Chapter 1

Mak slowly straightened up from his work, bending and twisting to take the kinks out of his muscles. He was strong, and proud of it. He knew that he was much stronger than most of the men in his village, but his muscles were unaccustomed to this kind of labor.

In the field around him, other men and women straightened as the dull rumble of a warning drum was followed by a clamor of shrill voices and the barking of dogs from inside the village. It was probably only a messenger from another village, but any excuse to stop weeding these hated hills of beans was welcome. There was little chance that the warning told of a real danger. Nothing exciting ever happened any more, not like in the old stories mothers told their children on long winter nights.

He blew his nose with his fingers, clearing it of the hated smell of freshturned earth and the rank stench of crushed weeds. The late afternoon sun beat down on his unprotected head, as heavy as the sullen anger in his heart. Clinging dust mixed with sweat to mat the heavy growth of yellow hair on his chest, back and shoulders. Like the other field workers, he was clad only in his usual garb of sandals and a short leather kilt.

The shrill clamor of children's voices rose again from within the village. He swung his head from side to side, peering about from under heavy brow ridges. The massive gate in the log palisade was still propped open, so it wasn't an attacking band of outlaws that someone had sighted, off in the cool green forest where he longed to be. Mak realized once more just how much he hated working in the fields! Oh well, for once it had been partly his own fault, his own idea. This time, anyway.

The clamor of children's voices grew louder as they clustered around the village gate. Mak threw down his hoe and ran lightly toward the edge of the forest, not caring how his sandals flattened the freshlytilled soil. His keen hunter's gaze pierced the gloom to pick out a line of figures filing slowly down the trail, the lowering sun at their backs.

A trade caravan! The first one, in... How long had it been? Too long, he knew that for sure. No matter, they had finally arrived. There were at least two dozen heavily laden donkeys, preceded and followed by a file of men carrying packs and armed with bows and spears. A large caravan, then, with ample trade goods. Mak permitted himself a brief, savage grin. This should shake up the Council of Elders!

His hills of lateripening beans were close to the wall of trees that ringed the village, and Mak hurried to be first to greet the caravan. The only one, he realized, abruptly slacking his pace. None of the other halfdozen men and women who were still working in the fields this late in the day had bothered. They only rested on their implements and stare openmouthed at the newcomers, once they realized that there was no immediate danger. Didn't any of them even care that something new was finally happening?

"Halloo there, youngster! What town is this?" The speaker was tall and straight, with lank dark hair that curled down around his ears, and a closecropped beard that failed to disguise a stronglymolded jaw. His eyes, a dark, piercing blue tinged with hazel at the centers, gazed frankly down into Mak's iceblue ones.

"This is the village of Wallen, as all men know." Mak was a bit nettled at the man's assumption of his youth. So, what if he wasn't as tall as the stranger, not by more than a head. He was a fully grown man of the True Folk at twentyfive winters. Taller and stronger than most of his fellow villagers, and by far the most skilled hunter of Wallen village.

He was by no means an ignorant peasant, either. He could even read and write. Well, only his own name and a few words more. He also visited nearby villages of Tall Ones from time to time, so that the hairless skin that covered most of the stranger's body didn't disgust him.

"The camping ground for traders is over there," he pointed, answering the man's next question before it was asked. "Just outside the gate. It has a good spring, and plenty of grass for your beasts. Elder Corb will meet with you there as soon as she is informed of your presence."

"Good. Have any other trade caravans been through here this season?" The words were spoken clearly enough, but Mak noticed more than a hint of a strange accent.

"Not lately." He thought for a moment. "No, only one small caravan in the spring of year before last, and none at all for two summers before that." In his present rebellious mood, Mak didn't care that he might be giving away valuable information, making it easier for the traders to ask high prices for their wares. He had marvelled at old tales of days when many caravans had visited Wallen in a single season, and men often traveled long distances just to visit other villages. Now a trader might visit once in a summer or two, if that often.

