The Last Road

by K. Johansen

  She’d been far out with the cattle when the smoke had called her home, too late, to find desolation. Luck that the Westrons had been and gone by then.

  She had ridden mindless a time, heading northeasterly above the All-Holy’s course until she was ahead of it, dodging Westron scouts. More by luck than any cunning. Luck and the grace of her dogs. Their sacrifice. Wrung her heart. Showed her she could still feel. Pain upon pain. The dogs had found that one patrol first, and paid the price for her flight. Bought her the time to flee.

  Found Reyka’s company. Found Tibor of all people among them, only family she had left.

  Found a reason to keep getting up in the morning.

  “Rider.”

  She looked behind first. No, ahead, she saw it then. Black horse. Coming up from the line of the dry stream. Tibor reached for his bow, glanced to her quiver, empty as his own, shrugged and drew his sabre.

  She was tired and her shoulder hurt. Face, damn it, itched, and scrubbing at it with her arm only made her foul jacket with its few reinforcing horn plates over the breast fouler. The blood was drying, sticky and stinking. Drew her sabre—taken from a dead comrade and some approximation of skill sweated into her by Tibor when she wasn’t having to figure it out with a Westron to teach her and life at stake. Arrows for hares and pheasants and the rare predators that didn’t have the sense to flee a bull or a rider, her stick for the cattle—those had always been enough. Sabre was only a stick with an edge, she had told Reyka, when Tibor first brought her before the chief, and Reyka had laughed. But she had not contradicted.

  Farmers, mercenaries come home from the caravan road, Jayala’s folk and Sayan’s, Retlavon’s and the northern Yalla’s. Reyka had Sayan’s blessing, and the respect of those she led. She had in the beginning gathered about the core of her own cousins and herders, and she ruled them like the household of a farm. Brothers, sisters, cousins. Kin.

  The rider only waited. He looked like a Westgrasslander, but a mercenary of the road, his hair worn long in many braids. Little gear. No buckler, no bow or spear. Didn’t bother hailing them, didn’t call to name himself. Didn’t draw his sabre. Trusting they weren’t converts. As they were him, she supposed, and did not sheathe her blade. He nodded as they came close enough to speak without shouting.

  “Reyka’s folk?” His voice was hoarse.

  “Whose are you?” Tibor demanded.

  The man shrugged. “Sayan’s.” Which his tattoos already told them, as their killdeer and frogs identified them as Jayala’s, rooted them to a place. Owls curved from his temples, down around his eyes and over cheekbones, the black lines faded like the marking of a much older man. Hint, on the backs of his hands, of the entwined snakes and cheetahs in black and blue that would mark his arms. His brown face was burnt dark from the desert, paler scars seaming above and below his left eye.

  Beardless, as most Westgrasslander men were. She’d been startled at the hairiness of a Red Desert man’s face, partner of a caravaneer of the Retlavonbarkash who’d come from the road to join Reyka’s company. Dark eyes peering out over a thicket of curling black. He had made her laugh. Gerbil peering from its burrow.

  Dead, both of them, a week back.

  The company had been almost six hundred, when she joined. Two-thirds that, now, and fewer fit to fight. Those so injured they couldn’t ride even clasped in a comrade’s arms or tied to their horse—

  Better a friend’s knife than to be taken by the Westrons.

  “Ride with you.” Not a question. The stranger looked exhausted. So did his horse.

  If that savage dog-thing belonged to him, there was no sign of it. She saw Tibor scanning the horizons, too.

  They could contest him joining them. Jolanan wasn’t sure how it would go. He looked menacing in a way that Tibor and the other caravan mercenaries, hard though they had seemed when she first found herself among them, did not. Caravaneer’s coat the colour of a brindled cat, undyed grey sheep’s wool and sandy camel spun together, flung open over his russet brigandine. Indigo headscarf pulled down about his neck. His hair was very long, even for a caravaneer, and so dark as to be called black, under the dust, which was caked to him as if he’d ducked his head into some pool and ridden while still wet. It wasn’t the look of the road so much as the air of him. The bull that knew the herd was his. The bitch that all the other dogs gave place to in the dooryard.

  “Yeah,” Tibor said wearily. “They can kill you when we get back if you need killing. I’m too tired. Want your name and gang, though. I’m Tibor. Used to ride with Hammad’s gang out of Marakand. This is my cousin Jolanan. We’re of the Jayala’arad.”

