Adams, Robert - Horseclans 07 - Horseclans's Odyssey

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(Highroller)
Author’s Introduction
In the previous Horseclans volumes (Swords of the Horseclans through The Patrimony) I have moved
consistently forward in time from the initial volume of the series (The Coming of the Horseclans) ; but this
volume and the next few which will follow it are all set before the time of The Coming. If some of my
readers are confused by this, I am sorry, but I had deliberately left the initial volume open at both ends
because I was planning just what I have now done.
The books to follow this one will deal with the origin of the prairiecats, the discovery of the breed of
mind-speaking horses, certain of the adventures of Milo of Morai prior to his return to the Horseclans,
and much, much more. May Sacred Sun shine always upon you all.
Robert Adams
Richmond, Virginia
28 July 1980
Chapter One
The Great River, which had shone bright-blue at a distance, rolled muddy-brown as it slid under the
blunt prow of the broad row-barge. Senior Trader Shifty Stuart occasionally spat from the cud of
tobacco in his cheek into the river, but be did not bother to look at the water, nor did he look back to the
west, at Traderstown, which the vessel had just left His eyes were for the east, for Tworivertown, where
he would shortly make landfall with his cargo of furs, hides, fine horn-bows, matchless felts and blankets
of nomad weave, beautifully worked leather items and a vast assortment of oddments obtained by the
far-ranging horse-nomads of the transriverine plains by trade or warfare from other folk farther west,
south or north.
This was not Stuart’s first such return from a long summer of trading with the nomads. For sixteen
summers he had roved the plains country in a caravan of trader wagons— endless days of baking heat,
choking dust, swarms of biting flies and other noxious insects, the incessant lowing of the huge oxen that
drew the oversized, high-sided wagons on their five- or six-foot wheels from one clan meeting place to
another or, every fifth summer, up to the semipermanent Tribe Camp for the quintennial meeting of the
chiefs of all or most of the sixty to seventy clans of horse-nomads that had ruled the plains for most of the
five or six hundred years since the fabled Mercan civilization had gone down in death and destruction at
the hands of some far-distant enemy who must have suffered equal or worse devastation and
deci-mation, since no invading armies had ever followed up the bombs and plagues. Stuart had heard all
the tales, and he even believed some of them, for he had seen with his own two eyes the cracked and
splintered shards of the network of fine roads that had once crisscrossed the land, and the long-dead and
overgrown, but still impressive by their far-flung hugeness, cities of the plains. On three occasions, he had
overruled the superstitious maunderings’of his wagoners and associates to camp in the ruins of one of the
larger of these, that one that the nomads called Ohmahah, and on each visit he and his men had garnered
several hundredweights of assorted metal scraps out of the ruins, for all that the nomads had doubtlessly
combed and recombed them for generations. Others of the old tales were believed only by fools and
children, opined Stuart, Such as the yarns concerning men traveling to and walking upon the moon, or
living beneath the sea or crossing the sea in boats lacking either oars or sails. Silly, asinine nonsense, all of
it!
The senior trader leaned his weight against the massive timber beside him—one of four, two each at
prow and stern, which were built into the flat bottom of the barge and ran through every level to more
than twenty feet above the top deck, where they supported the iron rings through which was let a
hempen cable over two feet in thickness and extending from the ferry dock of Traderstown to the ferry
dock of Tworivertown, enabling the ponderous, topheavy barges to bear men and women, wagons,
livestock and goods across the wide water in any weather and in complete safety.
He cocked up one leg to rest a booted foot upon the low rail and began to calculate his probable profits.
Then a hand was tugging gently at his sleeve. He turned his head to see Second Oxman Bailee.
“I’m sorry to bother you, Mistuh Stuart, suh, but it’s thet there nomad gal, she wawnts to git out to
squat. Ever sincet I beat her good fer messin’ up the wagon, she’s done been real good ‘bout thet.
D’you rackon…” Stuart waved a hand impatiently. Bailee was a good oxman, when he wasn’t drunk at
least, but he took forever to Say anything in his whining, nasal, Ohyoh-mountaineer drawl.
