Forest Mage

SEVEN

Dewara

I knew when my father decided to inform everyone of my utter failure. When I descended the stairs the next morning and went to the kitchen for a quick bite of food, the servants already knew of my disgrace. Previously they had treated me with a puzzled deference. I was a son of the household, and if I chose to eat in the kitchen instead of with my family, it was my own business. Now I sensed my diminished status, as if they had been given permission to disdain me. I felt like a stray dog that had crept in and was hoping to snare a few bites of stolen food. No one offered to serve my meal to me; I was reduced to helping myself to whatever was there and ready, and all the while, stepping back and out of the way of servants who suddenly found me invisible.

The gossip of the servants revealed that my brother and his new bride would be returning that evening. There would be a welcoming dinner tonight, and perhaps guests on the morrow. No one had bothered to tell me any of this. The exclusion from the family news was as sharp as a knife cut.

I left the house as soon as I could, taking a fishing pole from the shed, and going down to the river. I baited for the big river carp, some the size of a hog, and each time I caught one, I battled it to the river’s edge and then cut it free. I wasn’t after fish that day, but after something I could physically challenge and defeat. After a time, even that ceased to occupy me. The heat of the sun beat down on me and I started to get hungry. I went back to my father’s manor.

I tried to go in quietly. I’m sure my father was laying in wait for me. The moment I was through the entry, he appeared in the door of his study. ‘Nevare. A word with you,’ he said sternly.

I knew he expected me to follow him into the study. My Speck obstinacy surfaced. I stood where I was. ‘Yes, Father. What do you want of me?’

He tightened his lips and anger flared in his eyes ‘Very well, Nevare. It can as well be said here. Your mother shared with me the wild tale you told her.’ He shook his head. ‘Was that the best excuse you could manufacture? Mocking our god because you ruined your future? Now that you have destroyed all your prospects and cannot return to the Academy, you think that we must support you for the rest of your days. I warn you, I will not shelter and feed a lazy leech. In the doctor’s opinion, you are incapable of soldiering for the King in your present condition. But I intend to change your condition, while wringing some worthwhile work out of you, and eventually I intend to send you off to enlist as a foot soldier. You will never be an officer, but I will not support you in thwarting the good god’s plan for you.’

I held up my hand, palm towards him. I met his gaze in a forthright manner. ‘Simply tell me what tasks you want me to do. Spare me a lecture I’ve already heard from you.’

His surprise lasted only for a moment. Then he gave me his list of dirty tasks. All involved heavy labour and most had something to do with dirt, excrement or blood. A manor is like a farm, and tasks of those sort abounded, but always before, he had assigned them to hirelings. Now he chose them for me, and I was well aware it wasn’t because he thought I could do them well but because he found them distasteful and therefore assumed that I would. I lost most of the remaining respect I had for him, then. All the education he had poured into me, and in a fit of pique, he would waste it. I did not let my thoughts show. I nodded to him gravely and promised to begin my work. It involved a shovel and a lot of manure and a farm wagon. Actually, it was fine with me, and in accord with what Sergeant Duril had suggested, that was how I spent my afternoon. When I judged I’d put in a fair day’s work, I left my task and walked down to a shoal water of the river. Thick brush guarded the riverbank, but there was a deer trail through it. The slower water in the shallows was sun warmed. I stripped and waded out and washed away the sweat and grime of my work. I’d often swum here as a boy, but now it felt strange to stand naked under the sun, even in such an isolated place. I was ashamed of my body and afraid I’d be seen, I realized. The increased weight I carried brought more problems than simply ill-fitting clothes. My feet ached just from carrying my weight. I sweated more and smelled stronger after a day’s labour. My clothing often chafed me. Nevertheless, after I’d sloshed water over myself, it was restful to lie in the shallows and feel the contrast between the warm sun on my skin and the cooler water flowing past me. When I finally came out, I sat on a large rock and let the sun dry me before dressing again. I’d regained a small measure of peace.

I stole an evening meal from the kitchen, much to the annoyance of the cooking staff. They were overtaxed that night, serving an elaborate meal to my family and the new daughter of the house. I wondered how my father would react if I walked into the room in my rough, ill-fitting clothes and took a seat at the table. There was probably no place set for me there. I ate a modest meal sitting in a corner of the kitchen, and left.

That became the pattern of my days. I arose, chose a task from my father’s list, and worked all day at it. He intended such work to humiliate me but I found it strangely satisfying. By my labour, I would either prove to my father that my fat was a magical result of the plague, or I would regain my former condition and perhaps be able to reclaim my place at the Academy. I pushed myself each day, deliberately striving to tax my body even beyond the chores my father had given me. When frustration or humiliation gnawed at me, I shoved them resolutely aside. This, I told myself, was exactly what I needed to be doing. I ate frugally and worked my body steadily. And it responded, though not as I had hoped. Beneath the fat, my arms and legs bulked with new muscle. I gained stamina. I could lift more weight than I’d ever been able to lift in my life.