  “Holla,” the man said. Shrugged. “Ridden with a few gangs, over the years.”

  Jolanan had been around caravaneers long enough now to know that “a few gangs” wasn’t a recommendation, was a flag signalling trouble, in fact. They valued loyalty on the road. Someone who couldn’t settle or who got themselves turfed from master to master was not someone you wanted standing shoulder to shoulder with you in a fight.

  “Who?” Tibor demanded.

  “Gaguush’s gang,” Holla said, and there was a smile, even. Bleak. “Long time ago. She’s dead.”

  It didn’t satisfy Tibor. “Never heard of her.”

  “You wouldn’t have. Came up from Marakand this time with Mistress Varnouri.”

  Tibor grunted, seeming to recognize the name. “Kin?” he demanded. “Cousins?”

  “I look Westron to you?” The man turned his horse. “No kin. No cousins. They’re all dead. Whatever. Ride on my own, then.”

  There were even Westrons among the company, caravaneers come with their partners and spouses, folk who swore by memory of their dead gods and reviled the faith of the red priests. Not lightly trusted, but Sayan had known the truth in their hearts.

  “Still want to know who your kin were,” Tibor repeated, and kicked his bay up even, waving Jolanan to keep back. She ignored that, went up the other side. Holla didn’t seem much disturbed, although his black didn’t like it. Three stallions unfamiliar together. Lark didn’t like it either. Jolanan and the skewbald were still settling into one another’s ways. A spear had taken her old mare from her a fortnight back. Lazlan gave her Lark then, with the blood of a Westron commander still on his white-splashed flanks and Lark, it turned out, was no cattle-horse. He had a taste for fighting.

  Holla stared Lark in his blue nearside eye and the horse settled down. The man nodded to Jolanan, as if to say, There. His own eyes were hazel, flecked golden-green, she decided. Warm.

  Nice face. Much as she distrusted him, she liked it. Old, almost as old as Tibor, who was past thirty, but—when you were alive and hadn’t thought to be, it was surely an insult to life itself not to take a moment to appreciate a pleasing face, as much as it would be to shut one’s ears to the rising songs of the black larks or the bright swathe of pink a patch of campion made across the hillside.

  He smiled.

  Warm smile, too. Like he really saw her.

  Jayala prevent he’d seen anything but proper suspicion in her scrutiny.

  “I’ll talk to the warlord,” he said, turning from her.

  “The chief, yeah,” Tibor said. “You’ll be talking to her, never fear.”

  “How about we just take all the sniffing and growling as given, Tibor, and just ride? We want to be bearing more easterly.”

  “No.”

  “We do.”

  Jolanan didn’t quite smile herself. Too tired. But the man was right. Tibor had an appalling sense of direction.

  They caught up with the spread-out straggle of the warband eventually, just as it was drawing together again around the start of a camp: a few cookfires, pickets riding out. Jolanan didn’t like the way Holla frowned, seemingly noting everything. Disapproving. Assessing. Spy, she thought again, and when they found Reyka and Lazlan standing apart in some quiet consultation with the Marakander caravaneer Caro, she made sure to keep herself between the stranger and the chief, w
hich she saw Lazlan noting, then moving to do the same.

  “This is Holla,” Tibor announced without dismounting. “We found him riding north after the raid. He doesn’t give any good account of what he was doing there. Says he was looking for us, chief. No family, no kin, and shiftless between gangs, by his own admission.”

  “Looking for us, why?” Reyka demanded. A woman nearing fifty, her hair cut short, narrow face tattooed with the black larks that folk of the Sayanbarkash used for women, making a difference in pattern as Jolanan’s own folk did not. Grey eyes. A necklace of mountain-turquoise about her throat, last trace, maybe of the wealthy farmer she had once been. Her younger brother was very like her. Staring up now, with eyes narrowed against the sun, at the weary stranger on his horse.

  “You’d rather I rode with the All-Holy?” Holla asked. “I’m heading over the rivers. Thought I’d travel with you, lend my sabre to yours, if you’re heading north or east. If you don’t want me, I’ll ride alone.”

  Wanted the relative safety of a company about him, and precious grain for his horse, probably. Or wanted them to think that his only desire.

