At Chief Sami’s side sat his wife of twenty-two years, Alis Krooguh of Krooguh, flanked by her eldest living son. Alis and Sami were of an age: they had played together as children, shared together their herding duties and war training, and shared the wonders and pleasures of each other’s bodies from puberty.
Every soul in Clan Krooguh had accepted the fact that they two would someday wed long before the day Sami rode back into camp after three years of service as a hired guard for plains traders, married Alis and brought her into his mother’s yurt and household.
When, about two years later, his elder brother died of a broken neck while chasing after antelope on horseback, Sami, Alis and their two children had been summoned to live in the household of Chief Tim, that the younger man might begin to learn the art of chieftainship.
Upon Tim’s death, which came suddenly and unexpectedly though not in any way violently, Behtiloo began to move her effects to the yurt of her son Hwahlis. But Alis would not even hear of such a thing, for all that she had not tried to stay the departures of the late chief’s three younger wives or his concubines when they moved in with grown children and those children’s families.
“No, Mother, please stay here with us. This is your home, it has always been your home for as long as I can remember, and … and I cannot imagine living here, in your home, without you in it. Father Tim spent twenty years in teaching our Sami to be a proper chief; now you must teach me and watch over me and so see that I behave as becomes the proper wife of a chief. Besides, who but you can so brew the herbs so that children drink the broths without making those terrible faces and rude noises, eh?”
Skilled in compounding herbal tonics. nostrums and remedies Behtiloo Hansuhn of Krooguh assuredly was. She had been for many years, ever since Lainuh Krooguh, Chief Tim’s long-dead mother, had first taken her youngest son’s captive-wife under her wing and begun to impart her own considerable, in-depth knowledge of the curative properties of wild prairie plants. After Lainuh’s death, Behtiloo had learned more from Tim’s father’s concubine, Dahnah. Then, too, her years of practicing the herbal arts had taught her mightily.
But none of her encyclopedic knowledge availed her in saving the life of Alis Krooguh, who died during the fifth winter after Sami became chief. Sami took Alis’s untimely death hard, bitterly hard. He would hear no words of any remarriage from clansmen, subchiefs or even his immediate family, and soon, on the heels of a succession of heated outbursts from the long-grieving man, all the Krooguhs gave up.
All save Behtiloo, that is. She and Sami’s daughters-in-law and granddaughters had no trouble among so many willing hands in properly maintaining the chief yurt and household as it always had been, of course; but Behtiloo knew that the very honor of Clan Krooguh lay at stake in this matter. For the chief of so large and wealthy a clan to live without at least one wife would be considered by the other clans odd, to say the least.
She, of all people, knew just how long and hard and how unstintingly her own dear dead Tim had worked in building up the power and image of the clan of his birth. He had devoted much of his life to making the small, insignificant Clan Krooguh large and rich and widely respected by Kindred and non-Kindred alike, and she would not sit idly by and watch her grandson’s senselessly prolonged grief undo that work.
She set herself to the task. For two long years, she argued and debated and wheedled with Chief Sami. Then, when she fell the time to be ripe, she exchanged one of the last two of her remaining gold discs for a young, pretty, black-haired, dark-eyed slave girl who had chanced to be part of the merchandise brought west by a train of plains traders.
On the way back to the chief yurt, Behtiloo discovered to her chagrin that the girl spoke no single, recognizable tongue, aside from a few mispronounced words of Trade Mehrikan. At last, almost in desperation, Behtiloo tried to mindspeak.
“What is your name, child? What is your race? What tongue do you speak?”
A rapid-fire spate of foreign words poured from the girl’s dark-red lips, but Behtiloo was able to glean their meaning from the mind behind them: “Please, old woman, mistress, how can you speak to me without opening your mouth? I don’t … can’t understand how … ?”
Again, Behtiloo used telepathy, keeping in mind her own honest bewilderment when, so many years ago, she first had encountered Horseclans mindspeakers. “There is no need to speak aloud, little one. Think what you wish to convey to me, then merely project it. See, like this.”
It quickly became apparent that like Behtiloo herself, the little slave girl had been born with a dormant potential for mindspeak and had needed only instruction in its use. By the time she had had the girl make use of the sweat yurt, wash her body and hair and assume Horseclans garb, Behtiloo was easily engaging in silent conversation with her and had had all of her bitter story, though parts of it had been most difficult for the old nomad woman to credit, on the basis of the prairie life which was all she had ever known.
Leenah Goombahlees had been born far, far to the east, in a great huge place built of stone and brick, tiles and timbers. In this place, people—more people than all of thirty or forty large clans’ number—lived out their lives, only leaving, some of them, to till the fields, tend to the flocks and herds and vineyards outside the high, stone walls that surrounded the place, which was called a “city.”
Then, of a day, a vast host of warriors had marched down from somewhere in the north and camped on the hillsides all around the city. Leenah recalled that time in vague snatches—of her father and her brothers tramping in and out of the house at odd hours, all sheathed in shining steel, with swords and daggers at their belts and spears and axes in their hands; of her eldest brother being brought home, shrieking in agony, to die within hours of the great ragged wound torn in his belly; of a long time when no one had much of anything to eat and it had seemed that every other building was burning.
And then the day of ultimate horrors had come. Her father had run stumbling into the main room of the home, his black eyes blazing, wild, his helmet with all the pretty feathers gone and his armor no longer shiny, but nicked and deeply dented and dull with a profusion of crusty red-brown stains.
Leenah had seen him embrace and kiss her mother, then push her to arm’s length, draw his sword and run it deeply into her body below her breasts. Leenah’s older sister had screamed then, and turned to run; but her father, in a single, fluid movement, had drawn and thrown a dagger with such force that all of the slim blade had buried itself in her sister’s back, and she had fallen, twitching, to the blue—and-white tiles.
Too stunned to run, Leenah had simply stood as her father turned toward her, raising his bloody sword, his lips moving but no sound issuing from between them, pure madness shining from his eyes. Then, with an awful clanging and clattering, his body had fallen face downward at her feet, with the short, thick shaft of a war dart standing up from the spot where Spine met skull.
Suddenly, too suddenly, the room was filled with strange bearded foreigners, all garbed in armor and clothing of unfamiliar patterns….
When Behtiloo had tiled to prod the girl for more facts after that point in the tale, she could only arouse an inchoate confusion of memories of pain and terror and shame, of a sick and churning disgust. Then the girl had begun to cry, softly, at first, then with increasing violence.
Once the little slave had cried herself out in Behtiloo’s comforting arms, her mind got around to producing the sad end to her story.