Jedit Ojanen shook his head, which felt muzzy. Perhaps the letdown of battle madness made him sleepy. Still, Jedit was cursed with curiosity that more often than not landed him in hot water.
Stifling a yawn, he asked, "So. Whence have you come? And how? And why?"
"I came from the west. On the drake." The man's eyes roved over the jungle, studying, learning.
Jedit recognized the signs: The man totted up observations like a scout sent to spy out the enemy. Yet so feeble, surely he was no threat.
Jedit snorted, "Your answers tell me naught I didn't know."
"I'm sorry." Yet the man didn't expand. "Where are we bound?"
"The village. This is Efrava." Even with his mind muddied by the crystal's subtle charm, Jedit still burned with questions. "Are there many men like you in the west? How many? How far off?"
"Efrava…" The magician frowned as if irked. "How far does this oasis extend?"
"Some thirty leagues east to west, not so many north to south." Jedit backhanded a green snake hanging over the trail. "How large is your land?"
Continuing to ignore questions, the man asked, "Your spears are tipped with wurm teeth, yet your daggers are bronze. Are your people skilled at metallurgy?"
"At what?"
Jedit touched the empty scabbard at the small of his back. Ruko had lifted his dagger. One of the scouts cocked an ear at the prisoners, silently asking if they should be gagged. Ruko shrugged a negative.
Jedit went on, "You mean, can we forge? Yes. Our smith pours daggers in a stone mold. Puddling, she calls it. Tricky work, and the daggers still need days of honing with stones. Why do you ask?"
"How many tigerfolk inhabit this land?" The bony man ducked his head to peer up the trail.
"There are nine clans." Idly Jedit wondered why he felt so talkative. "The Dull Tooth Clan, the Red Rock Clan-"
"Hush! I asked how many people, you-" The man bit his tongue, barely civil, then tried again. "I mean… My fine host, I appreciate your enlightening me about your homeland."
Jedit gazed into the alien's black eyes, "And I asked where lay your homeland. You have yet to say."
With his face shadowed by greenery overhead, the man conceded, "My land is Tirras, where the mountains meet the plains, north by northwest. A goodly distance. The drake flew for four days to arrive here."
"Four days?" Jedit wrinkled his muzzle. "How can a flying lizard stay aloft that long? Certainly a bird can't."
"Some birds fly a thousand leagues without lighting on land or sea. But I aided my mount with magic."
"Ah. That was a good trick, sparking that rock alight."
"Lucky it worked. That was about my most powerful spell."
Feeling chatty, Jedit made idle conversation. "My mother works magic. She is clan shaman."
"Is she?" For the first time, the black eyes almost sparkled. "And her name?"
"Musata." Jedit narrowed amber eyes. Why did he play cat-and-mouse with this queer man? Were all men so reticent, so jealous of their knowledge? "Yours?"
"Johan. And your father's name?"
"My sire is Jaeger Ojanen." Jedit watched the man closely. "He traveled to the west. Did you ever hear of him?"
"Never," said the magician. "I'd remember a tiger-man."
"No doubt." Unease stirred in Jedit's mind like a coral snake. "Johan is an odd name."
"One to remember," said the bony man enigmatically.
"Jedit, stifle your jabber!" A scout pricked both prisoners in the kidneys with a wurm tooth. "You'll spill all our secrets to this chicken-stinking flat-snout!"
"Let them talk," said Ruko, the leader. "What little the manling learns he can tell his gods at moonset."
Calm as ice, Johan glanced back at the towering tiger scout. "Do you threaten my life?"
"Life is a gift from the gods, stranger," said Ruko. "Yet how long a man keeps it is up to him."
Jedit growled, purring low in his throat, an unvoiced warning for Ruko to back off. Wondering if he'd get any square facts from this twisty visitor, he still persisted, for only by asking questions could he learn of the world his father had gone to explore.
Jedit continued his conversation. "Our legends claim men are a lost race."
"Send your storytellers back to school. Men inhabit the west in countless droves. Do your people inhabit only jungle, and are these your westernmost reaches?"
"Yes. We've moved steadily west since the last days of Terrent Amese."
"Who?" The man's ears pricked. "Why the last days?"
Before he answered, Jedit studied the man like some exotic animal, as indeed he was. He wore a drab brown robe and went barefoot. His head was tanned and hairless, his chin pointed, his eyes flat as a snake's. The mage idly rubbed his brow with the milky crystal-why, Jedit couldn't guess. Despite the close heat under the trees, Johan didn't sweat. All in all, he seemed as helpless as a boar piglet. Especially compared to the tigerfolk, who were all near seven feet tall and weighed up to nine hundred pounds. Jedit Ojanen was the largest. Like men, the jungle warriors had a flattened muzzle, upright stance, and paws elongated into almost fingers and-toes with dark claws. But they were more tiger than man.
"I asked," Johan repeated, "why the last days?" "Eh?" With questions buzzing in his brain like a hive of bees and this infernal sleepiness, Jedit was distracted. "Uh, the legends are not clear. My mother can recite the stanzas, but disaster struck the Ancients, so they spread out from our homeland."
"Your tribe halts here," reasoned Johan, "because you can go no farther. That desert heat would kill man or tiger in a trice, if sand wurms didn't snap them up first." 'True. Yet my father dared to venture-" "Jaeger Ojanen." A crocodile's smile. "I listen well." Jedit was not reassured by sudden friendliness. "Yes. My father left to explore westward to seek other speaking races. A brave warrior I wish to imitate. I've watched for him these many months. Your fluttering drake seemed an omen."
"I am glad you spotted me," said Johan, "else I'd be food for sand wurms."
"Better the wurms caught you than us," Ruko hinted darkly from behind. "Now shush, both of you. We don't want this skinned pig frightening the cubs."
The trail gave way to a clearing illuminated by golden-green light from the forest canopy. Jedit frowned, for though the village spread for miles, it constricted him. He watched the stranger Johan study the community with black eyes that gleamed like oiled obsidian. A river rippled through a valley bottom, a glittering expanse sixty feet wide but only a few feet deep, which whispered off into dense vegetation to the southwest. Solitary creatures, tigers liked elbow room, so their huts were strung along both sides of the river and stippled up the gentle slopes under trees and brush. Most were separated by a hundred paces. Little more than poles and thatch, the huts were just crawlspaces for sleeping. Two monoxes could be seen cropping brush with their questing lips. Stout ropes of hemp hobbled one massive leg. The village center was only a square of packed earth before a long, ramshackle common house.
As if compiling some mental list, the stranger murmured, "No… firepits?"
"Fur and fire don't mix." Jedit looked up as a flock of yellow-headed parrots flapped overhead, all squawking at once. Tigerfolk, singly or in pairs, trickled into the village square. The warrior wondered if they scented the man's wet-chicken odor on the wind or if some other premonition drew them like an oncoming storm. Certainly this manling, a thing never seen by this generation, a race thought extinct, would bring changes to the tribe. And changes, Jedit knew, were an abomination, an insult to tradition, a violation of the sedate sense of foreverness his people smugly enjoyed. This day, for good or ill, would be more than a jotted line in the history of the tribe, and here stood Jedit, dead center in the circle. A troublemaker, they'd say, just like his father.