started to intervene, but Soutan smiled.
‘Why?’ the sorcerer said.
‘Because of the engraved numbers, I think,’ Arkazo said. ‘It makes it look like a tool or something.’
‘Very good! It does, yes. Think about that.’
Soutan walked over to his saddlebags and knelt down to put the crystal away. Tareev leaned close to Arkazo and muttered, ‘Huh! We’ll just see if this comnee ever shows up.’ If Soutan heard, he never responded.
All three Kazraks were in for a surprise when, after some hours of riding, they saw the comnee right where Soutan had said it would be. Warkannan and his men saw the horses first, and only then the sprawl of tents along a stream. Against the brightly coloured trees and the wild grass, the tents, so gaudy in themselves, blended in so well they almost disappeared. The comnee insisted that they eat the evening meal with them and brought out skins of keese to drink with the guests. When Warkannan asked his carefully prepared questions, he found that several of the men had indeed heard of a Kazrak exile who rode with a comnee. Somewhere to the south, they told Warkannan, and a spirit rider was the one who took him in. When Warkannan and his men were ready to ride out the following morning, Warkannan gifted their hosts with a sack of grain and received warm thanks in return.
‘No, no, I should be thanking you,’ Warkannan said. ‘For your company.’
And for your information, Warkannan thought. And yet, as they rode away, he felt heavy-hearted, to be hunting a man down like a saur. He’s one of the Chosen, he reminded himself. They’re more vicious than any beast alive.
In summer every comnee travelled to the Great River, which flowed, wide but shallow, from the north through the heart of the Tribal lands all the way to the distant southern sea. Apanador’s comnee arrived in the middle of a sunny day. Once the tents were set up and every scrap of fuel in the area scrounged and set drying, the men put out snares for small game. Along the riverbanks grew fern trees, spear trees, brushy shrubs, and mosses in a riot of orange fronds and yellow threads. In this thick vegetation lived the turquoise chirpers, the purple and grey spotted snappers, red-boys, and a dozen other kinds of meaty reptiles. They’d supply meat until the grassars came to the river to drink.
Ammadin had never thought of Kazraks as hunters, but Zayn had brought with him a perfect weapon for snaring tree lizards –three brass balls connected with leather thongs. Down by the river she saw him stalking a redboy. It scrambled up a fern tree, then made the mistake of shimmying out onto a frond, where it stood squawking on its six skinny legs. Zayn swung the balls around his head and made them sing like a giant insect, then let them fly from his open hand. The balls wrapped the cords around two pairs of the redboy’s legs and dragged it writhing from the tree. Zayn scooped it up with both hands and snapped its neck.
‘That’s amazing,’ Ammadin said. ‘You’ve got a good eye.’
‘For this kind of thing, maybe. I hope I can do as well with comnee weapons and bigger game.’
Handling a spear came to him easily, because he knew the lance from his time in the cavalry, but the bow was another matter. In the morning Ammadin rode out to watch him practise with the short bow, made of layers of horn and wood. Dallador had stuffed an old saurskin with grass and set it up as a target. Ammadin sat on her horse and watched as Zayn galloped by, guiding the horse with his knees and nocking an arrow into the bow. Zayn twisted easily in the saddle and shot three fast arrows next to, above, and beyond the target. With a whoop of laughter, he turned his horse and trotted back to Dallador. When he dismounted, Ammadin joined them.
‘There’s nothing wrong with the way you ride,’ Dallador said. ‘But you’re going to have to practise shooting dismounted for a while. You know, one step at a time.’
‘All right,’ Zayn said. ‘At home we hunt with a longer bow, and you hold it vertically, not across your body like this.’
On the morrow, the men rode out early. The women began their part of the food work: milking their mares, churning butter, setting yogurt to cure and keese to ferment. Ammadin saddled her grey gelding and rode out alone in the opposite direction from the men. Spirit rider or not, a woman would bring bad luck to the men’s hunt if she tagged along. She ambled south until she found, some miles from camp, a place where a shallow stream joined the river. She watered her horse, then tethered it out to graze.
On foot she pushed her way through the tangle of trees and ferns to the riverbank, where yellabuhs swarmed. Now and then a slender brown fish would leap open-mouthed from the water and scoop some of them up before falling back. The survivors would fly madly around for a few moments, then resume their swarm, only to fall prey to the next leaper. Ammadin knelt down and peered into the water to look for spirit pearls. Sure enough, they lay thick among the orange mosses and the red-brown river weeds, but it seemed to her that there were fewer this year than she was used to seeing in the Great River.
She sat on the bank and for a long while watched the pearls. Most lay inert on the river bottom; then suddenly and inexplicably one would float free and catch the current, only to sink again farther downstream. As she watched, most of the clutch jerked itself into the current and floated out of sight. Two, however, never moved, and they seemed wrinkled as well. Could they be dead? If so, there’d be no harm in her taking one out of the water, would there? She got up and considered the underbrush around her. Nearby she found a poker tree, so-called because its skinny orange branches stuck straight out from its fleshy squat trunk. She cut off a pair, then stuck them into the mossy bank next to the shrivelled pearls as a marker. If they hadn’t moved on by morning, she promised herself, she would consider examining one.
When Ammadin returned to camp, she found the men back already; they’d had splendid luck and surprised a herd of grassars as it left a stream. Out behind the tents they hunkered down to skin and clean the two kills, both of them fat from the summer forage and a good seven feet long from nose to the base of the tail. The children clustered round to watch with eager eyes for the fresh-roasted dinner ahead of them. Three of the men had already skinned one saur and were butchering the meat with their long knives.
Off to one side Zayn was kneeling beside a three-horned male with a skinning knife in his hand. Orador was standing over him and telling him how to separate the red-and-purple striped hide from its previous owner. Ammadin strolled over to join them.
‘What’s this?’ she said. ‘Did Zayn make his first kill?’
‘More or less,’ Orador said, smiling. ‘Someone else’s arrows crippled it – Grenidor, I think it was – but Zayn’s the one whose spear finished it off. Took some doing, too, so we awarded the kill to him.’
Zayn looked up, and she noticed the left side of his face, swollen maroon and purple around a bruise in the shape of a grassar hoof.
‘His first kill is an important point in a man’s life.’ Ammadin dabbled her forefinger in the bull’s dark blood and marked a cross on Zayn’s forehead. ‘You’ve brought home food for the comnee. The gods will honour you.’
‘Thank you.’ Zayn ducked his head in acknowledgment. ‘The Wise One honours me as well, and I’m pleased I could help feed us all.’
He’d answered as nicely as any comnee boy. Ammadin suddenly wondered just how and why he knew so much about Tribal ways.
While Orador taught him how to draw the carcass, Ammadin hung around and watched. Zayn was starting to attract her, with his exotic Kazrak features and lean well-muscled body. Years before, she’d taken a few casual lovers, just as any girl of the Tribes
