Mistress of Animals Page 5

  “I want to salvage every animal we can.” There were nods all around the fire. “Penrys, when you’re done, can you get me a count of every horse that shows evidence of having ever carried a pack? Sharma and Dimghuy can show you what to look for.”

  “All right,” Penrys said. It seemed to her that Najud’s voice had gotten even deeper with the advent of his new responsibilities.

  Heads came up at that. Jirkat said, “What are you planning, zarawinnaj?”

  “It’s only about eighty miles back to the zudiqazd, if you take the outward or returning routes from here, yes? And less if we go directly. Is there any reason we couldn’t go straight there, anything in the way?”

  Najud’s gaze was fixed on Jirkat who answered, “No, people do come visit sometimes, like their family.” He waved a hand at Yuknaj and Winnajhubr. “We can travel directly.”

  “Good,” Najud said. “That’s only six days of easy riding, since we have to take it slow if we want the cattle to keep their weight. We’ll spend a day or two here and gather fuel for the journey. Then we’ll take everything we can, make packs for every animal that can bear them. I want to salvage it all—all the wealth of the clan, if we can carry it.”

  Penrys noted Hadishti’s clear nod of approval.

  “It will mean we make less distance each day,” Najud said, “spending all that time loading and unloading the packs, but if the weather holds, what’s another couple of days?”

  Penrys asked, “Won’t we need more people as herdsmen, as we pick up more animals?”

  “Not necessarily. The big caravans are mostly long pack trains with a limited herd of spares and food. We’ll be the same. Every horse that can carry a load will be part of a string, and so the loose herds shouldn’t be unmanageable.”

  Ilzay said, “But what about our families?”

  “We look for them first, in the morning. I want to see the route up from the spring camp, its trace on the ground. Whatever happened, those herds didn’t fly out of here, and the numbers Penrys reports don’t account for most of them. Anything fresher than the spring trail should be visible. We find the herds, we may find the people.”

  “Forgive a foreigner for the question,” Penrys said, looking around the fire at the others, “but how often do people visit from the winter camp? Is it unusual?”

  Hadishti said, “No, each time we stop for the encampment, we tend to get one or two visitors. They know where we’ll be, and when, of course.”

  “That’s what I would have thought,” Penrys said. “Then where are those visitors? It’s been at least two months since this camp should have been moved. If someone came up from the winter camp, wouldn’t they have gone back and brought others to search, and to salvage everything, by now? Why is all of this still here?”

  The silence was unbroken for several moments, then Najud said, “If we had enough people, we would send a rider to the zudiqazd with the news, and they would come meet us part way. Meanwhile, we can’t be sure there’s been a visitor—perhaps there were none.”

  He looked around at his little command. “In any case, we can’t do everything. Our responsibility is to make one last assessment of what happened, preserve the clan’s livelihood, and get to the zudiqazd as quickly as we can, in that order. If there’s a problem in the winter camp, we can’t make it better by not bringing all we can.”

  CHAPTER 9

  When Penrys returned to camp at mid-day, she was eager to get her first daylight look at one of the seasonal camps of which she’d heard so much, even under the macabre circumstances. All the outlying stray animals had been brought in, young Sharma having proved very helpful in rounding them up, once she’d gotten over her awe at how easily Penrys located them.

  No goats had turned up, to be added to the current flock, but all the others settled into their new grazing smoothly. It was clear that they recognized their erstwhile herd companions, except for the horses and donkeys that Najud and Penrys had brought. The donkeys were proving to be a problem, not in themselves, but in the shock with which their new equine neighbors viewed them. When Penrys left, Sharma and Dimghuy were busy pushing the donkeys to the outside of the assemblage, to keep them as far from the other horses as possible.

  She dropped the bit from her horse’s mouth to let her graze on her tether at the edge of the camp, and walked in to take a look.

