"Well the baby is asleep and Thysia wants you to tell her one of your stories before she goes to sleep," Asophra smiled wearily.
Theris set down his drinking bowl, grinning. "Sure."
Asophra paused, seeing something in his eyes. "What are you looking at?"
"Just the most beautiful woman in the world," he said with a goofy grin.
"Stop making fun of me," she laughed. "I'm an old woman."
"Not at all. You're perfect."
"Now I know you're mocking me. Either that, or you're blind."
"No," Theris laughed. "I'm just very, very lucky."
Asophra blushed and looked away.
Though they had been married for two years, he took it as a personal victory that he could still do that to her.
"Where is Iyanni?" Asophra asked.
"Has she not come back in?" Theris looked around their small house. "I'll go find her." He rose and stepped outside, pausing on the threshold to look around the common area. "Iyanni!" he called.
Aulein, his neighbor, sat on a stump outside his house smoking his pipe. "Missing something?"
"You haven't seen my daughter, have you?"
Aulein pointed over his shoulder with his pipe stem. "Last time I saw her, she was chasing lightning bugs along the edge of the fields."
"Thanks."
"I'll help you look." Aulein rose and strolled along beside him smoking. They took turns calling for Iyanni. Aulein waved at Georgos, coming in late from the far end of his field. As they neared Onos' house, they heard a young girl scream.
"Iyanni!" Theris broke into a run. Aulein and Georgos raced to catch up. The silhouettes of a half-dozen men leading animals crossed their paths in the gloom.
"Iyanni!" Theris called. A smaller figure made muffled cries as it struggled in the grasp of one of the men. Theris froze seeing a glint of moonlight off a copper knife.
"Stay back," warned one of the men.
Theris froze and noticed Onos lying face down on the ground. "Take what you want, just let the girl go."
"Hey! That's our food!" Georgos shouted, and ran up to the silhouettes. Aulein followed. The dark figures produced clubs and beat Georgos, then Aulein to the ground.
Theris dropped to his knees and pleaded. "Please, let the girl go. Take what you want, just don't hurt her."
"Pshaw! We didn't want her anyway. Just one more mouth to feed." The figure shoved Iyanni to the ground. "But don't follow us or worse will happen to you." He kicked Georgos, grabbed a donkey's leads and followed the others.
-=====|==
Kaelis walked next to Ctonos who led the soreav on the path between the withered weed-choked fields lined with stunted keleos trees. Shriveled black keleos nuts crunched stubbornly underfoot as they neared the next village, surprising a young boy of about ten or twelve years old. The boy hastily shoved a net, in which a pair of doves fluttered, under a tanglethorn bush. He appeared to be trying to hide them.
"We don't want your food, kid." Ctonos chuckled. "We brought plenty to share." He slapped Artos on the chest and said, "Give the boy some bread"
Artos tore off a lump of bread and handed it to the kid who sniffed it suspiciously before taking a bite. He shoved the rest into his mouth and looked at the bundles strapped to the donkeys they led. "Is that all food?" he gasped.
"Yes and we're bringing it to the nearby koria if someone will show us the way," Kaelis added.
"I will!" the boy snatched up his net of fluttering doves and stepped out onto the path. "Why are you bringing them food?" he asked after they had walked for a few minutes.
Kaelis shrugged. He thought it pretty stupid, himself, but he repeated the words he'd been told to say. "When hard times come, people have to help each other out."
The boy looked up at him skeptically. "I hope you're not expecting them to help you back."
"Oh?"
The boy nodded to a strange ram-shackle structure that slumped together in a confusion of awnings and make-shift roofs propped up on sagging poles from which canvas sides had been hung to keep out the weather. "They're not much use," he said. "The adults just lie around dreaming all day. If it were not for some of us children, they'd all starve."
"Well, perhaps we can find some work for them to do in Nur."
The boy's eyes lit up with excitement. "Are you going to take us to Nur?"
"Yes. If they are not going to work the fields, we'll bring some other men who will. There's plenty of work in Nur this lot could be doing."
"Can I learn to use a spear like you?"
"When you get bigger."
"But I want to go with you now."
Kaelis laughed and threw a nervous glance to Ctonos who shrugged his indifference. "Very well. You can come with us. "We'll find some chores for you to do around Straton's field while you're growing bigger."
The boy led Ctonos and his men up to the village's central structure. Kaelis pulled back one canvas side releasing the stench of sweat, feces and the rot of putrefying flesh.
Ctonos recoiled. "Are they dead?" he asked the boy.
"No. Just dreaming." The boy kicked a middle-aged woman's leg. "Hey! Wake up!"
The woman sighed, mumbled something then lay still, taking long slow even breaths.
"Why are they like this?" Ctonos asked.
"That stone." The boy pointed at a chunk of black rock resting on a sawed-off stump.
Ctonos gave Kaelis a "deal with it" look. Kaelis sighed and tromped through the crowd, stepping on sleepers' arms and legs. When his foot slipped off someone's thigh, and he nearly fell, he slowed and picked his footing more carefully. No one stirred when he snatched up the stone and carried it outside. He placed the stone on a small boulder and smashed it with another rock.
A collective groan rose up from the structure. Ctonos nodded his approval. "Again."
