Ratha’s Challenge (The Fourth Book of The Named)

Ratha’s Challenge (The Fourth Book of the Named)

Clare Bell

Copyright © 1994 by Clare Bell

Published by E-Reads. All Rights Reserved.

www.ereads.com

To Donald V. Steward

former Mississippi Freedom Rider

believer in nonviolence

computer scientist and mathematician

peace activist and conflict-resolution researcher

father of my ideals

and

To Edna Kathleen Steward

voyager into a strange new world

singer and survivor

believer in the power of the human soul

and the beauty of the written word

who asked the Named to reach out

mother of my heart

Both have made the dream real.

Chapter One

Stones flew over Thakur’s head and rattled against the bark of a tree behind him. The steep-sided gully in which he and his companions were trying to capture a shaggy young mammoth had become a trap for them instead of for the mammoth. Thakur crouched, flattening his fur and ears. The beast before him raised its trunk in a trumpeting blast.

Thakur drove his claws into the ground and bared his fangs in a feline hiss before he could stop himself. As herding teacher to his people, the Named, Thakur knew and taught the young ones all the skills that had been developed to manage dapplebacked horses and three-horn deer. He told his cub-students never to show fear to a herdbeast. Now he had broken his own rule, though this woolly tusker wasn’t one of the clan’s herdbeasts. Not yet.

The ground vibrated beneath Thakur’s paws as the mammoth stamped its massive front feet and bellowed. The gully resounded with the brassy roar. His head ringing from the noise, Thakur glanced at his young fellow stalkers, Khushi and Bira.

Khushi, a herder, and Bira, a Firekeeper, had come with him on this scouting expedition far from the clan’s seacoast settlement. Khushi was a seasoned herder and not easily intimidated. This creature had him bristling all over. The usually calm Bira had a line of raised red-gold fur down her back.

This was their second attempt to catch a mammoth. And this one wasn’t even fully grown—that was why they had chosen it.

Thakur and Khushi made another sharp rush at the beast, trying to back it into a narrow corner of the gully. Bira joined in. The quarry tossed its head, flailing its trunk and spearing the air with its tusks. Thakur’s nose was filled with its heavy smell and the faint but sharp odor that told him that his two companions were fighting fear of their own. The beast’s red-rimmed eyes glared from behind a thicket of orange hair. Its trunk swung down and coiled like a snake in the loose gravel. When the trunk whisked up again, another barrage of rocks hurtled at Bira.

She dodged, but several struck her ribs and back. Thakur heard her grunt in surprise and pain. Herdbeasts weren’t supposed to throw rocks.

“You said this would be easier than herding three-horns!” Bira yowled at Khushi.

“I ... thought ... it would be since ... these face-tail things ... don’t have horns!” Khushi puffed.

“They don’t need them!”

Thakur glanced at Khushi. Every hair of the young herder’s dun-colored fur was standing on end. Still, Khushi advanced on the quarry, trying to trap its gaze with his own. The stare-down worked on deer and dapplebacks, but this mountain of hide and flesh was having none of it.

With an enraged roar, the beast charged Khushi. Thakur and Bira both leaped at the same instant, snarling, to turn it back before it trampled him. They broke the face-tail’s attack, but it would not be deprived of its quarry. Again the trunk swept down, but instead of gathering and flinging stones, it curled around Khushi’s middle.

In an instant the squalling herder was lifted high over Thakur’s head. Then he was shooting through the air. With a loud crash he landed in a thicket.

“Enough!” Thakur yowled to Bira, who was vainly trying to force the beast back to its corner with short rushes and feints. “Let the thing go!”

Bira dived to one side while Thakur galloped to the bush where Khushi had landed. He whirled, fearing for an instant that the beast would charge into the thicket and tear it apart trying to find Khushi. Even in his short experience with these animals, Thakur had found them to be very single-minded, especially when they wanted to trample an enemy.

With a ground-shaking trot, the orange-haired young mammoth headed for the thicket, then swerved aside. It lumbered away down the gully, ears flapping, short tail stuck stiffly upright.

Bira’s ribs lifted in a sigh of combined exhaustion and relief. The red-gold fur on her back flattened, but worry remained in her green eyes. Thakur shared it. The face-tail had thrown Khushi hard.

“He’s young and tough,” Thakur said before Bira could speak, but he could not keep anxiety out of his own voice as he pawed at the thicket, calling to Khushi.

At last he heard the herder’s low moan. “Oooh, why did we try to catch that creature? I wish we had never seen it!”

Thakur’s ears and whiskers lifted. Khushi couldn’t be badly hurt if he chose to complain about the face-tail instead of about his own injuries.

Thakur and Bira turned to the task of extricating the herder. Only one of his feet was visible, hanging forlornly from a tangle of thorn scrub. Using claws and teeth, Thakur and Bira attacked the bush.

“Let me get Biaree,” Bira offered as Thakur grimaced at the sharp twigs and thorns that lodged painfully between his teeth. He agreed. Bira ran off to fetch her treeling companion. Treelings were much better than the Named at untangling or clearing away things. Their clever fingers could do what paws and teeth could not.

Thakur thought longingly of his own treeling, Aree. His neck still felt bare without her small arms about it and her fingers twining in his fur. He’d left her behind in the clan’s care, for she was bulging with babies. A mammoth-capturing expedition was no place for a pregnant treeling.

