Green Sunset - #1

Seventh day

Seventh day Part one

It was not long to dawn. Paxma, sitting on the back of the wagon, recalled those events with some discomfort. Not that he had contributed to the carriage of the slightest load. No, but his laziness just rebelled at the thought of those slogs. He raised an eyebrow at the thought of Quilen. Quilen was the leader, what was more a respected one: he had to set a good example. Actually, a long series of good examples.

At the end, they had come out unscathed from those gorges, really all of them who had left the village. Now, however, Quilen was lying at death's door in a pallet just behind his shoulders. The great Quilen, hero and descendant of heroes. The man who, from the very first day, had contributed to opening his mind onto a reality that the Seminar Mentors had tried for long years and in all ways to place at the center of their teaching: the natives belonged to the Homo sapiens species. They were Homo sapiens but not always did their degree of civilization match their actual brainpower. In other words, CAUTION! Because one might find poorly evolved populations, but, though seldom, stronger in mind even than he. Caution!

He pulled himself together. The other two remaining carriages had stopped on the track a hundred paces away and, between them, a campfire was burning: a thread of smoke rose a few meters, then dispersed in the steppe's breeze. Four Nomads patrolled the area: now and again one of them would appear on his pacing steed, soon to disappear again into brushes and unevenness of the ground.

The thought that what had happened lied under his responsibility skimmed him occasionally, but he was not upset. There were no witnesses left: in a few days, the tribe had died out before his eyes and the bulk of Nomads had made off as soon as it had been clear that the caravan no longer existed. For all he knew, the nearest authority could not be other than some illiterate indigenous chieftain in an anonymous camp hundreds of kilometers down south. In addition, who could possibly have been aware of a caravan that, although massive and well escorted, had mostly moved through uninhabited territories? That caravan was the moving population of a village whose existence very few people had known outside its boundaries. Paxma shrugged, and actually started reliving the past week in his mind.