Ratha and Thistle-Chaser (The Third Book of the Named) (15 page)

Barrier building had to be abandoned for the moment, while the recalcitrant beasts were rounded up and driven back, but Thakur knew Ratha hadn’t given up on the idea.

As soon as she could, she was back at it again. Fessran offered the suggestion that sticks pushed into the river bottom might serve to keep the thornbrush in place, and, after several tries, it worked. Not without cost, however. Thakur had splinters in his pads and thornbark between his teeth by the time the two quit for the day.

Now that Ratha was assured that the spring Thakur found would serve the Named throughout the dry season, she decided to move the herds. She had considered the river where the seamares were kept as another possibility, but the outflow was so sparse that salt water had intruded, turning the river into a narrow arm of the sea. It was ideal for seamares but not other herdbeasts. The three-horns and dapplebacks would be moved to the area about the spring.

As soon as she told Fessran of her decision, the Firekeeper wanted to leave, bearing the good news back to Cherfan and the others. After hearing Fessran grumble about “walking across all the rocks in the world,” Ratha was surprised to see her so eager to make the journey once again.

Perhaps Fessran was starting to get restless, chafing at having to spend a good part of the day watching the captive seamares while Thakur and Ratha extended their brush wall into a corral that opened onto the river. Ratha had no doubt that Fessran would perform her task well and would take no nonsense from anyone. But she knew Fessran well enough to see that clan duty was not the only thing on the Firekeeper’s mind.

After Fessran left, Ratha tackled the task of building a brush wall that would stand in the river’s current. By ramming sticks into the mud-and-gravel bottom and having the treelings weave supple boughs between them, she and Thakur found that they could make a structure that held the seamares in while allowing water to pass through. Ratha tried to adapt the method of lashing sticks together that the Firekeeper student had shown her, although it was difficult to get Ratharee to stop twisting bark strips into tangles once she had started.

As the wall slowly grew, with Thakur’s help, Ratha wanted more seamares within the enclosure. When enough of the corral had been completed so that the beasts would not stray, she talked Thakur into another expedition to capture the beasts.

He was willing as long as they stayed north of the area where the Un-Named one prowled and did not take any that seemed to belong in that area. Another condition was that she disguise her smell by rolling in seamare dung. She grumbled, but she knew Thakur was right. She rolled.

They used the last of the smelly bait to lure more seamares and soon had as many as they could handle. The creatures milled about on the beach and sloshed in the water. Ratha and Thakur were kept busy reinforcing and raising the thornbrush walls.

When they weren’t working on the seamare corral, Thakur showed her how to find things to eat in tidepools and how to glean the seamares’ leavings. She did not like being a scavenger, even for a short while, and she was relieved when Fessran finally showed up at dawn one morning, along with Cherfan and Bira. She looked thin, dusty, but triumphant, leading a string of thirsty dapplebacks and three-horns, along with their equally thirsty herders.

Firekeepers arrived with the herders, bearing the Red Tongue in embers and on torches. Many of the Named looked tired and disgruntled at having to make the move, but no one growled or blamed Ratha, for they knew it was the drought that had forced them from their home ground.

Eagerly Ratha led them all to Thakur’s spring, and she saw that the watering place would serve as well as she had hoped. Even with three-horns and dapplebacks milling and trampling, the flow stayed clear, and the animals drank until they were sated. Then the herders let them scatter to browse, and the rest of the Named sought dens or sleeping places nearby.

At last, when the confusion died down, she sought out Fessran. The Firekeeper was sitting on a rock ledge near the pool, grooming her belly and purring softly to herself. As Ratha approached, she caught something unusual in Fessran’s smell, something sweet and almost milky. But the powerful seamare odor in her own coat interfered with her nose, and she couldn’t tell if the odd scent was just her imagination. She consoled herself by thinking that Fessran would soon be wearing the odoriferous stuff and would smell as bad as she did now.

