Then came a floating feeling, a headlong plunge against which his body instinctively reacted backward—and a teeth-cracking jolt as somehow he went forward again and his mouth hit the back of Nokhada’s neck.
Nokhada’s legs were under them again, all four of them, in a pounding rhythm—Babs’ dark rump showed in front of them as Babs suddenly darted left and right on the close track of something brown and white running ahead of them. Nokhada ran a straighter course, other mecheiti running like earthquake behind her.
A shot rang out ahead, from Ilisidi. Whatever it was—went down in a cloud of dust and flattening grass as it skidded downslope.
The guards all cheered the shot, as Babs stopped and the mecheiti came to a blowing, stamping halt around Babs, laying back ears and snorting and sidling about.
Bren’s mouth was cut. He blotted it, watching one of the guards ride down the slope to where the game had fallen. Everyone thought it a wonderful shot on Ilisidi’s part. He supposed it was. He was shaking. His lip was swelling already, and he must have bruised Nokhada’s ribs with the clenching of his legs—his inner thigh muscles were sore and shuddery, and he was sweating, after doing nothing whatsoever in the chase but hold on.
While the aiji-dowager had just shot supper for herself and her staff, and the mecheiti were all wild-eyed and excited, at, one supposed, the smell of blood and gunpowder in the air.
“How do we fare, nand’ paidhi?”
“I’m still here, nai-ji.” That sounded too much like a challenge. “Credit to the mecheita, not myself.”
“Are you hurt, nand’ paidhi?”
Dependable. Exactlylike Tabini. Nowthe concern.
“Her neck and my face,” he said ruefully.
“Too far forward,” Ilisidi said, and started off again at a brisk clip, uphill, while—a glance over his shoulder—the one guard was hauling the carcass up onto the riding-pad.
The beasts’ abilities weren’t just television. Machimi plays that showed a fugitive ripped apart by those tusks wasn’texaggeration, he was convinced of it. He didn’t want to be on the ground in front of those feet, or in the way of those teeth, which, in war, they’d not blunt-capped.
Cenedi’s assurances of safety with them began to seem more and less substantial. But—he began to recall with a shudder Babs smelling him over, a smell Babs could never have met before. The mecheiti-aiji, Cenedi had called him, Babs having fixed that smell in his beast-brain and the associative group hierarchy the experts swore extended right into the animal kingdom—
Politics. Four-footed politics. Colony behavior, they called it on Mospheira, where they studied small indigenous animals, but nothing—nothing like the mecheita, nothing like these hunters, that ate—he remembered his history—anything they could root up or catch. Omni-vores. Pack hunters.
His legs were limp. His hand was shaking, holding the rein, from the excess of adrenalin, he said to himself.
Like the gunshot. He wasn’t used to such things. They engaged his senses wholly, insanely, on a level a professional risk-taker like Cenedi surely didn’t deal with anymore: he didn’t know what was important, so he took in everything that hit his senses, like a madman, and tried to do something when, to a well-ordered mind like Cenedi’s, there wasn’t anything to do.
The single guardsman they had left overtook them at a diagonal on the hill, with a small, graceful creature tied to the back of his riding-pad. Its head lolled. Its eyes were like the beast’s on the bedroom wall, not angry, though: soft, and astonished. A small trickle of blood ran from black, fine nostrils, a pretty nose, a pretty face. Bren didn’twant dinner with the dowager tonight.
Sausages didn’t have such mortality about them. He preferred distance from his meals. Tabini called it a moral flaw. He called it civilization and Tabini called it delusion: You eat meat out of season, Tabini would say. Out of time with the earth, you sell flesh for profit. You eat what never runs free: you call that civilized?
He hadn’t an argument against that reasoning. He rode at Babs’ swishing tail, as the company remarked to each other again how fine a shot the dowager had made, and Ilisidi said that now that they had stocked the larder, they could enjoy the rest of the ride.
At a slower pace, Bren hoped: the insides of his legs, even relaxing, now, were finding the riding-pad an unnatural stretch, and when he tried to find a comfortable posture, he kicked Nokhada by accident and went humiliatingly off the trail, right down the mountainside, before he could get the mecheita stopped and redirected.
“Nand’ paidhi?” Cenedi asked from above.
“We’re coming,” he said. He supposed Nokhada made a ‘we.’ Nokhada certainly expressed an opinion, in flattened ears and plodding gait, once they reached the trail again, overtaking the rear of the column, where Cenedi waited.
“What happened?” Cenedi asked.
“We’re figuring it out,” he muttered. But Cenedi gave him a fast rundown of the signals: touch of the feet for direction, light tugs of the rein for attention signals, or to restrain outright rebellion. Don’t touch the nose, don’t pull down on the head. Left foot, go right, right foot, go left; tug lightly, go faster, tug hard, go slow, don’t kick a man in the groin or a mecheita behind the ribs.
Which seemed a civilized arrangement.
“If he intends to jump,” Cenedi told him, “do as you did. Your weight won’t bother him.—Are the stirrups short enough?”
“I fear, nadi, I wouldn’t possibly know.”
“If your legs cramp, say so.”
“They don’t.” He didn’t complain of the rubbery condition. He put that down to sheer fright and a workout of muscles he wasn’t used to using.
“Good,” Cenedi said, and rode off at a steep diagonal up the ridge, Cenedi’s mechieta ducking its head and sniffing the ground intermittently, while its long legs never broke stride.
Curious ability. It was smelling for something along the ground, and lifted its head to smell the wind as they reached the crest of the ridge.
And Cenedi kept the creature under control so damned effortlessly. Cenedi stopped, signalled them with a wave of his hand, and Ilisidi put Babs up the ridge at a fair clip.
Nokhada took the diagonal course uphill, then, hellbent on regaining second place to Babs. Dammit! Bren thought, cutting the guards off in their climb; but he was afraid to pull on the rein, among the rocks and sliding gravel.
“Excuse me!” he called back over his shoulder. “Nadiin, it’s her idea!” That drew laughter from the guards, as Nokhada fell in at Babs’ tail. Better than resentment, at least. There wasa hierarchy among mecheiti, and Ilisidi and everyone in the party had known Nokhada was going to follow Babs, come hell or high water. They’d had their joke. He’d gained a cut lip and sore muscles, but he hadn’t fallen off and he’d been a fair sport about the joke—it was the way he’d learned to deal with Tabini’s court, at least, and the way he’d learned to deal with Tabini, early on.
One just didn’t back away from a challenge—and atevi wouldtry a newcomer, if for nothing more than to determine his place in the order of things: they did it to anyone and they did it as a matter of course, on an instant’s judgment to find out a fool or a leader… neither of which he planned to be with them, not to threaten Ilisidi or Cenedi or any of them.
And after he had realized Ilisidi’s joke at his expense and let them know he saw it, then things were easier, then he could ride at Babs’ lazily switching tail and be easy about the position in which Ilisidi had set him, giving him a mecheita proper to a high-ranking visitor from Tabini’s own staff; he could quite well appreciate the humor in that, too—a mecheita that was going to give the unskilled visitor hell, especially if he thought he was going to adjust his position in line, or argue with Ilisidi.