The Horsemasters Read Online Free PDF Page B

Neihle had once explained to Ronan when the boy had first questioned him about other tribes that followed a male chief. “Look at the animals,” Neihle had said. “Is there anywhere among them a mother who will not fight to the death to protect her young? No father will do that for his offspring; only a mother. That is why we follow the Way of Earth Mother in this tribe, Ronan. And to us, the Mistress is her voice, is the Goddess-on-Earth.”
    It was a great responsibility to be the Goddess-on-Earth, and during the time of that long, bitter winter, Ronan watched his sister and judged her lacking.
    It was an accepted fact in the tribe that the Mistress did not tie herself to one man, that she was sexually free. As the Mother was the Giver of Life to the World, so was the Mistress the fount of life to the tribe. Her sexuality was a great and holy thing, demonstrated most powerfully during the two fertility rites of Winter and Spring Fires. There had never been any sexual jealousy manifested among the men of the tribe in regard to the Mistress. It was simply unthinkable.
    During that winter, however, it became evident to Ronan that Morna had no feeling for the sacredness of her sexuality to the tribe. Arika had always understood that, while in one way the Mistress was freer than other women, in most ways she was less free. Clearly, Morna did not understand that. Freed at last from the restrictions of maidenhood, Morna went from boy to boy, from married man to married man, encouraging rivalries and then laughing at the often angry results.
    She was not fit to lead the tribe, Ronan thought. In anger, in bitterness, in defiance, he thought it. She would never be fit to head the tribe.
    For the first time in his life, Ronan seriously began to consider the possibility that one day a man might lead the Tribe of the Red Deer. In Neihle’s anxiety to remove his nephew from harm’s way, he had planted the seed of an idea that, over the course of many long cold winter nights, put down roots in Ronan’s mind.
    Neihle had said that the Mistress feared her son. Surely, Ronan thought, Arika would not harbor such a fear without just cause. Did Arika see what he saw, that Morna was unfit to take her mother’s place? Did she fear that perhaps one day the tribe would turn from the daughter to the son?
    These were the thoughts occupying Ronan’s mind one spring day when he was standing alone at a secluded spot along the Greatfish River a short way downstream from the tribe’s homesite. Two of the older initiates had recently gone off to the local Spring Gathering with their fathers and had not come back. As with so many of the boys of the Red Deer, they had found wives in neighboring tribes and gone to live with their wives’ kin. It was the way things were done in the tribe; it was the way things had always been done. The boys, not the girls, left their maternal home when they married.
    Ronan did not want to leave his home or his tribe. The very thought made him scowl, and to relieve his feelings he picked up a handful of stones and began to throw them forcefully, one after the other, into the rushing water of the flooded river.
    “Ronan.” It was a feminine voice. He looked over his shoulder and saw Cala approaching. She smiled at him. “You have been so occupied of late that I have scarcely seen you.”
    He threw the last stone all the way across to the opposite bank, then turned to face her. “It is Ibex Moon,” he said. “A good time for hunting.” In fact, the sight of Morna’s blatant promiscuity had so disgusted Ronan that he had kept away from all girls for a good part of the winter.
    Cala nodded. “I have been hunting with the girls,” she said. She halted beside him, standing very close.
    He turned back to the water. Cala and he had lain together at Winter Fires last year. He had been her first boy, and he liked her. There was a gentleness about her that reminded him of Nel.
    “Ronan,” she said softly. Now he could