Children of the Plains

Chapter 8

Years passed. Ten times the trees blossomed, and ten times winter sheathed the cliffs surrounding the lake of the falls in white mantles of snow. Twenty-two plainsmen followed Amero to the lake — six women, four men, and twelve children. In ten years they became six hundred, partly from natural increase, partly from the arrival of new settlers. Word spread across the plains of the marvelous village on the lake where people came to live instead of spending their lives roaming the endless savanna. Some people came to see the settlement and went away puzzled. Others saw and remained to swell the growing population, and like tinder heaped on a glowing coal, the more the population swelled, the brighter the flames of progress.

The people who lived there called it Yala-tene, or “Mountain Nest,” though most outsiders called the settlement Arku-peli, which meant “Place of the Dragon.”

Unburdened by fears of attack, the people of Yala-tene devoted their energy to peaceful pursuits of hearth and field. The hide tents of the first settlers gave way over the years to real houses, stoutly built of local stone. There was little good timber in the vicinity — most of the wood available was soft pine and cedar — but stone was abundant. The villagers built their houses in the style of their old tents: round with high, domed roofs covered by slabs of slate or cedar shakes. The peak of the dome was left open to allow smoke from the hearth to escape. Each house was like a miniature fortress, with thick stone walls and no opening other than a single door. As families grew larger and more prosperous, some houses acquired second floors, and these were often pierced with long slit windows.

People who stayed in Yala-tene brought with them their own skills and ways of living. From the northern plains came gardeners, who taught the plainsmen how to cultivate crops instead of having to gather them in the wild. On the west shore of the lake, ground was cleared of thorny scrub and turned over to planting onions, cabbages, carrots, and even grapes. To make passage across the lake easier, the untamed river was bridged late one winter by a plan ingeniously conceived by Amero. Because of the lack of strong timber, a flexible plank bridge was held up by thick strands of vine rope that were anchored on each end by a squat stone tower. The bridge was completed in time for the spring planting of the settlement’s fifth year.

In the seventh year of Yala-tene, herders arrived from the far south, driving flocks of goats and oxen before them. They came to barter for fodder as they passed through the desolate mountains, but some of the herders, too, remained behind when the flocks moved on. Enough herders chose to stay to provide fresh meat to the settlement the year round. Rock-walled pens were built on the north side of the sandy hill on which Yala-tene stood.

Twice a week the villagers slaughtered an ox or a pair of elk for the dragon. Knowing Duranix liked his food cooked, they learned to offer the meat on a blazing pyre of logs. The smell and sight of roasted meat attracted the attention of many people, and in time the fashion of eating cooked food became a firm habit.

After many weeks, bones and ashes began to pile up. To contain the growing mound of debris, villagers laid the beginnings of a rectangular wall of rock around the fire pit. Eager to show their appreciation of Duranix, everyone in Yala-tene gathered an armload of stones for the project. Before long, a large flat-topped cairn of smooth lake stones rose in the center of the village.

It became a sought-after honor to present the dragon with the twice-weekly offering, one the families in Yala-tene vied for. To keep the peace and determine fairly which family could serve the select haunches of beef and venison, Amero had to institute a rotating schedule, fixed by the positions of the white moon.

It was an arrangement that suited Duranix perfectly. At first the dragon had maintained his stated lack of interest in the humans that accompanied Amero back to the lake. Gradually, over many months, he found himself intrigued by their activities. It was as though the very shortness of their lives imbued them with a sense of urgency. Duranix still came and went according to his desires, but he acceded to Amero’s wish that he not absent himself for extended periods, since the fledgling settlement had come to rely on him completely for protection.

Duranix seldom went among the people himself because, even in his human form, most of the villagers feared him and wouldn’t speak or act freely in his presence. Amero, who still lived in the great cave, became the dragon’s go-between, and through him, Duranix kept up with the villagers’ affairs. He knew them all by name, their rivalries, their passions, their triumphs and travails.

