“Your domain? Are you… are you the father of the whole plains, Duranix?”
He smiled briefly. “Father? Quaintly put. I am the master of the lands from these mountains west to the forest’s edge.”
“Are there other masters? In the forest?”
Duranix’s handsome face darkened. “There is. He is called Sthenn.”
“Your… brother?”
Duranix folded his arms, looking angry. Then he relaxed and said, “I must remember you have a limited range of expression. Sthenn and I are of the same race, if that’s what you mean.”
“You look like a man, but you do things I’ve never seen any other man do.”
“I sometimes go abroad in human form.”
“Why look like a man if you’re not one?”
Duranix was silent and Amero realized he was asking a great many questions. It was a habit that got him in trouble so often with Oto. The boy bit his lip. It was hard not to voice the questions that filled his head.
However, Duranix did not look annoyed, as Oto so often had. He simply looked thoughtful and replied, “It makes traveling easier for me to appear as a man. Besides, humans amuse me. Most of them are no better than the beasts they hunt and kill.”. He gave Amero a penetrating look. “You’re different though. I see signs in you of higher faculties — intelligence, curiosity, and perhaps something more. You heard the yevi speak. When you think clearly, I can hear your thoughts as loudly as I hear the falls outside.”
Amero felt oddly embarrassed. “I’m just Amero, the son of Oto and Kinar.”
“True, but you are different from your parents and siblings, aren’t you?” Amero hung his head, admitting as much. Duranix added, “You have special abilities. It’s why I brought you here. I want to know more about you.”
Duranix fixed the cape around his shoulders and stood in the lower opening. “I’ll return after sunset.”
Before Amero could protest being left alone in the cave all day, Duranix leaped into space. He plunged through the waterfall and disappeared. Still wrapped in the white ox hide, Amero crawled to the ledge and looked down. There was no sign of his host. The waterfall was more than an arm’s length from the cliff wall, and he could see nothing through the thundering stream but the blue of the sky. While he was gazing down the cliff wall to the boiling pool below, a large shadow passed swiftly over the cave mouth. Amero looked up, but whatever it was had vanished.
He sighed. Though he was pleased at having been rescued from the yevi, Amero thought of his current situation and found himself reminded uncomfortably of a field mouse he’d once captured. He had kept the mouse in a hollow length of cane. He would spend entire evenings playing with the mouse, seeing how it reacted to various things he put in its little home, learning what it would and would not eat. One day he found the mouse was gone — it had gnawed through the bottom of the cane over several nights and run away. Amero, only five at the time, had cried over the loss. Nianki had told him it was only an animal’s nature to want freedom. He was beginning to understand how the mouse must have felt.
Thoughts of his future couldn’t compete very long with the return of his curiosity. He decided to explore the cavern and see what clues he could glean about his mysterious host. If he found food along the way, so much the better.
He began at the lower opening and worked around the cave wall to his left. The floor here was rougher. Hard stone had been gouged out in some way, leaving long troughs in the floor. Each groove was as wide as his hand, and they occurred in close groups of three at a time.
He found more of the oval leaves along the wall, though most were green with mold. Amero tried to bend one, as he’d seen Duranix do. Arms quivering with effort, he managed to put a slight bend in one. How firm they were! He put one on the floor and stomped it, gaining nothing but an aching foot. With a loose stone, he hit the leaf with all his strength. A clear ringing sound echoed through the cave. The blow left a small dent in the leaf and broke off the tip of the stone cleanly.
These things could be useful, he mused. They were already well shaped for digging. He could scrape away a lot of soil with one.
Amero walked slowly along the uneven floor toward the rear of the cave. Aside from loose stones and the odd golden-red leaves, he found little else of interest until he came to Duranix’s sleeping place.
In the corner he discovered a heap of bones, many charred and splintered. This explained the sour smell in the cave. Duranix apparently enjoyed a variety of game, as there were bones of elk, deer, and oxen. Then Amero found something that froze the blood in his veins: a fleshless human skull.
Oto always said the spirits of the dead clung to their bones. That’s why the dead had to be buried. If you left their bones lying around, their ghost would wander the land, doing evil.
Yet there was something pathetic about that dry white lump of bone. Curiosity overcame fear and Amero picked up the skull gingerly. It was big. The jaw had come off, and there wasn’t a shred of meat left on it anywhere. On the back were deep, converging gouges. The bone had splintered there.
Amero put down the skull and wished peace to the spirit of the man who had once inhabited it. He decided not to dig further in the bone pile. He didn’t want to know if other humans had died here, perhaps — he shuddered to think it — eaten by Duranix. He determined to leave the cave as soon as possible. He would find a way to live, maybe even a whole new family. Anything was better than being eaten by — whatever kind of creature Duranix was.
With renewed vigor he searched the platform and all around it, looking for a passage out of the cave. There was none. All he found in the rest of the chamber were a large heap of hides and skins and piles of the hard red-gold “leaves.”
He almost wept with frustration. This high above the ground, how could he get out? He couldn’t fly like a bird, bat, or bug. How did Duranix enter and leave without harm?
Amero recalled his captor’s exit (how quickly Duranix had gone from host to captor in his mind). The strange man put on his long cape and flung himself through the wall of water, vanishing. The cape — why did he need the cape? To keep the water off, or was there a different reason?
Odd images from his flying dream flitted through his mind: rushing over the ground, the wind whipping his hair, the stars racing by. He imagined Duranix spreading his arms like a bird, the cape billowing out behind him like wings. Could a man really fly like that? Amero thought it unlikely. Was there power in the cape, spirit-power? He had no answer for that.
Yet not everything that flew had wings. In the spring, elms and maples cast their seeds on the wind. These fluttered and spun long distances, but they always came to earth somewhere, unbroken. Was that it? Was that the secret of Duranix’s cape?
He scrounged through the hides, looking for a likely scrap. All the pieces were too large. He tried to tear off a portion of pigskin, but it was too tough. He needed a flint knife or some other sharp stone.
The cavern was hollowed out of a sandstone cliff. All the loose pieces of sandstone on the floor, though good for polishing the bark off a spear shaft, were incapable of holding a sharp edge.
The strange leaves, Duranix’s so-called rubbish, were certainly hard and fairly thin. Amero tried sawing at a hide with the edge of one, but the leaf was too dull. Taking up a palm-sized chunk of sandstone, Amero scraped one side of the leaf, trying to hone it thinner and sharper.
It worked very well. After a few minutes’ work, he cut his thumb on the resulting edge. Bleeding but triumphant, Amero quickly sliced out a piece of hide, which would make a cape for him comparable in size to Duranix’s.
Even after his success in cutting the hide, Amero couldn’t bring himself to tie on the cape and leap off the cliff. Perhaps he should test his idea first.
He slashed out a smaller piece of buckskin, more square, and cut a few strips of hide as thongs. An elk skull, antlers still attached, would serve to give weight to his experiment. He tied the skull to the hide with four thongs, one to each comer of the buckskin. Amero carried this odd-looking assembly to the opening. Taking a deep breath, he rolled it over the edge.