Karavans (60 page)

Fear bloomed. The world
was
changed. But it tantalized her with seemingly familiar scents, a familiar sun.

“Tell me we’re not,” she blurted. Jorda, standing next to her, turned to read her expression. His own was grim. “Tell me this isn’t Alisanos.”

“It isn’t.”

She turned in a circle again, seeking something known. “How can you tell where the settlement is?” she asked sharply. “All the landmarks are gone.”

His mouth crooked in a faint smile as he pointed to the sky. “That landmark is enough.”

Of course. The sun. Ilona released a breath of renewed relief, tucking tangled, muddied hair behind an ear. Of the tales she’d heard of Alisanos, anything was possible. The deepwood, stories said, was a living being, unutterably alien, with a will of its own. She had been raised on those tales, of horrific punishments there promised by parents if she didn’t do as told.

Now, she realized, her parents had threatened her with the truth. Like a field of corn scythed down, Alisanos had taken what stood before it and swept it away.

But not her. Not Jorda.

“Where is everyone?” Surely she and Jorda could not be the only ones left. The only ones alive. They had passed straggling groups of people heading east, as they had been told to. Had she and Jorda, on horseback while refugees from the tent settlement walked, gone astray from the fleeing inhabitants?

“Your arm needs tending,” Jorda declared. “We’ll go back to the karavan and find wood and cloth for a splint.”

She looked at her battered arm. It was swollen between her wrist and elbow, with a knob of shiny skin stretched taut over what she knew was bone turned askew. It had not torn through the flesh, thank the Mother, but was ugly nonetheless, promising trouble.

Jorda slid a careful hand under her right elbow. “Come, Ilona.”

Hair hung in tangles to her waist. Her skirts were tattered, and the seams of her tunic had torn. Jorda was no better with soaked, soiled clothing and hair ripped loose from his braid framing his broad face. He looked concerned.

“I’m well,” she told him, wanting to wash away that concern.

“Are you?” His faint smile was grim. “You risk fever with that arm. Do you want to survive Alisanos only to die from a broken bone?”

She felt distant, dreamy. “Jorda …”

“Yes?”

“We survived
Alisanos
.” If she said it, said it aloud, she made it a true thing. “It went elsewhere—I think.” Frowning, she turned in a circle again. “Jorda, this is where we were, yes? Sancorra province? The settlement? Going east, as Rhuan said?” A knot of tension and apprehension took possession of her belly.
O Mother, let this not be Alisanos making fools of us.

“Come along,” he told her patiently, easing her into movement. “You’re fretting because of your arm. We’ll see to it, then do what we can for others.”

She turned abruptly to the karavan-master. “Give me your hand.”

His brows rose in surprise. “My hand?”

“I can’t read my own.” No hand-reader could. “If you’ll allow me to read yours, I may be able to see a little of your future. Enough to know whether we are in Alisanos, waiting with its traps; or if we are east of the settlement, east of all things familiar.”

“Ilona—”

“Please.”

Jorda extended his hand palm up. She could not use both her hands in the reading, but one should be enough.

AUDRUN LAY ON her side, curled upon herself to safeguard her belly. But it cramped. She felt the pain roll through her, rise up, crest, then recede too slowly.

Was she to lose the child?

She cramped again and curled herself more tightly yet upon her side, breathing noisily through an open mouth. The flesh of her abdomen felt overstretched. Felt on fire.

With her eyes closed, Audrun could not see. She wished not to see. That Alisanos had taken her, she knew. But she was ignorant of such details as where in the deepwood she was, what it might do to her, when the changes might begin, and whether she could escape.

The old man had escaped.

And begged to go back.

The ground beneath her was pocked with stone and wood. Sharp-edged leaves scraped her skin. Grass poked, like needles. A shadow of branches bent low over her, shading her, but beyond was light, too-bright light.

Audrun bit into her lip as she cramped again. She tasted blood. As a deeper cramp took her, as her belly skin burned, she could not hold her silence. A groan escaped, and another. Her world, her human world, was absent. Husband. Children. All absent.

Except for the unborn in her belly.

“Audrun.”

Her eyes snapped open as she rolled her head to look upward. In that first moment the sky visible between branches and leaves wheeled above her. Brownish sky, not blue. Much too bright. And numberless trees surrounding her; twisted, gnarled trees linked together by thorny vines and interlocking branches bearing wide, flat leaves, bluish leaves, speckled with the rust of disease.

Or merely of Alisanos.

Pain took her again and she bit once more into her bloodied lip.

“Audrun, I’m here.”

He knelt beside her. She heard the chime and click of hair ornaments, sensed his nearness even with eyes shut again against the brightness, the worst of it screened by low-hanging branches dangling large, sharp-edged leaves.

Her breathing came now in gasps broken time and time again as she caught her breath on a foreshortened grunt of pain. Blood ran into her mouth from her bitten lip. She coughed and gagged. She had refused to drink his blood; now she swallowed her own.

His hands were on her. “Let me see, Audrun.” Gently he urged her to turn from side to back. He slid a hand beneath her skull and lifted it, then resettled it on earth, not stone.

The sky above was
not blue
.

Cramping, again. Audrun could barely speak. “I’m losing … losing it. The baby …”

The quality of his silence, the sudden stillness of his hands as he eased her over, frightened her badly. Audrun opened her eyes. She lay now in the shade from the nearest tree, in the shade he made, blocking sunlight.

