the long nights that followed. Sometimes when he told tales, I could hear the echo of the years of repetition in the measured way he spoke. The oldest tales of his people spoke of when they were a settled folk and lived in the skirts of the mountains. The Dappled People had driven them out from their homes and farms, and a curse from the Dapples had made his people wanderers, doomed to live by raids and thefts and blood instead of tending plants and orchards. The way he spoke of the Dapples as immensely powerful sorcerers who lived in ease among their vast riches confused me for several days. Who were these people with patterned skins and magic that could cause a wind of death to blow upon their enemies? When I finally made the connection that he was speaking of the Specks, it was almost like seeing double of a familiar image. The image and opinion I had of the Specks as a primitive woodland tribe of simple-minded people was suddenly overlaid with Dewara’s image of them as a complex and formidable foe. I mentally resolved it by deciding that the Specks had somehow forced the Kidona to retreat from their settled lands and become wanderers and scavengers. Therefore Dewara’s people had endowed them with a tremendous and legendary power to excuse their failure to prevail against the Specks. This “solution” troubled me, for I knew it didn’t quite fit. It was like rough boards nailed over a broken window. The cold winds of another truth still blew through it and chilled me even then.
I never felt any warm glow of friendship or true trust of Dewara, but in the days that followed, he taught and I learned. From Dewara I learned to ride as the Kidona did, to mount one of his taldi by running alongside it, to cling to the mare’s bare smooth back and guide her by tiny thuds of my heels, to slide off my mount, even at a gallop, into a tumbling roll, from which I could either fling myself flat or come easily to my feet. My Jindobe, the trade language of all the Plainspeople, became more fluent.
I had never been a fleshy youth, always rangy and, thanks to my father and Sergeant Duril, well muscled. But in the days I was in Dewara’s care, I became ropy and tough as jerky. We ate only meat or blood. At first, I knew a terrible hunger, and dreamed of bread and sweets and even turnips, but those hungers passed like ill- advised lusts. A sort of euphoria at my reduced need for food replaced them. It was a heady sensation, difficult to describe. After my fifth or sixth day with Dewara, I lost count of the days, and moved into a time where I belonged to him. It was ever after difficult for me to describe the state of mind and body that I entered into, even to the trusted few with whom I discussed my sojourn with the Kidona warrior.
Almost every day we hunted pheasant and hare with slings, and drank blood drawn from our mounts when our hunt failed to produce a meal for us. He shared his water and dried meat with me, but sparingly. We often made camp without water or fire, and I stopped regarding such lacks as a hardship. He told stories every night and I began to have a sense of what passed for wrong and right among his people. To get another man’s wife with child so that another warrior labored to feed your get was a riotously good jest upon that fellow. To steal and not be caught was the mark of a clever man. Thieves who were caught were fools and deserved no man’s mercy or sympathy. If a man had taldi, a wife, and children, then he was wealthy and beloved of the gods, and the others of his tribe should pay heed to his counsel. If a man was poor, or if his taldi or wife or children sickened or died, then he was either stupid or cursed by the gods, and in either case it was a waste of time to hark to him.
Dewara’s world was harsh and unforgiving, bereft of all the gentler virtues. I could never accept his people’s ways, yet in some curious fashion I became more capable of seeing the world as he saw it. By the harsh logic of the Kidona, my people had defeated his and forced them to settle. They resented and hated us for it, and yet by their traditions, we could only do those things because the gods favored us over them. Therefore, our wisdom was to be considered when we spoke. Dewara had been honored when my father sent word that he wished him to be my instructor. That during the course of teaching me he could bully and mistreat me was a great honor to him, one that all his fellow Kidona would envy. Dewara had the son of his enemy at his mercy, and he would have no mercy for me. Freely he rejoiced before me that I would carry a notch in my ear from his swanneck to the end of my days.
He teased me often, telling me that I was not bad, for a Gernian cub, but no Gernian cub would ever grow to be as strong as a Kidona plateau bear. Every day he taunted me with that, not cruelly, but as an uncle might, several times, holding his full acceptance of me always just out of my reach. I thought I had won his regard when he began to teach me how to fight with his swanneck. He grudgingly conceded that I attained some skill with it, but would always add that that evil metal had ruined my “iron-touched” hands, and thus I could never regain the purity of a true warrior.