It was not easy. My heavy body was unwieldy for a man accustomed to being lithe and limber. I had to plan how I moved, and likewise plan my tasks. Strange to say, that too was satisfying. I applied what I’d learned in my engineering. When my father set me to building a stone wall to enclose a hog sty, I went at it as if I were establishing a fortification, laying it out to grade, levelling the first run of stone, making it wide at the base and less so at the top. I would have felt more satisfaction if it had won approval from anyone besides myself and the croaker bird that watched me all day. My father seldom bothered to view what I accomplished every day. He had written me off as a bad investment, like the peach trees that had gone to leaf curl and insects. Rosse made no effort to see me, and I responded in kind. I became invisible to my family. I still gave my mother ‘good day’ if I saw her in passing. I did not bother speaking to my sisters and they were likewise silent to me. I resolved that it did not bother me.

A simple life of arising, working and going to bed held its own sort of peace. The physical labour of each day was not nearly as demanding as my studies at the Academy. I wondered if other men lived this way, rising, working, eating and sleeping with barely a thought beyond doing the same thing the next day. I’ll confess that I felt a strange attraction to such a simple life.

When a week had passed by, and I’d heard nothing from Sergeant Duril, I sought him out one afternoon. When he opened his door to my knock, the first words he said were, ‘You didn’t tell me you’d been kicked out of the Academy for being fat!’ I couldn’t tell if he was outraged on my behalf or angry with me for holding back information.

I spoke evenly, without anger. ‘That’s because it isn’t true.’

He stared at me, waiting.

‘Dr Amicas gave me a medical discharge from the Academy. I wasn’t kicked out. He felt I couldn’t serve as a cavalla officer as I am. If I manage to regain my old shape, I’ll be able to continue my studies.’ I wasn’t sure of that, but I had to hold on to the hope or sink into despair.

Duril stood back from his door and motioned me in. His apartments were stuffy after the sunny day, even with the door left ajar. I took a seat at his table.

Slowly he sat down across from me and admitted, ‘I took a lot of pride in your being at the Academy. It meant a lot to me to think of you being there and being one of them, and knowing just as much as any of them fancy city boys, thanks to what I’d taught you.’

That took me by surprise. I’d never paused to consider that my success might mean a personal triumph to Sergeant Duril. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said quietly. ‘I was doing well until this befell me. And once I’ve straightened it out and returned to the Academy, I’ll do you proud. I promise.’

As if his first admission had opened a door, he suddenly added, ‘You never wrote to me. I had sort of hoped for a letter from you.’

That surprised me even more. ‘I thought you couldn’t read!’ I said, and then flinched to how blunt my words were.

‘I could have had someone read it to me,’ he retorted testily. After a pause he added, ‘I sent you a letter. When I heard you’d been sick and nearly died.’

‘I know. It reached me right before I came home. Thank you.’

‘You’re welcome,’ he said stiffly. He looked aside from me as he added, ‘I’m not an educated man, Nevare. I’m not even, as you well know, a proper soldier son, born to the career. What I know about soldiering, I taught myself or learned the hard way. And I did my best to pass it on to you. I wanted you to be an officer that, well, understood what it was to really be a soldier. Not the kind of man who sits in his tent and orders men to go out and do what he couldn’t or wouldn’t do himself. Someone who knew what it was like to have to go a couple of days with no water for yourself or your horse, someone who knew about the salt and sweat of soldiering for himself. So you could be a good officer.’

And here was another man I’d failed. My heart sank but I tried not to let it show. ‘You didn’t waste your time, Sergeant Duril. I’ve no intention of giving up my career. Even if I have to enlist as a common soldier and rise as a ranker, I’m determined to do it.’ As I said those words, I was a bit surprised to find how deeply I meant them.

He cocked his head at me. ‘Well. I guess I can’t ask more of you than that, Nevare.’ He smiled suddenly, pleased with himself. ‘And I think you can’t ask more of me than what I have for you. Fancy an evening ride?’

‘I’m not averse to it,’ I replied. ‘Where are we going?’

His smile broadened. ‘You’ll see.’ He went back into his apartments, and then emerged with a fat set of saddlebags slung over his shoulder. I wanted to ask what was in them, but I knew he was enjoying making his revelations as we went along. I held my tongue.

It had been some days since I’d ridden Sirlofty. Ever a willing mount, he reached for the bit, eager to go. Duril had the use of a clay-coloured gelding. As we stood together in the paddock, saddling our mounts, we both glanced at one another. Then, as one, we made the ‘keep fast’ sign over the cinches. I feared it would soon be an empty ritual, with no more true power than the acorns that some troopers carried for luck in finding shade at the day’s end. We mounted, he took the lead and I followed.

We struck the river road, and travelled east for a short way before Duril turned his horse away from the river to follow a dusty, rutted trail. We topped a small rise, and in the distance I saw the Bejawi village. An upthrust of stone granted it some respite from the endless sweep of the prairie winds. Brush grew in the shelter of the stone barrier, and even a few trees. My father had chosen the location for it and laid out the original village for them. My father’s men had built the dozen houses that stood in two neat rows. At least twice that number of traditional Bejawi tents surrounded the houses. ‘Is that where we’re going? The Bejawi village?’

Duril gave a nod, silently watching me.

‘Why?’

‘Talk to some Kidona there.’

‘In the Bejawi village? What are they doing there? Kidona and Bejawi are traditional enemies. And the Kidona don’t have villages. The only reason the Bejawi live here is that my father built it for them and they had nowhere else to go.’

‘And wasn’t that a rousing success?’ Duril asked with quiet sarcasm.

I knew what he meant but was still a bit shocked to hear him say something even mildly negative about my father.

