He stood at the door of the cell. The door itself was wide open. The lamp in front of the painted mural hissed
to itself then was silent. His toes
touched the line of the threshold as if pressed against a rock wall.
Ahrimaz held to the door posts not sure if he was
holding himself up, holding himself back, or bracing to try and lunge through
the opening, breath shuddering in and out of his lungs.
He could cross that threshold if asked, by anyone
else, even the animals. When Rutaçyen
had asked him to step in and out of the cell a dozen times he could do it without
a thought. When he tried to leave the
cell through his own volition, every muscle locked solid and he could go
nowhere.
One finger at a time he pried his grip off the door
posts, took a deep breath and tried to overbalance out the door and he lashed
out and grabbed rather than take that step.
He could hear Limyé and the dogs coming, at least he assumed that Limyé
was with the multi-scramble-claw-clicking rush of dog nails on stone. He closed
his eyes and stepped back from the dangerous threshold, went down on one knee
to be swarmingly greeted by slobbering dogs’s wet noses and tongues. How he had changed. Before he would never have tolerated it.
But when he looked, Limyé was not there. “Yes, yes, it’s all right, you’re good dogs
yes, yes, what the scorch?”
He flinched back as the dogs each took a sleeve and
began tugging him toward the door. “Have
you beasts gone mad?” He had to stagger to his feet, at least part way, or fall
on his face, though the blocky dogs weren’t quite tall enough to let him stand
straight with his cuffs clenched in their bull-baiting jaws.
They dragged him along, play growling, huffing, his
hair over his face and when they had him at a door he didn’t recognize they let
him go, sitting down so smartly that it looked as though he had commanded
them. Ahrimaz didn’t recognize the hall
or the door, save that it was an outside door, heavy only against the weather.
A rack of woolen cape/coats hung by the door.
He stood looking at the dogs, then shrugged and took a coat, before
opening the door to see where they’d brought him.
He nearly stopped dead in his tracks but Sure seized
his sleeve again and Teh ran ahead along the dark breezeway to tug on the rope
obviously put there so that the animal could open and close the door.
Sure dragged him into the building and Ahrimaz did sit
down in the sand as Teh closed the door behind them. It was the oddest riding arena that he had
ever seen and was different enough that he could seize control of his fear and
the knotting in his stomach and just sit.
“Father, those are
already being trained as warhorses, even if they’re just foals.” The old monster had looked at him and started
to smile.
“You’ll have to try
harder than that, son. You go down there
and choose your horse. That’s why I gave
you a rope. If they bite you, if they
kick you, fight back. Punch them. Grab a
stick… there’s lots in the paddock.”
The foals… really they
were nearly yearlings... had already learned that their job was to be
killers. They’d had slaves sent in
before, unarmed, and the men knew that if they got out of the field alive they
were free. At this point in their
training none of the slaves ever got out.
The herd had their own
hierarchy. He could see that. He focused
on the one that would be lead, and picked up the rope. Then he went in like a maniac, screaming,
running for ‘his’ horse making them get in each other's way. They’d knocked
him over once but he’d slid into a gap between two trees, wheezing. It turned out later that sometime in the scrum they’d broken his ribs. When the lead
horse reached to bite him Ahrimaz reached back and, lightning fast, pinched his
top lip, whipped a twitch around it.
He staggered out of the
paddock, leading his killer by the nose, the rest of the herd milling behind
them, confused.
The wind picked up in this early morning hour and the
light gradually got stronger, filtering in through the translucent panels all
around the top of the walls. The stables
were all apparently arranged around the arena.
The warm smell of clean horses helped ease his gut as he sat, even as
the rest of him tried to panic.
I'm not hurting, learning to ride.
There
was an interested equine head poking out over every stall door, long noses
bobbing as they turned their heads this way and that to catch his scent. Every stall had a line of shapes along the
front wall where the horses could reach and when the light grew a little
stronger half a dozen of them started tugging on the green circles.
One started kicking his door and trying to bull his
way out, making nasty, aggressive whistles, yanking at his green flag hard
enough to rip it loose. He chewed on it,
still screaming, though muffled until he dropped the mangled remains.
“Scorch and Drown you lot!” Ahrimaz cried. “Do even the horses in this world get
votes? I don’t know what that means! But I know you! You’re a killer.”
But the dogs apparently did understand and trotted to
several of the horses -- though not the one making the most fuss -- to casually
pull their stall doors open and Ahrimaz lurched to his feet, ready to run. “You all can’t be killer warhorses now, can
you?” He began backing up slowly arms
spread, eyes fixed on the first horse out of his… her stall. She was a two-colour patched mare with a
white splash on one side of her face and a bay on the other. She paced out deliberately, a few steps ahead
of a black and white filly and a dapple grey.
His attention fixed on the horses, he forgot to yell
at the dogs who had put him in such danger.
Teh had vanished from his immediate vision and he backed up a bit
faster, only to fall backwards over the dog who knocked his knees out from
behind.
He rolled to try and get to his feet and run but found
the coat pinned him and knocked him flat once more and he lay on the sand with
three of the horses around him, and the damned and scorched dogs, all looking
down at him, standing or in the case of the dogs, sitting on his clothing to
immobilize him. He lay, panting,
wondering idly if the dogs had finally picked up on his desire to die and
brought him to this pass. I’ve killed enough war-horses, in war and
out of it. Surely they can smell that on
me.
He tried to summon the indifference he’d learned but
failed utterly and found his body giving in to the panic and the pain he felt
around horses. It cut through the pink
haze of the drug that Limyé had him on completely.
He look up at the flaring nostrils, lips loose,
showing the enormous flat teeth that could bite so painfully, heard the scream
of a horse still confined and him kicking and banging on the closed stall
door. “If you aren’t going to stomp me to death,” he said mildly, “… just let
him out. He’ll do it for you.”
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