After a week of rapine, torture, looting and murder, the victorious besiegers had boated the few hundred survivors of the intaking of the city across the nearby river and had then marched them northward to a rendezvous with traders, who had bought most of the war captives.
Leenah had been but one of some threescore women and girls bought by men who fed them, gave them clothing to replace their tattered rags and allowed them to rest for a few days before loading them onto wagons to begin a westward trek of many weeks’ duration.
All of the captives were used by their new owners from time to time during the trip, but no other violence was wrought upon them. They were not beaten, they were fed as well as the new owners ate, and those who happened to become ill were treated with solicitude. Finally, the wagons came down from the mountains they had traversed and rolled into a riverside town, where the captives and captors boarded the two biggest boats Leenah had ever seen.
The trip, in toto, had taken months. It had seemed to Leenah and her fellow slaves that the twisting, turning river was endless. Moreover, stops were frequent.
At most stops, men would come aboard the boats. They would be shown the “merchandise.” gold or silver coin would change hands or a few bales and crates would be winched or carried aboard, and some of the women would go ashore.
After about two months (as near as she could reckon time) on the river, Leenah had become ill, desperately ill. Rightly fearful of possible contagion, her owners had moved her to a small cubicle abovedecks and cared for her as well as they knew how, but she had nonetheless been slow to recover and had still been far from well when the boats were current-borne into an even larger river.
Using their sails, the two boats beat into a small port on the larger river. There the traders, their goods and the score or so of remaining female slaves were transferred to a number of smaller boats—boats propelled by long, heavy oars pulled by the wretched, filthy, sore-covered men chained to them. They traveled against the current of the swift-flowing river for about a week before arriving at the docks below the walls of a bustling town.
After disposing of about half their remaining women, the traders loaded the rest into high-wheeled plains wagons, along with a vast assortment of hard and soft goods and joined with a well-guarded column of similar wagons for the long and hazardous trek westward in search of the nomad clans and the wide-scattered farming settlements along the prairie fringes.
Once the train had reached the territory of the Kindred, the Horseclans, wherein there was greater safety for traders (honest ones, at least) and smaller trains could proceed with fewer guards, the large caravan had split into several smaller ones and headed off in different directions, each group taking two or three of the women slaves.
“Please, mistress,” Leenah silently beamed, “why did you buy me? Am I to be your personal maid? To care for you?”
Behtiloo laughed throatily. “Hardly, child Leenah. We Horseclanswomen can care for ourselves in most ways and in most times. No, I bought you to be the concubine to my dear grandson, who is chief of this clan.”
Noticing the black eyes in the olive-skinned face cloud, while the surface thoughts of the girl’s mind boiled with the old, bitter memories of rapes and sodomies and other enforced degradations, Behtiloo added hastily, “No, little one, do not fear. Our Sami is a tender man, a gentle and a loving man. He has been grieving these last years for the loved wife who was his only wife for above twenty-five years.
“But you will completely replace her, we will see to it, just wait. At first you will replace her in his bed, then in his great heart. I vow to you, my child, as soon as your belly swells with Sami’s good seed, will see you a free woman, formally adopted into Clan Krooguh and honorably wedded to our chief.”
And so it came to be. At the wedding feast, Behtiloo foretold that Leenah and her get by Chief Sami would bring newer and greater glory, thrice greater glory to Krooguh.
That is why when, four months after the wedding, the new bride was delivered of not one, not two but an unbelievable three sons at a single birthing, clansfolk began to treat their chiefs grandmother with far and away greater respect than ever before, that awe-tinged respect accorded the proven seer.
A few days after the triple birthing. Behtiloo sat on the steps leading up to the wagon-mounted chief yurt. enjoying the bright, warm rays of Sacred Sun, when a female prairiecat approached and seated herself respectfully some two yards distant.
“Greet the Sun, two-leg female of powers.” beamed the cats strong mindspeak. “Do you guard the den of this first sensible two-leg female in memory, who bears her young in litters?”
Behtiloo smiled and replied. “Yes, cat sister. Do you wish to enter and see her and the babes now?”
Behtiloo and the cat—who was called Blackback and was obviously a recent mother herself, to judge by her heavy and thickened dugs—soon reached the rear area of the yurt. There Leenah reclined while nursing two of her little sons. while Chief Sami—almost bursting with his pride—held the other, The cat immediately bespoke the two women on a narrow, personal beaming.
“It is just as I had thought it would be. You two-legs have but two dugs, so you will never be able to properly nurse all of your litter at once and so one will most assuredly die … or all will become weak.
“Now, I bore my litter on the same day you bore yours, female-of-our-chief, but two of mine were born unbreathing, so I have milk and to spare, as well as dugs enough to feed yours and mine together, at the same time.
“I already have broached this matter with the cat chief, Steelclaws. and he says that if his brother, Chief Sami, approves, I may bring my two kittens here to the Clan Krooguh chief yurt and share with you the nursing.”
When the matter was put to Sami, he threw back his graying head and laughed uproariously. “Why not, I say, wife? Why not? Its never before been done, so far as I know, in any Kindred clan, certainly not in this one. But then neither has any clanswoman in the memory of the Kindred, right back to and including the Sacred Ancestors, borne a clansman three Sons at once. You and I, my dear little Leenah, have already set one all-time precedent. So why should we not set another, hey?”
Then, switching to mindspeak. he beamed gravely. “Cat sister, my yurt will be most honored by the presence of you and your fine cubs. Who was their sire, may I ask?”
“Steelclaws himself,” Blackback replied proudly. “My kittens, too, are the get of a chief.”
Shortly, Behtiloo and Blackback came back through the camp to the chief yurt, the cat carrying one struggling beastlet in her jaws and Behtiloo cradling the other blind, down-furred kitten in her arms. In months after, it was not at all unusual for visitors to the yurt to see Chief’s-wife Leenah nursing a pink-skinned baby boy on one breast and a gray—and-black-furred prairiecat kitten on the other, while beside her lay Blackback on her side, giving suck to the other kitten as well as to two little Krooguhs. Many a cat and human came for the expressed purpose of viewing this most singular sight.
Two years later, at one of the infrequent clan gatherings, all of the Krooguhs walked tall and proud, though none so tall and so proud as Chief Sami. The Krooguh of Krooguh strutted in his fierce pride, and other chiefs were quick to afford an almost reverential deference to this peer of such unmatchable potency of loins that he was capable of siring sons in threes.
So many chiefs and humbler clansfolk flocked to the Krooguh enclave to briefly watch the little triplets wrestling, playing with and making to ride upon the two big-pawed, big-headed sons of Cat Chief Steelclaws and Blackback, each visitor leaving behind a gift of some nature, that Sami had to buy two new carts to carry all the loot away when at long last Clan Krooguh was allowed to quit the gathering.