“Yes, yes, Bailee, let the little slut out. It’s safe to now— we’re almost halfway across.”
As an afterthought, he yelled at the oxman’s back, “And when she’s emptied herself, bring her up here
to me.”
The trader settled back against the immobile timber baulk with a self-satisfied smile. In his recent
calculations he had clean forgot to add the probable sale price of the girl and of the two other younkers,
as well, not to mention the three fine, spirited plains ponies. And even if she and the boys were to bring
Stuart not a penny, still the last few weeks of use of her slender, toothsome body of nights would be
almost recompense enough. The treks outward, in the springtime, were not so bad, for the trading trains
most always carried along comely young female slaves for sale to the nomads. Unlike most of the
eastern, civilized slave buyers, the horsemen of the plains cared not a scrap of moldly hide whether or not
their human purchases were virgins. Indeed, they would pay more for a pregnant girl or one nursing a
new brat than for the very prettiest virgin or barren slut. Therefore, all the traders and many a common
wagoner or oxman usually had a soft-breasted bedwarmer every westward leg of the year’s trek, until
she quickened or was sold into some clan or other.
But the returns usually were companionless. Providing food and water for any chit that had for whatever
reason not been sold by the end of trading was unbusinesslike. Nomads would not take a sickly or
lunatic slave girl even as an outright gift, and many a trader drove these unprofitable leftovers out into the
vast sea of grasses to fend for themselves. But Stuart was a bit more kindly. He had a guard or oxman
slit the creatures’ throats and leave the carcasses for the wolves and buzzards.
The horse-nomads only bought, however; they never sold slaves of any description. For all that, the
rarely captured nomad women brought high prices from eastern buyers, while a trader lucky enough to
acquire even one little nomad boy could practically name his own price from the slave mongers who had
journeyed inland from the coastal lands of the Ehleenee, no trader who valued his yearly custom and his
hide would so much as mention his willingness to deal in nomads to any of those shaggy, smelly,
fleabitten, but grim and ferocious warriors and chiefs with whom he dealt.
Nor could an enterprising man simply snatch a few of the immensely profitable nomad spawn and bear
them back east-ward with him, for his own guards—hired here and there, from this clan or that, for the
season—would not only desert him, but would bring back the fierce warriors of the closest clan to wreak
a horrible vengeance upon the kidnappers and free the captives.
“You’re a dang lucky son of a bitch, Shifty Stuart!” the trader told himself for the umpteenth time in the
last three weeks. “If them four savages had come a-riding into camp even two days earlier, wouldn’t *ve
been a dang thing we could have done ‘cept to give ‘em a feed and a mebbe do a little trading for them
raw hides and horns they had. With them dang Clan Muhkawlee guards still in camp. I’d’ve just had to
watch a small fortune ride back off from me.” Through the sleeve of his tough linen shirt, Stuart gingerly
kneaded the healing but still painful stab wound in his upper arm, thinking, with a prickle of justifiable
fear, “It were a near thing, though, fer all that If thet young feller had got away…” He shuddered, his
thoughts going back to tales he had heard of what had been done by vengeful nomads to would-be
kidnappers of their kin. He shook his head. “Whoever would’ve thought a little squirt—he couldn’t’ve
been more’n fifteen or sixteen, an’ dang skinny, to boot!—so groggy he couldn’t hardly stand up from
the drug we’d snuck into his bowl of stew, could of kilt two growned men outright, hurt another so bad
he died thet night, an’ stabbed or slashed four or five others, got on his horse and been on his way, afore
ol’ Lyl Sunk thet dart in his back?”
