Karavans

by Jennifer Roberson

  Rhuan, walking farther yet, knew Jorda, despite his ignorance of the Shoia race in all but tall tales and legends—and the example set by his senior guide—did nonetheless understand that his guide now and again required that apartness, and asked no questions. Men in these times of civil strife often kept secrets. For Melior and Branca, the two male diviners, Rhuan spared no thought; only Ilona offered empathy as well as threat. Of them all, she knew more of who and what he was. He had told her nothing of himself save the sorts of things with which anyone might be trusted, but Ilona, in one brief moment three years before when Rhuan’s personal wards were down—he was dead at the time—had seen in an instant just enough of his soul to be stunned as well as curious.

  This custom she would never understand, nor be given opportunity to wonder what it was, what it meant to him. And so he continued walking, leaving behind the lantern glow within dyed oiled canvas, the gray-red ash of crumbling coals, the splashes of oily, ocherous lamplight seen in open flaps of such establishments as Mikal’s ale tent, and the red-hued tents belonging to such women as the one named Audrun was not: Sisters of the Night. And when in wagons bound for other places, Sisters of the Road.

  In a copse of looming, wide-crowned trees some distance from the karavan grove he found suitable privacy. Kneeling, Rhuan took from the beaded bag a rolled section of thin hide. He spread it on the ground, pausing a moment to pass gentle fingertips across the slick, buttery surface. Beneath the moon the hide glimmered faintly, a rippling herringbone pattern of palest coppery scales.

  As sensitized fingertips brushed it again, the thin hide warmed. He felt the loosening of his muscles in response, the answering heat in his own flesh. Hastily Rhuan drew his hand away, biting hard into his lower lip to regain self-control.

  When his breathing steadied, he selected other items from the bag and assembled them in careful juxtaposition upon the gleaming scales: an ivory comb aged to watery yellow, its arched spine carved into the shape of a dragon; a series of small leather pouches, each dyed a different color; a short length of thick, jointed reed plugged with wax at either end; a pale cream gnarled root.

  Rhuan settled into a cross-legged position and began to untie and unwrap silken cord, to unweave dangling sidelocks. The rest of his braids remained interlaced in the complex pattern woven together into the thick main plait hanging down his spine. He also took from the sidelocks all the beads, charms, and coin-rings and set them on the hide.

  When the sidelocks were loosed, Rhuan took up the ivory comb and began to work through the rippled sections of waist-length hair. It required time, that; rebraiding would take more. By dawn he must be finished with the ritual and back at the karavan to aid Jorda and his travelers. For this reason he elected to undo only the sidelock braids.

  Combing tamed the loosened hair, though the ripples remained. Rhuan took up the root, cut into it with his knife, squeezed a pale, soapy liquid into his left palm, then began to apply the thin lather to the unbraided hair. Beneath the moon it shone a deep ruddy copper, verging on bloodied black.

  After cleaning the hair thoroughly, Rhuan unstoppered the section of reed, poured a measure of the contents into his hand, and began to work the oil through the loose hair. When the strands of hair glistened in moonlight with a delicate sheen from scalp to tips, Rhuan began the laborious process of rebraiding the sidelocks, weaving back into them all of the beads, charms, and coin-rings he had removed. With the addition of each colored glass bead, he told over the Names of the Thousand Gods.

  At the completion of the braiding and the telling, Rhuan opened the series of small leather bags set out before him. He then nicked the tip of the little finger on his right hand, the heart-hand. The bloodied fingertip was dipped carefully into each pouch, lifting out a faint smudge of colored powder. He blessed the substances with a touch of warm breath to waken them, and closed his eyes.

  Rhuan touched the finger to the eleven blessing points required by the ritual, all of living flesh: the middle of his forehead, the bridge of his nose between brows, each eyelid, the faint hollow between nose and mouth, each cheekbone, upper lip, lower lip, chin, the notch beneath his throat that joined the collar bones.

  He opened his eyes. The world hazed red.

  “No!” The blurt of sound from his mouth was not entirely comprehensible. “Not now—”

  Sweat burst from his pores and ran down his body in rivulets. Flesh rose up on his bones.

