Balsa gritted her teeth as the words Jiguro had uttered on his deathbed rang once again in her mind. I’ll sink beneath the Yusa mountains, the mother range, and atone for my sins myself.
“Don’t you see, Balsa? It must be fate that brought you here, so that you, who were trained by Jiguro, should risk your life for Kanbal.”
Balsa looked at him sharply. “Don’t be a fool!” Clenching her teeth, she almost snarled the words at him. “All this country ever gave me were days full of hell. Jiguro brought you misfortune? And who do you think made him do that? I will never believe that Jiguro was wrong. He made the only choice he could. If I were given the same choice, I would do the same thing. How dare you dismiss our lives, all those days of suffering, as ‘fate’!”
Toto recoiled as if he had been struck in the face.
Balsa breathed deeply and struggled to get her feelings under control. Finally she said in a low voice, “If, just if, I should gamble my life on anything, it will not be for Kanbal. It will be for Jiguro, who suffered a living hell until the day he died for the sake of this country.”
Toto remained silent for some time staring at Balsa. Then he spoke. “All right. For Jiguro then. But will you do it?”
Balsa shook her head. “No.”
“Balsa!”
“Enough! Jiguro has already been forced to live through this hell by ‘fate,’ as you would have it. One person is enough. I will not let Kassa repeat the same mistake!”
Her voice split the air like a crack of thunder. When the echo finally faded, a thin voice rang out from above.
“I’ll go.”
Balsa turned around in surprise. A shadow on the east wall stood up. Helped by another figure, he picked his way awkwardly to the grassy floor.
“Kassa …”
Togal flickered in his eyes. Balsa turned back to Toto. “You let him listen to all that?”
The Elder’s face grew stern. “Balsa. You’re forgetting something very important. This isn’t your problem; it’s Kassa’s. And the success or failure of this venture is much more important to Kassa than it is to you. It’s Kassa and his people, not you, who will starve if they get no luisha.”
Balsa looked once again at Kassa. His face was desperately determined. Since Nahna had led him here, he had sat on the rock shelf, sandwiched between the Herder People, who kept him warm, and listened to what was being said below. When he heard about his uncle Yuguro’s scheme, he remembered the words Kahm had said to him the other evening. To gain control over the kingdom beneath the mountains and take all the luisha they wanted: This was the dream of every Kanbalese. But as he listened to Toto’s tale, he had begun to shiver with apprehension. A premonition that Kahm and the others were about to make a terrible mistake — a mistake that could never be made right — grew stronger. Kahm must have felt this too. Why else would he have left Kassa with words that sounded like a last will and testament?
He did not want Kahm to die. And as for famine …
He shuddered. He found it hard to grasp the weight of the responsibility being thrust upon his shoulders. He looked up at Balsa, feeling like he was dreaming. “I’ll go. Even if I have to go alone.”
Looking at his face, Balsa felt fear rise from deep in her chest. As a bodyguard, she had been entrusted with the lives of many others, but never had she been afraid like this, not even when she had protected Prince Chagum, the Guardian of the Spirit. Chagum had had no other choice. And so she had believed that she too had no choice but to risk her life along with him and find a way through.
But this boy was choosing to gamble his life on her of his own accord….
“It’s just me against the best spearmen in Kanbal,” Balsa muttered. “The odds are so great…. I may not be able to save your life. Do you realize what will happen to you then?”
Kassa nodded.
“Do you still want to go?”
“Yes,” he whispered. “I don’t want to watch my people die.”
Laloog was dozing on the couch when Mistress Yuka came to visit. The events of the past few days had left him exhausted. His younger son, Luke, was the current chieftain of the Yonsa clan, and when he heard that the Gate to the Mountain Deep had opened, he immediately sought his father’s advice. As one of the last participants of the previous Giving Ceremony and Elder of the Yonsa clan, Laloog was highly revered. But inwardly, he was exasperated that his son insisted on consulting him about everything from the gifts for the Mountain King to the hospitality that should be offered to the envoys from the capital.
