The foreman squinted appraisingly at Stile, who stood with eyes downcast, knowing this meant trouble, expecting to receive the ridicule of the group again. Fighting was forbidden on these premises. Out came the clipboard the foreman always carried. “Shingle—one gouge in turf,” the foreman said. And almost smiled, as the group sniggered.
For Shingle had been the man low on the totem, whose business it had been to avoid trouble. He was by definition wrong.
The foreman turned to Stile. “Accidents will happen—but in future you will report to the recreation room for practice in your martial art, Stile.” He departed on his rounds.
Stile only gained one day clear of the low totem, officially, for that day he overlooked another dropping. But he had traveled considerably higher in the estimate of his peers. They had not known he was into martial art. In turn, he remembered how they had stood by him, honoring the convention, laughing this time at the other fellow. Stile had won, by the tacit rules; the others had seemed to be against him only because he had been low totem, not because he was new or small. That was a supremely warming realization.
After that Stile began to make friends. He had held himself aloof, unconsciously, assuming the others looked down on him. If they had, they certainly didn’t anymore. Now when he fouled up and they snickered, it was friendly, almost rueful. Even Shingle, nose out of joint about the episode, never made an issue of it; he too abided by the rules, and he had lost fairly.
Meanwhile, Stile was becoming adept at spotting horse manure. Horses tended to deposit their solid loads in semi-private places, in contrast to their liquid ones. Liquid went anywhere at all, sometimes even on their food, but solids were always well away from eating, grazing, or resting areas. This made the piles more challenging to find.
Missing piles tended to put him low on the totem. Consequently Stile had considerable incentive to improve his performance, He developed an extremely sharp eye for horse manure. His nose was not much help, for horses had mild refuse, unlike pigs or chickens; never unpleasant, its odor quickly faded. If left a few days—God forbid!—it could even sprout grass from undigested grains, for the digestion of horses was less sophisticated than that of cows. Horses were adapted to running, and their structure and heat-dissipation mechanism and digestion reflected this. So Stile’s nose availed only when he was in the near vicinity of a find. Yet sight was not the whole answer either, for the piles could be concealed in copses of trees or amidst bushes. Sometimes he found chunks of it in the foliage of low-springing branches. There was also the problem of rain—artificial, of course, here in the domes—that wet down the manure and tended to flatten and blend it with its surroundings. Even when everything was ideal, manure seemed to be able to disappear when he was in the vicinity, only to reappear when the foreman checked. It was so easy to overlook a pile on the left while collecting one on the right!
Stile’s instincts for manure sharpened to the point of near perfection. He could spade a full pile into his barrow with one scoop and heave, not missing a chunk. He learned the favorite deposit sites of the horses, and checked there first. Sometimes he even beat the artificial flies there. He could look at a section of pasture and tell by the lay of it whether a horse would want to contribute.
Yet when he had mastered his job, it grew boring. Stile was bright, very bright. People tended to assume that small stature meant small intelligence, but it was not true. The work became stultifying. Had he mastered calculus and Terrestrial ecology and aspects of quantum physics merely to fling dung for twenty years? Call him the King of Dung! Why had the Citizen snapped him up so quickly, only to throw him away on this?
But Citizens were all-powerful on Proton. They did not answer to serfs for their actions. Stile could neither complain nor change employers; his rights in the matter extended only to accepting proffered employment or suffering premature termination of tenure. If he wanted to remain on Planet Proton, he obeyed the system. He spaded dung.
Often while at work he watched the horses, covertly, lest he seem to be malingering. There was Sonny, a small handsome paint hackney with large ears, used for training new riders though he had no proper trot. Simcoe Cloud, an appaloosa gelding sixteen hands high, with a pretty “blanket” but too large a head. Navahjo, a fine quarter horse, dominant in her pasture though she was a mare. In another pasture were Misty, a gray plump Tennessee Walker with a will of her own, and her companion Sky Blue, only fourteen hands high and over twenty years old. Blue was a former harness racer, well trained but shy despite her graying head. There was Cricket, also gray verging on white. There were, according to the dictates of horse registry, no white horses; a horse that looked white was either albino or registered gray. Thus the joke: “What color was George Washington’s white horse? Gray.”
