Forest Mage (The Soldier Son Trilogy #2)

Forest Mage (The Soldier Son Trilogy #2) Page 60

His smiled broadened. “You’ll see.” He went back into his apartments, and then emerged with a fat set of saddlebags slung over his shoulder. I wanted to ask what was in them, but I knew he was enjoying making his revelations as we went along. I held my tongue.

It had been some days since I’d ridden Sirlofty. Ever a willing mount, he reached for the bit, eager to go. Duril had the use of a clay-colored gelding. As we stood together in the paddock, saddling our mounts, we both glanced at each other. Then, as one, we made the “keep fast” sign over the cinches. I feared it would soon be an empty ritual, with no more true power than the acorns that some troopers carried for luck in finding shade at the day’s end. We mounted, he took the lead, and I followed.

We struck the river road and traveled east for a short way before Duril turned his horse away from the river to follow a dusty, rutted trail. We topped a small rise, and in the distance I saw the Bejawi village. An upthrust of stone granted it some respite from the endless sweep of the prairie winds. Brush grew in the shelter of the stone barrier, and even a few trees. My father had chosen the location for it and laid out the original village for them. My father’s men had built the dozen houses that stood in two neat rows. At least twice that number of traditional Bejawi tents surrounded the houses. “Is that where we’re going? The Bejawi village?”

Duril gave a nod, silently watching me.

“Why?”

“Talk to some Kidona there.”

“In the Bejawi village? What are they doing there? Kidona and Bejawi are traditional enemies. And the Kidona don’t have villages. The only reason the Bejawi live here is that my father built it for them and they had nowhere else to go.”

“And wasn’t that a rousing success?” Duril asked with quiet sarcasm.

I knew what he meant, but I was still a bit shocked to hear him say something even mildly negative about my father.

In the era before the Gernian expansion the Plainspeople had been nomads. Different tribes followed different livelihoods. Some herded sheep or goats. Others followed the migrations of the herd deer that roamed the plains and plateaus, supplementing that meat with the seasonal gardens they planted in one season and harvested in another. Some of them built temporary mud huts along the river, little caring that they did not last long. The Plainspeople had few towns or what we Gernians would recognize as one. They built a few monuments, such as the Dancing Spindle. They kept rendezvous points where they came together each year to trade and negotiate marriages and truces, but for the most part they wandered. To a Gernian eye, it meant that the plains remained an empty place, unclaimed and scarcely used by the migratory folk who criss-crossed it in patterns that were generations old. Such land was ripe for settling, awaiting development of its full potential. The Plainsmen, I suspected, saw it differently.

Our “tame” Bejawi, as my father referred to them, were an experiment that had largely failed. He went into it with good intentions. When he set out to save them, the Bejawi had been reduced to mostly women, children, and old men. The Bejawi had been herders; killing their herds and a generation of their men had been the fastest way to subdue them. Deprived of their livelihood, the Bejawi were reduced to being thieves and beggars. My father took them in. Not all of them were willing to surrender their old ways in exchange for what he offered. My father bribed them with his promise that he would not let them starve. He had a village built for them, two rows of simple sturdy cottages. He gave them two teams of oxen, a plow, and seed for a crop.

Within two weeks, they had eaten the oxen and most of the seed grain. He then gave them goats, with far better success. Perhaps the goats reminded them of the woolly antelope they had once tended. Those creatures were extinct now, slaughtered during our running battles with the Bejawi. The boys took the goats to pasture each day and brought them back. The animals yielded meat, hides, and milk. When last I had discussed them with my father, he admitted that he still had to supplement their food supplies, but that some of the women were learning to make a cheese that he hoped they would be able to market. But in other areas, his success was more tarnished. A people who had no traditions of living in a settled village, they were used to moving on when a piece of land became tired of them.

The “village” stank. The smell of it hung on the still summer air. The tidy little cottages my father had erected with such pride were now derelict shacks. The Bejawi had no concept of how to maintain them. After several seasons of hard use had ruined the cottages, they had returned to their tents and set up a secondary settlement around the row of cottages. Offal and garbage, a problem that nomads left behind for the elements and scavengers to deal with, were heaped between the moldering cottages or piled into noxious waste pits. The children played in the garbage-strewn street, tangle-haired moppets with scabby faces and dirty hands. Few of the young men stayed once they became adults. Too many of the girls went to Franner’s Bend to work as whores as soon as they were developed enough to pass themselves off as women. They returned to the village with their half-blood offspring when their brief blossoming of beauty had been eroded by the hard life of a post whore. The village my father had built never developed beyond houses to live in. There was no store, no school, nothing that offered the people anything beyond eating and sleeping indoors. It was a place where people waited, but did not know what they were waiting for.