Konza sighed, pouring hot water over a pot full of mashed dewberries. He let this steep a few moments, then poured off the resulting tea for Amero and himself.
“You’ll forgive me for saying so,” Konza said solemnly, “but your sister is mad.”
Amero stared at the flames. No anger showed on his face, for Konza was saying only what Amero had secretly feared for some time. Hearing the words from the sober, hard-working tanner made them seem all the more true.
Following her fall from the cave, Nianki had sunk into a strange, withdrawn state. She wandered through the valley, laughing or weeping for no obvious reason. Her hands, feet, and face grew dirty, her hair was tangled with bits of straw and leaves from sleeping in the open. She remained fierce, however, and thoroughly thrashed a pair of young bucks from the village who cornered her in the orchard one day and taunted her about her wild appearance. Amero had a terrible time keeping the boys’ families from retaliating.
The only time Nianki ever seemed to regain clarity was in the presence of Duranix. The dragon, his broken wing rendering him temporarily unable to fly to his high cavern home, remained on the shore of the lake. The village healer, a young sage named Raho, designed a massive leather harness for the dragon to wear which supported his folded, broken wing as it healed. Village delegates brought Duranix offerings of meat, but none of them, nor any of the nomads, would remain near the crippled creature for very long.
Only Nianki and Amero would spend much time with Duranix, and they rarely appeared together. Her brother’s presence seemed to provoke wild extremes of emotion. When Amero complained of this to Duranix, the dragon flicked his forked tongue several times and said cryptically, “The hardest stone in this valley is your skull, human.”
Now, facing Konza across a flaming hearth and hearing the tanner’s comment about Nianki’s state of mind, Amero tried to reason out the cause of all the trouble between the nomads and their settled brethren.
“We’ve had a lot of bad luck lately,” he mused. “The tunnels collapsed, Duranix got hurt, my sister’s ill, the nomads are restless, and I haven’t had any time to work on my copper experiments.”
Konza shrugged. “The answer to our bad luck is simple. It started with the arrival of the nomads, and it will end when we rid ourselves of them.”
Amero flinched at his blunt words, which stung like a lash. “They’re valiant and useful people,” he said. “They can add to our strength.”
Konza snorted. “They’re violent and dangerous,” he insisted. With a sidelong look at the younger man, he added, “I’m not the only villager who thinks so.”
Shouts and a loud crash outside forestalled Amero’s reply and underscored the tanner’s claim. Wearily, Amero rose from the hearth and went to the door. Konza got up to follow, but Amero waved him back.
“Take your ease,” he said. “I’ll see what’s up.”
Two houses over he found a boy lying in the dirt, his head bleeding. The travois he’d been dragging was wrecked, and broken pots lay scattered about. A thick, sweet smell filled the cool night air. Honey.
Amero helped the boy sit up. His name was Udi, second son of Tepa, the beekeeper. Tepa had a cache of beehives in the apple orchard, and he traded his honey in the village at considerable advantage. Udi groaned a bit when he felt the bump on his head, but groaned much louder when he saw the damage done to his father’s supply of honey.
“Who did this?” demanded Amero.
“I never saw them,” said the teenager, a hand to his head. “I heard footsteps behind me, but. I thought it was just a neighbor. There was a yell, and when I turned to see who it was, something hit me on the back of the head.”
“Can you tell what’s missing?”
The boy counted jars. Eight were intact, four broken, and only one was missing.
“Someone attacked you to take just one jar of honey?” asked Amero, incredulous.
“It’s the riders,” Udi muttered. “They steal for the rough jest of it.”
“You don’t know that,” Amero replied, with more conviction than he felt. He helped reload the travois and sent Udi on his way. A cursory examination showed three pairs of footprints in the dust around the site of the robbery. Two pairs headed toward the lake. The third went north, toward the cattle pens.
He tracked the solo marauder straight to the walled corral. Sure enough, a single figure sat atop the stone wall, looking over the herd of brown and white spotted oxen.
“You there! Stay where you are!”
The fellow didn’t even turn around. Amero climbed onto the wall and was surprised to see that the lone figure was Pa’alu.
Pa’alu had been acting oddly ever since the night of the feast. He disappeared for days at a time and had not been seen now for over a week. Amero wondered at the epidemic of strange behavior.
“I thought perhaps you were gone from the valley,” he said, sitting beside the warrior.
“I’ve been away,” Pa’alu replied. “I’ve been hunting in the nearby valleys by myself, on foot. Haven’t done that in eight seasons.”
“There was a robbery back there.” Amero pointed to the row of dome-shaped houses.
“Robbery? What was stolen?”
“A jar of honey.”
“Ha, a robber with a sweet tooth.”
“He came this way. See anybody run by?”
“I wasn’t looking.”
The cattle stirred sleepily, crowding around piles of fodder that had been left for them. Amero watched the long-horned animals silently for several minutes, searching for the words he wanted.
“Pa’alu?” he said at last.
“Hmm?”
“What happened, the night of the feast? Why did you try to stab yourself? We’ve never talked about it.”
The other man turned his head, and for the first time Amero saw how hollow-eyed he’d become. “Too much wine,” Pa’alu said calmly. “I should thank the dragon for stopping me.”
Amero flashed a smile. “Duranix says living with humans means stopping a hundred stupid things a day.”
Both men laughed briefly. Amero threw his legs back over the wall and slid down to the ground outside the pen.
“I must keep looking for the thieves,” he said. “Good night, Pa’alu.”
“Peace be with you, Arkuden.”
Amero departed and was soon swallowed by the darkness around the village houses. Pa’alu waited to a slow count of thirty, then took a squat jar from under his cloak and broke the beeswax seal. Making clucking sounds in his throat to attract the hungry cattle, he poured a stream of golden honey on the dirt. Before long the oxen were lapping at it with their fleshy red tongues. Pa’alu wiped the rim of the empty jar with his fingers, then stuck them in his mouth.
Back in the camp, Nacris and Tarkwa were panting from their run. They ducked into a large tent, with triumphant grins. Hatu, inside the tent, was waiting with a small lamp burning.
“Well?” demanded Hatu.
“He wouldn’t strike a blow, but he took a jar,” Nacris reported.
“Good. Pa’alu will soon be one of us. Next time, we must make sure he strikes the first blow but not the last.”
Hatu bent forward and blew out the lamp.
Nianki was not sleeping in the orchard.
Though she lay in the soft grass at the base of an apple tree, she could not rest. She stared up through the tree’s twisted branches at the patches of night sky visible through its remaining leaves.
It was a tree that saved me.
Amero’s voice drifted through her mind. He’d climbed a tree to escape the yevi all those years ago.
Thoughts of Amero kept Nianki from sleeping. Each time she closed her eyes, her brother’s face seemed to