The dragon glanced from Nianki to Amero and back to Nianki again. “I think humans make terrible pets,” he said.
Chapter 18
Autumn arrived. The days grew short and dark, but the darkness was not confined to the sky. Once the dragon was known to be injured, the atmosphere in the valley changed.
Nomad and villager had been getting along tolerably well, with occasional disagreements between individuals offset by frequent incidents of cooperation. Several of the younger nomads had actually begun teaching their village counterparts to ride horses. At first the elder villagers scoffed at those taking the lessons, but the young of Yala-tene knew riding could be an extremely useful sill. The lessons were marked by much raucous roughhousing, but the gibing was good-natured, and no one got hurt.
Now trouble between nomad and villager was on the rise — name-calling and theft became more frequent and escalated into shouting matches and fistfights. Riding lessons came to a halt. The once-friendly sessions had become untenable after several violent melees.
Amero and the village elders moved from one crisis to another, separating angry nomads and villagers, smoothing over confrontations, trying to resolve a growing host of simmering disputes.
“I don’t understand it,” Amero complained one evening. He was in the home of Konza the tanner. He and his host had gulped a hasty meal by the circular fireplace while waiting for the next outbreak of trouble.
“I thought things would work out better than this,” he continued, poking the fire with an aromatic cedar stick. “Our people and Nianki’s — we’re all plainsmen. We’ve learned so much from each other and can learn a lot more. So why is there so much trouble?”
“You believe too much in the goodness of people,” Konza said. The firelight etched the lines of weariness on his face with deep shadows. “These wanderers are lazy, good-for-nothing savages. What they want, they steal. What they don’t understand, they destroy.”
Amero looked up from prodding the flames. “I thought Nianki could keep them in line.”
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.”