The King's Horse (Shioni of Sheba Book 2) (9 page)

“G
iant! Giant giant giant!”
screamed the village children as they scattered in all directions like chickens frightened by a swooping buzzard.

Talaku, far from being annoyed, flashed Shioni a
broad grin. “Sometimes I growl like a lion just to see how fast they can run.”

“
I once pretended to be a ghost,” said Shioni. “The poor man nearly wet his trousers.”

He hooted.
“At least you get to hide under that cloak. I can’t hide anywhere.”

Apart from
behind an elephant… anyways, she couldn’t change her face or hair either. But Shioni kept her thoughts to herself.

Traversing the high pass had been a
day and a half’s struggle through mud, loose rocks, and more torrential rain during the second evening. Shioni was splattered with mud up to the top of her head. Star had turned a different colour altogether.

Then they started the descent
–the mud slide, according to Tariku–a slippery, foothold-by-foothold affair broken by some good sections where the ground was rocky enough to take their weight well. To cap it off, they were now travelling inside a cloud that clung to the peaks. Thick, soupy mist obscured their vision and made their clothes stick to their skin.

Shioni had stumbled across
a set of clear tracks the previous evening. Tariku calculated from their condition that they were only a few hours behind the mad Arabian now. She was pleased to have earned his grudging approval of her tracking skills, at least, but her foraging so far had earned a shake of his head and a snort of disgust.

The other thing that Tariku kept muttering about was Talaku’s appetite
. Despite several meals of large tubers which were cooked by burying them beneath a fire for an hour or two, they were already running low on supplies. Talaku shrugged mountainously and called his stomach ‘his inner wolf’.

This
village was a small collection of round, mud-and-stick huts on the hillside. As they approached, Shioni saw a landslide had collapsed one of the huts. Most of the village seemed to be trying to dig through the mud and dirt with their hands. There was even a donkey lingering nearby as though it intended to lend a hoof to the effort. A couple of men were wavering between checking that the travellers were friendly, and helping tear at the rubble.

After a brief exchange of greetings
, Tariku asked the villagers what had happened.

“A dragon’s claw struck the hut!”

“Lightning, it was lightning!”

“This boulder
was dislodged by the rains,” said the oldest of the group. “There’s a child under there.”

“Under
neath the boulder?”

“
No. We can hear his cries. He was in a crib by this wall when the boulder–stop it! He’s alive!” One of the women had begun wailing and screaming and tearing at her face and hair with her fingernails. “That’s the mother. The boulder’s on the crib and the child is somewhere underneath, but we can’t get to it.”

“Let me take a look,” Talaku
rumbled, popping his knuckles purposefully.

It could have been any
one of a thousand mountain villages, Shioni thought, perhaps forty or fifty adults and children, raggedly dressed, not a shoe in sight. She squelched her toes in the mud. Well, her feet had never felt the inside of a shoe either. But she was a lowly slave-girl, not a well-heeled Sheban, much less even one of the noblewomen in their peacock-feather finery and bejewelled slippers.

She could
sense their distrust. What could a couple of Sheban warriors and a girl do, they were wondering? Did the visitors have other motives–hidden or sinister motives?

Talaku slipped Siltam off his shoulders and
set down his pack.

“Shioni!
Lend a hand will you?” Talaku handed his axe to her. “Hold this. Look, the boulder is on top of the wall, which is on top of the bed.” He patted the offending boulder, which was waist-high to Shioni and as broad as her outstretched arms. “If we can move this, I can lift the wall and we can get under there. I hope.”

The children were drifting back
to watch now as Talaku set about his work. He snugged right in to the boulder and grunted as he worked his fingers underneath it, trying to find some grip. “Come on, don’t just stand there. I need as many men as can hold this thing.”

He squatted, and then took up the strain with a grunt.
The men copied him. All the great tendons on his neck and arms seemed to pop out at once and his face turned such a shade of purple that Shioni thought something would surely burst–and that would be messy indeed. But the boulder only rocked slightly before Talaku’s hands slipped. The villagers all groaned.

“
Hmm.” He stood back, smacking his palms together. “Right.”

He found a smaller stone and positioned it next to the boulder, and then wedged his double bladed axe into the gap
between them. “Come on. All you men,” he ordered.

Tariku organised himself and eight other men around the giant
–four to lever the boulder up using the axe, and himself, Talaku and the others to try to heave it down the hill.

“And get the children out of the way!
Right, all together now… lift!” To a cheer, the boulder shifted several inches. “And again! Lift!”

This time Talaku found his grip and, with the help of the other men,
turned the massive boulder over. It slid downhill a few feet with a kind of slow majesty, like an elephant reluctantly leaving a water hole.

“
Terrific.” Talaku wiped his brow. “Shioni, while I lift that wall and the bedframe, you get your paws under there and grab hold of that child. Tariku, you pull her out the moment she gives the word. We wouldn’t want to squash anyone.”

This part went smoothly.
Shioni knelt. Talaku stretched his long arms underneath the fallen wall and lifted it a little ways. Again, the sinews of his arms and shoulders leaped out like taut ropes. She quickly wriggled beneath the wall, face down in the mud, and after a moment’s searching with her hands touched a little leg. The child screamed. She grabbed its ankle and shouted for Tariku, who whipped her and the child out as smoothly as a frog plopping into a stream.

Talaku dropped the wall
and slapped his hands together again. “Easy.”

“Y
ou’re the first Shebans
to show any care for us,” said the elder, the
shemagele
of the village. His word seemed to hold great weight; even the children listened when he spoke, Shioni had noticed. And his smile was more wrinkled than the bark of an acacia tree; a statement of many years spent in the mountains and a life’s treasure of wisdom.

