The people of the mountain village had offered Andar a house to live in. It was an unexpectedly generous act for a drifter like himself. The people who usually lived there were away, they explained, and it would be better for them to have someone care for the house than to leave it empty.
So there he was, Andar, first elder, living in one of the unfamiliar wooden houses of the mountain village. The people here used wood all through their homes. They had plenty of trees and a lack of wood-eating insects, so they could use as much wood as they wanted. The houses were built of hand-carved timber on the upper floors, with walls at the base fortified with earth and animal dung. The livestock lived under the house, and part of Andar's work in his borrowed house was to take care of the single cow that lived under his rooms. The village children informed Andar that the animals gave the families their warmth. They had become his teachers and friends, these children.
He slept under many wool blankets during the cold nights, and he got up in the early mornings to milk the cow, and in the midst of it all, he felt curiously, remarkably alive. Seeing and experiencing new things woke unused parts of his mind and heart—calling him back to his youth, when the world seemed full of possibility. The children brought him paper and a pen so he could write his thoughts down in the evenings when the quiet of the village seemed to press on him like a firm hand. Andar let his pen fly and found that he was writing stories and poems, prayers and stories.
Each day, after wrapping himself in shawls and scarfs to milk the cow and eating grain porridge with warm milk for his breakfast, Andar led the cow out to the grassy hillside and tethered it there, greeting others who were doing the same along the way.
The villagers found him hilarious and laughed at him constantly. Everything he did was funny in some way or another—the way he spoke with the cow as he led it into the grassy hills, singing. The way he tied knots. The way he walked up a mountain, made his morning food, or picked berries, eating as he went. It took a while for Andar to realize that the people here were just good-natured. Life was not easy for them, but they were ready to laugh. Sometimes Andar helped his neighbors with planting in their fields or gardening in the space around their homes, and in return, they gave him greens that he added to the grain for the evening meal.
Andar grew stronger as he climbed up and down the mountainsides. Sometimes a day required several trips up and down, and in the beginning, Andar was always winded. After some time, though, he could leap from rock to rock the way the children did.
They were his most attentive companions. They had their own chores and a little school work to do, but as soon as they were finished, Andar would look up to find the children and their foxes watching him. He was glad for their company and their teaching. They showed him how to stretch out on the rocks to soak up the sun's rays in the morning when he shivered from the cold. They showed him the best berries and edible plants. They still acted surprised that the foxes followed them, but Andar began to suspect that it was an act, something they pretended was an anomaly, so everyone didn't find out about this bond. They cuddled with the foxes in the evenings around a communal fire, and Andar saw how much the foxes adored these wild children.
Andar was starting to love them, too, these children who kept him from being terribly lonely. The adults of the village were kind to him and good-natured, but at first, they kept him at a distance. Andar wondered what had happened before, what the people who studied them had been like. Maybe they had pressed the gentle mountain people too much, and now they were afraid of questions. Or perhaps this was how they always had been. He had a lot of time to think it over. Too much time.
And then, slowly, as the children followed Andar daily, chattering away and helping him to find nettles or berries, or teaching him about the spicy bark of a particular tree, the adults of the village seemed to soften.
Then, Andar would find himself in a longer conversation, or he would be asked to help with a task that previously had been kept from him. The trust of the children seemed to reassure the adults. Andar was fascinated by the way the mountain people thought about their children. By no means were the Maweel overprotective of young ones, but these children were a different story. There seemed to be no rules about what they could and couldn't do. They were like tiny goats, scaling sheer rock walls even at a very young age.
After some time, Andar understood that it was the landscape that made this necessary. The children needed to learn, very young, how to move through their world without getting hurt. And they taught Andar everything because that was how everyone did things all the time. The adults taught the young people about farming and horses, and the older children taught the younger how to find the best handholds in the rocks, or showed them which fruits were hidden in the forest.
Then there was the celebration of the seventieth birthday of the village head. The festival took three days and nights. First, they killed two of the cattle and divided up the meat among all the people. Then, the children delivered several parcels of meat to Andar, and he salted it the way his neighbor showed him and stored it carefully in the eaves of his house. The cold wind would keep it, the woman told him. After that, what was left was made into a giant pot of soup for the whole village, spicy and full of flavors that Andar couldn't quite identify. They kept the soup hot and ate it all through the three days of the festival.
