The Horsemasters (16 page)

Ronan said, in a deceptively pleasant voice, “I am the chief of the Tribe of the Wolf, and I am the one to make the rules.”

Both Okal and Dai stared at their feet and did not reply. Ronan turned to Thorn. “How do you know there is no power in a picture?” he asked.

“I kept the pictures I made of you, and when I went to look at them recently I found that one of them had shattered,” Thorn replied honestly. “And another one had broken in two. I think it happened a long time ago, when I put them away with my childhood toys. Yet here you are”—Thorn gestured—”healthy and strong. That is why I know that the pictures have no power—or at least not the kind of power men have feared.”

“Luckily for me,” Ronan said drily. He glanced at his two followers. “As you say, I am still perfectly healthy.”

Dai said, “I do not want him to draw me!”

“Or me,” Okal agreed.

Ronan nodded. “It is your right to make that choice.” He stared at Thorn. “Do you hear me, son of Rilik? You are not to draw a picture of any person without permission.”

“Sa,” Thorn replied. “I hear you, Ronan.” Then he asked breathlessly, “Does this mean that I may join the Tribe of the Wolf?”

“I am thinking we have need of a flint knapper.” Thorn’s brown eyes were watching him anxiously. “And of an artist,” Ronan said.

* * * *

Ronan told Dai and Okal to bring Thorn to Fara, and the two young men led the boy in the direction of the huts that were clustered along the shore of the lake. The women Thorn had glimpsed earlier had disappeared, and he looked with eager curiosity at the substantial-looking series of buts reposing in the morning shade cast by the cliff. He commented about how well-built they looked.

“They have to be to withstand the winter weather,” Okal replied.

“Do you actually spend the winter in this valley?” Thorn asked in amazement.

The two young men nodded.

“But the snow must be very deep here. And the cold… Dhu, even the animals don’t stay in the Altas for more than six moons out of the year!”

“It is cold,” Okal agreed, “but the huts stay warm. The low angle of the winter sun warms them. There is actually little or no snow on the south-facing cliff, so there is grazing for the animals all winter long.”

“This valley is better protected than any place I have ever seen,” Dai put in. He pointed to the surrounding cliffs. “We are even protected from the winds.”

“But that side”—Thorn pointed to the cliff that ran along the whole western side of the valley—”is very low. It may protect you from the wind, but I do not see how it can keep intruders out.”

Dai grinned. “Climb it, and look down the other side,” he recommended.

“What is on the other side?”

“The mountains here drop down in shelves,” Dai explained. “You have seen how much lower this valley is than the land on the other side of the eastern wall?” Thorn nodded. “Well, it is the same on the far side of the western wall. The cliff is a sheer drop. Unclimbable.”

Thorn gazed at the deceptively low cliff. Beyond it, all he could see were the distant mountains of the Altas, lifting their lonely peaks to the sun and the clouds and the god of the Sky.

He let his eyes drift slowly southward. “And that way?” he asked, pointing to where the river had cut a passage through the cliffs on its exit from the southern end of the valley.

“A waterfall,” Okal said. “Tremendous. Unpassable.” He grinned with satisfaction. “The only way into this valley, youngster, is the passageway through which you just came.”

Thorn confessed, “I have been thinking that this is a land where even the gods might dwell.”

“No god,” Okal said drily. “Only Ronan.”

Dai laughed.

They stopped before one of the huts, and Dai called into the open door, “Fara! Eken! I have a visitor for you.”

“What visitor?” a woman’s voice called back.

“It is Thorn, Fara,” Thorn said loudly. “Rilik’s son.”

“Thorn!” A woman carrying a baby came to the door, and Thorn recognized Fara’s sister, Eken, the girl who was to have married his cousin. “It is!” Eken called back into the hut.

“Ronan told us to bring him to you,” Dai said.

Eken smiled. “We will take care of him, Dai. Thank you.” Then to Thorn, she said, “Come in, come in!”

Thorn ducked into the hut and saw Fara sitting on a reindeerskin beside the hearth, nursing a baby. Thorn smiled all over his face just to see her so. Her brown eyes looked so happy and serene as she gazed up at him, her babe at her breast.

“Have you come for me?” Eken had entered behind him, and as she took a seat next to her sister her pretty face puckered with a frown. “If you have come to bring me back to wed Herok, I will not go, Thorn. I am staying here with Fara.”

