From dailyprompt

Planners’-verse, further in the future.

Beginning of Spring, probably year 317 Post-Conflict

I have been living among the Kaveh for a little over five seasons now. Such was not my original plan, of course; we do not embed anthropologists in the wild tribes any more. Early attempts had a 0% survival rate, and even we – the Tower, that is – are not that mad.

I was not, at the time, even studying the Kaveh, or any of the wild tribes. I was visiting a village along the canal, discussing education plans and a method of marrying-out to nearby settlements that would prevent the excessive inbreeding such places are prone to. Considering what the tribes did to that place, I doubt that is a problem anymore.

Not the Kaveh, however; that was the Kybelii. They raided in numbers and with ferocity that exceeded any report or tale I have ever heard, tearing through the village. They killed the men, and took the women and children prisoner, including, of course, me.

I will not write of my days with the Kybelii. They were a violent and smelly people, and I don’t mourn their demise, except in the loss of their genetic diversity.

Their demise, and my unwilling and accidental embedding among the Kavah, came two and one-half moons after the slaughter of Johnsport, when the Kavah and two other of the wild tribes attacked and killed all of the Kybelii warriors and about half of their domestic population. They split the remainders and the slaves – myself, again – among the three tribes. I, of course, went to the Kavah.

At first, I believed that this would simply be the same unpleasant, odorous captivity with a new set of captors. Our information on the wild tribes didn’t indicate any major variation in behavior: they pillaged, stole, and raped, and as far as we could tell, they did so indiscriminately. Their slaves were treated as chattel, as cattle, bought and sold, bred until they died, often in childbirth.

And perhaps that would have continued to be my fate. The tribe sold many of the slaves they acquired from the Kybelii, and two more died on the long trip from summer pastures to winter camp. I could have been among either group, easily enough.

But a young female warrior-in-training who I believed to be the chief’s daughter, and her brother, slightly older, took a liking to me, and I was moved into the yurt they shared with their mother for the duration of the winter.

By the time that the long, miserable, snow was over and it was time to move back to summer pastures, I was swollen with an unwanted pregnancy from the Kybelli, and had learned to speak the dialect the Kavah used and taught my owners quite a bit of the Scholar’s English I had grown up speaking. I had also befriended my owners’ mother, as well as the two teenagers themselves, and, through them, the chieftain, as well as the man, their lore-speaker, who I had originally thought was the chief.

(Their lore-speaker is the father to my young mistress, the chieftain the husband-to-be of both mistress and master. More on that later).

And it seems that their lore-speaker is intrigued by the way that The City People (that would be yours truly, neveryoumind that I am, in fact a Tower Person) handle their disputes. His children were very miffed to find him taking more and more of my time, but he is, after all, an important person. And he is open to new ideas, even if, between you and I, journal, they are in actuality very old ideas.

We have been working on the idea of justice, recently, he and I. The Kavah, as with, I gather, many of the other wild tribes, have a concept of “revenge” and one of “survival,” but justice has until now been missing from their vocabulary.

During the summer, there is little time for talking, so I talk quite a bit during the long idle periods of winter, and now, as the snow begins to melt, I find myself talking quickly. They will raid again, soon. Perhaps I can bend them, slowly, towards fairness and justice. Perhaps this year there will be less slaughter.

I hope that I can. Their summer pasture, this year, is awfully close to the Tower.

Prompt: “bending towards justice”

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