At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories (9 page)

Several dogs were not dead but I had no knife, no pain-killers to ease their suffering. I knelt in the bloodstained grass holding my gasping brindle bitch until my captor ran up and caught my arm. “You do not leave us,” he said. Her head hit the ground as I was jerked upright.

“Kill her,” I said.

He started to pull me toward the camp. I ripped myself free and pointed at the dying bitch. “Kill them all. Finish it.”

“They are dogs.” He spat on the ground. “Unclean.”

“Kill them.” I met his eyes until he said something guttural and gestured one of the others toward us, a youth barely into adulthood, more boy than man. They spoke back and forth for a moment, and the boy walked toward the dogs, pulling a long knife free. My uncle Bran’s knife. I recognized the notch at the tip.

The leader bound my wrists with black cords and lifted me onto a horse, where he tied my feet to the stirrups. The strangers had taken nothing but my parfleches, the clan’s sextant, and a packet of gold and metal from ancient Earth that the family kept for bartering. Had kept. These were loaded on the backs of two mares. Mara seemed unconscious, held in front of her captor. The leader saw me staring at her. “To keep you honest,” he said.

Riding and shouting, the other barbarians circled the loose mare-herd until they gathered into a ragged bunch, the queen watching the strangers warily. Through the smoke, I listened to their talk, for they seemed to speak Trade among themselves. I learned there were seven of them instead of the five I saw; two were scouts. The barbarians were going to move fifty mares and thirty-five foals with five riders and no dogs.

The leader looked around and called, “Shen!”

The boy dropped Bran’s knife in the grass and ran back to us, mounted a horse. He caught my eye. “Finished,” he said, not unkindly. “It was not painful.”

My captor caught my reins and shouted to the others. We began to move toward Morning. Soon the camp was gone, the dark puddles of its collapsed tents no more than shadows. My family and my dogs would lie there until their bones baked in Noon and were lost forever. They would never return to n’dau.

My family usually traveled only as much as we needed to keep the sun at n’dau or to find a trade fair or the Moot. I had never traveled like this: endless whiles of arrowing north and dawnward, riding until dirty foam flecked the horses’ coats and their riders fell asleep against their necks. I was bound too securely to escape, even were I free of the smoke, the not-caring. After a time, the woman, Suhui, handed my niece to the boy, Shen, as they rode. Mara’s face was dirty and she slept in the crook of his arm as though waking were too painful.

I felt this way. I was awake, but the smoke was thick between me and the world. Nothing mattered, not even when I saw the gelding herd wandering far dawnward, Dana and Willem’s flattened shelter a shadow on the ground. The raiders had stopped there first, but they couldn’t bring the geldings into the mare herd, not with new foals.

The barbarians ate as they rode. I took strips of jerky in my bound hands when Huer gave them to me, but eventually my hands forgot their presence and they fell uneaten to the ground. I did not worry: the dogs would find them, and then remembered the dogs were gone. I swallowed when he held a waterskin to my lips. It was too much work to reject it.

We left the ribbon of Earth grasses and crossed a ragged plateau scoured nearly bare of soil, leaving only stones of every size. Dry as it was, velvet Ping-moss filled each rock’s short shadow with dark green. Dawnward, when the sun had been lower in the sky, the moss had filled in longer shadows; dying as the shadows shortened, the moss became soil for pockets of Earth grass. Ping-moss was poisonous to horses but grass was edible, and the horses snatched mouthfuls, until they walked in an ankle-deep cloud of pollen.

We came to a brackish stream, a thread following the broad bed of its Dawn self. The lead mare stopped, and the herd with her. Huer called a command and the riders moved upstream. Mara was awake. Shen swung her down to Suhui, who held her by the hand while pulling packs from horseback.

“You will not run.” Huer stood beside my mare, hands busy on the cords that held my feet in the stirrups.

The smoke in my head made it hard to think. I would not leave Mara. And where would I go, alone and unarmed, horseless and dogless, with a small child? They would catch me before I had gone a thousand paces. “I won’t run,” I said.

