Free Feather by Susan Page Davis Page B

careful.”
    “Our band has no dogs,” Feather said. She remembered Snap and Bobo back at home and wished her band of Blens had a dog.
    “No, but we must still be careful. Sleep nearer the fires when we are there.”
    Feather nodded. “Are they really so fierce?”
    “Yes. They stalk game on the plain, but when we come around . . . well, Mik says people are slow moving and easy prey for the cats. And they grow to be huge.” Tag swallowed, and Feather wondered if he was thinking of the ritual. She hadn’t dared to ask him or anyone else what the young men must do at the City of Cats to earn their place among the men.
    “Did you ever have a pet?” she asked.
    Tag shook his head. “I don’t think so.” He lowered his voice. “My people from before had dogs and riding animals.”
    Feather drew in a slow, deep breath. “You rode on a horse?”
    “Not horses, but like horses. Smaller, and very slow. The children could ride them, but mostly we used them to carry things.”
    Feather nodded. “My people had goats. One of our elders was quite clever. He made a little cart with wheels, and one of the goats pulled it. It will carry things in from the field for us. Loads of squash and corn this time of year.”
    “I miss the gardens,” Tag said softly. “We grew many foods I never see out here.”
    “How far have they brought you?”
    “Leagues and leagues. I don’t know. I hoped when they swung up toward your country that they would go near my homeland again, but they didn’t. Perhaps they did not find it profitable enough, and so they swung south and west.”
    “Your old tribe—were they farmers?” Feather asked.
    “We lived in families,” Tag said. His eyes were focused far away on something Feather could not see. “My father was a commoner, and we lived out away from the town, but we had our own house. My mother came from a richer family, and everyone said she’d married beneath her. But she didn’t care. She said the women in her family always married for love. In fact, three or four generations back, my ancestors were lords, they say. But not now. We grew wheat on the farm. My uncle was a miller.” He bit his lip and was quiet.
    Feather didn’t know what to say. His past sounded very different from hers. A civilized land where people lived in towns and families . . . like Elgin of old. Relatives and machinery and talk of love. “Did the plague come to your land?” she asked.
    “I don’t know. Maybe, a long time ago. Not now.”
    She nodded. “It was a long time ago in my land. Maybe a hundred years ago.” She tried to guess how old Alomar was, and to think how many years back his father’s father would have been a young man, for it was in Wobert’s youth that the sickness had come. “Many people died, and they never regained their strength of numbers,” she said. “That made them easy prey for interlopers like the Blens.” She picked up two arrows from the ground and held them out to him. “These are for you, Tag.”
    He took the two arrows and studied them in the moonlight. “Does Kama know you are giving them to me?”
    Feather nodded. “I used feathers not too fine and points of stone, not metal. I told Kama how you carried my burden the first day on the march and gave me your blanket. She said I could make the arrows for you.”
    Tag grinned then. “I never thought of Kama as one who cared about friends.”
    “She is superstitious,” Feather said. “She believes a gift deserves a gift. But I also think . . . yes, I’m sure. She is my friend now. She is very different from anyone I’ve ever known, and I would not think the way she does, but in her way she is wise.”
    Tag balanced one of the arrows on his index finger, at the middle of the shaft. It tipped, and he adjusted it so that it just teetered in the breeze. “I hear the men say how good your arrows are, and how they kill more game with them. You should ask Lex to trade one for a heavy cloak for you. You will need