elves. A band of hunters who were not blood kin — such a band had not existed on the plains before. Perhaps there was something to be said for the safety and strength of numbers. If elves could do it, so could humans.
Nianki scrubbed a hand through her hair and sighed gustily. “I’m unmated, yet I’ve acquired a family,” she muttered, then added more loudly, “All right, you can follow me.”
“Where should we go?” asked Pirith, Targun’s mate.
Nianki frowned at her, though it was a frown of thought rather than of displeasure. Pirith posed a very good question. Where should they go? East lay the domain of the elves, and the land to the south was also infested with the invaders. The western plain was where the killer pack had wiped out her family.
“North,” Nianki said firmly. “Good hunting up north, this time of year.”
They stripped the camp of everything useful, then waited for Nianki to lead them away.
Targun asked, “What is your name?”
Before Nianki could answer, Neko spoke.
“Karada,” he said. She looked at him and smiled.
“That’s right,” she said. “Call me Karada.”
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