Fleetingly, the trader once more regretted the loss—unavoidable as it had been—of the third nomad
boy, then shrugged, ruminating, “Ain’t no good to fret over spilt milk, I reckon. Mean as thet little bastid
was, likely he’da had to be beat plumb to death afore a body got any use outen him, anyhow.” Stuart
grinned again. “Three hundred dollars apiece, mebbe more, them two younkers oughta bring me, oncet I
gits ‘em to Fanduhsburk, mebbe twicet thet if I decides to take ‘em plumb to Looeezfilburk. Hell, mebbe
I’ll do ‘er, been coon’s years sincet I’z in Looeezfilburk, an’ I’ll have me the gal to play with till we gets
there, too. ‘Course, she’s gotta be gentled down some…” He had been the first to take the girl, and the
little minx had fought him like a scalded treecat—pummeling, punching, kicking and clawing until his arm
wound had started to bleed again, not to mention tooth-tearing his bristly chin and very nearly biting his
right ear off; which last injuries. she had wrought on him after he had had her wrists and ankles securely
tied to the wagon sides, nor was he the only man she had savagely marked. That he had successfully
resisted the impulse to give her back as good or better with his big, bony fists and strictly forbidden any
of the others with whom he shared the use of her to strike her face had been based upon a good, sound
principle of business—broken noses and knocked-out teeth lowered the value of female slaves.
He had not, of course, expected her to be a virgin, nor had she been; no nomad girl ever was so for any
length of time after attaining puberty. “But,” he mused and again grinned to himself, “they says them there
slave doctors in Fanduhsburk could make a virgin outen a thirty-year-old whore. Mebbe I oughta git ‘em
to make this gal inta one? Hmm, I’ll think on it. She’d sure bring more thet way, eastern buyers likin’
virgins the way they does.” He returned to his mental calculations for another few moments, then Bailee
was shoving the girl to a place beside him at the rail, and he lost his train of thought. A glance downward
gave him a glimpse only of the top of her head of dull, matted, dirty, dark-blond hair, for like all her
people she was small, barely as high as his armpit The girl’s baggy trousers and full-sleeved shirt were
both Somewhat the worse for having been violently removed from her body on several occasions, as well
as being filthy from having been lived in and slept in for the weeks since her capture. Her short boots of
red felt and brown leather had survived in better condition, since she had been carefully locked out of
sight in one of the big wagons for most of the journey.
She stood at the rail for some minutes, then shyly edged closer, closer, until her slender body was in
contact with Stuart’s. Her grubby, broken-nailed, but slim and graceful right hand hesitantly extended to
touch, then gently massage his genitals through the stuff of his clothing. Stuart grinned. “Cain’t git enough
of me, can you, baby dolir Without turning his head, he said, “Bailee, you can jest go on back, ‘bout your
work. Me an’ this here little gal’s got us some palav’rin’ to do up here.”
The trader closed his eyes in ecstasy as the captive girl rubbed and kneaded and caressed his flesh, and
he was completely unaware of her other hand’s activities, not even feeling the easing of the silver-hilted
knife from out its sheath in the top of his right boot.
When he did feel the girl’s body begin to crouch lower, he began to turn to face her… and a white-hot
agony lanced in behind his right knee! Even as he suddenly realized that the right leg no longer would
support him, the girl—still firmly clutching his scrotum in her wiry grip—launched herself forward, over
the rail. Stuart, screaming his agony and terror, was dragged over and down and into the muddy brown
water of the Great River.
Chapter Two
The shock of striking the water and its coldness stunned Stehfahnah for but a moment. She let go of the
man and put the blade of the knife between her small white teeth in order to free both hands for
swimming. Surfacing, she shook the water from her eyes and breathed deeply, treading water and
moving her arms to keep her body erect in the water.
Gasping and coughing up water, her sometime captor was floundering about a few yards distant, just
beyond the rhythmic file of splashing oars, which meant some eighteen feet from the side of the barge, the
upper rail of which was now lined with men, all shouting and pointing.
Taking another deep gulp of air, Stehfahnah swam purposefully in the trader’s direction. Once close
behind him, she grabbed the back of his wide weapons belt, jerked loose his big dirk and its sheath, then
shoved him deliberately into the path of the heavy oars.
Stuart did not even have time to scream before the hardwood blade of one of the sweeps, driven by the
strength of four brawny slave rowers, smashed into him. He sank for a long moment, then bobbed up, to
float, face-down, with the current. By the time Several of the bargemen and wagoners had swum out,
attached a rope to their leader and managed to hoist his limp, battered, broken and bleeding hulk back
onto the barge, the girl was nowhere in view. Remembering the shrewdly cast dart that had pierced and
slain her elder half brother, Broh, on the dark day she and her younger brothers were drugged and made
captive by the treacherous traders, Stehfahnah swam underwater until she was beneath the flat bottom of
the second barge, fifty yards behind the first. As the lead barge had halted, the barges behind had had no
choice but to follow suit, but the column could not remain immobile for long, else the insistent tugging of
the river’s current at their bulks would place undue pressure upon the transriverine cable.