In the second year after the founding of the village, Amero devised a hoist by which he could he raised and lowered from the cave to the lake. At first this was a simple rope of vines tied to a man-sized basket made of woven willow wands, and it required Duranix to haul the basket up or lower it down. By year three, Amero had added a counterweight and a windlass to the hoist so that he could raise or lower the basket without the dragon’s help.

Though still a young man, Amero was generally recognized as the chief of Yala-tene, by virtue of his special relationship with the dragon. At twenty-three, he was a lean young man of middling height. He was pale for a plainsman, a consequence of spending so much time in caves and tents. After getting his long hair tangled in the windlass one day, Amero had gone to Konza the tanner and had his hair cut short. Elder plainsmen were shocked — they thought the length of a man’s hair reflected strongly on his virility — but boys in the village took heed of the change and began cropping their hair in imitation of Amero. In time, only the most elderly men still wore traditional plainsman’s braids or horsetails.

One evening in early summer of the eleventh year of Yala-tene, as shadows lengthened and the first fires began to gleam in the village below, the timber frame attached to the lower mouth of the cave creaked, and the thick vine rope piled up in a heap on the cave floor. The basket arrived bearing Amero, who leaped out and tied off the hoist.

Amero hailed Duranix as he entered the cave. The dragon, in his natural form, was lying atop his platform at the rear of the cave. He held a stone in one foreclaw and rubbed and scratched it with the other claw. The stone’s surface glittered in the dimly lit cavern. Duranix’s tail was wrapped around an oblong slab of granite, and he repeatedly lifted and lowered the slab. Amero knew what that repetitive motion meant — the dragon was bored.

“What do you have there?” Amero said, climbing the steps to the platform.

“I found it on my last flight east,” said Duranix, squinting with one enormous eye at the stone in his fist. “It’s extremely hard. I’ve been trying to work it into a more pleasing shape.”

He paused his scratching and held the glittering stone on the points of two claws for Amero to see. It resembled a ball of ice the size of a child’s head and was almost completely clear. Amero could see through the stone to Duranix’s eye. The globular stone distorted the image, making the dragon’s eye seem even larger than usual.

“It’s beautiful,” said Amero. “What kind of stone is it?”

“Diamond.” He tossed the bright rock aside. “How go the storage caves?”

“Slow. The diggers hit a vein of black stone that’s stopped them.”

The villagers had decided to emulate Duranix and carve a series of tunnels in the cliff face — not to live in, but to store their supplies of dried and smoked meat, vegetables, and other foodstuffs. Early work went rapidly, and three galleries had been sunk into the mountain, but after forty days, the diggers met tougher rock. All three passages were blocked by the same impenetrable black stone, and their deer-antler picks and stone hammers could make little progress against the impervious wall.

“Do you need my help?” Duranix said.

“Not yet,” Amero replied. “There’s no better way to wake a lazy mind than to put it to work. Mieda will figure out some way around the problem.”

Mieda was their chief digger, a man of many unusual talents. He’d walked into Yala-tene a year ago, starving and unable to speak. With patience and many good meals, he’d recovered, though he remained a taciturn, enigmatic figure. He had many skills, but his black skin and tightly curled hair marked him as being from a far different place.

Amero had been thrilled to meet Mieda, remembering the glimpse he’d caught of the two black men the day his family was attacked by the yevi. However, any questions Amero and his fellow villagers had about his origins were doomed to remain unanswered. Mieda would not talk about where he was from or about his past, but he did work hard and well, winning the trust and respect of the plainsmen.

“Speaking of problems, how’s yours?” Duranix asked.

“Oh! My fire!”

Amero ran down the steps to the great hearth in the center of the cave. He used the leg bone of an ox to rake the ashes away from the morning fire. Buried under the ashes were several bronze dragon scales. Amero was trying to find a way to work Duranix’s bronze into forms the villagers could use. Gingerly, with much waving of singed fingers, Amero snatched the blackened metal from the ashes.

Duranix slipped off the platform in one sinuous movement and came to the hearth. He found the notion of formulating tools from his hide peculiarly human. His wide reptilian head hovered over Amero’s shoulder.

“Well?”

