There were no moons and the night noises were familiar. As always, the clear sky displayed its curious eyes. I was tired and arranging my bed when I heard a sound that didn’t belong. My head turned in swift alarm to the direction of the foreign transmission. Something was making its way through the underbrush, and it was not small. Voices, I heard them now, low and indistinct, carried on the wind and then taken back away. I gained my feet and peered into the blackness, completely caught off guard. Someone had crossed the desert and was now in my domain. My mind tried to clear itself of its sluggishness, to gain some sort of focus. I needed information.
Were they friend or foe? I must stay hidden until I knew the answer. They were coming my way, and my heart pounded as I pulled myself up into a bennawood from a low branch. It was lucky I did, for a caravan of strange beasts passed below the tree within moments of my ascent. These animals were unlike any I had ever seen. Their riders, however, were a different matter.
Men’s voices drifted up to me. To my surprise, I understood what they were saying. I had not expected to hear a language familiar to my ears. Yet these people spoke my tongue. Were they travelers from our lands inside the Kodor range? Were they Sakita? Or Raab? I knew the idea was ludicrous even as I thought it, for no Raab or Sakitan had animals such as these. I needed a better look, but didn’t dare move. I couldn’t risk alerting them to my presence.
The caravan stopped at the spring, so I turned my attention to the voices. Most of the words made sense to me, for the language was almost the same as my own, but some words puzzled me with their unfamiliarity, and some appeared as altered versions of words I knew.
“We will water the drooves, camp tonight, and resume our journey come daylight,” a man was saying.
I could not make out his features in the darkness, but he seemed clothed in some sort of flowing garment with an attached hood, which was currently down. Drooves, I gathered, were the animals they rode. I had no success getting a better look at them, for the beasts had moved farther downstream.
As I strained for a better view, a din erupted from within the group. Agitated voices rang out in high, sharp tones, and I heard the man who had spoken earlier angrily demanding from another what had happened. I couldn’t hear the second man’s reply, but then the first spoke again, his anger increased.
“I told you to make sure the captives were securely tied. This is the last time your incompetence goes unpunished.” I heard the sound of metal scraping against metal. An instant later a man screamed, then silence.
“Find that escapee!” the first man ordered. “Or you will all end up with a blade in your gut, like Osek.”
I had learned a few important things in a startlingly short amount of time. The man in charge was ruthless and averse to inefficiency. This caravan had prisoners of some sort and one had escaped, though I knew he had nowhere to go. I also learned that Osek was a very unlucky man, along with being allegedly incompetent. So, the only people I have seen in months are not the kind you invite to share your fire. I was in a bind, and there was nothing to do but wait and hope they departed in the morning. I would have to sleep in the tree and pray I did not fall out.
Of course, I did not sleep much. I stayed awake most of the night watching their flickering fire, listening to the sounds of the encampment. I caught muffled voices, the clanging of pots, the odd vocalizing of the beasts that sounded like a combination of snorting and bleating. I witnessed two men dragging a body across the compound and into the far woods. Osek, no doubt. I dozed off a couple of times, and I would have tumbled from the tree if my body had not felt the loss of equilibrium and jolted me back to wakefulness. At one point, I heard cheers erupt, and I gathered that the runaway was back in custody.
Toward morning, the company collected their drooves, and in the early light I at last got a good look at the intruders. There were nine men garbed in the same brown-colored, flowing apparel I had witnessed on their leader, whom I now saw more clearly as well. He was a sharp-faced man of about thirty with short black hair and a black beard, both meticulously trimmed. His thin face matched his wiry frame, and he worked his droove with practiced precision. As did all the men, he carried a fascinating weapon, a short-handled, double-edged blade that extended at least the length of the man’s arm, probably longer. He secured the blade in a leather and metal scabbard belted to his robe, along with a short knife in a sheath. I saw no other weapons. They were a rough-looking group, and I thought the sooner rid of them the better.
