19. Nothing to Lose
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| "Dindi" by Tara Maya |
Dindi
…but also makes you want to rage and weep because it reminds you the enemy has captured your cousins, your friends.
A
strange thing happens. You’re terrified, disoriented, humiliated,
helpless, panting with exhaustion, focused on trying to place one foot
at a time while avoiding the switch. You’re also angry. As your hearing
and sense of balance returns, your anger creeps up on you, growing
fiercer, until it strangles your fear.
Despite
the enemy’s precautions, your woodcraft whispers certain secrets. The
brush of the air on your skin, the texture and tilt of the ground, these
tell you you’re heading west, toward the ocean.
You
know you will be sold as a sacrificial slave, a mariah, as soon as they
leave the boarders of your clan and tribe, too far away for your kin to
find or avenge you. Obedience doesn’t bake well in your oven; you’re
certain you wouldn’t last long as a slave. They warn you they will kill
you if you don’t do what they want, that your life is worth less to them
than a fistful of seed. They call you wormbait, carion.
Their aim is to make you think you are going to die, and they succeed.
So you have nothing left to lose.
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| "Kavio" by Tara Maya |
Chapter Two
Rover
Kavio
Kavio stood on the balcony of his father’s house, back in the shadows, and the mob hadn’t seen him yet. That couldn’t last.
The
mob filled the dusty streets between the blocks of adobe houses.
Torches waved like luminous war banners. The throng had been gathering
every evening for days before the trial, shouting for blood. Wild fae
whirled around them, vicious little Red and Orange imps, unseen by most
of the people in the crowd.
“Death to Kavio! Death to Kavio!” the people shouted.
Kavio
inhaled the dry summer night. The decree of the Society of Societies
might have been commuted to exile, but he still had to get out of the
tribehold alive. Now that he faced a mob ready to rend him limb from
limb, he found he preferred life in exile to death after all.
Father,
still in his face paint and dance regalia, went to the edge of the
balcony. Like the kiva, the adobe house had been painted white and the
mud walls of the balcony rose organically out of the lower story of the
house. For defensive purposes, none of the houses in the tribehold had
doors on the first story. Ladders allowed access between the balcony and
the street.
Father held up his arms to silence the crowd. It took some time to still their chanting.
“Your cries have been heard. Justice is served!” he shouted. “Kavio has been judged guilty. He will be exiled!”
This appeased few in the mob.
“In the Bone Whistler’s day he would have been stoned!” some- one shouted.
Thunderous
rage contorted Father’s face, but he never lost his self-control. “The
Bone Whistler is dead and so are his ways. The judgment is exile.”
* * *
TO BE CONTINUED
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