Black On Black, page 9
His nose wrinkled at the yirn's scent; the herd was ranker than usual. This lot had not been worked lately in the hunts, and a few wild beasts must have strayed into it, which would make them edgy and harder to catch than usual. He dropped into a half-crouch, meaning to prowl closer, then snarled at a hot flash of pain as several of his scabbed-over slashes broke open. The feeding yirn froze, stared up with hot yellow eyes, radiating a peeved wariness.
Nisk sat back on his heels and conserved his strength while he waited for them to settle back down. They fell back to grazing, with snuffles and whuffs, still watching him out of the corners of their eyes. He had directed the Black/on/black to hide just beyond the last bend, so as not to alarm the beasts more than necessary. The Black/on/black had complied without argument. He obviously intended to travel only a short distance with Nisk, and then slip away to return for his Outsider companion. He had not said as much in words, but it was written in the slant of his ears and the uneasy lay of his fur and his frequent glances back at the red-orange cliffs guarding the plateau.
But Nisk could not permit that. He was now more sure than ever that the pattern shaping events was the legendary patience/in/illusion, never before perceived in living memory, but said to be unimaginably large, reaching into the skies and the lands beyond Anktan itself. The Black/on/black himself was part of its illusion—he had seemed to be dead, along with the rest of his Line, and yet was not. He also appeared deceptively ignorant, forever looking directly into Nisk's eyes until the blood pounded in his ears and his claws ached for the other's throat, yet this same male had hunted the stars themselves, where no hrinn had ever ventured before, had seen wonders which the eyes of earthbound hrinn like himself were forever denied. Being in his presence was like touching another plane of existence, one beyond all imagination, overpowering and unsettling and utterly unfamiliar.
The herd gradually grew careless of him and Nisk schooled his breathing to evenness, waiting for his chance. When one beast finally strayed within reach, he leaped and locked his fingers around its dangling ear. The yirn squealed and bucked as he dug his heels into the sandy ground and held on as though picking a ripe piece of fruit. With a deft twist, he avoided its horns and scrambled up to leap onto the broad back, clinging to the matted fur of its hump with his clawtips.
The Black/on/black darted around the bend and stared up at him. The whole process had taken less than two blinks of the eye. Nisk reached down an arm, beckoning him to come forward and mount.
He hesitated. "Can this beast carry the weight of two?"
Nisk bared his teeth in exasperation, but then thought of the pattern looming below the surface. Patience/in/illusion—nothing was what it seemed. He would have to wait until all participants abandoned illusion for reality, taking on their real forms, and events made themselves known. He leaned back. "Do you wish to catch your own yirn?"
The Black/on/black scowled, then took the offered hand and leaped. His weak right leg buckled, making him fall short against the yirn's side, then slide to the ground. The beast squalled and bolted sideways, halted only by the judicious application of Nisk's claws. He gripped its huge barrel with his knees and stared into the distant green-capped mountains. The Black/on/black was said to possess the strength of the molten core of the earth itself, stronger than all others of his kind, male or female, regardless of size. This apparent weakness of body was only another part of the illusion.
The Black/on/black picked himself up out of the sand, then stepped up on a flat rock. His fur was matted and he was panting as though he had run since last night. He flung himself upward, grabbing the yirn for purchase, started to slip back, then flexed handclaws into the matted fur long enough to swing his leg over the wide back. Pricked by a claw gone too deep, the yirn leaped forward as he settled into place behind Nisk.
Nisk kept his seat easily, moving with the beast, watching the whole procedure over his shoulder without flicking an ear. When the other settled into place behind him, breathing heavily, Nisk heeled the yirn into the river. "Not a promising beginning."
* * *
Drained and aching, Rakshal waded into the river until the cold green water swirled up to his breastbone. He braced himself against the throb of the current, letting the water numb the gashes written across his ribs like mysterious glyphs. Despite his age, Nisk had been far fiercer and more agile than he had expected. Without the foresight to draw power beforehand, events might have ended very differently.
