Four men of the Chosen Clan built a fire in the center of the plateau. They built it into a raging blaze and added large logs to create a cone of fire that lit up the whole area.

  “Oh, look at that!” Viking sneered. “The Followers are here.”

  The others burst out in laughter when they saw the women wearing long dresses with their sleeves cinched around their wrists.

  “How can they survive in this heat when they wear such restrictive clothing?” Zyria sneered.

  “I heard they even wear undergarments under their dresses,” Rila added. “Their undergarments cover the legs down to the ankles.

  “You can see them from here,” Estia chimed in. “Watch what happens when the women sit down.”

  All eyes turned to the Follower band across the plateau. The women had a distinctive way of flipping their dresses when they sat down.

  They all sat with their legs bent sideways. Each women arranged her dress to cover as much of her legs as possible. No one could see any part of a woman’s legs because her dress hid them.

  It gave the women a strange appearance of not having legs at all. Everything below the waist looked like one large blob of colored stone.

  Each time a woman arranged her skirts, she gave the observer a fleeting glimpse of her white undergarments. They really did cover the legs from the waist down to tight cinched clusters of fabric around the ankles.

  Hangman couldn’t imagine any attire more ill-suited to life in the jungle. The Followers must have sweltered under so many layers.

  The Follower women wore their long hair twisted up in elaborate curled knots on top of their heads. These knots didn’t look like Alien’s small, dotted knots.

  The sweeps of hair covered the whole head. The Followers’ long clothing and their strange hairstyles made them look as weak, effeminate, and useless as their reputation suggested.

  The Followers were famous—and not in a good way. They didn’t hunt. They didn’t defend themselves. They never confronted anyone who treated them hostilely.

  The Followers made a point of always retreating, hiding, or negotiating with anyone or anything that threatened them. They couldn’t be more opposite from the Godless.

  The Godless made a few more biting remarks about the Followers.

  “Heaven help the man who marries one of their women,” Boxer added. “Can you imagine trying to travel with a woman who doesn’t even know which end of a weapon to hold?”

  “They don’t even defend their own children from danger,” Katha went on. “And look at all those old people. What good are they? They would only slow the band down.”

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  “I wonder how long it took them to get here,” Chaos agreed. “They would have had to stop and hide every few seconds every time they see a dangerous creature. I’m surprised they made it to the gathering at all.”

  “Maybe they headed north last year at the end of last year’s gathering,” Shadow suggested. “Maybe they never left. Maybe they’ve been hiding at the base of the plateau all this time. Then they would only have to climb up here and make it look like they traveled here from farther south.”

  The others laughed. The Godless’ laughter got so brazen that the other bands noticed and looked over. The Followers looked over, too. Some of them wrinkled their noses at the Godless.

  “I heard they don’t eat meat,” Magnet remarked. “Most of their diet is taken from plants.”

  “Ew!” Zyria grimaced. “Disgusting!”

  “It’s no wonder they’re so weak if they don’t eat meat,” Katha replied. “They must be spindly under their clothes.”

  Boxer shoved Hangman against the shoulder. “You might get a Follower wife. Then you would find out and you could tell us what they’re like.”

  More laughter broke out. Hangman didn’t respond even to tell his cousin to shut up. Just a few more hours and this would all be over.

  The reality was starting to set in. The Followers wouldn’t be here at all if they didn’t have a young person coming of age who needed to marry.

  Hangman crossed his fingers that the young Follower would be a man.

  Hangman cast a critical eye over the rest of the assembled bands. He couldn’t tell by looking at them which young people were coming for marriage. Some might be too old or too young.

  He couldn’t tell which of the Followers was here for marriage, either. He really, really started to hope more young men showed up than women. Then the other young men could take all the women and he would leave alone.

  Hours passed. No one made a move to start the gathering.

  At some unseen signal, Dodge stood up from the cluster in Wizard’s band. A few different men stood up from different bands all over the plateau. Then Arda stood up and Bullseye stood up on opposite sides of the fire.

  Young people stood up one after another. Hangman finally had no choice but to stand up, too.

  He did a quick head count. The number of men and women standing up was exactly equal. Everyone would pair up tonight.

  His stomach dropped when a young woman stood up from the Follower group. She wore exactly the same long dress and hairstyle as all her female relatives.

  Arda and Bullseye immediately stepped out of line, met up in the center of the ring, joined hands, and he led her back to Wizard’s group. She sat down with Bullseye and he put his arm around her. So that was over.

  The other couples took longer to pair off. One other young man crossed the circle, approached a young woman he liked, asked her a few questions in an undertone, and led her back to his family.

  They sat down. That was all they had to do. Now they were married.

  No one moved for a long time. Wizard finally got to his feet, murmured something to Dodge, and crossed the fire to one of the other bands. It was a band of the Whisperers Clan, another hunting Clan that lived farther east of Godless territory.

  Another older man advanced out of that band and met Wizard in the center near the fire. The men talked for a few minutes.

  They still stood there talking when a few other men broke away from their bands, met up in the middle, and negotiated about their unpaired young people.

  “Who do you like, Hangman?” Boxer asked and laughed again.

  No one answered him. Hangman pretended not to hear. He could already see where this was going.

  Wizard accompanied the other father to the Whisperers group and came back with a young woman for Dodge. Then Wizard got into a lengthy negotiation with another Whisperer father about finding a husband for Distra.

  Hangman’s heart sank as more and more of the unpaired young people crossed the plateau and sat down. No one approached the Followers. That young woman would be the last one left. Then Hangman would have no choice but to take her.

  End of Chapter 21.

  ? 2024 by Theo Mann

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