  Speech was denied. The refrain ran only in his head: Not now—not now—not now—

  AS DAVYN RETURNED from his visit to the hand-reader, he found Audrun waiting for him beside the wagon, spine propped up against one wheel. He marked the weariness in her posture and face, the haphazard repinning of loosened hair, the worried expression in her lean, tanned face. At least now he could offer surcease from the latter. Smiling, he nodded and spread his arms. She walked into them.

  He folded her into his embrace, tucking her head beneath his chin. “All is well. We leave in the morning along with everyone else.”

  Audrun’s sigh warmed his flesh through the thin weave of his tunic. “I think I could not have borne it had we come this far only to be told we could not go on.”

  “Ah, Audrun, I think you could bear anything.” He kissed the top of her head. “Are the children in bed?” She nodded. “Then come with me. Only a moment, I promise, and not far; a shorter and less eventful day would have been preferred, I do know.”

  He took her hand and led her away from the wagon, away from the dying fires, where no light other than that of the stars and moon illuminated the landscape.

  “There.” Davyn set an arm around her shoulders. “Do you see it?”

  Audrun shook her head, pushing loose hair from her forehead.

  “Our future,” he told her. “Beyond the dark, beyond the horizon, lies Atalanda, under the Mother of Moons. Our future and our safety.”

  “Overmountain,” she murmured.

  “We will build anew. What we lost was only wood and nails, and a measure of years. We have our memories, and our children, children who will grow up without the taste of war in their mouths.” Gently he placed his hand across her belly. “This fortunate one will never know it at all.”

  She covered his hand with hers, but did not reply.

  “Come to bed,” he said. “You’re weary. Best to let you rest without me babbling in your ear.”

  “Davyn—” Her weight was set against him as he made to move. “Did she say anything else? About our future? About the children?”

  The query puzzled him. “Something else? No. Should she have? She told me there was nothing in my hand that suggested trouble for the karavan.”

  “Or for us?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing of us was said, other than we could accompany the karavan as far as we required. But surely that’s enough. We are safe among the others.”

  Audrun’s smile seemed forced. “Then there is nothing at all to fear.”

  This time she led the way to the wagon, and to the bedding on the ground beneath the floorboards. With four children sleeping within, it was all the privacy they had.

  ILONA SAGGED AGAINST the wagon doorframe as the tall, fair-haired farmsteader headed back to his wife and children. She was relieved to be done with reading hands for the evening, though the realization did kindle guilt. But she was exhausted. Now free of responsibilities, Ilona sat down on the edge of her narrow cot and stared into space a moment, then let her body fall backward to sink into goosefeather mattress and colorful blankets. She closed her eyes and drifted, detaching herself from the stress of reading hands. The thought of doffing boots and crawling beneath the covers fully dressed appealed, though she knew she wouldn’t do it. She did, however, pull the ornamental sticks from her hair to free her skull of weight and restraint. She blew out a huge gust of breath, then smiled crookedly. Despite telling Rhuan she would only read true, not falsify her readings for the sakes of the farmsteaders, she had been able to offer good readings
because that was what she saw. At least with regard to the karavan journey. She had not read beyond their departure from the karavan, when they turned off the main route to take the shortcut to Atalanda.

  Her eyes snapped open. The woman. The woman in her dreams. The woman even Lerin the dream-weaver had seen, in profile with tawny hair hanging loose at the sides of her face, obscuring her expression, but now, now, Ilona knew who she was.

  “Farmsteader’s wife,” she murmured. She sat upright again, loose coils of hair falling down around her shoulders. “Rhuan’s farmwife!”

  She saw it again in her memory. A woman in profile. A woman to whom she had spoken of tears and grief and blood.

  Ilona frowned thoughtfully. She read the hands of others but could not read her own. She had never sought out a dream-reader because, as she’d told Lerin, her dreams were of the mundane, the unimportant minutiae of life as a karavan diviner. She had not, for as long as she could re- call, ever seen a stranger in dreams who later arrived in her presence, and in the flesh. But it was incontrovertible. The woman who had sat beside her in the wagon, the woman who had confronted Jorda and convinced him to take the family on behind the Sisters of the Road, was the woman in her dream. A woman amid crimson lightning, roaring wind, heated rain, Hecari, and … “—a karavan turning around.”

