Snare

‘As the Holy One wishes.’ His smile gone, Zayn stood up. He nodded once in her direction, then hurried off into the camp. As she watched him go, she realized that she was as disappointed as he was. You don’t need entanglements, she reminded herself. Especially not when you’re planning a spirit quest. With a long sigh she sat down by the fire and began to unwrap her hungry crystals.

Warkannan woke just at dawn and found Soutan gone from the camp. Beside the dead fire Arkazo still slept, rolled up in a blanket, so sound asleep that Warkannan decided against waking him; they could say their morning prayers a bit late and not offend God. Warkannan pulled on his trousers and his boots, then stood for a moment winding his pocket watch, a morning ritual that dated from his first days on the border. It was comforting, somehow, to know the time, to measure the time, even out here where space seemed so endless that time became irrelevant.

This early in the day the air was cool; he could hear the nearby stream chortling over rocks; a breeze trembled the long purple grass that stretched to the horizon. The silver dawn caught a few streaks of clouds and turned them as crimson as the distant trees. Frogs croaked; tree lizards, as bright as jewels, sang to each other; the hum of constant insects sounded in the brightening light.

‘God, I hate it out here!’ Warkannan muttered. ‘Give me the city any day!’

He seated his watch in his pocket, clipped the chain to his belt, and went to look for Soutan.

Warkannan found him just a few hundred yards away, muttering over his crystals. At Warkannan’s approach, he looked up.

‘What would you say to an old-fashioned ambush?’ Soutan said.

‘Of Zayn, you mean? What did you have in mind?’

‘The comnee seems to be heading due east, and I suspect they’re on their way to the Cantons. They’ll have to pass through the downs to get to the Rift. Comnees always stop in the downs to hunt before they cross over. When we get there, you’ll see what I mean about the terrain – plenty of places to hide and wait for a hunting party with Zayn in it to come along.’

‘All right. I take it you couldn’t come up with some mighty magical spell.’

‘Sneer all you want, but the crystals will give us all the magic we need. When we see him ride out, we can set our trap.’

And that, Warkannan had to admit, was true enough.

As they continued east, Zayn took to riding at the rear of the herd, where he could turn in the saddle now and again to keep watch for his enemies. The land began to rise and fall in long low downs, as if the ground were buckling under the push of a giant hand. In the shallow valleys streams ran through tangles of orange ferns and gold pipeplants.

During the day the high-pitched chitters and whip-lash calls of the bush lizards would fall silent as the comnee approached, only to pick up and swell into a chorus of warning once they passed. Night brought a cacophony of frogs. Zayn learned to separate out the chirps of tiny six-legged hoppers and the booming of the big squat watertoads with their red double tongues. Whenever he heard a crane calling, he would turn in its direction and try to answer. At those moments the Chosen and the khanate both seemed things he had dreamt once, a long time ago.

This slow travelling eventually brought the comnee to a long, broad valley and a chain of small lakes, pale blue against the deep violet of spring grass. Here they set up a full camp to prepare for the journey across the Rift. Zayn was assuming that the danger from ChaMeech would be on everyone’s mind, but much to his surprise no one took it very seriously.

‘They’re a nuisance, sure,’ Dallador told him. ‘Sometimes they try to raid our herds, but they save their bloodlust for the Kazraks. I don’t know why, but they hate your guts.’

‘Yes, we’ve noticed.’

Dallador flashed him a smile. ‘The real problem with going east is taking our own hay for the horses.’

‘Isn’t there grass in the Cantons?’

‘Of course. But there’s a Bane. The horses can eat Canton grass while we’re there, but on the journey out they can only eat hay from the plains.’

‘Why?’

‘We can’t carry any seeds out of the Cantons and into the plains. If the horses ate Canton plants just before we got back and then shat, there could be seeds in it.’

‘That’s damned strange, Dallo. Why –’

‘I don’t know why. It’s just Bane.’

To keep down the amount of hay they had to carry, only part of the comnee would travel east; they would take only their own mounts and the horses to be sold. The women got together to decide who would travel and who would stay. Those leaving appointed trusted friends to tend their children while they were gone; in exchange, they would take along the horses that those staying wanted sold. Some of the men would ride with them as guards, and the spirit rider would bring the gods to keep her people safe from foreign magic in a dangerously different land.

‘At times I still think like a Kazrak,’ Zayn said to Dallador. ‘It’s strange to see the women doing the buying and selling.’

‘Why would men want to? Haggling is women’s work.’

‘But doesn’t it trouble you to have nothing to leave your son?’

‘A man always knows who his mother is. But his father? Who knows what women will do in the dark? So they’re the only ones who know who the blood-kin are, and it’s your blood-kin who should have your horses.’

