Exile's Challenge (8 page)

“Then,” Flysse rose, curtseying as best she could in leathern breeches, “I accept your compliment, 'sieur.”

“Good.” Arcole took her arm. “I'd not have a wife who argues with me.”

“That,” Flysse said, “I cannot always guarantee shall be the case.”

“Nor would I have it otherwise,” he replied, grinning. “Now do we go eat?”

Breakfast was again porridge, and some kind of hard bread that came in flat, round loaves, washed down with tea. It was not, Arcole thought, the height of culinary refinement, but undoubtedly filling, and he felt satisfied as the animals were saddled and they started down through the hills.

Davyd seemed happier today, more at ease on the buckskin, though Morrhyn and Kahteney still rode close to either side, poised to aid the lad should assistance prove needed. He will learn, Arcole thought as he watched Davyd swaying in the saddle; already he learns to move with the horse, and does it hurt, still it's a needful lesson.

For his own part he grew steadily more accustomed to the primitive harness, though he still found it hard to understand how these folk could fight from horseback. As best he understood it, they
had
fought with the invaders of their first land, who seemed—as best Davyd had been able to describe them—terrible warriors. But surely to fight effectively from the back of a running horse, a man needed stirrups and a firm seat. How else could he own a solid platform from which to
use his weapons? These Matawaye carried the accoutrements of war or hunting—all save the wakanishas had lances and bows and axes stowed about their saddles—but how did they use them without stirrups, or high-mounted saddles?

He got his answer as they came down from a defile flanked by two tall hills, onto a plateau where the broad shelf spread all grassy to the drop beyond and it seemed the world fell away into distance like a steep beach meeting a great green ocean.

A small herd of deer grazed the plateau, sentried by a high-antlered stag. The wind blew from the south, carrying the scents of horses and men away from the deer. Rannach raised a hand to halt the little column and turned, smiling, to Kanseah. Arcole saw the shy akaman nod, and then both men take bows from their packs and nock arrows. Morrhyn gestured that none move, but Arcole could not resist bringing his horse a little closer to the front, that he might see the hunt clearly. He thought that were it left to him, he would work his way slowly down on foot and belly until he had a clear shot—which should be difficult, because likely the stag would sight him and take his harem away.

Rannach and Kanseah had no such doubts: they heeled their horses and charged; and Arcole could scarcely believe what he saw.

The deer scattered at the first sound of the pounding hooves. The stag belled and ran away toward the timber edging the plateau, his harem running swift after him. Rannach and Kanseah galloped in the same direction, intent on cutting off the herd. Neither held their reins, but left them loose across their mounts' shoulders, guiding the horses with their knees alone, both their bows full strung as they closed on the panicked deer.

A doe ran laggard, clearly aged, and hampered by some old wound. Arcole thought that her meat would likely be toughened by the years she carried, and that he would have selected younger game, but neither Rannach or Kanseah seemed to share that thought. They ignored the younger animals and closed on the limping doe. Both sighted and loosed their arrows, and the shafts flew straight and true, thudding hard into the doe's chest, just behind the left foreleg, so that
she was killed on the instant and fell over with the feathered poles jutting from her side.

Rannach sprang from his horse as it still ran, landing loose with a long blade in his hand, that he drove deep into the deer's neck and slit her throat for all she was surely already dead. Then he fell to his knees and stroked her throat, and Kanseah joined him, and both men raised their hands to the sky and said something that Arcole could not hear, for the wind carried their words away, and he would not have understood them anyway. But he thought that they gave thanks for the kill to whatever god they worshipped, and that he had never seen such horsemanship.

Then Yazte slapped him on the shoulder and he must steady the prancing gray as he looked at the plump man, who pointed at the felled deer and then at his mouth, and then rubbed his ample belly, grinning hugely. Arcole nodded and smiled back.

“I think,” he said to Flysse, “that we shall eat well tonight.”

Flysse nodded, staring at the two akamans, who were already beckoning them forward that they might stow the deer on a packhorse. “I've never seen such riding,” she said, her voice awed. “They're like …”

“Centaurs,” Arcole finished for her. And promised himself that he would learn to truly master this simple style of horsemanship: the admiration he saw in her eyes rankled somewhat. “Like the legends.”

“I wonder,” she said, “if we've not stumbled into a legend.”

He smiled at that, and squeezed her hand. Had he felt confident enough of his seat, he would have leant to kiss her. But he was not yet so able, and so only smiled. Then they were moving again, down to where Rannach and Kanseah waited, and the doe was loaded on a packhorse and they all, laughing, rode down off the plateau.

The trail grew steep here, narrow between high walls of roseate stone, and Arcole feared that Davyd should find it too difficult. Neither wakanisha could any longer ride beside him, but must go ahead and behind and leave Davyd to his own
devices. The which, Arcole was pleased to observe, he managed well enough. He did not fall off, and was his face somewhat pale as they came out onto flatter ground, and his hands clasped like determined limpets on rein and mane, still he smiled proudly and called back, “I think I get the hang of this.”

“You do,” Arcole returned, “and well.”

Morrhyn caught his eye, smiling, and he wondered how fast the Matawaye would have traveled were they not hindered by their inexperienced guests. They showed great patience, he thought, and took pains to make three strangers feel so welcome; which prompted him in turn to think that these were kind people, such as he had never known. He looked up at the wide sky, all sun-burnished blue now, with the clouds fading like old dreams, and felt the wind on his face and laughed for the sheer wonder of it all.

