Karavans

by Jennifer Roberson

  Only one person had ever appeared to take that feat in stride, with no assumptions made; only one had witnessed a revival and then quietly accepted his explanation with no expression of shock, bafflement, or outright disbelief. But Ilona, of course, had her own measure of personal talent. Rising from the dead might be considerably more dramatic in nature than reading a man’s future in his hand, but it was no more unique than any diviner’s ability.

  A lopsided smile twisted Rhuan’s mouth. He rode with an Alisani demon, but the humans all believed he was the odd one, the alien one, the dangerous one. Rhuan knew quite well the kind of stories passed around concerning Shoia. That some of them were true was an exquisite irony.

  He looked up into the darkness of the Orphan Sky lit only by stars. “Will I ever understand them?”

  Unlike Brodhi, he wanted to.

  Rhuan glanced at the nearest wagon as he rode by: Ilona’s, with a small tin lantern hanging from a wagon rib to cosily illuminate the door and steps. But though her table and accoutrements were set out for divining with tea brewing over a small fire, she herself was not in evidence.

  Then the door lantern fell, spilling oil and flame down the wooden steps into grass.

  Rhuan was off his horse in one agile, twisting dismount and reached the wagon in three running strides. Without hesitation he yanked the rug from beneath Ilona’s table, overturning it as well as upsetting her stones and sticks and tea makings, and threw it over the burning steps. On hands and knees he smothered the fire, patting the rug down so no air reached the flames. Fortunately the small lantern had used up most of its limited supply of oil, and it burned off the spilled fuel quickly enough that none soaked the rug and caused it to catch fire.

  He intended not to call to Ilona until the flames were out; he didn’t want her opening the door and stepping into fire. But then he heard a crash from inside the wagon and felt it shift beneath an unknown weight.

  The rug smoked, but the flames had died. Still, he didn’t trust the blackened steps to hold him. Blessing his height and the length of his arms, Rhuan, from the ground, reached for the latch and pulled the door open. “’Lona?”

  The images, confused as they were, stamped themselves into his mind’s eye the instant he saw them. Ilona’s heels digging at the floorboards, knees bucking, thighs straddled by a man’s. Her skirt torn away to bare naked legs. And a man, a man atop her, twisting his torso to see who had pulled open the door in the midst of what could only be described as an assault.

  Then the man was up, turning, lurching toward the door even as Rhuan planted a foot on the potentially precarious lowest step. He was dark-haired, dark-eyed, and his stub-bled face was set in a rictus of startlement and fear, and a frustrated anger.

  It was one fleeting moment, no longer, as Rhuan’s mind registered movement, intent, desperation. The man, sweating, swearing, hurled himself through the door, all his weight and impetus knocking Rhuan sideways. The charred bottom step broke beneath his booted foot.

  The man fled into the darkness, but Rhuan did not pursue. Instead he caught hold of the door jamb and levered himself up into the wagon.

  “’Lona!”

  THE STRANGER’S WEIGHT and intensity were terrifying as he leaned down over Ilona, so close his gusting breath touched her face. But it was more than simple fear, more than panic, that seized her body even as his hands did. It was a complex layering of emotions and reactions, including foremost among them blank surprise and utter disbelief.

  She tried clawing him; he imprisoned and pinned her wrists over her head with one wide hand. She tried biting him; he was quick as a snake in avoiding the attempt. And his weight and strength were such that she could make no inroads on her imprisonment. She had never known herself so helpless, so impotent in the face of physical danger. In her experience karavaners simply did no such thing as assault a woman, and a diviner at that. She had always supposed there were men in the tent settlement who might stoop to such action, but someone from the karavan, usually Tansit when the guide was still alive, accompanied her there, and Mikal allowed no improper overtures in his ale tent if she were alone, as sometimes happened.

  Now she lay pinned against the floorboards in her own wagon with a stranger atop her, a man who even now tore her divided skirt from drawstring waist to hem. She smelled him now, the sharp, pungent tang of sweat and grime.

