West of January Read Online Free PDF Page B

hesitantly to their feet. We children followed. I remember staring around wildly for my father to defend us, while at the same time wondering if this armed intruder could possibly be an angel.
    The youth stopped and looked us over. “Who is senior?” he demanded.
    Aunt Amby stumbled forward and sank to her knees.
    The newcomer threw down his bundle before her. It fell open. The wrapping was my father’s breeches, and the bloody, hairy thing inside it was his head.
    —3—
    T HE STRANGER WAS VERY NERVOUS and therefore dangerous, although at the time I understood only the danger.
    The rest of the women followed Amby to the ground, prostrating themselves, and of course we children copied them at once. The babes and toddlers did not understand, and the rest of us were too shocked to make a sound. Thus there was silence in the sunlight, broken only by a crackle from the smoky fire and a listless flapping of wind in a loose awning somewhere. I crouched on the grass, staring at my shadow before my nose, trembling uncontrollably. A pair of large, bare, dirty feet walked by me as the newcomer inspected his catch. Eventually I risked an upward glance and saw that other heads were rising also.
    He was very tall and very thin, but his feet and hands were large, his shoulders broad. I was never to learn where he had come from, or how. He had apparently been sent out as a true loner, without woman or woollie, for he did not send any of us to retrieve a herd. Perhaps he had lost them to another; he never saw a need to tell us his history. He must have survived for some time on his own—time enough to grow that haze of beard around his mouth, time for his hair to reach down to his shoulders. Unless his father had taught him more archery than mine ever taught me, this loner would have needed time to learn that also. He must have lived off the land—which explained those conspicuous ribs and the crazy sunken eyes.
    “You!” he snapped. “What’s your name?”
    I shriveled small with terror. “Knobil, sir.”
    “Go and fetch the herders. All of them.”
    I was running before I was fully upright, racing over the dusty grass between the tents, off toward the distant woollies, making the horses shy and jerk at their tethers as I passed them, hearing my own heart thud and soon my own gasping breath.
    By the time I led the herders in, small ones at the rear, larger and faster ones at the front, the newcomer had ordered each woman to sit before her tent with her brood around her. Sleepers had been wakened, and the entire family assembled for the scrutiny of its new owner.
    He studied us with a fierce smile on his thin face, his ribs heaving periodically with deep breaths of satisfaction. He still had his bow and quiver on his shoulder, and he held my father’s sword, naked and caked with dry blood. Now he could see that his coup was not going to be contested, so his nervousness was fading. He must have been savoring a great sense of achievement, for at one stroke he had transformed himself from impoverished waif to man of wealth.
    I huddled as close to my mother as I could, but her smaller children were thick around her. I probably looked—and certainly felt—as terrified as Indarth, on her other side. It was then that I first wondered how our father had come by his start in life and if he had murdered for it. Amby must have known, but I never had the courage to ask her.
    “I am Anubyl,” the stranger said. “You belong to me now.”
    Heads nodded.
    He stepped first to Aunt Amby and demanded her name. He looked over her children, then moved to Aunt Ulith. When he reached us, his eyes narrowed. He told Indarth to stand, then to lift his arms.
    “You,” he said, “will leave.” He pointed across the empty ridges. “That way.”
    Indarth licked his lips, nodded, and started to move. After a few steps he stopped. “Who goes with me?”
    “No one.”
    White showed all around my brother’s eyes, but somewhere he found the courage