Read The Waterstone for Free Online

Pondleweed said, answering the children’s unspoken question. “You know that Hunters have no permanent homes like Fishers and Diggers have. They’re travelers, never settling, always moving from place to place, searching for game.” He sounded disapproving.
    The creaking was louder now, and soon the leafy branches pushed apart to let the caravan pass through. Or rather caravans. There were two of them — both little houses on wheels. Nobono’s family lived in a wooden wagon with a tentlike cover of stitched animal skins fastened to a frame over the wagon bed. The frame was decorated with colored ribbons of dyed and twisted grasses, and hung with strings of hollow seedpods and baked-clay bells that clattered and tinkled musically as the wagon moved. Bundles of pelts were strapped to the wagon’s sides, and an earth-filled box fastened to the back was planted with herbs: onion grass, elf parsley, and tea mint.
    Nobono and a woman with dark braids that hung to her waist walked before the wagon, pulling it along by a pair of wooden handles. Three children scampered beside them, and a fourth peeped shyly out from between the flaps of the skin tent. The children’s faces were deep nutbrown like their parents’, and their cheeks were also painted with stripes of blue.
    The second wagon was smaller, its wheels gaudily striped in yellow, red, and green. It was pulled by a plumpish elderly Hunter whose long braid was almost pure white. He had a thick white mustache that curled up jauntily on the ends, and bushy eyebrows that looked like fat white caterpillars. When he grinned at Tad and Birdie, they saw that he was missing two teeth in the front.
    “This is Branica, my
mari
,” Nobono said. “The mother of my children.” He gestured expansively. “And these are my sons, Bodo and Griffi, and my daughters, Ditani and Kelti. Our Ditani, she is now of the Hunt, having brought home First Blood.”
    The Hunter boys were dressed like their father, in leather trousers and fur vests, while the girls, like their mother, wore bright full-skirted dresses dyed scarlet with berry juice. There were ropes of agate and amber beads around their necks; and carved bone bracelets on their wrists and ankles clacked and clattered as they walked. Even Kelti, the baby of the family, wore necklaces of blue and yellow wooden beads, and there were goldfinch feathers tied in her pigtails. Birdie, stricken with shyness, edged closer to Tad, tugging nervously at the hem of her fringed tunic.
    “They look like flowers,” she whispered.
    Tad could hardly stop staring at Ditani. She was the prettiest girl he had ever seen. Her dark braids were threaded with red-dyed grasses and twisted into thick coils over her ears, and her eyes tilted up at the corners, which made her look as if she were laughing at some secret joke. With her black hair and scarlet skirt, she did look like a flower: a brilliant wild poppy or a slim stalk of flameweed. Beside her, Tad felt stodgy, clumsy, flapfooted, and dull.
    “And this” — Nobono gestured again, teeth flashing —“is Uncle Czabo, my father’s cousin, who travels with us.”
    The white-haired Hunter gave a loud bellow of laughter. Tad thought he sounded like a bullfrog.
    “Well met, Fishers!” he shouted. Something glittered when he turned his head. Tad saw, astonished, that he wore a silver ring in his nose.
    “We will eat, eh? And drink!” He dropped the shafts of his wagon, clapped his hands together, and pointed a long finger at Tad and Birdie.
    “And you, Fisher cublings, I will show
you
my magic tricks!”
    He winked at Tad and waggled his bushy eyebrows up and down at Birdie, who giggled.
    The children were shy at first, but soon they were chattering together as Branica rummaged in the wagon, pulling out food. Hunter food. Tad peered at it suspiciously. It looked like perfectly ordinary food, though it smelled strongly of onion grass and wild garlic. Even more interesting than the food, though, was