Karavans (8 page)

Rhuan, still kneeling, rubbed absently at his brow with the carved butt of his horn-handled knife. “Best go get Kendic.” He sounded regretful as any human. “I’ll stay here with the body.”

Hezriah nodded stiffly. Kendic would want to know. Kendic was head of the Watch, such as existed.

“Now,” the Shoia suggested pointedly. “Or do you want this poor dead fool to remain here all day, stinking up your tent?”

Hezriah did not. He went.

G
RANDMOTHER MOON LAY in wait for the sun to dip beneath the horizon, surrendering day to night. The west was ablaze. Ilona, squinting against the brilliance, ducked beneath pierced-tin lanterns dangling from the carved, curving ribs supporting the domed oilcoth covering of her wagon sitting amid the karavan grove not far from the ocean of tents. She had taken up the rugs, beaten them, and was sweeping out the painted floorboards when a shadow fell across her line of vision.

She glanced up: a man. Tall, thick in the shoulders, yellow of hair and beard, blue of eyes. Ilona read him at once even without seeing his hand, merely by marking the set of his shoulders and the tension in his face.

Standing at the top of the folding steps, clutching her broom, she opened her mouth to give him the ritual greeting of a hand-reader. Then realized that was not his goal. “Yes?” Ilona, like anyone else, had to rely on verbal answers in such things as were unconnected to the rite of divination.

Even his tone reflected weariness. “I have tried all of the karavans, asked all of the masters. None of them will take us. Someone sent me here … but your master also says there is no room.” Belatedly, color staining his face, he added, “My name is Davyn.”

“Ilona. Hand-reader, though that you know from the glyphs.” She gestured briefly, indicating intricate symbols painted onto oilcloth and plank sideboards as the faintest of sunset breezes stirred charms and chiming bells suspended from the roof-ribs over her head. Regret pinched. “It’s growing late in the season,” she explained, as if it would matter. “Most of the karavans have gone on already. Now those folk who were late to decide all wish to leave at once.” She reflected the last was not particularly tactful; likely he had been late to decide as well. But when left to herself as a woman, not a hand-reader, her tact often departed.

He nodded, seemingly unoffended. “Is it—is it me?” He lifted a broad hand and displayed his calloused palm. “Something here?”

“Ah, no.” She blurted it without thought, looking away at once from the hand; brushing her head, charms rattled, bells chimed. Ilona had learned there was often pain from seeing only portions of the truth. Either she did a full reading, or she did none.

But he took it badly, color peeling away. “Is it so terrible?”

Ilona turned back sharply, attempting to rectify what she had begun so badly. “No! Oh, no—I’m sorry. That isn’t what I meant. Please …” She glanced aside, then made a warding gesture. “Turn your hand away. If you wish a reading, certainly I will do one. But I dare not even see you sideways.”

That baffled him. “Sideways?”

Ilona set aside her broom. It was difficult explaining to those who were not gifted with the art. “If you see a man sideways, you know very little about him. Yet you may judge him by what you see, and judge him wrongly. Therefore to be certain of who and what he is, you should see
all
of him.” She paused, looking into his tired face for comprehension. “Would you buy a horse without looking at its teeth?”

“Ah.” That he understood; she saw the faint smile. It altered him tremendously. There was some handsomeness in him, beneath the worry and weariness. “I have a family.
Four children, and my wife is to bear another. We have decided to go overmountain to her grandmother’s land in Atalanda province. Yes, we decided late—
I
decided late—but should we be punished for it?”

That, too, pinched. “It isn’t punishment,” Ilona told him honestly. “It just
is
.” She knew that was no help—once more her tongue failed her outside of a reading—and tried yet again. “It isn’t
required
that you join a karavan. If the road is well-traveled—”

But his face had gone white. His mouth was taut. “Too close.” He clipped his words. “Too close to the—borderlands.”

Ah. That, she understood. No, they dared not go on their own; and only one road went so close to the borderlands. It was folly to risk Alisanos alone, lacking the protection gained by sheer numbers and the presence of Jorda’s three diviners.

Ilona drew in a breath. To break the moment, to change the tone, she sat herself down on the doorstep of the wagon, arranging the split tails of the knee-length leather tabard worn over baggy, summerweight trousers. She rested feet in scuffed boots upon the next to last wide rung, asking with carefully calibrated inquiry, “Might you go elsewhere?”

It brought pain, that question. “My family has always lived in Sancorra province. I can conceive of no place I would rather be … except now. After all that has happened.” He gestured futilely; she understood completely.
Hecari. War.
“But my wife’s grandmother came from Atalanda province. My wife has blood-kin there, if distant. We would do best to go where we have blood than where we have none.”

Ilona tried once more. “Wait here, then. Until next season. You would have your choice of karavans next year.” She gestured expansively. “There is pasturage, game, water … you could do worse.”

He was a man of simple dignity and immense pride. But defeat—by the enemy, by refusals of the karavan-masters—had worn away his substance. He was not yet
desperate, but self-control was fraying. “I haven’t the means to wait a year. And the diviners have said the child should be born in Atalanda, if it is to be worthy of the gods’ protection. The journey will take time. We must go soon.”

She asked it because she had to. “Why did you come to me?”

He spread his palm and looked into it. “I wondered—I wondered if it was me. If something
in
me …” His voice trailed off as he lifted his head to look at her again, hand falling slack at his side. “I don’t know. I saw you, sweeping. Your motions …” He shrugged. “Your coloring is darker than hers, but, well, in motion, you reminded me of my wife.”