  There were about twenty-five kazrab still standing, and fifteen more bare circles in the grass, with the kazr components stacked neatly nearby. They’d been arranged in a broad oval with their doorframes facing inward. Jirkat and his brother Khashghuy, teamed with Winnajhubr, were taking another one apart.

  Movement caught her eye, and she spotted Hadishti and Yuknaj emerging from another kazr bearing bundles and small packs. They added them to a pile of decorated wood which Penrys thought might be furnishings, disassembled, and went back in for more.

  She didn’t immediately see Najud, so she bespoke him. *I’m back. Where are you?*

  *Come to the southeast side of the encampment. Bring your horse.*

  She reclaimed her mare and then trotted down the open oval space between the campsites, lifting a hand to the work teams as she passed. Well outside of the camp she found both Najud and Ilzay standing on the ground, holding their horses’ reins, and arguing about droppings.

  “Too recent,” Ilzay was insisting, probing the sample in his hand with a knife. “It’s dry, of course, but not five months dry.”

  Penrys hid her smile, and dismounted to join them. Najud turned to explain.

  “Turns out that Ilzay is considered the best of the trackers we have, so he and I have been looking for the trail of the main herds. We rode a large circle all around the camp and its closer grazing grounds, and there’s no relatively fresh trail. Of course, the herd came in from the spring camp five months ago, and that trail is still there. We’re standing on it.”

  Ilzay nodded his agreement.

  “One of two things happened. “Either there is another trail even further out on the grazing range, where we haven’t looked yet, or the spring trail was used again two or three months ago, which is what we’re debating.”

  “Or they flew away, as you said,” Penrys said, supplying a third joking possibility.

  Najud’s mouth quirked. “Speaking of flying…”

  Penrys gave him a questioning look. *Are you sure you want me to reveal that? Won’t it just scare everyone?*

  And make me more of a foreigner than I am already.

  “I think we have to,” Najud said, startling Ilzay who hadn’t heard the silent question. “A large circle at the outer edges, and then a long look down the route from the spring camp.”

  She sighed. “Better warn them, then.”

  “We’ll all come back to camp first, and you can tell us about the herd totals, like a dirum, a herd-mistress.”

  She remounted her horse and followed them. Some herd-mistress—I can describe what an animal feels like, but not what it looks like. Not too useful for that.

  When they reached the two work teams, they dismounted and called them together.

  “Tell us the counts, dirum,” he said, calling on Penrys.

  “We’ve gathered all the strays I found yesterday evening. There may be more of course, further away.”

  She had their attention. On these numbers depended their plans for salvaging the encampment and feeding the clan in the winter camp.

  “When I first met you, and counting our own stock, there were forty horses. That’s now ninety-three.”

  Najud interrupted her. “How many should there have been, Jirkat?”

  “I don’t know the real count, from our dirum.”

  “Guess,” Najud said.

  “Then I would say at least three hundred and eighty. There were about two hundred people, and you see forty kazrab here, so the minimum would be two hundred and eighty, just for people and shelter, and more for food and other things, plus the young ones.”

  Penrys continued. “The
cattle have gone from twenty-two to forty-two.”

  Jirkat looked at his brother uncertainly. “From a hundred and fifty?”

  “No change in the goats, seventeen, but the sheep went from thirty-five to eighty-four. And of course, there are the seven donkeys we brought.”

  Jirkat echoed her. “Maybe three hundred goats, and four hundred sheep, including the young ones.”

  Hadishti said, “That’s about a quarter of the horses and cattle, or so, and less for the sheep and goats.”

  She looked at Najud. “We found some food—that includes the cheeses that should be here, aging for the winter, and the summer fruits drying, too—but it’s not as much as there should be. Still, the fleeces from the spring shearing are here, loaded into their packs, as usual.”

  When Penrys grimace caught her attention, Hadishti raised an eyebrow, and Penrys was forced to explain. “It’s good news, after a fashion—only the living need food.”