  And she could not scream.

  Could not so much as whisper.

  Mute, she fought … her desperate movements knocked something down from one of the rune-carved wagon ribs arching overhead. Then she smelled oil and smoke overriding the man’s odor. She heard the latch rattle as the door was pulled open.

  And heard her name called.

  She mouthed his name, though no sound came of it. Abruptly the stranger pushed up, pushed away, relieved her of his weight as he twisted; there was a momentary pause, and then he thrust himself forward and leaped for the door despite the person in it.

  Ilona rolled onto her left side, reaching with her right hand for anything that might be used against the man should he turn back. She found nothing save spilled willow bark tea and a pot that had fallen.

  “’Lona…”

  Hands were on her again. She tensed, teeth bared, her own hands striking out, then scrambled backward, unable to suppress the reaction until her mind recognized who it was, and recalled that he would never harm her.

  Embarrassment heated her face. She had never believed herself a woman who would lose self-control.

  Rhuan helped her into a sitting position. Her coiled hair had come loose of its anchoring sticks, spilling down over her shoulders. She looked into his face and saw concern in his eyes, but also a coldness in the lines of his face that shook her.

  “’Lona—are you all right?”

  Her hands touched her throat.

  He pulled them aside gently, searching for the expected finger marks that would bruise by morning. But Ilona shook her head and mouthed the words I can’t talk, and a charm, hoping he would understand.

  He did. And the anger in his eyes shocked her with its heat.

  Eyes glinting red.

  Chapter 25

  THE INTERIOR OF Mikal’s ale tent was illuminated by a single discolored tin lantern. Brodhi could have seen just as well with no light at all, but the humans would have found it strange—yet another oddity to attribute to the Shoia courier—and so he lit the wick, placed the lantern on the plank bar, poured a tankard of ale, and seated himself at a table.

  The tent was empty of Mikal, empty of customers. Brodhi sat alone and drank in flickering sepia light, while the keening laments of the women outside slowly died away into the occasional raised, wailing voice, and the deeper shouts of the men attempting to bring order to the evening, order to the dead.

  Brodhi had dropped the door flap for privacy. Now it parted; a small, slender form slipped through, and the lantern light glinted dull saffron off brass ear-hoops.

  Bethid.

  The bottom half of her tunic was soaked with water, and a smear of soot stretched from nose to ear on the left side of her face. As usual, her cropped hair stood up in haphazard spikes and tufts sculpted by a scrubbing hand, though its fairness was now colored with a patchwork of grime and blood and soot. An empty wooden bucket with a hempen loop handle swung from one hand.

  “What are you doing in here?” Her tone was sharp, shaded by disbelief.

  He felt it self-evident and offered no answer, merely lifted the foaming tankard to his lips and drank.

  “Mikal said you were here … I thought perhaps you’d come for a spare bucket. But you didn’t come back.”

  Brodhi remained silent.

  Her expression was incredulous. “Are you drinking in here? Just sitting here drinking?”

  With delicate irony, he observed, “You have a gift for stating the obvious.”

  Bethid, never even when happy able to keep opinions to herself, was notably less self-contained when she was angry. She stared at him. I
n dim light the angles and hollows of her tired face stood out in gaunt relief. “There are people outside, people who are dead, Brodhi. Some of the tents are still smoldering!”

  He asked a question with arched brows.

  Bethid strode across the space between the door flap and his table and slammed her bucket down on the knife-scarred surface. “The people,” she said with the kind of precision in enunciation and tone that underscored the intensity of her anger, “need your help.”

  Brodhi shrugged. “You asked me to aid the karavan. I did so. Mikal asked me to help search the burning tents, and I did so. For a while.”

  It astounded her. “There is a limit to the amount of time you’re willing to help?”

  Oaths, vows, and promises. Traps along the way. Brodhi said, “This is not our duty.”

  “It is our duty,” she retorted. “It’s the duty of any decent human being to help another in a tragedy like this.”

