Ratha and Thistle-Chaser (The Third Book of the Named) (7 page)

Abruptly the fight ended. With a great clapping of wings, the bird lifted and flapped away. Thakur peered hard at the stranger, trying to see if she were clan-born or one of the more intelligent among the Un-Named, but he failed.

Her rust-black and orange coloration was unlike anything he had seen before. She seemed to be limping. He thought at first that the bird had wounded her, but as he studied her closely, he realized her three-legged walk was habitual, and he guessed that the drawn-up foreleg must be permanently lame.

Thakur wondered if what he’d seen was only his imagination. Could it be that his training as a herder and his work as a teacher made him misinterpret the stranger’s behavior? Was he seeing only what he expected to see? Well, he could hardly have expected this! He watched the stranger wend her way among the odd, lumpy sea-creatures, their calmness convincing him that they knew her and had grown accustomed to her presence.

The stranger’s smell was faint at this distance, but the trace of it he could catch was not clan scent. Curious now, he cast about until he found a scent-mark she had made on the bluff and inhaled the odor. No, she wasn’t from the clan, nor was she of the Un-Named, who left their traces on hunting trails.

Thakur toyed with the idea of going down to meet this intriguing stranger, but something made him hesitate.

She must be from the fringes of the Un-Named, he decided, a product of a mating between a clan member and one of the Un-Named, just as he and his brother, Bonechewer, were. If so, she might be friendly, but she also might be dangerous. Though crippled, she had managed to beat off a bird bigger than she was. Thakur wasn’t sure he wanted to confront her directly and certainly not with Aree on his back.

Instead, he watched her, being careful to keep downwind so she wouldn’t smell him. He noted the trails she took through the terraces and rocks. If he scent-marked a shrub or boulder along her way, then he could announce himself in a casual fashion and see from a distance what her response would be.

He put his plan into action the following day. After spraying several shrubs and rubbing his chin on a boulder, he sent Aree to safety in the branches of a wind-gnarled cypress and hid himself above the path.

Soon he heard footfalls in the rhythm of his quarry’s three-legged gait. He peered from his hideaway for the first close-up view of the stranger. He was not prepared for the odd little face that appeared around the edge of a boulder. None of the Named had anything like her markings in orange and rusty black. An inky band across the lower part of her face emphasized the lightness of her eyes.

Thakur had never seen such eyes. An iris of milky green swirled about each slit pupil, giving the stranger a gaze that seemed distracted and diffuse. Yet her stare had an unsettling quality. The cloudiness at first made him think she might be blind, but the sharp definition of her pupils and the way she made her way without using her whiskers to touch things convinced him she could see.

The stranger’s ears flicked back, and her neck extended as she caught his scent. He saw her upper lip curl back, revealing short, sharp fangs without signs of wear. She took one limping step toward the bush he had sprayed and then went rigid. A look of terror and rage shot through her eyes. Reeling backward as if she’d been struck, she crumpled into a whimpering heap, her good forepaw shielding her face. Shudders racked her, throwing her on her side, where she fought and thrashed against some unseen enemy.

Thoroughly bewildered, Thakur crept from his hideaway. He had seen and smelled many reactions to his scent-marking, but none as dramatic or frightening as this! An irrational sting of guilt hit him for daring to place his mark in her path.

The young female lay on her side, pedaling weakly with three feet as she stared ahead. Her head arched back and she stared without seeing. As the paroxysm spent itself, her limbs stilled and her eyes closed. She lay limply. When Thakur pawed her, she wobbled like a freshly killed carcass.

Numbed by astonishment and disbelief, he went to her head and stared down at her. Part of him insisted that it was coincidence; she had sniffed his mark just as the fit struck her. No. He had seen too clearly the shock and fright that had flashed through the cloudiness of her eyes in that instant before she fell.

She took quick, struggling breaths that jerked her rib cage. Thakur himself took a sharp breath of relief. As her breathing steadied, he felt his panic drain away. Whatever the cause of this attack, it would run its course. Unable to sit still, he paced around her.

The stranger’s face resembled those of the Named. She had a delicate muzzle and a well-defined break from the line of nose to forehead that Thakur found attractive. But what made him start when he saw it was a line of reddish-tan flame that licked up her forehead from the top line of her eyes to the crown of her head. Against the background color of rusty black, the strange marking stood out. It seemed to waver and flicker in his gaze, as if he were looking once again at a windblown line of fire. In his memory, the Red Tongue made its march through the forest.

Suddenly Thakur felt angry with himself. Yes, she had strange markings, but there was nothing that should disturb him about the patterns on her face. There were little touches of white at the corners of her lips and a narrow cream blaze on her nose. In a Named female, the effect would have been one of disturbing ugliness, or perhaps beauty....

If her smell had matched the unsettling attractiveness of her face, Thakur might have found it harder to break off his close examination of the stranger. But his nose continued to remind him that she was ungroomed, filthy, and so full of the pungent stink of the sea-creatures that he couldn’t make out her underlying scent.

She swallowed. The abrupt movement of her throat startled him. Soon she would wake. Should he stay or go? Was it his scent that had thrown her into this fit, and would it happen again if he stayed?

He looked down at her crippled foreleg. Along her shoulder from nape to breast ran a half-collar of rumpled fur that, he guessed, might hide a ridge of scar tissue. The foreleg itself, though shrunken, didn’t appear deformed. He had seen a similar injury in a herdbeast, caused when one creature kicked another in the breast. Whatever made the leg move gradually died, until the creature could no longer use its limb. He remembered that herders had soon chosen the animal for culling.

He saw the stranger’s eartip tremble. Her lips drew back, exposing her fangs as she swallowed again. He noted the shade of her gums to check if she had lost blood or had the paling sickness. No.

