LITMIR.BIZ

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another way to say “coward”?’

      The words were like a knife in my back. I tried to ignore them. ‘Keeksha. Stand.’ The mare came to me.

      ‘Sometimes a man has to fight for what he needs to live. He has to fight, no matter what the odds.’ Dewara stood up, pulling his swanneck from its sheath. The bronze blade was gold in the rising sun. His face darkened with anger. ‘Get away from my animal. I forbid you to touch her.’

      I grasped the mane at the base of her neck and heaved myself onto her.

      ‘Your father said you would obey me. You said you would obey me. I said that if you disobeyed me, I would notch your ear.’

      ‘I am going to find water.’ I don’t know why I even said those words.

      ‘You are not a man of your word. Neither is your father. But I am!’ he shouted after me as I rode off. ‘Dedem. Stand!’ At that, I kicked Keeksha into a run. Deprivation had weakened her as much as it had me, but she seemed to share my mind. We fled. I heard Dedem’s strong hoofbeats behind us. ‘It can’t be helped,’ I thought to myself. I leaned into Keeksha’s gallop and hung on.

      The stallion was bigger and hardier than the mare. They were gaining on us. I had two objectives: to get away from Dewara and to find water before the mare’s strength gave out. I knew I would need her to get home. To those ends, I urged her to speed, guiding her back the way we had come. My somewhat rattled assessment of the situation was that by going back the way we had come, I knew that water was only two days away. A man can survive four days without food or water. Sergeant Duril had told me so. Yet he had added, kindly, that such survival was made more unlikely by exposure and exertion, and that a man who trusted his judgment after two days without food and water was as likely to die of foolishness as deprivation. I knew the horse could not run for two days straight, nor could I ride for that long. Yet my thinking was badly disordered by the fact that I was fleeing for my life, a new experience for me, and defying my father’s authority as I did so. The one seemed equally as terrifying as the other.

      I did not get far. I had only a small lead over the Kidona. Urge the mare as I might, Dewara gained steadily until he was riding beside us. I clung grimly to Keeksha’s back and mane, for there was little else I could do. I saw him draw his swanneck and slapped the mare frantically, but she had no more speed to give. The deadly curved blade swiped the air over my head. I risked a kick at him, hoping more to distract him than unseat him. I nearly unseated myself as well, and I felt the mare’s pace falter. The shining metal swept past me again, and such was Dewara’s skill that, true to his threat, I felt the harsh bite of the blade as it passed through my ear. The act dealt me a scalp wound as well, one that immediately began to pour blood down the side of my neck. I screamed as the blade sliced through my flesh, both in pain and in terror. The shameful memory of that girlish shriek has never left me. Pain and the warm seep of thick blood down my neck became one sensation, making it impossible for me to assess how badly I was injured. I could only cling tighter to Keeksha and ride hard. I knew I had no chance of survival. The next pass of Dewara’s swanneck would finish me.

      Astonishingly, he let me go.

      It took a short time for me to realize that. Or perhaps a long time. I rode, my wound burning and my heart hammering so that I thought it would burst from my body. At any moment, I expected the swish of the blade and the quenching of light. The drumming of my own blood in my ears was such that at first I did not realize that his hoofbeats were fading. I ventured a glance to the side and then back. He was pulling his stallion in. As I fled, he sat, unmoving on his horse, watching me go. He laughed at me. I did not hear it, could not see his smile, and yet I knew it. He flourished his golden blade over his head and flapped his free arm derisively at me. The knowledge of his mockery seared me.

      Shamed and bleeding, I fled like a kicked cur. I did not have the water in my body to weep, or I probably would have. My scalp wound bled thickly for a short time, and then crusted over with dust. I rode on. Keeksha’s pace slowed, and I lacked the will or energy to urge her to go faster. For a time, I tried to guide her, hoping to go back the way we had come, but we were already off course, and the little taldi was determined to have her own way. I gave in to her, excusing myself on the grounds that Sergeant Duril had often urged me to trust my horse when I had no better guide.

      Afternoon found me slumping on Keeksha’s back, letting her pick her way where she would. Our pace was little more than an amble. I felt dizzy. The sky was a clear blue and the sun was bright and warm. My hunger that had abated for a time had returned, and with it a retching nausea very painful to my dry throat. I felt completely adrift. When I had followed Dewara, I had believed that there was some destination that we sought, and despite my doubts, I’d felt safer with him. Now I was as good as lost until nightfall and the stars came out. Worse, I was lost in my life. I’d disobeyed my father and Dewara. I’d put my inexperienced judgment above theirs, and if I died out here, I’d have only myself to blame. Perhaps it had been a test of endurance, and I’d fled it too soon. Perhaps if I’d tried to take the water from him, he would have been impressed with my courage and rewarded me with a drink. Perhaps my fleeing had earned me a coward’s death. My body would rot out here, insect and bird bait until my bones turned to sand. My father would be ashamed of me when Dewara told him how I had run away. I rode hopelessly on.

      Midmorning of the next day, Keeksha found water. I claim no credit for helping her.

      People who say our plains are arid are only partially correct. There is water, but for the most part it moves beneath the surface, and breaks through to the top only when the terrain forces it there. Keeksha found such a sike. The rocky watercourse she followed was dry as a bone that spring, but she kept with it until we reached a place where an outcropping of rock had forced the hidden flow up, to briefly break above ground as a marshy little pond, not much bigger than two box stalls. The sike stank of life, and was the virulent green of desperation. She walked into it and began drinking in the thick water.

      I slid from her back, walked two steps from her and lay down on my belly in the muck. I put my face in the thin layer of water and sucked it up, straining it through my teeth. After I had drunk, I lay there still, my mouth open to the liquid, trying to soak my leather tongue and frayed lips back to a semblance of normalcy. Above me, Keeksha drank and then breathed and then drank some more. Finally I heard the heavy splashes of her hooves as she moved out of the shallow pond and to the cracked earth at the muddy edge of it. She began grazing greedily on the ring of grass that surrounded the sink. I envied her.

      I stood slowly and wiped a scum of slime from my chin and then shook it from my hands. I could feel the water in my belly, and felt almost sickened by the sudden plenitude of it. I waded out of the muck and inspected our tiny sanctuary. The cut of the watercourse meant that we were below the windswept plain. I could hear the constant mutter of the never-still air above us. Our tiny hollow cupped silence. Then, as I stood still, the chorus of life slowly took up its song again. Insects spoke to one another. A dragonfly hovered over the water. The gore frogs that had gone into hiding during our splashing began to emerge once more. Bright as gobbets of spilled blood, they were blots of scarlet on the floating scum and stubby reeds of our pond. I knew a moment’s relief that they had gone into hiding at our arrival. They were toxic little creatures. When I was small, one of our dogs had died from picking a gore frog up in his mouth. Even to touch one caused a tingling on the skin.

      I picked and ate some water plants that I recognized. They were something in my belly, but hunger growled around them. I found nothing that I could fashion into a vessel for carrying water. I dreaded the thought of the hunger and thirst I’d have to endure during my journey home, but not as deeply as I dreaded my confrontation with my father when I returned. I’d failed him. The thought made me return to the water’s edge. I washed the thick blood from my neck and ear. Notched. My ear would never be whole again. I’d carry the reminder of my broken promise to the end of my days. For the rest of my life, whenever anyone asked me about it, I’d have to admit that I’d disobeyed my father and gone back on my own word.

      The mucky edges of the pond gave way to plates of roughly cracked earth that showed how the pond had shrunken since winter. I studied the tracks in them. When the ground had been moist, a little shrub-deer had visited the water.

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