He nodded and pulled me from the horse’s back. “Mei,” he said to the junior of the two women. “Take her.”

Shrugging, Mei caught the trailing rope that led to my wrists. “Come.” On my leash like a dog in training, I moved into the long reeds away from the others to relieve myself, and then to rinse my face and throat with water that smelled of sulfur. Led back to the camp, I leaned against the mossy Dawn side of a rock. The shadow barely covered my knees when it should have spread over me like a blanket. So far from n’dau.

Mei started a fire that bled thin smoke. From a fitted felt case, she pulled a large silver metal bowl beaten thin as a leaf. She filled the bowl with water and hung it over the flames.

Once they had their saddle pads and bridles removed, the raiders’ mares mingled with my clan’s horses. There was some fighting, but less than I would have expected. The strange horses stood head and shoulders higher as they all waded into the stream. One of the riders, Ko, patrolled the opposite bank on horseback. As he cantered opposite us, he rubbed his dusty face wearily. My dogs would have guarded better.

Mara sat on the cracked-mud bank beside Shen. He was making something with reeds he had pulled.

“Mara.” My voice sounded blurred in my ears.

She turned slightly, perhaps afraid to look directly at me. “Aunt Katia?”

“Yes.” Meaning to reach for her, I lifted my hands until the cord stopped me.

“ ’Tia!” She bolted into my lap and clung to my neck.

“Are you all right?” I asked her.

She nodded, and her dusty, sweaty hair scratched my throat. She looked healthy, if tired and drawn. As well as I could, I felt her for injuries. She had a bruise on one shin, but I thought I remembered that from before the barbarians.

I had never been comfortable with the family’s children. I tended them when it was my turn but never asked to hold them or taught them the small-child things. After my father died, I showed Mara the things he had taught me when I was her size: how to clean the horses’ hooves, how to make a tablet from herbs or powders. I dealt with her best if I remembered my father teaching me, but now I had to deal with her. There was no one left.

“Where are Mama and Papa?” she asked.

Dust on Megan’s long-lashed eye; the ragged red gash left by an arrow removed from Daved’s side. “You don’t remember?” I finally said.

“Shen says they had to go away but that he’ll take care of me.” She frowned. “You’re dirty, ’Tia. You should wash.”

Dried blood flecked her cheek. “You should wash, too, Mara.”

“That’s what Shen says but I don’t want to. Shen says that where he’s from is so cold that water is like sand on the ground.”

“Snow,” I said. “At Dawn. I saw it once when I was smaller than you.”

“Shen says I’ll see it.” She blinked sleepily. “Why are you tied up like that? Were you bad like a dog?”

“No. You don’t remember the camp?”

She shook her head.

Shen came closer and squatted on his heels. He looked as tired as the rest of them, but he smiled at Mara and held out for her a small shape woven of reeds. “I have a sister her age,” he said to me. “Wulin. She is full of questions, too.”

“Shen says I may have the straw pony,” Mara said. “He made it.”

I watched through the smoke. Mara had already forgotten.

I slept until I was drugged with it. I woke once and staggered to the water’s edge to drink the silty water. My hands were bound in such a way that I could not cup water, so I dipped my face like a dog or a horse. When I was done, I knelt back, and picked at the knot with my teeth as I looked around me.

Shen and Ko slept nearby. Mara was cuddled against the youth. Mei guarded the horses and the camp; I saw her astride the one-eared mare from my family’s herd. She slowed when she saw me but did not stop. I could go nowhere and I was no threat; Shen and Ko lay with their knives and bows within arm’s reach.

I heard the murmur of voices, Huer and Suhui talking. They stood away from the herd with a single horse, the gray mare Suhui had first ridden. The gray held her head rigid as though afraid to move it, and barked a single shallow cough. Her halter was hung with prayer flags no longer than my finger.

