The Fire Queen

Chapter 4

One of the buffalos that were killed during the hunt we gave to the bandits, with whom we had been trading since we'd first started hunting shortly after the spring thaw. The woman that we had first met on our journey to the Northlands was the one that we always dealt with and every time that she came to the settlement to find out what we had to offer she would make a point of asking me how strong I'd gotten. Once, she asked my father if she could spar with me so she could see for herself how strong I was and we sparred with wooden swords for a few minutes. I did my best to show her how much I'd learned and how strong I'd become but she was so powerful, more powerful than my father even, that I doubted she could gauge my abilities at all. After our sparring session she told me that my training was progressing well and that if I remained diligent in my training I would grow up to be a formidable warrior. My father had been watching our session and invited her to eat lunch with us. There were so many things that I wanted to know about her that I was always too shy to ask; I didn't even know her name, which I learned during that lunch was Uraia. She was Okwari chief Kendor's daughter and had left the tribe and joined the bandits to see more of the world besides just the Northlands. As a bandit her talents had been recognized and she had quickly risen to become one of their leaders. She had not left the Okwari clan acrimoniously and returned regularly to the village to see her friends and family there. I told her that I was curious to see how the Okwari lived and she promised to take me with her to the village the next time she came to trade with us.

Through trading with the bandits we were able to obtain many of the tools that we needed for crafting wood, quarrying stone and for performing other important tasks, which was important because as my father predicted, other exiles as well as refugees started to make their way north. The settlement was capable of absorbing a few more but soon we would be at our limit, so it was critical that we started expanding the settlement.

Uraia returned to the settlement a week later. She had come to take me to the Okwari village like she had promised and to give me a present: a teewah chick. It was impossible to tame a grown teewah, she explained to me, if you wanted to have a teewah for a partner you had to raise one from when it was a chick or make a contract with one using a binding stone. The bandits got theirs by raiding their nests. Every spring when the eggs hatched they would raid their nests and steal about three or four, not enough to affect the population. I left the chick with my father to take care of for me while I was gone and left with Uraia on the back of her teewah. The teewah's speed was unreal, at full speed it was easily more than twice as fast as a horse. As big as I thought the Northlands were from our journey to the settlement, my journey to the Okwari village with Uraia opened my eyes to the true vastness of this land. Riding with Uraia we passed rivers, lakes and forests that were all home to animals that I'd never seen before. Whenever we came across one such animal Uraia would stop and allow me time to observe them for a short while. While I was watching some white wolves drinking at the far shore of a lake, Uraia explained to me that the Okwari live according to one core principle: that you don't take what you don't need and whatever you do take you give back in some way, and in doing so the balance is maintained. This was something that we needed to remember as more exiles and refugees arrived and our settlement grew.

We reached the Okwari village just before nightfall. I was exhausted when we arrived and was carried into one of the huts by Uraia where I fell asleep. I got my first real look at the Okwari village the next morning when I woke up. I emerged from the hut that Uraia had put me in and, although dawn had only just broken, much of the village was already at work on their first tasks of the day. Feeling out of place, I looked around for Uraia. She had been waiting for me and was close by. When she saw me she came over to me and brought me my breakfast.

"Here, I kept it warm for you," she said, handing me a bowl.

The bowl that she handed me was filled with warm meat and potato stew. I ate my first spoonful and was overwhelmed by the deep flavor of it.

"It's good, isn't it? We use herbs, mushrooms and other ingredients that we gather in the forests to add flavor; you can't find those ingredients anywhere else but here."

I gobbled down my bowl of stew and went back into the hut to get ready for my first day among the Okwari. When I went back outside six men carrying spears walked past on teewahs.

"Where are they going?" I asked Uraia.

"They're going hunting."

"Can we go too?" I asked, fascinated to see how they hunted.

"Sure, but we have to keep our distance."

Uraia and I went to get her teewah and we set off after the hunting party. The Okwari were all large and powerful like Uraia, this allowed them to hunt with spears rather than with bows. Because of the Okwari's power and the teewah's speed, they were able to hunt without any fear of the buffalo. With their big spears they were able to easily kill a buffalo with one throw, and when the herd turned on them their speed was no match for the teewah's. They'd kill a buffalo and run away, then when the herd had given up on chasing them they'd retrieve their spear from the carcass and go back for another kill. The six men that took on the herd did so with perfect synchronicity and managed to bring down twenty buffalo with ease in just minutes. They transported the carcasses using horse-drawn carriages like we did. Ten carcasses went back to Uraia's village and the other ten were shared with the other villages.

"How many villages are there?" I asked Uraia on the way back.

"There are over a hundred, spread out all across the Northlands. We all share with the villages that are closest to us."

Back at the village, I was free to roam and learn as much about the Okwari as I could. It turned out I was right, they did keep livestock. There were three large pens full of buffalo, and one smaller pen that had around twenty teewahs in it. The buffalo that they kept as livestock was what they ate during the winter; during the rest of the year they hunted and this allowed their livestock herds to be replenished by new calves in time for winter. In addition to the huts that were similar to what we had found when we arrived at the settlement, the village also had a large communal building that was primarily used during the winter, when all of the villagers moved out of their huts and moved into the communal building to enjoy greater warmth. The communal building was built differently than the huts. It's walls were made of two layers of stonework between which was a thick mixture of straw and wool that the buffalo shed during spring. This mixture between the walls sealed the body heat from the villagers within the building. There were pieces of land in the village where crops were being grown but it was small subsistence farming, nothing like what my father had planned for our settlement.

I spent hours roaming the village and despite being an outsider there was nobody in the village that looked at me or treated me funny, which, Uraia explained, was because they knew my father and liked and trusted him. When I returned to the settlement the next day with Uraia, it was with a greater appreciation for the kind of life that we could build for ourselves here in the Northlands.