The Luck Of The Wheels

by Megan Lindholm

  Goat had been coming toward the sound of her voice. Now he stumbled over her feet, crying out as he fell.

  'Careful,' Ki warned him, and heard him scrabble up and crawl over to sit beside her. His shoulder pressed against hers. He was shaking. 'Why are you so afraid?' she asked him quietly.

  'I could feel it ... how much they hated me. When they were tying me up and putting me on that horse.'

  'Maybe you were just imagining it,' Ki said comfortingly. 'They seemed efficient to me. Like they were moving us somewhere, but didn't particularly want to hurt us.'

  'You still don't get it, do you?' Goat asked her. 'Ki, I can feel what other people feel. The pity you feel for me now, the hatred those people felt for me. The way the Brurjan felt as he was dying. That was the awfulest it's ever been. Because Brurjans are so open anyway, like animals, it's like they're always shouting at you what they think of you ...' His voice trailed off. When he spoke again, it seemed to come from a great distance. 'When I was little, I didn't understand. I couldn't separate what I felt from what other people around me felt. People acted one way when they really felt a different way. I felt everything, for everyone ... and then when I got older and more sensitive, it was even worse. At night. When everyone was dreaming into my mind. When people sleep, they drop all the guards, most of them. They just yell it all out, over and over again. We moved away from town after it got so bad, to where I didn't hear as much of it. But some always got through. Dreams are strange. I don't understand how people think of them, how they make them up. I've never been able to dream that way ... not to make up one of my own. The closest I could do was to find ones that I liked, to listen to them the closest and try to ignore the others.'

  Goat had stopped talking. Ki had no idea how long the silence had lasted. Or was it silence, for Goat? Was it ever silent? Not a dream-thief, not an eavesdropper. An unwilling participant in others' lives, like a guest forced to listen to his hosts' quarreling through a thin wall. She tried to imagine a small child sharing his parents' emotions, an adolescent subjected to the unfiltered imaginings of the village's night minds.

  'Don't feel guilty, please,' Goat begged. 'Guilty is the worst. When people are kind to me because they think they've hurt me. I wish ...'

  'What?' Ki asked.

  'No.' Goat spoke the word slowly. 'If you ask someone to feel a certain way, and they do it because you've asked them to, it's not the same thing as if they just did it because they wanted to. Do you know what I mean?'

  'I think I do. If you have to say to someone, "Please kiss me," there's not much point to the kiss.'

  To have someone be kind to you because they liked you, Ki thought to herself. Is that so much for a boy to long for? She leaned back against the door. And waited.

  Goat broke the silence with a whisper. 'Someone's coming.'

  Ki strained her ears but heard nothing. But of course Goat had not heard footsteps, but had felt the approach of the other person's emotions. 'Someone friendly?' she asked hopefully.

  'No.' Goat's voice pinched with anxiety. 'Someone very wary. Don't be too near the door. She's frightened enough to hurt you if you startle her.'

  Ki didn't argue. Daylight was a blinding whiteness after the eternal dark of the root cellar. Ki's eyes had no time to adjust. The sack of food was tossed in, the door slammed again before she had any chance to see what was outside. Her jailor had been no more than a dark silhouette against the brightness. She listened to the bars of the door being dropped into place. One, two, three of them. 'They aren't taking any chances on us getting out,' Ki grumbled to herself.

  'They're afraid,' Goat explained needlessly. 'Mostly of me. They hate me, too. For you, this one felt guilt ...' His voice trailed off uneasily. He was holding something back.

  'You can hear their exact thoughts?' Ki asked as she rummaged in the sack.

  'No. More their feelings.' He paused. When he continued, strain made his voice higher. 'I felt... they were thinking of killing us.'

  Ki came to her feet. 'Are they coming back now?' Fear brought her back to life. The boy's voice was so certain of the threat.

  'No. They're both gone now. I think they're afraid to stay too close to the cellar. For fear of what I might be able to do, I suppose.' He paused thoughtfully. 'They must be riding horses, to get so far away so fast. I can't feel anyone at all out there now. Only you.'

  'Oh.' Ki wondered what impressions he was receiving from her, then buried the thought. There were some apples in the sack, a skin of water, some round meal cakes. That was all. Apple?' she asked, proffering it to the darkness, and felt Goat take it from her hand.

  She heard him bite into it, chew, then ask, with his mouth full, 'I've been so hungry. How long do you think we've been here?'

  'I don't know,' she answered softly. She wasn't really concerned with how long they had been here so much as how much longer they would be kept here. Already the small room stank of sweat and wastes. And why were they being kept at all?

  'About what you felt... just now. Are you certain of it? Maybe they were just...' She couldn't think of what else they might be thinking.

  'I've felt it before,' Goat said. The pause grew very long. 'It's the same as what Kellich felt for Vandien. What Satatavi felt for us. It's like a way of classifying how much to feel. Animal. Rock. Tree. Soon-to-be-dead-person. They didn't want to feel too much about us.'

