“How?” he asked.
“Sometimes just by whispering a word in someone’s ear. Sometimes by asking the nearest settlements to make a raid just before war was to break out. Different ways.”
“How long did it take you to learn to do that?”
I sighed. “It took me three years just to make the first contact. Another year to learn to lie on the night and go with it. Maybe two more years to pick up the sense of what was going on around me. The old woman said I was way too old to learn easily, a child of three or four is better at it. Still, she got four good years out of me. Enough for us to prove that some of the tribes were running ghyrm into the settlements.”
“Did you find the source of the ghyrm?”
“We came close. All we had was the pictures they had in their minds. They went down into a darkness. Someone gave them the ghyrm, and they were paid in weapons. We tried again and again to follow them when they went wherever it was. We were never there at the right time.”
He laved his arms. “Do you miss it? That work?”
I felt my brow furrow. “Well, Ferni, I was generally very dirty, very stinky, no baths out on the steppes, our clothing was mostly uncured hides, we slept itchy, we had bugs and what not. Do I miss it? Not the doing of it, no. The feeling of it, yes. That weightlessness. That was a nice feeling. But, so is this.”
He grinned at me. “What do you want to do today?”
“Horses,” I cried. “You promised me horses.”
We rode, later on, down a forested valley where a bright, tumbling river spilled a lake into the grasslands at the foot of the hills. I experimented with my posture, the saddle, the animal, trying to figure out what was possible, what was comfortable, what was least painful. Ferni had picked up considerable skill, which he patiently passed on. By noon, we were well out into the grasses, the hills some way behind us. We stopped among a scattering of small trees by the river, tied the horses, and spread out our lunch.
“I’ll never get back on that animal,” I snarled. “You didn’t tell me it hurt.”
“Only the first few times. Walk around a bit. That’ll help. Have some wine. That’ll help even more!”
“Oh, I’m sure being sotted would enable me to ride like the wind, for all of two steps before I fell off!” He hadn’t brought enough wine to made me insensible, but he was right, it did dull the pain.
I lay back on the grasses, head propped on one hand, admiring the velvety turf and the herd of gnar some little distance away, peacefully grazing while their young leapt and pretended to fight with their front feet. We watched them for a long, contented time.
“Are they native here?” Ferni asked drowsily.
“Umm,” I replied, lying back on the blanket. “What? The gnar? Yes. They’re native here, but they’ve been transplanted to several other grassland planets. The closest one I know of is Fajnard. Only on the highlands, though. They won’t stay anywhere near the Frossians.”
“They’re kept for wool?”
“It’s more hair than wool. In the winter they grow an undercoat that’s warmer than any other natural fiber known. It’s not as fine as umox hair, but it’s hollow, and that makes it a marvelous, lightweight insulator. The herders pull it out in the spring with combs shaped like little rakes.”
“Can they be ridden?” he asked sleepily.
“No. They’re very good at pulling light wagons, but their body proportions are all wrong for carrying people as horses can, or as umoxen will, even though they’re very slow.”
The herd went leaping away, toward the hills, in great, ground-eating bounds, and I, half asleep, wondered what had spooked them. All was silent except for the horses’ teeth, chomping grass, the twitter of some small creatures in the reeds along the water, the deep breathing of us two drowsers.
The tribesmen came out of the grasses fast and low. Four of them leapt upon Ferni and held him down, tying his hands behind him, his feet together, blindfolding him. Four of them seized me up, gagged me, wrapped me in a net, and ran off into the grasses. The horses jerked wildly at their reins, whinnying and screaming.
From the net that held me I thrust my mind back to the place Ferni was. He was pushing his face against the ground, shoving the blindfold away to find himself alone. “Stupid idiot,” he raged at himself. “Promised her horses. Promised to keep her safe. Damn! Where did they come from? No tribesmen nearer than a three-day ride, they told me! No danger! Don’t worry!”
While he railed at himself, he was working his hands as far apart as possible so he could sit on them, work his way back, move the hands forward, damn, damn, nearly dislocated a shoulder there, never mind, go ahead, dislocate the damned thing, get the hands in front, in front, pull up the knees, get his feet through. He was thinking he had done this before, but it had been a long,