The animal they called droove was a curious creature. It had four powerful-looking legs and was about the height of a tall man, with an elongated neck that elevated to a rather small, oblong head that sported two pointed ears. A pair of large eyes flanked a matching pair of flared nostrils above a wide mouth that seemed in constant motion as the animal chewed its cud. The droove’s body was solid, with a slight rise to its back, and it seemed covered in grayish wool. The beast appeared to have no tail. Sturdy ropes cinched packs to the animal's back, and the creature sported a bridle to aid in its guidance. The droove folded its legs beneath it and dropped to its belly to allow a rider to mount.
My attention shifted to the captives, who were all in one group. A knot grew tight in my stomach as I observed that most were women or girls with their hands bound severely in front of them. Only their legs and feet were free, which allowed perch on the animals’ backs. I counted four women and two men, and I assumed one of the men, who appeared badly beaten, was the would-be escapee of last night. The cruel treatment of the captives by those guarding them angered me. They taunted the bruised man. One of the guards deliberately pressed his wounds and then howled with glee from seeing the man flinch in pain. I could do nothing for them. My personal safety was in the balance and I had no adequate weapon for attack or defense. I could but sit in silence and wait for them to depart.
Then, that plan crumbled when they discovered my bag, blanket, and spear. I had left them on the ground not far from my hiding place in the tree and someone had stumbled across them. A shout went up. The thin-faced man gave orders and men fanned out to find me.
As they searched, I hoped none would think to look upward. I had to count on a lack of intuition on their part to do so. They thrashed through the underbrush, and then one passed below me. I held my breath, but the man didn’t even pause and was soon out of sight. Then, one of those unforeseen events happened, the kind seemingly scripted by the purposeful hand of Ra-ta. A bird landed on a branch near me and began a frenzied squawking. It was surreal, almost comical, the way the bird would change pitch, and I swear those were not the natural sounds or cadences of that particular species. It was as though the bird’s intent was to make sure it drew the attention of those below. It worked with beautiful efficiency.
The searcher who had passed below my perch returned and saw me. His eyes widened, and then he yelled for the others and ordered me to climb down. I hesitated, but as several more searchers arrived, I knew any one of them might grow impatient and decide to toss a knife to dislodge me. I swung down to meet my fate. When I landed, a large, bearded man grabbed my left arm with a grubby hand that felt slimy against my skin. The nauseating stink of the trail radiated off him. Feeling repulsed by his filthy touch and hurting from the man’s grip, I cut down on his forearm with the bottom edge of my right hand. He released his hold, allowing me to bring my left elbow straight up to crack him below the jaw. The man grunted and staggered. I attempted to run, to escape and hide somewhere from this unsavory company, but two others immobilized my arms in fierce grips. The large man rubbed his whiskered jaw and his eyes were afire. He advanced toward me with the sure intent to do bodily harm when a voice of authority rang out.
“Enough!” the thin-faced boss commanded. The larger man hesitated before reluctantly backing off, and I judged he knew to defy the slender man would be foolhardy. The caravan leader walked over to inspect me, appraising me with a contemplativ
e grin.
“You’re a feisty one, aren’t you?” he said with admiration. “Judging by your immaculate clothes, I’d say you’ve been here awhile. Being a curious man and inclined to want to know these things, please tell me your name and how you got here.”
As he calmly waited for a response, I reasoned there was no point in evading his questions.
“I am Sanyel. I came here from across the desert.”
The man waited, clearly expecting more details, and when he didn’t get them he pressed again.
“How did you get here? Who are your people?”
“My people are the Sakita.”
“Sakita?” The man evinced surprise and an enhanced interest. “I have never heard of such. Where do they come from?”
I was about to tell him about our mountain enclave when a warning sounded within my brain. The man had an expression, a look I recognized. It was a sly, expectant look one has when about to get something desired but not deserved.
“We live beyond the mountains,” I said. As I spoke, I held my head motionless and kept my eyes on my interrogator, giving away no particular direction.
“The mountains? Which mountains would those be?” The man smiled an ingratiating smile, the smile of the impossibly polite. It was the smile of the predator pretending to be no such thing.
I shrugged—that is I shrugged as much as having my arms held would allow.
“It has been so long,” I said, trying not to sound evasive. “I hit my head not long ago and cannot even remember how I got here, or in which direction the mountains are.”