Though warped and blackened by heat, the scales had not melted. “Failed again!” Amero cried. “I was sure it would work this time!”

“What did you do differently?”

Amero threw the hot shards of bronze back in the firepit and dusted his sooty hands. “I wrapped the scales in wet river clay. I thought it might hold in the heat and melt the bronze.”

“You laid an ordinary fire?”

Amero ran a hand through his cropped hair. “Yes. I’ve already tried using different kinds of wood in the fire. That had no effect. Are you sure your scales can be melted?”

“So I was told, long ago. It’s not something I’ve given much thought to, you understand,” said Duranix, rapidly losing interest. He flowed under the larger cave opening and reared up, resting his foreclaws on the rim of the hole and stretching his wings slightly. “I’m leaving the valley tonight. I may not be back till dawn.”

Amero yawned, stretching his arms wide. “I was in the diggings all day, breathing dust and smoke from torches. I think I’ll just wash up and go to sleep.”

Long ago, at Amero’s request, the dragon made a rent in the outer wall of the cave. A steady trickle of water from the falls flowed down this crack and filled a deep basin Duranix clawed out of the rock.

Amero stripped off his buckskin shirt and dipped his hands in the cool water.

“Where will you go?” he asked.

“South by east.”

Amero stopped, water dripping from his cupped hands. “You’ve scouted that direction twice in the last five days. What’s out there?”

“I don’t know. Something. I’ve seen large clouds of dust hanging in the air at twilight. I’ve seen swaths cut through the grass by some large, moving formation. The tracks I’ve found are of four-footed creatures.”

Amero dipped his hands in the water again and splashed a double handful on his face. “Yevi?” They’d periodically had to hunt down and destroy small yevi packs, but there’d been no massing of Sthenn’s minions in almost ten years.

Duranix shook his head. Several loose scales fell from his neck, ringing when they hit the stone floor.

“It’s the wrong direction for yevi unless they moved east in large numbers without my detecting them,” the dragon said. “Whatever it is, they don’t want to be seen. They move by night and hide by day. Game animals flee before them but follow after them, if that makes any sense.”

The dragon thrust his head through the cave opening and sniffed the evening air. “Nothing seems amiss, yet something is,” Duranix rumbled. “I’ll find out what. Nothing on the plain can hide from me for long.”

With his back feet gripping the rim, Duranix squeezed his bulky shoulders through the hole and unfurled his wings. A single push of his massive rear legs launched him skyward.

“Be careful!” Amero shouted. It was a silly thing to say to a creature as powerful as a dragon, but Amero meant it. He’d grown extremely fond of Duranix, slowly coming to understand the dragon’s odd sense of humor — and developing a sense of humor himself in the process. He enjoyed their companionship greatly. It still amazed him that he had such a fantastic creature for a friend.

He pulled a fur blanket around his shoulders and sat down on the warm hearthstones. Scratching a piece of scorched bronze with his fingernails, he pondered his problem. He needed more heat if he was ever to melt the bronze. What made one fire hotter than another? Women in the village would sometimes hurry a pot to boiling by blowing the flames with a reed fan. Would such a technique work on metal? Maybe he could get one of the town basket weavers to make him a big fan for the experiment.

Amero lay down on the hearth. Sleep claimed him, but his rest was not peaceful. For the first time in many years he dreamed of the day the yevi had killed his family. In his dream he kept looking back over his shoulder to see Nianki running behind him. Faster! Go faster! She mouthed the words, but no sound came out. Amero raced for the nearest tree. By the time he reached it and looked back again, Nianki had vanished under a seething mass of fanged, gray-furred bodies. He woke calling her name.

Duranix cruised slowly at a great height, buoyed by warm updrafts rising through the cold, high air. Far below, the valleys were deeply shadowed clefts where any number of enemies could hide. The valleys opened onto the plain, which by night resembled a featureless sea of gray grassland. The dragon gazed down, trying to detect movement. Individual creatures would be invisible from this height. Even the heat of their blood wasn’t discernible. It would take a hundred creatures moving in unison to register in Duranix’s vision.