  Hadishti nodded thoughtfully. “Maybe, but many of the personal packs were left behind. I can’t say what every family carried with them, of course, but it seemed to me that for some food and the packs to carry it were what’s gone missing. Maybe some clothing, but many things of value were left behind—small, portable things. For others, everything was abandoned.”

  Khashghuy broke in. “But they left their pack frames and packs, for the horses. Saddles, too. Are they on foot? Why, if the horses are with them? What are they doing for shelter?”

  Najud just shook his head and spread his hands.

  “I must speak to you now of something else,” he said, and motioned for Penrys to step into the center.

  “This bikrajti is different in some ways from the bikrajab you may have heard of. The herdsmen already know how she can reach out and sense your animals from a couple of miles away. We Zannib bikrajab can learn this, too—she is teaching me.”

  Penrys could feel the wariness behind their nods. They knew something else was coming.

  “We are lucky,” he said, “that she can help us in other ways. By being our eyes in the air.”

  He cocked an eyebrow at her. She clenched her teeth to keep her face expressionless and invoked her wings. They rose behind her, taller than her head even when held close to her body, the feathers colored like an eagle’s in golds and browns. The familiar odd sensation of the clothes on her back sliding unimpeded between what ought to have been solid attachments contradicted the feel of the wings against her shoulder blades and the tail against the base of her spine.

  How can they feel real to my body even when you can see daylight where they pass over my clothing?

  If they were a specialized magical device, as she believed, it was no technology she had ever encountered.

  The startled audience backed up involuntarily, but Hadishti recovered herself and approached to get a better look.

  “Is this something our bikrajab can learn?” she asked, and Penrys remembered that her older son had just become an apprentice to a master wizard.

  “I don’t know, lijti,” she said. “I don’t know the principles on which they work but surely it is in areas that the Zannib…”

  “…do not usually study, as nal-jarghal, like your son,” Najud supplied.

  She flashed a grateful glance to Najud for his rescue.

  “Najud has asked me to check the ground for trails while the daylight lasts, first for the outer range of the grazing. It may be that I can find more strays while I do that.”

  She nodded to Ilzay. “After that, I’ll look down the trail from the spring camp. Sometimes you can see more clearly from the air than from the ground.”

  Collapsing the wings back to wherever they went when not in use, she remounted her horse. Better to ride back to the nearest of the horse herds and untack her there before leaving, instead of scaring them all by just launching in front of them.

  They were too polite to talk about it while she was in earshot, but she could feel the dismay and unease in their minds as she rode away.

  CHAPTER 10

  Penrys took advantage of the prevailing winds from the west and pulled herself high enough that she could manage most of the work by gliding. Her mind-scan reached no further from the air, but she could cover a much larger stretch of territory when not limited by a horse’s long-distance speed.

  She worked downwind to a spot about ten miles southeast of the camp, not without marking the camp’s landmarks very clearly first, and began a circle to the south. She planned to circle the camp once at that distance. That would be a flight of sixty or seventy miles, two or three hours in the air. If she found many strays, she might have to widen it the next day, but a full circle five miles further out would take much longer, more than she could fly in a single day.

  At least, she assumed that was true. She’d never had an opportunity to fly free like this in daylight, for hours, without worrying about witnesses. Did the wings tire, if they were a device? How were they powered? Her back and shoulders felt some of the effort, and her belly, keeping her legs from dragging in the air—what would their limits be? Her only other long flight, in the dark, looking for the Kigali expedition a few weeks ago, had covered about forty miles and hadn’t tired her seriously at all.

  Assuming this first circuit didn’t exhaust her, that left her about two hours of daylight to look down the southeast trail toward the spring camp, maybe thirty miles coming and going. The lowering sun at that time of day should make marks on the ground stand out more clearly.

  She would be out of range of mind-speech with Najud the whole time. Unless she found the people they were looking for, she would be all alone, free as a bird.