The caravan leader studied me and I knew he did not believe a word of it. Again he smiled and asked, “Are there any others hiding in these woods?”
“No,” I told him—and that he believed.
“I am Dwelve,” he informed me. “I am sorry to tell you that you are now my prisoner.”
Again he smiled, and I have to say he did not look all that sorry.
“Why would you take me prisoner?” I asked. “What have I done?”
Dwelve let out a hearty laugh.
“What have you done? Why nothing, my child—well, Skak over there might dispute that,” and he glanced over at the sullen man whose jaw I had loosened. “Only I have a quota to fill and you will fill it nicely. You will be sold as a slave, as will these others, and the Spood will pay me generous coin, but especially for a beauty such as you.”
Dwelve grinned yet again and seemed as self-satisfied as a man can get. “Life is good,” he said, and then turned away.
They marched me back to the drooves, all waiting in line and ready to depart. A thin rope bound my hands in front and bit into my wrists and fingers. A man lifted me in a rough manner and placed me onto a droove behind a large-bodied girl. To my surprise, the girl appeared to have only one arm, her right one. Rope bound that arm rigidly to her side. The girl wore a hood and did not turn around, but she shifted slightly forward to give me room.
I wanted to speak to the girl, but the men were close and had warned us not to talk. The droove’s reins connected to a longer rope, and that rope connected to a cinched pack straddling the droove in front of us. The caravan started forward and our droove lurched ahead as its guide rope tautened. The beast’s awkward side-to-side motion took me off balance. I slid from its back and smacked into the ground. With my hands bound, I could not break my fall and was lucky I didn’t fracture a bone while landing on the forest sod. The prisoner escorts laughed, and then one of them assisted me back onto the beast.
Being a prisoner, and soon to be sold as a slave to some unknown entity, should have depressed me. It did not. Much as I had appreciated my stay at the oasis, I was ready for something new. Even though currently a prisoner, deep down I felt the condition was temporary and I would soon find a way to escape. I had nothing solid to base that on, yet the feeling was strong that slavery was not my destiny.
We traveled in the heat at a brisk pace, stopping on occasion to stretch our legs, relieve ourselves, and quench our thirst. Drooves were apparently born to desert duty, for they appeared to need little water. I had learned how to brace myself and managed to stay astride the droove’s back. However, that was no consolation when forced to endure its regular discharges of foul gasses, and the constant shifting was wearing on my lower back. I was thankful my captors had offered me one of the flowing garments they all wore, for my rags were unfit to confront the merciless sun.
We camped that night in the open desert under the still cloudless sky, and for the first time I got a close-up view of some of my fellow captives. We were sitting in loose formation around a fire, with the binds on our hands removed. Our guards had shifted those ropes to our feet, leaving our hands unbound to allow us to eat our meal. The food was some sort of gruel served in shallow wooden bowls and I ate with zeal, grateful for a change in diet. The taste was a pleasant, nutty flavor, reminding me of nothing I had previously eaten. We drank our fill of water and then the guards bound our hands up to our fingertips so we could not use them to untie our leg restraints. Our captors told us to get some sleep.
Realizing the guards were temporarily out of hearing range, I turned to the stout, one-armed girl, who now sat next to me, and asked, “What is your name?”
She was staring into the fire with a hood shadowing her features, and as she turned to me and shook her head covering loose, I let out an involuntary gasp. The girl had short black hair arranged in numerous little spikes. However, that’s not what shocked me. It was her face! The right half was plain, like mine, but the left overflowed with markings, intricate patterns of blue, green, yellow, and red all the way from her forehead down to her throat. An unusual metal ring of burnished orange pierced one nostril and I noticed another encircled her smallest finger.
She looked me over with amused blue eyes that reflected curiosity and intelligence, and then she flashed a perfect set of white teeth.
“I am Ismalia,” she stated in a rich, mirthful tone. “But you can call me Izzy.”
I was still taking in the remarkable, colorful images imprinted on her face and had failed to answer, but then realized I was embarrassing myself by prolonged staring. It was just that her entire appearance startled me, from the one arm to the spiked hair to the half-and-half face.
