Feathered Dragon - Douglas Niles [8]
This one comes to me, in supplication it seems, and allows me to mount it. Thus borne, I ride, far faster than human feet could carry, toward the east.
THE FERTILE DESERT
“We’d better get back to the camp. It’s dark already.” Erixitl slowly rose to her feet as Hal followed. They had only to turn, to look down the other side of the ridge, to see the scene they had escaped for these few precious moments.
The vast, straggling camp lay like a muddy blotch on the land, barely visible in the light of its thousand campfires. Still, that mud was a sign of good fortune-the blessings of gods, or of providential nature. A year earlier, there could have been no mud, for there would have been no water.
Now water was reasonably plentiful in the desert, and the humans who churned its neighborhood to mud lived where they would have died. The nature of the life, it must be said, gave these miserable folk little thought of thanksgiving.
Halloran and Erix did not know how many people fled in this great procession, moving gradually southward, away from ruined Nexal and the beasts that now claimed the city as their home. Like a swarm of locusts, the humans scoured each water hole, quickly baring the surrounding fields of mayz and berries. No single location provided a long rest; in a matter of days, the great march southward would commence again, for this was the only way the people could eat.
For now, this new water hole promised a brief respite. Even in the darkness, women moved through the fields, gathering mayz, while children splashed around the fringes of the once-blue pool, washing away the dust and weariness from the long day of marching. The water occupied the center of a shallow, bowl-shaped valley. The desert stretched for miles beyond the rim of the vale, an expanse of brown, windswept dunes and even harsher patches of rocky plain.
Within the bowl, a miraculous transformation had shown
itself. Green fields of sweet, waving mayz formed a belt around the valley, below the crest of the hill but some ways above the water. Around the water’s edge grew a lush circle of wild rice, while plump berries sprang from bushes that ringed the marshy fringe.
The spaces in the valley that had not grown food, or where such food had already been harvested, now served as living space for the population of a massive city. Nexalans, the citizens of vanished Nexal, formed most of this group, but a small fraction of the humans showed different origins. The latter were bushy of face and wore breastplates and carried weapons of steel. The Mazticans, of course, carried obsidian-edged clubs, called macas, as well as arrows and spears and knives of stone, and they wore armor of padded cotton.
Now these folk lived in uneasy truce, bonded by a mutual fear of the greater, and common, enemy lurking in the nightmare of Nexal. The truce did not approach camaraderie, but it was eased by the fact that the spokesmen for the deep religious schisms between these two diverse peoples were no longer with them.
Indeed, the fleeing Mazticans had even abandoned their practices of human sacrifice. The priests of Zaltec, universally transformed into trolls on the Night of Wailing, no longer hounded them for victims. The devastation, commencing at the height of a sacrificial orgy, had caused many to question doctrine they had always accepted at face value. Who were they to question the hunger of the gods?
But now, in the face of the potential starvation of their children, the hunger of the gods did not seem so tragic a thing to the people of Maztica.
Erixitl and Halloran slowly descended from the ridgetop, through a fringe of the camp in a clean-plucked field that had yesterday grown lush with mayz.
“Sister! Sister of the Plume!” A voice called out, and more of them joined in as several women recognized Erixitl. They quickly gathered around her, eagerly thrusting their children forward so that Erix could touch