At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories (10 page)

“Shen says we’re going to a city,” she said. “That’s where his family is from and he will introduce me to his sister.”

“City,” I murmured after her. An unfamiliar word, even in Trade.

“That is like a bunch of houses, only huge. Shen says that many more than a thousand people live just in that place. The emperor—that’s their group leader, ’Tia, like the Moot-leader—has a herd of a many more than a thousand horses, and they feed them with grain from farmers from all around, instead of eating it themselves. Shen says—”

“Who are your parents, Mara?” I interrupted.

“My mother is Meg Weaver of the Winden clan of the Moot people. My father is Daved Handler of the Leydet clan, crossed into the Windens,” she recited. “When are Mama and Papa coming back?”

“You won’t forget that, will you?” I asked. “Your clan? Your parents? No matter what happens?”

She twisted in my arms to look at me. “That’s silly, ’Tia. I have to say that every time we come to Moot.”

“But if you never go to a Moot again, Mara. Promise.”

“But—” Her face twisted. “Where’s Mama?”

“Gone,” I said. I still saw through the smoke; I had no resources on which to draw to explain things gently, or at all, to a child. Meg, Daved: dead, leagues noonward.

“When will they come back?” I recognized the signs of coming tears in the tension in her body and the tightening of her voice. “You have to tell me.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

She screamed and hit me. “You do know! You won’t let me talk to them. You’re here and they’re not. I hate you, I hate you!”

At her first screams, Shen and Huer left their places by the herd and galloped toward us.

“Hush, daughter, hush.” Shen pulled her from my arms and into his own. “Wulin is your size and she never cries anymore. Do you want her to think you are a baby when you meet her?” He met my eyes momentarily over her heaving shoulders; I saw anger that I had made her cry. “Let me show you a marker cairn, how we show a way for the horses to go home.” Still murmuring in her ear, he kicked his horse into a canter toward the front of the herd.

Huer barked a word; my mare, who had started after Shen’s, stopped in her tracks. “You are all right?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Your face—” He gestured toward his own cheeks. I raised my hands, but they stopped halfway, stopped by the short lead around my waist.

“Wait,” he said, and pulled free his knife and leaned across. The cords fell from my wrists and waist to the ground beside my horse, a tangle of black. “Now.”

My arms were stiff when I lifted them. My face was wet. “She is mine,” I said finally. “She is my clan, the only—” My throat closed.

“No one steals her,” he said softly.

I knew that; she gave herself away, to Shen and his family I had never seen.

For the Moot people, finding places is not so hard; we have the sextant to tell us how far north or south we are; and the angle of the sun shows us that we are where we belong, at the center of things. Rivers and hills and lakes and plains all move under us, but we and the sun stay still: n’dau.

The raiders did not use a sextant, although they had my clan’s as well as their own. Instead, we passed cairns no higher than my ankle, made of gold-pink stones—laid by the advance horsemen finding a route for so many horses. I did not know how anyone saw the cairns on a plain littered with gold-pink stones.

We ate on horseback. There was more water now, easy to find at the center of the soil ribbons we crossed. We stopped to sleep only when the lead mare refused to travel. Even through the smoke, I remembered to examine the horses of the herd, looking in their mouths for sores, but the Winden mares were healthy, if tired. Amazingly, the foals were all keeping up. The barbarians’ horses were not so well. None had caught pneumonia from Suhui’s mare before it had died, but they were more exhausted than they should be, even for the work they were doing.

Back with my family, I had always slept in a tent, but I got used to resting as the barbarians did, with a dark cloth thrown over my face to cut the sun’s bite. In the brief time between lying down and exhausted sleep, I looked up and saw the ball of the sun filtered through fabric and the smoke in my head to a hard hot ball. Still too high.

After a while, we crossed another ribbon of vegetation, this time mixed thorn bushes as high as my chest. Some were from Earth, but here they bloomed and seeded at the same time so that the tangle was filled with tiny yellow-green flowers and brighter wax-yellow berries. A small stream ran along the ribbon’s center. The herd drank there, but Huer said there was more water and better grazing ahead of us, and we did not stop for long.