He floated for some time, bearing south and east from home. Far to the south was the homeland of the elves, a region he could safely ignore. They were no danger to him. The elves were too civilized, too powerful to succumb to the influence of Sthenn. The host moving across the eastern plain by night, slowly closing on the mountains, could be an elf band, but he discounted the idea. He’d found signs in the Khar River region that the elves had been fighting a formidable foe there. Daylight investigation revealed half a dozen elven strongholds burned to the ground since the red moon last waned.

Duranix had landed at one such site. The log stockade had still been smoldering when he arrived, but the only bodies he’d found were of slain elves. There had been no clues left behind to identify the marauders. Whoever had attacked the outposts carried away their own dead and scoured the battlefield for lost weapons.

The dragon hadn’t shared this with Amero or the villagers. The settled life of the plainsmen was still precarious. One wrong word and many frightened humans would flee for the imagined safety of dispersal on the open grasslands. Amero had worked long and hard to win the trust of his people. He cared deeply that the village succeed. Duranix was too fond of his friend to allow his great project to fail, so he’d decided to hold his tongue until he had more certain knowledge of the possible danger.

A red glimmer broke the monotonous gray expanse below. It was only a momentary flare, but it caught the dragon’s attention. Wings beating hard, he held his place and watched for a repeat of the telltale light. It did not appear again.

He spiraled down as quietly as possible, slowing his speed by letting his feet dangle. The savanna gained more detail. A strip of silver water running east-west, probably the river the elves called the Thon-Tanjan, appeared on Duranix’s left. The ground was dotted with a few very large, widely spaced trees, burltops and vallenwoods. Scores of men or beasts could hide under a single one of them. He’d have to get closer still to investigate. At least the hilly terrain afforded him a concealed place to land.

The dragon alighted in a narrow draw and shrank to human guise. By the time he climbed the highest of the near hills, the denizens of the night had recovered from his intrusion. Crickets chirped in the grass, and clouds of mosquitoes filled the air.

He ran down the hill toward the spot where he’d seen the crimson gleam. When the pungent smell of burning pine reached him, Duranix flattened himself against the ribbed trunk of a giant burltop. He’d hardly taken up this position when a pair of animals trotted past. Mounted on the animals were riders carrying long spears.

Duranix froze. Grand as he was, as a dragon he was still cousin to the lizard and the snake, and when he wished he could remain perfectly motionless. The riders passed within arm’s length of him. Their shape and smell was unmistakable — two humans riding two horses. Duranix knew elves tamed and rode horses, but he’d never heard of humans doing it until now.

He considered snatching one of the men and forcing him to answer questions, but paused when he heard them conversing in the tongue of the plainsmen.

“… so I said, ‘The best flint is the black kind from Khar land,’ but you know Nebef, he thinks he knows everything, so he says, ‘The yellow flint of the east mountains makes the best points…’”

Interesting, Duranix thought. Whoever they were, they were wide-ranging if they knew both Khar and this eastern plain.

After they’d passed, Duranix stepped out from behind the tree and watched the riders continue down the draw. He was so distracted by his discoveries that he didn’t hear a second pair of riders steal up behind him.

Suddenly, a rough hide net was thrown over his head. Two horsemen, shouting in triumph, tried to sweep by on either side and scoop him into their net. They hadn’t reckoned on snaring a dragon in disguise. Though he looked no bigger than a sturdy man, Duranix weighed as much as full-grown bronze dragon. When the net snapped taut, he merely planted his feet, and the riders were yanked off their horses.

Duranix pulled the net apart as easily as a man can tear a cobweb and stood over the two dazed riders. One was a rangy fellow with yellow hair, a flowing mustache, and a smoothly shaven chin. His companion was a short, dark female, clad in a strange outfit consisting of a buckskin tunic with short lengths of twig sewn on. The twigs had been peeled of their bark and matched to length. The female’s arms and chest were covered in tight horizontal rows of white wooden pegs.

He picked up the woman by the collar and held her off the ground. She shook off the effects of her fall and stared at Duranix.