These constituted Stile’s world, during much of his working time. He came to know them all, from a moderate distance, from Shetland pony to massive draft horse. He longed to associate more closely with them, to pat them, brush them, walk them—but that was the prerogative of the stable hands, fiercely guarded. Stile was only a pasture hand, never allowed to get overly familiar with the stock. On many days his closest approach to a living horse was its manure.
Yet from that necessary distance, what beauty! There was a peculiar grace to a horse, any horse. The power of the muscles, the spring of the ankles, the alertness of the ears, the constant swishing of the tail. There were no natural flies here, so android flies were provided, that made loud buzzing sounds and swooped around the horses, just to provide exercise for those tails. Stile loved to watch the tails, perhaps the prettiest thing about any horse except for the manes. On occasion he saw a visiting horse with a red ribbon tied in the tail: the signal of an animal that kicked. If a pasture or stable hand got kicked, he was punished, not the valuable horse. Serfs were expected to be careful, not risking the horses’ precious feet by contact with the serf’s drab flesh.
Stile made the best of it. He was hardly conscious of this at the time, but the extreme value placed on horses here was to make a profound impression on his attitude in life. These were not the racing animals; these were the retirees, the injured, the secondary steeds—yet they were worth more than the lives of any of the serfs. Some serfs rebelled, secretly hating the animals they tended, but Stile absorbed the propaganda completely in this respect. The horse became his ideal. The horse, though confined to its pasture, had perfect freedom, for the pasture was equine heaven. If Stile had been a horse, he would have been in heaven too. Horses became prettier than people in his eyes, and though intellectually he denied this, emotionally he accepted it. Stile was in love with horses.
Thus he became an avid student of the species. Not only did he study the nuances of the mannerisms of the particular animals in his pastures, noting that each horse had a personality fully as distinct as that of any serf; during his free time he studied texts on horse manure. He learned of the intestinal parasites that might be found in it, the worms and the maggots and microscopic vermin. Of course there were no such parasites here, but he pretended there might be, and looked assiduously for the signs. He learned to judge the general health of a horse by its manure; whether it was being worked hard or was idle; what its diet was and in what proportions. Some horses had hard clods, some loose; Stile could tell which horse had produced any given pile, and thus was aware of the past day’s location of each horse without ever seeing the animals directly.
Time passed. One day, two years into his tenure, Stile actually spied a worm in manure. He reported this immediately to the foreman. “A worm in our manure?” the man demanded incredulously. “You’ve got delusions of grandeur!”
But they tested the horse, for the foreman let nothing pass unverified, and Stile was correct. A slow-hatching variety of parasite had slipped through the quarantine and infected the animal. It was not a serious bug, and would not really have hurt the horse, but it was genuine. The larvae had manifested in the manure only on the day Stile noted them; he had caught the n
uisance before it could spread to other animals.
The foreman took Stile to the shower, washed him personally as if he were a child, and combed his hair with an available currycomb. Stile submitted, amazed at this attention. Then the foreman brought him, shining clean, to a small door in the wall of the stable. “Always say ‘sir’ to him,” the foreman said warningly. “Never turn your back until he has dismissed you.” Then he guided Stile firmly through the door.
Stile found himself, for the first time, in the presence of his employer. The other side of the barn was a palatial apartment, with videoscreens on three walls. On each screen was a portion of a composite picture: the surface of a mountainous land as seen from the air. The image shifted in three-dimensional cohesion, making the illusion most effective. The floor was almost transparent quartz, surely imported from a quarry on Earth, thus more valuable weight for weight than local gold. What affluence!
