It was several more minutes before I could even sit up. Nothing that had happened to me before had ever hurt as bad as this. Compared to this, the bruises from Sergeant Duril’s rocks were a mother’s kisses. I knew there would be blood in my piss; I only hoped there was no serious damage inside me. Dewara was moving unconcernedly about my pond. He picked up a broken piece from my stick and stirred the water thoughtfully, perhaps to disperse the gore frogs.
I had never felt more defeated and humiliated in my life. I hated him passionately and hated my own ineffectualness even more. I stared at the meat in the dirt, wanting it desperately and shamed that I’d even think of taking food from my enemy. After a time, I picked up the jerky. I remembered Sergeant Duril telling me that in a dangerous situation, a man must do all he can to keep his strength up and his mind clear. Then I wondered if I was just making excuses for my weakness. I still feared a trick. I sniffed the jerky, wondering if I’d be able to smell poison. At the smell of it, my stomach lurched with hunger and I felt dizzy. I heard Dewara chuckle. Then he called across to me, “Better eat, soldier’s boy. Or did you learn the lesson too strong?”
“I learned nothing from you,” I snarled, and bit into the meat. It was too tough to rip a bite free. I had to chew it soft and then tear it off. I swallowed it in half-chewed bites that scraped down the inside of my throat. It was too soon gone. Never once had I taken my gaze from Dewara. It grated on me that he seemed to regard me with approval. He made a noise, a clicking of his teeth, and a moment later I heard the thuds of his mount’s hooves. Dedem appeared at the lip of the hollow, and came down in haste. He waded out into the shallow water and began sucking noisily.
Dewara moved toward the other side of the small pond. I watched him kneel. He used his hands to smooth the coating of plantlets away from the water’s surface before he bent his head and drank. I hoped that he would suck up a frog.
Having drunk, he moved back onto drier ground and settled himself for the night, which was now closing around us in earnest. I watched him, seething. His bland assumption that I was no danger to him, his mocking dismissal of how he had mistreated and maimed me, affronted me beyond insult. I choked on the indignity of it. “Why did you follow me?” I burst out at last, and hated that I sounded like a child.
He didn’t even open his eyes. “You had my taldi. And I told you. Kidonas keep their word. I must take you back safely to your mother’s house.”
“I want no help from you,” I hissed.
He leaned up on his elbows and looked at me. “Not even my Keeksha, that you ride? Not even the meat you just ate?” He leaned back, scratched his chest, and made the small sounds of a man settling down for the night. “Eat your pride tomorrow, I think. You have lots. Very filling. Tomorrow we start to make you Kidona.”
“Make me Kidona? I don’t want to be Kidona.”
He laughed briefly. “Of course you do. Every man wants to become the man who has bested him. Every youth with a thread of war in him wishes to be Kidona in his heart. Even those who do not know what Kidona is yearn for it, like a dream still to be dreamed. You wish to be Kidona. I will waken that dream in you. It is what your father wanted me to do, I think, even if he dared not say it.”
“My father wishes me to be an officer and a gentleman in his majesty’s cavalla, follow the ancient traditions of knighthood, and bring honor to my family name as the men of my line have always done, since ever we fought for the kings of Gernia. I am a soldier son of the Burvelle line. I desire only to do my duty to my king and my family.”
“Tomorrow, we will make you Kidona.”
“I will never be Kidona. I know what I am!”
“So do I, soldier’s son. Sleep, now.” He cleared his throat and coughed once. Then he fell silent. His breathing deepened and evened. He slept.
Full of fury, I walked up to him and stood over him for a time. He opened one eye, looked up at me, yawned elaborately, and closed his eyes again. He did not even fear that I’d kill him in his sleep. He used my own honor as a weapon against me. That stung like an insult, even though I never would have stooped to such a dastardly act. I stood over him, aching for him to make some sort of threatening move so that I could fling myself on him and try to throttle the life out of him. To attack a sleeping man who had just bypassed the opportunity to kill me while I sprawled at his feet was beyond dishonorable. Humiliated as I was, I would not and could not do it. I walked away from him.