Suhui soothed the horse. “Hush, daughter, easy.” The raiders all called one another family words—daughter, sister, father.

“The lesions and now the coughing,” Huer said.

“Yes,” Suhui said.

“Then the mare is already dead,” he said slowly. “I am sorry.”

“I understand.” Even at that distance I saw how pale she was, her gold-skinned face leached a muddy white. “But the others, the strange horses—they do not have the lesions, do they? They might not have it?”

“You saw them yourself. You looked in their mouths. No sores.”

“Every other horse on Ping seems to have them.” Suhui’s voice sounded bitter. “How are these free of them?”

“The handler,” Huer said. “Or she has something in her packs. Daughter, she might know how to cure your mare.”

Suhui’s voice was hopeless. “The pneumonia, maybe. The plague? Not even Earth medicine could cure her of that. It must be luck that her herd has not caught it. It was a mistake to take her, father.”

“Perhaps,” Huer said. “But it may not be luck. She may know things. Could I leave her behind?”

She said slowly, “She is too unwrinkled to be a great healer. I think there is more to it than this.”

“There is nothing,” he said harshly.

“She might poison her horses rather than see them become ours. Have you thought of that?”

“We have the child, what is it—Mara. She will not endanger her.”

“She might not care.”

The gray mare coughed again, once, shallowly, seemingly afraid of the pain. Huer touched her neck. “We cannot let her give this cough to the others, if she has not already. The handler may something to make this easier for her.”

“No. I will do it myself, as it has always been done.” The horse shifted at the grief in Suhui’s voice. “Would you trust the stranger if it were your horse dying?”

“We may all have to learn to, daughter,” Huer said wearily. “Her horses are well and ours are dying.”

Suhui removed the halter and walked away, singing softly to the mare. The gray’s ears pricked forward, and she followed slowly. They moved out of sight around a curve of the stream bed, Suhui plucking the prayer flags from the halter as they walked.

“And will you poison them?” Huer’s voice so close to my ear startled me. He stood a bare arm’s length from me, watching me watch Suhui.

I said nothing. I had thought of it but they were my family’s horses, all that was left of the Winden clan beyond Mara and me and the clan dog—if he lived. And to kill them would take me out of the smoke, to somewhere I did not want to be. “What sickness?” I asked finally.

“You don’t know.” I started to pick at the knots with my teeth again. “There is a plague. Everywhere on Ping, the horses are dying. The horses get sores in their mouths and then any illness kills them whether it is serious or not. It takes a long while for them to die. A dying mare can foal before she dies. But the foal is dying before it is born.

“Many leagues south of where I am from, back in Dawn, there were a people with a million horses. We used to raid them, but their horses are all dead now. Dead or dying. The Emperor sent us out, a thousand of us, while our horses were still well enough to carry us. To find information or anything that might help.”

“And so you killed my family and let me live.”

“You are an idea I had. That you might be able to heal the horses. Bringing you and the child to the capital may anger the Emperor. He may kill us.”

“Unless I keep the horses well?”

“Even then. I broke my orders.”

“Then why bring me back at all?”

“Because my death isn’t as important as saving the horses, if you can do that.” He shrugged. “We are horse people. The Emperor rules by the speed of our horses. When the horses die, we also die. I will only die a little faster than my people.”

Suhui was quiet, swollen-eyed and hard-jawed when she came back. She selected one of the bays from the Winden mares and looked her over carefully; the horse was young, so she danced as the woman did this, tossing her head high. Suhui seemed to like this and haltered her with the gray’s halter, tying a single prayer flag to her cheek strap.

We left the stream and traveled again.

There were fifty horses in the Winden herd, as well as the ones we rode. The queen mare decided she did not like being pushed so hard and kept moving the herd in other directions, away from north and dawnward. The riders exhausted their mounts trying to stop this. The barbarians’ gray horse that I rode trailed the herd, directed by Huer’s shouted commands. More often than not, Mara rode before Shen. When she did ride with me, she chattered about the strange world of the riders.