What happened to me?
He was ragingly thirsty and he ran his tongue over his dry, cracked lips. It was warm in the tent, and the air held the bittersweet scent of healing herbs.
He tried to gather his thoughts, but the last thing he could remember was setting forth with Nevin. After that there was nothing.
A woman's voice spoke from the open doorflap. “You are awake. Good.” He struggled to sit up again, and she came to kneel at his side, putting out a hand to press him back.
“I am hurt”, he said. His voice came out in a croak.
“Sa, you are hurt.” But you are getting better. It is important that you be quiet.” She spoke his languages, but her accent was unfamiliar.
“What happened?” he demanded. “How did I get hurt? Where am I ? Who are you? ”
“Softly, softly,” she said. “ I will answer all your question, but first you must drink some water.”
Ignoring the thunder of pain in his head, he managed to push himself up on his elbow, and she held the antelope horn to his lips. He drank thirstily.
“That is good,” the woman said.
He had flopped exhaustedly back to the bed skins after drinking, but now he said, “ I want to get up.”
“In a little while you can get up.”
His mouth set stubbornly. “Now.”
“Don’t you want your questions answered?”
He looked up into the face of the woman. She was no longer young; her fair hair was streaked with gray, and there were lines at the corners of her blue eyes and her mouth. Fair hair and blue eyes…
“Are you Norakamo?” he asked harshly.
“Sa.”
He stared up at the high cone of the Norakamo tent. “Tell me,” he said.
There was a long pause. “You don’t remember anything?”
He said fretfully, “ I remember leaving camp with Nevin. After that there is nothing.”
“You came to raid our horses.”
This did not surprise Nardo. The Norakamo and Kindred had been raiding each other’s horses for generations. The raiding helped increase the raider’s horse herd, but the main reason for the forays was that next to hunting, horse raiding was one of the main ways the young men of both tribes could prove their manhood.
The distant sound of children’s laughter floated through the open doorflap of the tent. There was the noise of running feet and the laugher became louder. The woman added, “ My husband, the chief, was waiting for you.”
There was a pause as Nardo assimilated this information. Then he demanded, “How did he know that we would be coming?”
“We wounded two of your men on our last raid. My husband was certain that Nevin would retaliate quickly.”
A muscle quivered in the corner of Nardo’s mouth as he realized how accurately the Norakamo chief had read his uncle. The woman was going on,” My husband gathered our men tighter.” ‘We must capture Nevin, ‘he told them,’ Roring will pay many horses to get back such a man.’ ”
Nardo said nothing.
“That was the plan,” the woman continue.” And they were almost successful. They were ready for Nevin, they cut him out from the rest of his tribesmen, they had him surrounded. Then…” Her voice wavered. She paused. “You do not remember what happened next?”
“Na,” he said harshly. He had a bad feeling about what was coming next.
The woman said simply, “One of our men disobeyed his chief’s orders and killed Nevin with his spear.”
Nardo lay as still as a stone, staring up at the smoke hole.
“You saw this,” Adah continued after a moment, “and you came running to avenge your uncle’s death. You were like an enraged bull, my husband said. You killed Loki, the man who had killed your uncle, and you wounded two more of our men before my husband hit you on the head with his spear handle and brought you down,”