Travellers #1 by Jack Lasenby Page A

kept bringing into their tent. Perhaps she put something in his food.”
    “Poison?”
    “What he did was wrong. The leader of the Travellers has to be just, like your father.”
    “You should have been the leader, Hagar.”
    She shook her head. A long rug was wound around the beam at the other end of the loom. She was showing me how to finish with a row of tassels.
    “Here.” Her hands went over mine and slipped the threads so they tied off evenly. Despite the wool and its oil her skin felt dry. Her hands looked like Dragon’s claws, but I pushed that idea into the back of my mind. I didn’t want to hurt Hagar.
    “A woman couldn’t be leader. I was busy having children, raising them, telling my husband what to do when he forgot.”
    “Do you mean…?”
    “He didn’t always remember things. But people wanted it to come from him always, not from a woman.”
    “That’s silly,” I said. “We’re the Travellers, now, and you’re our leader.”
    Hagar smiled.
    “You mean your husband was the leader somebody poisoned?”
    She bent over the tassels.
    “You killed him?”
    “They were going to hamstring him, leave him behind. That was the punishment for an unjust leader.”
    “Would you have stayed with him?”
    “I was still young, strong, with a baby to look after. I knewa lot about weaving, dyeing, plants for medicines. I was too valuable. They would have made me travel on. He had hurt me, too, but I didn’t want him to suffer his way to death alone, listening, watching our dust vanish. Then the bite of the cold, the wild dogs…” She tied another knot. “So I poisoned him.”
    “When someone was hamstrung and left behind, were they given anything to defend themselves?”
    “Not a stick. Not a stone. No fire.”
    I stroked Dragon’s breast with the feather. He wore a red cap that cut off the light so he sat quiet. “Wouldn’t it have been kinder to put a hood over their heads so they couldn’t see?”
    “Part of the punishment,” said Hagar, “was seeing the Travellers walk away.”
    “Weren’t you allowed to look back?”
    “You might be hamstrung, too.”
    “Did it keep the leaders honest?”
    “Most of the time.”
    “Was Karly like his father? Was that why he was cruel?” Hagar turned both hands, palms uppermost. “Is that why he hated my father? Because he was the next leader?”
    Hagar shrugged.
    “Is that why he drove me out, why he came back to kill me?”
    “We’ll roll this rug,” she said, “and set up the loom for another. You know how to do that. Take Dragon for a walk. Bar and Mak like to see you come around and speak to them. They get lonely just like us.” Hagar nodded her head which grew more like a skull, I thought, like Dragon’s head when he was a chick, all eyes and beak.

Chapter 17
A Sky lark for the Journey
    There was plenty for all at the Hawk Cliffs. I tickled, speared, and shot trout with arrows. I set lines for them. Hagar showed me how to make a net, the simple knot, and the clever needle with its middle prong. It caught more trout than we could eat. We hung them from the roof of a small cave and kept a smoky fire going.
    “They’d last well into winter,” said Hagar, “only we won’t be here then.”
    I looked at their rows of smoky gold and red and wanted to stay at the Hawk Cliffs for ever.
    One afternoon Dragon teetered on the glove as I knelt and looked into the lake’s deep, reflective eye. Across a blue sky small white clouds swam lazily. Their reflections drifted across the lake. I wondered how to draw them. Did the sky reflect the water? A trout jumped, and the clouds rippled. Circles followed each other out from the splash, losing their edge, becoming bulges rather than ripples. The surface smoothed again to small white clouds, travellers across a blue plain that stretched to the foot of the mountains.
    I tied Dragon to a branch and waded, leaning forward till the water swung my feet up behind. The lightness it gave me! My lame leg