The Citizen sat in a plush swivel chair upholstered in purple silk, on whose armrests a number of control buttons showed. He was garbed in an ornate robe that seemed to be spun from thread made of platinum, and wore fine suede slippers. He was not an old man, and not young; rejuvenation treatments made his body handsome and his age indeterminate; though behind that façade of health, nature surely kept accurate score. Few Citizens lived much over a century despite the best medicine could do. He possessed no overpowering atmosphere of command. Had Stile encountered him on the streets, serf-naked, he would never have recognized him as a Citizen. The man was completely human. It was the clothing that made the difference. But what a difference it made!
The Citizen was facing to the side, his eyes on a passing cloud. He seemed unaware of Stile’s intrusion.
The foreman jogged Stile’s elbow. Stile tried several times, and finally choked out his announcement of arrival: “S-sir.”
The Citizen’s eyes flicked to cover him. “You are the lad who spotted the worm?” The voice was ordinary too, amazingly.
“Yes, sir.”
“You are promoted to stableboy.” And the Citizen rotated in his swivel chair, turning his glossy back, dismissing Stile.
Stile found himself back in the barn. He must have walked there, guided by the foreman. Now the man led him by the hand to a cabin at the edge of the pasture. Three stable hands stood beside it, at attention.
“Stile is joining you,” the foreman said. “Fetch his gear.”
With alacrity they took off. In moments Stile’s bedding, body brush, and towel were neatly set up by the fourth bunk in the cabin. The stable hands were congratulating him. He was, of course, low man of the house—the “boy”—but it was like a fraternity, a giant improvement from the barracks. Only four to share the shower, curfew an hour later, and a cabin vidscreen!
Stile’s days of spading and hauling manure were over. A new serf took his place in the pastures. Stile was now of a higher echelon. He was working directly with the horses. Reward had been as swift and decisive as punishment for infractions; at one stroke the Citizen had made two years of dung worthwhile.
Stile lifted his eyes from the manure of this wilderness realm. Oh, yes, he knew about manure! He had never forgotten what dung had done for him. He considered it not with distaste or horror, but almost with affection.
He walked on down the river, inspecting hoofprints and manure. Some of these horses were large, some medium, some healthy, some less so. Some did have worms in their droppings, and these gave Stile a perversely good feeling. A worm had promoted him!
This region, then, was not sterile; it was natural. Flies hovered about the freshest piles: genuine flies, he was sure, species he knew only from books and museum specimens. No one policed this region; the old piles lay undisturbed, sprouting toadstools, gradually settling, dissolving in rainfall, bright green grass growing up through them. No self-respecting horse would eat at a dung-site, so such blades remained unclipped. Nature’s way of preventing overgrazing, perhaps—but Stile was appalled to see such an excellent pasture in such disrepair. Did no one care about these horses?
They must be wild, uncared for. Which meant that he would be free to take whichever one he chose. He might have to break it for riding—but he knew how to do that. Even with his injured knees he could ride any horse. Only specialized racing required extreme flexure of the knees; for other riding the legs were used for balance, for purchase, and guidance of the steed.
There was evidently a fair-sized herd in this region. A number of mares, governed by a single powerful stallion? No, there seemed to be several males; he could tell by the positioning of the hoofprints about the indentations of urination sites. Males watered in front of the hind hooves; females, behind. But there was bound to be a dominant stallion, for that was the way of horses. Geldings, or cut males, were no more competitive than mares, but potent stallions demanded recognition.
