by K. J. Parker
He tried to think like Axio. I come to the bridge, and I see the cart isn’t there, and the footprints stop. So I assume—He frowned. I assume the stupid little thief has taken his boots and socks off and waded twenty yards upstream, fondly imagining I’d be fooled by the oldest trick in the book. So I walk up and down the bank until I find where he got out again—
A sound in the distance made him freeze; a voice, and another answering it. He pulled himself together, jumped up, looked round. A stab of pain from his foot reminded him of the stupidity of running with something sharp in your boot toe. He hobbled a few yards on to the bridge, then stopped. Hiding wasn’t a practical proposition, he wasn’t sure he was flexible enough to get across the broken place in the planking, and running was out of the question. He heard the voices again; at least one of them was female. He went back to where he’d been and sat down again.
Before very long he saw a small, neat wagon, drawn by two horses. The driver and the passenger sitting beside her on the box were both women: one about forty-five (he wasn’t good at women’s ages), the other somewhere around seventy. The older one was driving. Both of them were wrapped up in enormous honey-coloured fur capes. Behind them in the bed of the cart were eight large barrels.
They must have seen him, because the cart stopped. He stayed where he was. So did the cart. The hell with it, he thought. He got up and walked slowly toward the women. When he was about ten yards away, the younger woman reached down and picked up an axe; call it an axe, it was a little hatchet, for splitting little logs into kindling. He stopped again, smiled and raised his hands, palms outwards.
“Who the hell are you?” the younger woman called out.
“My name’s Musen. Look, if you were planning on crossing at the bridge, I’m afraid you can’t. It’s all broken up in the middle.”
“What?” The older woman scowled at him. “You’re joking.”
“Come and see for yourself, if you like. But you won’t be able to get that rig across, not unless you’ve got tools and about a dozen twelve-foot planks.”
The younger woman climbed down; not an easy process, there was a lot of her under the cape. “You keep away from the cart,” she said, walking round him. Her heels clopped on the bridge. “Shit,” she said. “He’s right. It’s completely shot.”
“Well, that’s just perfect,” the older woman said. “We’ll have to turn round and go back to bloody Shant, or straight on to Cusavant and double back to Stert Ford. Either way, we can forget the fair. Might as well go home.”
The younger woman was staring through the hole into the river. “You,” she said. “Can’t you do something?”
“Me? Sorry, no. I’m not a carpenter, and, anyway, there’s no tools or materials.”
“You could cut down a tree or something. There’s one, look.” She pointed to a frail willow sapling growing out of the bank on the far side. “Chop it down, split it into planks, lay ’em over the gap. You can use our axe if you like.” She held it out to him. He raised his hand politely.
“I don’t think that’d work,” he said. “I guess we could break up one of your barrels and use the staves, but like I said, I’m not a—”
“Don’t even think about it,” the older woman said. “Tell him, Gorna, that’s six-year-old mead, it’s worth more money than he’s ever seen in his life. And don’t give him the axe; he might be dangerous.”
“It’s all right, Mother.” The younger woman rolled her eyes. “Don’t mind her,” she said. “She doesn’t like strangers. You’re sure you can’t do anything? Maybe if you could carry the barrels across, we could go downstream to that shallow place and swim the horses across.”
“How big are those barrels?”
“What? Oh, forty-five gallons. Why?”
“That means they weigh close on a third of a ton,” Musen said. “Sorry.”
“Oh, well.” She looked at him. “What’s the matter with you? Been fighting?”
Musen gave her a weak grin. “Bit of a one-sided fight,” he said. “I work for this man, and he’s got a nasty temper. When he gave me this, I thought, the hell with it. I’m sort of between jobs now.”
“Mphm. Caught you stealing things, did he?”
“Maybe there was a bit of that,” Musen said. “Anyway, sorry I can’t help you.”
“Gorna,” the older woman called out. “Come here.”
There was a brief whispered conversation; it looked like the younger woman was trying to get her case across, but she lost. Then she came back.
“My mother seems to think,” she said, “that if you come with us as far as Hart Ferry, you can unload the barrels, take them over, then bring the boat back and fetch over the cart. I told her, those things weigh half a ton, but she wouldn’t listen. Well?”
“We could do it, if we had a couple of planks. Where’s this ferry?”
“Five miles upstream, give or take. What do you care? You aren’t doing anything.” She hesitated, then added, “Mother says you can have thirty stuivers.”
“Where did you say you were going?”
The woman frowned. “I didn’t,” she said, “but if you must know, we’re going to Malfet fair.” She paused, then added. “It’s a hiring fair: you could come with us and look for a new job. But that would be instead of the thirty stuivers.”
“Gorna, what’s he saying?” the older woman called out.
The younger woman sighed. “Come on,” she said. “She gets impatient. Well? Do you want to come with us or not?”
“How fast does this cart go?” The words came out before he could stop them. The woman looked at him. “You said there was a hiring fair,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to miss that.”
The woman frowned, then shook her head; there was a mystery, but it wasn’t worth solving. “You’ll have to ride in the back with the barrels. I expect you can find somewhere to sit.”
