***
Each morning, Mei and Kai returned to the pens, and let loose their herds. The tauzak could thrive on the wild grass and wandered with only mild supervision during the day. When herders left their house to tend to their charges, riding on the backs of their tauzak, Jezhei watched them go. They saddled the wide nosed bovines, combing knots from their long, thick fur, and returned again in the evening to repeat the ritual as they removed the tack. She looked carefully as the herders adjusted their bridles, and made sure the rounded brass caps they put over the tips of the beasts’ horns were tightly into place. “I can do that,” she told herself every day. “I could ride a tauzak home.”
Each night, the herd was gently driven back to their pens, and the couple prepared as large a meal as they could manage, attempting to draw Jezhei into their conversations. They met with limited success, but her questions were very focused. “Do you need to clean their hooves, like those of a horse?”
“Of course! Feet are very important, Jezhei. The larger the animal, the more strength their feet need, and the better they can thrive with good care.”
“But you said they don’t wear shoes.”
“There is no need. Unless a hoof is cracked, they are quite thick. We have few rocks here to damage them. Is the Roof of the World rockier than it is down here?”
“Perhaps, in some places,” Jezhei said, dodging their questions as she always did. “I’ve seen so little below the Roof. We never stay for long. Can’t you take me riding with you? I need to get out of the house.”
“When your leg can hold you again, we can bring you to watch the herd. Your thighs are important on a tauzak just like a horse, and we won’t see you hurting yourself,” Kai answered. It was never a question, to him, that she would become the daughter they never had.
Mei was no less kind, but shrewder, “How far have you ridden again? Your father has been heard of for hundreds of miles, or so the travelers tell us, for nearly twenty years. You can’t be more than fifteen winters even. Such places you must have seen.” But Jezhei would fall silent, still unwilling to speak more of herself or her family, giving no heed to the banter that arose between them, and would curl up quietly as the herders maintained their tools, and spun thick thread from the sheared wool of their charges. Instead, she focused with knife, saw, and file, with hammer, drill, and peg upon the long branches Mei and Kai had brought her. The work consumed Jezhei day and night. Every night the herders offered to help her, and every night she refused, instead focusing on the work, and ruining many pieces of wood in the process, until she had a pair of crude but usable crutches, fit to her height.
As the weeks passed, Jezhei’s leg pained her less and less. Four days after she had finished the crutches, Jezhei felt ready. She had feigned lethargy through the whole day, and pretended to sleep very early, waiting until the tired herders finally took their rest. She looked at the knives of their kitchen, and let go of her desire to use them. Mei and Kai had shown her too much kindness to be dealt with in her father’s way. She left them behind, taking only one of the leather bridles, and used her crutches to get to the pens. “I shall tell my father that we must leave this village alone for the mercy they’ve shown me. We can hunt anywhere but here,” Jezhei promised herself.
It took her several attempts to get a bridle on one of the dri, for she would not attempt a male of a species she had no experience with. They could be as dangerous as a stallion, she was certain. Jezhei led the beast just beyond the edge of the pen and closed the gate behind it, then used the fence to gain purchase on its back. It took several tries, as the tauzak did not want to stay still. Her whole leg had not regained its full strength yet, so she was forced to put too much of her weight on the unpadded crutches, which dug cruelly into her arm pits. Once more Jezhei became covered in dirt, but she reached the tauzak’s back and managed to balance precariously there. She found her seat and lost her crutches to the ground.
Jezhei pushed her heel into the tauzak’s side, urging it onward, but the animal stayed still, and bent its head to eat a tuft of grass. She kicked it harder, and dug her heel in strongly, only to be rewarded with a grunting snort. She squeezed her thighs, flicked the reins, pulled them, and started to curse but the dri she rode was unmoved. It shook its head as though to clear away the buzzing if a fly.
“Oh come on, what will it take to make you leave? Don’t you want to run with me to the high places? To breathe the pure air and touch the sky?”
“You can’t make a tauzak leave its herd without earning its trust first,” answered Mei.
Shaken as a leaf, and stiff as a branch, Jezhei nearly lost her seat like a child and only kept her place by grabbing the tauzak by its mane. This was enough to end the dri’s patience for mistreatment and it shook her off its back. She crashed to the ground with a loud snap. Pain and confusion blinded Jezhei’s senses until she realized that it wasn’t her leg, but a crutch which had broken. Then she looked up at Mei, who had calmed the dri already and pulled it away from Jezhei where it’s stomping wouldn’t hit her. Shame deeper than the hurt of her body wracked the young woman, who curled up and began sobbing.
“Dry your tears. As soon as I’ve brought put the herd together, I’ll bring you inside. We’ll find more wood, so you can make a new crutch.”
“How can you continue being so kind to me when everything I do has been for the sake of leaving you?”
“Vengeance is not part of the Way. Kiritru does not approve of it.”
“Kai and you are always talking about the Way, about how to keep it. I don’t understand it. You are trying to explain the sky to a mole, the land to a fish.” Jezhei threw her hands in the air. “The only Way I’ve ever known is the Way of the Sword, the way of taking.”
Mei shook her head, “The way is family, and you know it deep inside you. You know loyalty to your kin, don’t you? To your father and tribe?” Jezhei nodded slowly. “This is part of the Way, but Kiritru helps show us the whole of it, and gives us her children in life and death to show us the rest. She is the mother of all the tauzak, and our inspiration. The Way is Family. The Way is Community. The Way is Forgiveness. The Way is Mercy. The Way is Love and Nurture.”
“How do you know her way is the right one?” Jezhei wailed “What makes you so sure?”
“It brings us peace, and we already herd her children. If we were smiths, we might have followed Juntai, the Lord of Iron, or Ansur of the Kind Flame. If we were stone carvers we might have learned the path of Sinta whose bones are the foundation of the world. Even being herders, they would not refuse us. Instead we follow Kiritru, though there are many paths, and they are also good ones. Compassion, more than anything else, inspires us, moves us, and brings us our sense of community.”
Jezhei wiped her face with one sleeve, and said with all the confidence she could “Teach me.”