Yesterday they had finally sent off the carts, heavily laden with gifts, and, at last, fatigue overtook the old man. He had found it hard even to get out of bed this morning. He felt himself drawing closer to death a little at a time, but he supposed it could not be helped. After all, he had never expected to live to seventy.
He woke to a knock on the door, but it was a few moments before he could move. “Mmm?” he finally managed to murmur.
“Master Laloog.” It was a young guard from the entrance. “Mistress Yuka from the house of healing is here again.”
Laloog sighed. “Show her in.”
Listening to the young man’s footsteps recede into the distance, Laloog stared moodily into the fire. Lately, he dreamed constantly of his eldest son, Taguru, and that could only be due to the unsettling news that Yuka had brought recently. Her words had stirred up the grief that he had thought buried by time. But if what she had told him was true …
The moment he had seen her six days ago, he had been filled with foreboding. Nothing unsettled Yuka, not even when she had to lop off a patient’s arm, and he had often thought that if she were a man, she would have been an unparalleled warrior. Yet she had rushed into his room with her hair in disarray, and his fears had been immediately confirmed. Greeting him only perfunctorily, she had fixed him with fierce, glittering eyes, and launched into her preposterous tale.
To think that Karuna’s daughter still lives …
Of course, Laloog had not believed her at first. He had tried to convince Yuka that the woman must have been Jiguro’s lover, or that she was manipulating the story of Karuna’s daughter to suit her own designs. But Yuka had merely laughed sharply and shook her head. “It was Balsa,” she said. “You’d recognize her too if you saw her.”
Laloog had only seen Balsa once before, long ago when Karuna, back from the capital, had paid a visit to Laloog’s younger brother, the chieftain. As a Spear, Laloog had also been living in the capital, but he happened to be staying at the chieftain’s hall to attend his nephew’s coming-of-age ceremony. Karuna had brought his three-year-old daughter with him. Her arm was in a sling, and the white bandage stood out against her skin, which was as darkly tanned as a boy’s. Apparently, the first thing she had done on reaching Yuka’s house was to fall from a tree and break her arm. “She looks more like Yuka at the same age than you,” he had told Karuna.
Those were good years, Laloog thought. Karuna was the king’s physician and we were so proud that he came from the Yonsa clan.
Then it had all come tumbling down in a landslide of misfortunes — the death of the king, Jiguro’s flight, Karuna’s murder, and finally the loss of Laloog’s eldest son, Taguru, who left in pursuit of Jiguro, never to return. If, as Yuka claimed, these tragedies had all originated in a plot hatched by King Rogsam …
Laloog recalled King Rogsam’s oily face, and then the face of Jiguro Musa as a youth of sixteen, shining with courage in the Darkness below. He felt as if Jiguro, a man he had hated and tried hard to forget these many years, had suddenly fixed his fearless, determined eyes on him.
He came back to the present at the sound of the door opening. The pungent smell of rubbing ointment preceded Yuka into the room. She came every day on the pretext of treating the pain in his joints.
When she met his eyes, he shook his head gently. “They haven’t caught her yet.”
Rumor had swept through the Yonsa and Musa clans faster than galloping horses: The fugitiv
e captured by the two Musa warriors had slipped from their grasp, badly wounding them both. The news had reached Laloog’s ears the same day it happened. On its heels came a message from Kaguro Musa himself, officially requesting that the woman be apprehended if she fled into Yonsa territory. Further rumors indicated that a massive search launched by Kaguro had been unsuccessful.
Yuka brought a chair over to Laloog’s couch and sat down. She began massaging ointment into his wrinkled elbow with practiced hands. His arm was thin and the muscles were withered, so that the loose, baggy skin moved under her hand each time she ran her fingers over it.
“I hear that Yuguro Musa has already passed through Yonsa territory,” she said.
“Yes, he joined up with the men from our clan. They should reach Yonro territory tomorrow.”
Yuka increased the pressure in her fingers. “I’m sure Kaguro will listen to you now that Yuguro’s gone.”