“Uran! Uran, get up!” she yelled. The yellow-haired man only groaned. The woman yanked a sharply pointed flint dagger from her waist and slashed at Duranix with it.

He caught her wrist with his free hand and squeezed. She screamed and let the knife fall to the ground. Duranix dropped her.

“You broke my arm!” she gasped, collapsing to the ground. “I haven’t broken it yet, but I can,” said Duranix

“Who are you?”

“I’ll ask the questions, though I can’t improve on yours. Who are you?”

The woman glared at him fiercely and wouldn’t respond. He picked up the stone knife and snapped it in two with one hand. His great strength caused her anger to dissolve into shock. To further intimidate her, Duranix allowed his eyes to flash with contained lightning.

“Forgive me, Great Spirit! Forgive us! We thought you were an elf!” the woman said.

“What is your name?” asked the dragon.

“Samtu.”

“And him?”

“Uran. We are of Karada’s band.”

Duranix folded his arms. “And who is Karada?”

“The greatest hunter, the bravest warrior, the keenest tracker, the cleverest — ”

“Yes, yes,” said the dragon, interrupting a no doubt lengthy list of superlatives. “Where is this Karada? I would like to meet him.”

All at once something gripped Duranix’s ankles. There was a sharp tug and he lost his balance and fell backward. This is why four feet are better than two, he thought in disgust.

Samtu yelled, and her companion, Uran, leaped on the fallen Duranix. It was a brave deed, but entirely futile. With only the slightest effort, the disguised dragon hurled Uran aside. The plainsman flew some distance and landed heavily in the grass.

Duranix rose, irritated at being tripped by such a puny creature. He grasped Samtu by the hair and dragged her to her feet.

“I should pluck the head from your shoulders like a ripe cherry,” he said coldly, “but first tell me where I can find this Karada.”

“Spare me, Great Spirit!” she begged. “I’ll take you to the camp! It isn’t easy to find in the dark! Please let me live!”

Duranix released her, embarrassed he’d caused such terror. Humans, with their spears and stone knives, were far too weak to present a serious danger to him. He might as well torment a rabbit.

“Look to your companion,” he said gruffly, gesturing at the fallen man. “He landed hard.”

Samtu went to Uran, who hadn’t moved since landing. She found him wide-eyed and staring, dead of a broken neck. She reported this to Duranix.

“My apologies,” he said.

He was surprised when Samtu shook her head and declared, “It was a fair fight, though not an even one.” She closed the dead man’s eyes and removed the flint knife from his belt. Favoring her injured arm, she managed to heave Uran’s body onto his horse. Samtu tied the reins to her mount’s bridle.

“Come, Great Spirit. I will take you to Karada.”

He expected to find the human chieftain camped beneath a spreading vallenwood, but the truth was more subtle. The plainsmen had cleared a large area of the shoulder-high grass in the midst of the open plain. Nets, supported by poles, were spread across the clearing. The cut grass had been layered on top of the net, which kept the camp from being spotted from above and gave shade to the artificial clearing beneath.

Leading her own and Uran’s horse, Samtu allowed Duranix to precede her into the clearing, which was lit by a few small, smoky fires. That’s what he’d glimpsed from the air, one of these veiled campfires.

Tough-looking warriors leaped to attention when they spied the stranger. Samtu tied the horses and warned her comrades off. As he passed them, Duranix slowly increased the height of his human form, so that he soon overtopped the tallest plainsman by a full span. He hoped his imposing size would forestall any more rash attacks.

Samtu announced, “Tell Karada a mighty spirit wishes to speak with her.”

A runner was dispatched, and all awaited the arrival of the chieftain — the warriors with much muttering and fingering of spears, Duranix with utter calm. They did not have long to wait.

The chieftain entered the clearing alone and on foot. She was a woman, a bit older than twenty-five, rawboned and red-brown from the sun. Aside from her piercing eyes, Karada’s most striking feature were the jagged scars that crisscrossed her throat, left arm, and right leg. She was clad in a knee-length, divided kilt of pigskin, tanned a soft gray. Her torso was covered with a ribbed breastplate of carved twigs, similar to the one Samtu wore, except the twigs were studded with carved teeth taken from various predators. Karada carried an unusual short-handled spear. The shaft was only half the usual length.

