Grass (4 page)

Somewhere a grass peeper shrilled and shrilled again, an arrhythmic pulse within the grove, repeating until it was almost but not quite a pattern, then silencing until she thought it had stopped, only to return once more. She caught a glimpse of a peeper out of the corner of her eye, white and wriggly, squirming among the grass roots.

A hound bayed, a deep, bellowing
aroo
which made her heart falter as it went on and on. Then another joined, half a tone above, the sound of the two like a knife in her ears. Then all the pack, the tones of the voices lost in a vast cacophony,
aroo
and
aroo,
unmelodious and dissonant. The mounts screamed in answer and lunged deeper into the wood. They had found the fox, started the fox, would pursue the fox. Dimity shut her eyes and held on once more, biting her tongue, biting her cheeks, anything to stay conscious and upright, anything at all. A thought came to her.

This is Darenfeld's Coppice, her mind told her. Darenfeld's Coppice which lay, once upon a time, within the bounds of Darenfeld's estancia. You are riding to hounds in Darenfeld's Coppice, where your friend Janetta bon Maukerden died. Dimity's mouth opened to shout, and her mind told her mouth to close itself once more. You will be still about it, she told herself. No one really said Janetta died here. No one said that. No one said anything except her name and then whispering, "Darenfeld's Coppice." And when Dimity asked, they said shush, shush, don't say, don't ask.

They know more than you do, she told herself. You can't tell them anything they don't know already.

The hounds were baying as they raced away, and the mount beneath her was dashing after them. She stayed on, eyes shut once more. It was all she could do to hold on. To stay where she was. Not to fall off. To be silent. To bear the pain. To go on with the Hunt.

The Hunt does go on. Time passes. The fox runs for hours. The riders pursue it for hours. Dimity forgets who she is or where she is. There is no yesterday, nor any tomorrow. There is only an everlasting now, full of the pound of feet on the turf, the rustle of grasses as they push their way through, the scream of the fox far ahead, the bay of the hounds. Hours gone. Days, perhaps. Perhaps they have ridden for days. She would not know.

There is nothing to mark the passage of time. Thirst, yes. Hunger, yes. Weariness, yes. Pain, yes. All of these have been there since early in the morning: burning thirst, gnawing hunger, aching bones, deep-set as a disease. Her mouth cannot be drier than it is, her stomach emptier. She cannot hurt more than she hurts. And now, at last, she gives up fighting against it. It will last forever. The thing in her head wipes out any concern about that. Nothing measures time. No before. No after. Nothing, nothing. Until the mount beneath her slows and stops and she unwillingly leaves the agonized daze she has fallen into and opens her eyes.

They are standing at the edge of another copse, moving slowly into it, into a grove, into the dusky cathedral shade of the trees. High above them the foliage opens to allow the sun to pierce the gloom in long radiant spears. One of them lights Stavenger where he stands upon his mount with the harpoon in his hands, ready to throw. From the tree branches above comes a scream of rage, then Stavenger's arm whips out and the line streaks behind the harpoon like a thread of purest gold. A horrible scream again, this time of agony.

A hound leaps high to seize the line in his teeth. Other hounds as well. They have it. They are pulling the fox out of the tree, still howling, still screaming, never silent for an instant. Something huge and dark with glistening eyes and mighty fangs falls among them, and then there is only the sound of screaming mixed with the sound of teeth.

Dimity closes her eyes again, too late not to see the dark blood fountaining among the struggling bodies, and feels … feels a welling of pleasure so deeply intimate it makes her flush and draw her breath in, makes her legs quiver where they bestride the body beneath her, makes her whole body rock in a spasm of ecstatic sensation.

All around her other eyes are closed, other bodies quiver. Except for Sylvan. Sylvan sits erect, eyes fixed on the bloody tumult before him, teeth bared in a silent rage of defiance, his face quite blank. He can see Dimity from where he is, see her body thrashing, her eyes closed. In order not to see it, he turns his face away.

