The decline of the Matile Empire affected the rest of Abengoni as well. The Matile colonies in the Mashambani-m’ti were abandoned; their people either made their way back to their beleaguered homeland or stayed behind to be dominated and absorbed by the more vigorous Bashombe kingdoms. In the Gundugumu lands, Matile embassies and trading posts were abandoned. And in the Kashai, the Ikuya finally razed Buhari and scattered its inhabitants.
Throughout the continent, the once-great Empire was shunned, and the very name Matile became a murmur of myth. And in the sister-continent to the east, Itsekiri, it became even less than that.
Penned into the northwestern horn of Abengoni, the Matile remnant managed to survive. They rebuilt what they could, and reclaimed a small measure of the ashuma they once commanded. The Jagasti did not abandon them completely, but their involvement had diminished. And the Matile were constantly beset by the Uloans’ ceaseless quest for revenge. And to the south, a mighty Thaba nkosi, or chieftain, named Tshakane was uniting scattered clans and tribes, forging them into a spear aimed at the remaining Matile lands ....
That was what Kyroun saw. Almost all of it was true, in one way or another.
CHAPTER EIGHT
What Gebrem and Tiyana Saw
While the minds of Gebrem and Tiyana wove their patchwork dreams of Matile history, Kyroun fashioned his own carefully prepared Seeing for them. Instead of showing them the entirety of Cym Dinath, the great landmass that held his homeland, Kyroun provided only glimpses, scenes that verified legends passed down since the time the Fidi regularly visited Abengoni.
Tiyana and Gebrem saw a land covered in white, where fur-clad hunters pursued herds of shaggy elephants ....
They saw endless forests of trees with tiny needles instead of leaves on their boughs ....
They saw a range of mountains with peaks higher than the Seat of the Gods ....
They saw teeming cities scattered across the Dinathian lands; some as magnificent as Khambawe had once been, others so squalid their obliteration would have been a blessing ....
They saw a vast desert called the Bashoob, speckled with oases, that separated west from east ....
And on the eastern edge of that sea of sand, they saw Lumaron, a city of delicate spires and tree-shaded streets, a link between the nomadic tribes of the Bashoob and the ancient, powerful kingdoms of the far east. This was the city that Yekunu, the Matile sculptor, had made his home.
Then Kyroun showed them his life ....
Gebrem and Tiyana saw him as a slim, dark-haired boy, a youngest child pampered by a family that had accumulated wealth for generations as artists and artisans. Young Kyroun’s brothers and sisters inherited their share of the talent that ran in their family, the legacy of Yekunu. But nothing of that wellspring of creativity had ever touched young Kyroun.
His hands could not create anything of beauty. The floor of the family’s studios became littered with the debris of statuettes he had broken in disappointment over his lack of ability. He could sense the pity in the eyes of his family when they looked at the pieces he had not destroyed, and that pity gave him greater hurt than any harsh words or blows could have inflicted.
As he grew into lonely adolescence, Kyroun discovered an outlet for his frustration and disappointment – fighting.
Balled into fists or clenched around the hilt of a sword or the narrow end of a cudgel, Kyroun’s hands discovered the aptitude that had eluded them in the studio. He soon became the terror of Lumaron’s streets, bursting into a berserker’s fury at the slightest provocation. Only the high standing of his family kept the brooding, belligerent youth away from prison or the gallows as he wreaked havoc throughout the city during the course of his growth into manhood. More than one Lumaronian believed that Kyroun’s life was headed inexorably toward a quick and violent end.
Then Kyroun’s father, Channar ni Abdu, died suddenly, leaving the family’s studios to the older children. To the surprise and chagrin of his brothers and sisters, however, it was the rebellious Kyroun who received the most precious heirloom of all – the Ishimbi statuette that was the legacy of their long-dead ancestor from a faraway, half-forgotten land. Kyroun himself had been shocked by the gesture; his relations with his father had grown distant as the years passed.
Still, he kept the statuette, and earned the enmity of his eldest brother, a renowned sculptor who believed the Ishimbi rightfully belonged to him.
Realizing he no longer had any place in the life of his family, Kyroun departed Lumaron, joining a company of sellswords headed for the fractious lands of the east. Ten years passed before he returned.
Kyroun was just past the end of his adolescence when he left Lumaron; he came back a hard-eyed, battle-scarred man of the sword. Of his time among the warring nations of the east he said nothing, not even to his family. Some whispered that he had been an assassin; other rumors spoke of terrible deeds that caused even the bloodthirsty Easterners to drive him from their midst.
If he had accumulated any wealth in his years of warfare, he kept it well-hidden. His horse – which to Gebrem and Tiyana looked like some strange, stripe-less breed of quagga – and weapons were all he possessed when he rode again through Lumaron’s gates.
Kyroun’s reckless youth had long since passed. No longer was he inclined to lash out at anyone he believed affronted him. Still, he could not find a niche in Lumaron, a city that preferred to create wealth rather than wage