Tariku, sitting in the circle
of villagers crammed into the biggest hut, with most of the village hanging about the doorway and in the windows, sipped his coffee. “You honour us. We only saw your need.”

The elder was sketching on the
cow dung floor with a sharp stone. “Look here. The Mesheha River runs through the gorge below us. It cuts through the flank of the highland like a spear thrust into its belly. To the north, is the great peak Ras Dejen. But if you cut south for two hours, you will find a path down from the heights. It is not for the faint of heart. And a half-day’s walk further south along the river, you can cross safely.” He scratched a cross on the floor. “The river is shallow here. It is marked by a boulder cut in the shape of a tower, a stele… with ancient writings carved on it in a language lost before the time of our grandfathers. Gion–the young man there–says he saw the horse travelling south in the early hours. You couldn’t miss that animal, he tells me.”

Gion grinned and signed at them.
“Hmm. He says the trail is good by the river and spoor will be easily found. The waters haven’t risen much yet.”

“There’s been enough rain.”

“It runs away just as quickly.” The elder gave them a beaming, utterly toothless smile. “We would like to give you a gift of thanks. Will you accept a goat?”

Shioni could almost hear
the drool dripping from Talaku’s chops at the thought. Azurelle had been right about his appetite; it was simply enormous. But where did all that food disappear to on his sinewy frame?

Tariku was trying to negotiate for the goat.
He wanted to pay for it, while the elder insisted on making it a gift. Cleverly, Tariku added a second goat to the bargain, which he paid a steep price for, and then he proceeded to gift it back to the village so that they could celebrate the child’s rescue! The villagers all laughed and praised Tariku for his quick thinking.

But his next question
–regarding the whereabouts of the Wasabi–stopped up their mirth as quickly as if he had tossed a verbal lion into the middle of the circle. There was much shrugging of shoulders and hawing and jawing this way and that. Eventually it was agreed that it might be possible that they had evaporated into thin air, or possibly drawn back to Chiro Leba past the Mesheha River, or even as far as Chenek and the Geech canyon in the deep wilderness, but nobody seemed to be very sure about anything. What was abundantly clear, to Shioni at least, was the morass of fear the mere mention of the Wasabi had exposed.

They did not trust Sheba, and so would take
no risks.

Seeing Talaku
sitting with a girl-child of perhaps four or five years on his lap, made Shioni think of how she could steer the conversation into safer waters.

“We brought our own giant,” she said, when the silence grew too long.
“Are there other giants in these mountains?”

“Who do you think makes these storms?
The clouds are giants’ breath upon the mountaintops! Thunder is the sound of their feet tramping–”

“And they
toss boulders about when they’re angry!”

“
They kick over trees for firewood.”

“They
devour our goats and cows and throw the bones into the gorge.”

“No, they sharpen the bones
on the cliffs and use them to pick chunks of meat from between their teeth.”

But there was as much laughter amongst these creative offerings as there
was any pretence of seriousness. Through the hubbub, the poor village elder was trying to point out that there were legends of giants, but he had as much chance of being heard as a whisper from a mountaintop.

“Giants are real!”
Shioni could not resist provoking them further. “Look, you’re sitting next to one. It wasn’t a lily he was lifting today, was it?”

“I’m as real as any girl with yellow hair,” said Talaku.
“Go on, children. Pinch her and you’ll see she’s real.”

The children had been hanging back,
perhaps shy or afraid of her otherness. At his words, squeals of delight erupted in the room. Shioni was tackled by at least a dozen children and pinched, prodded and poked until she became alarmed. Hands were yanking her hair. Then someone took pity on her, and shooed the children away.

Shioni sat up,
brushing off her clothes as she tried to regain some semblance of dignity. “He’s a mean, nasty, angry giant as you can see, children. Shall I tell you what he eats for breakfast? Three ch–”

“
Goats!” Tariku interrupted. His glance accused her of trying to wreck the relations which had been warming with the villagers since their ‘heroism’ of that morning. “Three whole goats, each roasted with twenty-five cloves of garlic, ten red onions, and a whole cooking pot full of berbere stuffed down their gullets, to give the meat flavour.”

“And for a snack, seven chickens,” said Ta
laku. “I am not called ‘the big one’ for nothing! I swallow the chickens whole and they run around inside my stomach, still clucking. Like this–KA-KA-KA-KA-KA-KADOOOOO!”

The children and most of the adults jumped as he
startled them with a loud cackling noise. Then everyone shared a laugh. The villagers were delighted, of course. Now they would have a story they could share with all their neighbours for years to come.

Tariku looked at the
grounds in the bottom of his coffee cup. “We should be leaving, or we’ll lose time tracking the King’s horse.”

But Talaku
raised his hand. “One more question. I heard someone say the hut had been struck by a dragon’s claw. Do you believe in dragons?”

His
request rippled into the room, this dropping of words that spread a reverential silence among the crowd gathered in and around the hut. Shioni remembered Annakiya reading a scroll from the records room, which had talked about how some of the mountain-folk honoured and venerated spirits, and made small sacrifices to appease them at the foot of special trees in the high places. Some were
asmati
–small, magical creatures which created trouble–and others thought there were spirits of their ancestors, or even, spirits of the ancient dragons. All could do harm if not appeased.

The elder turned to Talaku.
“I can see that you are a true seeker, my gigantic friend. Let me therefore tell you a story–the tale of Belshalar, the ancient King of Abyssinia.”