Andar would get so involved in things like this, watching the preparations and writing it all down, that he forgot, at times, that he was lost. He had always been able to lose himself in observation. Before he was an elder, Andar had wanted to be a scholar, but his parents hadn't allowed it. Being an elder, a regent, was his heritage.
It meant staying in Maween and working with people he had known his entire life. So the parts of himself that loved to learn and explore went to sleep, wakening now with a fierce thirst for knowledge. The thirst felt like joy. He often wondered if he should set out for home, but he couldn't fathom it. How? So he remained.
But he wondered in the quiet of his house, how were his lands faring? What had happened to cause this strange displacement? And how was Laylit? Was she worried about him? He missed her badly, the smell of her hair and her skin, the feel of her hand in his. Nights were bad sometimes, when he couldn't distract himself with learning, and he missed his wife and sons.
But then, in the morning, the children would appear with their foxes and follow him as he milked the cow and made his meal. Their chattering and laughter helped him put away the fears of the night. They would confer with one another and bring him to see something new. Maybe a hillside covered with wildflowers or some tree needles that could be boiled into sweet nectar to drizzle over the grain, the endless grain that they ate every single day.
And then the day came when the villagers trusted him to ride one of their horses. In the morning, the children were beside themselves with excitement, shouting that Andar needed to follow them as soon as he had finished with breakfast. The foxes ran on ahead, and the children ran after them, necklaces and earpieces flapping in their hurry. Spring had arrived with thousands of flowers, though the nights were still cold to Andar. The children no longer wore as many layers, and their skinny arms and legs were a blur as they ran. Andar wore layers. At night, he heated water and bathed, then dove under a pile of blankets to get warm. He couldn't quite adjust to this weather.
But despite the cold, there was something startling about the wild beauty of these mountains, Andar thought as he followed the children. They led him down to the large plain at the edge of the village and the feet of the mountains. The flatness of the plain looked impossible, like a giant's footstep. From here, Andar could see the little stone outcropping where the children had found him months ago. He stopped to look at it, remembering that day, the confusion of waking up in the cave.
I need to get home, Andar thought, with the twinge of guilt he always felt when he thought of home, as though it had been his idea to land here. Of course, it hadn't been his idea, but he loved it here, and other than missing his family, Andar wasn't eager to leave. That made him feel guilty.
But the children were still running, so Andar shook himself and followed them into the horse stables.
A few villagers waited there, and one of them stepped forward after Andar arrived with his entourage. The stables were dark after the bright day outside.
"Our men and women ride horses," the man said, "and despite the company you keep, you are not a child or a fox. If you are going to be here with us, then you need to learn to ride our horses."
"I know how to ride a horse," Andar said, trying not to sound offended.
"I saw the horses that the other men led over the mountains," the man replied. "And the leather straps and ties and…" he gestured dismissively, "strange things on the horse."
A woman walked forward. "This is not a kind of riding that you have done," she said. She held out a hand to show Andar something she held, offering it to him. A smooth stone, about the size of his palm, heavy but small enough that he could curl his finger around it.
"What is this?" he asked.
"This is your stone of telling," she said. "When you have the stone in your hand, the horse will understand your mind speech, and you can direct it."
Andar gripped the stone, feeling shaky. This was mountain magic he hadn't heard of, and his ignorance pushed at him, threatening his sense of himself.
But there wasn't time for ruminating because the woman was leading him to one of the horses. They stopped before a tall reddish horse, sleek and imperious. There was nothing on the horse except for a small quilted pad.
"This is it?" he asked, unable to keep nerves out of his voice.
The children laughed. The woman turned and shooed them out of the stable.
"Let's bring the horse out to the plains, and you can mount there," she said.
Beneath her respectful tone, Andar could hear barely contained laughter. She led the horse out of the stable and beyond the fence, onto the vast plain that Andar. He had seen people riding there many times, back and forth across the plain, and hadn't imagined they would allow him to join. The plain was empty, but Andar still had an audience. The children were standing or sitting on the fence, their foxes clustered around them.
