Karavans

by Jennifer Roberson

  Defeat. Davyn felt it. Knew it. And the knowledge was bitter.

  “Of course.” It took effort to keep his expression neutral, to maintain control of his voice. “I wish you safe journey.”

  Chapter 34

  RHUAN WAS NOT blind to the tension in the father, but neither was he unaware of the same in the wife and the elder children, who very much disagreed with the decision. Family conflict was a familiar thing to him—and one reason he had taken service with Jorda—but he had no experience of such things among humans. He didn’t blame the father for wishing to protect his family unaided. He did blame him for being stubborn enough to refuse that aid when the lives of his family depended on it.

  Rhuan recognized the cause. Pride. Excessively male pride. He knew the latter well; he was too acquainted with the urgings of his own pride to say one thing or another, to do one thing or another. That pride had, in fact, been the bane of his kin for generations.

  So Rhuan smiled, infused his voice with light-heartedness and acceptance, and simply informed the father of his plans to travel the same direction upon the same road.

  He saw relief in the faces of the children and the wife. He saw anger and resentment flare in the farmer’s eyes; saw too, and appreciated, as the man applied self-control to keep from permitting the disagreement to kindle into true and lengthy argument.

  “Safe journey,” the father said courteously, if through stiffened jaw. The wife glanced up at him, fully cognizant of the tension between two men, and so Rhuan purposely diffused the moment.

  “My thanks,” he said warmly, “and to you. If you’ll excuse me, I must return to my duties. I will see the karavan to the settlement, then begin my own journey.”

  As he turned away, he glimpsed the startled and dismayed faces of the wife and the two elder children. They had expected him at the very least to depart at the same time they did, thus placing himself near them upon the road. His return to the settlement with the karavan would put more than a week between them. But on the face of the farmsteader, Rhuan saw a relaxing of the features from stoniness into relief, and an easing into cheerfulness. Just as he expected.

  He smiled again, made the graceful gesture of departure required in his own kin, and strode back down the hill toward Jorda’s wagon. Behind him, he heard the father firmly directing the oldest son to see to hitching the oxen.

  The thorn of anger pricked as he walked. Rhuan flattened it instantly with a wave of rejection. Anger he knew as well as pride; it rose quickly when teased into life or beckoned on purpose. Usually it was Brodhi who brought it roaring to the surface, heated and strong, which was one of the reasons Rhuan preferred to keep his distance from his kin-in-kind. No good, and quite a lot of bad, might come of it were they to enter into kin-feud. Such things killed among his people, including the innocent.

  Then, of course, there was Darmuth, who ridiculed him in an entirely different way for entirely different reasons.

  And now it was anger encouraged by a human. Rhuan shook his head briefly in denial and dismay. He knew better. Humans were very young, and very emotional. Those older were held to be wiser, and thus responsible for guiding the young with that wisdom.

  Guiding. As Darmuth guided him? As Ferize did Brodhi?

  He thought not. He thought most decisively not.

  “Rhuan.”

  Lost in musings, he had been watching only his direction of travel, unaware of others as he neared the wagons. With the rites completed, families were busy packing belongings and hitching teams, calling to one another. But this voice was quiet, pitched to privacy. This person waited specifically for him.

  There was pain in hazel eyes. There was a rigidity in slim posture. There was pride, female pride, every bit as strong as that claimed by males, as she stood waiting, swathed in a rich green shawl. Dark hair was wound in untidy coils against the back of her head, anchored in place by rune-carved sticks, but had loosened around her face so that wavy tendrils framed her features. He had stood beside her throughout the dawn rites held for a man who had assaulted her, and had seen nothing in her of the emotions she tried to suppress now.

  He halted, aware of warmth rising in his face. He owed this woman honesty, and so he answered before she could ask. “Yes. It’s true.”

  She did not look away. She met his eyes levelly, and a slight twitch moved the corner of her mouth. “For all your wilding ways, you have always offered to help those most in need of it.”

  He had expected something entirely different. He stumbled with a reply. “They shouldn’t …it’s … they are going into danger.”

  “Extreme danger.” Ilona nodded. “While the karavan is returning to a safety that is somewhat more evident, if not wholly assured in a province overrun by Hecari.”

  Floundering—he had not thought ahead to envision what it would cost to wish farewell to those he treasured—he sought to offer reassurance. “I’ll return, Ilona.” He grimaced. “If Jorda will have me.”

  “He doesn’t keep guides in his employ out of season; how can he consider this desertion? If you survive to return for the next season, he’ll have you.”

  “If I survive!” He began to laugh, halted it before it could gust from his mouth, insulting her concern, and tamed it to a crooked smile. “How could I not? I have several lives left to me.”

  The single word reply was an odd mixture of emotions. “Several.”

  And so he lied, to give her ease. “Six.”

  She sought the truth in his eyes. She found something there, but he could not tell what it might be. “Six.”

  He glanced beyond her, seeing Jorda in the background. He owed the man news of his decision sooner rather than later. “I will return,” he repeated.

  She made no move to detain him as his body and thoughts inclined toward the karavan-master. She merely said, “If Alisanos allows it.”