I made my bed a good distance away from him and huddled in my nest of dry grass, feeling queasy still. I thought my anger and hatred would keep me awake, but I fell asleep surprisingly quickly. At fifteen, the body demands rest regardless of how sore the heart may be. Somehow I had completely forgotten my plans to ride in the darkness, letting the stars guide me home. Years later, I would begin to comprehend how neatly Dewara had put me under his control again. I would comprehend, and see how it was done to me, but I would never understand it.
The next morning, Dewara greeted the new day with enthusiasm and extended his good wishes and warm fellowship to me. He behaved as if all differences between us were settled. I was mystified. I ached still, and a private inspection of my chest and belly showed me the deep bruise I bore. My slit ear still burned from my morning ablutions. I itched to carry on my feud with the man; I almost hoped he would somehow abuse or challenge me so that I could fight him. But he was suddenly all good-natured jests and companionable conversation. When I reacted to his friendly overtures with suspicion, he praised me for my caution. When I maintained a surly silence, he praised my warrior’s quiet demeanor. No matter what I did to express my defiance of him, he found something in it to compliment. When I sat absolutely still, refusing to respond to him in any way, he commended my self-control, and said it was the wise warrior who conserved his energy until he understood his situation.
In every imaginable way, he was a different man from the one he had been the day before. I vacillated between being stunned by the change in his demeanor and being certain that his apparent sincerity was a mask for his contempt of me. His friendly behavior made my hostility seem childish, even to myself. His affability made it difficult for me to maintain my antagonism toward him, especially as he endeavored to include me in every one of his activities, beckoning me repeatedly to come closer while he explained his actions in detail. Nothing in my life experience had prepared me for something like this. I wondered if he was mad, and then wondered if I was.
A confused boy is easy to manipulate.
That morning, he offered me meat without my asking, and showed me how he used the water plants as a filter when he filled his long tubular water skins. I think they were made of gut. He also caught several of the gore frogs, taking great care not to touch them with his bare hands. He carried them away from the sike to a large flat rock and marooned them there. The little red creatures swiftly baked flat and brown in the hot sun of the day. He made a packet from the tough flat leaves of a swort bush and carefully stored the dried frogs in one of the inner pockets of his loose robe. I was beginning to realize that although I had believed we had both ridden away from his camp empty-handed, Dewara had actually been very well supplied for our sojourn. He had with him all we both needed to survive. To get it from him, he would force me to admit my dependency on him.
He was so cheerful and affable with me, it was bewildering for me to sustain my wariness, but I managed. He suddenly stepped into the role of instructor, as if he had finally decided he would teach me the things my father had wanted me to learn. When we mounted up that first morning by the pond, I thought we would go straight back to his camp on my father’s lands near the river. Instead, he led and I followed. We stopped at midday, and he gave me a small sling, showed me the Kidona style of using it, and told me to practice with it. Then we left our taldi and moved into the scrub brush along the edge of a ravine. He stunned the first prairie grouse we flushed and I raced up to wring its neck before it recovered. His second one, he broke the wing, and the bird led me a merry chase before I caught it. I could not hit a bird for the life of me until the late afternoon, when I actually killed one with my stone.
That night, we had fire and cooked meat and shared his water skin as if we were companions. I said little to him, but he had become suddenly garrulous. He told me a number of battle tales from his days as a warrior, back in the time when the Kidona raided their fellow Plainsmen. They were full of blood and rape and pillaging, and he laughed aloud as he joyously recalled those “victories.” From those tales, he went on to “sky legends” about the constellations. Most of his hero tales seemed to involve deceit, theft, or wife stealing. I perceived that a successful thief was admired among the Kidona, while a clumsy one often paid with his life. It seemed an odd morality to me. I fell asleep as he told a story about seven lovely sisters and the trickster who seduced them in succession and had a child with each one of them while marrying none of them.
His people had no writing, yet they kept their history in their oral accounts. I was to hear many of them in