In the era before the Gernian expansion the plainspeople had been nomads. Different tribes followed different livelihoods. Some herded sheep or goats. Others followed the migrations of the herd deer that roamed the plains and plateaus, supplementing that meat with the gardens they planted in one season and harvested in another. Some of them built temporary mud huts along the river, little caring that they did not last long. The plainspeople had few towns or what we Gernians would recognize as one. They built a few monuments, such as the Dancing Spindle. They kept rendezvous points where they came together each year to trade and negotiate marriages and truces, but for the most part they wandered. To a Gernian eye, it meant that the plains remained an empty place, unclaimed and scarcely used by the migratory folk that criss-crossed it in patterns that were generations old. Such land was ripe for settling, awaiting development of its full potential. The plainsmen, I suspected, saw it differently.

Our ‘tame’ Bejawi, as my father referred to them, were an experiment that had largely failed. He went into it with good intentions. When he set out to save them, the Bejawi had been reduced to mostly women, children and old men. The Bejawi had been herders; killing their herds and a generation of their men had been the fastest way to subdue them. Deprived of their livelihood, the Bejawi were reduced to being thieves and beggars. My father took them in. Not all of them were willing to surrender their old ways in exchange for what he offered. My father bribed them with his promise that he would not let them starve. He had a village built for them, two rows of simple sturdy cottages. He gave them two teams of oxen, a plough and seed for a crop.

Within two weeks, they had eaten the oxen and most of the seed grain. He then gave them goats, with far better success. Perhaps the goats reminded them of the woolly antelope they had once tended. Those creatures were extinct now, slaughtered during our running battles with the Bejawi. The boys took the goats to pasture each day and brought them back. The animals yielded meat, hides, and milk. When last I had discussed them with my father, he admitted that he still had to supplement their food supplies, but that some of the women were learning to make a cheese that he hoped they would be able to market. But in other areas, his success was more tarnished. A people who had no traditions of living in a settled village, they were used to moving on when a piece of land became tired of them.

The ‘village’ stank. The smell of it hung on the still summer air. The tidy little cottages my father had erected with such pride were now derelict shacks. The Bejawi had no concept of how to maintain them. After several seasons of hard use had ruined the cottages, they had returned to their tents, and set up a secondary settlement around the row of cottages. Offal and garbage, a problem that nomads left behind for the elements and scavengers to deal with, were heaped between the mouldering cottages or piled into noxious waste pits. The children played in the rubbish-strewn street, tangle-haired moppets with scabby faces and dirty hands. Few of the young men stayed once they became adults. Too many of the girls went to Franner’s Bend to work as whores as soon as they were developed enough to pass themselves off as women. They returned to the village with their half-blood offspring when their brief blossoming of beauty had been eroded by the hard life of a post whore. The village my father had built never developed beyond houses to live in. There was no store, no school, nothing that offered the people anything beyond eating and sleeping indoors. It was a place where people waited, but did not know what they were waiting for.

Yet the Bejawi were not a foolish people, nor were they stupid. They were not even a dirty people, when they followed their own ways. They had been dealt a hard blow by fate, and had not, as yet, discovered how to recover. I wondered if they ever would, or if they would vanish, leaving only a legend of what they had once been. Once they had been a proud folk, renowned for their beauty and handiwork.

I had read accounts of them, written by Darsio, a merchant trader who had bartered with the plainspeople in the old days before the Gernian expansion. His writing always made me wish I had been alive then. The descriptions of the Bejawi men in their flowing white robes mounted on their swift horses leading their people, while the women, the children and the elderly followed, some shepherding the animals and others on the sand sleds pulled by their sturdier draught animals, were the stuff of epic poetry. The women manufactured beads from a certain petrified tree stone, and this jewellery had been the trade good that Darsio had sought from them. They made delicate ornaments from bird bone and feather, charmed to bring good luck to the owner. Every woman of marriageable age wore a veritable cloak of beads and ornaments and bells. Some of the cloaks, Darsio wrote, were passed down for generations. The children, he wrote, were exceptionally beautiful, open-faced and bold, easily laughing, the treasure of their people. The Bejawi flocks were a peculiar heavybodied antelope, prized for the thick undercoat they grew for the winter and shed in spring. This lightweight, warm wool was the basic of Bejawi textiles at the time of Darsio’s writings. The first time I had visited the Bejawi village with my father, that romantic image was what I had expected to see. I had come away disappointed and oddly shamed. I had no wish to visit the village again, but my curiosity was piqued by Sergeant Duril’s assertion that Kidona were there. I knew the Bejawi hated the Kidona with a loathing that went back generations.

Every creature has a predator that preys on it. The Bejawi had the Kidona. The Kidona did not herd nor harvest nor hunt. They raided. They had always been raiders, descending on trading caravans or summer villages, or they stole, creeping up on herds, flocks and tents to take whatever they needed. By their tradition, it was their right to do so. They travelled constantly on their pot-bellied striped-legged taldi, creatures that had little of a horse’s beauty, but even less of a horse’s weaknesses.

Dewara had been Kidona. I touched the double ridges on my ear, the healed scars from the notches he’d cut there when I’d disobeyed him. The man had starved and brutalized me, and then, in a turnabout that still baffled me, he had befriended me and attempted to induct me into his people’s culture and religion. He’d drugged me into a shamanic trance, and in that trance I had first encountered Tree Woman. That spirit journey had changed my life and warped my concept of reality. All of it had been my father’s doing. He hadn’t really wanted me to be Dewara’s student so much as he’d hoped Dewara’s harsh treatment of me would finally force me to make my own decisions and stand on my own two feet.

