Ratha’s Challenge (The Fourth Book of The Named) (2 page)

The line broke up as its members dispersed and melted into the high grass about the wallow. Thakur narrowed his eyes. At one end of the marshy area stood a face-tail whose patchy orange-and-black coat showed that it was older than the one the Named had tried to capture.

“They are hunting it,” Bira said. She had arrived so quietly that Thakur had hardly noticed.

Yes, they were. He caught a glimpse of a circle of hidden stalkers creeping toward the face-tail. There were more hunters than he had first thought, and they seemed to move with a deadly purpose. Unconsciously he cased himself down, peering through the high grass. Bira and Khushi followed his example.

The face-tail, unconcerned, was sloshing in the wallow, squirting water over itself with its trunk. The circle of hunters paused, as if making the final decision to attack. The scent wafting to Thakur’s nose carried more than a sense of hunger or the usual blind ferocity of the Un-Named. He sensed a certain unified purpose in their behavior that surprised him.

If these ones are truly Un-Named, they are different than any I know,
he thought.

He did not see which individual triggered the attack. At one instant they were all crouched together in the grass; the next they were swarming onto the startled face-tail. Muddy water turned pink as the attackers clawed their way up the beast’s flanks and laid open its flesh with deep slashes.

The rest of the face-tails, alarmed, lumbered away with raised trunks, abandoning the victim.

The struggle did not last long. Despite the face-tail’s trumpeting and plunging, it soon toppled under the savagery of the assault. For a while it flailed in the shallow water as the hunters gathered atop it and began to feed. Then it grew still.

Beside him, Thakur felt Bira shivering. “I have never seen Un-Named ones like these before,” she hissed. “And I don’t like them!”

Khushi was struck silent. “They made it look ... easy!” he blurted at last.

“Sh. We don’t want to attract their attention,” Thakur cautioned.

Bira began to creep slowly backward, deeper into the shade cast by the oak. Khushi followed. Thakur, torn between curiosity and fear, was the last to come away.

“Let’s go,” said Bira as Biaree huddled nervously on her shoulders.

Thakur agreed, but would only let his companions retreat as far as the small fire-den Bira had dug to store the coals of the Red Tongue.

He was thinking hard. The speed and efficiency of the unknown hunters told him that they were not a ragtag group of Un-Named ones such as those that had raided the clan’s herds in previous seasons. Even the organized attacks that had nearly decimated the Named had not been as complex or as smoothly carried out as this hunt. His sense of danger told him to leave these hunters far behind, but there was another sense that told him to stay.

Who were they? Where had they come from? How had they learned to hunt such formidable prey as the face-tails? The questions whirled through Thakur’s mind.

“You saw the hunt,” he argued, when his two companions protested against the idea of remaining. “Something like that takes more than strength and fierceness. They were working together.”

Bira gave him a questioning look. “The Un-Named can work together. They did when they attacked us several seasons ago.”

“Yes, but those attacks were not as well planned as the hunt we just saw. I was in those fights. I remember.” Thakur turned to Khushi. “This kill looked easy because everything was arranged in advance. Each hunter knew exactly what she or he was supposed to do and did it.” He continued, growing more excited. “Don’t you see? Not only must they be able to think and speak, they must be able to make detailed plans and describe them to each other. They must be like us!”

The other two stared at him, their jaws hanging open. As long as the Named had existed, they had thought their clan was the only one of its kind and that they alone had the gifts of awareness, forethought, and speech. A few individuals with such gifts existed among the Un-Named, but they had come from fringe matings with the clan.

Perhaps the Named were not unique after all.

Thakur and his two companions returned to the scene of the kill, hid, and watched patiently. The face-tail hunters were joined by others: elders, half-grown cubs, and nursing or pregnant females. The group all gorged themselves until late in the day. They then scattered to chew on bones they had taken from the carcass, or to lie in the sun.

Now was the best time to approach, Thakur decided. The Un-Named would be sated and sleepy. Carefully he and the others crept to a small stand of brush that was closer to the hunters and safely downwind.

“Are you sure this is a good idea, herding teacher?” Bira asked when he told her what he planned and asked her to stay behind with a small flame of the Red Tongue and pine branches to light for torches.

“They won’t attack. They’ve eaten too much. And if they chase us, they can’t run far with heavy stomachs.”

Bira was still doubtful. She also questioned Thakur’s conviction that he would be able to talk to the face-tail hunters. “We did not hear them speak to each other,” she argued quietly. “And they did not seem to be following a leader’s directions. That tells me that they are not like us. Perhaps we should wait and keep watching from a distance.”

Thakur answered that those objections had occurred to him, but that this chance was one worth taking. The hunters would only be sated and lazy for a short time. Afterward it would be too dangerous to approach.

Khushi, listening to them both, offered to go by himself. Thakur’s skills were too valuable to risk losing, he said. Who else would instruct the clan’s young if the herding teacher were killed?

“You and all the other herders I have trained,” Thakur answered. “Together you have enough knowledge. What you do not have is my experience in dealing with strangers outside the clan. I don’t plan to let myself be killed. You and I look enough like the hunters to fool them, at least from a distance.”

“What about our smell?”

“Rolling in face-tail dung should disguise it; the stuff is strong enough.”

Khushi only made a grimace.

Thakur gazed out over the open plain where the hunters sprawled in scattered groups. “Bira, watch us and keep a torch ready. I hope we will not need it....”

“But if you do, the Red Tongue will be there,” Bira said fiercely, taking up her post.

With Khushi pacing beside him, Thakur left the sheltering brush and walked out onto the open plain. The sun sat low behind him and the sky was starting to pale into the colors of dusk. After rolling thoroughly in a fresh pile of face-tail manure, he and Khushi took a wandering course toward the hunters. Sometimes the two lay down or even flopped over on their backs for a little while, imitating the bloated lassitude of the others.

