Carol Emshwiller by The Mount

Carol Emshwiller by The Mount

Author:The Mount
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-02-10T22:35:03+00:00


I make Little Master stay back with Jane so I can go down to those three young ones that I cut loose. They move closer to each other and away from me. The way they look at me you’d think I was older and wiser, but they have got to know a lot more, and more important, things than I do.

First I sit—not too close—and don’t say anything. They don’t, either. They all three have painted-on mustaches, though it looks as if two have beginnings of their own real ones. I guess not good enough yet. They don’t have misshapen mouths as my father and the older mounts mostly do.

Then, finally they ask—and it’s my father’s question over again. “Whose side are you on?”

And then, “Are you a Wild or a Tame?”

And, “That guard that almost killed you was our captain. She’s as bad as a Hoot gets.”

“I know that.”

“We wouldn’t have put up with her here.”

“I know.”

They all sputter a little but nothing like my father. And even to me they use signs. They take for granted that I know them. I pretend I do.

“How did you get to be guards’ mounts? What did you do?”

“We were incorrigible.”

They leer. They’re proud of it.

“We’re worse than any Wilds.”

“Still are.”

They start to laugh and snarl and make gestures as if they’ll leap-and-choke me, but I don’t flinch. I don’t like people to think I’m a Wild. They think Wilds don’t know anything, which they don’t. I pull my lip up and out to prove I’m not, and then I ask, “So what did you do that was so bad?”

“Revolt. Big one.”

“We killed Hoots.”

“All of us did.”

“What about you?”

“You mean me?”

“You took a pretty good hit. Looks like maybe top-to-bottom”

I have a lot on, but my leggings are too short. You can see my calf and ankle, and my cheek and my neck down to my collarbone.

First I feel proud, and I don’t know what kind of lie to tell. I should have practiced one. But I’m not on their side anyway. Only sort of, when it comes to what they wear, and how they march, banging down with their metal heels. I guess I’m on a very small side, with only Little Master and me in it. I might as well stick up for us.

I point my chin up to where Little Master is—sitting on Jane’s lap now. It looks as if she’s telling him a story, too. “I saved that baby Hoot,” I say.

The young one—that youngest—the one I wanted most of all to be friends with….

Talk about fast as a rattlesnake or the leap-and-choke. He punches me. Two punches. One two. Before I have time to even think one. I fall back, about as hard as when my father threw me, but this time I get up fighting. Except he’s trained for it. He knows tricks and nasty punches to the wrong places. And he kicks. And he knows how to block. I don’t come close to hitting him. Not even once.



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