Stehfahnah, too, was menaced by the current. She clawed at the rough, slimy boards, hearing just a few
inches above her the clashings and ianglings of the chains that held the oar slaves to their benches. At last
she found a hold that would allow her to extend her head slightly and break surface at the waterline to
take air while she did what she must do.
Her lungs once more filled afresh, she sent out a telepathic beam—a type of communication that her
people called “mindspeak,” fairly common in those of her blood, but rather rare among these alien folk.
She did not really know if one or both of her younger brothers were aboard this barge, but she could
hope… “Djoh, Bahb!”
“Stehfahnah?”
“Yes,” she affirmed. “I have escaped. I jumped off the water wagon. I think I slew the swine, Stooahrt,
so a small part of our clan’s vengeance has been taken, perhaps. I am under your water wagon, but there
is no way I can free you, as well; you must find a time and a place to accomplish that for yourselves.”
Twelve-year-old Bahb’s acceptance of the situation was beamed clearly, but the younger boy, Djoh,
asked silently, “But sister, there are so many of them and they are all so big and strong. What if we
cannot get away?” “Then you must go to Wind, little brother,” Stehfahnah replied. “You must get or
make a weapon and force them to slay you… but, for the honor of our clan, you must try to take at least
one of the pigs with you. Be not overhasty, though, in aught you do. Depend upon Bahb’s judgment—he
has the mind of a full-grown warrior, for all that he has seen but twelve summers.** The barge had
commenced to move forward, the heavy oars rising and falling rhythmically to the resounding strokes of a
mallet on a hollow board. Stehfahnah took one last, deep gulp of air, then let go her hold and began to
swim with the current, angling toward the western bank of the river.
The bargemen, long familiar with cases of near-drowning, had pumped the water out of Trader Stuart’s
body. Then his own men had stripped him of his soaked clothing and carefully bedded him down in his
personal wagon. It was not done out of love or even liking for the man, but rather out of
respect—respect for him both as a man and as a fighter of some note, not to mention the fact that he paid
a decent wage for hard work. Never had he been known to try to cheat an employee out of monies due
him.
Senior Wagoner DonnHwyt dropped heavily to the upper deck from the tailgate of the wagon. The
aging but stocky and still powerful man was the nearest thing to a true physician that the caravan had. He
was paid an extra amount for doctoring horses and oxen, but he practiced on the men as well whenever
there was need. Now his thin lips were drawn even thinner into a grim line. Three men awaited him—the
two junior traders who had chanced to be on the lead barge, Hwahruhn and Custuh, plus Stuart’s
bodyservant-cum-sometime-bodyguard, “Clubber* Fred Doakes.
Custuh, almost qualified to be a senior trader himself, was the first to speak. “Well, man,” he lisped
through the gap left when the nomad boy had smashed out his front teeth with the pommel of a saber,
“will he live or not? If he will, ith he tho badly hurt he won’t be able to command nekth yearth venture?”
Old Don shrugged, his broad shoulders rising and falling, his big, callused hands spread wide, palms
facing outward. “Lordy, Misruh Custuh, I ain’t no real doctor. And it’d tek one to tell yawl awl thet.
Misruh Stuart’s left shoulder is broke, bad broke—thet oar done as much damage as a iron mace, and
even if some surgeon don’t tek the arm off, he won’t never use ‘er much agin. “And the outside tendon
a-hint his right knee’s done been sliced clean in two, but thet ain’t awl. His bag was damn near tore loose
from his pore body by the there damn HI bitch. It’s a pow’ful good thang he done a’ready got him a son
‘r two, ‘cause I ‘spect he ain’t never gonna git him no more younguns of no kind awn no woman… if he
does live, thet is.” “The real question is,” commented Hwahruhn, scratching at the scalp beneath his
silver-shot black hair, “dare we—any of us—go back on the plains next year, since the gal’s gotten free?