  She knew that horse. Dark stallion, white blaze. Small wonder Lark had reacted as he had. She’d killed its rider, that very dawn. The knight. She’d have known it at once if she hadn’t been so tired.

  “Arpath?” Lazlan called, turning away.

  The young Sayanbarkashi seer was conscious again, at least. He came from the round tent the chief’s household shared, a blanket wrapped over his shoulders, though the day was warm. Face wan, golden-brown eyes bruised-looking as if he’d sat unsleeping too many nights. His gaze fixed on the stranger, stayed there.

  “This is Holla. Tibor and Jolanan found him after the raid. He says he wants to join us. We trust him? Won’t say who his kin are.”

  Arpath, like Lazlan, had the men’s owls of the Sayanbarkash tattooed on his face. A different style than the work on Holla’s. Well, the bards who did the work when a youth came of age sometimes revived old styles, or found new of their own. Didn’t mean Holla’s tattooing was false. It would have been fresh and new and out of place on his weathered face in that case, anyway.

  “Lose your own horse?” she asked him.

  The corner of his mouth tucked up, as if she amused. “Yes. Thanks.”

  “For what?”

  “Providing another.”

  “Did I?”

  He shrugged, looking away now, at Arpath. “Found him straying when I needed him. Rather like I did you two.”

  “We found you,” Tibor said.

  Arpath still stared.

  “Go on,” Lazlan said. “Ask him.”

  Lies, Arpath had said, gave him a bitter taste, like bile rising.

  “I’m not a Westron spy,” Holla said to the seer. “I’m not any enemy of yours.”

  Arpath swallowed, nodded.

  “You didn’t grow up under a mushroom,” Reyka said. “Who’re your kin? What farm, what valley?”

  “They’re all dead,” Holla said. Seemed to hesitate. “Where you from? North hills?”

  “I held the valley below Dyer’s Hill.”

  “Huh. Thought so. You’ve got his face.”

  “Whose?”

  “Someone I knew once.” He shook his head. “No family. I was a foundling. Doesn’t matter.” He looked tired, suddenly. More tired than he already had. “It really doesn’t matter where I’m from. You want me to ride with you a while, or not?”

  “Arpath?” Reyka asked, gentle, as she always was with the young seer. They’d come on him at his own family’s execution. Father, mother, sister, cousins, grandparents already burning, beyond saving. He’d been on his knees, screaming, cursing, a sixth-circle priest, a diviner of the All-Holy, in her soot-smudged white cope pulling his head back by the hair, shouting at him in bad Westgrasslander to look, see what awaited if he did not give himself and the blessing of his talent to the service of the All-Holy as the Old Great Gods had intended.

  “He’s true,” the young man said. “He’s—” Fell silent. Took a deep breath. Eyes wide, pupils dilated, as if he were falling into vision without drum or prayer.

  Did Holla shake his head, ever so slightly? Arpath blinked and looked away. “He’s not a Westron spy. Trust him.”

  Reyka was frowning. Summoned her brother with a raised chin. They murmured, heads together. Beckoned Arpath in close. More murmuring. The seer seemed vehement. “I swear it, chief, marshal, Sayan—Old Great Gods be my witness, he’s true.”

  Jolanan leaned over to murmur herself, “They’ll kill you if they decide you’re a spy anyway.”

  “Sensible. If I were.”

  “Does Arpath actually know you?”

  “Haven’t been back to the grass since before he was born. No.”

  “Are you a spy?”

  “No.”

  He didn’t seem worried. Just tired. Bored, even. The black horse stood head low, ears drooping. Holla scratched its neck absently.

  “We’re not bandits,” Reyka said. “We’re a warband. We ride in justice, with honour. We protect the folk. We don’t raid them, any we find surviving. We’re the rearguard of their flight beyond the rivers. We serve the folk and the gods and the goddesses—the memory of the gods and the goddesses of the Western Grass. We do as they would have us do, under the Old Great Gods. If you can’t hold to this, if you think this is about brigandage, if you’d murder or steal from the folk the little they have left, if you’d abuse those weaker than you or think to make yourself a master over bondfolk like a Great Grass chieftain, you can ride away now. If you can ride on our terms, you take an oath to us.”