  That came as a shock. He fastened all of his attention once again upon the hand-reader, and accusation. “You’ve been talking to Darmuth.”

  “Not intentionally. He was mending my steps.”

  “Oh Mother, I forgot.” Rhuan put out a hand in an apologetic appeal, then withdrew it. “I forgot, ’Lona.”

  “But yes, I’ve been talking to Darmuth. And he has been most frank.”

  Warily he said, “Darmuth, frank, is often dangerous.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “That I have seen. But I have never seen him afraid.”

  Rhuan swore. The flicker of anger deep in his belly threatened to grow, to rise, to redden his gaze. And she would see it, and wonder. More than she already did. “He is a consummate manipulator. Don’t allow him to sway you. Darmuth—”

  “This wasn’t manipulation.”

  “Darmuth’s version of the truth is often manipulation. I know it well, Ilona. I’ve been its victim all too often.”

  “He believes if you go so close to Alisanos, you invite it to take you.”

  She was pale. Her face was carved of bone. Beneath dark, level brows, her eyes were unflinching.

  Darmuth’s truths could be most discomfiting when used on fragile humans. And yet that was not how Rhuan had ever viewed Ilona. This moment in particular, she was strength incarnate.

  He owed her much. But not this. “I’m going, ’Lona.”

  “I know that.” Her mouth curved slightly. “I came only to say farewell, and to wish you well on your journey.”

  She could not possibly know the costs of his journey, the requirements of a highly personal journey so different from the one he now embarked upon. But Rhuan nonetheless very much appreciated the sentiments from the only human who knew him half so well.

  “In the name of the Mother of Moons—” But no, that was a human oath. Rhuan wanted to give her something more. He raised his hand. He turned it to her, displaying his palm. Displaying what he had kept hidden from her for three years. It was not true disclosure; that he kept shielded. But it was more than he had ever offered before. “On this,” he said, “I promise. I will survi
ve. I will return.”

  He did not lower his hand.

  And she did not look at it.

  “Be certain of it,” she said, and turned away.

  Rhuan watched Ilona go. He was aware of a pinch of guilt, of regret, of wishing life might be different. That he could explain to her why it was necessary she not truly read his hand; that he could show her what it held. But of them all, Ilona was most dangerous to him. And so he let her go despite a twitch of his body that nearly sent him after her. He restrained that which was goading him to follow, to catch up, to place a hand on her shoulder and turn her toward him. To look into her face and see no disbelief, no fear, no alarm, as he told her the truth.

  They were friends. Nothing more. And so it had to remain.

  In other women, he found physical release. He had loved none of them, nor had they expected it. He chose carefully, and as carefully exercised self-restraint in the bedding so that he would impregnate none of them. He would risk no child of his having to make the choices he did, nor to undertake the tests he faced every day. And so he did no more as Ilona departed than to watch her as she walked away, straight and tall and slim, until she was lost among the wagons.

  KNEELING INSIDE THEIR wagon, Audrun tucked away various items more properly than her children had. She appreciated their efforts, but when a family of six lived out of a wagon—a large one, to be sure, but not so large as the home of sod and wood Davyn had built at the beginning of their marriage—every bit of space was important. Anything left out of its place, anything put away haphazardly, affected everything else in the wagon.

  On the road to the tent settlement as they made their way through steep hills on a difficult track, they had seen an array of furniture, of things once beloved of a woman, built with care by a man, left at the side of the track. Audrun was stunned by the waste until Davyn grimly explained that packing a wagon with too many unnecessary things burdened the draft animals required to pull it. Lives, he’d said, were far more important; a man could build another table, had he the skill, or buy another bureau mirror for his wife, had he the money.

  But it was the woman-high harp standing beside the road that took her breath. She knew nothing of the instrument save that she had heard about harps, heard that a person who could play it conjured the music of the gods. The sweeping belly wood had cracked, destroying the symmetry of the carvings that once had been silver-gilt. The strings were a snarled ruin. One, only one, remained as it had been, taut top to bottom, glinting in the sunlight.

  No, she had said when the children walking beside the wagon wanted to explore the abandoned things. No, she told herself inwardly, when her own heart wanted to touch the single harp string, to hear a whisper of the magic.

  No, Davyn said, asking the oxen to move out more smartly as he called his children back to the wagon, back to the barren track to raise dust with their footsteps.

  Now, the wagon shifted and creaked beneath the weight of her husband climbing in from the back. Some idea, some concern, set vertical creases between his brows. He smelled of oxen and labor and grime, the salty tang of perspiration.

  She noticed suddenly what she undoubtedly should have marked before: his hair was receding.

  She wanted to touch that hair, to smooth away the cares. But even as she lifted her hand, he spoke. “I have done my best. All the years of our lives.” His tone was lowered for privacy, but nonetheless thrummed with emotion. “I always will, Audrun.”

  Instead of touching fine blond hair, she placed her hand over the calloused one of her husband. “There is nothing, and no one, who could possibly make me doubt it.”

  His eyes sought hers. “The guide.”

  In her mind’s eye, she saw the Shoia. His attire, so alien to her; the deft motions of his hands when set to a task; the kindness, the humor, in his eyes. The unexpected dimples carved deeply in his face as he smiled, or laughed. And how he understood her children.