Dimity did not open her eyes again until they had come all the way back to Klive and had left the Dark Forest to enter upon the Trail of Greens and Blues, There the pain became too much to bear silently and she moaned without thinking, only a tiny sound. One of the hounds looked back at her, a great, violet-mottled hound, its eyes like flames. There was blood on it, blood all over it, its own blood or the blood of the fox. She was conscious in that moment that those same eyes had looked at her again and again during the hunt, that those same eyes had looked at her even when the fox fell from the tree into the middle of the pack, when she felt … that.

She looked down at her hands clenched upon the reins and did not raise her head again.

When they arrived at the Hunt Gate, she could not dismount by herself. Sylvan had to help her. He was at her side so quickly that she thought no one noticed how weak she was. No one but that same hound, his red eyes gleaming in the gathering dusk. Then he went away, all the hounds went away, the mounts went away, and the Huntsman sounded his horn softly at the gate, crying, "The Hunt is over. We have returned. Let us come in."

From the balcony, Rowena heard the muted horn call. It meant the creatures were gone and humans waited to be attended to. She leaned across the balustrade, hands clutching one another, mouth open, as a servant opened the Kennel Gate from inside and the weary hunters straggled through: the Master and the members of the Hunt in their red coats, the women in their black, their padded breeches making them look wide and froglike in the gloom. White breeches were sweat-stained now, and the pristine purity of the hunt ties had been sullied by dust and by chaff from the tall grasses. Male servants waited with goblets of water and bits of grilled meat on skewers. Baths were waiting, had been waiting for some hours, steaming from the heat of their own little furnaces, and the hunters, hands full of meat and drink, scattered toward their various rooms. Gasping, ready to cry out at last from the fear she had fought during the long day, Rowena sought among the riders until she found the slight figure of Diamante leaning on Sylvan's arm. Then the tears spilled over and she sought a voice she had almost lost in the conviction that Dimity had not returned.

"Dimity." Rowena leaned across the rail, not wishing to be overheard by Stavenger or one of the other aristocratic old guard. When the girl looked up, Rowena beckoned, and Sylvan nodded toward a side door. Within a few minutes Dimity was in her mother's room and Salla was greeting her with an exclamation of disgust.

"Dirty! Oh, you're filthy, girl – i Filthy. Like a migerer mole creature. Covered all over. Take that coat off, and that tie. I'll get your robe and you can take off the rest of this filthy stuff."

"I'm dirty but I'm all right, Salla," said the girl, moon-pale, pushing weakly at Salla's busy hands.

"Dimity?"

"Mother."

"Give Salla your clothes, dear. Here, I'll help you with your boots." There was a brief, grunting interlude as the high black boots were tugged off. "You can have your bath in here while you tell me about the Hunt." She moved through the luxurious bedroom, beckoning, opening the door into the mosaic-tiled bath, where water had been already drawn and kept steaming by its own fires. "You can use my bath oil. You always liked that when you were tiny. Are you sore?"

Dimity tried to smile in response, failed. It was all she could do to keep her hands from shaking as she stripped her underclothes away, letting them fall in a pile on the bathroom floor. Only after she was neck deep in steaming water did Rowena say again, "Tell me about it."

The girl murmured, "I don't know. Nothing happened." The water was soaking away the pain. It hurt to move, and yet in the warm soothe of the water it had become almost pleasure to feel that ache, that deep, abiding agony of the bones. "Nothing happened."

Rowena stamped her foot, very softly, eyes bright with tears. "Did you have any trouble mounting?"

"No. Not really."

"Had you … had you seen the mount before?"

Dimity opened her eyes, suddenly aware, looking at her mother directly. "The mount? I think it's one I've seen before, grazing maybe, out near the shortgrass field where Syl and I used to play." Perhaps this meant something. She searched her mother's face, but Rowena only nodded. When Rowena had first ridden, her mount, too, had been one she had seen watching her when she was a child. "Where did you go?"

"I think we drew a copse in Darenfeld's … in the valley." Rowena nodded again, remembering dark trees towering, shutting out the sky, the ground covered with small flowering mosses, a noise of running water under the mosses, under the roots. Remembering Dimity's friend, Shevlok's lover, Janetta … "Did you start a fox?"

