Season of the Wild Hunt(Book 1 of The Seventh Gate series)

One Hundred Braids - pt 2

Music: Matha's Song by Deep Forest (click image to play)

Nyani was around six or seven years old when the teasing was at its worst. One afternoon, she was brought to bay with her back to the river, her escape cut off by a ring of jeering children.

"What's the matter, Usgoluh? Afraid the birds will peck you up?"

"She won't go in the river 'cos the crabs will think she's dinner!"

The sing-song taunt captured the imagination of the pack, and they took up the cry with relish. Nyani's grubby cheeks were streaked with tears of rage and humiliation, but she clutched a fistful of rocks with one already loaded in her sling, and Ashira stood side by side with her. They were dená-gi, a unique relationship and bond second only to immediate blood kinship, and had been inseparable since babyhood. Ashira yelled every insult her six-year-old vocabulary could muster at Nyani's tormentors.

Just as Nyani let fly with a painfully accurate stone from her sling, her father came striding up. Ryandar scattered the circle of brats with one startling roar, and scooped up the beleaguered girls. He carried them perched on his shoulders like skinny fledglings, back to the communal hearth in the centre of Homecamp.

"Brave girl," he praised Ashira, patting her head. "A true friend is the blood of life. Now - off to your Amma, and tell her Ryandar says her daughter has earned her first braid."

Ashira bolted away with a delighted squeal, and Ryandar settled comfortably on a­­ log with Nyani on his lap. She sobbed out her misery to him, clinging to his chest and soaking the ends of his myriad black braids with her tears. Ryandar said nothing at first, smoothing one hand over her tangled hair until she cried herself out.

"They test you, little one. It is always so with scrapping pups, but you are stronger and they know it. That is why they test you so hard." He wiped the tears from her grimy face with a gentle thumb.

There was something different about his daughter, and it was not just her appearance. At times it made him uneasy, although he never allowed either her, or her mother, to see that. When he was needed to comfort her tears of pain, it was seldom for the physical cuts and bruises of childhood. Last spring, she had fallen from a tree and broken her arm. The sight of white bone poking through her skin turned his stomach, but Nyani had only begun to wail in earnest when she saw the ill-concealed horror on her parents' faces.

"I...know I'm stronger!" Nyani hiccupped through her fading sobs. "And I'm not a dirty grub! Why can't I look like you instead of Amma?"

Ryandar chuckled, but quickly forestalled her as she looked set to turn her ire on him. "It's like this. You know the amekusohi that you like so much?"

Nyani nodded. The sweet milk and creamy meat of the sea-nuts was her favourite treat, but an infrequent one, here so far from the southern coasts and Waságá Nasda. It had been months since a visitor had come from the islands. She didn't know what the sea-nuts had to do with anything, but sitting in her father's lap to listen to a story was another favourite treat.

"Sweet amekusohi are not something you find every day around here, are they? Just like Amma. And of course you know the honey of the Kamen bees. That is like me - dark and delicious, but found often and easily enough."

Nyani giggled at the idea of her father being 'delicious'. She touched her tongue to his bare chest, but all she could taste was the salt of his skin and her own tears.

"Yuck!" She wrinkled up her face in exaggerated disgust, giggling again at his smile.

"So," he continued, "what do we most like to do with these two things? Hmm? We mix them together with a little sonuli isá, then roll the dough and bake it by the fire. And then - what do we have?"