If you’ll all recall, I was against the whole dirty business from the outset—the treachery, the killing, the
kidnappings, not to mention the way that gal was abused during these last few weeks. If she gets back to
her clan…” Custuh snorted derisively. “Bert, you maunder like an old woman, you do! ‘If the gal gits
back to her clan,’ indeed! Did you ever hear tell of anybody swimming this here river with all their clothes
on? Huh? And too, while all the rest of you were set at getting ol’ Stuart out’n the water, I had a pair of
darts ready and was watching to see her haid come back up… and it never did, so she probly
drownded.”
But Hwahruhn shook his head, unease in his voice and worry in his dark-brown eyes. “What you aver is
just possible, true, but these nomads are tough, wiry, resourceful people. They’re survivors, Liasee. If the
child you all insisted upon wronging gets out of the river alive… God help us all!” Stehfahnah had not
intended to come out of the river in close proximity to the trader town, but she certainly would have
preferred to get out of the cold, swirling water much sooner than was the case. When at last she was able
to drag herself up an inclined and muddy bank on the western side of the broad waters, she could but lie
for a long while on the brush-grown verge, her muscles jerking and twitching with the fatigue of her
efforts.
At length, as hunger began to nibble at her belly, she sat up and commenced—as she had been
taught—to think out her situation, to take stock of her possessions and gauge their potential usefulness
for accomplishing her purpose. She knew that she was far, far east of the last place her clan had been
encamped. She and her brothers, one of dozens of farming hunting parties, had been a good two days’
ride from camp when they had been taken, and the wagon train had lumbered on for nearly three weeks
after. Therefore, she estimated that a span of not less than three days’ ride west would bring her near the
tents and yurts of her people… but she had no idea just how far south the river might have borne her this
day. Also, she had no horse or any hope of easily acquiring one, unless she should chance across one of
the increasingly rare wild herds and could mindspeak the king stallion into allowing one of his sons or
daughters to accompany her on her quest. She knew better than to approach any of the scattering of
dirtman settlements; such would only mean slavery or worse. She sighed, then spoke aloud to herself.
“So I must walk. Sun be praised that the wolves are well fed this time of year.”
But if she must plan upon making a journey of such length solely on foot, it might well take a month or
more. Winter storms had been known to come very early, and if she wasf to survive alone, dismounted
and friendless upon the open plains, she must have many things she now lacked—more and heavier
clothing, more effective weapons than one large and one small knife, some kind of food that could be
packed without quickly spoiling, a container for water, a means of making fire.
The last necessity was fulfilled almost at once. When she got around to closely examining the weapon
she had torn from the trader’s belt, she found not only a knife, but a number of smaller enclosures within
the leathern sheath. A hone stone occupied one pocket, another held a flint and a steel for fire-making,
and two smaller ones contained a tiny steel eating skewer and food-knife plus a small silver spoon.
The belt knife itself was a heavy, handsome, formidable weapon—a full foot of thick, broad blade,
honed to razor keenness along all of one edge and the first third of the other. Below the polished steel
ball pommel, the wooden hilt had been well covered with black leather and wound with many yards of
silver wire, and the number of deep nicks in the blade side of the shiny brass guard showed that the
weapon was not simply a gaudy showpiece. Knowingly, Stehfahnah weighed and balanced the knife,
finding its weight properly distributed to render it an effective missile. A design had been etched onto
both sides of the blade, and Stehfahnah grunted satisfaction when she closely studied these. She had had
little experience at the arts of reading and writing—not many of her people had, for few books had
survived six hundred years of chaos, and neither of these two talents were necessary for survival on the
prai-lies, high plains and mountains wherein Horseclansfolk dwelt—but she could write her own name
and that of her clan, so she easily recognized that the letter S was the central motif of the designs and at
once felt that Wind had intended this fine, deadly, lovely weapon just for her, Stehfahnah’s, hands. The
boot knife was typical of weapons of its type—a leaf-shaped, double-edged blade of some half-inch
width and some four inches in length, guardless and with a plain hilt of deer antler. Stehfahnah found that
it fitted securely into the sheath built into her own left boot top.
