The War God's Own

grandfathers.'

'So they can,' Wencit put in dryly, 'and especially if they're hradani or Sothoii.' Bahzell and Tellian frowned at him almost in unison, and he laughed. 'I rest my case!' he declared, and human and hradani darted looks at one another, then looked away quickly.

'No doubt the wizard is correct enough about that, Milord Baron,' another wind rider put in, 'but for myself, I'll trust a hradani-and especially a Horse Stealer hradani-no further than the end of my own lance.' Bahzell's face tightened, but several others, especially among the dismounted Sothoii, muttered in agreement.

'Perhaps not, Hathan,' Tellian said in a flat, discouraging voice, 'but I am the one who must decide what happens here today, not you!'

'With all due respect, Wind Brother,' Hathan said in an oddly formal tone, 'the decision you make may affect all Sothoii. And we are both wind borne, you and I. If I may not speak my mind to you, then who may?'

Tellian flushed and opened his mouth as if to snap back an answer, then paused and closed it. He glowered at the other for a moment, then nodded grudgingly and waved a hand at Bahzell, as if resigning the conversation with him to Hathan. The other wind rider made a soft sound, and his courser flicked its ears and stepped daintily forward until it stood directly before Bahzell. Unlike any of the Sothoii, the hradani seemed almost properly sized for the huge creature, and he stood motionless, arms once again crossed, and met Hathan's gaze levelly.

'You claim to be a champion of Tomanak ,' Hathan said finally, speaking to Bahzell as if no one else were present, 'and Milord Baron and Wencit of Rum both accept your word. Very well, so will I, hradani. Yet you might be ten times a champion, and still you would be hradani, and a Horse Stealer, and the son of the ruler of the Horse Stealers.' Hurthang and Vaijon both stirred angrily, but Hathan ignored them, his unflinching gray eyes locked to Bahzell's. 'My wind brother has said memories are long in border war. So they are, and I tell you this, Bahzell Bahnakson: the Sothoii will never forget that your people have raided ours from the first day ever we set foot upon the Wind Plain. Nor will we forget the very name in which you glory: Horse Stealers, the barbarians who raid our herds, who steal the horses we love almost as our own children and devour them like beasts of prey! What say you to that, Champion of Tomanak ?'

'Say?' Bahzell cocked his head, and his brown eyes were just as hard as Hathan's gray ones. 'I'll say as how I 'claim' to be himself's champion because I am. But, aye, you've the right of it when you call me hradani and Horse Stealer. And Wencit has the right of it when he's calling hradani nigh as stubborn and long in the memory as you Sothoii. True enough all of that is, true as death, but you've set the cart before the horse for the rest of it, Wind Rider. Aye, we're after calling ourselves 'Horse Stealers,' and proud of the name, too, for never another name in all Norfressa was harder earned. But let's be telling the whole tale, shall we? Aye, we were after raiding your herds, and stealing your horses-yes, and eating them, too-for we'd no choice at all, at all… but it wasn't my folk as began the raiding.' Hathan shifted in the saddle, and many of the other Sothoii muttered angrily, but Bahzell ignored them and glared straight into Hathan's eyes.

'My folk were here before ever yours came next or nigh the Wind Plain, Wind Rider, for none of the other Races of Man would have us. Warrior, woman, and child, we were driven off wherever we'd managed to fight our way ashore after the Fall, and if we were after dying in the wilderness, so much the better. And so we ended here, at the foot of the Wind Plain, on land no one else was wanting and too far from the 'civilized' folk for their warriors to be creeping up on us at night and burning our roofs over our heads while our children slept!'

The anger in his deep voice dwarfed the Sothoii's mutterings, and his brown eyes blazed like iron fresh from the forge.

'And what came of us here, Milord Wind Rider? What happened when first your folk brought their herds and horses to the Wind Plain? My folk remember, if yours are after forgetting. We remember the Starving Time, when your warriors came down off the Wind Plain like a pestilence. When the barns burned, and the harvests with them, and our babes starved at their mother's breasts. Aye, we remember it, Hathan of the Sothoii, and we're after taking our name from what your kind forced upon us, for we'd no choice but to raid your herds for food! It was that or be watching our children starve, and I'm thinking your own choice would've been no different from ours!'