Well, I supposed it had, but not in the way my father had hoped, nor in any way that had brought me confidence or satisfaction in my life.

I had come to a deep understanding of Kidona ways before Dewara and I had parted. Theirs was a strange morality, in which the clever thief was held in high esteem, and the clumsy one could claim no protection from anyone’s vengeance. Dewara paid great respect to any man who could beat him, and disdained any fellow he could dominate. Prosperity was the equivalent of the blessing of his strange gods, and thus the opinion of a wealthy man was not to be disputed, while a poor man, no matter how experienced or kindly, was seen as a fool, unloved by the gods. Despite their skewed beliefs, or perhaps because of them, the Kidona were a tough, resourceful and savagely efficient people. Even though Dewara had damaged my life, I grudgingly admired him, in the same way that one might admire any exceptionally competent predator, without any element of fondness or trust.

Sergeant Duril hadn’t answered my most important question. I asked it again. ‘Why are Kidona in the Bejawi village?’

Sergeant Duril cleared his throat. ‘I suppose your father didn’t write to you about it. It was an ugly incident, while you were away at school. Not too long after you’d left, farms around here began to lose stock. At first, we thought it was wolves returning to this territory. Then someone pointed out that wolves leave carcasses, and we hadn’t found any. The Bejawi were blamed at first, because of some trouble a while back, but there was no sign of them having more meat than they should.

‘Well, when the dust settled, it turned out that Kidona were up to their old tricks. A band of them camping mostly out of sight of settled places had been raiding flocks and herds and gardens. They got bold and took a dozen yearlings from a herd that belonged to the garrison at Franner’s Bend. The commander there didn’t take kindly to it and sent some of the fellows out to track down the raiders and teach them a lesson.’ Sergeant Duril’s tone was light but his face was grim. ‘The soldiers at Franner’s Bend … well, you know how it is; you’ve seen the place. Those troopers never see any real action. It’s a soft post. And in a way that makes the recruits antsy for it, and when they do have a reason to crack down on something, they get carried away, as if they have to prove they’re as tough as real soldiers out on the border. Well, they got carried away with the Kidona raiding party they tracked down. Killed them all, and that was just about every male that wasn’t still sucking on a titty. Well, that stirred up trouble with the other Kidona groups that were in the area. Especially when it come out that the group our troopers had slaughtered hadn’t stolen the cows themselves. They’d traded for them with the thieves. So, we had troopers slaughtering “innocent” Kidonas, and the other Kidona in the area on the verge of an uprising.’

‘Why didn’t they just buy them off? The Kidona feel no shame about taking blood money.’

He nodded. ‘That’s what we did. But that left the women and tykes from the dead raiders to provide for. You know the Kidona. Practical and hard as stone. The survivors had nothing left in the way of resources. No taldi, no sheep, tents burned. The other groups of Kidona saw them as a liability. They didn’t want to take them in, but they didn’t want to see them starve, either. So this was the compromise. Your father said the Franner’s Bend commander could settle them here, as long as he supplied shelters, food and a pair of taldi for them to get started with again.’ He shook his head. ‘Putting Kidona in a village. That’s like putting your foot in a hat.’

I could easily distinguish the cottages and tents of the Bejawi from the shelters of the Kidona newcomers. There was not one village but two, forced into proximity. A line had literally been drawn, a row of stones and trash set as a boundary between the Bejawi area and the four military tents given to the Kidona survivors. As we approached, a Bejawi youth came to his feet. He appeared to be about fourteen and wore what looked like a dirty nightshirt and a drooping hat felted from goat hair. His pale eyes fixed on us accusingly as we approached. He leaned on a stave, watching us silently, no sign of welcome on his face. When Duril reined his horse towards the Kidona area, the young man sat back down and pointedly ignored us.

‘Have they always kept a sentry like that?’ I asked Duril.

‘Doubt it. I think he’s there to keep an eye on the Kidona, not us. But I could be wrong. I don’t come here unless I have to. It’s depressing.’

It was. We rode past the wall of garbage that fenced the Kidona from the Bejawi settlement. The insult was obvious. Equally obvious was the misery of the Kidona tent village. The thin wailing of children was as pervasive as the ripe smell of the rubbish. The tents were pitched with a military precision; so the troopers had at least set up the shelters for the widows and orphans. There were two cook fires, one burning and one a nest of banked coals. Sticks had been wedged against boulders to form a sort of drying rack, and two blankets festooned the ramshackle invention. About ten women, all middle-aged, sat on makeshift benches in front of the tent. One sat and rocked from side to side, droning a song under her breath. Three of them were employed in tearing old rags into long strips that one of them was braiding. I surmised they were making rag rugs to soften the tent floor. The others sat, empty-handed and still. Several taldi, one a pregnant mare, grazed on whatever they could find at the edge of the campsite.

A scatter of children idled in the area around the cook fires. Two were toddlers who sat bawling near a granny’s feet. She did not appear to be paying any attention to their cries. Three girls of seven or eight years of age were playing a game with pebbles and lines drawn in the dirt. Their faces were dirty, and their braids looked like fuzzy blonde ropes. A single boy of thirteen sat by himself and glared at us as we approached. I wondered how he had survived and what would become of him in this settlement of old women and children.