“No,” he said. “You are not.”

How could he say that? How could he know?

Cramping seized her again. This time she cried out.

“How am I not losing this baby?”

He took her hands in his own. He guided them to her belly and flattened them there, pressing them against her abdomen.

Roundness. Pronounced roundness. It was not the belly of a woman at five months, but of a woman nearing term. And she felt it,
felt
it grow beneath her hands. Her skin stretched, but not enough. She thought she might split open.

Sweat ran into her hair. She stared in horror at the man beside her. “How is this happening?”

For a moment he said nothing. She could not read his expression. Then he spoke a single word, very quietly: “Alisanos.”

Realization sent a wave of fear through her. She was not losing the child. She was
bearing
the child.

In Alisanos.

Her belly spasmed again. She felt it heave beneath her hands. “It’s too soon!”

“No.” His hands were gentle upon her, stroking hair back from her sweat-filmed face. “No, it’s at term.”

Cramps transformed into contractions. Her belly now was huge, tight. It writhed beneath her trembling hands. “Why is this happening?
How
is this happening?”

He wore no mask now. His expression was grim. “Alisanos wants it.”

The words stunned her. “Alisanos wants my
baby?”

“Hush now,” he said. “Save your strength.”

Audrun ignored the instructions. “Why?
Why does it want my baby?
”

She saw a kind of grief in his eyes. But his tone was curiously flat. “Your baby is human.”

The contractions now were harder, closer together. She reached out for his hand, clung as she found it. A question occurred. “Why,” she began on a caught breath, “did you want me to drink your blood?”

Something flinched in his eyes. She saw grief again, briefly, and surrender. “I believed it might offer some protection.”

“Your blood would offer me protection?” She tasted her own in the back of her throat. “How?”

“Alisanos recognizes its own.”

“Its own,” she echoed. Another contraction took her. She forced the question between her teeth. “You’re not Shoia, are you?”

“No.”

“Then what are you?” She squeezed her eyes closed as the contractions worsened, coming much more quickly. It was time to push, time to use all her strength for bearing the child. But she had to know. “What are you?” Audrun repeated. She recalled her youngest daughter’s accusation. “A demon?”

His mouth twitched in a brief ironic hook. “No.”

“Then what?”

“Half-human. But I was born here.”

The contractions now came very hard. “And what is the other half?”

“You need to concentrate on bearing the child.”

A cry of pain was wrenched out of her. She bore down upon the baby that wanted to be born well before its time, but was, inexplicably, at full term. Audrun bared her teeth at Rhuan. “I’m trusting you to help me deliver this baby … tell me who you are. Tell me
what
you are.”

“
Dioscuri,”
he said quietly. And before she could ask what that was, “My father is a god.”

Pain gripped her. Pain tore her asunder. And on that pain, on a rush of blood, she bore the full-term child that was not due for another four months.

The child, he had said, that Alisanos wanted.

In the depths of the trees, howling began.

THE TREES BEHIND Brodhi quieted. Thunder dissipated. The sun crept out and began, albeit slowly, to dry his hair and clothing even as it shed light upon the wasteland. He heard silence, nothing more.

Brodhi’s arms fell to his sides. He remained upright on his knees, but the joy of anticipation was usurped by a dawning awareness he refused to acknowledge. He felt his body begin to tense, muscle by muscle, fiber by fiber, until he ached with it. An unrestrained howl of fury broke from his throat, banishing silence. Hands curled tightly into fists as he bared his teeth. The world, free of storm, nonetheless turned red. He broke into a lengthy litany of curses heaped upon the heads of the primaries of Alisanos, the gods who had the ordering of that world.

One thousand of them. And not one of those thousand had seen fit to release him from the journey he despised with all of his being.

They left him here, the gods. Left him among the humans.

The message was plain: He was not one of them yet. Not
worthy
of them yet.

He heard the snap of a twig from the forest just behind him. “They would believe you mad, the humans,” Darmuth observed, gliding out of cracked, upended, and leaf–stripped trees. “A moon-touched man shouting nonsense to the sky in words they can’t understand.”

Brodhi lunged to his feet, spinning to face the demon who wore human form. “I care less than nothing what humans believe.”

“Yes, you’ve made that rather plain.” Darmuth folded muscled arms across his chest and cocked a hip, looking wholly at ease. “And that may be the very reason Alisanos left you behind.”

“I belong there.”

“That’s yet to be determined.” Darmuth’s winter-gray eyes lacked the irony that so often glinted in them. Black pupils elongated into slits. “Your time among the humans isn’t completed.”

It was all he could do not to shout it. “Alisanos
moved.
”

Darmuth shrugged lazily. “That matters less than nothing. Human time, Brodhi. The land may be different, but the time, and the counting of it, remains unchanged.”

“Why are you here?” With effort Brodhi cleared his vision of the red haze. “Why not go to Rhuan?
He’s
your task, not me.”

Something flickered in Darmuth’s eyes. “Rhuan’s not available.”

Brodhi shook his head in disgust. “He went with those foolish farmsteaders, didn’t he?”

“Rhuan’s in Alisanos.”

For long moments Brodhi could only stare silently at Darmuth. When he could speak again, the words issued from his mouth in heat and raw pain. “The primaries took him back? How by all of their names could they take him? He’s not worthy! He’s repudiated them. He wants to be
human
.”