'Nonsense!' Hathan shot back. 'The earliest tales make it perfectly plain that it was your kind who raided us! And-'

'Excuse me, Hathan.' Wencit didn't raise his voice, but something in it snapped all eyes to him. He paused a moment, as if waiting to be certain he had the attention of all of them, and then he shrugged. 'I'm afraid Bahzell's version is the more accurate, Hathan,' the wild wizard said almost gently. 'Oh, his ancestors were no saints, but it was yours who began the war between you.'

'But-' Hathan paused, mouth frozen in the open position. Then he shook his head. 'But that's not possible,' he protested. 'All of our tales, all our histories-'

'Are wrong,' Wencit said with that same note of gentle regret. All the Sothoii, even Tellian, stared at him in disbelief, and he sighed. 'Unlike any of the rest of you, I was here at the time,' he told them. 'I warned Baron Markhos of the presence of Bahzell's ancestors when he set out for the Wind Plain, and I urged him to keep clear of them-to leave them in peace so long as they left him in peace. But he didn't. Like almost all the refugees, he hated the hradani for what they'd done in the Carnadosans' service. It didn't matter to him that they'd had no choice. It was simpler to hate than to understand them, and so when his scouts reported the locations of the Horse Stealers' ancestors, he waited until winter was near and the harvests were in, and then-exactly as Bahzell says-he ordered their barns burned to starve them out.'

Total silence ruled the Gullet when he paused. The Sothoii sat or stood frozen in shock, and he sighed.

'It was an ugly time, my friends,' he said sadly. 'An ugly time for all of us. But I tell you this, Hathan Shieldarm: of all the Races of Man, the hradani's suffering at the hands of the Carnadosans was the cruelest. They were enslaved, driven and goaded by spells you cannot imagine, used and discarded and broken into slavering beasts which remembered being more than beasts yet could not fight the sorcery locked upon them. And then, when a handful of them escaped to Norfressa against all but impossible odds, the other Races of Man fell upon them and slaughtered them like animals, too filled with hate for what the Carnadosans had forced them to do to heed me, or Duke Kormak, or Ernos of Saramantha when we told them the hradani had had no choice.

'So, yes, they raided your herds, for your ancestors had left them nothing else to eat. And, yes, they slaughtered and ate your horses, as well as your cattle. Indeed, they preferred horsemeat to beef, for they knew how much you loved your horses, and they treasured anything they could do- anything at all-to strike back at the warriors who'd tried to exterminate them. It was your people who first called them 'Horse Stealer,' Hathan, but there was no name in all the world they would have preferred, for they, too, knew how to hate, and, oh but your ancestors gave them cause to.'

He fell silent, and, one by one, the Sothoii turned away from him, looking at one another in shock and confusion. It never occurred to them to doubt Wencit's word, even though it turned everything they had ever been taught on its head, for he was Wencit of Rum. And, as he said, unlike any of them he had been there.

Bahzell shared their shock, though in a different way. Hradani and Sothoii had each known for centuries how the other's version of history had differed from their own, yet none of them had ever expected the differences to be so suddenly resolved or to have the truth disclosed with such brutal directness, for it had never occurred to either of them to simply ask the one person who'd been there at the time. And now that the truth had been revealed, Bahzell had no idea what to do with it. It was almost worse than the bitter denials and denunciations his people and the Sothoii had hurled at one another for so many endless years, as if the proof that the Horse Stealers had been right all along was somehow almost immaterial. As if in some strange way the hatred and distrust between them and the Sothoii had been the only thing they truly shared, so that the destruction of its basis left them all bereft of rudder or compass.

But then, at last, Tellian stirred. He shook his head as if to clear it and looked at Bahzell once more.

'I don't-' He paused and cleared his throat. 'It will take me some time to come to grips with what Wencit has just revealed to us, Milord Champion,' he said finally. 'And in many ways, I suppose which of us first offended the other matters far less than the history we have built between us since… and what we must build now.' He smiled