They had not tied my hands again but the blazed gray mare I rode still had no reins. Perhaps she was the best trained for voice commands, because I never rode another, even when she was tired and fell to the back of the group. I had memorized one of the words Huer used on her, the command for
stop.
Her ears flicked back when I tried the word, but she plodded on. At last, impatient, I slid from her saddle and ran to her head, caught the cheek straps of her halter and forcibly halted her.

Her head hung as she labored for breath. She was sweating too hard for the work she was doing, as I am small and she was a big horse. Her coat was stained dark. When I laid my ear against her side I heard her heartbeat, too fast. Looking for a sign of the fever I already knew she had, I peeled her lip back. Her gums were pale.

But the inside of her lip and her gums were also covered with weeping sores, some the size of my thumb. The flesh around them was hot red, inflamed. She flinched when I touched her mouth, even with cool hands, even a finger’s length from the sores.

I heard a shout from the herd: Ko’s voice, calling for Huer. Perhaps he had seen me off my horse. But where would I go afoot? To the ribbon behind us, to squat among thorns? No: Ko galloped past me, back toward the ribbon.

Huer rode up. “The mare,” he said harshly. “The pregnant sorrel. She’s left the herd.”

I stared at him. “Bring her back, then.”

“Have you been watching? She’s shedding, drinking a lot. It is her time. Mount.”

I looked at my heaving horse. “I don’t think mine can carry me.”

“Behind me, then,” he said impatiently, and leaned over, his hand outstretched. I laid mine in it; he heaved me up in front of him. He pivoted his mare and we followed Ko, back the way we came.

Ko had found her almost immediately, and we followed his shouts to a place in the thorns just south of where we had crossed the water. We stopped where Ko’s horse stood. Ko paced beside a gap in the thorns. Huer pulled me down, caught my wrist, and dragged me down a short path.

The sorrel stood in a small clearing, pawing at the blossom-dusted ground. When she noticed us, she charged a step. Huer and I stepped back into the path’s mouth and silently knelt to watch. Perhaps this was distance enough, for she ignored us there.

Something was wrong. She acted as any mare delivering would: shimmied her huge bulk as though uncomfortable, then laid down with her legs tucked under her like a crouching dog. And then up again and then down, twisting restlessly.

“No,” I said, realizing.

“What?” Huer said behind me, his breath warm on my ear.

“She’s not eating,” I murmured. “She should be eating everything she can reach.”

He left me and moved back. I heard him say in a low voice, “Get her medicines.” Ko mounted and left at a gallop.

When Huer returned, I said without looking back, “Wasted effort.”

“What?”

The sorrel was rolling on her back, heaving her huge torso from side to side. “It’s colic. I can do nothing.”

“Is this the plague?”

I turned to look at him. “No. The mare is damaged internally somehow: the foal kicked her intestinal wall or has been lying across a vein in her belly. Or she’s eaten something strange.”

“Did the plague make her susceptible?”

“No,” I said impatiently. “There have always been difficult deliveries, colics.”

Her neck was stretched straight out, her throat muscles working. Her legs thrashed as she tried to shift her bulk. The coppery coat was streaked dark and light with sweat and foam. The eye I could see was rimmed with panic-white. Huer said, “You must do something.”

The spasms stopped and she lay on her side, heaving. The hard drying mud of the clearing was spangled with tiny fallen green-yellow blossoms. I moved to her and stroked the long bone of her face.

“There’s nothing I can do,” I said without looking up.

He crossed the clearing in two strides and pulled my face to his, until his gold eyes were a flat angry glow a hand’s width from mine. “You can try, Katia. You can fight for her life.”

“Why?” I said wearily. He had never called me by my name before. None of them had. “So that she can bear foals for you?”

