Deepwood: Karavans # 2 (3 page)

She wanted to protest. She wanted to remind them that
they
were alive, the four of them; that Alisanos had tasted of them and let them go. But that was a selfish impulse and she chided herself for it.

“Oh, Mother,” Bethid murmured. “Other than the oldest trees, most of the grove is blown down!”

“But the wagons remain,” Jorda said. “Many of them—see? That one there, that’s Ilona’s. It may be lacking its canopy, but otherwise it looks whole.” He shifted Ilona slightly in his arms. “Almost,” he told her. Then, “Bethid, run ahead. Make certain her cot is clear of debris, and brew some willow bark tea. Mikal, look for wood suitable for a splint. Try the supply wagon—even tree branches would do.”

Ilona wished to say they need not do so much for her, but her awareness had begun to fray at the edges. She was dreadfully tired. Her eyes insisted on closing.

Jorda raised his voice. “And Mikal, perhaps you can check your tent and see if there are any bottles of spirits left intact. She will need it when I set this arm.”

Ilona, who drank ale or wine and did not care for spirits, tried to override the suggestion. But there was no strength in her voice, and Jorda simply ignored the attempt.

BENEATH THE DOUBLE suns of Alisanos demons gathered, and devils. And beasts and creatures. Some slithered, some walked, some
dropped out of the trees. In brambles, in briars, shielded by dense vegetation, tangled groundcover, and thick, twisted tree trunks, they waited. Tails whipped. Eyes stared. Bodies trembled. Forked tongues tasted the air, lured by the scent of human flesh. In particular, the flesh of a newborn human.

Rhuan could feel them on his skin, all the avid eyes fixed upon him. Hair rose on his arms and legs, prickled at the nape of his neck. He stood very still before the assemblage. He saw the glint of an eye here, the twitch of an ear there; heard the subtle susurration of muscles flexing, of bodies tensing to leap. He had been long out of Alisanos, bound to his journey in the human world, but he had forgotten none of the deepwood’s dangers, or its denizens.

He stood before them all, holding a human baby. That baby was, wondrously, made mute by sleep. Behind Rhuan, the farmsteader’s wife had stopped moving. His attention no longer needed to be divided between baby and mother. Instead, he gave it all to the creatures, to the devils and demons, to the children of Alisanos.

If he were to survive, perhaps it was time he summoned the arrogance of his sire, donning Alario’s certitude of power, the implacable aura and arrogance of sheer superiority. The primaries ruled their own in Alisanos, but even they could fall victim to the jaws of predators, to inhabitants who were power made tangible, inexplicably alive; to progeny born of the deepwood’s bones and blood. No one, no
thing
, born of and
in Alisanos, was immortal, save for the deepwood itself. The battle to survive amid the deadly challenges of capricious Alisanos began again with each dawn, beneath the double suns, beneath the sepia sky.

He raised the ruddy membrane that turned his eyes red. He let the heated flush of blood rise beneath his skin, deepen its hue. He stood his ground in the very posture he had seen in his sire, when Alario engaged in a battle of wills with the creatures, the demons, the beasts, who would pull him down if given the chance. Half of Rhuan was human; yet at this moment, the other half was completely, and incontrovertibly, Alario’s get.

He used the language most familiar to demons, devils, and beasts. He had been raised to know several forms, from his milk-tongue, to the careful enunciations of adolescence, to the burgeoning of self-awareness, to the finding of one’s place amid all others as a young male. But he was
dioscuri
, and he knew additional tongues, additional inflections. Such things as marked him different.

Rhuan summoned what he had witnessed in his sire; summoned the words and tones and postures of an Alisani primary, who held dominion among his own. Who was of the first litter of get whelped by Alisanos, thousands of years before.

They knew what he was. They knew
who
he was: Alario’s half-human son, the first
dioscuri
born to Alario in three hundred years.

He sought the eyes, captured them, held them with
his own. He felt the first faint stirring in his genitals; the initial tingle of pure, concentrated
maleness
rising from his skin. He entirely subjugated any part of him that questioned, that wondered, how he could do this thing; to do what he had never attempted before.

“I say no.
I
say no. I say
no
. You cannot; you shall not. This is not for you.”

But all of them wanted. Very badly, they wanted. From a hundred mouths came the hissing, the chattering, the guttural clicking sounds of denial, of warning; that much they allowed him. Heads tipped sideways. Bodies wove from side to side. Jaws dropped open, displaying tongues and teeth.

“I say,
I
say: You shall not.”

The child, cradled in a sling made out of his leather tunic, neither stirred nor made noise. She slept on, the infant; the girl-child they all of them hungered for. Sweetest flesh, human flesh, infant flesh. Such a rare delicacy had not appeared in Alisanos for forty years.

Rhuan felt his lips drawing back from his teeth in a rictus of challenge.
“She. Is. Mine.”
Heat bathed his flesh, rising from his bones. He viewed the world from behind the ruddy membrane. Fingertips twitched, itched, as if he might grow talons. “You. Shall. Not. She is mine. I claim her. I name her my get. I shall raise her to be
dioscuri
, as I am, and to one day become a primary, as I shall. She is fated, this child. She is not for you. Not for
such
as you.”

He held his tongue, his breath. He waited. He did not permit his gaze to waver, to flicker aside for even
a brief moment. He maintained the posture of sheer superiority, that of an alpha male, a primary, a god, standing before them regardless of his shape. They could assault him. They could mutilate his flesh, shatter his bones. They could dismiss his posture, his attitude, the language in his mouth. It was a daily fight, this; a deeply ingrained acceptance of the need to dominate. To perservere. To be
more
than any of them.

