Karavans (24 page)

Two other men Brodhi didn’t recognize sat at a similar table on the other side of the tent, deep in conversation over a desultory dice game. They paid his entrance brief attention, marked his presence as no concern of theirs, and turned back to their game. Kendic’s hazel eyes widened as Brodhi slid by the drape of oilcloth.

Bethid turned to look. “Brodhi!” She windmilled one arm in a broad gesture for him to join them. “Sit your pretty ass down here with us, won’t you?”

He desired no such thing as to sit his pretty ass down
with those two. But days later he was still unsettled by Ferize’s behavior and found himself moving toward the humans regardless, shrugging out of his courier’s cloak. He hooked out a stool with his foot, borrowing it from another table, then sat down and tossed his cloak to land atop Bethid’s.

Brodhi caught Mikal’s questioning eye. “Whiskey.”

“Whiskey?” Bethid stared at him. “That’s not your usual poison.”

Kendic also stared at him, then shifted his gaze as Brodhi’s eyes locked with his. Brodhi merely said, “What poison I choose to drink is my own affair.”

Bethid scowled at him. “Of course it is. Do we care? Of course we don’t care. You make it plain you want no one to assume anything about you. Which of course makes everyone do it.” She drank from her tankard, then thumped it down again as she licked foam from her upper lip. “Did you hear about the murder a few days back?”

“Wait.” Kendic, big and sandy-haired with a scar across his bristly chin, raised a forestalling hand. The forefinger was knobbed and crooked from an old injury. “Be fair, Beth. We don’t know that it was murder.”

Her smile verged on triumph. “Rhuan was involved.”

That was worth some interest. Brodhi looked at Kendic for clarification.

The big man sighed and rubbed a hand across a scruff of beard. “Rhuan swore the man died when he feel and hit his head on Hezriah’s anvil. Or died a moment before, and then fell. The point, Rhuan says, is that
he
didn’t kill him.”

Bethid’s shrug was dismissive. “Rhuan’s killed people before.”

“Other places, maybe,” Kendic replied evenly. “He says never here.”

The female courier fixed Brodhi with a sharp eye. “He’s your kinsman …what would you say to this? Is it likely?

Has
he killed people here?”

Mikal arrived with a battered pewter cup and set it down before Brodhi. The eye-watering odor of raw whiskey permeated
the table. “If Rhuan’s killed anyone,” the ale-keep declared, “he had good reason. Enough folk have tried to kill
him.
” His mouth jerked briefly. “And some have succeeded. I was here the night he first met Ilona, when two men killed him outside in the dark.”

Bethid shook her head, setting her brass ear-hoops to swinging, and smiled crookedly at Brodhi. “Don’t know that I’ll ever get used to you and Rhuan being able to come back to life. Handy, though, I will admit.”

Brodhi ignored the comment and looked at Kendic, who shrugged heavy shoulders and elaborated. “Hezriah says he didn’t see what happened clearly enough to know if Rhuan did it. And in view of what the dead man was, it doesn’t really matter. Dead is likely better.”

Brodhi picked up the cup, brought it close, and inhaled. The odor was unimproved. He considered setting the cup back down again, but Mikal lingered, obviously waiting for Brodhi’s response, dark brows raised and his mouth twisted in an expression of droll anticipation.

If he didn’t drink the whiskey, he would lose face before the humans. With an inward sigh, Brodhi brought the cup to his lips and swallowed. The liquor burned through his chest and down into his belly, where a small bonfire was lighted. Mikal grinned.

When he thought he could speak normally again, Brodhi said, “Why is dead better?” It certainly was not, in his experience, a philosophy humans held.

Bethid, Mikal, and the Watch captain exchanged glances. It was Kendic who answered, in a voice carefully stripped of emotion. “He wasn’t a man anymore.”

“Came out of Alisanos,” Bethid added pointedly.

Brodhi recalled the gaggle of children who had accosted him, talking about a demon. Something about him being at their wagon with their mother. He drank more whiskey, decided he didn’t care what the humans thought and set the cup aside. “Alisanos does now and again disgorge what it takes in.”

“Changed, though, aren’t they?” Bethid’s blue eyes were bright with fascination. “I’ve heard those who go in the
deepwood and come out—
if
they come out, that is—aren’t human anymore.”

Brodhi opened his mouth to comment but was interrupted by noise from outside. One shout was joined by another, and another by a third. It was taken up tent by tent, person by person, until a chorus of voices called out one word of mutual fear and warning:
Hecari.

Hecari in the settlement.

Kendic swore, then pushed away from the table to rise. He caught Brodhi’s eye. “Will you come?” he asked abruptly. “I speak a little of their heathen tongue, but not enough as to make a difference. They say couriers have to know it.”

“I’m
a courier and
I
know it,” Bethid said, annoyed by being overlooked. Then she waved a hand to indicate she understood why Kendic had looked to Brodhi. Her mouth twisted. “Go on. They’ll only speak to a woman if they have no other choice.”

Mikal closed a hand around the amulet he wore at his throat on a greasy leather thong, reciting a common supplication to the gods to preserve his life and business. As Brodhi and Kendic exited the ale tent, the two strangers, expressions apprehensive, slipped out the back.

That wouldn’t save them, Brodhi knew. The Hecari were not so stupid as to leave escape opportunities open.

KARAVAN GUIDE DUTY was an unending plethora of tasks and responsibilities. Now, beneath the sun at its zenith, Rhuan and Darmuth rode well ahead of the wagons to find and secure the expected, such as a known watering place, or to discover and prepare for the potentially
un
expected, such as fouled water or the presence of predatory animals, possibly even bandits.

