“I can’t order men to near-certain death, Jack. But you know this is the only way left, and someone has to do it.”
“So, they found the weak spot.”
Jurak turned away from the map in the center of the yurt illuminated by oil lamps looted from a nearby Roum villa.
He motioned for his aging friend to have a seat. Taking down a wineskin, he tossed it over. Zartak grunted his thanks, uncorking the skin and draining half of it off in long, thirsty gulps.
“This Roum wine, far better than the brew the Chin make. About the only thing I like in this damnable country is the wine.”
Jurak said nothing, turning back to study the map and calculate his next move.
“There’s a wine from the south, a land out across the great encompassing ocean,” Zartak said. “Our cousins who live there make it themselves, delicious as nectar.”
“Make it themselves?” Jurak asked.
Zartak nodded, motioning for Jurak to sit down. The — expression on Jurak’s face made it obvious that he did not want to be diverted at the moment, but Zartak simply chuckled and patted the camp chair.
“You already know what needs to be done, and so do I. Now relax for a few minutes before you go off.”
Jurak grudgingly gave in and sat down, taking the wineskin.
“None of these humans down there,” Zartak continued. “Oh, a few slaves are traded as we ride past. Five hundred leagues or more south of Cartha. The two oceans here are mere lakes to the Great Sea.”
“Have you ever seen it?”
“I’ve ridden nearly four circlings,” Zartak cackled. “I’ve seen everything of this world. Not like the stories you tell me of your world, my Qar Qarth.”
Jurak looked up, annoyed at the honorific title. Zartak smiled as if joking.
“Cities that glow at night, flying machines that are as fast as sound. Now you are my Qar Qarth, but I must confess I find it hard to believe, for nothing can outrace the voice of thunder. So many strange things you’ve seen Jurak.”
Zartak sighed wearily, shaking his head, running long, knurled fingers through his thinning mane.
“You’re different, too,” Jurak replied. “Not like the other clan chiefs.”
Zartak laughed.
“The Merki had a position within their Horde, the Shield Bearer, believed to be the spiritual advisor, the other half of the soul of the Qar Qarth. The fallen Tugars as well had an elder general. I fought him once, the last one that is. He was good, very good.”
“And you were thus to the last leader of the Bantag, before we, Ha’ark, the rest of my squad came here?” Jurak asked.
Zartak nodded.
“We’re not all as primitive as Ha’ark believed, or wanted to believe. We were here long before the first humans trod this world. I, for one, believe this was the home world, the birthplace of the first ancestors who grasped the stars and then fell from greatness. How else is it explained that you came from another world through the Portal of Light.”
Jurak nodded. The history of his own world taught that they were descendants of the first elders, godlike travelers who stepped through space and then became stranded upon his world. If so, they had to have come from somewhere. This world might very well indeed be the ancestor world of all of his race.
“The portals, I’ve wondered about that since we came here,” Jurak said, staring up through the open flaps of his yurt, the Great Wheel overhead.
“Gates, I think,” Zartak replied. “And may the gods and all the ancestors curse the day the gates into the world of the humans were created. The fools who built them, then left them unattended, were mad.”
“Yet it brought you the horse, even the great woolly beasts, and of course the cattle?” Jurak said cautiously.
Zartak looked at him carefully and leaned forward. He picked the wineskin up, realized it was empty, and tossed it aside.
Jurak reached under a table and pulled out another sack, handing it over. The old warrior nodded his thanks.
“The air up in this region is chilled at night; this will warm my bones and help me to sleep.”
He smacked his lips, sighing as he recorked the skin, which was now half-empty. Picking up the folding stool he had been sitting on, he moved it over to the open doorway of the yurt, motioning for Jurak to join him. They sat in silence for several minutes, gazing out at the steppes and the Great Wheel rising in the eastern heavens.
“The Endless Ride,” Zartak whispered, gaze fixed on the heavens.
“Oh how glorious it was in my youth. You came long after these troubles had started, and all was changing. I think you would have liked it then, even though you are civilized.”
Jurak looked over and saw that Zartak was smiling slyly.
“At dawn to see the vast multitude arise, facing to the east, chanting our greetings to the morning sky. The yurts, a hundred thousand of them, and that of the great Qar Qarth drawn by a hundred oxen with room for a hundred within. Our encampments blanketed the steppe for as far as the eye could see.
“And then we would ride, the wind in our hair, the thunder of a million hooves causing the earth to shake. Hunters sweeping far forward, bringing in game, the great wool-clad giants with tusks that could feed a thousand for a day.”
He smiled, taking another drink.
“I remember my first hunting eagle. I named him Bakgar after the God of the Westerly Wind. His cry would reach to the heavens. We’d range far ahead, he and I. Have you ever truly been alone on the steppes, my son?”
Jurak shook his head, inwardly pleased that the wine had loosened the old one’s tongue, causing him to drop the deference, the titles, to call him son. He realized that Zartak was not even aware of the slip.
“To be truly alone, the bowl of the blue heavens overhead, the great green sea beneath you, spring grass as high as your stirrups. When the god Bakgar sighed, the green sea shifted, rocking, the wind taking form as it touched the land. And the air. the smell, you know you were breathing the sweet breath of heaven.
“And I’d raise my wrist, setting my own Bakgar loose, and with a great cry he’d circle upward, bright golden feathers rippling. Alone, so truly alone, and it was worth everything to be alive and to know that, to know the joy of a fleet horse, an eagle on your wrist, and the wind in your hair.”
He lowered his head for a moment, lost in his dreams.
“And you never knew the joy only the young can feel when they ride to war for the first time. Our umens would fill that green sea, ten thousand riding as one, turning as one, pennants snapping overhead, the great nargas sounding the charge.
“My first charge, ah there was a moment. It was the year before I completed my first circling, not far from here in the land of the Nippon. We and the Merki. When we loosed our shafts ten thousand arrows blotted out the sun, the dark shadow of them racing like a storm cloud.”
He shook his head and sighed.
“Madness really. But we fought for different things then. The world was big enough for all of us to ride, to hunt, to have pasture. It was simply to match steel against steel and prove that we were still worthy of the blood of our ancestors and unafraid. It was not to the final death, to the slaughter of the young, the old, the bearers of young. No, just steel against steel. Not like this.” And he vaguely waved back toward the west and the front lines.
“If you bested a champion, you took his faka, his glory, but would suffer him to live, even to feast him before sending him back to his yurt. That was as war should be.”
He took another drink of wine.
“But always there were the humans.”
“You don’t call them cattle anymore,” Jurak said.
Zartak laughed sadly.
“You know I once had a pet. It was when I was a child, a female. In those days, among those of the blood of the royal lines it was common to give to a youth a human pet to serve as companion, a teacher of their languages, a slave to do the menial tasks.”