Unicorn Tracks (3 page)

Shaking the image out of my mind, I looked down the path. There was no sign of Mr. Harving or his horse. “We should probably look for him. I don’t see him down the track. His horse didn’t look like it would stop anytime soon. I’ll find him a different mount tomorrow.”

Kara laughed. “I’m sure he’s fine. He’s a great rider. Probably enjoying the chance to have a good gallop after so many weeks in wagons and on ships.”

Although I’d ridden her a few times myself, Mr. Harving’s horse was pretty new. She probably had never seen a griffin before, definitely not one poised for hunting. I would have to tell Tumelo about her behavior. The mare’s inclination to bolt made her unsuitable for us. Our horses had to spook in place, as running only made them more likely to get attacked.

Lucky for me, the horse left deep, muddy hoofprints in the red path. We followed them at a trot until we found the horse grazing beside the path in a field, with no sign of her rider.

Kara sucked in a breath beside me. “He’s lost. God, I can’t believe this. Lost on our first day. Do you think something attacked him?”

I didn’t want to say that it depended on how badly he’d fallen. Some of the animals in Nazwimbe could literally smell blood for miles. Falling off your horse with those things nearby never ended well.

“I’m sure he’s all right, Miss Harving. He’s probably back along the path somewhere, in a hedge or something. I was focusing on the trail and probably didn’t spot him.”

I steered alongside Mr. Harving’s mare to grab her reins. Kara kicked her gelding back and forth down a small stretch of the path, calling her father’s name, getting louder each time she yelled. I glanced about the field itself. Long blue grass whistled in the light breeze, the stalks swaying. The mare had trampled a flat square in the middle of the field, but I couldn’t see a rider’s impression. A blue mush of grass dripped from her bit. I scanned the edges of the field, looking around the tree roots for any sign of Mr. Harving.

“He’s here, he’s over here! Mnemba, quick!” Kara shouted from the edge of the forest, twenty meters farther back up the track. “He’s not moving.”

She dismounted, wrapping her horse’s reins around her fist, then knelt down in the tall foliage. I could make out a tuft of her flaming hair shining like a beacon as I cantered toward her, dragging her father’s reluctant horse behind me.

I swung off Elikia and crouched beside her. Kara had peeled her father’s trouser leg up, revealing his swollen calf. A boil had formed along the man’s curved muscle, red and swelling with a white center. I swallowed hard. “Help me flip him over. I need to see the other side of the injury.”

“What if it’s broken? Won’t we risk moving the bone?” She laid her hand protectively across her father’s chest.

“It’s not broken. I think it’s a sting, but I need to see it more clearly.”

“A sting? A sting from what?” Her voice rose. “Is it poisonous? Oh no….”

Without thinking, I laid my hand over hers and squeezed it. Immediately, I tried to justify my alarming overfamiliarity with a client to myself. It was a maternal gesture, right? Comforting? Out here, she and her father were my responsibilities. My safari-children. Her hand was as soft as the inside of a flower petal and the milky color of unicorn ivory.

If she thought I had overstepped a boundary, she didn’t show it. Maybe friends did that kind of thing in Echalend. Kara squeezed my hand back without looking at me. “If you’re sure.”

We turned him on his stomach, and I inspected the back of his calf. In the middle of the boil’s white center was a black stinger, the length and width of my middle finger. I closed my eyes, worst suspicion confirmed. I slid my fingers to the man’s neck as subtly as I could. I didn’t want Kara to see me checking if her father was dead. His pulse beat strongly, and I relaxed. Bracing his leg with one hand, I pulled the barbed stinger out with the other. Chunks of white pus dripped from the stinger like goat’s cheese.

I stood up and went to my saddlebags. Feeling around the bag’s crumb-filled bottom, I found the small knife I always carried. I sat back down next to Mr. Harving. “You might want to look away for this. It’s pretty gross.”

Kara shook her head, her hair coming free from its tie and falling around her shoulders. I hadn’t noticed how thick it was back in the office. She rubbed her father’s back and watched my every move.

I slid the blade into the boil, making an incision the length of my thumbnail. A trail of yellow-green poison spurted out, the smell strong enough to make Kara gag. I braced myself and then squeezed the remainder of the toxin out through the opening. Pus and blood spilled down his leg in a waterfall of red and yellow. I imagined Bi Trembla’s face, watching me conduct this field surgery without alcohol to clean the wound or a needle to seal it. Her mouth would be gaping with partially formed curses, her hands balled into fists at her hips. But if we left it, the poison would spread throughout his body. Even Bi Trembla would have to concede to that.

