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. 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.