When we dismounted, all activity ceased. Duril took his saddlebags from his horse’s back and slung them over his shoulder. ‘Follow me and be quiet,’ Sergeant Duril instructed me. ‘Don’t look at anyone.’ I did as he told me. They stared at my body and a slow flush crept up my cheeks, but I didn’t make eye contact with any of them. Duril walked up to the granny and her howling charges. He spoke Jindobe, the trade language of the plains. ‘I bring you fat meat.’ He lowered the saddlebags to the ground and opened them. He took out a side of bacon wrapped in cheesecloth and offered it to her. Her mouth twitched, carrying her chin with it. Then she lifted her old blue eyes to his and said, ‘I have nothing to cut it with.’

He didn’t hesitate. He unhooked his belt and slid both knife and sheath from it. He offered them to her. She stared long at the proffered gift, as if weighing what she lost by taking it against what she gained. The boy had drawn closer and was watching the exchange intently. He said something in rapid Kidona. In response, she made a quick flipping gesture with her hand, as if throwing something aside. His face set in an expression of anger, but he made not a sound as she took the knife and sheath from the sergeant. Turning, she handed it immediately to the woman next to her. ‘Cut meat to cook for the children,’ she said. Then she stood up, grunting with the effort. She stepped over the small children who had never ceased their wailing, turned and went into the tent behind her. We followed.

It was a grey canvas barracks tent, long and wide, with side walls. It was dim and stuffy inside the tent. To one side, there was a row of army blankets arranged as pallets. On the other side, there were several casks of hardtack, a tub of dried corn and a wooden crate of withered and sprouted potatoes. Neatly arranged beside these donations were the remnants of their former lives. Tin and copper cooking pots were stacked beside a row of baked clay jars and plates next to folded bedding with the characteristic Kidona stripes.

They had cut a flap in the sidewall of the tent. She unpegged the sewn strips that had fastened it shut, and sat down beside the small rectangle of light and fresh air it admitted. After a moment, Sergeant Duril sat down facing her and I took my place beside him. ‘Did you bring it?’ she asked him.

I thought the bacon had been his bribe, but evidently that had only been for show. He reached into his shirt and took out his wallet. He opened it, and removed something I recognized from my childhood. I’d only seen it once before but it was not a thing to forget. He held out the darkened and shrivelled ear on his palm. Without hesitation, she took it.

She held it to the light, and then brought it close to her eyes, examining it closely. I was surprised when she sniffed it, but tried not to show my disgust. I knew the tale. In a moment of youthful rage, Sergeant Duril had taken the ear as a trophy from the body of a warrior he’d killed. In the same fracas, he’d gained the scar that had severed part of his own ear. He’d once told me that he was ashamed of cutting off the dead warrior’s ear, and would have undone the deed if he could. But he couldn’t return it to the body for decent burial, and he’d felt it would be wrong to discard it. Perhaps he’d finally found a way to be rid of it. She held it in her hand, looking down at it with a contemplative air. Then she nodded decisively. She rose and went to the tent door. She shouted something, a name I guessed, and when the boy came, she spoke to him rapidly. He argued back, and she slapped him. That seemed to settle his disagreement. He looked past her at us.

‘I’ll take you now,’ he said in Jindobe. And that was all he said.

By the time we were mounted, he was on the taldi stallion and riding out of the camp. We had to hurry the horses to catch up with him. He didn’t look back to see if we followed him, and never spoke another word to us. Instead he rode inland, away from the camp and towards the broken lands where the plains gave way to the plateaus. He kneed his taldi into a gallop. If he followed a trail or path, I could not see it, but he never hesitated as he led us on. As the shadows grew longer, I began to question the wisdom of what we were doing. ‘Where are we going?’ I finally asked Sergeant Duril.

‘To see Dewara,’ he said curtly.

It hit me like one of Duril’s ambush rocks when I was a boy. ‘We can’t be. My father did everything he could to find Dewara after he dragged me home. There was no sign of him, and the Kidona said they didn’t know where he went or what became of him.’

Sergeant Duril shrugged. ‘They lied. Back then, Dewara was something of a hero for what he’d done to your father’s son. But petty glory is faded, and Dewara has fallen on hard times. That woman back there believed me when I said I’d give her brother’s ear back to her if she’d give us Dewara.’

I rode for a time in shocked silence. Then, ‘How did you know it was her brother’s ear?’

‘I don’t. But it could have been. I left it up to her to decide.’

We followed the boy into a narrow, steep-sided canyon. It was a perfect site for an ambush, and I rode with a chill spot on my back. The boy’s taldi still had a good lead on us. He started up a narrow path across a rock face and I had to rein Sirlofty back to follow Duril’s horse up the treacherous way. I was becoming more and more dubious of our mission. If the boy was leading us to another Kidona encampment, I didn’t like the odds. But Sergeant Duril appeared calm, if watchful. I tried to emulate him.

There was another switchback in the trail, very tight for our horses, and then the ground suddenly levelled out. We had reached a long, narrow ledge that jutted out from the rock face. As soon as Duril and I were out of the way, the boy turned his taldi and silently started back down the path. Before us was a patched tent set up with a neat stack of firewood beside it. A blackened kettle hung from a tripod over a small smokeless fire. I smelled simmering rabbit. Dewara stood looking at us with no trace of surprise on his face. He had seen us coming. No one could approach this aerie without his being aware of it.

