"The new church might put me in touch with the Service, but it had been wiped out in Nagvale and nobody seemed to know anything about it—or even want to discuss it. If my interest in it got back to the wrong ears, then I might wake up dead one morning. I had no other leads, so I just stayed where I was and waited to be rescued. That wasn't very likely, of course. I knew the Service believed the reapers had killed me in the Sacrarium, the night I crossed over. It had sent Onica Mason to confirm this, and she had disappeared also. So the chances that it was still searching for me were about two thirds of zero.
"All I could do, I concluded, was try to find out as much as I could about the Vales. And learn the local jabber, of course. Perhaps one day I might pick up some mention of the Church of the Undivided that would tell me where to look for it. My group brethren were as informative as anyone, which wasn't informative at all. At least I could trust whatever they told me, which was more than you could say for anyone else. Most of them had never been outside Nagvale in their lives, and never expected to be, but there were a dozen or so who had jobs that required them to travel—peddlers and drovers, mostly. A couple had gone off to work in the capital, Nag. As they drifted back home, to stay a while before their next excursion, I got to know them and questioned them. I didn't learn much. I was lazy, I suppose, or just windy. Having nowhere to go, I kept putting off my departure.
"Obviously I needed a job. The group talked it over and decided I was tall and would be good on roofs, so about a dozen of them took me along to see Gopaenum's uncle's brother, Pondarz Thatcher. They suggested he hire me. He didn't argue, because a village has to support its militia. Also, he had a daughter."
"Aha!” Alice said. “Describe this daughter."
"Absolutely gorgeous. About ten, I think ... I don't know, I never set eyes on her. I never saw much of my supposed wages, either. They went toward her bride price. It didn't matter to me, as long as I ate twice a day. All I had to do was toss bundles of reeds up to the workmen on the roof. The job was well within my capabilities.
"But I agree that the original purpose must have been cattle stealing, just as in Africa. In the olden days—whenever those may have been—a young man's occupation in that herding society would be stealing the neighbors’ livestock. He would give his loot to some older man of the village as payment on a wife. When he had paid enough cows and proved his mettle in more or less serious battles, he would marry the girl he had bought and retire. Thereafter he would just watch his own herds grow and his wife do all the work. War he would then leave to the young men, because that was their business."
"If that were true here,” Ginger Jones said, “then we might not be in the mess we're in."
Nobody commented for a while. The car roared on through the night. Smedley decided that the remark had been very close to defeatist. The war existed, so it must be won. He had done his bit.
When Exeter spoke again, his tone was more somber than before.
"You can't imagine how strange it feels to be back in England, spinning through the night in a motorcar like this! It feels odder than all these things I've been telling you. I'm sorry to chatter so much. It's such a relief to be able to talk again."
"We're all enjoying it,” Alice said. “It is better than having Baron Munchausen along. You're leading up to something. You're going into all this sociology for some reason?"
"Absolutely! You remember Nyagatha and the Embu. A lot of Bantu peoples had that sort of age-group arrangement, or something similar. When the English arrived they usually said, ‘Take me to your headman,’ and the natives would look blank, not knowing what they meant. Who you talked to depended on what your business was! So the English would appoint a headman and tell him to stop the cattle raiding. Then they wondered why the whole culture collapsed. What astonished me about the Nagians was that they had managed to make a transformation to a money economy without losing their social structure. A lot of the Vales are very close to an industrial revolution, you see, although they don't have guns yet, thank goodness. The Joalians play the part of the English, but without firearms Joalia can't ever make a real colony out of Nagia. They had imported a mercantile culture, though, and yet the traditional ways had very largely persisted. The Nagians had managed to blend the old and the new. I was very intrigued to know how they'd done it. The answer was obvious, but I didn't think of it."
"But who do the warriors fight?” Smedley asked.
Exeter chuckled. “Nobody. Oh, they have periodic brawls with neighboring villages, but they're prearranged, show affairs. A few bones get broken and teeth knocked out and a deuce of a lot of betting goes on, and that's about it. I never saw one.
"The most exciting thing that happened in my first few fortnights there was that Toggan Silversmith got married. His father had money, of course. He was the first of our age group to tie the knot, and it was a big milestone for all of us. I swear it took half a fortnight to decide how our face design should be changed. We could add some more green emblems, you see, because that is the color of manhood. We could introduce some red, which represents the Lady, Eltiana, who's goddess of motherhood and, um, related matters. But if we overdid it, the senior warriors would get in a snit and the juniors might start crowding us on the blue. So we had to appoint delegates to negotiate with other age groups. Everyone found it fascinating.
"As soon as Toggan got married, he wasn't a warrior anymore, but he was still one of the group. He slept with his wife and came around in the morning to get his makeup on. After the first fortnight, we saw a lot more of him than she ever did. Being a warrior just seemed like being in a boarding school. So I assumed. Until the war came."
"Followed you, did it?” Alice said. “Oh, sorry! I didn't mean—"
"No, this was a different war. The first I knew of it was when a priest turned up one evening, an elderly chap in a green robe. I smelled trouble right away. He sat down and negotiated with us. I suppose there were about sixty of us there, sitting around sharpening spears. We didn't stop because of him, either! He said that the temple had learned that the junior warrior age group had adopted a foreigner. Well, the whole village had known that for fortnights. He said that Krobidirkin was Sonalby's patron god, and the foreigner really ought to make a sacrifice to the god and ask for sanctuary—matter of protocol, you see.
That debate lasted all night. A lot of the fellows said the priests just wanted a free meal, but eventually the group decided that it was a good idea. I considered making a break for it, but Krobidirkin must have known about me all along anyway. Moreover, I could see that if I did a bunk, I would get my pals in trouble with the numen and probably with the elder groups. And I was curious.
I couldn't be expected to take part in an important ceremony without the backing of my peers, so the next afternoon the whole age group assembled. We bought a bullock from Gopaenum's uncle and drove it along to the temple.
There we were right on the node. The virtuality made my scalp prickle, as usual. There were shrines to Olfaan, and Wyseth—he's the sun god, and in that climate you don't ever forget the sun. And there was one to Paa Tion, the god of healing, and one to Emthaz, goddess of childbirth. The usual Pentatheon representation. But the temple was the center of the village, and it was Krobidirkin the Herder's.