As she approached, Fessran stopped grooming and lay down. The elusive scent teasing Ratha’s nose vanished as if it had never been. Fessran yawned, looking weary but happy. The strained look on her face seemed to have gone.

“Well, I did it.” She grinned at Ratha. “I helped Cherfan whip that lazy bunch into shape and get them here.”

“No one gave you trouble?”

Fessran licked some new scratches on her muzzle. “Oh, there were a few malcontents—there always are. I had to use a little persuasion, but not much. The sight of the dry streambeds helped change their minds.” She shifted, grimacing and sneezing. “Would you mind sitting a bit farther away, clan leader? I mean no disrespect, but until I get used to that smell... ”

Ratha moved herself, sitting a little apart, while Fessran told her how they had made the journey without losing a single fawn or foal. It suddenly struck her that the Firekeeper was preoccupied by something that had nothing to do with herdbeasts. She could tell by the absent tone in Fessran’s voice and the way she groomed herself.

“Are you still thinking about your treeling?” she asked suddenly.

“What? Oh, Fessree? No. I’m sure she’s surviving without me. No point in fretting, and I have other things to think about.”

A little later Ratha paced away, swinging her tail. When she returned later to ask the Firekeeper something, she found Fessran gone.

She did not have much time to wonder where her friend had disappeared. No sooner had she turned away from the pool below the falls than she saw Thakur trotting up to her. She could tell by the way his whiskers bristled that this wasn’t just a friendly call.

He jogged to a stop, Aree rocking on his back. Ratha lifted her chin, raised her whiskers.

“Ratha, I thought you told the herders not to take any wave-wallowers from the southern beach.”

“I did,” she said mildly.

“Well, they aren’t obeying you,” Thakur said. “I saw several young herders bringing an animal over the rocks that separate our beach from the one Newt stalks.”

Ratha’s tail twitched with irritation. She did not like her instructions to be flouted, even though she had given them to appease Thakur. Privately, she didn’t think that the Un-Named female Thakur called Newt would really miss a few wave-wallowers.

By the time the two backtracked to where Thakur had seen the stolen seamare and then made their way to the corral, the herding students were driving the beast past the brush wall. The herders, all yearlings, looked inordinately proud of themselves. Ratha thought sourly that the creature they had pirated was small and not really worth all the effort. She lost sight of the seamare as it lumbered past the thornbrush wall and mingled with the honking, hooting mass of its fellows.

She was about to tongue-lash the overenthusiastic youngsters when Thakur interrupted, asking if she had tracked the seamare through the brush gate and knew which one it was.

“No,” she admitted, staring across the thornbrush at slick, mud-smeared flanks and swinging tusks. “I lost sight of the creature as soon as it got in.”

Thakur sighed. “Newt isn’t going to like this. I should have stopped those yearlings and returned the beast myself. I also don’t know which others they may have taken.”

“Does it really matter?” Ratha asked. “There are more on her beach than on ours. Surely she won’t miss a few.”

Thakur’s ears twitched back. “Don’t tell me you agree with what the herders did, Ratha!”

“I don’t, and I was going to let them know that when you stuck your whiskers in,” she snapped. “Why is your nape all up about this anyway? Your lame friend has got more of the wave-wallowers than she needs.”

“She knows them all, and she’ll know if one is missing. She has favorites among them.”

At this Ratha grimaced disdainfully. “You may think it’s silly, but she does,” Thakur insisted. “She may tolerate us stealing a few, especially if she thinks they have wandered over from her beach, but if we take the wrong animal, we will have trouble. And I’m afraid we may have already done that.”

“All right,” Ratha said, seeing that he really was worried. “I’ll tell everyone they’d better keep to our territory, or they’ll have more than an Un-Named cripple to worry about.”

She saw Thakur grimace at that and knew she should have chosen her words less recklessly. “I’m sorry, Thakur. She deserves more respect than that. I’ll be sure the herders leave her alone.”

She didn’t like it when Thakur held her gaze with his own, his copper-furred face serious. “Don’t underestimate Newt, Ratha.”