  The father of those children now doubted himself.

  “No,” she said. “No, Davyn.”

  He looked away from her, lips working as if he chewed the interior of his mouth.

  “I was blessed,” she told him, “when the Mother made you and set you into my path. We were blessed when she gave us healthy children growing straight and strong. Guide or no guide, Davyn, you are not alone in this.”

  After a moment he nodded. He turned his hand beneath hers so that it faced up, and interlaced his fingers with hers. “I was blessed,” he said hoarsely.

  She smiled, leaned forward, brushed a light kiss across his stubbled chin. “If we’re bound for Atalanda, we’d best be going.”

  He squeezed her hand, then backed out of the wagon, ducking his head so as not to brush the string of charms hanging from the white-painted Mother Rib.

  Audrun stared at the dangling leather thong, the tarnished silver charms, the fragility of feathers, the carved stone and wooden beads. At her throat hung something similar. She closed one hand around the necklace.

  “Mother of Moons,” she whispered, “see us there safely.”

  IT WAS AS she climbed the steps into her wagon that Ilona realized what Rhuan had told her.

  Six deaths left.

  Six.

  He had meant it as comfort, to assure her that he had other deaths left to him. And despite the wonder that still, even after three years, teased her mind as she remembered the first death and resurrection she had witnessed, she had grown complacent with the knowledge. He had died again only two days before, and resurrected. And now he told her six deaths remained to him of the seven.

  Her hands holding onto the doorjamb, one foot poised for the top step, Ilona stilled.

  Six deaths. Six.

  But she had witnessed two.

  Surely Rhuan could count.

  She could.

  A man who died twice, who had, supposedly, six deaths left to him out of seven, was one death wrong.

  Her muscles tensed to turn, to descend the steps in haste, to go to him, to confront him, to explain that lies to her were not necessary. But she held her body in check.

  Ilona had known liars in her life, men and women who, for whatever reason, almost never told the truth. Her own father had lied to her time and time again, until she learned, as a girl, to believe nothing he said; except those promises made to punish her if her chores were not done on time. She had seen the satisfaction in his eyes, sensed an inner amusement that was pleasure. She had never looked into his hand with the eyes and senses of a hand-reader because in those days she didn’t know what she was, but there had been no need. He lied. That was all, and it was enough.

  Rhuan was not a habitual liar, but she had known him to lie. Always it had to do with a question from a worried, exhausted karavaner on the verge of breaking down for one reason or another; or with his own health. He lied to mislead people from frightening truths.

  She knew then that he had not killed her assailant. She had allowed herself to believe he might have, but now, removed from the emotions of that time, she knew.

  But this time, she knew he lied. Six deaths, he said, and Shoia only died for good on the seventh.

  She had witnessed two.

  So. Six deaths left were more likely only one.

  Ilona climbed the top step and stood inside her wagon, staring at the rune-carved Mother Rib and the dangling string of charms. Absently she removed the sticks from her hair, let down that hair, shook it out, then slowly began to twist it upon itself once more. When it was more neatly wound against the back of her head, she thrust the sticks through again to hold the coils in place.

  Her own ritual, to busy her hands as she prayed to the Mother. A simple prayer, withal: Let him live.

  Chapter 35

  AT JORDA’S BEHEST, the karavan made haste to return to the tent settlement. Rhuan spent the journey riding up one side of the column and down the other, calmly but firmly urging those driving the wagons to get quicker gaits out of the draft animals. He knew Jorda’s mind was on
discovering the magnitude of the damage done to the settlement where he had many friends; his own attention was split between wondering if he also had lost any friends in the Hecari decimation and concern about how the farmsteaders were faring as they struck out on their own. Practically speaking, though the settlement decimation was a brutal thing, it nonetheless left survivors who could help one another, while the farmsteaders numbered only two adults, and one of them was pregnant. With Alisanos preparing to go active, they were, Rhuan felt, in a far more perilous position.

  And yet as he at last rode ahead to the outskirts of the settlement, Rhuan revised his opinion. The odor of burned oilcloth, timber framing, lamp oil, and human hair and flesh clothed the remaining tents like a miasma. He saw charcoal-smeared inhabitants dragging forth the remains of their property from burned tents, while others piled up wagons with charred and useless tent poles and destroyed belongings, preparing to haul the loads away for burial or burning some distance from the settlement. Others were raking the pathways through the narrow, winding routes throughout the settlement, mixing ash and wet coals with dirt so it might pack down somewhat. He saw grieving families piecing through the ruins of their tents frantically as others tried to gather up and take away that which was no longer of use. And he saw a place amid the copse of trees usually reserved for the karavans that now, seated or lying on blankets, was filled with the wounded. Many of them had burns from fighting the fires, while others had sustained injuries from the Hecari in the midst of the culling.

  The sight stunned him into halting his horse abruptly, staring mutely at the destruction. Away from the settlement, merely hearing news of the culling, the magnitude of the destruction had not registered. He had been busy with Hecari incursions upon the karavan, including his own death, and had allowed other matters to remain in the forefront of his mind.