Mistress of Animals

Chapter 7

CHAPTER 7

“Not what you expected, is it?” Penrys said late that night, careful that her voice didn’t carry beyond their tent.

Her question met with silence, so she tried again. “Came home to be a master-wizard, and instead… I suppose this is just a different sort of mastership.”

She was curled up against his back, and in any case it was too dark to see his face. She left his mind in privacy, all in turmoil as it was, but she wanted to help, if she could.

“The zarawinnaj is a position of great responsibility,” he said, at last. “It’s either the clan leader or someone he appoints, and the man who undertakes it is much older than I am, very experienced, very respected. He holds the safety of the clan in his hands.”

He turned over to face her, in the dark.

“I am not qualified to do this, Pen-sha. I don’t know these people, I don’t know their herds. I don’t even know the tarizd, the route.”

“They know that. And they know the route home,” she said.

He snorted. “We may not even go back that way. The shortest route, unless there’s an obstacle, would be straight back to the zudiqazd before the weather turns. We have to get this remnant of the herds back to the winter camp. At least they’re in good shape, healthy and fat.”

“I can help with that. I did a count this evening and you know I can find them if they stray.”

“Good. I’ll rely on you for that. We are far too few to make the herding easy.”

They lay in silence for a moment.

“Naj-sha,” she said, finally, “What do they expect of me, of the… woman of the migration leader?”

“Oh, people come tell her things they don’t want to say to the zarawinnaj directly. The women and the youngsters, particularly. We won’t have that here, I think—too small. And they don’t know you. Besides, they’ll be shy of a bikrajti—it’s not likely they’ve ever seen one before.”

“That Hadishti will help,” he mused. “Her other son’s now a nal-jarghal so we can look to her for commonsense about that. But I’ve never heard of a bikraj leading the taridiqa—it would never happen.”

“It’s happened now,” she said. “You’ll get them home.”

“I’ll have to,” he said, his voice still troubled. “At least it’s not very far, just a few days.”

“But won’t that depend on what we find?”

“That’s what I’m worried about,” he said.

“And that’s why they need you.” She tapped his chest with her finger. “Now go to sleep and stop thinking about it. Or else I’ll make you.”

As she’d hoped, his attention focused on her, and he hitched himself up on his elbow to free up both his hands. “Oh, yes? Show me how you’d do that.”

Najud was all business the next morning, up before daylight and packed. He went to each kazr and spent time asking about pack animals, food supplies, and special skills.

Penrys made herself useful. She scanned the whereabouts of the herds and came up short for one of the small, shaggy cattle, so she extended her reach and found him. She saddled up her Rasesni mare and went after him.

He was a one-horned stubborn old bull, no longer the herd-leader, and he liked the patch of grass he was in better than the company of the herd which had stopped obeying him. But when Penrys started to crowd him, he grunted in token objection and ambled back to his herd in front of her. Dimghuy was already in place on the herd perimeter and was glad to see them both.

“I couldn’t go look for him,” he said, “without someone to hold the rest of them.”

Penrys smiled at him. “I know. I think this is going to be my job, looking for the strays and bringing them back.”

“You, bikrajti?”

“It’s something I can do to help.” She didn’t tell him, but she would also be tracking all the people, since there weren’t so many.

She could be Najud’s eyes and ears on the backtrail. *All strays accounted for.*

*Good. Come in to the camp.*

Her lips twitched. He’s busy. It’s not just the two of us anymore.

She tethered her mare on the edge of camp, after taking the bit out of her mouth so she could graze more easily.

The tent she’d shared with Najud had been packed, and the last kazr was being disassembled before her eyes. Jirkat’s group had already uncovered the roof felts and dropped that canvas to the ground, and the rectangular felts themselves were half gone, exposing the thin rafters that ran from the tops of the five-foot circular wall to the roof crown, the zamjilah.

Hadishti and Yuknaj stacked the felts into tidy piles and rolled the canvas covers tightly. Yuknaj chased each anchor rope as it fell and coiled it neatly.

The men dropped down to the ground when they were done and stripped first the canvas and then the felts from the outer wall, leaving the light wooden lattice sections standing when they were done. Only two long ropes remained—the one around the top of the lattice, just where the rafters connected, and another halfway down.

Khashghuy ducked through the doorframe into the exposed interior, now stripped of carpets and contents, and steadied the two long poles that propped the multi-spoked zamjilah while Jirkat and Ilzay walked around the wall and lifted the crutch of each rafter loose from the top of the lattice wall, and then pulled it out of its slot in the zamjilah. Then Ilzay went in to help Khashghuy lower the wheel-like crown. By the time they came back out with it, the ropes were gone from the lattice wall, and Jirkat was untying the bindings lacing the lattice sections to each other.

Penrys watched all this in fascination. The women took each lattice section as it came free and collapsed it into a compact stack of sticks, the leather bindings at the joints holding the lattice-work together. In what seemed like moments, the entire kazr lay in its components at their feet—a stack of rectangular felts and rolled canvas sections, coils of rope, five bundled lattices, a pile of rafters, the two roof-crown props, and the door and its disassembled frame. The zamjilah itself, brightly painted like the rafters and the props and the door with its frame, leaned jauntily against the tallest pile.

Najud joined her. “Two horse loads, for a kazr this size, but that includes all the contents.”

He nodded back at the spot where the smallest kazr had been, now just a pile of parts. “A very small kazr, four lattices like that one, can fit on a single horse, but you need two for a five or six lattice one.”

“Can a single person set one up?” she asked.

He waggled a hand. “It’s been done, but it’s difficult. If you’re going to travel alone, you use a kamah, like ours. That smallest kazr, the one Yuknaj and Winnajhubr borrowed from their mother, held two adults and the little girl. A kazr is always more comfortable than a kamah, and stronger against bad weather, but not for a solitary traveler.”

“How big do they get?”

“In the winter camps, once in a while, you may see a seven or eight section one. Needs long rafters, one like that, and it’s not easy to move, so they’re uncommon. And even the winter camps shift locations a little bit, every few years. For very big families, it’s easier to have two kazrab, or even three, sometimes connected, sometimes not.”

Penrys surveyed the treeless steppe. “Where do you get the wood?” Their cooking fires had been fueled by dried dung.

Najud surprised her with a broad grin. “You trade for it, from the eastern woodlands. Very precious, it is.”

His face sobered suddenly. “More of the wealth of this tribe—their kazrab, left behind in the summer encampment.”

“Come. We break camp now.” He strode away to the ashes of the prior night’s fire, where everyone not on herd duty was waiting.