He gentled the horse quite without thinking, for his heart was like a cold stone in his chest. He had heard the crunch the first time its forefeet descended. . . .
Maybe, he told himself as he jumped from the saddle, the pounding hoof had just split the frame he’d carved. He could always make another frame. “Sun and Wind, let it be so,” he murmured. Even then, he knew how slim the odds were.
Simply trying to find the glasses gave him a foretaste of the helplessness he dreaded. He had to put his head down to the ground like a tracking tooth-hound. If Mikk should come now and see him groping around with his butt in the air, he knew he would never live it down.
He was spared that humiliation, anyhow. Something glittering soon drew his eyes, as, unbeknownst to him, it had drawn the sparrow hawk’s only moments before. Soon he was holding a few precious, irreparable fragments of the lenses that let him pass for a normal man.
He slowly got to his feet. His horse pressed its soft nose against his shoulder. “Not your fault, Snowdrop,” he beamed, though now the white blaze that gave the beast its name was fuzzy-edged to his weak eyes. “Not your fault,” he repeated. “Just—one of those things.” He flung the bits of broken glass to the ground. “But why, curse it all, did it have to be one that came down on me?”
There was no answer to that. There was never any answer to that. Peet set his foot in the stirrup, swung onto Snowdrop. He needed no eyes for that. Like any Horseclansman, he could have got into the saddle stone blind. Men had, now and then, and got themselves into songs afterward.
He kept riding with the herd, his mere presence helping to keep the cattle on course. In his brief, haphazard boyhood schooling, he’d always had trouble understanding the notion of zero. “A placeholder,” old Eyereen had called it, and boxed his ears when he failed to catch on. Now he understood. Mounted on Snowdrop, he was a placeholder until Mikk got here.
A zero, in other words.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” he beamed at the longhorns. He knew that was wasted effort. They were too stupid to catch the beaming, and certainly too stupid to obey it if they did.
He glanced at the sun. That, at least, he could still see. Mikk was late. He started to remind himself to do the other rider a bad turn, stopped with the thought half-made. Why bother? He would not be doing any more riding with the herds himself. His place would be with the yurts again.
He hated the idea of going back to them. Before he got his glasses, he had never known the full freedom of the plains, or what he was missing. Now he would be returning to a cage he thought he had escaped.
He swore out loud. Beaming the foul words did not
pack the same punch. He needed the feel of them in his mouth, their sound in his ears—
Laughter broke into his cursing. He wheeled in the saddle. The blur behind him was a man on horseback. Of that much he was sure, but it might have been any Horseclansman on any horse—or, for that matter, one of Don Jorge’s soldados, even if none was supposed to be close by.
Most likely, though, he thought, it was Mikk Staiklee. “Took you long enough,” he tightbeamed, operating on that assumption.
“Sorry, Peet.” Yes, it was Mikk, not sounding any too sorry in spite of his beamed apology. He was still laughing, with his mind and with his mouth. “What happened to get you so riled? Hornet sting you, or—” He suddenly stopped, noticing for the first time what was different about—wrong with, Peet thought—his fellow clansman. “Your glasses.”
“Yeah.” Peet spoke now instead of beaming, the better to hide his hurt. He kept his voice flat, laconic. “Somethin’—hawk I guess it was—knocked ’em out of my hand, stupid damn bird. Snowdrop went and tromped on ’em.”
“How’s your eyes without ’em?” Mikk spoke too. “Same as always—not worth a tooth-hound turd.” “Oh.” Mikk thought that over. He took a while; he was a long way from being a quick thinker. Finally he asked, “Want me to ride back to the yurts with you?” Peet’s mouth dropped open. Just when he had worked up a pretty fair grudge against Mikk, the fellow had to go and offer a favor like that! Peet slowly shook his head. “The herds come first,” he said, a creed more basic to a nomad even than Sun and Wind. “If I can’t make so much as one short ride on my own, I don’t deserve to belong to the clan.”
“The herds come first—reckon you’re right,” Mikk said. His blurry image shifted. Peet guessed he was waving. “Luck to you.”
“Thanks.” But as he turned Snowdrop back toward the yurts, Peet thought Mikk’s wish came too late to do him any good.
* * *
“Nope, nothin’ like that,” the trader said. Peet was hunched forward, leaning so close to the fellow that he could see his face clearly in the firelight. It did him no good—like any trader worth his salt, this one let his features reveal nothing. “Might have some next year, now I know you want ’em. Might not, too.”
“Next year!” Six weeks of being chained within sight—his own short sight—of the yurts had driven Peet close to wild. The prospect of a whole year—and maybe longer than that—trapped this way was more than he could bear. He jumped up, started to stamp away from the trader’s wagon.
The man’s voice pursued him. “They’ll cost you plenty, too.” The trader knew desperation when he saw it.
“Shut up, curse you,” Peet muttered under his breath. He headed back toward Clan Staiklee’s camp, a hundred yards away. Halfway there, his foot went into a hole he—of course—had not seen. Only a wild scramble kept him from falling on his face. Even a man with good eyesight might stumble at night, he told himself. The thought did precious little to console him.
As he entered the circle of light the Staiklee fires cast, someone called aloud to him: “Peet, there’s some boots here need fixing. Come sit by me and help?”
“Sure, Ann,” he answered, walking toward the sound of her voice. He stumbled again three steps later, this time tripping over a child’s wooden toy. As he slowly picked himself up, he tried not to hear people snickering. It wasn’t easy. He’d fallen like that before, more than once. Swearing under his breath, he managed to find Ann without any more mortifications.
As he sat, she leaned over to kiss him. He responded, but with mixed feelings. Before he lost his glasses, he’d planned on marrying her one day. Probably one day soon; they’d been sharing a bedroll for more than a year now. His plans had shattered with the lenses. How could she stand having a helpless husband? How could he stand being one?
He could see the boots, but where was the sinew to repair them? He did not beam the question, but the moment it formed in his mind Ann handed him a threaded needle. “Thanks,” he said; he would have spent five minutes patting the ground before he found it, and likely stuck himself in the process. Even so, needing the help was galling.
Nothing he could do about it, though. Grumbling, he got to work, holding the battered boots close to his face so he could tell what the devil he was doing. He finished repairing a rip, set the boot to one side, and reached for another.
Ann touched his hand. “You do such fine, tight stitches, Peet. Mine aren’t anywhere near so nice and neat.”
He knew she was trying to cheer him up, but her words had the opposite effect. Was this what he had to look forward to, years of pity-born praise for things that by rights were hardly worth mentioning? Better the way of some of the outlaw bands, who knocked defectives over the head and had done!
“Any luck with the trader?” Now Ann tightbeamed; she was sensitive enough to realize he might not want the wholei clan to know if the answer was one he had not hoped for.
And it was. “No,” he answered flatly.
“Oh, Peet.” She looked away from him. Her hopes had ridden on the trader, too.