He was a changed man from the tough warrior I’d known. His clothing was worn and rumpled: dust stood in the ridges of the fabric. His dingy long-sleeved robe reached just past his hips and was belted with a plain strip of leather. The brown trousers he wore beneath it were faded to white at the knees and frayed at the cuffs. His swanneck hung at his hip, but the hair sheath looked dirty and frayed. The man himself had aged and not well. Four years had passed since I had last seen him, but to look at him, it had been twenty. His grey eyes, once so keen, had begun to cloud with cataract. He had a stoop in his back. He had allowed his hair to grow, and it hung in a thin yellowish white fringe to his shoulders. He licked his lips, giving us a brief glimpse of his filed teeth. No fear showed in his face as he greeted me. ‘Well. Soldier’s son. You come back to me. You want a new notch in your ear, maybe?’ His bravado did not fool me. Even his voice had aged, and the bitterness in it surprised me.

Sergeant Duril had not dismounted and he did not speak. I sensed he deferred to me, but I didn’t know what to say or do. The old Kidona warrior looked shrivelled and small. I remembered belatedly that when I first met him, he had been shorter than I, and I had grown since then. But that was my ‘real life’ memory of him. In the far more vivid dream memory, he had been much taller than I, and had the head of a hawk and feathered arms. I struggled to reconcile those memories with the withered man who stood squinting up at me. I think that puzzle kept me from feeling any one emotion clearly.

I dismounted and walked up to him. Behind me, I heard Sergeant Duril do the same. He stood behind my shoulder when I halted, allowing me this battle.

Dewara had to look up at me. Good. I stared down at him and spoke sternly. ‘I want to know what you did to me, Dewara. Tell me now, without riddles or mockery. What happened to me that night when you said you would make me Kidona?’ My Jindobe had come back to me without hesitation. I felt as if I had leap-frogged back through the years to confront the man that had abused, befriended and then nearly killed me.

He grinned, his pointed teeth shiny with saliva. ‘Oh, look at you, fat man. So brave now. So big. Still knowing nothing. Still wishing you were Kidona. Eh?’

I towered over him, dwarfing him in girth as well as height. Still he did not fear me. I summoned all my disdain. ‘If you are Kidona, then I do not wish to be Kidona.’ I drew on all my knowledge of his people to make my insults sting. ‘Look at you. You are poor! I see no women here, no taldi, no smoke rack of meat. The gods despise you.’

I saw my words hit him like flung stones. Shame tried to stir in me, that I would attack someone in his situation, but I held it down. He was not beaten. If I wanted to wring answers from him, I must first dominate him. From some depth of courage in his soul, he summoned a grin and retorted, ‘Yet I am still Kidona. And you, you are still her plaything. Look at you, all swollen up with her magic like a sore toe full of pus. The fat old woman claimed you, and made you her puppet.’

His words jabbed me and I retorted without thinking, ‘Her puppet? Her plaything? I think not. I did what you could not do. I crossed the bridge, and with the iron magic of my people, I laid her belly open. I defeated her, old man. What you could not do, even using me as your tool, I did alone.’ I struck a pose I remembered from our days together. I threw out my chest and lifted my head high, the same posture he had held whenever he wished to express how far above me he was. ‘I have always been stronger than you, Dewara. Even when I lay unconscious before you, you still dared not kill me.’

I watched him, trying to gauge his weakness in this battle of exchanged brags. To the west of us, the sun was dying in a welter of reds and purples. It was hard to read his features in the fading light. Perhaps a shadow of doubt brushed Dewara’s eyes, but he brazened it out. ‘I could have killed you if I wished,’ he said disdainfully. ‘It would have been like crushing a hatchling in the nest. I thought of it. You were useless to me. You claim to have killed her? Well, where is your proof? You brag like a child. When I sent you against her, you fell like a child. I witnessed that! The weakness of your people made you fail, not my Kidona magic. You were not strong of heart; you did not have the will to do what you should have done. If you had not spoken to the guardian, if you had rushed forward and killed her as I commanded, then all of our lives would be better now. But no! You are so wise, Soldier’s Boy, you think you know more than a Kidona warrior. You look, you think, oh, just an old woman, so you talk, talk, talk, and all the while her wormy white roots sink into you. Look at you now, like a fat grub from under a rotting log. You will never be a warrior. And you will ever belong to her. She will puff you up full with her magic, and when you are full, you will do whatever her magic makes you do. Or maybe you have already done it. Has the magic turned you against your own people?’ He laughed triumphantly and pointed a crooked finger at me. ‘Look at you! I didn’t need to kill you. Better to leave you alive. Think. Is there a better revenge on your father? Fat one! You belong to the Dappled People now. You’ll never be a soldier. Your father put iron in me to kill my magic. But I had enough magic left in me to give his son to my other enemy. I had enough magic to make my enemies become the enemies of each other. Long after I am dead, you will fight and kill one another. The corpses you make will pile up at my feet in whatever afterlife I am banished to.’