“I have not come for you, Eken,” Thorn said. “I have come to join the Tribe of the Wolf for myself.”

The women looked at each other in wonderment, then turned back to him. Eken waved for him to sit, and demanded, “Why?”

Thorn sighed, sat on his heels, and told them the story of the shaman’s son. While he was speaking Fara finished feeding one babe, handed it to Eken, and received the second, which she put to her other breast, Eken expertly cradled the first babe against her shoulder and began to pat its back.

“And so you came because you thought Ronan would let you continue to draw?” Eken asked when Thorn had finished his tale.

“Sa, And he has agreed that I may join the tribe—as a flint knapper and as an artist.”

“It is in my heart that you came on a fortunate day,” Fara said. “He has turned away two other men since we first arrived.”

“I do not understand that,” Thorn said in bewilderment. “If he wants to build a tribe, I should think he would want to increase his numbers.”

“He does, of course, but these two were particularly unsavory characters,” Eken said. “The tribe does not need thieves and murderers to make up its numbers.”

Thorn thought of Ronan’s comment about rapists and murderers, but did not know quite how to put his question. “Ah…”he said, “then what kind of people do make up the Tribe of the Wolf?”

Eken’s hand was gently massaging the baby’s back. “People who broke the rules of their own tribes,” she said. “People who made a mistake and were made to pay heavily for it. Not bad people, Thorn.”

“People like Beki and Kasar?” Thorn asked.

The two women looked at him curiously. “How do you know about Beki and Kasar?” Fara asked.

“The shaman’s son whose face I drew? He is Beki’s brother.”

“Sa,” said Fara, and she bent her head to rest her lips on the fuzzy baby head nursing at her breast.

“Well, then, sa, people like Beki and Kasar,” Eken said. “When I think of it, there are actually a number of people here who were unlucky in love.”

Thorn thought of Bror, whose sad story he had heard from Kenje. There was a man who had certainly been unlucky in love. “What of the two men who brought me here?” he asked Eken. “Dai and Okal. Were they unlucky in love also?”

“Okal was. He is of the Tribe of the Bear, and they are a tribe that is very strict with their unmarried girls. Okal lay with one of these girls and got her with child. She tried to rid herself of it and died in the attempt. Her brothers swore to kill Okal, and he fled to Ronan.”

“They must be strict indeed if the girl was reduced to such a fearful measure,” Thorn said wonderingly. “Why did she not just marry Okal?”

Fara raised her face from her baby’s hair. “He was to marry someone else,” she said drily.

“Oh.” Thorn thought of the redheaded young man whom he had first met at the gathering and slowly shook his head, “He does not look like the sort of man who would play games like that.”

Fara took the baby from her breast and lifted it to her shoulder. “It is not always easy to tell a man’s heart from his face,” she said.

Thorn nodded politely. “That is so.” He glanced at the open door and the daylight beyond it. “What of Dai, then?” he asked.

“I am not sure of his story,” Eken answered. “It has something to do with the death of his brother. I do know that he has been with Ronan for a long time—for almost as long as Bror.”

“How many people are there in the tribe altogether?”

“There are three handfuls of men—plus one, now that you are here. And one handful plus three of women.”

“That is a goodly number,” Thorn said, impressed.

“There are children also,” Fara said. “Three others besides my twins.”

Thorn looked from the bundled twin on Fara’s shoulder to the one that was reposing upon Eken’s. “Are they boys?” he asked.

“Girls,” Fara replied proudly.

Thorn smiled at the look on her face. “I am so glad that Ronan let you keep them.”

“He was brought up in the Way of the Goddess,” Fara said. “The Mother is gentler with children than Sky God is.”

“Yet it is my understanding that even the Goddess allows you to keep but one twin,” Thorn said. “At least, that is what my father told me.”

“Your father was right,” Eken said. “We have people here from the tribes of the plains and they are followers of the Mother. Twins, they believe, are really one child that has split in two in the womb. All of the goodness given to that one child goes into the first twin, the twin of lightness, and this twin they keep. The second twin, they believe, is the repository of all the single child’s evil, and this twin they expose.”

“But the Tribe of the Red Deer keeps them both?”

