Mistress of Animals

Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

Penrys took her own look down the trail before the light faded entirely, after the horses and donkeys had been unloaded and fed.

A dead horse lay in its tack at the side of the trail, mummified in the drying winds and well-nibbled. That was bad enough, but it was the scattering of belongings that raised the hackles on her neck. Why were they abandoned there?

Najud was uncharacteristically quiet as they set up the camp at the wide spot, by its spring, overlooked by the presence of the lud on the far side of the trail. Its surface sparkled occasionally, reflecting the flicker of the fire. Their supply of wood was limited, carried all the way up from Jaunor and intended to last for three more days to get them through the pass, so the fire was just large enough to heat water for their meal and to take some of the chill off.

By unspoken consent, they’d set up their small tent, partly to keep the wind off but more, she thought, as a barrier against the sinister debris they’d found.

She wrapped her hands around the warm mug of trail stew and cleared her throat. “So, what are you thinking? Have you ever seen a horse and packs abandoned like this before?”

Najud looked up. “No, nothing like this.”

He bestirred himself to give her his full attention. “Of course. I forgot for a moment that you aren’t a Zan. You wouldn’t know.”

He glanced off into space to collect his thoughts. “This trail is used for trade between Neshilik and sarq-Zannib. And sometimes for refugees—Rasesni came this way when Kigali cleared out Neshilik, a couple of generations ago. But these are Zannib goods, all over the trail, so it’s not refugees from the north.

“No Zan would desecrate a trail. That horse should not be there. It would have been butchered for meat, perhaps, or at the very least stripped of its gear and pulled off of the trail and covered with rocks, as much as possible. And the tack would never have been abandoned. What you saw—there was no respect shown the animal. And men on the trail do not abandon useful things.”

“Maybe they had more than they could carry,” Penrys suggested.

“That’s not like the Zannib, either. We are nomads, we plan everything around what we can carry and what we need.”

He searched her face. “You saw the small pack, over there?” He c****d his head in the direction of the lud.

She nodded.

“That’s a child’s pack. From the day we can walk we begin to learn how to carry what is needful. And below, I found these.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out two small objects which he tossed to Penrys.

One was a cloth doll the size of her hand, dressed in a Zannib robe. The face had painted eyes and mouth, and bits of dark wool attached as hair. It was soft, easily stuffed into a pack or a pocket. When she sniffed it, no scent remained except the dust of the trail. The other was a dingy brown horse, the same size as the doll. Bits of leather were sewn on as a saddle, and a mane and tail of dark fleece had been attached.

“Children?”

He nodded. “I had toys like this, most children do. When I was, maybe, four or five years old. You don’t understand. It’s very rare to take children that young on the taridiqa. And no one would take them over the High Pass. So, what were children doing here?”

One obvious possibility suggested itself to her. “Could they have been fleeing something and forced to try the pass?”

“I thought of this, but where are they, then? And why are their goods still here?”

Penrys shifted her position uneasily. “Maybe they weren’t alone, Maybe someone found them and took them away.”

Again, he nodded.

“And left their goods behind. It’s possible. But who made the pile of packs at the foot of the lud? Only the Zannib would do that. If they were taken by other Zannib, why would they take people but not gear? And in either case, why involve the lud?”

“What does it mean, these packs to the lud?,” she asked. “You said they weren’t offerings.”

“They’re not. It’s hard to explain about the lud. They’re not gods, the way the Kigaliwen and the Rasesni think of gods—something that directs the world and may reward or punish them. The creator of our world does not take such an interest in us. He made our world good for us, and it’s up to us to keep it so.

“What the lud do is show us where the dunaq wandim, the world that surrounds, shines through for us to see, piercing the veil of illusion that is our life. Yes, I know that is just a rock formation over there. But it is also a hint of something…”

“Sacred?” Penrys suggested.

“Yes, sacred. A reminder. We owe it respect because of that reminder. We speak of the lud sometimes as if they were little gods. This one is the husband of the other one at the north of the pass. They’ve been married a very long time, hundreds of years, and they don’t talk much to each other any more, but they are still yuj, a married pair, and not separated very far. It’s a silly little story, and they are not little gods, not really, but it makes things more comfortable for people, stupid as we are.”

“I understand, I think. But what does it mean, then, those packs?”

Najud shook his head. “A plea for help? A pledge to endure?”

He lowered his voice. “A farewell to life?”

Penrys lay awake after Najud finally subsided into an uneasy sleep. There was no laughter under the robes tonight.

It was strange to her, this withdrawn mood of his. He was cheerful in the face of his own troubles, but the presence of children in this sinister scenario had been a blow to him. That, and the uncertainty over their fate.

All the way down through Neshilik for three weeks he’d been bubbling over with eagerness to get home, free for the first time in his ten years of self-imposed exile, even though the time of year would keep him from reaching his own clan’s winter camp before the snows set in. No one had bothered them as they moved south through the chaos in Neshilik—not the Rasesni occupiers, once they’d shown their safe conduct from Menchos, a high-ranking Rasesni officer now based in Gonglik, and certainly not the Kigaliwen who recognized non-Rasesni foreigners and were glad to be rid of them.

The bigger problem had been the occasional encounter with Rasesni priests in the towns they passed through, wherever a temple had been rededicated to Rasesni gods. The news of events at the north end of Neshilik, and the death of the Voice, the wizard-tyrant that had so threatened Rasesdad, had spread from the temple school in Gonglik, and along with it Penrys’s role in his defeat, the one that had led to a Kigali tailor referring to her as “Destroyer of Demons,” the somewhat comic title she was still living down with Najud.

These priests had wanted to make a fuss once they realized who they were, and more than once Penrys had been grateful to the tailor’s wife for the scarves she wore around her neck, obscuring the chain that marked her. She was very tired of explaining to them that, yes, the Voice had also worn a chain like hers but, no, she didn’t know who he was.

She hoped to spend a year or so in sarq-Zannib, some of it with Najud’s family, before deciding what she should do next. If Najud would have her that long…

Would their intimacy survive once they were back with his people and no longer alone on the trail? If she would be moving on in a few months anyway, maybe she should encourage it to attenuate into a professional relationship, one wizard to another.

That would be wiser—he would be settling with his clan, as most Zannib wizards do, now that he was a master wizard and no longer a journeyman, and what could she offer him that would fit his life? The endless circle of the annual migration? Children? Whatever she was, she doubted she could bear him children, and this was a man who wanted them, who had deferred them too long. She didn’t want to watch him make his choice of a wife, and she couldn’t stay indefinitely—there was no place for her there.

She wasn’t ready to give him up, not yet—she’d been alone far too long for that—but she was determined to try.