  “But I’m not,” Brodhi said; and when she didn’t understand, added, “not human. Remember?”

  For a long moment she was speechless, staring at him. The flesh of her throat leaped as she swallowed with effort, as if on the verge of tears. Her voice was thick. “Do you know, I have always stood up for you. Always defended you when other couriers had nothing decent to say about you. And I’ve always reminded them that you likely have reasons for what you do and say …but now?” She shook her head slowly, jerkily, as if dazed. “Now, I begin to believe they are right. You are a cold bastard, Brodhi.”

  In a swift, unthinking move he thrust himself upright, shifting the table as his thighs bumped the edge. Only the meager space of its surface divided them: providing a small but virulent battlefield.

  Ordinarily he would have ignored all that she had said, but something welled up inside, something demanded to be said. To be explained.

  “We are observers, Bethid. Oath-bound observers intended to witness incidents like this, and then to carry the news and messages unfettered by personal opinion.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “If we allow our own emotions to unseat the neutrality of our task, then we are useless. We become nothing more than gossip-mongers. And then what we say can never be trusted as impartial, and our offices will no longer be necessary …nor will they keep us safe from the Hecari.”

  “Brodhi—”

  “What would you have us be, Bethid? Couriers left alive to carry word—and survive to do so again—or bodies who may well be counted a portion of the one in ten during decimation?”

  She flung out one hand, pale against the dimness. “Look outside, Brodhi! Men, women, and children—children— who were counted out like so many kernels of corn!”

  “Yes,” he said sharply. “Exactly like kernels of corn … because when seed corn is planted, it is expected that some will be lost. Four kernels planted per hollow, Bethid. If only one of four kernels matures into a cornstalk, a farmsteader counts himself fortunate.”

  She shook her head, tears of angry disappointment filling her eyes. “I don’t understand you. I’ve tried …I’ve excused your rudeness, forgiven your bad temper—”

  He cut her off. “Excuse nothing of me. Forgive nothing in me. I am what I am, and it matters not at all what others may think of me.”

  She opened her mouth, closed it. Studied his face a moment, then began again. Softly, at first. Slowly, at first. “You mean it doesn’t matter what humans think of you. Well, I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that at all. I think you do care, but for some twisted reason you want to keep us—to keep humans—at a distance. To know nothing about you, to care nothing about you …I just don’t know why.” She shook her head. “And maybe I never will.”

  “It isn’t for you to know—”

  Bethid raised her voice over his. “Maybe it’s just that you’re Shoia. Maybe it’s that you have only one life left, and you fear to lose it, to risk yourself. Maybe it’s that you can’t bear to see humans die because it reminds you that you’ve only got that one death left …only one, the way all of us have only one.” Her chin rose. “Rhuan was at the karavan. Had he not been, had another Shoia not been there, would you have warned them at all?”

  Brodhi, startled, laughed. “If you think I predicate decisions on what becomes of Rhuan because he’s another Shoia—”

  “He’s your kinsman.”

  “—or that he’s my kinsman, then you’re quite correct: You don’t understand me. Not in the least.”

  She looked exhausted in the lantern light, worn by the events of the day and the requirements of the aftermath. But he thought perhaps something he had said, something he had said or done—or something not done—now deepened the shadows beneath her eyes.

  Bethid picked up her bucket. He watched her turn away, watched her walk out of the tent with a spine so stiff it verged on fracturing. She was a small, slight woman, almost delicate in the way she was made, but he had on many occasions seen her display a wiry strength and enviable stamina, as well as a stubborn will to see through to completion what she set out to do.

  Tonight she would put out fires and bury the dead.

  Rhuan would do it.

  Brodhi knew it in an unexpected flash of insight, an unanticipated thought that annoyed him: Rhuan, who in- explicably cared about humans, would work side by side with Bethid, or Mikal, or even a stranger. He wouldn’t care about the oath a courier swore when he joined the service. He wouldn’t care about whatever tests lay before him, what traps he might discover along the road. To Rhuan, it was the journey, not the destination, not the end result, that was most important.

