Hundreds of nomads hugged the fire's warmth.
Skiljan and Gerrien whispered together. Marika eavesdropped.
"What are they doing?" Skiljan asked. Scores labored upon the slopes. One particular nomad moved among them, giving orders that could not be heard. Little could be told of that person at a distance, except that it was someone the nomads considered important.
There were shouts. Boulders rumbled downhill. Nomads scrambled out of their path.
"The cave," Gerrien replied. "They're clearing the mouth of the cave. But why baffles me."
Back of all the other racket were the sounds of log drum and tambor and chanting. The nomad Wise were involved in some sort of ceremony.
"They would not be trying to draw the ghost, would they?" Skiljan asked.
"They might be. A wehrlen ... They just might be. We have to stop that."
"Too many of them."
"They do not know we are here. Maybe we can panic them."'
"We will try." The two separated. During the next several minutes Skiljan whispered to each of the huntresses on her side of the hill. Then she returned to center. Gerrien arrived seconds later.
Skiljan and her companions readied their bows. Marika's dam said, "Shout when you are ready."
Gerrien closed her eyes for half a minute, breathed deeply. Then she opened them, nodded, laid an arrow across her bow, rose. Skiljan rose beside her.
An ululating howl ripped from Gerrien's throat. In an instant it was repeated all across the slope. Arrows stormed downhill. Nomads squealed, shrieked, shouted. Dozens went down.
Skiljan's shafts, Marika noted, all flew toward the nomad Wise. And many found their marks.
Gerrien arced her arrows toward the meth leader on the far slope. It was a long flight in tricky light, and meth with shields had materialized around that one. None of Gerrien's shafts reached their mark.
A wild-eyed meth in bizarre black clothing suddenly materialized a few paces from Skiljan. She pointed something like a short, blunt spear. Skiljan and Gerrien were astonished by the apparition's appearance.
The meth cursed in a strange dialect and glared at the thing in her paws. She hefted it as a club. A pair of poisoned arrows ripped into her chest.
Gerrien then charged downhill. All the huntresses joined her. Javelins arced ahead of them. Nomads ran in circles. Already some were scattering into the darkness up the opposite slope. Only a handful dared counterattack. Their charge was met by huntresses with captured swords, and hurled back.
The panic among the nomads heightened. On the slope opposite, the leader screamed in dialect, trying to stiffen resistance.
Gerrien carried the charge two thirds of the way to the creek, then halted. Sheer numbers of nomads promised to make further going too difficult. After some bloody swordplay, spearplay, and javelin throwing, she loosed another ululating howl and withdrew.
Confused, terrified, the nomads did not press.
The Degnan huntresses loosed their remaining arrows. Every shaft that touched a nomad killed, for each was poisoned.
Once their last arrows flew, the Degnan ran. They left more than a hundred nomads slaughtered. Awe at what they had done would not touch them for some time, for they were too involved with fighting and surviving. But battle and slaughter were not meth customs. There was no precedent for this in the upper Ponath. Fighting in the mass meant holding the stockade against northern raiders, not taking death to the nomads before they struck.
Marika sensed the elation of the huntresses. They had done the nomads great damage while suffering no harm themselves. Perhaps this would compel them to seek easier looting. Now the Degnan needed do nothing but outrun their enemies.
Marika scrambled down the tower, ran to the loghouse. "Pobuda," she gasped. "They are coming back. The nomads are chasing them."
Pobuda asked no questions. Not then. She alerted the rest of the packstead. Everyone capable, males included, hurried to reinforce the palisade.
And found there was nothing to see.
Marika got up the tower again and tried to remain invisible. When she did look down she spied Pobuda staring up, paws on hips, looking angry.
A shout rolled out of the distance. Gerrien and Skiljan. Marika could not tell which. As if to offset its earlier perfection, the touch would not open at all. Perhaps she was too excited.
Those on the stockade heard. Weapons came to the ready. Dark shapes appeared on the snowfields, running toward the gate. The Degnan huntresses came in a compact group, with the strongest to the rear, skirmishing with a scatter of nomads darting around their flanks. The nomads were having no luck. But scores more now were pouring from the woods. It looked as though Skiljan and Gerrien would be caught against their own stockade.
Arrows reached out. Nomads went down. Those most imperiled held up. Skiljan and Gerrien faced their huntresses around and retreated more slowly, backing into the now open gateway. Well-sped poisoned arrows kept the pursuit at bay. Marika saw that her dam carried the club that had been wielded by the strange meth in black.
Skiljan was last inside. She slammed the gate. Gerrien barred it. The home-come huntresses rushed around the spiral and took their places upon the stockade, hurling taunts at the nomads.
The enemy made one ragged rush. It fell apart before it reached the foot of the palisade. The survivors fled ignobly. From a safe distance nomads who had taken no part howled ferocious threats and promises.
Marika abandoned the watchtower while all attention was concentrated elsewhere. She hastened to her loghouse and to her sleeping furs, where she tried to make herself vanishingly small against Kublin.
III
It was late fall, but not as late as the incident of Pohsit and Stapen Rock. The skies were graying and lowering with the promise of what was to come. The creeks often ran raging with runoff from small but virulent storms. All the portents were evil.
But a spirit of excitement filled the Degnan packstead. Runners from other packs came and went hourly. Wide-ranging huntresses brought in reports which Degnan just out of puphood sped off to relay to neighboring packs.
No sighting, said the reports. No sighting. No sighting. But each negative message only heightened the anticipation.
Marika was more excited than any of her packmates. This was a landmark autumn. This would be the first of her apprentice runs with the hunting pack.
"Soon, now. Soon," the Wise promised, reading the portents of wind and sky. "The herds must be on the move by now. Another day. Another two days. The skies are right. The forerunners will appear."
Up in the Zhotak a month or more ago, the kropek would have begun to gather. The young would be adolescent now, able to keep up during the migration south. The nomads would be nipping the flanks of the herds, but they seldom cooperated enough to take sufficient game to see themselves through their protracted winter.
The autumn kropek hunt was the major unifying force of the settled upper Ponath culture. Some years there were fairs. Occasionally two, three, even four packs gathered to observe an important festival. But only during the kropek hunt did the Degnan, Greve, Laspe, and other packs operate in unison-though they might not see one another at all.
The herd had to be spotted first, for it never followed the same route southward. Then an effort had to be made to guide it, to force it into a course that would allow a maximal harvest beneficial to all the Ponath packs.
Ofttimes the post-hunt, when the packs skinned and butchered and salted and smoked, became a gigantic fair of sorts. Sometimes tradermales arrived to take advantage of the concentration of potential customers. Frequently, charitable dams made arrangements on behalf of favored male offspring, saving them the more dangerous search for a new pack.