Mistress of Animals

Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3

“We should bring what we can with us,” Najud said.

He was reluctant to disturb the packs at the base of the lud in the morning, especially since someone had gone to the effort to arrange them there, but there was no point leaving everything to rot, not when they had capacity in their pack train now that some of the fodder and fuel had been consumed.

“We can at least get it off the pass and take it to the clan.”

“Do you know which clan it is?” Penrys asked.

“I know the markings.”

He showed her the arc of the world-bow, the blessing after rain, cut into the leather of the packs. “That’s Kurighdunaq, my cousin Zaybirs’s clan. My mother’s sister Qizrahi married into it, to everyone’s surprise. It’s unusual to marry out-tribe like that—made quite a stir when she brought her herds into their bloodlines.”

“Is that the clan we were hoping to meet?”

He nodded, unhappily. For all he could tell, his cousin’s pack was here somewhere, and he among the missing. He’d never met the man, and now he feared he never would.

“You can see the zamjilah, the eye-of-heaven, on our goods, for my clan. That’s what we call the spoked ring in the center of a Zannib kazr, where the smoke rises up.”

He would be glad to shift to a warm, round kazr from the flimsy traveling tent they were using, once he could buy or make one. Waiting for one until he reached his family was not appealing, not as the weather got colder.

“I didn’t know what that was,” Penrys said. “Thought the symbol might be a wheel.”

He kept forgetting she was a foreigner to his land. The intimacy of the mind-speech and her fluency with his language made it seem as though they knew each other well and, of course, there was the sharing of their bodies. But she was still a stranger, not some Zan woman, considering a marriage. And he was years past the sudden, impulsive passions that snatched a woman from around the fire and arranged with the tayujdaj, the marriage broker, to speak with her family and count her herds.

And then, they were both bikrajab, wizards, and she something alien and strong and solitary, with that chain around her neck and her unknown origins.

There were so few woman like him. He could live alone, or try to make a life with a mind-deaf woman, one who would dislike and resent the differences between them, the way the old songs demonstrated. He’d always expected to end up unmarried, settled in his clan with all of its families and children, making a fuss over his nephews and nieces and maybe sharing time with a widow, now and then, to keep away the loneliness.

Penrys thought the donkeys he was bringing home, to breed mules with, were the main purpose of his present little caravan, and that she was just keeping him company to learn more about the Zannib and their practices. He didn’t dare tell her the rest of his plan, that he thought of her as a cautious wild creature that he was luring along, crumb by crumb, hoping to make her comfortable in the warmth of his family, since she had none, hoping she might stay and build something with him, anything.

And like any wild animal, he had to be careful not to alarm her. He didn’t want her to feel his attention on her, the way the hunted animal can tell it’s being watched. When they mind-shared, he sensed her withdrawing a little more each day, as though she were anticipating a parting, and it worried him—he wasn’t ready to bring a discussion about the future into the open, and scare her away.

“Come, help me stuff these packs into the donkey loads. We won’t look into their contents now—that’s the clan’s business, not ours. Then you can help me pile some rocks on that horse, once I cut its tack off and free it from constraint.”

“How’s your hand?”

Najud’s question was a welcome distraction from the mindless work of piling a rock cairn over a dead horse. They’d been at it for a couple of hours and were finally nearing the end. The tack Najud had cut off of the body made a forlorn heap near the road, ready to be stuffed into another donkey pack.

“It’s fine. The glove keeps it protected,” Penrys replied.

Her left hand was healing quickly. Though she was used to the speed with which her body healed, leaving no marks after the worst of wounds, it had been a surprise to her when her left hand began rebuilding the four fingers, lost in her desperate fight with the Voice only a month ago. The first two were already fully grown, and the third nearly so. The fourth was still a stub, since the slice that took them all had been diagonal, and it had the longest way to go.

How old am I? No marks on m’body at all, not wrinkles, not childbirth.

She had no memory older than three years, when she was found in far away northern Ellech, in the snow, naked except for the chain around her neck.

The Voice had also been chained, but she’d learned nothing from him—neither where he came from nor any information about his own past. She’d been brooding about it for weeks now. Someone must have made us, but why? Can he control us somehow, through the chains? Are there more of us?

She shook it off and stood up, bending and stretching to relieve her muscles. No point worrying Najud about it—not his problem. Just another reason to end it before it’s worse for both of us.

She’d been alone for three years, isolated at the Collegium in Tavnastok in Ellech. She could get used to it again. She shivered a little in the chilly air, and headed for her horse to tighten its girth and resume her cloak.

Najud placed his last rock, and then scooped up the stripped tack. The bright colors of the abbreviated Zannib-style saddle were dulled from a couple of months of outdoor exposure, but even so the day seemed a bit less vivid to her, once they were stuffed away into a pack.

Once they’d passed the debris in the general vicinity of the lud, there was nothing else to be found. After a couple of miles of trail, Penrys stopped looking for it and relaxed back into the work of the trail, keeping close behind Najud’s string and watching after her own.

From five horse-lengths in front of her, she heard Najud’s voice raised in a sad, solemn song. He stopped himself, abruptly.

“Join me,” he called. “Do the harmonies. The right ones, mind.”

Then he started over again.

She tapped him for his expertise in singing, to share the feel of how a song like this should go, how it should sound, and then she raised her own voice in wordless harmony to match his.

As she heard the words she could follow the meaning, but since she didn’t know what the words would be in time to sing them, all she could do was provide a counterpoint for his voice. Verse after verse it continued, a commemoration for the fallen.