Laloog looked at her sharply. “Yuka —”
“People are saying that Yuguro left Kaguro’s eldest son behind and took his own son with him instead. In fact, Master Kahm only passed through Yonsa territory this morning. Surely this is a god-given opportunity. Kaguro must have some misgivings.”
Laloog sighed. “You hear everything.”
Yuka smiled. “The waiting room at the house of healing has always been a hotbed of gossip.”
Laloog gazed up at the ceiling. “You would ask me to trigger an avalanche between the Yonsa and Musa tribes? There’s no strength in this old body of mine to stop it once it starts, you know.” He added in a whisper, “I can’t take that risk on something that won’t benefit our clan in any way.”
“You are the clan Elder. The clansmen are your children. Would you stand by and watch your children die?” She scooped up some sticky yellow ointment with her ring finger, then said quietly, “Even now I hate the one who killed my brother. I can still see Karuna’s dead eyes staring into space. Would you forgive the man who made the best young warriors of our clans die for nothing — the man who sent Taguru to his death?”
Laloog roughly brushed her hand away and sat up with a groan. He faced her, glaring. “Where’s the proof? Tell me that. Just where is the proof that will convince our people I should accuse the most powerful man in Kanbal of deception?”
“There is a witness — Balsa. Will you let Yuguro kill her?”
“That’s what I mean. There’s no proof that that woman is telling the truth.” He shook his head. “Yuka, there’s nothing I can do about it. How many times are you going to bring this up?”
She stared straight into his eyes. “As many times as it takes. Do you think I’m going to stand by and let him kill my only niece?”
There must be some way to help Balsa. This thought consumed Yuka both waking and sleeping. But she always came back to that one fatal flaw: There was no way to prove that Balsa was telling the truth.
When she left Laloog’s room and went outside, snow was falling like dust from the silver sky. The men were busy fixing the winter livestock pens to ready them for the goats being herded down from the crags. Soon the mountains would be buried in snow.
Yuka wondered where Balsa was now. Mounting her short, sturdy mare, she headed back to the house of healing through a flurry of powdery flakes.
That night Laloog heard a strange bird calling him in his dreams. He opened his eyes with a start and lay on his bed listening to the faint sound of the wind. The room was dark. The fire had died down to embers that cast only a feeble glow.
Suddenly, he tensed. Through the chimney came a high, thin whistle. When he grasped its meaning, he began to tremble. Thirty-five years ago he had heard that same call in the Mountain Deep: “The People of the Mountain King have come to speak to thee.”
He lay motionless in stunned disbelief. But when he heard it again, he rose from his bed and dressed warmly in seldom-used boots, two pairs of woollen socks, and his thick kahl. Then he went over to the window and opened it as quietly as possible.
A cold, snowy gust blew into the room. The window faced onto the back garden, which was sunk in darkness, but below the windowsill he saw two small bluish-white eyes glowing in the black.
“Welcome, Servant of the Mountain King,” Laloog said in a low voice. “Please come in.”
The villages of Kanbal bustled with activity during Langal Tonoi, the month of the first snow, when the Herders brought the goats down to their winter pens beside the clan settlement. Herder men and boys lived much of the year in simple huts beside the high mountain pastures, while the women lived in houses just outside the village, working in the fields and weaving. But at the beginning of winter, all the clansmen helped tend the goats, and the clanswomen likewise took over the Herder women’s share of the fieldwork, knowing they were busy welcoming their menfolk home.
Kassa too was swept up in the activity. As he gathered his family’s goats, he watched Toto the Elder, Yoyo, and the others joyfully returning to their homes just outside the outer wall of the village. He found it hard to believe that the people rejoicing at this homecoming were the same ones who had crouched with him on the rock shelves only a few nights before.