I cannot describe how his words affected me. I had expected him to profess ignorance of everything I said. I hadn’t wanted him to admit that somehow we had shared that dream, and that he recalled as clearly as I did what the Tree Woman had done to me. He had just confirmed my worst fears. A terrible cold welled up inside me. I crossed my arms on my chest and held myself tightly, afraid I would start shivering. The last walls inside me were breaking; it felt as if cold blood was leaking inside my gut. I gritted my teeth to keep them from chattering. My heart thundered in my chest. Then, out of that turmoil, a terrible black calm emerged in me. I spoke in a soft voice I scarcely recognized.

‘You still lost, Kidona. You lost to her and you lost to me. I went to your Dancing Spindle. I am the one who put the iron in the Spindle’s path. I am the one who destroyed the plains magic. You can no longer draw on its strength. I made you an old man. It is done, Kidona. Done forever. You cling to shreds and threads, but the fabric is gone. And I come here tonight to tell you, I am the one who tore it from your people and left you cold and shivering in the dark. I, Soldier’s Boy of the People. Look at me, Dewara. Look at the end of your magic and your folk.’

There paraded across his face such a progression of emotions that they were almost laughable. He did not comprehend what I said, and then suddenly he did. Disbelief dawned on his face, and then I saw him admit the truth of what I’d told him. I’d killed his magic and the knowledge of that was killing him.

His face turned a terrible colour and he made a strangling noise.

I never even saw him draw his swanneck. Foolish me, I had never thought it would come to blows. Aged he might be, but fury renewed his strength and speed. The curved blade swept through the air towards me, the bronze catching the red of the firelight and the sunset, as if it were already bloodied. I skipped back, feeling the wind of its passage in front of my face. As I drew my own sword, Dewara, his face purpling with effort, leapt forward. All the weight of his hatred was behind the sharpened blade. I had scarcely cleared my own sword of its scabbard before the tip of his swanneck sank into my belly. I felt the sharp bite of it, felt the ripping of my shirt as the fabric gave way to the metal and then, oddly, nothing. I grunted and my sword fell from my hands as I clutched at my gut as he pulled his weapon free of me. I stood there, my hands clutched over my wound, feeling blood seep out through my shirt and between my fingers. Shock stilled me. What a stupid way to die, I thought as he swept his blade back for the strike that would behead me. His lips were pulled back from his pointed teeth and his eyes bulged out of his head. I thought how disgusted my father would be with his soldier son for dying in such an ignominious fashion.

The explosion behind me jolted me with a shock of light and sound. The impact of multiple balls striking Dewara’s chest stopped him in mid lunge. For an instant, he hung suspended, caught between his momentum and the stopping power of the lead. Then he fell like a puppet with his strings cut, his swanneck bouncing free of his nerveless hand as he struck the earth. I knew he was dead before his body even fell to the ground.

There was a moment that seemed to last as long as a whole day. The sulphurous stench of black powder hung in the air. The magnitude of so many things happening at once paralysed me. I stood, clutching my belly, knowing that a gut wound could fester and kill me as surely as being beheaded. I could not comprehend my injury, any more than I could grasp that Dewara sprawled dead at my feet. I’d never seen a man shot to death. Instantaneous death was shocking enough, but Dewara had been more than just a man to me. He’d figured in my most horrendous nightmares. He’d nearly killed me but he had also taught me and shared food and water with me. He had been an important figure in my life, and when he died, a significant part of my experiences died with him. Of all that we had experienced together, I alone remained to recall it. And I might die. My own blood sang in my ears.

As if from the distance, I heard Sergeant Duril say, ‘Well, I didn’t think much of this at first, but now I’m glad I bought it. The shopkeeper called it a pepper-pot. Guess I peppered him, didn’t I?’

He stepped past me to crouch over Dewara’s body. Then he stood up with a grunt and came towards me. ‘He’s dead. Are you all right, Nevare? He didn’t get you, did he?’

Duril still held a small, multiple barrelled gun in his hand. I’d heard of them, but never seen one before. They were only good at short range, but fired several balls at once, making it more likely that even without a chance to aim, you’d hit your target somewhere. My father had spoken of them as a coward’s weapon, something that a high-priced whore or a table gambler might carry concealed in a sleeve. I was surprised that Sergeant Duril would carry such a weapon. Surprised, and very glad.

‘I’m not sure,’ I said. There wasn’t much pain. But I’d heard that the shock of a wound could keep a man from feeling pain at first. I turned away from Duril and staggered a few steps towards the fire, fumbling at the front of my shirt as I went. It seemed a private thing; I wanted to be alone when I discovered how bad it was. I managed to unbutton my shirt and pull it open just as he caught up with me.

‘Good god, help us!’ he muttered, and it was a prayer the way he said it. Before I could stop him, he leaned forward to probe the injury with his fingers. ‘Oh, thank all that’s holy. It’s just a jab, Nevare. You’re hardly hurt at all. A flesh wound. And there was a lot of flesh there to wound, begging your pardon. Oh, thank the good god! What would I have said to your da, before he killed me?’

His knees seemed to give out on him and he sank down to sit beside Dewara’s fire. I turned a bit away from him, strangely embarrassed that I was not hurt more severely. I wiped my bloodied hands on my shirt and then gritted my teeth as I prodded at the cut on my belly. The sergeant was right. It was scarcely bleeding now. I felt humiliated that such a minor injury could have stopped me in my tracks and made me drop my own sword. A fine soldier son I was! The first time I actually faced an enemy in combat, the old man had disarmed me with a minor poke in the gut. The thought of my own proud sword lying in the dust shamed me. I went to retrieve it.