"Yes." She shut her eyes, unwilling to say more. She didn't want to talk about it. She wanted to forget it. Next time she would give in to the pain right away. Next time she wouldn't fight it Through slitted lids she saw Rowena's face, still questioning, still demanding, wanting more. Sighing, Dimity said, "The hounds went in. Pretty soon they were all baying, and we went racing off. I seem to remember the hounds lost him three or four times, but they got him each time again. Maybe I only made that up. He just ran and ran forever, that's all. And then the hounds treed him away north somewhere."

"Did you kill?"

"Stavenger did. Daddy. I mean, the Master did. He only had to throw once. I couldn't see where the harpoon stuck, but they pulled the fox out of the tree and the hounds got him." She flushed then, deeply, the blood rising into her face in an unmistakable tide as she remembered what had followed.

Rowena saw the flush, interpreted it correctly, and turned aside in order not to confront what she saw there. Shame. Embarrassment. Mortified pudicity. Rowena sought for something, anything to say other than … other than this. It had happened to her, too. It had always happened. She had never mentioned it to another soul. She had not known until now whether it was her guilty secret or a secret shared. "You didn't really see the fox, then."

"I couldn't see anything except a blob in the tree. Then eyes, and teeth, and then it was all over."

"Ah." Rowena sighed, the tears now streaming, laughing at herself and her fears, shamed for Dimity's shame but relieved just the same. "Mother! I'm all right. It's all right."

Rowena nodded, dabbing at her eyes. Of all the things that might have gone wrong, none had. Dimity had mounted, had ridden, hadn't fallen off, hadn't been attacked by the fox, hadn't done anything to upset the hounds.

"Mother." Softly, moved by the tears, offering something.

"Yes, Dimity – "

"There was this one hound that kept watching me, all the time we were coming back. A kind of purplish mottled one. He just kept looking at me and looking at me. Every time I looked down, there he was."

"You didn't stare!"

"Of course not. I know better. I didn't even seem to notice, not that the hound could see. I just thought it was funny, that's all."

Rowena argued with herself. Say too little? Say too much? Say nothing? "Hounds are peculiar that way. Sometimes they watch us. Sometimes they don't look at us. Sometimes they seem to be amused by us. You know."

"I don't, really."

"Well, they need us, Dimity. They can't climb, so they can't kill the fox unless we bring him down."

"They only need one man for that, somebody with a strong arm to throw the harpoon."

"Oh, I think there's more to it than that. The hounds seem to enjoy the Hunt. The ritual of it."

"When we were riding back, I kept wondering how it ever got started. I know they ride to the hounds on Terra, back before Sanctity, before we left. That was in my history book, with pictures of the horses and dogs and the little furry thing – nothing like our fox at all. I couldn't figure out why they should have wanted to kill it, even. With our foxen, killing it is the only thing to do. But why do it this way?"

"One of the first settlers made friends with a young mount and learned to ride him, that's all there is to it," Rowena answered. "The settler taught some friends, and the young mount brought along some more of its kind, and gradually we had a Hunt again."

"And the hounds?"

"I don't know. My grandfather told me once that they were simply there one day, that's all. As though they knew we needed them to have a proper Hunt. They always show up on the proper day at the proper place, just like the mounts do … "

"If we call them hounds when they aren't really hounds, how come we don't call the mounts horses?" Dimity asked, lying back until her head was half submerged, contented now to say nothing much, to talk, perhaps to have her mother wash her back.

Rowena was startled. "Oh, I don't think the Hippae would like that, not at all."

"But they don't mind being called mounts?"

"But my dear, we never call them even that where they can hear us. You know that. We never call them anything at all where they can hear us."

"It makes your head feel funny," said Dimity. "Doesn't it?"

"What?" asked Rowena, suddenly on her feet. "What does?"

"Hunting. Doesn't it make your head feel funny?"

Rowena said in a preoccupied tone, "It has a kind of hypnotic effect. It would really be rather boring otherwise." She put a folded towel within Dimity's reach, then left the room, closing the door behind her to keep the steamy warmth within.

One of the hounds watching Dimity? She bit her lip, frowned, acquired a suddenly haunted expression. She would have to speak to Sylvan about that. Right now he would be closeted with Figor about that Sanctity business, but perhaps he had noticed something. No one else would have noticed anything, but perhaps Sylvan had. Or perhaps it had all been in Dimity's mind. Weariness and hours of pain could do that.