This seemed a marvelous land, vast and verdant—he saw the hills falling away around and before their path, like great descending steps that cupped meadows and woods and streams within their huge and magnificent embrace; behind, the mountains stood sentinel duty, broaching the sky itself, snowcapped guardians dividing Ket-Ta-Thanne from Salvation. And ahead, where the lower steps ran down, he saw an infinity of blue-hazed distance that must surely stretch out to the ends of the world. Or perhaps go on forever: he could not know, only wonder at the enormity of it all.

“God, but this is surely a wonderful country!”

He had not realized he spoke aloud until Flysse answered him: “Yes, I think it is.” And Yazte brought his horse closer and beamed and waved a hand as if to embrace all of it, and welcome the newcomers. And Arcole nodded and reached out unthinking to clap the fat man on the shoulder, at which Yazte laughed and spoke in his odd guttural language, which Arcole could still not yet understand for all the words seemed daily to border on the comprehensible. Perhaps, he thought, some magic worked here, past those dividing mountains, that gave newcomers the gift of tongues. Surely it was a magical place.

That day they halted around noon to butcher the deer and pack the cuts. Morrhyn gave Davyd more of the herb that numbed his aches, and they continued down through the foothills. For a while, they followed a tumbling stream that danced away between stands of tall timber, larches and aspen that dappled harlequin patterns of sunlight and shadow over the ground, then the water turned and went off northward as they continued to the west, descending through the trees and over grassy hummocks. The woodland was loud with birdsong, and unseen animals crashed away through the undergrowth at their approach; plump rabbits watched from the hummocks, bounding for the safety of burrows as the horses came near; overhead, hawks circled the sky, and swallows darted, crows flew noisy, and magpies chattered announcement of their coming. It seemed to Arcole a land filled with life, untamed and quite unlike Salvation, and its inhabitants as different.

As the sun fell away to the west they made camp where a ring of ridgepole pines surrounded a meadow. There was no hot spring, but neither Flysse or Arcole felt overmuch need of that solace, and Davyd bore up well, even did he grimace as he seated himself and eagerly take the herbs Morrhyn offered.

Arcole noticed that the wakanisha offered neither him nor Flysse that cure, and wondered if that was compliment of their equestrian skills or indication of the herb's scarcity. Or—as Morrhyn and Kahteney again engaged Davyd in a busy conversation that existed as much of handsigns as words—of the importance they attached to the young man.

Certainly, they paid him the greater part of their attention, mostly leaving Rannach and Yazte and Kanseah to communicate with the other newcomers. It was as if, Arcole thought, they would impress their language on Davyd as quickly as possible. And then he thought that that was surely the obvious course—the dreams had already imbued Davyd with far greater understanding than he or Flysse owned, and so it was logical the youth be taught first, and become translator for them all. Or was there something else? Some other reason, that lay beyond his comprehension? He recognized now that these folk were not savages—they were too kind, too courtly—and had he at first believed them primitive, he now
began to see that it was only a different way of life they followed, which did not make them less than his own people, but only different.

That night he joined with Flysse in awkward repetition of words as the three akamans patiently spoke, holding up a variety of items and carefully intoning the names. It was not easy. The language of the Matawaye was deeper than his own soft Levanite tongue, even deeper than Flysse's Evanderan, and much of it clicking glottal stops or what seemed to him an entirely unnatural joindure of tongue and teeth. But he learned to say the words for knife, and meat, and deer, and fire, and began to believe that he might—in time—converse articulately with their hosts. And that, no less than the kindness shown three refugee strangers, persuaded him he and Flysse might find a life amongst these folk. It was an afterthought to realize he already assumed Davyd should have a life here, as if the youth and Morrhyn had already reached some mutual treaty of adoption.

That night he slept well, and was it frustrating to lie so close to Flysse and not be able to hold her as he wished for fear they wake the softly snoring Davyd, then still it was good simply to be there, safe.

They went on down through the foothills, lower and lower, wending along ravines and gullies that turned and twisted, mazy as some rocky labyrinth, as if the mountains dug claws of stone into the land, reluctant to let go their hold. Three days they traversed the breaks, and then the stone leveled and fell away, like exhausted waves foundering on some imponderably vast beach. Save that beach was all green grass, and more akin to an ocean. Arcole had never seen such a plain: it spread out to the limits of the horizon as if it held all the world within its grasp, lushly painted with a myriad shades of green that rippled, shadow-shifting, under a soft wind. Stands of timber stood like hazy islands in the vastness, and as they rode through the knee-deep green sea he saw ahead vast, darker shadows that moved slowly over the verdancy, like great shoals of fish. He looked up, but the only clouds in that enormous sky were random billows of cumulus, too high and
not large enough to lay such shadows. He wondered what they were.

A half day out onto the great grass sea he saw. The riders drew closer and the shadows resolved into individual shapes: great shaggy beasts, with massive shoulders, all hair-hung and dwarfing the homed heads that turned suspiciously toward the riders. Some snorted a challenge and ran a little way toward them, horns tossing in warning, but when the horsemen offered no answering challenge, only hooved ground and returned to their grazing. Rannach pointed at them with his lance, making a thrusting motion, and said a word Arcole could not understand, then the word for meat—which he could—and that for leather, and more that were incomprehensible.

“What are they?” Flysse asked. “Some kind of cattle?”

“I think so, but wild,” Arcole replied, indicating the herd's guardians. “Those are surely bulls. And ready to fight.”

He watched them warily, grateful the Matawaye steered a course around such massive beasts. For all the guardian bulls grazed, still they tossed their heads and watched and stamped their hooves, and there were so many of them. He calculated there must be some several hundred, perhaps even a thousand or more. If that herd charged, the riders would surely be swept under their weight like debris beneath a surging sea.