Preparations for the trip took days. While the women cut grass and spread it to dry into pale blue hay, the men hunted. The big grassars avoided this rough shrubby terrain, but a smaller species, the orange-and-grey striped browzars, flourished in the valleys. Every time someone made a kill, the men stripped the carcass down to bone and smoked the meat into jerky. Zayn spent several days learning how to cut the raw flesh – a job that he found irritating beyond belief. It was tricky work, using the long knife to slice leather-thin strips of meat. Sweat ran down his forehead and got into his eyes. Shiny magenta flies and the ever-present yellabuhs swarmed around, stinging and stealing.

His turn to hunt came as a welcome relief. In the downs, the browzars sought shelter in the valley thickets; once they got into the underbrush, the men would have to take their spears and follow on foot – a dangerous kind of hunting, thanks to venomous snakes and other such creatures in the dense thorn thickets. The best tactic, or so Dallador told him, was to look for a herd that was grazing part-way up the slope of a hill, then get below and chase them towards the crest and open land.

They left camp just at noon. Riding single-file the six hunters worked their way upstream along the riverbank. In a shallow valley, they spotted at last a small herd. The men looped their reins around their saddle horns, then took their bows from their backs. With their quivers on one hip, they walked the horses, guiding with their knees, until they were close enough for the noise to alarm the dominant bull.

It threw up its orange head and bellowed, slapping the ground with its tail. The hunters kicked their horses to a gallop and charged, shrieking a warcry. The browzars lashed out with striped tails, then bounded away, turning uphill. The men loosed their first volley and grabbed for second arrows while the well-trained horses sped after the fleeing prey.

Zayn loosed an arrow, missed badly, and rode hard for the main herd. Arrows arched overhead as the other men shot again. Bleeding and howling, a young female browzar fell. Zayn aimed for another, missed again, and pulled another arrow as they raced up the side of the hill. He swore under his breath – his reflexes were simply all wrong for this sort of bow. Almost directly in front of him a young bull, smarter than most, broke from the herd and headed downhill. With a curse Zayn loosed, missed, and shifted his weight in the saddle to turn his horse after it.

Down through the treacherous tall grass they raced. Zayn was hoping that the thorny brush along the stream would stop the bull and force it to stay in range. He was determined to hit at least one target for the day, and the determination got the better of his common sense. When they reached the flat, Zayn’s horse gained ground, but even from this close a distance Zayn’s arrow sailed wide. The bull gave one last leap and charged into the tangled cover. Cursing, Zayn let his horse come to a halt and swung himself off.

Shrubs rose waist-high among the nodding frond-trees in an infuriating orange and red tangle. Zayn could see the bull pushing its way through ahead of him as it struggled to reach the stream. He would have gone after it with his last two arrows, but from behind him he heard someone yell.

‘Stay right there!’ Dallador shouted. ‘Don’t go in!’

Zayn obeyed. He mounted his horse, but he let it rest while the others rode down. They surrounded him, and he could see the concern on all their faces.

‘What’s wrong?’ Zayn said.

‘Firesnakes, that’s what,’ Dallador said. ‘Don’t you remember what I told you? We’ve already made a kill. You don’t need to risk getting bitten and poisoned to make another one.’

‘Sorry. It just makes me so damn mad that I can’t hit anything with this bow.’

‘You’ll get it eventually. Come on, let’s get the kill back to camp.’

When the men left for the hunt, Ammadin had taken her crystals and walked out into the grass. Over the past few days, she’d been trying at every pass of the Riders to contact Water Woman, but so far she’d failed. On this occasion as well she heard nothing but the mysterious ocean waves that seemed to emanate from somewhere inside Long Voice. Finally she gave up, took Spirit Eyes, and scanned, sweeping outward from the camp in a spiral. Off to the east, at the very limit of the spirit’s power, she saw three figures who looked like ChaMeech, but the image was too indistinct to reveal their gender.

Ammadin did, however, find the hunting party. On one of her sweeps she saw the tiny figures of men on horseback, driving browzars along the crest of a down. All at once a bull broke free and charged downhill with one of the men riding hard after it. She recognized Zayn’s sorrel gelding.

‘Closer!’

Spirit Eyes obliged. The view shifted, and she was looking down as if from a height of some fifty feet. It was Zayn, all right, risking the horse’s legs and his own neck. By the time he reached the flat, the browzar had plunged into the brush, just under mark twelve on the crystal. Zayn started to follow, then pulled up to wait for the other men, riding more cautiously down the hill after him.

‘Go to twelve.’

In the red and gold tangle of foliage she saw the bull shoving its way through the brush. It tossed its head from side to side, raised its muzzle as if it were bellowing, and thrust with its thick shoulders. At last it splashed across the river, burst out on the other side, and rushed off into the grass. The hunters had lost it. Some yards downstream, however, something moved. Someone stood up – a Kazrak, the same older man with a black beard she’d seen before. He held a hunting bow, and he was visibly angry.

‘Long Voice,’ Ammadin said. ‘Listen for.’

Dimly she heard his voice, humming in the bone behind her left ear. Arkazo, come on, we might as well give it up.