In high summer, the rolling grasslands were lush. Lone trees were scattered hither and yon like dice in an elaborate counting game bisected the horizon. Wheel ruts cut through turf to rich soil beneath, where it was exposed to
the drying sun and the depredations of hooves and wheels. The rains had not yet begun so dust stirred by passage was a constant companion once morning dew dried. After the monsoon arrived, passage would be made nearly impossible by mud and thick, fast-growing grass. Jorda’s final karavan of the year skirted the line between the dry season and the wet.

Rhuan, who preferred the temperate, even hot days of summer to the rains or colder seasons, relaxed nearly to bonelessness upon his spotted mount. He gloried in self-indulgent languor, smiling face turned up to the sun. Were he alone, he would strip out of every scrap of clothing so his skin could soak up the warmth. It was in him to express his pleasure with a long, insouciant purr, but he desisted lest his companion mock him.

Darmuth, riding abreast upon a dark sorrel gelding, did no such thing. Frowning, he said, “
There.
I can smell them.”

Rhuan’s lassitude fractured, replaced by sharp attention. “Hecari? Or bandits?”

Darmuth tilted his head slightly as his pupils slitted, then inhaled sharply. Catlike, his mouth dropped open to evaluate the scent. With a hiss underscoring the word, he said, “Hecari.”

The news was not unexpected, but unwelcome all the same. Indolence and sunshine were forgotten. “How far?”

Rhuan asked. “How many?”

Darmuth’s pale eyes were half-lidded, almost as if he were in a trance. His tongue, narrower than was found in humans, extruded, displaying a subtle, serpentine fork as it tasted the air.

He withdrew it, retreating to the guise of a human male. “Perhaps a mile ahead. Ordinary patrol: six warriors. Moving this way.”

Rhuan never asked Darmuth if he was certain of such announcements. The demon always was. Instead he nodded grimly and swung his horse around. “Wait here. Hold them for as long as you can.”

Rhuan’s duty now, with Darmuth posted as both lookout and delaying tactic to buy the karavan time, was to ride
back to warn Jorda, to prepare the people for the meeting and the inevitable Hecari demand for “road tax.” The karavan would lose hours to the patrol. Good water lay on the other side of the Hecari; they would now lack the time necessary to reach the next stop before nightfall. No water barrel in Jorda’s karavans was allowed to be more than half empty if possible; the master would call for strict conservation measures until barrels could be refilled. But for all that good water was critical, it was more vital yet to receive the Hecari patrol without complaint, to pay what they asked in coin and goods so that no lives were lost.

EVEN AS BRODHI followed Kendic out of the ale tent, the winnowing had begun. Mounted Hecari warriors with warclubs rode through the mazelike pathways among the tents, sorting the men from the women, the children from youngest to eldest, ordering the designated into specific lines upon the pathways. Kendic stopped short but paces away from Mikal’s ale tent, staring in shock.

Dark men on dark horses. Too many to count and all of them in motion, but their numbers clearly were well in excess of the customary six-person patrols that collected “tax” from the people. Skulls were shaven except for black scalp locks, and gleamed with pungent oil. The lower halves of broad faces were painted indigo. Heavy golden ear-spools stretched earlobes into long teardrops of flesh, and each Hecari wore slantwise across his chest a red-dyed leather baldric bearing blowpipe and feathered darts tucked into sinew loops.

Standing beside Kendic and aware of Bethid and Mikal coming up behind them, Brodhi noted that the Sancorrans’ initial anger and shock had been transformed to fear, then to terror as everyone was ordered or pulled from tents, roughly inspected, sorted, and assigned a place to stand. The Hecari, directing with warclubs, counted down the winding lines and motioned specific men, women, and children to step forward.

Brodhi’s emotions, trained into reflexive quietude in times of danger, stilled. He knew what was to come. “Too many,” he murmured.

“One Hecari is too many,” Kendic growled beneath his breath.

Brodhi shook his head. “You misunderstand me. Too many tents. Too many people all in one place. I have seen this before. It will be a decimation.”

Bethid’s voice was thin. “One in ten.”

“One in ten?” Mikal’s apprehension was clear. “What do you mean, one in ten?”

Brodhi knew Bethid, courier-trained to witness and record for dissemination, comprehended as well as he what was to come. She bit into her lip. “Mother of Moons …”

Kendic frowned. “I don’t understand. Aren’t they here for their ‘tax’?”

Children forcibly separated from their parents were crying loudly, clinging to one another. If they tried to go back to their parents, the Hecari used their clubs to prod them away.

“Oh, no,” Bethid blurted. “Oh, Mother, that one’s coming over here.”

Kendic quivered with tension. “Hold your ground,” Brodhi told him. “No matter what is done, hold your ground. Make
no
complaint.”

The Hecari warrior halted his roan horse in front of the four. Disease had pitted his face so badly the scars showed even beneath the dark paint. His nose, characteristic of his race, was wide and slightly flat. He had, as the others in his party, shaved his eyebrows. Ear-spools dangled in stretched lobes.

Black eyes glittered as he stared down at Brodhi. A gesture with his warclub indicated the blue mantle. The Sancorran word was guttural. “Courier?”

Brodhi did not include Bethid despite her identical mantle. In Hecari he answered, “Yes.”

The warrior stared at Mikal and Kendic. He ignored Bethid altogether. Then his gaze returned to Brodhi. Still he spoke Sancorran. “With you, these?”

Again Brodhi answered, “Yes.”

“Tell. Tell all.” The warrior’s gesture indicated the lines of frightened humans. “You know. Tell.”

Brodhi drew in a long breath, then slowly released it. He adopted the emotionless detachment of his duty and raised his voice, pitching it to carry.
“Do nothing! Do nothing, and you may survive!
”