“Come to the place of the Sasku,” he said. “We will talk with the manduktos. They have knowledge of many things, and if there is a way across the desert they will know about it. If the sammads do go there you will have the twin barriers of the desert and the mountains behind you. The murgu will never cross both of them. You can forget them then.”
“I would like to. More than I desire anything else I would like to put them from my mind during the day, from my dreams at night. Yes, let us go and talk with the dark ones.”
Herilak was not like the other hunters who laughed at the Sasku who worked here in the fields, strong males digging in the dirt like women instead of stalking game as real hunters should. He had eaten the food raised here, had lived well through the Winter because of it. When Kerrick showed him how the plants were grown and stored, he listened with close attention.
He saw how the tagaso was dried, with the tasseled, yellow ears still on the stalks, then hung from wooden frames.
There were rats here, mice as well, who would have grown fat on this provident food supply had it not been for the donsemnilla who kept their numbers down. These sleek, long-nosed creatures, many of them with their young hanging on their mother’s backs, tiny tails wrapped about her larger one, stalked the vermin in the darkness, killed and ate them.
They stopped to watch the women who were scraping the dried kernels from the ears, then grinding them between two stones. This flour was mixed with water and heated before the fire. Herilak ate some of the cakes, still hot enough to burn his fingers, dipping them in honey and biting on the hot peppers that brought pleasureful tears to his eyes.
“This is good food,” he said.
“And always abundant. They plant it, harvest it, and store it as you have seen.”
“I have. I have also seen that as they depend on the green fields, so do the fields depend on them. They must stay in this one place forever. That is not for everyone. If I could not roll my tent and move on I do not think I would find life worth living at all.”
“They might feel the same way about you. They might miss returning to the same fire in the evening, not seeing the same fields in the morning.”
Herilak thought about this and nodded agreement. “Yes, that is possible. You are the one who sees things in a different way, Kerrick, perhaps because of all those years living with the murgu.”
He broke off when he heard someone calling Kerrick’s name. One of the Sasku women was hurrying towards them, crying out in a shrill voice. Kerrick looked worried. “The baby has been born,” he said.
He ran off and Herilak followed at a more leisurely pace. Kerrick was concerned because Armun had been so upset of late. She wept daily and all of her earlier fears had returned. The baby would be a girl and would look like her, then it would be laughed at and scorned just as she had been. Kerrick could do nothing to change her mind; only the birth itself would remove her black doubts. The women here were skilled in these things, he had been told. He sincerely hoped that they were as he clambered up the notched log to their quarters.
One look at her face told him all that he need to know. All was well at last.
“Look,” she said, unwrapping the white cloths that swaddled the infant. “Look. A boy to make his father proud. As handsome and as strong.”
Kerrick, who had no experience of infants, thought it wrinkled, bald, and red, nothing like him at all, but had the intelligence to keep his opinions to himself.
“What is his name to be?” Armun asked.
“Whatever you like for now. He will be given a hunter’s name when he is grown.”
‘Then we will name him Arnwheet, for I wish him to be as strong as that bird, as handsome and as free.”