The smell of the carcass was rich in Thakur’s nose. Next to him, Khushi swallowed, and the aroma of hunger tinged his smell. Thakur could not blame the young herder. His own mouth was watering. They had eaten yesterday, a few ground-birds caught by Bira, but it was not enough to fill their bellies.

“Don’t think about eating,” he said when he saw the thought in Khushi’s eyes. “We won’t get close to the kill. The chances are that they will smell something strange about us, despite the dung, and chase us away.”

To Thakur’s astonishment, his deception worked. In the fading light the two managed to pass the outer fringes of the large group without being challenged. To one side, Thakur saw spotted cubs gamboling around their parents. He and Khushi skirted a group of half-grown males all snoring together in a pile.

“They don’t even post sentries?” Khushi whispered to Thakur.

“Why should they? Who is going to attack them? As for the kill, it is too heavy to be stolen, and they have eaten all they want.”

Thakur looked about for someone who might respond to their approach. He chose a group of three who were resting but not asleep. One was toying with a broken piece of rib bone, but none were still eating. As one lifted a muzzle against the sky, Thakur could see that the fangs were long enough to show outside the mouth.

The sight of those teeth reminded him of Shongshar, the orange-eyed stranger that Ratha had once taken into the clan. Could these hunters be his people? Feeling a chill, Thakur hoped not. Shongshar had turned into a tyrant, overthrowing Ratha and ruling the clan with his savage ways and long saber-teeth. One of his kind was enough.

But the fangs of these hunters were not as long as Shongshar’s, although their teeth were longer than Thakur’s own. The length seemed to vary in different individuals. It also did among the Named, although not to such extremes.

He realized that he was delaying, fearful of making the first try at speaking to these people. Was he more afraid of provoking an attack or of losing his hope that this group might be a clan like the Named? He did not know.

“Khushi, stay close behind me and don’t say anything,” he warned. His mouth, wetted by appetite, went dry with apprehension. His usually eloquent tail felt stiff and clumsy. Swallowing to moisten his tongue, he deliberately approached the other group. Eyes—green, gold, and amber—shone in the fading dusk.

He feared that his heart was booming loud enough for everyone to hear. His pelt felt as though it would jump right off his body—every hair was standing so much on end. Would the face-tail hunters know him for a stranger and attack, or would they welcome him as a brother?

Not trusting the manure scent to conceal his smell entirely, he and Khushi positioned themselves downwind of the three they were approaching. He lifted his tail in a friendly arch.

One, a tawny female with heavy shoulders, got up. He was afraid she would snarl, but instead she extended her muzzle for a nose-touch. His hopes leaped up. This was the same greeting the Named knew and used. Eagerly he answered in kind, breathing in her scent. It was much like that of his own people, though overlaid with the powerful aroma of face-tail.

The two others in the group roused themselves and also greeted him with the nose-touch. One even rubbed a welcoming chin on Thakur’s shoulder and flopped a tail across his back. Khushi was also accepted.

Yet as soon as the nose-touching and rubbing were finished, the three turned back to lazing or grooming or playing, without a word to the newcomers. Thakur found this disconcerting. They must have recognized that he was a stranger. Why, then, hadn’t they attacked him or chased him away?

Or, if for some reason they had chosen to accept him anyway, why wouldn’t they say something to him?

He rolled over on his side, nudging Khushi to follow suit. He would have to speak first. A dismaying thought seized him. He had not heard any of these hunters talk. Suppose Bira was right and they couldn’t.

No, that can’t be true, he argued to himself. They could not have organized that hunt if they couldn’t tell each other what to do.

Perhaps their language was all gesture and scent. As Thakur considered that possibility, he heard a voice that was not Khushi’s.

“Give the bone,” it said. The heavy-shouldered female was trying to paw the rib fragment from the male who was playing with it.

“No. Go get another. There are plenty left in the carcass,” came the irritable reply.

Thakur’s heart leaped in excitement. Not only did these ones speak, but they used a language so close to that of the Named that he could understand what they said. He waited tensely, hoping someone would speak to him.

The female yawned. “The meat was tender.”

“Salty,” said the other.

“Go drink,” the male advised. “There are places at the water hole.”

Thakur’s ears, which had been sharply pricked, started to sag. Surely they had more interesting things to say than this. He made himself stay quiet and listen, but he heard only more of the same.

Khushi, bored, yawned widely, showing all his teeth. He snapped his mouth shut self-consciously.

“Open it again,” said the male who was playing with the bone. Thakur blinked when he realized the command had been given to Khushi. Khushi was startled, too. Thakur had to nuzzle him before he responded.

The male peered into Khushi’s mouth. “Those fangs are too short. Stop eating bones. They wear teeth down. The song says good teeth are needed for the hunt. Listen to the song.”

“The ... song?” asked Khushi, but he spoke so softly that the male didn’t hear him. Thakur listened, but he could hear nothing like the courting yowls the Named called songs.

Puzzled, he asked the hunter, “What are you listening to?”

He thought he spoke clearly, but the male only gave him a baffled look. “Those words are confusing,” the other said. “Speak again.”

Thakur had no idea why his question was not clear. “The song,” he faltered.

“The song is always being sung,” the other stated.

“Why can’t I—”

“Stop speaking!” the male ordered sharply. “Those words make no sense.”

Puzzled and slightly irritated, Thakur closed his mouth. He noticed that the others in the group were eyeing him as if he were something noxious that had walked into their midst. What had he said? He wondered if it had been wise for him to confess he could not hear this “song” or whatever it was that they were making such a fuss about.