With a terrific splash, it fell into the river. Ratha expected a dunking but to her surprise, the woven mass of driftwood and brush held together, acting as a floating platform beneath her. Only her toes got soggy from water seeping through.
After getting over her initial shock, Ratha realized she was drifting downriver. She saw Fessran trotting along the bank, accompanied by several irritated pole-setters yowling insults at their reckless leader for knocking the wall down.
The current wasn’t very strong, and soon Ratha’s make-shift raft grounded on a sandbar. Everyone who wasn’t occupied with keeping seamares from escaping waded in to steady the strange craft and rescue a frightened Ratharee, but Fessran and a few others took the opportunity to make sure Ratha got well splashed, dunked, and pummeled by the time she reached solid ground.
“Wait!” she yowled just as the Named were about to tear the raft apart to use in an attempt to repair the seamare pen. The group drew back, letting her through to examine the thing. She pushed on the craft with a paw, watching how it bobbed and floated. Again she clambered on, scrambling from one end to the other. Yes, it made her feet soggy and had a disconcerting tendency to sink under her weight in certain places, but it had carried her quite a distance.
She hopped off, her whiskers bristling excitedly.
“I know that look,” said Fessran. “Don’t tell me you think we can use that broken piece of the wave-wallower pen.”
“Didn’t you see what happened? It carried me and Ratharee over the water. We didn’t have to swim. I think it could carry more than one of us. Come on, Firekeeper. Let’s both try.”
Gingerly, Fessran made her way aboard, grimacing when Ratha joined her in a gleeful bound, making the raft bounce. “You, clan leader, are still a cub sometimes. Yarr, this thing makes my stomach feel queer.”
“We can ride down the river on it,” Ratha argued.
“You can ride down the river on it. I’ll stick to burning my whiskers with the Red Tongue.” Fessran disembarked, waded to the bank, and shook her feet. “Anyway, we need the sticks to fix the hole you made.”
Reluctantly, Ratha gave up her new discovery, but as she watched the other Firekeepers pull it apart, she fixed the idea in her mind, resolving to build another raft once the pen was finished.
Chapter Nine
Thakur’s worry about Newt’s reaction to the taking of her seamares by the Named soon proved true. Shortly after the incident with the two yearling herders, he learned that other herders had laid out bait trails to lure more seamares. But they had been scattered or trampled into the sand. There were reports that someone seemed to be hiding in the rocks, watching the herders, even if they stayed on their own beach. And one of the young herders who had been involved in the seamare stealing had been attacked by night. Though he was able to drive his assailant off, the ferocity of the attack frightened him. Thakur decided he had better find Newt.
He discovered her in the lagoon where she swam. When she saw him, her ears pricked forward, and she bounded out of the water. He saw, to his mixed delight and dismay, that her foreleg looked stronger and that she made attempts to use it, even on land. He felt a pang of guilt, wondering if his attempt to help her regain the use of her leg had led to her retaliation against the Named.
As soon as she had limped up to him and touched noses, he found she had worked on her speech as well as her leg. She greeted him with the words he had taught her. “Thakur come. Good. Newt swim with him?”
“No,” he said carefully, “talk.” In simple language he explained that the Named herders had been told to leave her and her seamares alone. In return, she was to keep to her territory. Any further ambushes would be looked upon with great disfavor by the leader of the Named.
“If there is another fight, and our clan leader knows I helped you heal your leg, there will be a bit of my fur flying as well,” Thakur said.
“Fur fly,” Newt echoed.
“I promise that no one will take any more of your seamares. If you do see Named herders on your ground, come and get me instead of fighting. You could get hurt.”
Newt looked at the ground, growling. She made a noise like a seamare.
“No fights,” Thakur said, “or we’re both in trouble. My clan leader will stop me from helping you. Understand?”
She looked up at him and hissed a soft yes.
“Good. Now that’s settled, what do you want to do?”
She hopped around him. “Teach. Words.” Thakur grinned, unable to refuse her eagerness. She made a scrubbing motion with her good paw against her face. “Word,” she said again.
“Wash,” he said, licking a forepaw and performing the action. “I wash my face. You wash your face.”
“Splash, wash, face place,” Newt crowed.
Thakur flicked his tail. He didn’t know what to make of her playful rhyming with sounds. He tried to recall if clan cubs did it. If so, they went through such a phase with their mothers before he got them to train.
“Stop being a pest and pay attention,” he said severely. “I’m washing my chest, see, like this.” He tongued his ruff.
“Wash chest, best for pest,” was her response.
He wondered where she had picked up some of the new words. Perhaps she had learned them from shadowing the Named herders, although not all the rhyming sounds she made had meaning. The fact that she had been able to pick up words and figure out their meanings indicated that her intelligence might be higher then he had first thought.
Even so, he wondered if anyone other than himself would understand her singsong garble. There was something oddly lyrical about the way she put sounds together.
He sighed. “You are strange.”
“Strange, change, mange. Thakur talk, stalk. Newt swim,” she said, and with an impatient toss of her head, she trotted back into the lagoon.
This time he did not join her but sat on a low dune overlooking the water and watched while she swam. Something had been plaguing him, and he decided that now was the time to sort it out. Ever since she had first spoken, the question had arisen within Thakur’s mind: Had she come from the lineage of the Named?
Herding animals wasn’t easy. Thakur knew how many of his own students, whose eyes were far brighter than Newt’s, had struggled to learn how to judge a creature’s mood or behavior. How could Newt think fast enough to outwit a beast?
She can plan, thought the herding teacher to himself. She can think ahead and plan. I’m convinced of that.
And the more he became convinced, the more a new certainty began to arise in his mind. She has done this because she was born with the talent, ability, and need to manage other animals, he decided. That conclusion could only lead to another: Somehow, this castoff from the ranks of the Un-Named had clan blood in her.
But how? Thakur thought of his own parentage, of his mother, Reshara, who took a male from outside. Such pairings were forbidden, and his mother was driven out. Hers was the last such mating until Shongshar’s coming showed what a tragedy they could be.
No, Reshara was not the last clan female to dare an outside mating. Thakur sat up suddenly, his ears swiveling forward. Ratha and Bonechewer. She hadn’t spoken much about it, but he remembered she had said something about having had cubs and having lost them. He’d assumed by her words that they had all died, but perhaps not.
Suppose one had survived, had somehow managed to scratch a living from the unfriendly world outside the clan. Without any of her own people to learn from, of course such a cub would be mute. But Newt looked too small to be a product of a mating several seasons past. Perhaps it was struggle and privation rather than age that had stunted her. And that crippling injury.