Mistress of Animals

Chapter 9

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’s 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 c****d 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.