He sank lower in the cold current until the water swirled around his throat and muzzle, redolent of the soil and sand it carried, almost brackish in this season from high mineral content. The taste lingered on his tongue, whispering of other, more verdant lands upstream, other, less sacred ways to live. He shuddered. Last night's challenge had strayed far beyond his intent. He'd meant to slay the false Black/on/black, revealing him for the falsehood he must surely be and thereby gain additional status for himself.
Instead, Nisk had stepped into the center of events and taken control, obviously discerning a different pattern in this situation than death/in/longing, the one Rakshal had glimpsed, something potent he could exploit to his own advantage. Now Rakshal found himself mired within this unnamed pattern/in/progress, forced to make decisions he had not planned, to act in ways he had not forseen. He had meant to wait until Nisk was older before he challenged. Now he was Leader in Nisk's place, a rise in status, but subject to challenge himself with all that implied, while the Outsider male was wandering free in the company of wily old Nisk, benefitting, no doubt, from his counsel, and all the while following the dictates of a pattern Rakshal could not divine.
Deep in thought, he waded toward the shore, then stopped, still knee-deep in the shallows. The water sluiced from his dark-gray fur in rivulets. At least half the males currently in residence, including most of the older ones, were watching him from the shore. Silhouetted by the rest of the group, Jikin's pale-gray form blocked Rakshal's path, so still he might have been carved from whitestone.
Jikin? Rakshal stared. The wiry old Teller who never harassed anyone, not even cublings just accepted for training, who just told the old tales and let them be? He emerged from the water as though nothing were out of the ordinary. "What do you want, Teller?" he asked, edging his tone with the superior-to-inferior inflection.
"I am serving you notice." The breeze ruffled Jikin's green robes around his tough old body, revealing muscle and bone under the pale fur, and very little else. "After the required ten days, I intend to challenge."
Jikin was a head shorter than Rakshal, and more than twice his age. The old male would never survive. Rakshal took a deep breath that made his open gashes sting. "That is your right."
Jikin glanced at the males fanned out behind him. "Each of these others intends to challenge in turn, if I fail."
So. Snatching up his gray priest's robes from the sand, Rakshal thrust dripping arms into one sleeve, then the other, feeling the burning weight of all those eyes. Last night, they must have seen something in him that they could not respect, and so now he would face challenge after challenge, each spaced only the minimum ten days apart, until he fell, as he must, and another took his place.
He buckled the leather straps across his aching chest, then glanced up into their silent faces. "I shall be waiting."
* * *
Forcing the obstinate yirn along the faint path with flexed handclaws, Khea squinted, trying to mark the edge of the plateau, somewhere beyond the scrubby gray-green brush ahead. The sunbaked ground smelled like the inside of one of the immense ovens outside the hold, hot and closed, fused. Panting against the terrible heat, she wondered why the Line Mother had bid her travel in the hottest portion of Ankt's midmorning gaze instead of sending a messenger jit. Was this yet another of the endless tests a cubling was subjected to between gleanings?
If she were culled this next time, she might be relegated to the nursery, one of the lesser responsibilities, or even worse, sent to the fields to sow and reap, activities at which even unnamed servants took a turn. Her ears trembled. She did not know how she could bear the shame of that. Far better to die than to fail, better to leave this life altogether than live the rest of her days, a worthless shadow among her superiors.
The yirn trotted up a small rise, grunting with the effort, and then she saw the tumbled redstone rocks that signalled the plateau's abrupt edge. She tethered her mount, then slid down the steep sandy descent, dodging boulders and loose chaff all the way. At the bottom, bruised and scraped, she paused to catch her breath and look at the Guildhouse. Someone actually seemed to be sitting on the whitestone roof under the sweltering morning glare of Ankt. How strange, she thought, hurrying down the well-worn path, but then Restorers were reputed to be an odd lot, even pale-gray Vexk, who had been born of Vvok and was a cousin of hers out of her birth-mother's generation.
