Kynthides winced. Another yoke of draft oxen gone! Well, Corn Mother willing, the war would be settled soon. It might even be tonight. “Won’t you, er … Sit? Lie down? Er, make yourself comfortable.”
Iratzabal lowered himself to the ground with his feet under him, and Kynthides sank gratefully into a leather-backed chair. He had been afraid the discussion would be conducted standing up.
“I got to admit you gave us a good fight today, for all you’re such lightweights,” the centaur said. “You generally do. If we don’t get things settled somehow, we could go on like this till we’ve wiped each other out.”
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TREATY IN TARTESSOS
241
“We realize that too,” said the man. “I’ve been asked by the heads of every village in Tartessos, not to mention communities all the way back to Thrace, to make some reasonable settlement with you. Can you speak for centaurs in those areas?”
“More or less.” He swished his tail across the bandaged fetlock, and flies scattered. “I run-most of the territory from here up through Goikokoa Etcheawhat men call Pyrene’s Mountainsand across to the Inland Sea. Half a dozen tribes besides mine hunt through here, but they stand aside for us. We could lick any two of them with our eyes shut. Now, you take an outfit like the AcrocerauniansI don’t run them, but they’ve heard of me, and I can tell them to knuckle under or face my boys and yours. But that shouldn’t be necessary. I’m going to get them a good cut.”
“Well, remember that if the communities don’t like promises I make in their names, they won’t honor them,” said the man. He slid his fingers through the combed curls of his dark-brown beard and wished he could ignore the centaur’s odor. The fellow smelled like a saddle-blanket. If he didn’t want to wash, he could at least use perfume. “First, we ought to consider the reasons for this war, and after that ways to settle the dispute.”
“The way I see it,” the centaur began, “is, you folks want to pin down the corners of a piece of country and sit on it. We don’t understand ground belonging to somebody.”
“It began,” Kynthides said stiffly, “with that riot at the wedding.”
“That was just what set things off,” said
Iratzabal. “There’d been a lot of small trouble
before then. I remember how I was running
down a four-pointer through an oak wood one
rainy day, with my nose hall of the way things
smell when they’re wet and my mind on haunch
; of venison. The next thing I knew I was in a
:<;L, clearing planted with one of those eating grasses, | twenty pounds of mud on each hoof and a pack >-.- of tame wolves worrying my hocks. I had to sj kill two or three of them before I got away, f%l and by then there were men throwing spears f and shouting ‘Out! Out!’ in what they thought ‘|; was Eskuara.” j| “We have to keep watchdogs and arm the
§ field hands, or we wouldn’t have a stalk of grain s,; standing at harvest time!”
iv “Take it easy. I was just telling you, the war | isn’t over a little thing like some drunks break-
#: ing up a wedding. Nor they wouldn’t have, if ‘^ the wine hadn’t been where they could get at it. t There’s blame on both sides.” |f The man half rose at this, but caught himself.
-Ľ The idea was to stop the war, not set it off
: afresh. “At any rate, it seems we can’t get along
: with each other. Men and centaurs don’t mix
well.”
“We look at things different ways, said Iratz-
abal. “You see a piece of open country, and all you can think of is planting a crop on it. We think of deer grazing it, or rabbit and pheasant
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nesting. Field-planting ruins the game in a district.”
“Can’t you hunt away from farm districts?” asked Kynthides. “We have our families to support, little babies and old people. There are too many of us to let the crops go and live by hunting, even if there were as much game as the land could support.”