Ilona felt the coil of regret tightening in her belly. How she hated this! “I’m sorry. If Jorda has said there is no room, then there is no room.”

The man nodded. “I know.” He managed a faint, fleeting smile that left nothing of itself in his eyes. “I know.”

She watched him turn and walk away. A tall, wide, sturdy man. A man of substance, and certain to be judged worthy when it came his time to cross the river, for all he had no wealth. And like so many others in Sancorra province, he had lost everything to the Hecari.

Ilona shut her eyes. She could not change fates. She could only read them.

AUDRUN WENT IN search of and found her children inexplicably huddled behind a brown-dyed tent in the midst of the settlement. They gazed at her with identical wide blue eyes. It never failed to strike her how similar they were, despite dissimilarities in height and gender. Davyn was bearded now, and weathered, but she saw him again in the faces of his children. She wondered idly if the new baby would share Davyn’s coloring and thus that of its siblings, or, at long last, her own dark gold hair and brown eyes.

Smiling, she said, “Come back to the wagon.”

Kneeling by the tent, they were stiff as wooden dolls
with jointed limbs. Megritte, eyes stretched wide, whispered loudly, “We saw a demon!”

“He killed that man,” Torvic added, fascination overriding his younger sister’s tone.

Audrun frowned and looked to her eldest for explanation. “What man?”

Ellica and Gillan were not prone to childish excesses like Torvic and Megritte, but they too looked stricken. “The man who came to the wagon,” Gillan explained faintly.

It stunned her. The man had not left her wagon all that long ago. “He’s
dead?
”

Torvic, clutching tent ropes knotted to thick wooden ground pegs, thrust out a pointing arm. “He went in there. He went in there with the demon.”

Skepticism made it difficult to maintain an even tone. “The demon went into the tent with another demon?” Audrun glanced briefly across the footpath, then before her children could answer she made up her mind to contain the tale before it grew lengthier and even less believable. “Never mind. We are going.” She caught her youngest daughter’s hand in one of hers and clasped the other over Torvic’s skull, swiveling it to aim him. “Move.
Now
.”

They knew that tone. They moved.

Megritte, seeming pleased to surrender her demon-watching responsibilities, asked, “Did Da find us a karavan?”

“I don’t know. Torvic, stop twisting! But if we don’t get back to the wagon someone may well steal it—Megritte, stand up on both feet; you’re too big for me to carry!—and then we’ll have no need to join a karavan at all.”

Her children continued to ask questions all the way back to the wagon, and Audrun continued to insist there were other far more interesting things to discuss in the world though she was not at that moment, in view of a dead man, murdered or no, certain she knew of any.

And then the wagon was there before them, and so was Davyn.

“Bless the Mother of Moons,” Audrun sighed, releasing
her two youngest to run to their father. “And bless those who have more patience than I—and more children!—for they are truly the worthiest among us.”

Then she saw Davyn’s eyes, even as he smiled and pulled his two little ones up into his arms, and Audrun realized a new home overmountain lay farther away than ever.

BRODHI, FREE ONCE more of meddlesome human children, continued his journey along one of the maze-like pathways among the tents, and sensed the presence, as always, before he saw its progenitor. He stopped. He summoned patience. He did not turn. “Yes, Darmuth?”

Laughter, if soft. Then the other slipped around from behind, sliding into his path. Neatly blocking him.

A short, compact, smooth-skinned man of indeterminate age was Darmuth, with feathery pale brows and eyelashes, and a head shaved all over except for one coarse silver—haired plait low on the back of his skull. It was clubbed on his neck, wrapped with a length of red-dyed leather thong. His eyes were light gray, very like winter water. He wore a simple black leather tunic with the sleeves chopped short to expose muscled tattooed arms, shell-weighted leggings, and a vulgar purple silk sash doubled around his waist. The hilt of his knife, jutting from the tooled sheath tucked into the sash, was black-and-white striated horn, the pommel intricately carved.

“I’ve lost him, Brodhi.”

Irritably Brodhi countered, “You never lose him. You can’t. You’ve just let him wander off.”

The man grinned. “You refer to him as if he’s a pet.”

“Not
my
pet.” Brodhi resettled the bright blue courier’s mantle hanging off his left shoulder, feeling the tug of the wrought-silver badge pinning it to his long-sleeved leather tunic. He hid impatience; Darmuth would keep him here, if he saw it. “Perhaps a leash might serve.”

The man cocked his head. “Have you seen him?”

“Not lately.” Brodhi shrugged idly. “He’s here somewhere. Or so I’ve heard.”

“Rhuan’s
always
somewhere,” Darmuth noted. “Too many ‘somewheres.’ I do lose track.”

Brodhi wasn’t amused. “You do no such thing.”

“All right.” Darmuth’s vulpine grin flashed; his canines were slightly pointed, and he had invested in a brilliant green gemstone that was drilled and set into the left one. “I actually wanted to visit with you. It was an excuse.”

Though surrounded by tents, Brodhi was aware that, as usual, the footpath he inhabited had emptied of people. They found other ways to go where they wished to go rather than share a path with him if they could avoid it.

Or—he brightened a moment—perhaps it was
Darmuth
the humans avoided. In his way, Darmuth was more exotic and unique—and threatening—than a Shoia.

“It was no excuse.” Brodhi folded his arms, mantle rippling. “What is it?”