What the Herd Took Them For

Before they left Truhalu Point, Kahir Alnuaf had one more thing to sell them. It was a device that could take down Elven script, or another tongue the notes call Oatia, and analyse what it took down. He asked four hundred credits. They paid it. Somewhere ahead were ruins, and a scholar who had gone to read them without choosing to, and nobody in the party read Elven.

His notes also record a debt: a hundred credits owed to Qwitch by everyone but one of them. They don't say what it was for, and I won't guess.

The tracking was also settled before they set out. There were two ways to follow the mercenaries. They could keep to the trail the group had left, which was slower but forgiving. Or they could navigate the country directly, which was harder and gained more ground. His notes list both, with a word on what each costs. The notes they had brought from Qabarat, the old route laid over the new map, made the second choice easier than it would otherwise have been. That seems to be the one they took.

Tracks tell you where they went. The land tells you where they had to go.
Where the two agree, stop reading the tracks.

— the Field Canon, on Pursuit

They went in jeeps, which the notes mention without saying where they came from. The heading was north-west. The grass beyond the outpost was very tall, taller than a sitting passenger, and it was full of animals: large ones, some of them light-bodied and quick, which he wrote down as gazelle like things. That is a field note made at speed, by someone who means to come back for the proper name. They drove for a few hours into the evening. By dusk they were ten kilometres out from Truhalu Point, and they stopped there for the night.

Ten kilometres is not far. In grass like that, at that hour, I think it was about right. A grazing plain at dusk is the busiest place in the world, and none of it was moving for them.

The morning began with insects, as mornings there do. Then there was a great deal of noise in the grass, and the noise was yaruks.

A yaruk is a large herbivore, six-legged, built heavy at the front, with forelimbs that can pull a tree down to reach its leaves. It carries a hollow crest on its head that turns its bellow into something you feel in your teeth. His notes give the plain version: generally docile, but can be dangerous. The herd lay across their line of travel. They could go round it or try to pick a path through, and they chose to weave through. Given the grass, the jeeps and the distance still to cover, I understand why. The Field Canon would have them give the ground, and so would I. But I was not there with a day's lead slipping away.

They were in among the herd when a gun went off about a hundred yards away. They saw the muzzle flash and nothing else, not the shooter, not the reason. A yaruk was hit, and it roared.

A herd works out its threats quickly and not always correctly. These yaruks had just been shot at, and the nearest unfamiliar things in the grass were the party. The herd turned on them.

The order keeps an account of what came next.

And they came out of the grass by the light of morning, and the grass was full of the great grazers,
and the grazers were at peace, and the party went in among them.
And from far off in the green came the sound of a gun, and a flash, and no face behind it.
And one of the great ones was struck, and lifted its crest, and cried out,
and the whole of the herd heard it, and the whole of the herd looked for the one who had done it.
And they looked upon Kopalo and his companions, and they chose wrongly.
And they came.
And they bore down on Bren together, more than one, and he was struck, and kept his feet.
And one came against Kopalo shoulder first, and he was struck, and harder.
And the herd turned where no herd should turn, and the ground went bad beneath them all,
and Grek was left where the ground was worst, and the great ones found him there.
And Kopalo called to the grass, and the grass rose up in vines and took hold.
And here the telling stops. It does not say what the vines held, or what came after.

— Fragments of the Keepers, the Kopalo cycle, as it is usually told

The Fragments end there because the records end there. His last lines are a list in the middle of the stampede: Taeon: Grasping Vines. Grek gets hit with Body Check. After that there is a dash with nothing beside it. Novitiates always ask what happened next, and the honest answer is that this page doesn't say.

I would add one thing the Fragments leave out. When the herd came, what he reached for was the grass. He did not use his pistol or the mind-strike he used on enemies elsewhere. He made the plain under the yaruks' feet do the holding, against animals that had done nothing worse than believe what the gunshot told them. I can't say whether he thought it through that way or whether it was simply the nearest tool. I know which one I was taught to reach for, and I know where that teaching came from.

The shooter in the grass is not mentioned again on this page.