Her tail did an irritated flip. Why was he getting so touchy about Newt, or whoever she was? Abruptly she decided to change the subject and asked him if he’d seen Fessran.

“I caught a glimpse of her going somewhere with Khushi,” Thakur answered.

Ratha padded away. It seemed odd that Fessran was spending so much time with her son. None of the other Named females bothered much with their cubs once they were grown. She often had to scratch in her mind to remember who had birthed whom, on the rare occasions when it mattered. She shook herself and went on her way.

The following day, when she saw that the herdbeasts and the Named had settled after the journey, she gathered up those herders and Firekeepers who could be spared. After teaching them and their treelings how to work sticks and brush together to form a section of wall, she put them to work building the seamare pen.

Although Fessran still lacked a treeling, she made up for it by diligently bringing pieces of driftwood up from the beach and piling them near the wall.

Ratha had the pole-setters place additional sticks alongside the ones she and Thakur had laid. Once more poles were in place she worked alongside them with Ratharee on her back. The treeling held crossmembers where Ratha wanted them and helped to lash these in place. It was wearing work, hard on both Named jaws and treeling hands.

“Don’t you think it’s strong enough?” Fessran asked Ratha. “Watching you grunt and tussle in that miserable river is making me squirm.”

From the shallow water where she was standing, Ratha eyed the wall and the seamares inside. “It needs more brush on top. I want to be sure those duck-footed bellydraggers can’t escape.”

“If you put more on top, it will fall over,” Fessran argued, but Ratha wasn’t in a mood to listen. She slogged her way out to midriver, where the construction crew and their treelings were reinforcing the barrier by shoving sticks and thornbrush into the crude latticework. Not satisfied with how the others were building the wall, she took a tangle of brush in her own mouth and clambered atop the construction.

“Here’s where it should go,” she said, and shoved the mass in the fork of a driftwood branch. As she stretched down to take more thornbrush that was being passed up to her, she felt the whole wall shift alarmingly under her weight. With squalls of dismay, the workers scattered as a section of the barrier toppled over, carrying Ratha and her treeling with it.

With a terrific splash, it fell into the river. Ratha expected a dunking but to her surprise, the woven mass of driftwood and brush held together, acting as a floating platform beneath her. Only her toes got soggy from water seeping through.

After getting over her initial shock, Ratha realized she was drifting downriver. She saw Fessran trotting along the bank, accompanied by several irritated pole-setters yowling insults at their reckless leader for knocking the wall down.

The current wasn’t very strong, and soon Ratha’s make-shift raft grounded on a sandbar. Everyone who wasn’t occupied with keeping seamares from escaping waded in to steady the strange craft and rescue a frightened Ratharee, but Fessran and a few others took the opportunity to make sure Ratha got well splashed, dunked, and pummeled by the time she reached solid ground.

“Wait!” she yowled just as the Named were about to tear the raft apart to use in an attempt to repair the seamare pen. The group drew back, letting her through to examine the thing. She pushed on the craft with a paw, watching how it bobbed and floated. Again she clambered on, scrambling from one end to the other. Yes, it made her feet soggy and had a disconcerting tendency to sink under her weight in certain places, but it had carried her quite a distance.

She hopped off, her whiskers bristling excitedly.

“I know that look,” said Fessran. “Don’t tell me you think we can use that broken piece of the wave-wallower pen.”

“Didn’t you see what happened? It carried me and Ratharee over the water. We didn’t have to swim. I think it could carry more than one of us. Come on, Firekeeper. Let’s both try.”

Gingerly, Fessran made her way aboard, grimacing when Ratha joined her in a gleeful bound, making the raft bounce. “You, clan leader, are still a cub sometimes. Yarr, this thing makes my stomach feel queer.”

“We can ride down the river on it,” Ratha argued.

“You can ride down the river on it. I’ll stick to burning my whiskers with the Red Tongue.” Fessran disembarked, waded to the bank, and shook her feet. “Anyway, we need the sticks to fix the hole you made.”