“I hadn’t thought about that.”
“And now we must deal with it. It doesn’t matter what the terl told Henta. Word of what you said will spread. That sort of thing cannot be kept secret for long. And when it does it will spread fear in its wake. We must be prepared for that.” He gave Karliss a meaningful look.
“What should I do?” Karliss asked. He felt incredibly young and stupid.
Yeke tapped the parchment that Karliss was holding. “Figure out how to use those words. They are a powerful weapon, but one only you can hope to control.”
He left the yurt. Karliss stood there wondering how he could be so stupid. He’d let the old woman upset him, and now he’d gone and made everything worse. Yeke was right. He should have kept his mouth shut and only shared the information that the others needed to know. Maybe he shouldn’t even have told his friends.
He suddenly felt very tired, the strain and exhaustion of his journey hitting him all at once. He wanted nothing more than to lie down and sleep for a very long time. Maybe when he woke up things would be better.
╬ ╬ ╬
When Karliss walked up Nergui was working on the stays for Karliss’ yurt, hammering one of the stakes deeper into the ground. He glanced up, saw who it was, and jumped to his feet.
“Karliss! You came back!” Nergui dropped the hammer he was holding and charged Karliss, nearly knocking him down in his enthusiasm. “I’m so glad to see you!”
Karliss managed to extricate himself from Nergui’s embrace and gave him a smile that felt mostly genuine. “I told you I would, didn’t I?”
“But it was so long. It felt like forever.” Nergui’s old, battered felt hat was sitting askew on his head, and he was smiling broadly, showing the gap between his front teeth.
“The mountains are far away.” Karliss looked at his yurt. It was set up solidly, the door facing east. “You set up my yurt.”
“I did! How can you use it if it’s rolled up?” Nergui shook his head at Karliss’ foolishness.
“But how did you know I was coming back today?”
“I didn’t,” Nergui said stoutly. “I set it up every time we made camp. So it would be ready when you needed it.”
“That’s…” Karliss paused, feeling a little choked up. He was moved by Nergui’s simple enthusiasm and honest concern for him. “That’s really nice of you.”
Nergui closed one eye and looked at Karliss. “I kept an eye on everything the whole time. It’s all safe, you’ll see.”
“I don’t doubt that at all. No one is better at taking care of things than you are.”
“Yes. It’s true. You need Nergui. He takes care of the little things so that you can fight demons. Did you fight any demons while you were gone?”
“Not demons, but I did have to fight something.”
Nergui’s eyes got big. “Tell me. I want to hear everything.”
“I will. I promise. But first I’d like to lie down for a bit. I’m tired.” He turned to the yurt, but Nergui beat him there. He held the door flap back and motioned Karliss to look inside.
“Everything is set up the way you like it,” Nergui said proudly.
Karliss went inside and Nergui followed. His sleeping furs were laid out on a bed of fresh grasses. The boxes and sacks containing the materials for his rituals were set out neatly. There was even a skin of water hanging from the ceiling.
“It’s perfect,” he told Nergui, who beamed proudly.
“You need Nergui,” he said. “I take care of things for you.”
“You’re right. I do.”
“Do you need anything else?”
“Not right now. Maybe later.”
“If you need anything, you yell loud, okay?”
“I will.”
Karliss waited for Nergui to leave, but the man stood there, grinning broadly at him. “There is one thing, Nergui,” he said at last.
“What? Anything.”
“I was going to lie down for a while…”
Nergui looked down at Karliss’ sleeping furs, then back at Karliss. Some of his smile faded. “Not enough grass?”
“No, the grass is fine.”
“Then what?”
“I probably don’t need your help to sleep.” Nergui’s brow creased, but he didn’t move. “I want to be alone now,” Karliss said finally.
“Oh, right. That’s dumb of me. I should have thought of that.” Nergui walked to the door and stepped out. Then he leaned back in.