While it was a season of reunion for the Herder People and their families, it was also the time when most clansmen left their families to seek work in New Yogo. The men’s well-worn kahls, painstakingly waterproofed with grease, hung from the eaves of the clan’s houses, swaying in the wind over small mounds of earth: the graves of the countless children who had died soon after birth. In a poor country like Kanbal, only four out of every ten children survived. Those who died were buried in the shelter of the eaves, where they became guardian spirits watching over the house. The kahls were hung over their graves in hopes that their spirits would slip inside the cloaks, protecting their fathers or brothers on their journeys to foreign lands.
Children now sat by these same graves, rubbing grease into the men’s boots. They talked and laughed with their friends as their fingers worked the leather. They would miss their fathers and brothers during the long winter months, but they accepted their temporary absence as part of life. Nor did the men who would soon be leaving appear sad or gloomy. Working in foreign lands far from their families was hard, but for the young ones, it was also a chance to see the outside world and learn from their elders how to find a little fun. For the older men, it was simply what they did every winter.
Kassa’s father had at first been happy that he could stay home, thanks to the large sum of money they’d received for the luisha. But when he saw his fellow villagers preparing to go, he spent much of that small fortune buying new boots for all of them, probably out of guilt. Driving the goats along the path, Kassa overheard several men talking about Tonno’s gift as they fixed a fence. “It was nice of him,” they said with affection and a trace of humor. “But how like Tonno to worry about what others might think!” Kassa listened with mixed feelings, understanding both the men’s thoughts and his father’s motivations.
As Kassa herded the disgruntled goats into the enclosure, he glanced toward the village gate. According to Toto, the Yonsa clan Elder should arrive sometime today. “Ow!” he yelped as a goat stepped on his foot. He blushed, embarrassed, but fortunately no one else seemed to have noticed.
Just then the shrill blast of a horn split the air. Kassa jumped and looked toward the gate again. Far in the distance, he saw people coming up the road from the valley. A warrior rode ahead, the Yonsa flag tied to his spear flapping in the wind, and behind him rolled a horse-drawn carriage accompanied by a single horseman.
He’s here. The Yonsa Elder really had come to meet Kaguro, just as Toto had said. The village was now astir with excitement at their arrival. As he pushed an escaping goat back into the pen, Kassa hoped with all his heart that the meeting would go well.
Frowning slightly, Kaguro came out to greet his unexpected guest. Guards lined both sides of the road from the gate to the hall as the carriage, flanked by two mounted warriors, drew up to the entrance.
As soon as it halted, a strange woman wrapped in a kahl climbed out quickly and then turned to help Laloog down. She led him forward to stand before the Musa chieftain.
“Master Kaguro,” Laloog said in a rasping voice. “Please forgive me for arriving unannounced.”
Kaguro inclined his head slightly. “No, no, you are welcome,” he said. “Please come inside. We’ll prepare a feast to celebrate your visit.” He turned to lead his guest toward the great hall.
“Just a moment, Master Kaguro. I’ve actually come to discuss something highly confidential.”
Kaguro paused, momentarily discomfited. As one of the last surviving Spears, Laloog was held in high esteem by all the clans, and Kaguro felt a little nervous in his presence. “Ah, I see. Then shall we go to my private chamber?” He led him deeper into the building to his room. He noticed that although Laloog had claimed the discussion was to be confidential, he showed no sign of dismissing the woman by his side.
Once the three were alone in the dimly lit, chilly room, Kaguro hastily added coals to the fire and stirred up the flames. Then he led Laloog over to an armchair. After a brief glance at the woman, he looked at Laloog. “Excuse me, but who is this?”
Laloog returned his gaze steadily. “Let me introduce you. This is Balsa of the Yonsa clan, daughter of Karuna, and Jiguro’s foster child.”
Kaguro reeled backward as if he had been struck. Quietly removing her kahl, Balsa turned to him and bowed slightly.
“Wha — what do you mean by this?” After the first shock of surprise, anger kindled in Kaguro’s eyes. “This woman is a criminal, one I requested you capture to protect the honor of my clan! Why have you —”
Laloog raised his hand abruptly. “Master Kaguro. Will you trust me long enough to hear me out?”
Kaguro clenched his shaking fists and sat down heavily in a chair.
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