Chapter 1

I startled awake as the cart jolted over a stray rock, and heard the girl next to me cried softly. It was cramped in there, dozens of bodies crushed together with barely enough room to sit. So it was a small wonder that I had managed to doze off as the open-aired cart rumbled on in its journey, up and down and up again over the rolling hills, each bump a jar traveling straight up the spine.

The weather would have been wonderful for a ride with friends otherwise, there were more than enough children my age in the cart. The bright summer sun shone over our heads and the breeze was cool on skins barely covered with rags. We could have been pointing at the strange sceneries, the flitting birds and beasts.

Could have been, were it not the face that we were all passengers in a slave driver's train, and we sat together not by choice, but because of our chained manacles and fetters.

A woman's arm held me tight against her, and even though the day was growing warm with the high sun, I did not complain. Rather, I snuck even closer to her side, to extract as much comfort as possible from her presence. Closer still as a slave driver suited in their strange armor rode pass our cart, idly flicking his whip over our heads. Sometimes he missed, and a stifled scream was heard, quickly hushed by the others. The slavers missed more often whenever they heard our pain.

Her hand pressed heavier on my thin shoulder when the swish of the whip and the hoof beats thudded closer again, on his way back up the line, and she pushed my head low with her other hand. She relaxed a little when the slaver drew away, still flicking his whip over the stray arms or heads, though the arm stayed around me.

It was torn away when the raid happened.

There was no warning, or none that I remembered. A single scream sounded against the blue sky, then shouts, curses, and more screams. The old nag drawing our cart reared despite her age and the driver lost his grip on the reins when she bucked, fighting to flee the chaos. The people in the cart were all in a panic, some tried to escape over the side, but no, we were all linked together through our chains. Blades flashed in the sun, and somewhere a fire flew up from the dry grass.

Something barreled into the cart, turned it over, and upended us onto the ground. We morphed into a pile of writhing bodies, straining uselessly at its chains, and even though they were only nailed loosely onto the floorboard of the cart, it was enough to hold us captured with our frail muscles and starved frames.

I remembered myself screaming too. The push and pull, the shoves and shouts of fighting were everywhere around me. Then something happened: I slipped free. Whether it was because of my thinness that the large iron rings did not hold me, or someone helping me, or something else entirely, I did not think of it. I was up and running, running, running, flying away from the line of burning overturned carts, the cruel slavers, the eyes of the dead woman who held me, trampled by the many feet of crazed slaves. I ran and ran, for what felt like eternity, I stumbled and fell, but kept going, kept moving even though my breath came in gasps and my vision darkened, until the true night had fallen and the huge moons rose in the brilliant openness of the sky.

The last thing I saw before my consciousness faded was the golden moon, shining brightly next to its larger silver lover. She had names for them, the woman who was kind to me, who was maybe my mother, whose face and voice I could not recall even now.

But in my hazy memories, I knew her to be beautiful.


“Inde, are you awake?”

I blinked, and frowned at the face peering at me through my tent flap. I knew the tone even if his features were against the sun, there was only one who called me Inde with a slight verbal jab in the ribs, “Narl? What is it?”

The owner of the face carefully stepped into my cramped quarter and folded up his lanky limbs to sit down by my bedroll, “You were due for first watch at dawn, my sleepy friend. Now it is full morning. Are you not feeling well?” he asked mock good-naturedly as he peered at me. I must have been as pale as dust. I felt like dust.

I stared up at the low ceiling, the last vestiges of the nightmare still behind my eyes. “A dream…of old memories…”

My friend studied me solemnly. He knew what I was talking about. “Inde, I do wish I could tell you to stay in bed all day, but then I will have to give the lorkaa, the herdmaster, my skin instead of yours. He is angry enough to skin you, and the whole herd, by himself right now.”

Narl smirked, telling me what he thought of the idea of old lorkaa skinning a whole herd of the tribe’s massive mufaas, cattles, by himself. I could not help but at least smiled in response to his attempt of making me forget. There were things I should have been doing, instead of indulging in dreams all day. Those were the jobs of malokii, dreamseers, and I was a dolokaa, a herder. My duties were clear.

“Tell him I will be at the skinning pen on time Narl.” I replied as I got up and shooed my friend out the tent’s opening before me.

He snorted, “I will tell him you are also washed and ready for the knife.” and delivered a parting shot as he strode away in the direction of his own tent, clearly with no inclination to deliver my message, jabbing a thumb at the waiting water bucket by the remains of the communal fire.

Narl and I were the oldest of friends, but I still sometimes wonder how he came by his sardonic streak when we were all but surrounded with people who smiled at the antics of young calves. I used the water gratefully to wash away the last traces of sleep, and pulled on the leather vest, leggings and woven cloak trademark of a dolokaa inside my tent. “Dolokaa” meant “green men” in the old tongue of the Nomaddi. With our green cloak made from the mufaas’s own hide, we blended in seamlessly with the herd and the grass of the Endlessplains.

I heard the thudding of hoofs before a nose thrust through my tent flaps, for the second time that morning, and snorted its displeasure at me. I grinned at the nose’s owner, a beautiful palomino mare who demanded I called her Desuun, or ‘sunrise’, from the moment she stood quivering on her shaky new-born legs, turned her head sideways, and looked at me as if to mark me as her possession. Desuun did the same now, eyed my clothes, snorted again to say “so you are finally up and about” and stepped back. I grabbed the cloth saddle I had hung on the tent’s pole and threw it on her, tightened the girth, and swung on easily as she started to walk, canter, then gallop. We cleared the camp’s perimeter in less than a heartbeat later and the Endlessplains sea of grass opened up before me in a blast of wind. I leant low over her neck and hung on tight to her neck.

It was sixteen summers ago when I first had to cope with the almost non existent saddle of the Nomaddi. The moment I woke, I was beset with a throng of curiously dark faces and strange rhythmic words, not the coarse dialect of the High language I was used to hear from the slavers. It did not take long for my small mind to be eased and understood that I was safe at last. By night, the Nomaddi traveled, sitting astride their graceful horses which roamed as free as the wind itself, following their vast herd of mufaas on its migration around the plains. At daybreak, they struck camp and the strains of songs as old as earth filtered into the wide sky. I was allowed into the circle around the fire and to join the brood of young boys who jumped up and down horses with backs twice their height as if they were mere tree stumps. A foundling who was kept safe by the herd that surrounded me during the night, I was lucky indeed to not be trampled as I lay unconscious, and the Nomaddi, who believed in signs, welcomed me.

If I sometimes cried out in my sleep, or woke with eyes filled with unknown terrors, they took no special note. I was Nomaddi now, and when you have nightmares, the malokii will help you.