Her gnawing hunger partially assuaged by a few handfuls of berries and the raw legs of a large frog she
was fortunate enough to catch, the Horseclans girl sought and found a willow tree, and her nimble fingers
had soon produced a quantity of twine from the inner bark. After locating three game trails in the
riverside brush, she constructed as many simple snares of whittled twigs and twine nooses, plus a log
deadfall where the mark of cervine hooves was plain; if even one of the traps proved effective during the
night to come, she would have fresh meat, a skin or hide of some description, bone and possibly sinew or
horn with which to fashion other tools and weapons.
By the time she returned to her starting point, the late-afternoon wind had completely dried the shirt and
trousers which she had carefully draped over bushes. Dressed, she began to cast about for a safe place
to spend the night, finally settling for the spacious crotch of a huge mimosa tree. Cold she knew it would
be, but safe from any prowling predators, poisonous snakes or the like. That decided, she cut armfuls of
springy pine tips and coarse grass and filled the depressed crotch with them. She debated kindling a fire
with which to warm herself before she climbed aloft to sleep, but decided to not do so, for if her former
captors were searching along the river for her, smoke or flame might give away her position.
Twice during the long, dark night, she awoke with a start, gasping and trembling and imagining herself
still confined within that hateful, wooden-walled wagon, defenseless prey to the lusts of the hateful
traders. Throughout all the suffering, the horrors and deep humiliations she had been forced to undergo,
Stehfahnah’s fierce pride had sustained her, and she had refused to allow her tormentors the satisfaction
of seeing a Horseclanswoman’s tears; but now, alone and high in a riverside tree, she wept, violently,
uncontrollably, and at long last she slept again, so deeply that the warming beams of Sacred Sun on her
face finally wakened her to the first morning of her new-won freedom. Two of the snares still gaped
empty, but the third had caught her a fine, fat rabbit. With practiced ease, she broke the neck of the
struggling animal and went on with the furry carcass slung from a loop of the twine. “Wind be praised!”
she breathed fervently at the site of her painfully constructed deadfall, for beneath the heavy log lay a
buck, so recently dead that the carcass still was warm. True, he was much smaller than most varieties of
plains bucks, but his dearth of meat and smallness of hide was fully compensated for in the girl’s mind by
the pair of slender, needle-tipped and almost straight horns standing a good two feet up from his head.
Good fortune remained with her. Two days later, now armed with a brace of horn-tipped spears and a
hand-carved spear thrower, she slew a large white-tailed doe. With the sinews of her two largest kills
and the knife-shaped trunk of a redbark bow-wood tree, the wood roughly cured over the heat of her
carefully shielded cooking fire, she began to fashion a bow. Arrows were whittled down from lengths of
birch, fletched with owl feathers and tipped with fire-hardened bone shards. Birch bark and strips of
partially seasoned deerhide were fashioned into a combination bowcase and quiver. She also began the
involved process of converting the doe’s second stomach into a water bag for her journey. She felt
pressed for time, being fully aware from a lifetime on the plains that she still was highly vulnerable to the
elements and that the first freezing storm of winter could swoop down upon her with amazing
suddenness.
Stehfahnah’s first warning that she was not still alone in the riverside woods was the smell of smoke. She
had been ranging farther and farther afield since she had finished her makeshift bow. Armed with it and
her balanced pair of spears, she was seeking feral cattle or the large, curved-honied bucks for the
thicker, better-quality hides they grew, knowing that her thin, flimsy riding boots would need heavy
reinforcement soon.
Then she found an otter in a steel trap. The sinuous shiny-brown creature’s frantic struggles to free itself
had only broken the flesh of its pinioned leg, the remorseless bite of the metal jaws cutting the flesh to the
bone. The beady eyes were full of pain and terror, and the whiskered lips writhed back to bare the white
teeth.
The fine, large, water-resistant pelt would have been a most welcome addition to Stehfahnah’s growing
hoard, but her recent ordeal bred within her a kindred feeling with the trapped and suffering animal.