  “I take no oaths to serve any woman nor man,” Holla said. Matter-of-fact, no great emphasis. “But I swear, I ride in the service of the gods of the Western Grass. Always. Take that, or don’t.”

  “It’s enough,” Arpath said, as if he had authority here, and Reyka gave him a long look. He didn’t seem to notice.

  Lazlan began to say something, but Reyka held up a silencing hand, transferring her stare to Holla. “You an archer?”

  “If I need to be.”

  She shook her head. “Take him to Caro for the lancers, Tibor. She’s a caravaneer; she can deal with him. Jolanan, stay a moment.”

  Jolanan dismounted, joined Reyka, Lazlan, and Arpath as Tibor reluctantly turned his horse and led away, Holla following.

  “Get Tibor alone, when you can. Let him know—you and he both, ask around among the caravaneers. See if anyone from the road knows anything of Holla.”

  “Yes, chief.”

  “He’s true,” Arpath said. “He’s—I felt it, for a moment, Reyka. He’s touched by the gods. Blessed. Somehow.”

  “A bard? He isn’t. Nor a wizard of any sort.”

  “No. But—”

  “I’ll accept what you’ve seen in him, Arpath, but nonetheless, I want someone keeping an eye on him. Everyone’s got cousins of some degree, by blood or adoption. Talk to Lazlan when you find out anything, Jo.”

  “Yes, chief.”

  Reyka gave Jolanan a weary smile, Lazlan a friendly thump on the shoulder as she led Lark off in search of the food and rest they both needed.

  No chance to talk to Tibor alone there; he was with Caro, a Marakander caravaneer who’d followed a Westgrasslander husband to this fight and lost him to a Westron arrow in their first battle. But maybe no need.

  “Gurhan grant we do get over the river,” Caro was saying in the desert-road tongue, though she spoke good Westgrass. “Wish you’d brought Varnouri and the rest of her gang with you, Hol.”

  “They were heading up to At-Landi,” Holla said, frowning over a swollen bruise on the black’s neck. Lark’s doing, maybe. The horse shifted its weight unhappily, turned its head, but only to rest a nose on the man’s shoulder. He resumed his grooming with a twist of wiry grass. “I don’t think most gang-bosses are understanding, yet, how bad things are. The Westrons aren’t going to stop at the Kinsai’av.”

&nb
sp; Jolanan had to listen carefully to catch the words. Till this summer she’d never learnt any language but her own, living in the shadow of the Karas, that and a few words of Westron.

  They should have killed the red priests, the missionaries, who’d been creeping down the old lost road from the mountains in dribs and drabs all her life, not listened to them, however politely, however deafly. Not given them advice on the road east, and shelter, and food, and kindness.

  First folk to be overrun by the Westrons, the Jayala’arad.

  “We’re running north.”

  “ I know.”

  Caro gave Jolanan a smile, switched languages. “You’ve found us a good one this time. He says the horse is yours. Can he keep it?”

  Her prize? They didn’t work like that. Lazlan and Reyka would assign captured livestock and supplies where they were lacking. But the man needed a mount and nobody had shown any urge to take it from him.

  “Sure.”

  But Lark was cranky, tugging at the bridle, not liking the black any better, and she moved him off. Ate with Tibor and a crowd of fellow skirmishers and scouts. Heard who was dead and who was missing. Small stones, piling on. A weight that pressed down, day after day. Passed on Reyka’s order to find out about Holla, but Tibor shrugged.

  “Caro knows him. He’s been with Varnouri’s gang six years, she says. That’s enough for me, I guess. Maybe he has good reasons to deny his family, you never know.”

  Even a foundling had family of some sort. Maybe he’d been heading home to look for them, and discovered them all dead, the longhouse roofless, walls pulled down. Maybe a pyre in the dooryard, and the charred bones. Maybe he hurt too much to talk of them.

  As the shadows gathered into night, she left Tibor and his friends searching out their beds, such as they were. Not enough tents, and a clear night, so nobody much was bothering with cutting brush and rigging shelters of hide and blanket. Everyone slept in some order, near their own horselines. They’d had to cut and ride before. Pickets out, with dogs, and Arpath would have searched in a bowl of tea, which had made her laugh the first time she’d heard Lazlan say it, but rocking and singing, catching the sky in the dark liquor worked to bring visions for him, so what did she know?