It was rare that a boy perished upon the peaks, but it had happened. The tribe prepared each boy as fully as possible, but those who had failed to survive the naming ordeal were considered to have been judged by the gods as lacking and their families’ mourning was a bitter counterpoint to the celebration of Midsummer.
The heat increased and the air dried, and suddenly Kieli realized a sa’tata was upon them. The wind from the north blew cold year-round, but the summer western wind would grow hotter and dryer by the minute. The boy had seen grass turn brown and brittle in less than three days and fruit dry upon the branch from this wind. Men grew restless and women irritable when the sa’tata lingered more than a few days, and the skin itched. Kieli and his brother had swum in lakes and rivers on such days, only to be dry by the time they had returned to the village, as if they had not felt the cooling touch of water at all.
Kieli also knew he was now in danger, for the sa’tata would suck the moisture from his body if he remained. He glanced at the sky and realized he had only two more hours before midday. He glanced at the sun, now more than halfway along its climb to the midheaven, and he blinked as tears gathered in his eyes.
Kieli let his mind wander a few moments as he wondered who would be chosen to sit at his side. For while Kieli lingered on the mountain, waiting for his vision from the gods, his father would be meeting with the father of one of the young girls of the local villages. There were three possible mates for Kieli from his own village: Rapanuana, Smoke in the Forest’s daughter; Janatua, Many Broken Spears’ daughter, and Eye of the Blue-Winged Teal, daughter of Sings to the Wind.
Eye of the Blue-Winged Teal was a year older, and had gained her woman’s name the year before, but there had been no boy of the right age in the local villages to pledge her to. This year there were six, including Kieli. She possessed a strange sense of humor that made Kieli wonder what she found funny most of the time. She often seemed amused by him and he felt awkward when she was near. Though he hid it well, he was more than a little scared of her. But Rapanuana was fat and ill-tempered, and Janatua was pinch-faced and shy to the point of being speechless around boys. Eye of the Blue-Winged Teal had a strong, tall body, and fierce, honey-colored eyes that narrowed when she laughed. Her skin was lighter than the other girls’ and scattered with freckles, and her heart-shaped face was surrounded by a mane of hair the color of summer’s wheat. He prayed to the gods that his father had met with her father the night before Midsummer, and not with one of the other girls’ fathers. Then with a surge of panic, he realized his father might have met with the father of one of the girls from close-by villages, the slow-witted Pialua or the pretty but always complaining Nandia!
He sighed. It was out of his hands. Stories were told of men and women who longed for one another, sagas told by the storytellers around the fire, many of them borrowed from singers from the lowlands as they passed through the mountains of the Orosini. Yet it was his people’s way that a father would choose a bride for his son, or a husband for his daughter. Occasionally a boy—no, he corrected himself, a man—would return from his god’s vision and discover that no bride waited to sit next to him at his manhood festival and he would have to wait another year for a bride. Rarely, a man would discover that no father wished his daughter wed to him and he would have to depart the village to find himself a wife, or resign himself to live alone. He had heard of a widow once whose father had died before her husband, and she had taken one such man to her hut, but no one considered that a proper marriage.
He sighed again. He longed for this to be over. He wanted food and to rest in his own bed, and he wanted Eye of the Blue-Winged Teal, even though she made him uncomfortable.
Upwind he caught a sound he knew to be a sow bear with cubs. She sounded alarmed, and Kieli knew her cubs would be scampering up a tree at her warning. Kieli sat up. What would alarm a black bear this close to the mountain? A big cat might, if a leopard or cougar was ranging nearby. They were too high up for the big cave lions. Maybe a wyvern was hunting, he thought, feeling suddenly small and vulnerable out on the face of the rocks.
A small cousin to a dragon, a wyvern could hold off half a dozen or more skilled warriors, so a boy with only a ceremonial dagger and a gourd of water would make a very satisfying break of fast for such a beast
Hunting packs might frighten the sow bear; wild dogs and wolves usually avoided bears, but a cub was a manageable meal if they could draw the sow away from one of her babies.