“Watch over the cattle and the sheep. Be with my wife and children. In the time I was gone, my son reached the age when all Naumkib are initiated into the lore of adults. That is a task I must begin tomorrow.”
“Hoy, I wish I could stay, and I don’t want to offend you, but I’m really not interested in sitting through some quaint ceremony where a boy learns how to castrate cattle or dock sheep or paint his face with vegetable dyes.” With a last regretful grin, he spun on his sandals and headed north, pausing once at the top of a ridge to turn and wave. Then he vanished, welcomed and swallowed up by the sea fog that hung perpetually over the coast north of the village, and Ehomba saw him no more.
* * * *
On the morning of the following day the herdsman took his son Daki out of the village, heading inland. Mirhanja packed them a lunch and bade them good-bye, but not after extracting from her husband a promise to be back well before nightfall.
The trail father and son trod was narrow and overgrown in many places with weeds and vines, so that it was difficult to see. It wound its obscure way into the grassy hills behind the village until it terminated next to a plain rock face at the end of a shallow canyon that looked exactly like a hundred other similar heavily eroded canyons. Clearing away some brush and dead twigs, Ehomba exposed a narrow, dark opening in the weathered granite. Preparing torches from the ample supply of dead wood that lay scattered about, the two men entered.
The downward-sloping floor of the tunnel had been worn smooth by centuries of running water and sandaled feet. They walked for an indeterminate time before their torches were no longer necessary. Daylight filtered in through cracks in a ceiling that was now high overhead. A little farther on, the tunnel widened and became a chamber. Very soon thereafter it widened a great deal more, and became something else entirely.