Enemies, all of them, but in this they were united. They scented the child. They wanted the child. They could, one or all of them, take that child. And he, Alario’s most recent
dioscuri
, would be taken down, torn apart, supped upon by those whom he, in this moment, dominated. Whom he had to dominate, were he to survive. Were any of them to survive, including infant and mother.

Fear did not shape him. Fear did not fill his eyes, his belly, nor the words, the tones, in his mouth. Fear could not exist.

“Go,” Rhuan said. “Go now, each of you. You are not wanted here. You have no business here.” And then, without turning, without breaking his gaze, he said to the woman, the mother, who waited in silence behind him, “Come here to your child, and draw one of my knives.”

For a moment she did not move. And then Rhuan saw all the watching eyes shift focus, departing from him to make note of the woman. He heard her rise, heard her walk, heard the raggedness of her breathing. But she said nothing. She stepped up beside him. He could smell her fear. But she showed none of it.

“Draw a knife.”

She took one of his throwing knives from his baldric, shorter-hilted, shorter-bladed, than the horn-handled weapon at his hip.

Rhuan, who held the infant, displayed the palm of one hand. “Cut me. Bleed me. Do not hesitate.”

But the woman’s pause was long, was fraught with doubts.

“Do it,” he told her, “or all is lost. Cut me. Bleed me. Now.”

He felt her cool fingers close around his wrist, steadying his hand. “Just—cut?”

“Just cut.” He showed nothing at all as the blade nicked his palm. “Deeper, if you please. Bleed me.”

She cut him. She bled him.

“And now,” he said, “something more, something difficult, something you will cry out against as a mother, but you must do it. It is the only way.”

She was frozen beside him.

“Do it,” he repeated. “Now. Waste no time.”

He felt her disavowal, her denial, her despair.

“I am fighting for her life,” he said, “not for her death. I promise you this.”

She cut into the tiny palm, brought blood to the surface of the new, pink flesh. The child awoke crying.

Rhuan closed his much larger hand over the tiny knife-cut palm. Felt against calloused flesh the softness of her palm, the perfection of her skin that now was scarred. His blood mingled with hers. Her cries increased in volume.

To the creatures, to the beasts, to the demons and the devils, in the tongue that made him their superior, he declared, “She is mine. I claim her as my get.”

Audrun, beside him, trembled. Tears ran down her face. She could not understand his words, but she understood his tone.

“She is
mine
,” he repeated, with purposeful emphasis. “Go you, each of you,
all
of you: away. This girlchild was born in Alisanos. She is
of
Alisanos. She is not for you.”

He stood his ground, and waited. And inwardly, he rejoiced; one by one, the children of Alisanos deserted him, disappeared into the shadows.

The woman’s voice was unsteady. “What have you done? What have you done to my child?”

In the language of the humans, he explained, “I have adopted her. She is now as much my daughter as she is yours.”

Audrun recoiled. “
Davyn
is her father! Not you!”

“What little protection there is, she now has.”

“She is mine,” Audrun said. “Give her to me.”

He might have protested. He did not. He handed the baby over, watched her settle into the arms of a visibly angry mother.

“I do what I must,” he told her, “to keep my charges safe.”

D
AVYN HAD WEPT himself dry. His eyes, swollen by tears, stung now in the glare of the sun. No more wind. No more rain. No more blackened sky. And around him, filling the horizon, stretched empty, barren miles of untenanted grasslands, beaten flat.

He had called his wife’s name, and the names of his children, until his voice broke. Now, as he offered prayers aloud, he spoke in a hoarse rasp.

He had returned to the wagon, hoping against hope that somehow his family had made their way to it as well. Instead, he found it absent of wife and children, still canted sideways on its broken rear axle. The canopy had been torn free and carried away by the wind. Naked curving ribs jutted skyward. The Mother Rib now was empty of charms intended for protection, for luck. In the flattened grass near the wagon lay the bodies of two fawn-colored oxen, hides wind-beaten, eyes scoured from their sockets.

Mother of Moons, but how was he to find Audrun
and the children? The storm had scattered them all. Rhuan, the karavan guide, had taken the two youngest by horseback to what safety he could find; Ellica and Gillan, the eldest, had fled after him on foot. And Audrun … Audrun had disappeared in the midst of the storm, her hand torn from his.

Davyn turned in a circle. Where?
Where?

The sun, so warm after the chill of the wind, beat down upon his body, beginning to dry his mudstained, sodden clothing and dirt-crusted fair hair. Beneath caked mud the leather of his boots was still damp and pliable; he dared not take them off lest they dry too rigid to put on again.

Where?

“Mother,” he rasped, “show me where they are.”

Desperation crept up from his belly and lodged in his chest and throat. Gone.
Gone
. All of them. He was stiff-jointed with dread, with the immensity of his fear. He could see nothing, where he stood, beyond the horizon. Were he a bird, he could fly and see the land stretching below him.

Fly
. He could not. But the wagon stood upright, canted though it was.

Davyn clutched at rain-soaked wood, pulled himself up into the back of the wagon. Inside, amid the tangle of storm-tossed possessions, were two narrow cots, a massive trunk, a chest of drawers he had fashioned for Audrun in their first year of marriage, and other belongings. He was a tall man, but no oilcloth canopy remained to hinder his height. Davyn climbed
up onto the chest, balanced himself against the tilt of the wagon with a hand on one arching rib, blocked out the sun with his other hand, and stared across the land. He turned, searched. Turned and searched again.