Ardu-un Iqul Roba looked over the tribesmen who had gathered.

  “The uqandu have taken two promising adolescents from us. They have taken Blood from our tribe. This will not stand!”

  The Uli gathered roared in agreement.

  I watched from the side, too inexperienced to join the hunt. Unlike past hunts, which were for meat, this one was personal; the Uli sought retribution for being attacked in their home. Though, the mantis meat I ate when I killed some last year was pretty good, so I hoped they would still bring it back.

  While the chief and the tribesmen were acting slighted, in truth the uqandu were just animals. Clever ones, to ambush during our mating cycle when we were at our weakest, though perhaps they were simply attracted by the smells of the camp itself.

  I wasn’t too worried about the tribesmen. I was strong, admittedly, but not as strong as the chief. Surely he would make short work of the creatures, and things would go back to normal.

  At least, that was what I thought as the tribesmen, Daru included, set out to deliver their justice, something that felt ironic given that these were a people who pit their children against each other in battles to the death. Intellectually, I understood the difference—our ritual killing empowered the tribe, these animal deaths weakened it—but it was a masterpiece of compartmentalization to be able to see one as purely righteous and the other as abhorrent when they weren’t that different, at the end of the day.

  But the tribesmen returned diminished. There had been losses, and more than I would have guessed. Presumably more than they had expected, as well. The Uli were subdued in their victory, largely returning to their tents to feast in private, while the other boys my age and I ran meat to the creches, as per usual after a hunt.

  When the work was done, and I got my share to eat, I returned to Daru’s tent, where I found my father morosely carving at some ivory, his food mostly untouched.

  “That bad?” I asked quietly.

  Daru looked up at me, sighed, then went back to his carving for a minute before he spoke. “They caught us by surprise, and in larger numbers than we expected,” he finally said. “I’ve never seen so many uqandu together before.”

  The mantises usually lived further inland, where the terrain grew rocky and jagged, with tall stone spires breaking sightlines, which they used for their ambush strategy. That had likely been a factor in the Uli settling near the ocean, alongside the need for salt and the extra food resource. Perhaps a group migrated in this direction, found a strategy for survival, and there’s been a local population boom?

  Unfortunately, if they weren’t killed to the last, that likely meant this would be a recurring problem. Their numbers would likely rebound, unless we kept up the pressure, but with fewer tribesmen, the chief wouldn’t risk another hunt unless pushed to act. The tribesmen were needed to hunt the mirulu—the mammoths—and keep the rest of the tribe fed.

  Sure enough, a year later, the uqandu were prodding the camp again.

  This time, the chief had enough foresight to be concerned with attacks, and the Bloodied boys who didn’t have mates, like myself, were put on watch. Repeatedly, the alarm was raised, interrupting the tribesmen from their time with the females as they leapt to defend the tribe.

  By the end of the mating season, nerves were frayed, and the relative peace within the camp was simmering with displeasure and tension. For the first time since I had graduated from my creche, I saw someone argue with Roba, and wondered if there would be a challenge for leadership.

  “What are you going to do about this?” the Uli demanded of the chief, tusks bared and four fists clenched.

  A crowd of Uli, both tribesmen and adolescents who were soon-to-be tribesmen themselves, had gathered near Roba’s tent, and other voices called out similar question.

  Ardu-un Iqul Roba once again looked over the tribesmen who had gathered.

  “Perhaps it is time we move camp.”

  * * *

  I had spent my whole life as an Uli in this camp, but I knew the Uli were semi-nomadic. I had heard my mothers comparing this camp to the last several times in my youth, and having since come to know some of the grandmothers as part of my duties to the tribe, I knew some of them had moved up to five times through their long lives.

  “I’m too old to move camp,” the grandmother I was helping with her packing grumbled.

  “I’m kind of excited about it,” I said as I rolled up a hide and tied it off. “It’s my first move.”

  “Pah,” the old woman spat, baring yellowed tusks. “Every camp is the same. There’s nothing to get excited about.”

  I hummed a partial assent. “Hopefully less uqandu, at least.”

  The grandmother let out a harsh cackle. “Yes, I suppose there’s that.”

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  All across the camp, tribesmen were packing their tents and then helping their mates pack up the creches, while Uli like myself were responsible for the communal tribe’s belongings. Not everything would make the trip with us; some things could be remade, and anything worn out and in need of replacement would just be reacquired wherever we settled, since we would only settle somewhere with the resources to support the tribe.

  The structures and belongings themselves spoke of our nomadic history. We lived in tents and yurts, and while they had been semi-permanent structures during my life, they came down easily and could be raised again elsewhere. The largest support bones would be left behind, and the first hunt of a mirulu would be critical for the new camp, as those bones would be used to establish the new poles, but the smaller carved items and the intact hides would be coming with us, as those could take a lifetime to replace wholesale.

  Perhaps if a better building material was available to the Uli, like wood, we would have already made the leap to permanent settlements. I had done some experimentation with carving stone using [Blood Control], but there were too many hard limits. My Blood energy ran out quickly carving blocks, and even if all the tribesmen put all their energy into it every day, progress would be slow. Without metal tools, there was only so much Brawn we could use in stone construction.

