The Reverend Gerald Falconer knelt in a spreading pool of his and Emmett’s blood, hunched over the pain, hugging his agonized body and shrieking mindlessly, until Chief Gus Scott stepped forward, grasped a handful of the parson’s hair, tilted his head back and slashed his throat almost to the spine. The noises made by the death-wounded man had begun to rasp on his nerves.
Epilogue
For all that fresh wood and dung chips had been added to the central firepit, it now contained only a mere scattering of isolated, dim-glowing coals mixed among the gray ashes. The halfmoon rode high overhead in the star-studded sky of full night, and Chief Milo Morai was tiring, having spoken and simultaneously mindspoken for hours to the assembled boys, girls, cats and clansmen.
The tale that he had spun had been a complex one, dealing as it had dealt with times long past, times before those and snatches of time of even a greater age.
He had told the stories of the War and the Great Dyings of the most of mankind, he had recounted for his rapt listeners—young and old, human and feline and equine—almost the earliest years of the Sacred Ancestors, the progenitors of the Kindred folk known as the Horseclans. And the stories bore the stamp of hard fact, not of mere bard song, possibly embroidered and added to over the long years by who knew whom. For the teller of the tales spun this night had been there, and all who had listened to him had known that truth.
But his long, intricate tale had only whetted the appetites of his audience for more, and as he fell silent, a flood of questions broke upon him and washed about him. Some of them were spoken aloud, but a larger number were beamed silently, by cats and horses who could communicate in no other way, as well as by telepathically gifted humans.
“Uncle Milo,” Snowbelly, the cat chief, mindspoke, “this cat had never been told that the Kindred had kept dogs. Why did the Sacred Ancestors keep such loud, clumsy, dirty, smelly creatures? When did finally they come to their senses and cease to harbor the yapping things?”
“Uncle Milo,” said one of the Linsee boys, “please tell us what the world was like before the Great Dying. Were there then as many people on the land as the bard songs attest, or do they exaggerate?”
Another, a Skaht youngster, asked, “Please, Uncle Milo, is it true that men knew how to fly in those times? That they could even fly up to the moon and … and truly walk upon it?”
Then Karee Skahts’s strong mindspeak beamed, “Uncle Milo, whatever became of the girl Arabella and the stallion Capull? Did she marry into her own clan or into another?”
“I find it difficult to credit, Uncle Milo,” said Rahjuh Skaht dubiously, “that this pack of mere Dirtmen could ever have become Horseclansmen. That Chief Gus Skaht and his tribe became of the Kindred sounds at least reasonable. But Uncle Milo, everyone knows just how slow and dense of mind, how clumsy and slow of action, how ill coordinated of body are Dirtmen, such as were those long-ago Linsees. So how did they manage to survive living as free folk on the plains and prairies long enough to breed any more of their ill-favored kind? Were all of them, then, as oversized and dark and stupid as the Linsees of today … as Gy Linsee over there, for instance?”
“Now, damn you, you young impudent pup!” snarled Hunt Chief Tchuk Skaht, coming suddenly to his feet and bulling his way around the firepit toward his insubordinate clansman, his big, powerful hands ready to grab and hold, heedless of whom or how many he stepped upon in getting to his quarry.
But before he could reach that objective, dark-haired Gy Linsee, already, despite his youth, a trained if unproven warrior and far bigger of body than most adult clansmen, laid aside his harp with a resigned sigh. He had taken days of oral and telepathic calumny in silence, tightly controlling himself in hopes that emulating his precedent, his example, his peers and his elders would give over the endless, senseless round of mutual bloodletting between Clan Skaht and Clan Linsee, as Uncle Milo wanted. But this last was the final straw; his personal honor and that of his ancient and honorable clan demanded either public apology and retraction from the sneering Rahjuh Skaht or a generous measure of the wiry young man’s blood.
“All right, Rahjuh Skaht,” he said aloud in a resigned tone of voice, “you have been relentlessly pressing the matter for long enough. I did not want to fight you—”
“A coward, eh? Like any other Dirtman,” said Rahjuh scathingly. “For all your unnatural size, you—”
“No, I do not fear you, though you are a fully trained and experienced warrior who has fought battles and slain men, while I am yet to see my first real fight. But if fight you I must in order to know peace during the rest of this hunt, then fight you I assuredly shall. Choose what mode of fighting and what weapons you will, little man; I’ll try not to hurt you too seriously.”
“Here and now, with whatever weapons we have or can grab up!” shouted the raging Skaht, at the same time that he plucked a knife from his sleeve sheath and threw it with all his force at Gy Linsee’s chest.
But moonlight is often tricky, and the hard-cast knife flew low, striking and skittering off the broad brazen buckle of Gy Linsee’s baldric, then falling point-foremost to flesh itself in the tail of the prairiecat still lying at Gy’s feet.
The prairiecat queen, Crooktail, squalled at the sudden sharp unexpected pain and sprang to her feet, her lips pulled up to bare her fangs, her ears laid back close to her skull and every muscle in her body tensed to leap and fight and kill.
And all around the firepit, there was a rapid ripple of motion as boys and girls, warriors and cats, of both clans came to their feet and felt for familiar hilts and hafts. But then Hunt Chief Tchuk Skaht came up to his young and impetuous clansman Rahjuh. Seizing the murderous youngster by the back of the neck, he lifted him from off his feet and shook him like a rat, hissing all the while, “Now damn you for the intemperate fool you are, you little turd! Uncle Milo warned me earlier that you intended to provoke a death match with Gy Linsee, but I had credited you with brains you obviously lack, lack utterly, from the look of things.
“You mean to fight a man nearly twice your size to the death when you can’t even throw a knife properly? You shithead—he’d kill you in a bare eye-blink of time, or if by luck you killed him, you would only dishonor yourself and your clan for provoking such a fight, for you are a seasoned warrior and he is not. And either outcome would undo everything for which Uncle Milo and the Council of Chiefs and Hwahltuh Linsee and Gy and I have worked so hard to attain despite your constant badgerings and insults.”
He raised his voice and mindspoke, too, “Hear me well, ail of you, Skaht and Linsee and cat and horse. This hunt is our last chance to show the Council of Chiefs that we all can live together in harmony and love and mutual respect as Kindred clans should live. If we fail here, Uncle Milo has told me and Subchief Hwahltuh that it is probable that the Council of Chiefs will, at the next Tribal Gathering, declare both Skaht and Linsee to be no longer Kindred, disperse our women and children among other clans, give our slaves and kine to new masters, strip us of everything, then cast us out upon the prairie to die in loneliness, far from all that we love.
“I do not mean to end my life so nastily, clans-people. I know not just when or just how this feud between our two clans commenced—it started long before my eyes first saw the blaze of Sacred Sun or my nose drew in the first breath of Wind—but it is going to end, here, now, on this hunt, in this place, this camp by this river. It will end if I have to shake and break and batter apart every hot-blooded fire-eater hereabouts. And if any one of you thinks I can’t do just what I’ve threatened, then come over here and try me!
“As for you, Rahjuh Skaht, if you’re so anxious to nibble at fire, then here, eat your fill of it!”