Vexk emerged from the hold as she approached. "I bear a summons from the Line Mother," she said, making an effort not to pant.
"So." Vexk's ears flicked. "It is as I feared."
"Will you come?"
"I can do nothing more for this creature at Vvok." Vexk studied her face. "Tell the Line Mother it must be brought here—by you, no one else." Her lips wrinkled back from bone-white teeth. "Otherwise, we shall refuse the honor of this service."
Khea forgot herself and stared at Vexk's pale face in wordless, undignified surprise.
Her expression was strange, unreadable. "Now, come into the hold and rest. There is time enough for that."
Khea's ears pricked forward, then she thought of the Outsider, how it had stirred in her arms when she laid it at the Line Mother's feet. What if it woke and stared directly into Seska's eyes, as it often did hers? Seska would kill it out of pure reflex.
Her ears sagged. "No," she said hastily. "I must return."
Chapter Nine
Heyoka found riding double with Nisk difficult to endure. The beast, sturdy as a buffalo crossed with an elephant, took no notice of the extra weight, but the ascending trail forced him to hold onto Nisk or fall off. The other male's scent triggered something in the deepest recesses of his brain, making him twitchy and irritable. He began fantasizing about killing Nisk. It would be so easy to break his neck from behind, just one quick twist, and then he was even angrier, both at himself and the older male, for creating this pointless and idiotic situation.
When, for the tenth time in the last hour, Heyoka had to forcibly resheathe his claws, he glanced over Nisk's bobbing head up into gradually rising green-topped hills to distract himself. After Ben's death, he had left the Oglala hills and Earth behind forever to train as a soldier. The alien flek were making deadly incursions into Confederated Space and soldiers, of any description, were desperately needed. Fortunately, the long-repressed vicious other within him made such a splendid soldier that his military unit did not quibble about his appearance, or what appallingly primitive race had birthed him.
It was only after his injury on Enjas Two, when soldiering was no longer an option, that he contemplated a life outside the military. Surely, he had told himself, during those long, difficult days of rehabilitation, there was more to him than just a frighteningly efficient killing machine. If he could find his own kind, they would know thousands of ways to make life meaningful, and one of those ways would be right for him.
But now that he had at last met the hrinn, he was more lost than ever. The vicious other, whom he had struggled against all his life, seemed the foundation of their culture, a veritable ideal, and unpracticed as he was at giving in to that aspect of himself, he was not nearly ferocious enough to suit them. He had no desire to live like that.
The yirn's broad hooves beat a steady rhythm as it plodded up the winding trail, and every step wasted valuable time by taking him farther from Mitsu. His skin itched from the inside with the need to act until he couldn't sit still. He had to get back, and soon—if he weren't already too late.
"Where are we headed?" he asked finally. Not that it really mattered, he told himself. He and Nisk would part company at the first opportunity.
Nisk flicked an ear back at Heyoka. "Levv Hold."
The path forked and he flinched at the sight of Nisk's claws urging the yirn onto the steeper of the two tracks. Blood dribbled down the beast's matted coat, and Heyoka held on as its muscles bunched beneath them to navigate a steep rock jumble. His fingers tightened over Nisk's arms and the iron bands of muscle beneath; blood pounded in his ears. He felt dizzy and hot, sick with a sudden, overwhelming desire to slash the other's throat. "Levv—you mean my Line?" he forced out.
"Levv birthed you." Nisk leaned over the yirn's hump as though to examine the trail, casually breaking the physical contact between them. He snagged a handful of tiny blue leaves as they passed a tree and stuffed them into an inner pocket of his robes. "No one with half a nose could mistake that."
Heyoka wiped his hands on his robes. It must be male pheromones, he thought. He wasn't used to them, and they were making him crazy. How did hrinn share the males' houses without killing each other? He swallowed hard. "What is Levv like?"
"I cannot say, Black/on/black."
"Heyoka!" he blurted. "I told you before—I have a name."
