Shaman's Crossing (The Soldier Son Trilogy #1)

Almost every day we hunted pheasant and hare with slings, and drank blood drawn from our mounts when our hunt failed to produce a meal for us. He shared his water and dried meat with me, but sparingly. We often made camp without water or fire, and I stopped regarding such lacks as a hardship. He told stories every night and I began to have a sense of what passed for wrong and right among his people. To get another man’s wife with child so that another warrior labored to feed your get was a riotously good jest upon that fellow. To steal and not be caught was the mark of a clever man. Thieves who were caught were fools and deserved no man’s mercy or sympathy. If a man had taldi, a wife, and children, then he was wealthy and beloved of the gods, and the others of his tribe should pay heed to his counsel. If a man was poor, or if his taldi or wife or children sickened or died, then he was either stupid or cursed by the gods, and in either case it was a waste of time to hark to him.

Dewara’s world was harsh and unforgiving, bereft of all the gentler virtues. I could never accept his people’s ways, yet in some curious fashion I became more capable of seeing the world as he saw it. By the harsh logic of the Kidona, my people had defeated his and forced them to settle. They resented and hated us for it, and yet by their traditions, we could only do those things because the gods favored us over them. Therefore, our wisdom was to be considered when we spoke. Dewara had been honored when my father sent word that he wished him to be my instructor. That during the course of teaching me he could bully and mistreat me was a great honor to him, one that all his fellow Kidona would envy. Dewara had the son of his enemy at his mercy, and he would have no mercy for me. Freely he rejoiced before me that I would carry a notch in my ear from his swanneck to the end of my days.

He teased me often, telling me that I was not bad, for a Gernian cub, but no Gernian cub would ever grow to be as strong as a Kidona plateau bear. Every day he taunted me with that, not cruelly, but as an uncle might, several times, holding his full acceptance of me always just out of my reach. I thought I had won his regard when he began to teach me how to fight with his swanneck. He grudgingly conceded that I attained some skill with it, but would always add that that evil metal had ruined my “iron-touched” hands, and thus I could never regain the purity of a true warrior.

I challenged him on that. “But I heard you asking my father to trade guns for what you are teaching me. Guns are made of iron.”

He shrugged. “Your father ruined me when he shot me with an iron ball. Then he bound my wrists with iron, so that all my magic grew still inside me. It has never fully come back. I think a little bit of his iron stayed in me.” And here he slapped his shoulder, where I knew he still bore the scar of my father’s shot. “He was smart, your father. He took my magic from me. So, of course, I try to trick him. If I could, I would take his kind of magic from him and turn it against his people. He said no this time. He thinks he can keep it from me always. But there are other men who trade. We will see how it ends.” Then he nodded to himself in a way I didn’t like. In that moment, I was completely my father’s son, the son of a cavalla officer of King Troven, and I resolved that when I returned, I would warn my father that Dewara still meant him harm.

The longer I stayed with him, living by his rules, the more I felt that I was straddling two worlds, and that it would not take much to step fully into his. I had heard of that happening to troopers or those who interacted too freely with the Plainspeople. Our scouts routinely camouflaged themselves in the language, dress, and customs of the indigenous people. Traveling merchants who traded with the Plainspeople, exchanging tools and salt and sugar for furs and handicrafts, spanned the boundaries of the cultures. It was not uncommon to hear of Gernians who had gone too far and crossed over into Plainspeople ways. Sometimes they took wives from among them and adopted their way of dress. Such men were said to have “gone native.” It was recognized that they were useful as go-betweens, but they were accorded little respect, less trust, and almost no acceptance into gatherings of polite company, and their half-breed children could never venture into society at all. I wondered what had become of Scout Halloran and his half-breed daughter.

I had never before understood what would prompt any man to go native, but now I began to see. Living alongside Dewara, with him as my only society, I sometimes felt the urge to do something that would impress him, according to his own standards. I even considered stealing something from him, in some clever way that would force him to admit I was not dull-witted. Theft ran against all the morality I had ever been taught, and yet I found myself thinking about it as a way to win Dewara’s respect. Sometimes I would snap out of such pondering with a jolt, surprised at myself. Then I began to wonder, would stealing something from Dewara truly be an evil act, when he seemed to regard it as a sort of contest of wits? He made me want to cross that line. In Dewara’s world, only a Kidona warrior was a whole man. Only a Kidona warrior was tough, of body and mind, and brave past any instinct for self-preservation. Yet self-preservation was high on a warrior’s priority list, and no lie, theft, or cruelty was inexcusable if it was done with the goal of preserving one’s own life.