Fara shook her head. Her face looked strained. “Na. The Tribe of the Red Deer keeps the first twin and exposes the second. It is Ronan who said both babies should stay.” Her arms tightened around the precious bundle on her shoulder. “I will call blessings upon him for the rest of my days for that.”

Thorn said, “His heart is kind.”

Both Fara and Eken gave him identically startled looks. “I do not know if I would say that, precisely,” Fara murmured doubtfully.

“Why else would he allow you to keep the twins?”

It was Eken who replied. “I think it is because he is not afraid.” She rocked slowly back and forth, her cheek brushing against the baby sleeping so contentedly on her shoulder. “He is not afraid of twins, at least. Nor”—here she smiled faintly at Thorn—”of having pictures painted of his face.”

“But it is dangerous not to fear anything,” said Thorn, frowning slightly. “A man who has no fear has no reverence.”

Both women gave an identical shrug.

“What god does the Tribe of the Wolf worship?” Thorn asked next.

“We are all from different tribes, Thorn,” Fara said, “and we have different ways. Ronan’s rule is that each person should be free to follow his or her own way, so long as it does not interfere with the way of someone else.”

“What god does Ronan worship, then?” Thorn asked.

“Now that,” Eken said softly, “is a mystery.”

Chapter Twelve

It was not long before a procession of women began to appear before Fara’s tent, Thorn soon found himself at the center of a good-natured and curious group, all drinking Eken’s freshly brewed sage tea. Thorn was still young enough to feel perfectly comfortable among women and children, and so he drank his tea and answered their questions readily, and all the time his eyes were flicking from face to face, trying to match individuals to the names and stories Fara and Eken had told him earlier.

He would have known Beki for Kenje’s sister anywhere, he thought, looking at the girl’s sleepy blue eyes and tip-tilted nose. Seated next to Beki was a woman called Yeba, whose once-pretty face was disfigured by an ugly scar, It was not until afterward that Thorn learned from Eken the story behind that scar: Yeba’s husband had caught her in adultery and in punishment she had been expelled from the Tribe of the Squirrel with the tip of her nose cut off.

Thorn was also introduced to two women from the People of the Dawn, one of the tribes that dwelt on the plain to the morning side of the Altas. Thorn had never before met a woman who was not of the Kindred, and he looked at them with wide-eyed curiosity.

Both Berta and Tora had glossy, dark brown hair, which they wore in a single braid that reached to their waist. Their eyes were large and brown, their nosebones and cheekbones broad, their complexions warmly olive. They were sisters, Thorn found out later, who had left their tribe when their brother had been expelled by the healing woman for being possessed of an evil spirit. The girls had refused to desert their young brother and had taken him into the high mountains in a valiant attempt to contact the spirits that would cure him of the sweating sickness that had so terrified their tribe. There they had been discovered by Heno, one of Ronan’s men, and he had helped to care for the sick boy. When Mait had recovered, all three siblings had followed Heno to the Valley of the Wolf, Both girls had since married, and both had arrived at Fara’s fire with young children in cradleboards upon their backs.

All of the women were politely curious about what had brought Thorn to the Tribe of the Wolf. Reluctantly, he told them his tale, acutely aware of Beki, Kenje’s sister, sitting at his side. When he had finished he turned and assured her earnestly, “I am convinced that Kenje was in no danger.” And he related the story of Ronan’s pictures.

“Ronan was mad to let you draw his picture in the first place,” Fara said firmly. “What was he thinking of?”

Before Thorn could reply, Berta spoke. “Ronan was brought up in the Way of the Mother and we do not believe in painted images as do those of you who follow Sky God.” Berta spoke the language of the Kindred, but with an accent that proclaimed her outlander origins.

Beki spoke next, her voice bitter. “I see that my father has not changed. You say that he managed to extort a big fine from your chief?”

“Sa,” Thorn said. “We lost all the profits of our trading. Haras was furious with me.”

“My father has ever been watchful to make a profit from his children,” Beki said, even more bitterly than she had spoken before.

“Fathers do not feel for their children the way mothers do,” Berta said. Her baby had begun to fuss a few minutes earlier, and she was busy unfastening her from the cradle-board. “It is a constant amazement to me the way the women of the Kindred have allowed the men to usurp their mother-rights.”