Forest Mage

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 ru

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 Fra

Yet the Bejawi were not a foolish people, nor were they stupid. They were not even a dirty people when they followed their own ways. They had been dealt a hard blow by fate, and had not, as yet, discovered how to recover. I wondered if they ever would, or if they would vanish, leaving only a legend of what they had once been. Once they had been a proud folk, renowned for their beauty and handiwork.

I had read accounts of them written by Darsio, a merchant trader who had bartered with the Plainspeople in the old days before the Gernian expansion. His writing always made me wish I had been alive then. The descriptions of the Bejawi men in their flowing white robes mounted on their swift horses leading their people, while the women, the children, and the elderly followed, some shepherding the animals and others on the sand sleds pulled by their sturdier draft animals, were the stuff of epic poetry. The women manufactured beads from a certain petrified tree stone, and this jewelry had been the trade good that Darsio had sought from them. They made delicate ornaments from bird bone and feathers, charmed to bring good luck to the owner. Every woman of marriageable age wore a veritable cloak of beads and ornaments and bells. Some of the cloaks, Darsio wrote, were passed down for generations. The children, he wrote, were exceptionally beautiful, open-faced and bold, easily laughing, the treasure of their people. The Bejawi flocks were a peculiar heavy-bodied antelope, prized for the thick undercoat they grew for the winter and shed in spring. This lightweight, warm wool was the basis of Bejawi textiles at the time of Darsio’s writings. The first time I had visited the Bejawi village with my father, that romantic image was what I had expected to see. I had come away disappointed and oddly shamed. I had no wish to visit the village again, but my curiosity was piqued by Sergeant Duril’s assertion that Kidona were there. I knew the Bejawi hated the Kidona with a loathing that went back generations.

Every creature has a predator that preys on it. The Bejawi had the Kidona. The Kidona did not herd or harvest or hunt. They raided. They had always been raiders, descending on trading caravans or summer villages, or they stole, creeping up on herds, flocks, and tents to take whatever they needed. By their tradition, it was their right to do so. They traveled constantly on their potbellied striped-legged taldi, creatures that had little of a horse’s beauty, but even less of a horse’s weaknesses.

Dewara had been Kidona. I touched the double ridges on my ear, the healed scars from the notches he’d cut there when I’d disobeyed him. The man had starved and brutalized me, and then, in a turnabout that still baffled me, he had befriended me and attempted to induct me into his people’s culture and religion. He’d drugged me into a shamanic trance, and in that trance I had first encountered Tree Woman. That spirit journey had changed my life and warped my concept of reality. All of it had been my father’s doing. He hadn’t really wanted me to be Dewara’s student so much as he’d hoped Dewara’s harsh treatment of me would finally force me to make my own decisions and stand on my own two feet.

Well, I supposed it had, but not in the way my father had hoped, nor in any way that had brought me confidence or satisfaction in my life.

I had come to a deep understanding of Kidona ways before Dewara and I had parted. Theirs was a strange morality, in which the clever thief was held in high esteem, and the clumsy one could claim no protection from anyone’s vengeance. Dewara paid great respect to any man who could beat him, and disdained any fellow he could dominate. Prosperity was the equivalent of the blessing of his strange gods, and thus the opinion of a wealthy man was not to be disputed, while a poor man, no matter how experienced or kindly, was seen as a fool, unloved by the gods. Despite their skewed beliefs, or perhaps because of them, the Kidona were a tough, resourceful, and savagely efficient people. Even though Dewara had damaged my life, I grudgingly admired him, in the same way that one might admire any exceptionally competent predator, without any element of fondness or trust.

Sergeant Duril hadn’t answered my most important question. I asked it again. “Why are Kidona in the Bejawi village?”

Sergeant Duril cleared his throat. “I suppose your father didn’t write to you about it. It was an ugly incident, while you were away at school. Not too long after you’d left, farms around here began to lose stock. At first we thought it was wolves returning to this territory. Then someone pointed out that wolves leave carcasses, and we hadn’t found any. The Bejawi were blamed at first, because of some trouble awhile back, but there was no sign of them having more meat than they should.

“Well, when the dust settled, it turned out that Kidona were up to their old tricks. A band of them camping mostly out of sight of settled places had been raiding flocks and herds and gardens. They got bold and took a dozen yearlings from a herd that belonged to the garrison at Fra