed with only his dirk—a rare feat of skill and daring of which the bards of many a clan still sang on winter nights around the lodge fires.

  The black-haired man who sat between them was taller and heavier of build—though not with fat, of which there was none upon his body. His name was Milo Morai, but his two present human companions, like all the Horseclansfolk—male and female, young and old—called him Uncle Milo. No one knew his age or just how long he had ridden with and among the Kindred and their forebears. He would live a year or two with a clan, then ride on of a day to the camp of another . . . and still another; possibly, he would return a score of years later, unmarked, unchanged, with no slightest sign of aging.

  And there existed nowhere any Clan Morai, only the one man. Uncle Milo, peer of any chief. The most ancient of the bardsongs mentioned him, the rhymed genealogies of almost every clan told of his exploits in war and the chase; indeed, if some few of the oldest bard songs were to be believed in entirety, he it was had succored the Sacred Ancestors after the Great Dyings and truly set what were to become the Kindred on their path to their present near mastery of plains and prairie.

  But there was no denying, for believers and non-believers alike, that Uncle Milo or someone exactly like him had been present in one clan camp or another, had ridden with the Kindred on hunts and raids and treks, for tenscore summers and more, for such a presence was mentioned in the songs—history-genealogies—of clan after clan, and clan songs of this sort never contained aught save bald truth.

  Yet no man or woman, no boy or girl, no prairiecat of any sex or age, thought of Uncle Milo as being in any way unnatural or supernatural, for he lived, slept, ate and played among them. He sweated when they sweated, made love no differently than any other clansman, and bled when injured, though he healed very fast. His bladder and bowels required periodic emptying, too, like those of any other living creature. He only differed from them in that he neither aged nor d
ied ... or so it seemed.

  The respect the Kindred afforded this man they all called Uncle Milo contained no awe and was in no way worship. Rather was it but an amplification of the natural respect granted to the old and the proven-wise of the clans, the deference due any chief—for, as the one and only member of his "clan," Milo was automatically "chief" or Morai—plus the admiration of a warrior and hunter of consummate skills.

  Up there on the high, moss-fringed rock, between Tchuk Skaht and Uncle Milo, lay another prairiecat. This one was a good deal bigger than Crooktail, he was a male and his furry pelt enclosed nearly three hundred pounds of muscle and sinew and bone. His name was Snowbelly, and he, too, was a subchief of this autumn hunt. He had had his swim and now lay white belly up, thick, powerful hind legs splayed widely and taloned forelegs bent at the wrists that the cool, evening wind might dry him more readily.

  Despite his lolling head and closed eyes, however, the big cat lay fully awake and as alert as always, his razor-keen senses missing neither sound nor any windborne scent, most of his mind engaged, though, in listening to and occasionally contributing to the conversation of the men. Of course, his "speech" was perforce all telepathic—the "mindspeak" of the Horseclans—since his kind had never developed the vocal apparatus necessary for true, oral speech. But he emitted a constant, rumbling, contrabasso purr of appreciation for the thorough scratching that Milo and Tchuk were giving his exposed chest, belly, legs and throat.

  Hwahltuh Linsee made a peculiar clucking sound and shook his head, silently beaming, "Crooktail should have given that impudent Skaht boy's damned rump a good sharp nip or two, in return for his insults. He had but just climbed out of the damned pool. So how were a few more drops of water going to do him harm or injury, hey?"

  While Tchuk Skaht glowered at the subchief from under bushy brows, Snowbelly mindspoke, "No, not so. This cat laid down the law to all the rest when first we assembled for this hunt: if fight the cats must, they are to fight other cats—opponents who, like them, have fangs and claws and tough skins. Brothers and sisters of cats though you Kindred are, you are all just too thin of skin, too easily injured. So the wise and prudent Crooktail comported herself entirely properly, you see,"