  Brodhi sat down. He picked up the tankard and lifted it to his lips. “He’ll fail,” he said aloud into the lantern light.

  And again, “He’ll fail.”

  He drank. But the ale tasted bitter.

  RHUAN SAW ILONA recoil and realized she’d seen the red flicker in his eyes. He damned himself for losing self-control, for betraying how quickly his anger, a cold and dangerous anger, could rise. It was something he and Brodhi fought, each day, apart from one another and with differing methods—and vastly different temperaments—but shared was one abiding element: they were cursed with the wilding blood of their sires.

  With effort he buried that anger, plunged the kindling restlessness deep, and deeper yet; he would not become proxy for that which he detested in his father and in Brodhi’s, who were brothers. Kin-in-kind. A much closer bond, a far more demanding and difficult bond than the one humans called family.

  He sat back and raised his hands, showing her his palms in a gesture of peace. To her it would mean more than to others; she might read those palms, albeit neither was close enough for her to see in detail, to touch. And in fact the gesture had the effect Rhuan desired. Ilona relaxed, tension leaving the rigid line of her shoulders. She found one of her carved hair sticks on the floorboards, then coiled a haphazard rope of hair onto the back of her head and anchored it with the stick. She opened her mouth to say something, then recalled she had no voice.

  Rhuan grinned at the expression of annoyance that crossed her face. “Oh, but we’ll have heretofore unknown peace for as long as this lasts.”

  She scowled.

  He kept his tone light, though the words were deadly serious. “Are you all right?”

  The scowl didn’t dissipate, but she nodded. Then nodded again. She mouthed a word he thought was bruises.

  “Are you sure?”

  Ilona nodded again, more vehemently. Her expression made it clear she in no way wanted the subject to be debated. A sharp, curt hand gesture underscored it.

  Rhuan put all of the light-heartedness he could muster into his voice; he wanted nothing in his eyes to startle her again. “Well, you do know he’ll have to be killed.”

  She went still. Immeasurably still. Then shook her head.

  Rhuan found and picked up the other hair stick shed during the struggle. “Oh, I do think so—here, bow your head.”

  Instead, Ilona snatched th
e stick from him and drove it through the wiry coil of hair so hard he winced. Once more she shook her head. A gesture indicated her torn skirt, followed by a hands-up motion coupled with a shrug that suggested nothing so serious had happened that should dictate death as a means of revenge or reparation.

  He grinned at her. “I rather approve of your current predicament. It means I’ll win all the arguments.”

  She reached out and caught his wrist. Her grip was firm. With the other hand she mimed a knife being drawn across her throat, then shook her head vehemently. She mouthed a word he interpreted as promise.

  “I don’t believe I can make that promise.” He lifted her hand from his wrist. “You’ll have to excuse me. I have business to attend to.”

  As he rose, she slapped the flat of her hand against the plank floor to gain his attention once more. Again she shook her head.

  “Oh, not now,” he assured her. “I mean I’m going to repair your steps.”

  And without using any of them, he leaped lightly down from the wagon.

  GILLAN AND ELLICA, as told, walked up the low, rumpled rise to the grove of trees crowning the hilltop along the horizon. Before them, silhouetted against the sunset, ran Torvic and Megritte, playing some sort of game wherein Torvic was a hero rescuing a maiden— Megritte, of course—from the horrible Hecari. Gillan reflected that while their mam might well suggest another game entirely, he found it normal that the youngest could so quickly forget the brutal and sudden deaths they all of them had witnessed. He wished he could. But the images were jumbled, broken into innumerable fragments so diffuse that he couldn’t possibly reassemble them in the proper order. The guide had been so fast, so quick with his throwing knives …and the fact that one of the blades had ended up in his father’s shoulder, though an undesirable result, did not in the least lessen Gillan’s admiration for the guide’s prowess. Five Hecari killed within a matter of moments.