“Who are you?” she asked. Her voice was clear and firm, the tone of a woman used to being obeyed.

“My name is Duranix.”

“Samtu says you killed one of my men.”

“An accident. My regrets. I should have been more careful.”

“Uran was a stout fighter,” she said. “How did he die?”

Samtu related how they’d spied Duranix in the dark, apparently skulking on the trail of two of their other riders. She described their failure with the net and Duranix’s amazing strength.

“Are you a spirit?” Karada asked, nonplussed.

“I am a living, flesh-and-blood creature, I assure you, but this shape you see is not my real one. I am a dragon — what you call a stormbird.”

This revelation set off a loud hubbub in the clearing. Plainsmen left their campfires and filled the clearing around Duranix while he spoke, eyeing the body of their fallen comrade. When he announced the truth about himself, there were many loud denunciations.

“Shut up,” Karada said without raising her voice. The crowd fell-silent at once. “That’s a tall tale, stranger. I’m known to be a blunt woman, but I won’t call you a liar. What I want to know is, why are you here?”

“I dwell some distance from here, in the mountains. There are humans there living under my protection, and when I detected your band hiding by day and advancing by night, naturally I wanted to find out whether you were dangerous to my people.”

Karada rested the short spear on her shoulder. “You live with humans?”

“A modest settlement,” Duranix said.

Someone in the crowd said, “Arku-peli!”

The dragon surveyed the faces of Karada’s plainsmen. They were very different from Amero’s villagers, and different from the small family groups who still wandered the western savanna. There was pride in their faces, a sense of their own independence and toughness. Despite Duranix’s words, his appearance, and the corpse of their comrade, they were not intimidated. The dragon found this interesting and disturbing at the same time.

“I see you’ve heard of our village,” Duranix said. “Those who live there call it Yala-tene.”

“It’s said a stormbird lives at Arku-peli, in the cliffs above the lake,” Karada replied. “Are you him?”

“None other.”

She smiled thinly, sitting down on a fallen log. “I saw a stormbird once, many years ago, high in the sky. It was riding the crest of a storm, and I watched it slay half a herd of elk with its fiery breath.”

Her words triggered a memory. Duranix hadn’t hunted elk in years, not since the villagers began supplying him with choice sides of meat. An image surfaced in his mind: a bedraggled and bloody human waif, standing in pouring rain, watching him devour his food on the hoof…

“Are you listening?” Karada was saying.

Duranix pulled himself back to the present. “What?”

“I said, let me see you as you really are.”

He considered the request briefly, then said no.

“Why not?” she asked. “You allow the people of Arku-peli to look upon you, don’t you?”

“They’re used to me. I wouldn’t want to scare your men.”

Duranix’s remarks brought on a shower of boasts and threats from the plainsmen. Karada let them rant.

The dragon ignored their posturing. “What are you doing here, Karada? Are you headed for Yala-tene?” he asked.

“What if we were?”

“You’re welcome, so long as you come in peace.”

She jabbed the butt of her spear into the dirt. “Peace is not our concern just now! Silvanos, lord of the elves, is trying to push us back across the Tanjan. We’re fighting back, as we did in the south. My scouts tell me he’s moving a large war band up the Thon-Thalas on rafts. I intend to meet them. We’ll crush them where they step ashore.”

This declaration stirred fierce cheers from the warriors.

Karada continued, “When we’ve defeated the elves and sent them back to their forest, maybe then we’ll pay a friendly visit to Arku-peli. Does that answer your question, dragon-man?”

“Well enough, Scarred One.” The mutual witticism made them both smile. He touched his right hand to his forehead in salute, allowing a small snap of lightning to pass between his fingertips and head. The plainsmen pressing in on the scene grunted in surprise and drew back.

“I’ll tell the people of Yala-tene you’re only interested in fighting elves. Good luck to you, Karada, and be cautious. Elves are not to be trifled with. They’re a force of nature, like a cloudburst. Their fury can be endured but not turned aside.”