Recalling that some animals, predators in particular, could often be reached by mindspeak, she made the
effort.
She had mindspoken horses and a few of the prairiecats— the huge, long-fanged felines which had for
hundreds of years lived among and made common cause with the Horseclans-folk—but she found the
water dweller’s mind significantly different from the other two animal sentiences. Silently, she offered to
free the trapped creature if, in return, it would agree not to bite her. The otter mind was a roiling
maelstrom of agony and terror and bloodlust.
“Hurt…kill… kill… kill!”
Broadbeaming a message of soothing, Stehfahnah repeated her offer. “Furry brother, if you will not bite
me, I will free you from the hurting thing.” After a number of repetitions, when she had almost despaired
of reaching the pain-mad beast and was upon the point of ending its suffering with a well-placed shaft
from her bow, the otter abruptly ceased to struggle against the trap, although its muscles still jerked
involuntarily with the pain. “Stop hurt thing?” he queried. “Not bite if stop hurt.” Laying down her spears
and throwing stick, unshouldering her bowcase-quiver, Stehfahnah approached the otter, wondering if he
really understood her. With some trepidation, she knelt near the trap, which was chained to a
deep-driven wooden stake. The otter was big—almost four feet long—and could seriously hurt her
before she could draw a knife and kill him if he had misunderstood the tenuous mental messages.
Nonetheless, she gripped the blood-slimy jaws of the trap and tried to pull them open, but the leverage
was not right and her fingers kept slipping from the smooth, wet metal. Her well-intentioned efforts were
only hurting the otter more, and his snarls were not reassuring to her. Reaching behind her, she drew one
of the spears closer. Drawing out her big knife, she worked the blade in near one hinge of the biting steel
jaws, then gingerly twisted the knife. Haltingly, the trap opened a fraction of an inch, then a Smidgen
more. When it was open to the extent of over two fingers’ width, she mindspoke again.
“Now, furry one, pull out your leg, quickly!”
Scurrying as rapidly as three legs would carry him, the otter disappeared into the brush in the direction of
the nearby river. Stehfahnah, unable to either pull up the stake or break the chain, finally squatted over
the trap and urinated on the device, knowing that the strong odor of human urine would warn animals
away from the hellish instrument.
Within the next several hours, she chanced across half a dozen identical traps. Each one of them was
empty, and she used a spearbutt to spring them all, also disturbing the ground about them, spitting to be
certain of leaving twolegs scent. Such was her preoccupation with the traps that her day’s hunt proved
fruitless and she trudged back to her campsite that afternoon empty-handed. She had just lit her
squaw-wood tinder and laid a virtually smokeless fire in the little hollow and had lowered a quarter of
venison she had hung high on an oak branch preparatory to slicing off enough meat for her dinner when
she suddenly realized that she no longer was alone within the brushy-banked hollow. She let go of the
deer meat and whirled, crouching, her big knife held low, ready to stab or slash or throw. But then her
blue-green eyes widened in stunned disbelief.
On the river side of the fire pit were no less than three otters. The largest she recognized as the big male
she had earlier freed from the steel trap; the other two were significantly smaller, although obviously adult
animals. Before the trio, in the weeds, lay a big catfish, still flopping and feebly gasping. Sheathing her
knife, Stehfahnah mindspoke, “Welcome, furry ones. Will you share this meat with me?”
The larger mustelid had sunk into a crouch, taking his weight off the three legs now, perforce, doing the
work of four. It was he who answered, although Stehfahnah could feel the attentiveness of the two
smaller beasts. “Why female twolegs stop hurt thing and let this one go free, why not kill like kill other
furry ones and take hides? Why hunt out and kill other hurt things of male twolegs?”
摘要：

 (Highroller)Author’sIntroductionInthepreviousHorseclansvolumes(SwordsoftheHorseclansthroughThePatrimony)Ihavemovedconsistentlyforwardintimefromtheinitialvolumeoftheseries(TheComingoftheHorseclans);butthisvolumeandthenextfewwhichwillfollowitareallsetbeforethetimeofTheComing. Ifsomeofmyreadersareconf...

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