  What we needed was something that could be used as mortar to fill the gaps. Then, we could use natural stone to build structures, just by searching for the right size and shape, using minimal Blood to break down larger ones as needed. There were some instances of stone stacked like this already in the camp, just far from the scale of a full building.

  Of course, if there were enough pressures to drive Uli to migrate every decade or two, it didn’t make sense for stone construction to develop, since it would need to be left behind every time. Once I was a tribesman and had my own living arrangements, it was something I planned to experiment with. I had some minor success using silt dredged from the ocean as very basic mortar, but it wasn’t enough by itself, too crumbly when dry.

  Not that living in tents wasn’t working out for the Uli, and the climate was forgiving enough for it. I had no idea what the possibility of permanent structures would do for the culture here, either, though I couldn’t help but think strong stone walls would protect from a threat like the mantises. Hide tents provided no defenses, though they were easy to take down and roll up for travel.

  Quicker than I would have guessed, the camp was packed, and the tribe set out in search of a new home.

  We headed up the coast, which provided a limited food supply for us on the journey, though we often had to stop so the tribesmen could hunt. It was a bit of a feast-or-famine situation, compared to the generally consistent food supply of this life so far.

  In the early days, the children were rowdy and prone to complain. I was even a bit jealous of them, running around and talking to children from other creches, getting a better look at the tribesmen and tribe as a whole, albeit in an unusual situation. As a reincarnator, I could have done significantly more information gathering had I been in a similar situation in my youth.

  The one major upside of the migration was I got to see Nadi again. Since we were all marching together, the tribesmen and the Bloodied boys were often around the other females and children, protecting them from any potential attacks. It wasn’t considered especially proper in our culture to engage in conversation with other Uli’s mates or children, but that was a lot less important in the face of survival, and wasn’t all that enforced, especially early on in our travels.

  Nadi was a mother now, and not just in name. While the children would be communally raised, she secretly told me which of the new babies in her creche was hers. She seemed proud and happy, and was getting along with her fellow creche mothers.

  I chose to be happy for her, putting away my mixed feelings, at least until things began to sour. Travel was hard on us all, especially the children.

  As days turned to weeks, they had fallen into the routine, but as weeks turned to months, most fell into a quiet sort of survival mode. It wasn’t enough for every child, some of which fell to the endless march in search of a new home. My jealousy had entirely faded by that point.

  Part of the problem was that good locations were often already occupied by other tribes. In order to avoid conflict, we often had to veer inland quite a distance to avoid these tribes, which cut off our access to the water for stretches of the journey, and opened us up to possible uqandu attack.

  And yet, we persisted, for we had to in order for the tribe to survive.

  Months later, many of us gaunt and weak, we finally found a decent, coast-side location. It appeared to be free of any other people or predators, and the tide pools here were decent, though not as good as the ones we had left behind. With some work, we could probably expand on them. For our diminished tribe, it was a promising start.

  Even if it was imperfect, the tribe was exhausted, and had been run ragged.

  “Can we settle here, Roba?”

  “We’ll have to scout further up the coast to make sure we’re not too close to another settlement,” the chief said, glancing over his people. “But if not…” Ardu-un Iqul Roba looked over the tribe who had traveled so far in search of a new place to call home. “This could be the place. Begin setting up the camp.”

  * * *

  After the scouts confirmed there wasn’t another tribe nearby, the camp was fully laid out, largely a copy of the previous one. A mirulu hunt was undertaken, and in addition to the meat, the rest of the mammoth was used as needed to help the tribe replace lost goods. One wasn’t enough to cover all the needs of the tribe, but each brought us closer to the comfort we had left behind. In surprisingly little time, things fell back into a usual routine.

  While we had put a lot of distance between us and the uqandu—as well as a few other tribes, who would likely either suffer predation or handle the issue in a way our tribe couldn’t—we hadn’t traveled so far for things to be that different. The climate was largely the same, as were the cycles of plants and animals, including those of the sea.

  There was a time of year where one particularly tasty sea creature tended to come to the tide pools to breed, resulting in an influx of them in our diet. It was a time of year that I always looked forward to, as did many other Uli. After months on the road with limited food, the tribe was looking forward to it more than ever, this year.

  Unfortunately, it also brought conflict to our door.

  One of the other Bloodied boys saw them first, and raised the alarm. The tribesmen gathered at the edge of the new camp, as the strangers approached.

  The nomadic tribe of Uli stopped a short distance away, and the chief of this new tribe stepped forward.

  Like our Roba, he was massive and covered in the names of the dead, a physical manifestation of the Blood he wielded. He also bore many scars, a second history written on his skin, which spoke of the conflict he had survived. His tribesmen stood behind him, a unified force; they too were heavily Bloodied and scarred.

  These Uli were warriors, and the way they looked at us made their thoughts quite easy to read: we didn’t belong here.