I challenged him on that. “But I heard you asking my father to trade guns for what you are teaching me. Guns are made of iron.”
He shrugged. “Your father ruined me when he shot me with an iron ball. Then he bound my wrists with iron, so that all my magic grew still inside me. It has never fully come back. I think a little bit of his iron stayed in me.” And here he slapped his shoulder, where I knew he still bore the scar of my father’s shot. “He was smart, your father. He took my magic from me. So, of course, I try to trick him. If I could, I would take his kind of magic from him and turn it against his people. He said no this time. He thinks he can keep it from me always. But there are other men who trade. We will see how it ends.” Then he nodded to himself in a way I didn’t like. In that moment, I was completely my father’s son, the son of a cavalla officer of King Troven, and I resolved that when I returned, I would warn my father that Dewara still meant him harm.
The longer I stayed with him, living by his rules, the more I felt that I was straddling two worlds, and that it would not take much to step fully into his. I had heard of that happening to troopers or those who interacted too freely with the Plainspeople. Our scouts routinely camouflaged themselves in the language, dress, and customs of the indigenous people. Traveling merchants who traded with the Plainspeople, exchanging tools and salt and sugar for furs and handicrafts, spanned the boundaries of the cultures. It was not uncommon to hear of Gernians who had gone too far and crossed over into Plainspeople ways. Sometimes they took wives from among them and adopted their way of dress. Such men were said to have “gone native.” It was recognized that they were useful as go- betweens, but they were accorded little respect, less trust, and almost no acceptance into gatherings of polite company, and their half-breed children could never venture into society at all. I wondered what had become of Scout Halloran and his half-breed daughter.
I had never before understood what would prompt any man to go native, but now I began to see. Living alongside Dewara, with him as my only society, I sometimes felt the urge to do something that would impress him, according to his own standards. I even considered stealing something from him, in some clever way that would force him to admit I was not dull-witted. Theft ran against all the morality I had ever been taught, and yet I found myself thinking about it as a way to win Dewara’s respect. Sometimes I would snap out of such pondering with a jolt, surprised at myself. Then I began to wonder, would stealing something from Dewara truly be an evil act, when he seemed to regard it as a sort of contest of wits? He made me want to cross that line. In Dewara’s world, only a Kidona warrior was a whole man. Only a Kidona warrior was tough, of body and mind, and brave past any instinct for self-preservation. Yet self-preservation was high on a warrior’s priority list, and no lie, theft, or cruelty was inexcusable if it was done with the goal of preserving one’s own life.
Then one night he offered me the opportunity to cross over completely to his world.
It was in this fashion. Each day of our hunting and wandering had carried us closer to my father’s lands. I more felt this than knew it. One night we camped on an outcropping of rocky plateau that fell away in gouged cliffs below us. The altitude gave us a wide view of the Plains below us. In the distance, I saw the Tefa River carving its way through Widevale. I made our fire Kidona-style, as Dewara had taught me, with a strip of sinew and a curved stick as my fire bow. I was much quicker at it than I had been. The narrow-leaved bushes that edged our campsite were resinous. Though the branches were green, they burned well. The fire crackled and popped and gave off a sweet smoke. Dewara leaned close to breathe in the fumes and then sat back, sighing them out in pleasure. “That is how the hunting grounds of Reshamel smells,” he told me.
I recognized the name of a minor deity in the Kidona pantheon. So I was a bit surprised when Dewara went on, “He was the founder of my house. Did I tell you that? His first wife had only daughters, so he put her aside. His second wife bore only sons. The daughters of his line wed the sons of his line, and thus I have the god’s blood in me twice.” He thumped his chest proudly and waited for me to respond. He’d taught me this game of bragging, where each of us tried to top the other’s previous claim. I could think of no reply to his claim of divine descent.
He leaned closer to the fire, breathed the sweet smoke, and then said, “I know. Your ‘good god’ lives far away, up past the stars. You are not the descendants of his loins but of his spirit. Too bad for you. You have no god’s blood in your veins. But”-he leaned closer to me, and pinched me hard on the forearm, a physical gesture I’d become accustomed to-“but I could show you how to become part god. You are as much Kidona as I can make you, Gernian. It would be up to Reshamel to judge you and see if he wished to take you to be one of us. It would be a