The younger woman was Gorna, and her mother was Elaim, and the family had been carters for six generations, until the war came and took all the men away. It would be all right, the soldiers said; nobody was expecting them to fight or anything like that. All they were expected to do was drive their own carts along the military roads, for which they’d be paid their usual rates plus a third, in government scrip, guaranteed by the emperor himself. This war’s a wonderful opportunity for people like you, they said. That was eight years ago.
So Gorna and her mother fixed up the last remaining cart, which the soldiers had declared unfit for service, and taught themselves how to drive it; and now they had a flourishing business, pretty much a monopoly, because the soldiers had taken all the other carts in the county, along with the wainwrights and the wheelwrights and all the good lumber. There wasn’t much actual cash money, of course, because the taxmen had had all that long ago, but they were happy to be paid in kind: it’s surprising how well you can get along without money. It was only men who couldn’t run a business or a farm without money and tallies and chequerboards and ledgers, and you can get along pretty well without men, too.
“However,” Gorna said, her eyes on the road ahead, because craning round hurt her neck, “I’m not saying we couldn’t use a strong pair of hands about the place. I mean, it’s amazing how much lifting and loading you can do once you’ve learned all the tricks and dodges, but Mother’s not getting any younger, are you, dear, and I hurt my back about ten months ago and it’s never really been right since. Of course we couldn’t pay you in money, there simply isn’t any, like I said, but there’s plenty to eat and you can have a house of your own to sleep in, there’s all those buildings empty and just falling down, it wouldn’t take you hardly any time at all to fix one up and you’d be quite cosy and snug, if you used the slates off the old trap-house roof. Of course it’s entirely up to you, but you might think about it. I mean, it’s not like you’ve got anywhere else to go, and I’d have thought someone in your position would be glad of a roof over his head and two square meals a day, and who knows, I mean, when Mother and I ge
t too old for the business, someone might as well take it over, there’s no point the cart just mouldering away in a shed. No hurry, of course: you take all the time you want, and if you don’t want to you can take your chances at Malfet fair and see if anybody’ll have you. They’re always looking for men for the stone quarries, though I gather they don’t last very long there, because of the dust. Still, it’s up to you entirely.”
The ferry was an old charcoal barge, little more than a raft, hauled along on a double chain that spanned the river. All you had to do was haul on a lever, which opened an ingate and allowed water to run down a channel, which filled a dam. You then pulled another lever which opened the dam, and the water poured out and turned a waterwheel which drove the chain; when the dam was empty the chain stopped, but by then the ferry was across to the other side, where there was an identical arrangement. The ferry was rated at two tons—if you put any more load on it than that, you’d break something and be stuck in the middle of the river. There used to be ferries like it every ten miles, but none of the others worked any more; they’d been broken up for scrap metal, which was so much in demand because of the war.
There was also a derelict shed, where the ferry keeper used to live. Musen demolished the door and came away with two strong inch-thick planks. Rolling the barrels down off the cart wasn’t easy, and one of them nearly got away from him into the river, but Gorna managed to head it off and between them they wrenched it on to the barge and got it standing upright. Mother operated the levers—anything mechanical or that needed manipulation seemed to be her province—and Musen and Gorna rode over to unload the barrels. Gorna had Musen operate the levers on the far side. “I’m hopeless with machinery,” she said, with what sounded like pride. “My father and my husband always did that sort of thing, and the boys, when they were old enough. Of course, Mother does her best, bless her.”
The horses didn’t want to get on the barge. Gorna had to talk to them quite sharply. There wasn’t any trouble after that.
Musen half killed himself getting the barrels back into the cart. He’d thought to bring a couple of rafters from the fallen-down shed to use as levers; Mother and Gorna sat on the ends, while he heaped stones up under the barrels to raise them a foot; then more levering, more sitting, more stones, until eventually the barrel could be tipped and wrestled over the lip of the bed, forced upright and walked into position. By the time the last barrel was loaded he was shaking, and his arms felt as light as air. After that, it turned out that there was enough room for three on the box, if Musen didn’t mind sitting on the end and hanging on to the rail.
It had been a good road once, but the frost had got into it, followed by the grass and then the briars. But Mother was a single-minded driver and the cart had good springs; just as well the soldiers didn’t want it, of course, but, really, it was a very good cart; they knew how to build them back then, of course you could get the materials then, before the war. At this rate, they’d be in Malfet by noon tomorrow, which would mean missing the first morning of the fair, but that couldn’t be helped, and mostly the first morning was just the village people coming in to town to gawp: the serious people didn’t do any real buying or hiring till the second day. The owners of the six barrels of mead might be a bit upset about missing a morning’s trade, but they’d just have to understand, it’s not easy moving stuff about these days. Take the bridge, there was a very good example: ten years ago the village would’ve come out and fixed it straight away, but nowadays—
In fact, they were making such good time that Gorna agreed to a brief stop, near the first substantial copse they’d passed in some time; she hurried away and walked back a little later, and suggested a bite to eat before they carried on. She flipped up the hinged lid of the box and came up with wheat bread, dried ham, sausage, apples, honeycakes and a stone gallon bottle of beer: just a snack, she said, to keep them going. She offered Musen some of the beer; he said thank you, but he’d rather have water. Later he washed the jar out carefully in a stream beside the road and filled it up, for later.