“I’m so happy you’re back. Everything is going to be fine now, I know it.”
He walked away, whistling happily. Karliss stood in the doorway of his yurt looking after him, wishing it was true. He looked around the camp. He’d missed all of this, the people going about their tasks for the day, the sounds of conversations and laughter. Two middle-aged women walked by, carrying a green hide between them. They both smiled at him and said, “Tlacti.” It felt good to be home.
But would it last? He’d come home worrying about what Kasai was going to do next. He’d never dreamed that he’d have to face what had happened with Henta in the council meeting. How long before it got around the camp? How long before the friendly smiles turned into something else? How many would turn on him? Yeke was right. He should have kept his mouth shut.
An elderly woman walked by carrying a leather pail of water. Her name was Irme, and she was a close friend of Henta’s. He greeted her, and though she greeted him in return, it seemed to him that she had a sour look on her face when she did. Was it already starting? Or was he imagining it? He closed the flap and went to his bed.
Chapter Thirty-five
Karliss lay down on his bed and stared at the ceiling. He’d spent so much effort getting home. He and his friends had talked about it incessantly the past few days, what it would be like to sleep inside again, to have enough to eat, to see friends and family. Now he was here, and he wished he was somewhere else. He could hear the aranti in the distance, babbling to each other, flitting about with no fears, no worries. He wished he was one of them. Then he could be free of all this.
He fell asleep for a time. When he awakened, he found a bowl with some meat pies wrapped in a cloth outside his yurt. The pies were still a little warm. Nergui must have left them. After taking the first bite, Karliss suddenly realized how hungry he was and polished the food off quickly. Once he was full he felt a lot more positive. Things would work out somehow, he told himself. Henta would calm down. He’d learn how to use the new words. It was even possible that Kasai would leave them alone now. After all, the Guardian had made no moves against the clan since the one attack.
He went looking for his mother. He found her down by the river, grinding seed pods and washing the husks away in the river. She set the basket down when he walked up and turned to him.
“You’ve gotten taller,” she told him.
“I don’t think so. I wasn’t gone that long.”
“No, I’m certain of it. You grew up. My boy went away, and a young man returned in his place.” She wiped her eyes.
“Don’t you think you’re being a little dramatic?” he asked, rolling his eyes.
She raised one eyebrow and smiled at him. “I’m your mother. I can be as dramatic as I want.” She patted him gently on the cheek.
“Walk with me.” She hiked up her skirts, and he followed her as she waded across the river. On the far side was a low rise, not high enough to be called a hill, but high enough that they could look out over the camp.
For a time they stood there. Munkhe said nothing, only stared off into the distance. Karliss shifted restlessly. He wondered why she’d brought him up here. “The grass is so dry this year,” he said, wanting to fill the emptiness with something.
“It hasn’t rained since the Gathering,” Munkhe replied. “The fires this summer will be bad.” Wildfires were a serious danger on the steppes when it was too long between the rains. Clans had been decimated by them before, when the wind shifted at the wrong time, and the flames
caught them. She gave him a sidelong look. “People are saying it’s because Erlik Khan is angry with us.”
“After the way the ritual went, I’m not surprised.” During the ritual of appeasement, when it came time to sacrifice a horse to appease Erlik Khan, a lightning bolt killed the horse.
“They’ve been waiting anxiously for you to return. A lot of people have been frightened that you wouldn’t.”
Karliss felt the weight of his responsibilities pressing down on him.
“It’s a lot, isn’t it? Everyone looking to you to save them,” she said gently.
“It is.”
“It’s strange for me. On the one hand you are our tlacti, and your power is undeniable. But at the same time I look at you and see my little boy, the one who was always getting into trouble.”
“I wish I was still him.”
She took his hand. “I do too.”
“Why did we come up here?”