We waited, hardly breathing ourselves, while his shallow breath became deeper and more regular, and he slipped into a more peaceful sleep. The sleep didn’t worry me. If a person survived a manticore sting, sleeping after the stinger was removed helped them recover. Still, Mr. Harving could be ill for up to a week. Manticore stings were known to cause fever, chills, vomiting, and sometimes hallucinations. The sooner we got him back to camp, and into Bi Trembla’s regimented care, the better.

Elikia wouldn’t run if we met anything else on the trail, so I decided to load him onto her and ride his mare back. I brought the reluctant horse right over to Mr. Harving and gestured to Kara. “I’ll need your help to load him. I can’t lift him alone. He won’t wake until tomorrow at the earliest, and we need to get him back to camp.”

If she had been any of my other tourists, I might have ridden back at hell speed to bring Tumelo. Somehow I couldn’t imagine a Mrs. Dyer-type lifting her husband onto a horse, emergency or not. But Kara was different—I’d just seen her stare down a griffin, and she hadn’t fainted at the sight or smell of her father’s injury. When I told her what had to be done, her mouth set in a firm line and she nodded. Together we bent down and lifted her father’s snoring deadweight off the ground.

THE
MKUU
scattered ash in a circle around Mr. Harving’s sickbed. Tumelo had insisted on calling a local spiritual leader, to give our guests an “authentic cultural experience” even though neither of us practiced the ancient beliefs. Nor did anyone I knew. Bi Trembla rolled her eyes as she changed the dirty dressing on Mr. Harving’s injured leg. But Kara watched the Mkuu with fascination as he placed a phoenix feather under her father’s pillow and traced a square in putrid amarok musk between his eyes.

When the healer completed his ritual, Bi Trembla pointed toward the door. “My patient needs his rest and some
real
medical attention. Why must you bring in these wretched displays, Tumelo?”

Tumelo shrugged, grinning at her. “Maybe I think they work.”

Bi Trembla’s eyebrows rose so high they almost touched her hairline.

“Or maybe I just like a good performance every now again. And these guys are cheaper than bringing in actors.”

I covered my mouth so Bi Trembla wouldn’t see my smile. Her scowl grew more pronounced, and she shooed all of us out, shutting the flap behind us.

Since Bi Trembla had taken over the hut assigned to the Harvings as a hospital, we’d had to set Kara up in another. Luckily, with the Harvings as our only current guests, we had more available. But none were as luxurious as the one her father had paid for. So we tried to make the new one as comfortable as possible, lining the floors with our best rugs and buying new furs from the village at exorbitant prices. The local tanners smelled desperation and charged Tumelo double. Still, we had a standard to maintain. We couldn’t let her travel back to Echalend and tell her circle of friends our hospitality was lacking or that the hut where she’d stayed wasn’t like the one promised to her father. There were too many up and coming safari camps in Nazwimbe. If our reputation wasn’t perfect, Tumelo’s business would fail.

Kara followed us out of the hut, smiling for the first time since we’d returned to camp two days before. Her father’s color had returned, and he’d taken a little clear broth. The two of us would go back out into the wild today.

I went to get the horses ready, sending Kara to the kitchens for a morning cup of tea and some hot porridge. Tumelo jogged up behind me, gasping for breath.

“I have a plan,” he panted, bracing his hands on his knees.

I sighed. Things never went well when Tumelo had a plan.

“In case you can’t find a unicorn. Since it’s only his daughter going out with you for the next week, I can put a horn on Ketz and leave her in a field for you to find. That way if you don’t find one when Mr. Harving is better, his daughter will still say she saw one. Then they can’t go home and say I’m a liar.”

I groaned. Ketz was an elderly gray mare, arthritic and boney with knobby knees and growths on her ankles. Unicorns had rounded, strong bodies. Kara would never believe she was a unicorn no matter how well Tumelo decorated the horn. “That’s not going to work, Tumelo. She’s not stupid. She helps her father with his research. And Ketz looks nothing like a unicorn.”

“She’s white-ish,” Tumelo defended.

“And that’s where the similarities end.”

