“Where can we hunt?” shrugged the centaur. “Whenever we come through one of our regular districts, we find more valleys under plow than last time, more trees cut and the fields higher up the slope. Even in Goikokoa Etchea, what’s as much my tribe’s home as a place can be, little fields are showing up.” A swirl of lamp smoke veered toward him, and he sniffed it contemptuously. “Sheep fat! The herds I find aren’t deer any more, they’re sheep, with a boy pi-pipping away on a whistleand dogs again.”
“If you’d pick out your territory and stay on it, then no farmers would come in,” said Kynthides. “It’s contrary to our nature to leave land unused because somebody plans to hunt through it next autumn.”
“But, big as Goikokoa Etchea is, it won’t begin to feed us year round! We’ve got to have ten times as much, a hundred times if you’re talking of Scythia and Illyria and all.”
“I live in Thessaly myself,” Kynthides pointed out. “I have to think of Illyria. What we men really want is to see all you centaurs completely out of Europe, resettled in Asia or the like. Couldn’t you all move out of Sarmatia and the
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lands to the east? Nobody lives there. It’s all empty steppes.”
“Sarmatia! Maybe it looks empty to a farmer, but I’ve heard from the boys in Scythia. The place is filling up with Achaians, six feet tall, each with twenty horses big enough to eat either one of us for breakfast, and they can ride those horses all night and fight all day. By Jainco, I’m keeping away from them.”
“Well, there’s hardly anybody in Africa. Why don’t you go there?” the man suggested.
“If there was any way of us all getting there”
“Certainly there is! We have ships. It would take a couple of years to send you all, but”
“If we could get there, we wouldn’t like it at all. That’s no kind of country for a centaur. Hot, dry, game few and far betweenno thanks. But you’re willing to ship us all to some other place?”
“Any place! That is, within reason. Name it.”
“Just before war broke out in earnest, I got chummy with a lad who’d been on one of those exploring voyages you folks go in for. He said he’d been to a place that was full of game of all kinds, and even had the right kind of toadstools.”
“Toadstools?” To make poison with?” cried Kynthides, his hand twitching toward the neatly bandaged spear-jab on his side.”
“Poison.1” Iratzabal ducked “liis head and laughed into his heavy sorrel beard.” That’s a good one, poison from toadstools! No, to eat. Get a glow on at the Moon Dancessame way you people do with wine. Though I can’t see why you use stuff that leaves you so sick the next day.”
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The Unicorn Trade
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“Once you’ve learned your capacity, you needn’t have a hangover,” Kynthides said with a feeling of superiority. “But this place you’re talking of”
“Well, my pal said it wasn’t much use to men, but centaurs would like it. Lots of mountains, all full of little tilted meadows, but no flat country to speak of. Not good to plow up and sow with barely or whatnot. Why not turn that over to us, since you can’t send any big colonies there anyway?”
“Wait a minute. Are you talking about Kypros’ last expedition?”
“That’s the one my pal sailed under,” nodded Iratzabal.
“No, by the Corn Mother! How can I turn that place over to you? We’ve barely had a look at it ourselves! There may be tin and amber to rival Thule, or pearls, or sea-purple. We have simply no idea of what we’d be giving you.”
“And there may be no riches at all. Did;this guy Kypros say he’d seen any tin or pearls? If he did, he didn’t tell a soul of his crew. And I’m telling you, if we don’t go there we don’t go anyplace. I can start the war again with two words.”
The man sprang to his feet, white-lipped. “Then start the war again! We may not have been winning, but by the Mother, we weren’t losing!”