She didn’t respond for a while, and when she did her voice was subdued. “Dark days are coming. We all know that. What we don’t know is how it will go. We don’t even know if we’ll survive.” He tried to interrupt her, to comfort her, but she stopped him. “No, let me finish. There’s no way to know what will happen. I accept that. I think I wanted to come up here with you, so I could spend a little more time with my boy before there’s no chance to do it again.” She squeezed his hand tighter and ruffled his hair with her free hand. “I wanted to have some moments with you before the world takes you away again.”
“Maybe it won’t be that bad.”
“Maybe not. Either way, all we can do is steal the moments we can.”
They stood there in silence then. Munkhe stared at the horizon where some birds were circling. Karliss looked at the camp, his people going about their everyday lives. It all looked so ordinary, so timeless. How much longer would it last?
Out of nowhere, Munkhe chuckled. Karliss looked at her. “I was thinking of the time you took your father’s basket, the one his mother made for him, down to the river and used it to catch fish in. Do you remember that? He was so angry, and I had to try so hard not to laugh. The look on your face, you couldn’t understand how he could not see that fishing was a perfect use for it.”
Karliss smiled, reliving the memory. “I remember. He didn’t stay mad for too long.”
“As I recall, he took you down to the creek and tossed you in, and you two ended up having a water fight. Ganbold got in on it too. Narantse cried because she was too little to join in.”
Once again, they simply stood there, enjoying the afternoon. It was unnaturally hot, but not unpleasantly so, and there was a touch of wind to cool things down.
“What’s that?” Karliss pointed to the western horizon. Far in the distance was a brown haze, a low-lying mass that looked almost like a fog bank, though it was the wrong color.
They stared at it for a while as it drew closer and larger. It was huge, covering half the horizon. All of a sudden Munkhe gasped.
“Locust swarm!”
Without waiting for Karliss, she ran down the slope toward the camp, shouting and waving her arms. Karliss followed. There’d been no locust swarm in his lifetime, but he’d heard the old people talk about them, how they stripped the land as they came, eating the grasses and other plants down to nothing.
That wasn’t all they did either. Their jaws were sharp, and they would chew on exposed flesh if given the chance. Karliss had grown up hearing stories about yak calves who weren’t old enough to run with the herd being found dead afterwards. And there was one particularly frightening story spread by the older boys about a little boy who tried to hide in some bushes when a locust swarm passed by. According to them, when they found the boy the next day there was nothing left of him but his bones.
By the time Munkhe and Karliss reached the camp, the word had already spread, and people were reacting. The men were racing towards the herds—most of them riding bareback, not wanting to lose the time needed to saddle their steeds—stirring the animals to flight. Women were gathering up their children and bundling them into the yurts, while others helped the elderly. There was a flurry of tightening of yurt stays and weighing down loose edges to keep the insects out.
Karliss hesitated when they reached the camp, not sure what to do. People were running everywhere. A young woman ran by calling for her children, while another went by in the other direction carrying a child under each arm. Munkhe saw his indecision and grabbed his arm.
“Grab as much food as you can and get it into a yurt!” she yelled, and then took off running, calling for Narantse.
Karliss ran for the cook wagon. The sound of the locusts was audible now, a low, whirring hum that got louder by the second. The swarm was swallowing the horizon, a blurred wall of flying insects too high to shoot an arrow over. He nearly tripped over a small child as he rounded a wagon. It was a little boy. He was crying and looking about in confusion.
Karliss came to a stop and doubled back. “Let me help you!” he cried, picking up the child. The boy wailed and squirmed in his grip.
But he didn’t know where to take the boy. He stood there looking around, wondering which yurt was his. A woman came running up, yelling, and the child reached for her. Karliss handed the boy over and headed for the cook wagons again.
Once there he joined others who were frantically grabbing sacks of seeds, dried meats, fish, and flour and carrying it into nearby yurts.
The hum of the swarm was louder now and mixed in with it was a new sound, a frightening clacking, snapping sound. Karliss was carrying some bags of flour when the day suddenly got darker. He looked up and saw that the swarm had blotted out the sun. The entire western horizon was black with the creatures, a dense wall of seething insects.