“Better that she bear foals for someone,” he said grimly. “Yours is the first pregnant horse I have seen in six of Suhui’s menstrual cycles. If they cannot be infected, your horses, their foals, will save us all. You will not let her die of colic.”

“Important? Nothing is so important that you had to kill Ricard and Jena. Meg. Daved. The boys. The dogs.” My words came as croaks. My eyes felt pressured by poisonous, unshed tears.

“Do you think I do not have a family, Katia of the Winden Clan? That I do not have brothers, a sister married to a book-saver in the city? A son, too young to leave his mother and join me? I have family and I fear for them. Without horses we will die. There will be no way to communicate, no way to gather tribute. We will starve. Save this foal.”

“Or what? You will kill me? Mara?”

A horse galloped up. Its rider dismounted and pushed through the gap in the thorns with the first of my parfleches.

For a moment Huer’s eyes glittered. He looked away before I did. “No,” he said. “The child learns our tongue from Shen. She is already loved as a sister by one of us. We will not kill her. Or you.”

My clan was gone: my dogs, my family. Even Mara, forgetting it all. But I still had the parfleches and my knowledge. And somehow his admitting he would not kill me freed me to do what I was meant to.

“Bring me the parfleche with the red beads.”

“You will save her?” he asked.

She began heaving beside me. “I told you. No one can. But I can kill the pain, and help her deliver even though she dies.”

She was thrashing again, and I had retreated to the path before he got the parfleche to me. I laid it out quickly. I knew what Huer saw, leaning over my shoulder: a horsehide packet filled with small cloth- or leather-wrapped bundles, each tied with dyed cord hung with beads. But I saw the contents instead: boxes of powdered leaves and roots and molds and earths, stoppered jars of honeys and tinctures, knives and threads and needles, splints and bowls; a waxed sack filled with clay dust, for casts.

“When she relaxes again, cut her in the neck, a slice this long.” I showed him the first joint of my thumb. “And then hold her.”

I mixed water and tincture, sucked them into a bamboo straw cut to a point at the bottom, and stoppered the top with my tongue, which instantly went numb.

When she stopped thrashing for a moment, he dug the point of his knife in, just above the shoulder. She flinched and prepared to fight, but she was tired and in pain, and I was faster: I jammed the straw’s sharp end into the hole he had made and blew hard, then jumped back before she could knock my teeth out with her tossing head. Blood sprayed from the cut.

“That will work?” Huer said, panting.

I nodded. “I was in muscle. She will calm.”

Which she did. Tired and drugged, she writhed less and less, until she died.

We cut the live foal from her belly. While Huer and Ko wiped him clean, I milked the dead mare out. Ko took the waterskin filled with milk and cut a tiny hole in a leg, which he thrust into the tiny colt’s questing mouth. He drank greedily.

“Look how healthy,” Ko said. Tears fell down his face. “He will father many foals.” Huer sent him back to the herd, colt and milk laid over his mare’s neck, to find a milk-mother as soon as possible.

I still knelt with my hand on the mare’s sagging, empty belly. I began heaving. It was a while before I realized this sickness was sobs. I cried for a while. When I was done, Huer gave me water and rode with me back to the herd, now far ahead. I heard a feral dog howling at a great distance. It was a lonely noise and I was grateful for the first time for the company of the barbarian.

We rode. My numbness was over, replaced by a raw ache. The sun scarcely moved in the sky. I watched my short shadow and cried steadily.

Shen’s dark bay got sick: a runny nose and fever, then influenza. By the time we noticed it was more than her usual exhaustion from the early stages of the plague, all the other horses had it, as well: the raiders’ horses and the new colt worst, my herd no worse than they ordinarily would be in influenza, coughing and staggering their way through the disease’s course.

We were passing a drying lake that stretched dawnward to the horizon. Far to the south, a group of small buildings stood where the lake’s shore had once been, not much more than dark blots on the horizon. People had lived there when this place was closer to Dawn, then abandoned their village as the lake withdrew and the mud bed cracked.