Kaelis lifted the rock and smashed it until a loud crack sounded from the stone.
"Ah!" a man cried out from inside the structure. A woman's voice joined his, followed by other individual cries of shock and surprise which no longer came in unison.
Kaelis held up the broken pieces of stone and smirked.
The first man staggered up to the edge of the structure, clung to a support pole and squinted into the light.
"Getting these people ready to travel is going to take some time," Ctonos said. "Kaelis, leave me a couple of hands and take the rest of the spears to the next korion. With any luck, we'll be on the road to Nur by the time you get back."
"Take me with you," the boy pleaded, pulling on Kaelis' tunic.
Kaelis gave Ctonos a helpless look.
Ctonos smirked. "You wanted him you've got him."
-=====|==
Karux and his tireavs arrived at Theris' village within the sennight. Theris thought Karux had grown taller in the two years since he'd last seen his cousin. His beard had grown in and made him look older and more like his father. "Karux!" Theris called out as he ran to embrace him. "It is past time you came for a visit."
"We came as soon as we heard."
"No! I mean you didn't have to wait until there was a problem."
Karux laughed. "I was joking. We would have been here sooner, except we've been chasing angorym all over the Pelavale." His smile barely touched his eyes, which had an aged weariness to them.
"Perhaps if you had told us about the wedding, we would have come sooner, brah" Macander said.
"Mac? Is that you?" Theris flinched as a large man caught him up in a bear hug, lifted him off his feet laughing and crushed him in his embrace. When Macander released him, Theris took a step back and looked at him. "I don't believe it's really you. You're bigger than either of us."
Macander shrugged. "Must be all that clean mountain air."
"Or constantly bathing in angorym blood," Karux chuckled.
Macander winced, a pained expression flitting across his face. Theris frowned at Karux who glanced down at the girl who took his hand.
"Is that Eiraena?" Theris wondered aloud.
She ignored everyone, staring at the ground then tilting her head to look up at the sky then staring back down at the ground repeatedly. She had grown until she was nearly Thysia's size. Someone had put a new dress on her and tried to fix her hair, but the dress had started to get the stained look of persistently dirty cloth, and her hair held a large collection of tangled knots.
"Yes," Karux said.
Theris shrugged.
"So, when do we get to meet this wife of yours?" Macander asked.
"Right now, if you like. You all can stay with us."
Theris enjoyed showing off his wife and children to their wondering smiles. Iyanni and Thysia charmed them both. Though Theris considered them his daughters, in the end another man had sired them. But when he brought out his son, one year old Garick, Macander lifted him up in his big scarred hands and stared in wonder into his face. "You really outdid yourself brother."
"I seem to remember doing most of the work," Asophra smiled and everyone laughed.
That evening while Macander played with his new nieces and Asophra fed the baby in the next room, trying to get her to sleep, Karux and Theris sat drinking and reminiscing about their life in the valley.
"What would you do," Karux began after a long thoughtful moment of silence. "...if you were somehow given the power of life and death over the land itself?"
"Huh? What do you mean?"
"Let's say, for example, that you could stop this blight which has cursed the southlands or spread it throughout the world as you willed. You could control everything that draws its life from the land."
"What a strange question to ask." Theris paused to take a drink.
"Agreed." Karux nodded and refilled his bowl. "So how would you use such power?"
Theris thought about it. "I wouldn't."
Karux locked him in a piercing stare. "You could increase the crops and the number of animals, make the land overflow with milk and honey."
Theris felt as if Karux was testing him. He tried to think of what Karux might say if he chose the obvious answer. He finally just decided to be contrary. He shrugged. "If I made everyone's life too easy, they'd stop doing anything. I have enough children already," he smirked. "Besides, a person with that kind of power would be tempted to set themselves up as some sort of high lord. Who would want to return to the mountain?"
"So who would you give the power to?"
"No one should have that kind of power."
"But if you had that power and had to give it away, who would you give it to?"
Theris shrugged. "Probably someone who didn't want it. I wouldn't trust anyone who did."
Karux leaned back and sipped his beer, eyeing Theris intently. "So would you accept that power to keep it out of another's hands?" he asked with a slight smile.
-=====|==
Kaelis led his soreav to yet another nameless korion. Actually, the locals had muttered some random collection of syllables and pointed north when he'd asked where he could find their nearest neighbor. As they neared the village, they passed weed-choked fields so blasted by the blight one would never suspect farming had even taken place there. They walked up the rise and had nearly made it to the center of the village before they found the first body. It was a collection of bones and dried skin that some animal had scavenged and scattered near a pile of rocks at the center of town. A strangely shaped stone, covered in rust-red dust sat on the top of the pile, besides which sat a sour-smelling mold-covered barrel.
They searched the buildings which all stood open and found a handful of dried bodies. In the largest building, they found the remains of a half-dozen carved-up people, mummified arms and legs still hanging from the rafters of the larder.
"I think we're too late here," Artos said. "I don't see anyone left."
"So what do we do now?" Thrainos asked, his tone a complaint.
Kaelis shrugged. "North, I guess."
They traveled northward, pausing at the top of a low rise, surprised at the strip of green appearing on the horizon.
"What's that?" Artos asked.
Kaelis squinted into the distance. "Growing crops."