  Najud tried not to worry as the sun set and Penrys had still not returned. It was unnerving, being out of mind-speech range with her. None of the Kurighdunaq clan-kin mentioned it to him, and that worried him in other ways. If it had been a scout that was overdue, all would have spoken of it, with concern. But what he had decided to do at mid-day, showing them her wings, had made her more alien than just a foreign bikrajti, and so they held their tongues. Who knew, after all, what a foreign wizard could do?

  He hadn’t wanted to expose her, fearing this sort of consequence, but it had to be done, for the better survival of the whole group. And now she was out there somewhere in the dark, and he had no idea where.

  The work at the encampment had gone well. All the kazrab were disassembled and ready to be loaded, and it looked like there would be enough packhorses to carry the camp, barely. He hoped Penrys would turn up more of them, though it might take another day to bring them back to the accumulating herds. Better more horses than trying to improvise packs for the cattle, or even the goats—assuming the Kurighdunaq even trained those animals for packs.

  But where was she?

  If Ilzay was right, then they needed to take the spring trail southeast out of the camp in hopes of finding the missing people.

  He looked up. The moon was half-full, and the sky was clear. She’d flown at night before, he remembered, that night she located the Kigali encampment, and came back to him. That first night he had finally acted on his desire for her, and found her willing. He smiled, lost in his thoughts.

  He caught Hadishti’s eye on him. She glanced down at his bowl, still untouched.

  “She’ll be back, bikraj. Who could stop her, up in the air? Maybe she was overtaken by darkness and will return in the morning, cold but unharmed.”

  Could she be simply lost? She has water and the makings of fire, on her belt, and even a bit of food.

  He nodded to Hadishti and conscientiously ate his dinner.

  The talk around the fire later was quiet, but less haunted than the night before. Packing up the summer encampment had taken some of the curse off of the abandoned kazrab.

  Najud had tried to stop checking the sky, once he’d noticed that everyone looked up when he did. No one wanted to mention contingencies—what they should do if Penrys were still missing in the morning. Time enough then to discuss it.
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  *Naj-sha, can you hear me?*

  He jumped to his feet, abandoning all dignity, and faced the south.

  *Are you all right?*

  *Fine. Sorry to be late. I have news—be there in a few minutes.*

  Najud tried to convey his relief through the mind-speech. *Come to the fire. We’re all here.*

  He couldn’t keep himself from grinning when he turned to face the others. “She’s not far away, and coming in.”

  He sat down again somewhat abruptly, before his knees weakened altogether.

  He rose again a few minutes later when the moon outlined the dark shape of something large gliding in from the south.

  Penrys stumbled a bit on landing, and staggered. Najud walked over to take her arm.

  “It’s nothing,” she told him. “I’ve never flown that long and I’m just tired. The wings can go on forever, seems like, but not the rest of me.” She rotated her head until her neck cracked.

  All eight of their fellow-travelers had stood up to watch. Hadishti picked up a bowl she had been keeping warm by the fire and a skin of water and held them out. “Come have some dinner and tell us your news,” she called.

  Penrys smiled at the welcome. She took the skin of water and drained a good bit of it before stoppering it again and laying it on the ground.

  She took the bowl and its spoon from Hadishti’s hands. “If you don’t mind, I’ll eat standing. Anything to work the kinks out.”

  She took her first two bites, and then paused. “I’ve found strays around the encampment, quite a few of them. And then I took the trail southeast about thirty miles.”

  Looking over at Ilzay, she said, “I can’t vouch for how old it is, but the next thirty miles look the same to me as the part we stood on earlier today. If that was recently traveled, then…”

  She took another couple of bites. “Rather than just retrace that path back, the shortest way, I decided to swing west until I was due south of here, figuring that would put me near the direct route to the winter camp. Then I would come back that way. The other two sides of the triangle, you understand. I wanted to see if there was anything along that route we should know about, like more strays. There wasn’t quite enough daylight left, but the moonlight would be sufficient.”