Bazza'Jo

Chapter 2

"You could ask Nana Lalia," Ibi suggested, watching Raina play with the furry tube. Raina made a sour face. She knew what Nana Lalia would do: she'd confiscate her treasure.

"I could ask Marko." she retorted. She turned the pouch over in her hands, admiring the pattern. She had been right: it wasn't a dead animal. Instead it was something made from the skin of a dead animal, and no animal she could even imagine. This thing had hand-sized blue-black splotches on a background of lighter shades of blue-grey that ranged from the dark of the sky at dusk to the near-white of the smoke of a green log. It had been beautiful.

Raina had to admit it also made a beautiful pouch. That was what the hide tube must be; some kind of long, thin pouch. There was a strap at either end that tapered off into thin, worn-looking tips. Raina tied the straps together to form a loop and slung the whole over her shoulder experimentally. It was a funny design for a purse - Baz would pour out of it at this angle. Of course, it wasn't a Baz pouch. That much Raina knew for sure. Way up in the trees like that, it had to belong to the Padmen.

Raina knew little enough about the wild Padmen of the forest, only what she could coax out of their Padman servants. Nana Lalia was proud of her people, but acted as if giving Raina too much information would result in her running off into the East Wood, never to return. Marko was even less forthcoming, and only spoke of the people of the woods in disdainful terms. Real information was in short supply, but Raina knew three things for sure: wild Padmen didn't use Baz at all, either to Cast or to eat; Padmen would hunt animals using bows and arrows, and Padmen lived high up in the trees deep in the Padravana Forest.

"But why would they be this close to town?" Raina asked herself out loud. Ibli answered the non-sequiteur with a shrug. She had always been able to follow Raina's thoughts, even when she didn't speak them out loud.

"Markus is probably at the warehouses with the new shipment," Ibli pushed a strand of her loose white hair behind one ear and stood up. "Nana's at the house." Raina rocked to her feet too.

"I'm sneaking in the back door." she informed her sister. She pulled open her Baz pouch with two fingers and peered in and groaned. "Do you have any Drifters? I'm down to my last few." Ibli tugged open her pouch and fished out a small handful of assorted grains. She pulled the foggy green Drifters out from among the multicoloured selection one at a time and handed them to Raina, who accepted them with relief.  She added them to her collection, planning to use them when they were closer to the house. 

Raina hiked her new fur pouch up higher on her shoulder as they turned to leave and felt the slightest thump of something jostling inside it. She paused a moment to shake the mystery object out, only to have it bite the flesh of her hand when she caught it. A thumb-sized triangular knife sliced her palm cleanly where it landed. Raina gave a cry and let the knife fall to the ground, and stared at her bleeding hand in surprise. Then she bent to carefully scoop up the little black, metallic tooth and slipped it carefully back into the hide pouch. Another question, she thought.

*

Raina and Ibli waded through the uncut Baz crops that extended from the edge of town all the way to the edge of the North Wood in familiar silence. Ibli had never been a big talker, and so Raina occupied herself by watching the farmers and Padmen labourers harvesting the last of the season's crops.

The tall, grassy stalks of Green Baz lay in heaps at the end of the shorn rows, where they would eventually be gathered, threshed, and boxed up to be shipped out to Dhalai. There they would be cleaned and packed into perfect crates stamped with the Bazza'Jo logo. To Raina the most maddening part of the cycle was that the crates would often then be shipped back to Fort Arnisson to be sold. No matter how often her father explained the reasons to her, Raina still thought it was fantastically stupid that they couldn't just keep the Baz they grew here. She took no small amount of satisfaction in occasionally raiding the ripe crops of the farmers; Casting Drifters to creep through the fields, shaving a pouchful of ripe grains off the stalk and dashing out into the woods before she could be caught.