He drew back, then changed his mind. If the fit left her weak or ill, she would need help. But his reason for staying was more than that. What he had seen her doing with the sea-creatures might be valuable to the Named.

At last, after many preliminary stirrings and twitchings, she blinked and moved her head. Thakur sat down where he was, letting her gaze find him. Her nape fur rose, and the pupils of her milky-green eyes shrank. Despite her lame foreleg, she moved so fast that she was a rust-and-black blur in his eyes. In the next instant, she faced him, body displayed broadside, head twisted, fangs bared. The upturned tips of her flattened ears signaled fear as well as anger.

Thakur slowly got to his feet, lifting his tail in the greeting gesture common among the Named. He gave a rising purr.

The other stiffened her defensive posture, her back legs doing an angry little dance of their own that tended to swing her hindquarters toward him. He watched her tail. If it relaxed and curved into a hook, that meant he might have some chance of reaching her.

“I won’t hurt you,” he said slowly. “Please. I want to talk to you. My name is Thakur.”

He faltered on the last word. There was no understanding in those milky-green eyes, not even curiosity. He might as well have tried to speak to a herdbeast! She spat at him and made a pitiful wrenching motion with her stunted foreleg, as if hoping to use it to claw him. He lowered his head and tail. How could this be? How could she have established that unusual relationship with the sea-creatures if she was as dull as this? Herding wasn’t a simple task; that he knew well. You had to outthink the creatures you wanted to control; you had to plan ahead.

He stared at her in dismay, his tail sagging. She backed away in a three-legged crab walk, growling deep in her throat.

“Go then,” he said sadly, more to himself than to her. Deliberately he broke eye contact, looking away. When he looked back again, she was gone.

Once Thakur had recovered Aree, the treeling cheered him, but he still remained puzzled about his encounter. He walked along the low bluff above the beach with Aree on his back, airing his thoughts aloud to his small companion as he often did.

“She doesn’t speak. I’m sure of that,” he said over his shoulder to the treeling. “And her eyes are those of a witless Un-Named one.” He stopped, remembering the swirling milky-green irises. Were those eyes indeed empty, or did the opacity hide the spark of intelligence that the Named valued? What about her led him to brood this way?
Her companionship with the sea-beasts,
part of him answered, but another, more honest part said
no, that is not all.

He needed to find forage and a steady supply of good, fresh water for the clan and its herds. He had already noticed several estuaries and inlets that cut into the coast-line, but most that he sampled were too salty or brackish, even when he moved upstream. Sparse rainfall had dried up the rivers that fed the bays and inlets, allowing seawater to intrude.

Finally he found a creek that fed a lagoon. Though the lagoon water was briny and mixed with the sea, the stream itself, when he tasted it, was fresh. He followed the creek inland until he came to its source. At the base of a second tier of cliffs set far back from the ocean, a spring ran steadily from a cleft in blue-gray stone, collecting in a pool beneath. Shaded by the rock walls and watered by the spring, trees grew at the base of the cliffs with an open meadow beyond. Seepage from the spring moistened the ground, and fresh grass sprouted amid the dappled patterns of sun and shade.

Here, near the sea coast, morning and evening fogs muted the heat that blistered areas farther inland. Thakur drank from the pool, then stood on its margin, letting the feel of the place seep into him.

Several small pawprints in the moist earth near the pool told him that the stranger too knew of this spring. And seeing her prints made Thakur wonder what would happen if the Named did choose to come. She could always drink from the creek that spilled out of the overflow from the spring-fed pool instead of from the pool itself.

His belly gave a twinge: not true hunger, but a warning that he should eat within the next day or so. His time here was drawing to an end; the other scouts that Ratha had sent out would be returning with descriptions of their discoveries. He too would tell his story to those assembled before the sunning rock. This place, with its oasis of fresh growth and unfailing water, appeared ideal for the clan and their herd animals. In addition, the sea-beasts might be the answer to Ratha’s quest for another source of meat. If a lame Un-Named one had formed a protective relationship with one of them, surely the herders of the Named could do more.

Yet even as he thought this he had misgivings. He sensed that the relationship of the stranger to the sea-beasts was different from that of the clan herders to their animals. The creatures’ reactions as she walked among them told Thakur that she had blended herself into their community. She lived with them rather than managing them to serve her needs, as the Named did with their animals.

But she was alone and weak as well. This was the only way she could live, by disturbing the sea-beasts as little as possible. Perhaps she was only a scavenger after all, he thought, but the idea saddened him.

Could she perhaps find a place among the Named? And if the clan came, with their herds and their ways, could she live a better life than one of scratching and scrounging among middens left by these wave-wallowers?

No. She was not like his people. He doubted if she could accept clan ways even if the Named chose to share them. A promise lay behind her shuttered eyes, but not one the Named could easily trust. Could it be that hers was a different sort of intelligence, one that might show not in mastery of words or brightness of eyes, but in another way?

Thakur knew that he could determine whether that intelligence—that light—would be given a chance to develop or not. If he returned and stood before the sunning rock to say that nothing here would be of value to the Named, this stranger could continue to live her life among the seamares without interference.

He sighed deeply, knowing this path was not open to him. He could not lie to his clan leader or betray his people for the sake of some odd castoff. He would speak, and herders from the clan would come, for the spring-watered trees and meadow offered the Named refuge from the worsening drought. And the wave-wallowing animals might well become an unusual, though successful, addition to the beasts the Named now tended. Their meat might taste a bit odd, but in times of need, the Named couldn’t be particular about taste.

He knew where his loyalties lay, and it saddened him. The stranger would be pushed out, tossed aside, and no one would think anything of it because she had no light in her eyes.
But that would be wrong, because we can learn from her. Even if she can’t speak, she teaches us by what she does. Ratha must be made to understand.