“I’m sorry, I’m Sanyel . . . I didn’t mean to stare. It’s your face. I have not seen anything like those markings.”
Izzy smiled, and I got the feeling my reaction had not put her off at all.
“They are the marks of Mim,” she volunteered. “I have had them since my eleventh year. That’s when all members of my tribe are required to have them imbedded in the skin with needle and pigment. They identify us as loyal servants of the sun god, Mim.”
This was the first I had heard of another sun god other than Ra-ta, and wondered if they were the same divine being.
“We also worship the sun god, but he is named Ra-ta in our tribe.”
A look of surprise crossed Izzy’s face.
“He? Mim is female.”
It was my turn to experience surprise. I had always assumed a god had to be male, for males were the dominant sex in our tribe, or at least pretended to be. This was something new to consider. Our afterlife spoke of finding eternal peace in Mimnon, Ra-ta’s realm, so I wondered about that, too. Were the words Mim and Mimnon similar only through coincidence?
“Perhaps the sun gods are the same,” I postulated, “and can appear as either sex.”
Izzy seemed comfortable with that notion and we went on to speak of other things. Rippling laughter drifted over from the guards. Caught up in some game or contest, they ignored us.
“Have you knowledge of this ‘Spood’ the caravan leader Dwelve spoke of?” I asked. I emphasized the word to indicate how odd I found it to be.
Izzy signaled no with a shake of her head. Then a slight, wide-eyed girl who had been listening to our conversation ma
naged to slide up beside me after several awkward attempts to do so. She volunteered to enlighten us.
“Do you not know of the Spood?” she asked in a hushed, excited voice. “Are you not aware that they are the all-powerful masters of the world?”
She spoke the last words in a tone of fear and awe and looked anxiously around as if dreading dire consequences for daring to speak of them. I failed to see what was so intimidating.
“Masters of the world, you say? With a name like Spood? You’d think if they were masters of anything, they’d pick a name that doesn’t make you think of droove droppings when you hear it.”
Izzy made a slight noise in her throat and I thought she was choking, but she was only stifling a laugh.
The girl ignored her and persisted, saying to me, “Spood—does not the very word frighten you?”
“Honestly, it sounds like something I might cough up,” I replied.
This time Izzy could not stifle a laugh and the wide-eyed girl frowned, looking perplexed by our irreverent responses.
Izzy coughed.
“Sorry, just trying to clear some spood from my throat.”
We both giggled and the girl stared at us as if we were mad. She inched away. The guards had completed their game and were coming to check on us, so we stretched out on the sand and pretended to be asleep.
The next day, back on the drooves, I again sat behind Izzy. This time we were in the center of the caravan and thus far enough away from the guards to risk conversing. In short order, I conveyed my life history, including my banishment, though leaving out some details, such as my power over animals and my skill with weapons. The fewer people aware of those things the better.
Izzy’s story was amazing. She was born sixteen years before to a tribe called the Sarto, although she seemed unable to say just where that was. When the tribal elders saw Izzy’s missing arm, they advised Izzy’s family to throw the baby into the nearby creek and drown it. Her clan desired only those with strong, perfect bodies, as they felt anything else would burden the tribe. Izzy’s father wanted nothing to do with the deformed child and ordered his wife to dispose of her. Her mother refused. Izzy's father tore the baby from her mother's grasp and tossed her into the raging waters. Her mother screamed and jumped in after her, only to find her child already rapidly floating downstream. By a miracle of Mim (as Izzy put it), she somehow remained afloat and the ample cloth layers wrapped around her protected her from fatal encounters with rocks. She wound up a considerable distance downstream where she washed up onto the low bank of a shallow cove. In a remarkable twist of fate, her mother, who was half-drowned while trying to swim after Izzy, soon washed up in that identical cove.
A member of a friendly tribe, the Cartu, found them, and the clan welcomed them into their fold. Izzy grew up with the culture and traditions of the Cartu and considered herself one of them. Her mother died two years ago and Izzy decided last year to leave the comfort and familiarity of her adopted home. For a long while she had stifled growing yearnings to explore and see what lay beyond the hills. She was well into that journey when the slave traders (called “rancers,” Izzy informed me) caught her unawares three nights ago as she slept on a grassy hillside.