The cart had two lamps, very good quality, imported, so they were able to keep going through the evening and well into the night, until they came to a stretch of road that Mother declared wasn’t fit to drive in the dark. The women slept sitting up, on the box; Musen crawled under the cart and tried to sleep, but every time he started to drift off he seemed to feel the presence of someone close to him, breathing without making a sound. He was glad when the sun rose and they could get going again.
“I think it was a government road originally,” Gorna was saying. “It’s not straight like an army road, but look at the way they’ve cut through the hill rather than going round. It’s amazing to think there was a time when they could do that sort of thing, though of course it was all other people’s money.”
Musen didn’t like the cutting. The embankments were steep on both sides, and thorns and ash saplings had taken root in them and grown into dense clumps, big enough to hide an archer. Gorna laughed at him. “There used to be bandits on this road at one time, about five years ago,” she said. “But hardly anybody comes this way any more, and those that do haven’t got anything. If you hung about here waiting for someone to rob, you’d starve.”
Musen didn’t tell her it wasn’t bandits he was worried about. But they passed through the cutting without any trouble, and beyond it the countryside was flat and open; all the way, Gorna assured him, to Malfet.
“All this was marshes once, of course,” she told him. “And then they dug the rines and drained it, but the land’s too sour, apparently, so it’s only fit for sheep. Of course nobody clears the rines out any more so it’s getting soft again.”
There were no sheep: nothing living except for a distant hovering buzzard. Musen tried to remember the last time he’d seen anybody out working on the land—not the sort of thing you notice, until you realise it’s not there. Still, there was a positive side. Axio would stick out a mile; he’d see him coming, at least by daylight. He wriggled his toes in his boot, wondering if he was fit to run yet.
“See that plume of smoke? That’s Malfet.” Gorna was pointing; he tried to follow the line of her finger, but the cart was bouncing up and down. He couldn’t see any smoke. “Should be there just after noon, assuming Mother doesn’t run us into one of those damned potholes and crack the axle.”
Mother scowled at her and flicked the whip; the horses shied forward and carried on at their former pace. A town, Musen thought; a town where there’d be people, a normal place where there was buying and selling, buildings, windows with shutters and doors with locks. And a hiring fair. If half of what Gorna had said was true, he’d have his choice of work—remote farms in the hills where nobody ever went, or in some busy town where nobody remembered faces. Or perhaps it would be better to stick with the women, who were always on the move, at least for now, until he could think straight again and find out about faraway places and how you got there.
“You wouldn’t have thought anybody had the money to buy fancy mead these days,” Gorna continued, “but apparently they have, because Frassa—that’s the beekeeper—he reckons he could’ve shifted twice as much if we could’ve carried it. Of course, if we could find a bigger cart, maybe something that needs a bit of work doing to it—did I mention we’ve got six horses, though don’t go telling anybody, the last time the soldiers came round we sent them all up to the shieling on the moor and said they’d been stolen. I think the soldiers suspected something but they couldn’t prove it, of course—”
There was a loud noise, like a crack, but also like a heavy stone falling into mud. Gorna had stopped in mid-sentence; her eyes and mouth were wide open and there was something in the middle of her forehead—like a walnut, only grey. Then she fell back off the box, hit her head against a barrel and slid forward, so Musen had to grab her to keep her from sliding off the box and under the wheels. Mother saw him and turned her head, and there was another noise, slightly different, solid, like a hammer on
a wooden wedge, and she dropped off the edge of the box, the reins still in her hands. The cart lurched sideways and something hit Musen in the ribs, like a punch from an invisible fist. He grabbed the rail to steady himself but it snapped off in his hand and he fell and the ground rushed up to meet him.
“See that?” A boy’s voice. “Did you see, Grandad? I got them both. Two in two shots. Is that good or what?”
Musen opened his eyes. A boy, maybe thirteen years old, in clothes he recognised as Western army fatigues, sleeves and trouser legs rolled up into ludicrous ruffs; he had a cloth bag over his shoulder, and the thing like a long sock in his right hand was a slingshot.
“Keep your voice down, for crying out loud. And come down off of there. You don’t know who’s watching.”
An old man, maybe sixty, sixty-five, and another boy, say fifteen and also with a cloth bag and a sling; both of them in the same fatigues. The old man’s limp suggested a badly set fracture many years ago, and two of the fingers of his right hand were missing. Didn’t General Moisa, Senza’s predecessor, use to cut off two fingers of any Western archer he caught?
“Look at those barrels, Grandad. Wonder what’s in them. Do you want me to go and look?”
“Shut up and get up on the box. Pileo, you, too, while I see to these reins. No, leave it, for God’s sake, we don’t have time.”
But the older boy was tugging at Mother’s hand for a ring; he put his foot on her neck to hold her steady. That couldn’t be right, Musen thought; and then his left hand felt a stone, and before he knew what he was doing, his fingers had closed around it and he was sitting up.