Briefly he considering calling the wind, wondering if he could use it to blow the swarm away. But the swarm was huge, stretching south and north further than he could see. There was no way he could push the whole thing back. And if he hit it with the wind, what would happen? Would it just swirl the bugs around? He might be able to put up a shield like he did when the sandstorm hit, but his new krysala was in his yurt and by the time he got it out and started the shield it would probably be too late.
He went back to hauling food. Every moment the swarm got closer. The day had grown quite dark. The sound of the locusts was a roar so loud it was deafening. He was picking up another sack when he felt a hand on his shoulder, pulling on him. He turned. It was his mother. She yelled something, but he couldn’t hear her over the deafening roar of the locusts. She put her mouth to his ear.
“Leave it! There’s no time!”
The leading edge of the swarm hit. Locusts smacked into him. One hit him in the eye. Another flew into his open mouth, making him gag. He spat it out and stumbled after Munkhe. One landed on his forearm, and a moment later he felt a sharp pain. He slapped the insect away and saw the spot of blood it left behind. Suddenly the danger posed by these things became much more real.
The locusts got so thick it was hard to see. Karliss ran with his eyes squinted down, his mouth clamped shut, trying to wave the insects away from his face. He almost ran into his mother when she stopped outside the family yurt. She yelled something at him and pulled the flap back. He dove inside. She jumped in right after him, and he helped her fasten the door securely. Narantse got up from where she’d been huddled on her sleeping furs and threw her arms around her mother.
“There’s not time for that right now,” Munkhe told her firmly. “Help me kill the ones that got in.”
“One bit me!” Narantse wailed.
“All the more reason to kill them,” her mother replied, smashing one that landed on her arm. “Use your shoe if you don’t want to touch them with your hand, but get busy killing them or you’ll get bitten a lot more.”
The sides of the yurt reverberated constantly as thousands of locusts slammed into it. Then came a sound unlike anything Karliss had ever heard before. It was the sound of thousands
of tiny claws scrabbling over the yurt. It was truly chilling. It sounded like they were trying to claw their way in.
“I hope Sarnai made it to her yurt okay,” Narantse said. Sarnai was one of Narantse’s friends.
“I’m sure she did,” Munkhe replied. “Karliss, help me with this. The edge has come up here, and they’re starting to get in.”
Karliss helped his mother secure the edge and kill the ones that had gotten in.
“They’d eat us all up if they could, wouldn’t they?” Narantse asked, looking about with big eyes. “And we’d be nothing but bones.”
“Hush. Don’t say that. No one is getting eaten today. Everyone had time to make it to safety.” Karliss wondered if she believed her own words, or if she was only trying to comfort them.
“Are Ata and Ganbold going to be okay?” Narantse asked. “They’re out there with those things.”
“They’ll be fine,” Munkhe replied. “They have horses. Horses are lots faster than locusts.”
“What if they fall off? What then?”
Munkhe gave her daughter a look. “When have you ever known your father or brother to fall off his horse?”
Karliss thought about Nergui. Nergui still shared a yurt with his parents. Hopefully he’d gone there. He hoped he hadn’t gone to Karliss’ yurt, and then panicked when he didn’t find Karliss there.
Then there was nothing left to do but wait. Outside, the insect storm howled unabated. Narantse curled up in her mother’s lap. “Will they eat through the yurt, do you think?”
“No. It doesn’t taste good to them. Stop worrying. They’ll move on soon.”
Karliss wanted to ask how soon, but he didn’t want to upset his sister, so he kept his question to himself. He crouched there in the dim light of the oil lamp and waited for it to pass, thinking how glad he was that the swarm hadn’t come in the morning. He and his friends would have been trapped out in that nightmare. As worn down as their horses were, he didn’t think they could have possibly run from it.
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