Dimity tried to smile in response, failed. It was all she could do to keep her hands from shaking as she stripped her underclothes away, letting them fall in a pile on the bathroom floor. Only after she was neck deep in steaming water did Rowena say again, “Tell me about it.”
The girl murmured, “I don’t know. Nothing happened.” The water was soaking away the pain. It hurt to move, and yet in the warm soothe of the water it had become almost pleasure to feel that ache, that deep, abiding agony of the bones. “Nothing happened.”
Rowena stamped her foot, very softly, eyes bright with tears. “Did you have any trouble mounting?”
“No. Not really.”
“Had you… had you seen the mount before?”
Dimity opened her eyes, suddenly aware, looking at her mother directly. “The mount? I think it’s one I’ve seen before, grazing maybe, out near the shortgrass field where Syl and I used to play.” Perhaps this meant something. She searched her mother’s face, but Rowena only nodded. When Rowena had first ridden, her mount, too, had been one she had seen watching her when she was a child. “Where did you go?”
“I think we drew a copse in Darenfeld’s… in the valley.” Rowena nodded again, remembering dark trees towering, shutting out the sky, the ground covered with small flowering mosses, a noise of running water under the mosses, under the roots. Remembering Dimity’s friend, Shevlok’s lover, Janetta… “Did you start a fox?”
“Yes.” She shut her eyes, unwilling to say more. She didn’t want to talk about it. She wanted to forget it. Next time she would give in to the pain right away. Next time she wouldn’t fight it Through slitted lids she saw Rowena’s face, still questioning, still demanding, wanting more. Sighing, Dimity said, “The hounds went in. Pretty soon they were all baying, and we went racing off. I seem to remember the hounds lost him three or four times, but they got him each time again. Maybe I only made that up. He just ran and ran forever, that’s all. And then the hounds treed him away north somewhere.”
“Did you kill?”
“Stavenger did. Daddy. I mean, the Master did. He only had to throw once. I couldn’t see where the harpoon stuck, but they pulled the fox out of the tree and the hounds got him.” She flushed then, deeply, the blood rising into her face in an unmistakable tide as she remembered what had followed.
Rowena saw the flush, interpreted it correctly, and turned aside in order not to confront what she saw there. Shame. Embarrassment. Mortified pudicity. Rowena sought for something, anything to say other than… other than this. It had happened to her, too. It had always happened. She had never mentioned it to another soul. She had not known until now whether it was her guilty secret or a secret shared. “You didn’t really see the fox, then.”
“I couldn’t see anything except a blob in the tree. Then eyes, and teeth, and then it was all over.”
“Ah.” Rowena sighed, the tears now streaming, laughing at herself and her fears, shamed for Dimity’s shame but relieved just the same. “Mother! I’m all right. It’s all right.”
Rowena nodded, dabbing at her eyes. Of all the things that might have gone wrong, none had. Dimity had mounted, had ridden, hadn’t fallen off, hadn’t been attacked by the fox, hadn’t done anything to upset the hounds.
“Mother.” Softly, moved by the tears, offering something.
“Yes, Dimity-”
“There was this one hound that kept watching me, all the time we were coming back. A kind of purplish mottled one. He just kept looking at me and looking at me. Every time I looked down, there he was.”
“You didn’t stare!”
“Of course not. I know better. I didn’t even seem to notice, not that the hound could see. I just thought it was funny, that’s all.”
Rowena argued with herself. Say too little? Say too much? Say nothing? “Hounds are peculiar that way. Sometimes they watch us. Sometimes they don’t look at us. Sometimes they seem to be amused by us. You know.”
“I don’t, really.”
“Well, they need us, Dimity. They can’t climb, so they can’t kill the fox unless we bring him down.”
“They only need one man for that, somebody with a strong arm to throw the harpoon.”
“Oh, I think there’s more to it than that. The hounds seem to enjoy the Hunt. The ritual of it.”
“When we were riding back, I kept wondering how it ever got started. I know they ride to the hounds on Terra, back before Sanctity, before we left. That was in my history book, with pictures of the horses and dogs and the little furry thing — nothing like our fox at all. I couldn’t figure out why they should have wanted to kill it, even. With our foxen, killing it is the only thing to do. But why do it this way?”
“One of the first settlers made friends with a young mount and learned to ride him, that’s all there is to it,” Rowena answered. “The settler taught some friends, and the young mount brought along some more of its kind, and gradually we had a Hunt again.”
“And the hounds?”
“I don’t know. My grandfather told me once that they were simply there one day, that’s all. As though they knew we needed them to have a proper Hunt. They always show up on the proper day at the proper place, just like the mounts do…”
“If we call them hounds when they aren’t really hounds, how come we don’t call the mounts horses?” Dimity asked, lying back until her head was half submerged, contented now to say nothing much, to talk, perhaps to have her mother wash her back.
Rowena was startled. “Oh, I don’t think the Hippae would like that, not at all.”
“But they don’t mind being called mounts?”
“But my dear, we never call them even that where they can hear us. You know that. We never call them anything at all where they can hear us.”
“It makes your head feel funny,” said Dimity. “Doesn’t it?”
“What?” asked Rowena, suddenly on her feet. “What does?”
“Hunting. Doesn’t it make your head feel funny?”
Rowena said in a preoccupied tone, “It has a kind of hypnotic effect. It would really be rather boring otherwise.” She put a folded towel within Dimity’s reach, then left the room, closing the door behind her to keep the steamy warmth within.
One of the hounds watching Dimity? She bit her lip, frowned, acquired a suddenly haunted expression. She would have to speak to Sylvan about that. Right now he would be closeted with Figor about that Sanctity business, but perhaps he had noticed something. No one else would have noticed anything, but perhaps Sylvan had. Or perhaps it had all been in Dimity’s mind. Weariness and hours of pain could do that.
Still it would be an odd thing to imagine. The hounds had killed, so they should have been in a good mood. There was no reason for one of them to have watched Dimity. There was no reason for Dimity even to have imagined it. Surely no one had ever said anything to her, about Janetta… about that side of things.
She would speak to Sylvan about it. As soon as she could. As soon as this silly matter of the scientific mission was decided and everyone could think about something else.
Grass.
Millions of square miles of prairie, with villages and estancias, with hunters and the hunted, where the wind walks and the stars shine on stalk and seed plume and where the sluglike peepers cry from the roots all day and all night, except when certain things call deep in the star-specked dark to make a stunning, eerie silence fall.
North, almost at the place where the shortgrass country begins, are the ruins of a city of the Arbai, not unlike the many other cities of the Arbai found among the settled worlds, except that here on Grass the inhabitants died of violence. Among the ruins the Green Brothers are intermittently occupied, digging trenches, listing artifacts, making copies of the volumes in the Arbai library. The Brothers are penitents, it is said, though no one else on Grass knows or cares what they are penitent about.