That dominant stallion would probably make the finest steed for Stile’s purpose—but would also be too obvious. Stile needed a good, fast, but inconspicuous animal. A non-herd stallion—probably there were no geldings here, if the animals were actually wild—or a mare. A good mare was in no way inferior; some of the most durable runners were female. Stile had ridden a mare named Thunder once, who brooked no back-talk from any horse, regardless of size or sex, and was herself a magnificent, high-stepping, lofty-headed creature. If he could find a mare like her, here—
He spied the prints of a small horse, no more than fourteen hands, on the verge of being a pony, but supremely healthy. Probably a mare; there was something about the delicacy with which she had placed her feet. Every hoof was sound, and the manure had no infestation. She could run, too—he traced her galloping prints in the turf, noting the spread and precision of the marks, the absence of careless scuffmarks, of signs of tripping. No cracks in these hooves, no sloppy configurations. A good horse, in good condition, could outrun a greyhound, maintaining a velocity of 65 kilometers per hour. This could be that kind of horse. She seemed to be a loner, apart from the herd, drinking and feeding in places separate from the others. That could mean she was more vulnerable to predators, so would have to be more alert, tougher, and swifter. But why was she alone? Horses were basically herd animals.
He followed this trail, by print and manure. At first the piles were old, but as he used his skill to orient they became fresher. It took him some hours to make real progress, for the horse had wandered far—as healthy horses did. As Stile walked, he wondered more persistently: what made this one separate from her companions? Was she, like himself, a private individual who had learned to value alone-time, or had she been excluded from the herd? What would constitute reason for such exclusion? Obviously she made do quite well alone—but did she really like it?
Stile had quite a lot of empathy for horses, and a lot for outsiders. Already he liked this little mare he had not yet seen. He did not after all need any giant steed to ride; his weight was slight, and he knew how to make it seem lighter. A small horse, even a pony could easily support him. In heroic fantasy the protagonist always bestrode a giant stallion; Stile could handle such a horse, but knew there were points to smallness too. Just as there were points to small people!
Here he was, abruptly, at an aspect of the truth: he was very small for his kind, therefore he liked small things. He identified with them. He knew what it felt like to be looked down on, to be the butt of unfunny jokes. “Hey, dja hear the one about the little moron?” Why did it always have to be a little moron? Why did the terms midget, dwarf, pygmy, and runt have pejorative connotation? What the hell was so funny about being small? Since small people were not inferior intellectually, it stood to reason that smallness was a net asset. A better value, pound for pound.
So why didn’t he really believe it? He should not choose a horse because it was small, but because it was the best mount for his purpose. Yet, subjectively—
Stile’s irate chain of thought was interrupted by the sight of his objective. There she stood, as pretty a little mare as he had ever seen.
Her coat was glossy black, except for white socks on her hind feet, one rising higher than the other. Her mane fell to the right side, ebony-sleek, and her tail was like the tresses of a beautiful woman. Her hooves glistened like pearl, dainty and perfectly formed. She had a Roman nose, convex rather than straight or concave, but in nice proportion. And her horn was a spiraled marvel of ivory symmetry.
Her what?
Stile actually blinked and rubbed his eyes. He only succeeded in blurring his vision. But what he saw was no trick of the light.
He had found a unicorn.
CHAPTER 7
Neysa
He must have gasped, for the mare raised her head alertly. She had, of course, been aware of his approach before; horses—unicorns?—had sharp hearing. She had not been alarmed—which itself was remarkable, if she were wild—so had continued grazing. Equines were like that; they startled readily, but not when they thought they had the situation in hand. Evidently this little lady unicorn was much the same.
This was a fantasy world, where magic evidently worked; he had already established that. He still felt the burn on his neck where the amulet-demon’s chain had scraped. So why shouldn’t this world have magic animals too? That made perfect sense. It was only that he had never thought it through, before assuming that these were horses. Was there, actually, much difference between a horse and a unicorn? Some artists represented unicorns with leonine bodies and cloven hooves, but Stile distrusted such conceptions. It could be that a true unicorn was merely a horse with a horn on the forehead. In which case this one would do just fine for him; he could ignore the horn and treat her as a horse.
Stile had not taken time to fashion a lariat; he had been more interested in surveying the situation, and in the memories this experience evoked. Now he decided: this was definitely the animal he wanted. With no rope, he would have to improvise. He doubted she was tame, but she might not be man-shy either.