Nisk stared ahead. "Not a Hrinnti name."
"An Oglala name, given by my—" He broke off, unable to find a name for the relationship of "father," much less "adoptive father," in his Hrinnti vocab-ulary— "by the Outsider who rescued me from the flek."
"You were not of his kind and yet he cared for you?"
Heyoka thought of the wizened Oglala trader, the only family he had ever known. "It did not matter to him. He considered himself to be related to everything that lived, as well as rocks and earth and water. It was an ancient belief of his people."
"H-a-oo-kka." Nisk tried the name out on his narrow hrinnti tongue. "This name has a meaning?"
"It means `sacred fool,' someone who has had a—special seeing—something important for the people to know, and who does everything differently from that time on."
Nisk's ears flattened. "These Outsiders thought you a fool?"
"Most were afraid of me." Heyoka remembered the startled faces of the Oglala when Ben had emerged that first day from the shuttle towing a snarling, half-wild, sharp-toothed cub.
Nisk's ears lifted again. "It was proper for them to be afraid. But why then should they name you `fool'?"
Heyoka understood Nisk's confusion. It had taken years for him to understand, not that he was certain he had ever completely understood Ben's Oglala people, or they, him. "The man who cared for me gave me that name. It means someone different, touched by the—the Voice, as you would say; someone who does not do things the same as everyone else—but for a special reason."
"Outsiders honor these `sacred fools'?"
That was a harder question for Heyoka to answer. The Oglala did honor their own heyokas, but their feelings about raising an alien cub among their own sons and daughters had never been better than mixed. "A few of them honored me, but most were afraid. They felt I represented something outside their world, a sacred presence made flesh. They were uncomfortable when I walked among them."
"So now you walk among us again."
"It has taken me many seasons to find Anktan." Heyoka thought of the database sweeps, the DNA studies, the comparison of dentition patterns he had authorized with his back pay. "Few Outsiders have heard of this world, or the hrinn."
Nisk glanced back at the black power brace encasing Heyoka's right leg from the knee down. "Were you born imperfect?"
The emerald beaches of Enjas Two flashed back into Heyoka's mind, prickling every hair along his spine. "No, it was an injury."
"Then perhaps a Restorer can do something for you."
A solid sheet of flek fire pinning them down on every side, green laser bursts blindingly brilliant against the pale blue of the sky. Heyoka shook his head. "The damage is—permanent."
Nisk glanced at him sharply. "Do not be so certain. Even though Outsiders were unable to heal your flesh, you know little of your own kind or our abilities."
Waves crashing against the shore as his vision shifted to blue, time slowed to a crawl—
Heyoka shivered, the remembered tang of alien seas thick in his nostrils. After the severity of that injury, he was lucky to walk at all. He glanced up at the red sun, now high overhead in the pale amber sky.
Nisk's unfathomable black eyes turned away and Heyoka felt he had failed in some important way.
* * *
A couple of servants accompanied the gray-and-white cubling to help carry the litter. Vexk watched them struggle down the steep path from the plateau, while she herself prowled the red-orange rocks at the bottom with a restlessness born more of excitement than worry. This Outsider was important to old Seska. If the Guild could restore its life, they could rightfully name a great price, and she had just the sum in mind.
The two undersized servants, their legs stumpy and their coats an unfortunate grayish-brown, had likely been culled at birth, but the young gray-and-white, there was a prize. Vexk had sensed great depths in that one on her previous visits to Vvok. Khea had the tensile strength of one often bent, but never broken, yet she retained a sensitivity to others in the face of all the hardening an upbringing in the Lines imposed. Such empathy was regarded as "weakness" among the older breeders who supervised the Line's genotype, and was discouraged at every turn. Cublings like Khea usually died young, far below the ground in the nursery at the claws of their age-mates, never to look upon the eye of Ankt, or sniff the rising wind. The Line Mother doubtless only saw another potential breeder to be beaten into a preordained form as she had once attempted to beat Vexk.