"Can you tell me what is going on with the foxes?" Andar asked the woman, who was walking in front of him, one hand resting gently on the shoulder of the horse.
She glanced back at him. "You don't know?" she asked.
"No one ever talks about it, and the children are evasive."
She nodded. "We don't speak of it much. We have always sensed that if we give them too much attention, they will disappear. They are shy and wild, despite their closeness to us. They protect the children. They know when a child will be born, and they sit outside the house. They follow the toddlers. Sometimes they have saved children from a bad fall. So we feel they are a gift to us in our wilderness."
They paused at the edge of the plain, and the woman looked back at the children on the fence.
"I went to a city once," she said, "and saw that not everyone lives the way we do, perched on cliffs like birds. Our children learn to climb early, and they need to be strong. The foxes protect them."
Andar couldn't hold the words back. "Then why did you sell your children to the Desert King?"
The woman looked at him, horrified. "Sell them? They were taken from us. What did you hear? That we sold our children?" She looked angry. "No. He gave us the choice of losing all or losing one or two each time. This is not an easy thing that you ask me."
"I am sorry," Andar said, stretching his hand out and then pulling it back on second thought. He was silent for a moment, unsure of how to proceed. He had upset her, bringing up something evil and painful. "When I first met them," he said finally, "the children said the foxes don't follow them, that it must have been because of me that they were around."
The woman's face was flushed, and she was trying noticeably to get her breathing under control. Andar felt terrible for bringing up the children who had been given to the Desert King. He had always believed the lie that the people of these mountains sold their children willingly. He should have known better.
"They would say that," she said with a slight laugh after a few minutes. "It is something we say to misdirect the attention of visitors. We learned long ago not to speak too directly about this protection, or the foxes would disappear for days or weeks. We don't understand fox emotions, but something about looking at things straight on makes them uncomfortable. So we dance around the edges of it, and we never say that they are here for us."
Andar mounted the horse clumsily and held the stone in front of him. He was fascinated by the thought of the foxes who wanted to help but didn't want to be examined too closely. People were like that too, sometimes, he thought. They needed you to not look at them straight on so they could have the freedom to become more of themselves. He thought about Isika and how he and the other elders had pressed her when she arrived. He cringed away from the memory. They had been too direct with her. He hoped it had not done too much damage.
"What are you doing just sitting there?" the woman demanded. "Tell the horse to move."
Andar shook himself and, gripping the stone, told the horse to go forward. It leapt so quickly that Andar lost his balance and fell. He landed heavily, the wind knocked out of him. He lay there trying to breathe while the children laughed uproariously from their places on the fence. The woman's face came into his line of vision. She was grinning.
"You don't need to shout at it," she told him.
Once Andar got his breath back, he remounted and tried again. This time he nudged, just thinking about the idea of the horse moving forward a little. The horse moved just a bit, so Andar tried a bit more, and finally, they were walking together. Andar adjusted his seat according to the horse's gait, and the stone allowed them to be absolutely in sync. Was this how it felt for Jabari and Isika when they could hear the speech of animals? All Andar had to do was think of turning, and the horse would turn with him. He practiced and grew more confident, and then as the day went on, others joined, racing across the plains. Andar joined in the races, but he was nowhere near as fast. Not yet, anyway.
Finally, when his stomach was raging at him with hunger, Andar dismounted stiffly, and someone put a bowl of soup in his hands. He sat on a nearby stone and ate so quickly that the food was gone before he tasted it. Another person refilled his bowl, and he ate more slowly this time, watching the riders on the plain, the shadows across the stone mountain faces. He felt alive and happy and like he couldn't wait to ride again.
They came the next day.
Andar was out in the morning, foraging with the children, when the foxes sat up, alert, and soon they heard the sounds of a group of people approaching. Andar was so sore from riding and falling the day before that he had barely been able to crawl out of bed that morning. So he wasn't feeling his best as he plucked green vines from the trees. The foxes seemed alert, not frightened, but Andar told the kids to hide anyway.
Andar climbed to the ridge so he could see the other side, and when he came out from the trees, he saw them. His people.