The light was going rapidly. I found my blade by touch, sheathed it, and then stooped to pick up Dewara’s swanneck. For one boyish instant, I thought of keeping it as a trophy. In the next, I felt repulsed by such a vainglorious thought. I hadn’t even killed the man who’d wielded it. I shifted it in the firelight, and watched as it illuminated the gleaming bronze blade. Then I went queasy at what I saw. A full four fingers of the blade’s tip was bloodied. It had gone that deep. With my free hand, I groped at my injury. No. There was almost no pain.

It made no sense.

I carried the swanneck back to the fire where I could look at it more clearly. Sergeant Duril was recovering from his fright at my injury. He stood up as I approached the fire. ‘Leave that!’ he ordered me harshly. ‘Leave everything, just as it is. We need to get down that trail before it gets any darker.’

He walked away from me. I stood alone in the firelight and stared at my blood on the blade. I lied to myself, pretending that perhaps it had run there. I knew it hadn’t. The swanneck had pierced me, had gone right into my gut. And my flesh had simply closed itself when he pulled it free. The blade fell from my hand and landed in the flames. I turned and walked away from it.

I didn’t look at Dewara’s body as I passed. When Duril announced, ‘We’re leading the horses down the trail, at least as far as the switchback,’ I didn’t argue with him. Instead, I followed him just as trustingly as I had always followed him when I was a boy.

I didn’t dwell on what we left behind us. I doubted that either the boy or the old woman would admit to anyone that they had betrayed Dewara’s hiding place. Even if they did, even if we were connected to his death, he had attacked me, and Duril had saved my life. It felt strange to leave him lying where he had fallen, but it would have felt even more wrong to take his body and bury it elsewhere.

Darkness filled the narrow canyon like water fills a bucket. ‘Can you ride?’ Sergeant Duril asked me gruffly.

‘I’ll be fine. It wasn’t much more than a scratch.’ I hesitated, and then asked him, ‘Are you going to report this to my father?’

‘I’m not going to report this to anyone. Neither are you.’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said, relieved to have that decision taken from me so firmly. We mounted our horses and he led the way back towards home.

We rode without speaking through the deeply shadowed canyon. When we emerged onto the plain, we came back out of night into evening. The last light of the setting sun still washed red across the flat lands. Duril stirred his mount to a faster pace and I pushed Sirlofty up alongside him. He didn’t turn to look at me when he spoke.

‘Well. You got what you were after?’

‘I did and I didn’t. Dewara’s dead. I wasn’t after that, not really. But I don’t think he would have let it end any other way, once he knew what I’d done. But I don’t think I solved anything tonight. I’m still fat. According to Dewara, I’m still in Tree Woman’s power.’ I shook my head wildly. ‘And it all sounds like a strange old tale told by a fireside. How can I believe anything so bizarre?’

He didn’t say anything. I kept my eyes straight ahead as I pondered everything that had happened. ‘He knew,’ I said at last. ‘Dewara knew what had happened in my dream. And he couldn’t possibly know that, unless he was there. And to him, it was just as real as our visit today. According to what he believed, the Tree Woman somehow enslaved me with her magic and doomed me to be, to be – this!’ I could scarcely contain my disgust. ‘If I believe him, I’m doomed to be this for the rest of my life, and perhaps worse things will befall me. Maybe I will go on to betray all of Gernia!’

‘Easy, boy. Don’t give yourself too much importance,’ Duril warned me, a sour touch of humour in his voice. It jabbed me.

‘But if I don’t believe him, if I say magic doesn’t exist or has no power over me, well, then, none of it makes sense. Then there’s no reason for me being fat, and that makes it even harder for me to know what I’m going to do about it. How do I manage it, Sergeant? What do I do? Believe Dewara’s truth, and give up because the magic will use me as it wills, or believe in my father’s world, where I don’t know why I got fat and nothing I do seems to change it?’

‘Hold up a minute,’ he suggested. He reined his horse in and I pulled Sirlofty to a halt beside him. He dismounted and tightened his cinch. ‘Came loose coming down that trail,’ he observed. Then he looked up at me, squinting his eyes against the fading sunset. ‘Never used to do that, Nevare. The “keep fast” charm held it tight. And now it doesn’t. That’s proof enough for me. The plains magic is fading. Will you think me a fool if I say I’m sorry to see it go?’

‘I’ll never think you a fool, Sergeant Duril. But are you saying that you believe in magic? You believe I went somewhere with Dewara and that Tree Woman stole part of my soul, and that I took it back and killed her? And you believe that my being fat is not my fault but the magic affecting me?’

Duril mounted his horse again. He didn’t say anything as he kicked him to a trot. I started Sirlofty after him, and in a few moments we were cantering. Before full night fell, we were back on the river road. We went more slowly in the dark and finally he answered me.

‘Nevare, I don’t know how to tell you what to believe. On the Sixday, I worship the good god, same as you. But every time I saddled my horse for the past thirty years, I’ve made the “keep fast” sign over my cinch. I’ve seen a windwizard, and I’ve seen gunpowder send a bullet on its way. I don’t really understand how either one worked. I guess what I believe in is whatever works best for me at that time. I think most men are like that.’

‘What am I going to do, Sergeant?’ I didn’t expect him to have an answer. I was shocked when he did. His voice was grim.

‘We both have to pray to the good god that you can find a way to turn the magic against itself, I suppose.’