  And then from outside she heard a voice calling her name. A voice she did not at first recognize; and then she did, in marked surprise. Brodhi? Asking for her?

  Ilona rose and stepped to the door, pushing it open.

  Yes. Brodhi. Supporting a sagging-on-his-feet Rhuan.

  Later, then. The woman she had dreamed, the woman for whom she had read, would have to wait.

  Chapter 13

  “RHUAN.”

  Sprawled across damp grass, at first he didn’t recognize the name, or the voice.

  “Rhuan!” Hands were on him, straightening stiffly contracted limbs into something akin to the normal fit of tendon and muscle. He smelled the elusive tang of baneflower, a scent he associated with only one woman. And if Ferize were here, that meant the man whose hands were on his body…

  Rhuan opened his eyes. Blood ran red across his vision, but he saw beyond the fading haze to the man kneeling at his side, setting order to his body. His stiff, aching mouth—he could not yet unclench his teeth—shaped the words without thought. “Not you!”

  Brodhi said sharply, “Don’t speak. Rhuan, hold still—you’ve convulsed. Let be. Let be. The body will loosen of its own, if you allow it.”

  Baneflower. Cool, soothing hands trapped his head. Not Brodhi’s, those hands. But he wanted Ferize present no more than Brodhi. “Private,” he mumbled, with what small amount of self-command was left to him.

  She whispered something dismissive, sibilants hissing in the darkness, and did not so much as meet his eyes.

  Nor could he meet hers. He did not dare it, knowing what he would see. Contempt from Brodhi was one thing. From Ferize was quite another, and less palatable.

  Of all the people he would wish absent from the moment, Brodhi stood highest. Inwardly Rhuan cursed. He was aware now of grass and leaves beneath his body, of night-chilled ground; heard chittering in the trees and the brittle, metallic complaints of locusts. “Let me be.”

  Ferize knelt beside him. Long-fingered hands lifted the freshly oiled and rebraided sidelocks. Her own hair hung loose and wild about her shoulders, framing a pale face. Accusation weighted her husky, somnolent voice: “You might have let one of us aid you.”

  Yes, he might have. But. Rhuan’s blurt of laughter was hoarse. “No, no—there is no sense in calling on a kinship Brodhi would prefer to repudiate.” Bile burned at the back of his throat. “I can’t let it take me. Not before my time.”

  “Not precisely what I would ask.” Brodhi’s tone was dry. “But whenever are we in accord on anything?” And then, “No … no, Rhuan. Let be. It will pass.”

  “I can’t, Brodhi.”

  “Here.” Something was pressed against his lips. “Take it. Chew it. It’s kevi leaf.” Brodhi’s fingers pushed it between Rhuan’s lips, though his teeth remained locked behind them. Brodhi’s dangling beaded sidelocks brushed Rhuan’s throat.

  Ferize’s hands slid from pulsing temples to stiff jaws. She applied pressure he could not refuse; his mouth sprang open, stretching cramped muscles.

  Brodhi pushed the leaf into Rhuan’s mouth and jammed his jaw closed. “Chew it. Swallow it.”

  He managed to do so, barely. The juice was bitter, but as it ran down his throat he felt the locked muscles in his body beginning to loosen. The haze before his eyes receded. He ached all over, but his body was his again.

  Rhuan swallowed the last bit of the leaf. He lifted arms heavy as stone, set the heels of his hands against burning eyes, and noisily sucked in air. Relief, that he could do so again.

  Trembling had replaced the rigidity of convulsion. With effort, he managed courtesy. “What about you? Have you more kevi?” He lowered his arms and stared at his kinsman. In the face of austere disapproval, courtesy dissipated. “Or are you so disciplined you need no such thing?”

  Brodhi didn’t trouble himself to answer. “Go to sleep.”

  “Not here.” Rhuan levered himself up on one shaking elbow. “I’ll return to the encampment.”

  “I doubt,” Brodhi said with exaggerated clarity, as if to a child, “that you can walk that far under your own power.”

