Paul Cook - Children of the Plains

“Thank you,” he said, eyes closed as he savored the wonderful taste.

His thirst appeased, Amero turned the unusual object around and around in his slender fingers. “You made this?” he marveled.

“It would be foolish to die of thirst within sight of a waterfall.”

Wet through and through, Amero began to shiver, his teeth chattering in the cool air. He returned to his bed of boughs and crawled among them, trying to get warm. The water-catcher he kept firmly in his hand.

Duranix busied himself in the far corner, below the high, larger opening. He returned shortly with an armload of furs and hides.

“Use these as you see fit,” he said, dumping the load beside Amero.

“Where are you going?” The boy’s voice cracked as he asked the question, and Duranix turned slowly toward him, red eyebrows pressed together in a frown. Amero muttered, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean… I’m sorry.”

Duranix studied him silently for a moment, and Amero hid his embarrassed face by turning to the heap of furs.

“What did you call the animals who attacked you?” the man finally asked.

Amero pulled a thick white ox hide over himself, up to his chin. “Yevi?”

“Well, boy, I must find out how far the yevi have penetrated into my domain.”

“Your domain? Are you… are you the father of the whole plains, Duranix?”

He smiled briefly. “Father? Quaintly put. I am the master of the lands from these mountains west to the forest’s edge.”

“Are there other masters? In the forest?”

Duranix’s handsome face darkened. “There is. He is called Sthenn.”

“Your… brother?”

Duranix folded his arms, looking angry. Then he relaxed and said, “I must remember you have a limited range of expression. Sthenn and I are of the same race, if that’s what you mean.”

“You look like a man, but you do things I’ve never seen any other man do.”

“I sometimes go abroad in human form.”

“Why look like a man if you’re not one?”

Duranix was silent and Amero realized he was asking a great many questions. It was a habit that got him in trouble so often with Oto. The boy bit his lip. It was hard not to voice the questions that filled his head.

However, Duranix did not look annoyed, as Oto so often had. He simply looked thoughtful and replied, “It makes traveling easier for me to appear as a man. Besides, humans amuse me. Most of them are no better than the beasts they hunt and kill.”. He gave Amero a penetrating look. “You’re different though. I see signs in you of higher faculties — intelligence, curiosity, and perhaps something more. You heard the yevi speak. When you think clearly, I can hear your thoughts as loudly as I hear the falls outside.”

Amero felt oddly embarrassed. “I’m just Amero, the son of Oto and Kinar.”

“True, but you are different from your parents and siblings, aren’t you?” Amero hung his head, admitting as much. Duranix added, “You have special abilities. It’s why I brought you here. I want to know more about you.”

Duranix fixed the cape around his shoulders and stood in the lower opening. “I’ll return after sunset.”

Before Amero could protest being left alone in the cave all day, Duranix leaped into space. He plunged through the waterfall and disappeared. Still wrapped in the white ox hide, Amero crawled to the ledge and looked down. There was no sign of his host. The waterfall was more than an arm’s length from the cliff wall, and he could see nothing through the thundering stream but the blue of the sky. While he was gazing down the cliff wall to the boiling pool below, a large shadow passed swiftly over the cave mouth. Amero looked up, but whatever it was had vanished.

He sighed. Though he was pleased at having been rescued from the yevi, Amero thought of his current situation and found himself reminded uncomfortably of a field mouse he’d once captured. He had kept the mouse in a hollow length of cane. He would spend entire evenings playing with the mouse, seeing how it reacted to various things he put in its little home, learning what it would and would not eat. One day he found the mouse was gone — it had gnawed through the bottom of the cane over several nights and run away. Amero, only five at the time, had cried over the loss. Nianki had told him it was only an animal’s nature to want freedom. He was beginning to understand how the mouse must have felt.

Thoughts of his future couldn’t compete very long with the return of his curiosity. He decided to explore the cavern and see what clues he could glean about his mysterious host. If he found food along the way, so much the better.

He began at the lower opening and worked around the cave wall to his left. The floor here was rougher. Hard stone had been gouged out in some way, leaving long troughs in the floor. Each groove was as wide as his hand, and they occurred in close groups of three at a time.

He found more of the oval leaves along the wall, though most were green with mold. Amero tried to bend one, as he’d seen Duranix do. Arms quivering with effort, he managed to put a slight bend in one. How firm they were! He put one on the floor and stomped it, gaining nothing but an aching foot. With a loose stone, he hit the leaf with all his strength. A clear ringing sound echoed through the cave. The blow left a small dent in the leaf and broke off the tip of the stone cleanly.

These things could be useful, he mused. They were already well shaped for digging. He could scrape away a lot of soil with one.

Amero walked slowly along the uneven floor toward the rear of the cave. Aside from loose stones and the odd golden-red leaves, he found little else of interest until he came to Duranix’s sleeping place.

In the corner he discovered a heap of bones, many charred and splintered. This explained the sour smell in the cave. Duranix apparently enjoyed a variety of game, as there were bones of elk, deer, and oxen. Then Amero found something that froze the blood in his veins: a fleshless human skull.

Oto always said the spirits of the dead clung to their bones. That’s why the dead had to be buried. If you left their bones lying around, their ghost would wander the land, doing evil.

Yet there was something pathetic about that dry white lump of bone. Curiosity overcame fear and Amero picked up the skull gingerly. It was big. The jaw had come off, and there wasn’t a shred of meat left on it anywhere. On the back were deep, converging gouges. The bone had splintered there.

Amero put down the skull and wished peace to the spirit of the man who had once inhabited it. He decided not to dig further in the bone pile. He didn’t want to know if other humans had died here, perhaps — he shuddered to think it — eaten by Duranix. He determined to leave the cave as soon as possible. He would find a way to live, maybe even a whole new family. Anything was better than being eaten by — whatever kind of creature Duranix was.

With renewed vigor he searched the platform and all around it, looking for a passage out of the cave. There was none. All he found in the rest of the chamber were a large heap of hides and skins and piles of the hard red-gold “leaves.”

He almost wept with frustration. This high above the ground, how could he get out? He couldn’t fly like a bird, bat, or bug. How did Duranix enter and leave without harm?

Amero recalled his captor’s exit (how quickly Duranix had gone from host to captor in his mind). The strange man put on his long cape and flung himself through the wall of water, vanishing. The cape — why did he need the cape? To keep the water off, or was there a different reason?

Odd images from his flying dream flitted through his mind: rushing over the ground, the wind whipping his hair, the stars racing by. He imagined Duranix spreading his arms like a bird, the cape billowing out behind him like wings. Could a man really fly like that? Amero thought it unlikely. Was there power in the cape, spirit-power? He had no answer for that.