Looking away from the animal for a moment, he saw that the fence behind him was lined with his would-be peers, three or four deep, as they watched one animal try to tame another. He saw Esah-Zhurah, her face caught in something between a grin and a sneer. She knew how badly he wanted to get away from the kazha for even a little while, to see something other than the hundreds of blue, hostile faces that greeted him each day as he learned how to fight and kill. And bringing this magthep to heel was the only way he could do it, the only way he could escape this great cage for a day or so. He felt a wave of anger boil up as he swept his eyes over his unwanted spectators, and channeled it into determination. He reached down for the bridle.
The magthep suddenly snorted and began to back away, and Reza stopped. He straightened up, the bridle still on the ground.
Moving again down the beast’s flank, Reza started to lean against its side, patting it, stroking it, then pulling on its hair, lightly at first, then harder in hopes of sensitizing the magthep to his presence. He found a particularly good spot to scratch, and the magthep elongated and twisted its neck in pleasure, its upper lip reaching out to flip at the air.
Holding on tightly to thick hanks of the animal’s fur, Reza suddenly leaped up. Twisting his right leg over the animal’s back, he planted himself in the wide, shallow valley between its shoulders and hips. His hands curled around the longer hair further up on the animal’s neck with a grip that bled his knuckles white, anticipating the pounding he was going to get when the animal reacted.
Esah-Zhurah held her breath as Reza mounted the animal. Around her, the other tresh gasped, waiting for the beast’s savage twisting and bucking that would send the human flying.
But nothing happened.
Reza watched, wide-eyed with surprise, as the beast’s head slowly turned toward him on its graceful neck. It blinked its eyes twice as if to say, “Oh, it’s only you.” Then it turned away and began to amble toward the shelter that housed its water trough, Reza clinging to its back like a confused tickbird.
“In Her name,” Esah-Zhurah heard someone beside her whisper, an oath that was repeated many times up and down the rows of onlookers.
“How is it possible?” someone else asked, and she felt a tug at her arm. “Esah-Zhurah,” asked Amar-Khan, the most senior among the tresh of the kazha, “what trickery is this? Is it so that one animal may speak to another? How can the human do this, when our best riders and trainers have failed?”
“I…” Esah-Zhurah began, her gaze torn between the tresh’s angry eyes and the sight of Reza, scratching the magthep’s shoulders with both hands, seemingly oblivious to any danger of being thrown. “I do not know. I do not understand their Way.”
Amar-Khan let go her arm, baring her fangs in a grimace. “Their Way,” she hissed. “You give animals a great deal of credit, Esah-Zhurah. Perhaps you, too, would speak with the magtheps?”
Esah-Zhurah felt a surge of fire in her blood, and the rational thoughts of her mind boiled away as her hand sought the handle of her knife.
“Enough!”
The tresh parted before Tesh-Dar, who came to stand beside Esah-Zhurah, dismissing Amar-Khan with her eyes.
“Offense was given, Esah-Zhurah,” the priestess said quietly, “but I bid you pay it no heed. Neither Amar- Khan, nor the others – myself included – understand the life you have accepted as Her will, and you will encounter such ill-conceived notions from time to time. Your blood sings to Her, but your mind must control the fire in your veins.”
“Yes, my priestess,” Esah-Zhurah said, grateful for the older warrior’s understanding. She sheathed her weapon, feeling a chill run through her body as the fire faded from her veins.
“He again surprises me,” Tesh-Dar murmured thoughtfully, stroking the scar over her left eye as she watched Reza begin to communicate his wishes to the magthep in an as-yet uncoordinated signaling of hand and foot. “Already the beast acknowledges his commands,” she said. “And without a bridle, without a saddle.” She paused for a moment, cocking her head, as if listening. “He speaks to it.”
“I hear nothing, my priestess,” Esah-Zhurah told her. She could see Reza’s mouth moving slightly, but they were many strides away, far beyond Esah-Zhurah’s hearing. “What does he say?”
“I do not know,” Tesh-Dar replied, shrugging. “It is in the human tongue so many of them use.” She sensed Esah-Zhurah bristle at the knowledge. It was one thing about which she had been adamant: Reza was to speak only the language of the Empress. To speak any human language was to summon fast and furious punishment. “Allow him this one day to speak as he would,” Tesh-Dar suggested, commanded, sensing Esah-Zhurah’s reaction. “If he can tame such a beast with this,” she tapped her foot at the base of a mound of yezhe’e plants, “and alien words and thoughts, then he has earned such a privilege. Our own ways fared not nearly as well.”
They both looked up at the sound of the rhythmic pounding of clawed feet in time to see Reza bring the magthep to within a meter or so of the fence and stop. The beast flared its nostrils and bared its flat, grinding teeth at the Kreelans. The young human warrior sat erect on the dirty back of his mount, his hands resting on his thighs, arms shaking from the exhaustion of his intensive acquaintance with the animal. But his eyes did not waver as he looked over the crowd. His gaze lingered on Esah-Zhurah, making sure that she saw and understood the contempt in his own eyes before he sought out the priestess’s gaze. He bowed his head to her.
“This,” he said proudly, “is
Nine
After a hasty breakfast of barely cooked meat and a handful of small fruits, Reza and Esah-Zhurah joined the hundreds of other tresh who were making their way from the kazha to wherever they had chosen to spend their free time. Some would go to the city, many to the forests and mountains, and still others to places Reza did not yet even know of. Only the priestess and some of the more senior warriors would remain behind.
The weather that morning was magnificent, the sunrise breaking over the mountains to fill the valley below with the promise of a warm day under a clear magenta sky. The cool air was crisp and filled with a cornucopia of scents that Reza had come to subconsciously accept as the smell of home.
As he rode beside Esah-Zhurah, towering above her on Goliath’s back, he found that he could hardly wait to get away from the suffocating closeness of the peers. They treated him with more respect than they had when he had first come among them, but he was still the lowest form of life on this planet, lower even than the simpleminded animals raised for meat. Ironically, it was Esah-Zhurah who had consistently proven the most difficult to sway, her arrogance virtually undiluted from the day he had first awakened to her scowling face.
Yet, he was increasingly unsure if her behavior was entirely sincere. Sometimes he awoke to find her staring at him, her eyes flickering in the glow of the low fire they kept to ward off the night’s chill. The look on her face was always thoughtful, contemplative, rather than the perpetual sneer he was used to seeing during the day. But always, as soon as she realized he was watching her, a cloud passed over her eyes, and she would roll over, turning her back to him.
The way he had seen her interact with the tresh also made him wonder. As the months had come and gone, she had become less and less tolerant of the other tresh making derisive comments about Reza or bending the rules in the arena just far enough to try and do him serious injury, something he had thus far managed to avoid. For