  “You could. You would.” Rhuan rolled, gathered himself, made it to his knees with a lurching upward thrust. Indeed, the kevi did threaten to undermine what self-control he had begun to recover. Instead of the knotted tautness of overstrained muscles, he felt thinned nearly to transparency, nerves twitching with fatigue.

  He began somewhat shakily to gather up the items used in the ritual and return them to the beaded bag. A glance up at his kinsman’s face showed no emotion. “I have employment, Brodhi, and duties, just as you do. Jorda expects me.” He pulled closed the slender thongs on the last of the pouches, knotted them, and tucked it back into the bag.

  “Humans,” Ferize said. The single word, said as Brodhi might, held a wealth of implication.

  Rhuan inhaled deeply, seeking patience and self-control. “Yes. Humans. Whom I choose to accompany.” He looked expectantly at Brodhi, brows raised. “Well? Surely you have something to say.”

  Brodhi barely lifted a single shoulder in a dismissive shrug, stirring braided sidelocks. “It matters less than nothing to me what you choose to do.”

  Rhuan slung the bag over a shoulder and dredged up a sardonic smile as he rose, expending great effort merely to remain vertical. “But it apparently matters something to you that I, a fellow Shoia, not relinquish another of my lives.”

  “Among humans, it matters,” Brodhi agreed. “Because then I would have to haul your rotting carcass all the way home to your sire.”

  Ferize, in black clothing and hair, was lost in the darkness save for her husky voice and the pearlescence of her moon-illumined face. Shadowed, her eyes were blackened hollows. “Darmuth should have been with you. If you intend to do such a foolish thing as that so close to an active Alisanos, at least you might be fools together.”

  “It was precisely because we’re close to an active Alisanos that I did it,” Rhuan retorted. “The idea was to cleanse myself, so it couldn’t scent me.” He flipped his newly oiled and adorned braids behind his shoulders and examined Brodhi’s expression in the moonlight. “Don’t you feel it?”

  “I feel it. How not? But as our goals are very different, I am less inclined to look upon discomfort or discovery as an entirely bad thing.” His tone sharpened. “Do you intend to fall down?”

  Rhuan gritted his teeth against a wave of dizziness. “I intend to walk. To the karavan. And do my duty by Jorda, and by all the families—the human families—whose lives are mine to guard.” He took a breath. “And so long as Alisanos stays put a day or two longer—or goes active in a direction other than this one—I will be fine.�
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  “In the meantime,” Brodi moved swiftly as Rhuan wobbled and closed a hand firmly around his upper arm, “I will see to it that you retain some measure of decorum before the humans you are to protect, or all your fine posturing will be for naught.”

  Rhuan considered protesting that he could walk perfectly well without Brodhi’s help, except that it was becoming increasingly clear that pride was not enough to keep him on his feet.

  Ferize came up on his other side. She was far shorter and slighter than he, but stronger than either of them. And so he was propped upon trembling legs and escorted through the trees toward the firelight beyond.

  “When does Jorda’s karavan leave?” Brodhi asked.

  “Just after first light.”

  Brodhi said a single markedly obscene word in the language of their home, weighted with a contempt long familiar to Rhuan. He and his kin-in-kind had been no friendlier in childhood.

  “I choose it,” Rhuan said in the same language. “I choose it. Not you.”

  “Rhuan—” But Brodhi cut it off, shaking his head. “Jorda knows nothing?”

  Rhuan squinted; even the distant light of dying coals hurt his eyes. “Of what we are? No, only what he should know of Shoia, with one as his guide.” Fingertips itched. He curled them tightly into his palms and swore. “Stop. Stop, Brodhi—”

  “He’s ill,” Ferize said sharply, even as Brodhi began to speak.

  With his last measure of strength, Rhuan managed to rid himself of Brodhi’s grip and turned away, to drop hastily to hands and knees as the meal he’d eaten earlier exited his belly. Decidedly not what he wished to do before Brodhi, but his body left him no choice.

  When he had cleaned himself and found his feet again, Rhuan declared, “This is not fair.”

  It startled a blurt of disbelieving laughter out of Brodhi even as he again steered Rhuan toward the karavan grounds. “Whenever has Alisanos been ‘fair,’ that you could say it is not now?”