“Eh, Mnemba. They’re foreigners. They’ve never seen a real one. They just know they look like horses, yeah?” Tumelo ran a hand through his hair, and a faint blush rose to his cheeks.

We entered the barn. Ketz was not tied to her post.

My eyes narrowed. “You’ve done it already, haven’t you? Where did you leave her?”

“I used a real unicorn horn!” Tumelo protested. “I gave it to the kitchen boy to tie on. That girl will never know the difference! And I didn’t leave the horse. The boy is out watching to make sure she doesn’t get eaten.”

“And who is going to make sure the boy doesn’t get eaten?”

“I gave him a gun. Bi Trembla said he’s reliable.”

“You gave a ten-year-old child a rifle?”

“He’s just small. I think he’s twelve or thirteen.”

I shook my head, sighing. For all his wily business sense and salesmanship, sometimes the stupid things Tumelo did made my head hurt.

“Where did you even find a unicorn horn?” I asked as I threw a saddle over the back of the black gelding I’d chosen for Kara to ride. When he puffed out his stomach to stop me tightening his girth, I slapped his belly. Unicorns almost never lost their horns. The spirals were even denser than the tusks of an elephant, and unicorns were peaceful creatures that did not use the horns to fight each other.

Tumelo shrugged. “Oswe found a pile of them. Out by the Olafrango Lake, all clustered under one tree. We took a few back with us. We’ll see if we can sell them at the market. I know some people make jewelry out of them. They’re in great condition. All the silver spirals still on. Maybe you should go out to the lake? With all those horns near, maybe it’s a breeding ground and you’ll find some to show her.”

I frowned. A pile of horns all in one place? It sounded to me like someone else had gathered them with the idea to sell before Tumelo, but why leave their stock out in the open? I needed to see for myself. Even if we didn’t find a live unicorn there, Kara could bring a horn back to study. I bit my lip to hide a smile, imagining how excited she would be to have a real unicorn horn to bring home as a souvenir.

I decided to saddle Tumelo’s horse for myself, figuring that if I took Brekna, he wouldn’t go sneaking around trying to put any more horses with horns out in the savanna for us to find. Showy and dramatic, like his owner, Brekna had a powerful gait, a long ground-eating stride and always went with a beautifully arched neck. I loved riding him but barely got the chance. Tumelo wouldn’t ride anything else.

“Don’t take Brekna,” Tumelo whined, chasing after me out of the stable block after I’d tacked up both horses. “What if I want to go into town?”

“Sorry,” I said, batting my eyelashes at him sweetly. “I’ve been leading so many groups recently that my mare’s exhausted.”

Kara stood in the camp’s muddy courtyard, sipping tea from a cracked pottery cup. Her hair was loose, framing her face. Over the past few days, she’d developed a bridge of freckles across her nose and cheeks, choosing to forgo the sun hats most of the ladies wore while in Nazwimbe. Some of the skin on her burned chest had started to peel off in a way that should have been disgusting, but instead drew my eye down toward her bosom. I bit the inside of my cheek. What was wrong with me? When she spotted me leading the gelding toward her, she smiled widely, a dimple forming on her left cheek.

I wanted to believe the smile was all for me.

That pleasant delusion was short-lived. After setting her cup aside on a nearby stone, Kara approached and took the reins from me. She scratched the horse between the eyes and cooed. “What a beautiful boy. Look at those long legs. I bet you’re fast, aren’t you?”

I scowled and busied myself checking Brekna’s girth again. Jealous of a horse. How pathetic was I? It had to be loneliness bringing on these feelings. This place was too isolated. There was no one else my age at the camp, and I had not gone home in over a year. I wanted a friend, someone to talk to—that was all. Not that being attracted to another female was unheard of in Nazwimbe. If both women were married to the same man, it was often actively encouraged. But I didn’t think I was like that. I liked men, or at least I used to. It had been so long since I saw someone my age that I’d started to forget what it was like to have a crush on anyone, male or female.

Not that this was a crush.

When Kara started to adjust her stirrups, I cleared my throat and my thoughts. “Tumelo says we should ride for the Olafrango Lake. It’s not far from here, but one of our other guides found some unicorn horns. Might be a good place to start looking.”

Kara’s gorgeous smile vanished. “Horns? Do the unicorns shed their horns like deer? We never thought they did….”