Wait a minute. She said grassy hillside? When I asked her about that, she informed me that if I had continued heading west along the mountains for three more days, instead of turning south to the oasis, I would have reached the end of the desert. I knew I would not have lasted walking three more days in that direction, so I was grateful my father had instead directed me to turn south.
Still, if the rancers were already in the grasslands when they found Izzy, why did they come into the desert with their captives instead of skirting it? Izzy believed it was because they feared something out on the plains and knew whatever they feared could not follow them into the desert. Supposedly, the desert route was safer, and the rancers were aware of the oasis as a place to rest and restock.
I had to ask Izzy about her nose and finger rings. She told me the rings were common adornments among Cartu women and were fashioned from a very rare and prized metal. Her tribe called it “the singing metal,” because it emitted tones that were always changing and that were not discernible unless one brought the metal close to the ear. She turned her head and leaned back so I could put my ear to her nose ring. Currently, a high pitched, steady tone did indeed appear to emanate from the metal.
I wanted to learn more details about Izzy, her culture, and her travels, but our approach to the southern edge of the desert diverted our attention. Sporadic tufts of green began to appear, and I thrilled at the sight of low hills and open plains not far ahead.
I glanced upward, for the light and heat of Ra-ta had dimmed. Clouds. Muscular bands of gray and white were streaming in broad formations across the blue paleness. Excitement rose in me, for Kaynar had returned. Long absent, he was again issuing a challenge to his father for heavenly dominance.
The challenge was weak, however. Kaynar had scattered his forces too thin, allowing Ra-ta to retain his advantage. There would be no tears and no angry words. An unsettled truce would prevail, with both sharing rule over the day.
As the clouds drifted over and the sun alternately showed and hid, I took several deep breaths, savoring the rich smell of the boundless grasslands. The oasis had been a paltry substitute, cramped and stifling, leaving me feeling like Pilkin’s caged starfen. What I missed was this—the vastness of the open plains. This was a promise of freedom, the freedom to roam for days on end, chasing, always chasing the elusive wild herds. It was at times like these that I realized most clearly that I was a nomad in my soul and a hunter at heart.
A palpable unease settled over the company as we headed deeper into the green land. Dwelve fidgeted with noticeable agitation and snapped at his men to keep their awareness sharp. I gathered that genuine danger prowled nearby, as the group’s tracker studied the ground with meticulous scrutiny.
The tension grew as night approached and Dwelve gave terse instructions to keep the drooves close together. We found a location on top of a high, flat hill, and set up camp for the night. As the twilight faded to pitch darkness, Dwelve’s men built a ring of eight campfires. We accompanied the drooves to the center of the wide circle they formed—for safety we assumed. Dwelve posted guards beyond the edge of the fires to give warning of any approach from downslope in any direction. Kept ignorant of the nature of the threat, we captives could only speculate.
A few hours into the night, a cry shattered the quiet, a shriek of pain swiftly come and just as swiftly gone. Dwelve leaped to his feet and drew his long blade. His look of terror indicated he knew the thing he feared had come. It had snatched away one of his men, and even now might be sizing him up as the next victim. The men not guarding the perimeter had also drawn arms. Their eyes nervously scanned the darkness and their bodies twisted, trying in vain to cover all avenues of danger at once. The drooves were in a panic, obviously smelling the intruder and not liking what that portended for them.
I was anxious. Trussed hand and foot, we were helpless to defend ourselves. Our captors apparently had no qualms about losing their bounty to this nighttime killer. I glanced over to each of my fellow captives. Izzy seemed calm and alert. The wide-eyed girl flailed about in a useless endeavor to loosen her hand ropes while whimpering and crying. The bruised young man who had earlier tried to escape had a bitter look and the other, a plump man in his thirties, seemed resigned to his fate. The other two women huddled together, perhaps drawing strength from each other’s proximity.
Another man’s scream pierced the night.
Then, I saw it.
**
~~TWELVE~~