Mak was one of the few villagers who visited even nearby towns, though there had been rumors of furtive messengers sneaking back and forth, these last few moons. He had overheard worried talk among a few of the older villagers of some future day when such luxuries as iron, brass, obsidian and salt no longer came from the faraway towns that crouched by the edge of the distant sea.

"I am called Mak," he ventured cautiously, offering only his dayname to this stranger. His soulname was his closelyguarded secret, not to be disclosed outside of his own family.

The trader smiled, a flash of surprisingly even white teeth in a tanned face, but answered with equally courteous formality. "My people call me Nurm. My band of traders has never come into this part of the land before. Tell your Elders that we have brought many goods to trade. If this journey goes well, we hope to return again and again."

"We shall hope that the Elders will be interested in your words." These formalities taken care of, Mak turned and loped toward the gate. Yapping dogs, and cries of 'Who are they?' and 'Where are they from?' greeted him. It seemed as though most of the village's toofew children were there, milling uncertainly just inside the palisade of pointed logs.

"Traders! They have come to trade with us. The leader is called Nurm. Thirty men, with about twenty laden donkeys." He recited the stranger's words for Corb, whose shrunken body and silvertipped hair proclaimed her status as High Elder of Wallen Village.

Behind Corb, his face dark with suppressed anger as any thundercloud, stood Vorkan, the village shaman. "What else did this trader ask of you? What more did that loose tongue of yours let spill of our affairs?"

"He only asked whether his caravan was the first this season," Mak answered calmly, biting back an angry retort. Vorkan had not endeared himself to Mak in the short time that he had been the shaman of Village Wallen.

"And you answered him, of course?" Vorkan's beady eyes examined Mak with unconcealed disgust, as though he was some chancemet species of vermin.

"Only with the truth, that he was the first." Mak turned away before any more was said, losing himself in the small crowd of watchers.

By the time that the hastilycalled Council of Elders was convened, the caravan had reached the camping place. Men were unloading the donkeys and arranging their goods in easily watched piles. Small, hairy blond children watched from a safe distance, fearfully recalling bedtime stories of longago children stolen away by traders, never to be seen again.

Two smaller figures supervised the work under Nurm's watchful eye. Looking closer, Mak was shocked to realize that they were women! Traders never brought women along! Indeed, as a small child 'trader's get' had always been a handy insult to hurl at any village youth taller and with darker hair than his or her fellows.

Thus alerted, he looked more closely at the newcomers. Why hadn't he noticed before that nearly half of the guards and packers were women? He was Mak the Hunter! Keen of eye, and quick to notice anything out of the ordinary! Ternan, were his old teacher still alive, would have soundly beaten his apprentice for such utter lack of perception.

Enough of such woolgathering! Mak shook his head, remembering. Ternan was dead. Had been dead for three rounds of seasons, trampled and torn by a herd of wild pigs. Now Mak was the village's only skilled hunter, their only teacher of young hunterstobe. Not that it gained him the smallest measure of respect among the villagers. Nor even one lone pupil, thus far. Even worse, none of the other villages he'd visited boasted even so much as a single fulltime hunter. Farmers, all of them, and that was all that any of them wanted to be. Tillers of the soil! Herders of cows and goats! Plodders with downcast eyes, fearful of all that transpired outside their narrow village walls.

As the donkeys were being unloaded and staked out to graze, Nurm came to meet Corb at the village gate. They talked in low voices for some time, the trader looming over Corb, then separated with formal gestures of mutual respect.

"The traders will set up their booths in the usual place outside the gate." The villagers gathered around once more as Corb spoke in her slow, dignified voice. "Trading will commence as soon as the morning sun rises over the mountains."

The sun was nearing the tops of the trees, shadows growing long. No more work among the hills of beans for him today, Mak decided with a grunt of satisfaction. He trotted out to the field to retrieve his wooden hoe, then returned through the gate for his evening meal. His bentkneed lope covered the ground at a surprisingly fast pace, though he was more used to the shaded animal trails of the forest than to the ridged earth of plowed fields.