Soon Bira galloped back with her male treeling, Biaree, perched on the nape of her neck. The treeling’s slender ringed tail stuck up, and a pointed light-brow muzzle with a black mask showed between Bira’s cars. A few purrs of encouragement and a nudge from Bira’s nose soon had the treeling pulling apart branches and breaking off dead twigs. With his aid, they cleared a way in to Khushi and gently pulled him out.

Khushi was more shaken than hurt. While Bira and Biaree groomed thorns and twigs from the young herder’s hide and tail, Thakur used his paws and his sensitive nose to check Khushi for injuries.

“Why did I ever tell the clan leader about these animals that wear their tails on their faces?” Khushi asked him plaintively. “And why did I ever think we could add them to our herds?”

“I think we will be able to, when we find ways to manage them,” Thakur answered.

“If we ever do.” Khushi groaned.

Thakur didn’t contradict him. Despite his words, he wasn’t sure that these beasts the Named called face-tails would work out as herd animals. There was certainly a lot of meat on one, but Khushi’s unexpected trip through the air had shown that there were certain hazards involved in taming them.

“Well,” said Bira, “if they aren’t suitable, it won’t be the first time we’ve chosen the wrong kind of animal. Thistle’s seamares didn’t work out either.”

As he watched Bira and Biarce finish grooming Khushi, Thakur licked his own dark-copper fur and thought of their previous attempt to bring a new kind of animal into the herd. Last season’s drought and its effects on the three-horn deer and dapplebacked horses had made Ratha, the clan leader, start the search. If the clan herds had animals that could survive under different kinds of conditions, the Named would have a more stable supply of meat.

Ratha’s idea was a good one, but putting it into practice was difficult. It had also yielded one very unexpected result. While scouting the seacoast for possible herdbeasts, Thakur had found a crippled young female of his own kind. She turned out to be Thistle-chaser, Ratha’s lost daughter.

Thakur had also found the seamares, chunky water creatures with horselike heads and webbed feet—and tusks that they used to dig up and tear apart heavy-shelled clams on the shore. Thistle had formed a strange but real friendship with them. When the clan tried to capture and keep seamares, she angrily interfered. Then she turned her wrath against her mother.

Thakur still remembered finding the two on the wave-washed rocks, both bleeding from their fight and nearly dead from exposure. Since then Ratha and her daughter had become partially reconciled, but Thistle had not accepted Ratha’s offer to join the clan. She remained apart, living among the seamares.

With a twitch of his whiskers, Thakur turned his attention back to Khushi, who had recovered enough to shake the last leaves and twigs out of his coat.

“Maybe you should have used a lighted torch,” he heard Khushi say to Bira. “I haven’t seen a beast yet who didn’t fear the Red Tongue.”

Except us and our treelings,
Thakur thought.
And I have seen that we do fear it, although in a different way than the herdbeasts.

“Thakur doesn’t like using the Red Tongue to frighten herdbeasts,” Bira said, looking to him. “I agree. It’s cruel and often useless. Once a herdbeast is maddened by fear, you can’t do anything except kill it. That is a waste.”

“And imagine what would have happened if that face-tail had grabbed the torch and flung it,” Thakur said, entering the conversation. “If it hadn’t hit one of us, it would have spread the Red Tongue all over the grass.”

“That wretched beast deserved to get burned up,” Khushi growled.

“Yes, and we’d have burned up with it,” Bira reproved. “You know how fast the Red Tongue can run.”

Khushi admitted that they were right, but he wouldn’t have minded if Bira had singed the obnoxious mammoth in a tender spot.

“I need to see that the embers in the fire-den haven’t gone out,” Bira announced, lifting her plumed tail. “Are we going back to the knoll? Good, I’ll meet you there.”

As she loped off down the gully, Thakur climbed up the side, followed by Khushi. He found the hill that they had used as a vantage point to locate the face-tails. It had a single oak that gave shade from the sun. The prevailing breeze carried their own scent away from the face-tail herd.

It brought him the odors of many other kinds of animals. Among these were feline scents that might belong to the Un-Named outsiders who outwardly resembled his own people but had only the minds and ways of beasts. Everything was so overlaid with the pungent smell of mammoth that Thakur could not be sure. He was not going to worry. The Red Tongue that Bira carried would protect him and his party.

He sat down in the litter of last season’s leaves and acorns, letting his gaze travel over the rolling plain below. It was still filled with the face-tailed beasts, some wallowing in a marshy sink between two hills, some drifting back and forth in a large group as they tore up grass with their trunks and stuffed it into their mouths.

The young ones showed up as blotches of orange against the more somber black and brown wool of their elders.

One of those orange splotches was probably the animal that had just escaped them. Despite their bulk the face-tails could move fast. Thakur eyed the beasts, trying to pick one that was young enough to be vulnerable and old enough not to need the protection of its mother. It wasn’t easy. Yesterday he had chosen a young calf and ended up fleeing from the enraged mother. Today’s quarry had proved to be old enough to defend itself.

His cars pricked forward as a line of smaller shapes emerged from a copse of trees near the wallow. They were not face-tails, nor any other kind of herdbeast. Beside him he felt Khushi stiffen as the wind brought a stronger version of a familiar scent to their noses.

“Un-Named ones, Thakur!” Khushi hissed.

The herding teacher hesitated in his reply. Yes, the forms were the cat shapes that resembled those of his own kind, but never had he seen the Un-Named do what these newcomers were doing.