Fessran leaped up, her whiskers bristling. “We’ll get that belly-biter!”
“Fess,” Ratha paused. “Don’t kill him unless there is no other way to stop him. We have to find out why he did this.”
“Trust me, clan leader,” Fessran answered. Ratha then looked at Bira, who said, “I’ve put my fire out and get Thistle,” and galloped away, Fessran following.
Ratha looked after them, thinking, I have often feared that the Red Tongue would be stolen from us. Now it has happened. She found herself panting, and then she shook her pelt and slowed her breathing. She couldn’t waste time in panic.
Thakur, I need you. Please be there.
At the meadow’s far end, she found the herding teacher, with his students and the practice animals. As soon as he heard her, he sent the younger cubs back to their mothers and asked Cherfan and the herders to take charge of the older cubs and the animals. Fear quickening her steps, Ratha ran beside Thakur toward the tail leading to the hunters’ land. On the way they joined up with Thistle-chaser and Quiet Hunter. Bira took everyone’s treelings, promising to hide them safely in the trees. Ratha agreed with Bira that this task was not for treelings.
There was no need to seek out True-of-voice. He and his people met the Named at the boundary of the hunters’ territory. The solemn look in his eyes made Ratha’s stomach sink.
Quiet Hunter and Thistle approached the gray hunter leader, but the intensity in his gaze turned them back. He clearly did not want to talk.
Without words or gestures, he turned abruptly, looking back, his eyes commanding her and the Named to follow.
Ratha led her people slowly after him. Thakur paced beside her, slightly behind and so close that his whiskers brushed her shoulder. Quiet Hunter walked as close to True-of-voice as he could get, while Thistle-chaser took up the same position as Thakur on Ratha’s opposite side.
Ratha hoped that it wasn’t Fessran’s tracking party that had inadvertently caused trouble by invading the hunters’ land too suddenly.
“I don’t think it was Fessran,” Thakur said quietly. “I am sorry, but what you tried to prevent has happened. We are no longer the only ones who have the Red Tongue.”
Ratha could only lean forward into the wind and keep walking, wondering what she and her people would find. From the look on True-of-voice’s face, it was not something he welcomed.
Had the black renegade set a blaze that destroyed the other tribe’s hunting ground? Or worse?
Their destination was a canyon that cut into the rolling hills east of the hunters’ plain. Ratha saw it first from a distance, the tumbling smoke that belched from the canyon mouth. When they got closer, she stepped in the water of a creek that was gray and turbid with ash. The creek was spilling down from the canyon. As she shook the mud-ash from her feet, she smelled and heard the fire.
When they got closer, she saw her creature gone wild and raging in the dry, resin-filled pines that filled that cut in the earth. It was a blaze no longer, but a storm of flame, creating its own strong wind up the canyon.
Enveloping and devouring brush and trees, the firestorm made a sound no longer a hiss or a roar but a ground-shaking thunder. It left no blackened crags or stumps but burned and blasted entire trees to coals and powder that thickened the air. Ratha braced herself back against the wind that was trying to suck her off her feet and into the firestorm. It flew the tip of her tail nearly to her ear and her whiskers nearly straight in front of her face.
Frantically she thought of Fessran. Had she sent her friend into this maelstrom?
True-of-voice led his group to the side, out of the strongest wind. Ratha and the Named followed. He stood still on a small rise. Ratha, peering through the roiling smoke, saw Quiet Hunter’s dun coat moving among the hunters’ browns and grays. He was leaving True-of-voice and coming to her. Thistle-chaser joined him when he reached the clan.
Ratha, searching the surrounding hills for Fessran and the trackers, spotted movement and caught familiar smells. Soon Fessran and her party were close enough to see. They were ash-dusted and soot-streaked, but none looked injured. Much as she wanted to run out and greet the Firekeeper and her searchers, she needed to hear what news Quiet Hunter had brought from True-of-voice.
“Thakur,” she said to him softly, “meet Fessran and make sure everyone is all right.”
The herding teacher was away almost before she had finished. She turned to face Quiet Hunter. His expression was also solemn, almost stern.
“True-of-voice tells this one that female hunters had trapped face-tails in this canyon. Then the Red Tongue appeared and filled the canyon. The female hunters did not come back.”
Ratha swallowed, trying to ease the dry scratchiness in her throat. “Did True-of-voice send any searchers? Is there a chance those females escaped?”
“No. The song was torn by their death-screams. The Red Tongue has eaten them.”
“One hunter? Two? A few?” Ratha forced herself to ask.
In answer, Quiet Hunter sat, lifted both paws and spread the toes.
Again Ratha turned her head to the canyon’s entrance. She could see flames leaping over the rocky walls. The air above shimmered with waves of heat. Soon there would be nothing alive in the canyon, nothing moving except ash settling and dying coals breaking apart.
Ratha caught sight of Fessran butting her way through other clan members.
“It was him,” she panted, when she reached Ratha. “We followed his tracks here. That whelp of a belly-biting hyena let the Red Tongue loose.”
“Fessran, Quiet Hunter says that many of the other tribe’s hunters died in this fire.”
“I smelled burned face-tail hide,” the Firekeeper answered. “I wondered why the beasts would be in a canyon. So they were driven in there by hunters and then that black devil started the fire?”
“Accidentally or deliberately, yes.”
“Rrrr, if I was True-of-voice, I’d be spitting mad.”
“Well, I hope he isn’t, since I need to talk to him and tell him what happened.”
As she turned away to summon Quiet Hunter and Thistle, she heard Fessran growl, “Night-who-eats-stars, rahrrr! It’s more Night-who-lacks-brains.”
I’m afraid it’s the opposite, Fess. If anything, Night-who-eats-stars has too many brains. If he didn’t, we wouldn’t be in this mess. Who, by the Red Tongue’s flame, is he?
Chapter Eleven
With cinders filtering through her fur and still uncomfortably hot under her feet, Ratha sat, surrounded by the Named. More of the clan were present, for she had sent a messenger to fetch those who could be spared from the herdbeasts and the cubs. The firestorm had died down, but the smoke and ash were thicker than ever. It would not burn beyond the canyon, for the in-rushing wind now forced it deeper into the rocky cleft.
She had not seen the Red Tongue rage like this since the forest fire that had brought “her creature” to the clan. It made her realize how unpredictable and dangerous it was, and how familiarity with it had made the Named careless.
Ratha looked the other direction, through haze, to where True-of-voice sat surrounded by his tribe. Close by were Thistle and Quiet Hunter, eyes closed, noses lifted, speaking wordlessly to True-of-voice through the mystery called only “the song.”
I gave birth to her, Ratha thought, yet I am totally deaf to whatever she can hear. How can that be? Her gifts must have come through Bone-chewer‘s line, not mine. If he were still alive, would he be able to reach True-of-voice?
Part of her wanted to snort with derision. If there ever was an independent, irreverent son of a rutting three-horn, it was her first mate. She remembered all too well that copper-dark face with amber eyes. It resembled Thakur’s, for the two were brothers. But Thakur never had Bone-chewer’s sardonic expression which was softened only briefly by caring and passion.