“Keep your advice, dragon. Silvanos is learning we humans are a force as well. We ask only the right to go where we will, to live as we will. If Silvanos would grant us that, there would be no fighting.”

Tired of the belligerent band, Duranix said farewell and departed on foot. Karada’s nomads parted ranks for him, and he strolled away into the night.

*

When the dragon was gone, Karada called, “Pakito, Pa’alu, I want you.”

The two brothers, long members of Karada’s band, pushed their way through the throng and stood before their chief.

Pakito had grown into a huge man, heavily muscled from balding head to bare toes. Pa’alu cut an impressive figure as well, less massive than his brother, but with a formidable width of shoulders and powerful limbs.

“What’s your will, Karada?” asked Pa’alu.

“Follow him,” she said, indicating the departed Duranix. “Find out where he goes, and see if he is what he claims.”

“And if he’s not?” rumbled Pakito.

“If he’s a fool or a liar, let him be. If he’s a scout for Silvanos, bring back his head.”

“Aye, Karada. That we’ll do.” Pakito cracked the joints of his enormous hands for emphasis.

The plainsmen dispersed to their beds. Pa’alu lingered in the clearing until he was alone with Karada.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I still think your plan is wrong,” he said, kneeling beside her. “We can’t face an elf war band on equal terms. Most of our men still use flint-head spears and stone axes. We have horses now, and a few elven blades, but it’s not enough.”

She regarded him coldly. “Is it because you are afraid, Pa’alu?”

“I’ve hunted and fought at your side for nine seasons. What’s at stake is not my life or yours, but the whole band. You know I speak from the heart.”

“When the gray killers destroyed my family, I survived because I fought back,” she said. “I’ve hunted down and slain more of them than I can count. When the ‘Good People’ tried to drive all humans from the southland, I brought the families and single hunters together to fight back. Now we’re five hundred strong. We have horses and can cover ten leagues a day, hunt and fight on the move…” Karada paused, tracing a line in the dirt with her toe. “I know the elves are powerful, Pa’alu. They have metal. Their shamans have spirit-power none of our wise men can match. It’s said they can change the weather, command the winds, talk to beasts of the air, land, and water…” She slammed the butt of her spear on the ground. “So, do we throw down our spears and run away, hoping the great Silvanos doesn’t decide to take the land north of the river away from us?”

She stood up, hair falling loosely into her face. “We will fight, Pa’alu. We will hit them as they try to leave their rafts, and the river will run red with elf blood. Then Silvanos will know we are not rabbits, but plainsmen!”

She stalked away. He followed, catching her arm.

“You’ve been alone too long,” he said in a low voice. “You see only with the eyes of a hunter. Put down your spear, Nianki. Take me as your mate.”

She pried his hand loose. “You take a chance,” she whispered. “I’ve killed men who laid hands on me. Do you remember Neko?”

Pa’alu stepped back. “I meant no disrespect. I love you, Nianki.”

Her expression did not change. “I’ve no time for such things. Pakito is waiting. Go.”

When Pa’alu remained, she gave him a level look and departed. He watched until darkness engulfed her, cursing himself for saying too much and for loving a woman he could not reach. He might as well love the stars in the sky — like Nianki, they could lead you through the darkest night, but they were impossible to touch and gave no warmth. So it was with his chief. Many men had tried to win her or take her, but she’d bested them all. Through it all Pa’alu remained at her side, glad to be a friend and comrade, if nothing else.

Pakito’s bull voice echoed across the clearing, calling him. With a deep sigh Pa’alu shouldered his knapsack and went to join his brother.

Out from under the protective canopy of grass, the sight of the stars mocked his heart. Pa’alu had never thought much about spirits and powers, but faced with an impossible goal, he decided it couldn’t hurt to reach out to them in case there were forces greater than humankind who could intervene on his behalf.

Pa’alu looked up at the sparkling firmament and made a solemn vow. Some day, Nianki would be his. Whatever the cost, he would have her.