“What puts you in this awful mood, Holy Madness? I half-expected you to call Loyte a grass-eater.”
Høngan laughed. “In my mother’s house, that word is still used. So at home, I might use it on him.”
“You know, you have a certain political ugliness about you, Holy Madness, that you did not learn from me.”
“Oh, but I did!”
“No, you didn’t!”
“Are you going to try to whip me too, O Teacher?”
“I have done that.”
“When I was ten and you were younger. You taught me not to hit clergy, but you’re not—” The Nomad stopped. He saw the change in Ombroz’s face, shook his head, sorry, and walked back to his horse.
By the time they had made camp for a second night under the stars, they met a messenger from the Wilddog Horde’s royal tribe. He was riding south with bad news. Granduncle Brokenfoot had suffered a stroke, had lost the use of his left leg, and was composing his death song. It was therefore deemed wise for the grandmothers and shamans to begin considering other candidates for the ancient office of the one Qæsach dri Vørdar.
The following day, they arrived at the hogans of Grandmother Wetok Enar’s clan. The old woman was weak and ailing, so it was Loyte’s wife Potear Wetok who, unaccompanied by her grandmother, bade them welcome. Her husband dismounted and went to embrace her, but she pushed him away; his “learning about our horses,” the Nomad euphemism for the breaking in of a new groom by the mothers of his new family, was not yet finished. She bowed to Father Ombroz and Chür Høngan, and invited them into the hogan of her grandmother. Out of politeness, they followed her, although both were in haste to return to Høngan’s family.
“Chür , have you heard the bad news?” asked the lovely granddaughter. “I hope I’m not the one who has to tell you.”
“We met a messenger. I know about my father.” He handed her a leather pouch containing the horseshoes. “Your husband will explain these, but later.” She looked at the pouch curiously, but left it inside the door-flap unopened as she ushered them into the hogan.
The old woman sat in a leather slingchair hung between two posts sunk in the hard dirt floor. She tried to rise, but Høngan waved her back. Nevertheless, she signed her respect for Høngan and Ombroz by making the kokai, striking her forehead with her knuckles, and bowing her head while placing her hand against her scalp palm out ward toward each of them. This politeness seemed excessive, and she did not repeat it toward Esitt Loyte. Her son-in-law she ignored; whether this was normal groom-hazing (“teaching him about our horses”) or real contempt was hard to say.
“What the Night Hag has foolishly done to your father grieves me greatly, Høngan Ösle Chür .” The utterance was fraught with portent. Ombroz noticed that Høngan was actually fidgeting before her. To attribute Brokenfoot’s illness to the Night Hag and call it foolish meant that he had been this Weejus woman’s choice for Qæsach Vørdar, and her reversal of Chür ’s name, with the matronymic placed last, meant that the rank of Brokenfoot’s son had risen in her eyes, for whatever reason. But Høngan Ösle was a diminutive for the historical Høngan Os, who lost a war and half of his people to Hannegan II.
“Will you drink blood with us tonight?” the old woman asked. “We celebrate the birth of twin colts by Potear’s best mare. And they are healthy, too—a rare and wonderful event.”
“Toast the Virgin for us, Grandmother,” said Father Ombroz. “My apologies for the haste, but Granduncle Brokenfoot needs us.”
“Yes, he will want to see his son, and from you he will want last anointing. Go then with Christ and the Lady.”
The two of them rode on, leaving Esitt Loyte behind with his bride and in-laws.
“The captain still has much to learn about the Wetok horses,” Ombroz said wryly when they were out of earshot.
Høngan laughed. “He will learn quite a bit in a hurry when Potear shows that old Weejus the horseshoes.”
The mountains had all but disappeared in a dust haze to the west when Holy Madness suddenly announced that Brokenfoot had become irascible in his illness, and that his old wife had found it necessary to appoint another as temporary head of the family.
“How do you know this?” the priest scoffed. “A vision?”
“That vision.” Høngan pointed toward the east. Carefully he raised himself in the saddle, and soon was standing on the back of his horse.
“My old eyes can’t see anything but emptiness. What is it?”
“There is someone there, I think my uncle. It’s miles away, still!
He moves its arms and dances a message. They see our dust.”
“Ah, the Nomad semaphore language. I should have learned it when I was younger. It always amazes me.”
“It gives us an advantage over their Texark warriors.”
When the hogans of the Little Bear clan hove into view on the horizon, a small cloud of dust appeared and soon a rider approached them. It was Brokenfoot’s wife’s brother, Red Buzzard, who was the nominal leader of the clan, who nevertheless deferred to his sister’s husband because she willed it so. Now during the husband’s illness, the brother resumed his rightful role. He was a thin, serious man, nearly sixty, with livid patches of skin which might have marked him as a genny except among the Nomads, where the cosmetic defect was highly regarded as a mark of Empty Sky. He spoke seriously to Holy Madness about Brokenfoot’s condition, which was disabling but apparently not getting worse at the moment.
“Some of our drovers are already back from the south,” Red Buzzard said to Ombroz, “including our Bear Spirit men. They are with him now, Father. But of course he wants to see you.”
Ombroz started to tell him about the Pope, but Red Buzzard already knew. Even in Cardinal Brownpony’s absence from Valana, his Secretariat was constantly sending and receiving messengers from the people of the Plains. When they came to the Little Bear village, the children and younger women came out to greet and be hugged by Høngan and their priest.
“Will you stay with us after you see your father?” asked his mother. “Or must you ride on to Grasshopper country?”
Holy Madness hesitated. He had not told her before. “I think Kuhaly has divorced me.” He glanced at Ombroz, who had married them, but the priest was looking away. “She said she would send for me if she wants me. Even if she does, I may not go.”
His mother’s face melted. “They blame you for having no daughters?”
“Perhaps. Also for being away too much of the time. Her brothers complain. I’ve done too little for the family. They say I am too attached to you. You know the word for that.”
“I was afraid it would be so when you married Grasshopper. Our drovers told us they had to fight Grasshopper drovers again this winter, to get pasturage.”
“Anyone killed?”
“Among ours, only wounded. Among theirs, I don’t know. It was an exchange of shots and arrows. Now, come and see your father.”
The Little Bear family shamans left the hogan while Father Ombroz administered the last anointing to his oldest convert. The priest knew they were embarrassed that some of their practices could not be reconciled with the religion he taught, and that they had accepted baptism themselves because Brokenfoot wished it so. When the old man died, their embarrassment (and envy?) might turn into hostility.
But the whole family knew that when he, Ombroz, had been forced to choose between them and his Order, when a new superior general of that Order, nominated by Archbishop Benefez, and therefore by Filpeo Harq, had called him back to New Rome, he had refused to go. He had been expelled and placed under interdict—measures which he ignored. Still, the punishment hurt him more than he cared to admit. He knew the Weejus women would be his allies in any quarrel with the Bear Spirit shamans, but he wanted to avoid the quarrel, and so far, so did they. Under his teaching, most of this Nomad family had become Christians, while he himself over the years had become a Nomad.