“Your Pope’s wife has come. Look. The sister of the Day Maiden.”
Overhead, a large bird was circling the battlefield. In the smoke and the light of the late sun, the buzzard appeared to be bright red. Other birds were gathering. They seemed small and dark by contrast, but perhaps they flew at higher altitude.
“It means the battle is over.”
Nimmy and Gai-See were eerily silent.
“Tomorrow we leave for the tents of my tribe,” Bråm said. “The wounded can stay there until they heal. The rest of you will be taken west to be judged by the Qæsach dri Vørdar, Høngan Ösle Chür . Then I imagine you will be escorted back to Valana, or in your case, Nyinden, to your Brownpony. Tell this to the others. Tell them they must travel with us, or they will fall into the hands of the motherless ones. We have recaptured enough of Hadala’s horses for you to ride.”
Demon Light seemed quite friendly, and Nimmy dared ask, “Are you satisfied with today’s outcome, Sharf Bråm?”
“The Burregun will not eat Grasshopper bodies; I lost no men,” said the Nomad leader. “We captured five wagonloads of rifles and pistols before the fire or the motherless got to them. The ammunition wagons exploded. The Texarki must have got about four loads of weapons that went through the fire. Those guns were ruined.”
“Ruined as weapons, maybe, but not as patterns for Texark to copy,” Nimmy said.
“You think so? And how long will that take?”
“I don’t know. Months, probably.”
“There is one other matter I do find troublesome, Nyinden,” said Eltür. “Do you know that there were many gleps among the Texarki?”
Nimmy frowned. “The man I killed was a glep! That surprised me. It seems that the Emperor is either impressing able-bodied gleps from the Valley, or hiring them as mercenaries. It suggests he is short of manpower.”
“Or, he is sending some of his main force to the east of the Great River, as we hoped. There was dissent in the Texark ranks. My messengers told me so. Do you understand why?”
“I think so. Cardinal Hadala was expecting a force from the Valley to strike the troopers’ rear. When they did so, the glep troopers probably refused to fight. Maybe that’s why they retreated from us.”
Eltür snorted. “You townsmen make good corpses but not good killers. It had to be the reason. Now, tomorrow we must go to a messenger family and send today’s news to the Lord of the Hordes and your Pope. You may, if you wish, write to Brownpony yourself, so long as you tell me what you say to him.”
“Of course! You may read it.”
Demon Light laughed scornfully and departed. Blacktooth’s face burned. He had forgotten that the sharf was without letters.
Blacktooth was prepared to write his letter on cowhide with ink made of blood and soot, but the messenger family to which Bråm brought him the following afternoon kept paper and pens for such emergencies, although they themselves were barely literate. He wrote hurriedly, because the sharf was impatient to return to his family and tribe.
I understand that Sharf Eltür Bråm is sending you an oral account of the battle fought here, and to his words I would add nothing. While most of the weapons were recaptured by the Grasshopper war party, Texark troops found a number of them that passed through fire and are probably unfit for use, but the Mayor’s gunsmiths may learn much from studying the design.
I am ashamed, Holy Father, that I was not present in your time of peril. I was staying with the late Pope when you departed from Valana, and then I fell into the hands of your betrayers. Sorely Cardinal Nauwhat has sought asylum in Texark. Chuntar Cardinal Hadala was executed by Brother Gai-See when he learned of his treason against Your Holiness. Many townsmen died in this futile battle. My body was unharmed, but my soul is a casualty, for I killed a man.
I have been invited to stay with my distant Grasshopper relatives (yes, the Sharf knows who they are) of his tribe until I receive orders from Your Holiness, Abbot Olshuen, or the Secretariat concerning my future duties and destination. Meanwhile, Sharf Bråm wants me to be tutor to his nephews. I would find this work congenial, but with no books and no proper writing materials it will be difficult.
Again, I beg your forgiveness for my absence without leave in your time of need, and shall gratefully accept and perform any penance it may please Your Holiness to impose.
The relay horses of the messenger families were fast and frequently changed. In late August, the moon was waxing, permitting them to ride by night. Still, Nimmy was astonished by the speed of Brownpony’s reply. It was very simple. “Honor the slaughtering festival, then come at once,” said Amen II, only three weeks later.
His cousins had been teasing him unmercifully about joining the fourteen-year-olds who would be undergoing the rites of passage to manhood at the festival, which normally occurred during a period of several days around the last full moon of summer, before the autumnal equinox. “They will stop calling you ‘Nimmy,’ if you endure the rite,” the great-granddaughter of his own great-great-grandmother told him.
“Thank you, but the first man to call me ‘Nimmy’ was Holy Madness, the Lord of the Hordes, and he intended no insult. I am not a warrior, I am not a Nomad.”
This was the same festival which had been declared a movable feast last year when its usual time coincided with the funeral of Granduncle Brokenfoot. The farmers celebrated a harvest festival at about the same date, but for the Nomads it marked the beginning of the time of killing off old cattle and weaklings who could not survive the winter. Women culled out the horses not fit for war or breeding, and sold them to farmers north of the Misery River, or had them butchered and barbecued. Many of the slaughtered animals were converted into jerky for the time of deep snow when the wild herds were hard to reach.
It was a time for dancing, for drums, for gluttony, smoking keneb, drinking farmers’ wine, for fighting by firelight, and for celebrating the ravishing by Empty Sky of the Wild Horse Woman. Young men crawled into the tents of sweethearts, and Blacktooth was visited in the night by the dark form of a woman who would not reveal her name, but began removing his clothes. He was careful to do nothing that might offend her, and it turned out to be a hot and sweaty night.
The following morning, one of his female cousins smiled whenever she caught his glance. Her name was Pretty Dances, and she was chubby as a pig, but cute and comely. He thought of Ædrea and avoided her glance as much as possible.
He had established his honor by fighting several young men his own size, and did well enough to avoid further teasing, but they still called him Nimmy more often than Nyinden.
On the day before his departure from the lands of his ancestors, the Grasshopper double agent Black Eyes brought him a book he had obtained in a transaction with Texark soldiers. Black Eyes had occupied the cage across the aisle when he and Brownpony were prisoners in the Emperor’s zoo, and he still admired Blacktooth for an alleged attempt to kill Filpeo.
“The book cost me seven steers,” he told the monk. “The sharf thinks it might help you teach his nephews, because the soldiers said it is written in our own tongue. I don’t understand how a book can have a tongue.”
Nimmy looked at the Nomadic title and felt a rush of grief and shame. The Book of Beginnings: Volume One, by Verus Sarquus Boedullus. The Texark publisher had done a good job of duplicating Blacktooth’s pan-Nomadic orthography, with the new vowels which permitted any Nomad of any horde to hear the words as pronounced in his own dialect. In the front matter, there was an acknowledgment that the translation had come from Leibowitz Abbey, but there was of course no mention of the translator’s name. Blacktooth had not included it in the original.