Kij Johnson by The Horse Raiders

Author:The Horse Raiders
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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 its cheekstrap, the first.

We left the stream and travelled again.

There were fifty horses in the Winden herd, as well as the ones we rode. The queen mare decided she didn’t 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 tracked 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.

“Shen says we’re going to a city,” she said—an unfamiliar word, even in Trade—“that’s where his family is from, and he’ll introduce me to his sister.”

“City,” I murmured after her.

“That’s like a bunch of houses, only huge. Shen says that more than a thousand people live just in that place. The emperor—that’s their group leader, ‘Tia, like the Moot-leader—has a herd of a thousand horses, all together, and they feed them with grain from farmers from all around, instead of eating it themselves. Shen says—”

“Who are your parents, Mara?” I interrupted.

“My mother is Meg Weaver of the Winden clan. My father is Daved Handler of the Leydet clan, crossed into the Windens,” she recited. “When are Mama and Papa coming back?”

“You won’t forget that, will you?” I asked. “Your clan? Your parents? No matter what happens?”

She twisted in my arms to look at me. “That’s silly, ‘Tia. I have to say that every time we come to Moot.”

“—But if you never go to a Moot again, Mara. Promise.”

“But—” Her face twisted. “Where’s Mama?”

“Gone,” I said. I still saw through the smoke; I had no resources on which to draw to explain things gently, or at all, to a child. Meg, Daved: dead, leagues Noonward.

“When will they come back?” I recognized the signs of coming tears: the tension in her body, the tightening of her voice. “You have to tell me.”

“I don’t know,” I said. Never.

She screamed and hit me. “You do know! You won’t let me talk to them. You’re here and they’re not; I hate you, I hate you!”

At her first screams, Shen and Huer left their places by the herd and galloped toward us.

“Hush, daughter, hush.” Shen pulled her from my arms and into his own. “Wulin is your size and she never cries any more. Do you want her to think you’re a baby when you meet her?” He met my eyes momentarily over her heaving shoulders; I saw anger that I had made her cry. “Let me show you a marker-cairn, how we show a way for the horses to go home.” Still murmuring in her ear, he kicked his horse into a canter toward the front of the herd.

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