  Ki pressed the apple she still held against her cheek, felt the coolness of its smooth skin. She bit into it, chewed methodically. Soon-to-be-dead-person. She was not hungry, but if they had given them food, then she probably should be hungry. What was it Vandien was always saying? 'If there's nothing else you can do in a tight spot, it's always a good idea to eat or sleep. To be full and rested for when there is something you can do.' But there wasn't going to be anything she could do, and he wasn't going to turn up to help her. Not this time.

  Vandien. She tried to call up his face against the darkness, but only got the image of him as she had last seen him, thrown over the horse like a meal sack, the blood drops falling swift from his hair. He was dead. She knew it. She eased down to her haunches, her back braced against the sandy wall. She forced herself to think about it, very carefully. He was dead. She was soon-to-be-dead. Then everything would be gone, not even someone left to remember it. There would be no touch of his hand on her face, no warm breath on her shoulder in the darkness. No deep voice spinning long tales in the evening by the fire. His scent would fade from the coverlets on her bed. It wouldn't matter. Strangers would use those blankets, and never think of the way his lips moved against hers. Gone and ended.

  'Ki?' Goat asked cautiously.

  She lifted her head. 'What?'

  'I ... I couldn't feel you. It was like you were ... gone. Like the Brurjan.'

  'No. I'm here.' But she felt the truth of his words. She was gone. Her life hung limp as an empty sail. She tried to convince herself that there were important things to be done. She and Goat must escape, she must regain her horses and wagon, she must get the boy to his uncle in Villena. 'And then what?' some sardonic voice within her kept asking. And then resume her life, she told herself. Find a cargo, deliver it, get paid. Why? So she could eat, rest and find a cargo, deliver it and get paid. The triviality of it overwhelmed her. A purposeless round, like a song sung endlessly over and over. Until it stopped. It had no more meaning than sitting in a root cellar and waiting for someone to kill you. But sitting in the cellar was easier. Until it stopped. Just as Vandien had stopped.

  It was not, she suddenly knew, that Vandien was gone from her life. She could have lived with that, if he had ridden away, let his life lead him elsewhere. She did not love him that selfishly. She would have known that somewhere he existed, that somewhere he continued. That was all she wanted of the world. To know that somewhere in it, he existed. He didn't have to be hers, had never really been hers at all. But even when he had not been by her side, she had known that he was somewhere, and it had pleased her to think of him riding
through the rain on his horse somewhere, or telling tales by an inn-fire, even standing on a hillside looking over the lands that should have been his but were not. He had ended. Nothing more of him, ever. His line had ended with him; no child carried his precious names. He was gone as completely as the song is gone when the singer closes his mouth. She suddenly comprehended the void.

  She sank completely to the floor, pressed her eyes to her knees. She opened her mouth, tried to breathe but could not. Grief and anger filled her. The truth rounded on her. Damn it, it did matter! He'd left her, damn him. Died and left her howling in the dark for him. The fabric of her life was torn across, and she hated herself for ever letting Vandien became a part of it. She'd always known it would come to this. Her eyes burned but tears would not come.

  'Stop!' Goat begged her. 'Please stop!'

  'I can't,' she whispered.

  'Please,' he whimpered, and then she heard him break. Horrible choking sobs ripped his throat. He cried as only children can, giving way to hopeless, inconsolable sadness. She listened to the fury of her grief shake the boy, close his throat and reduce his voice to a helpless keening. She sat panting in the darkness, knowing she should go to him, comfort him somehow. But she had no comfort, not for herself and not for him. There was only this suffocating grief that filled the cellar like a palpable thing. Goat became her grief, gave tongue to it with his hiccupping wails, gave form to it as he thrashed on the floor.

  Ki drifted. Somewhere a cellar was filled with a grief so abiding that a boy convulsed in its grip while a woman crouched numbly. An ending was coming, bringing peace.

  There were noises, a terrible light. A man stood before her, dragged her to her feet. 'Stop it!' he cried, and shook her wildly. Ki was dragged from the cellar, thrown onto the rough sod outside it. The man vanished, reappeared a moment later with the jerking boy in his arms. Then Brin lowered the boy carefully to the earth, and spun on Ki. 'Stop it!' he roared. 'You're killing him!' Ki saw the raised hand, knew the blow was coming, but could not recall why that should be important.

  FOURTEEN

  Blood was slick in her mouth. She coughed, spat it out and sat up slowly. The sky slowly cartwheeled around her head and then settled. Gradually she took in her surroundings. There was the gaping black door of the root cellar. Over there, the mounded remains of a sod hut that had fallen in and grown over. In the skinny shade of a dying tree, Brin knelt over Goat.

  No. Not Brin. This man was more weathered than Brin, more muscular. Even looking at his back, she could feel the difference in his temperament. Leather-tough and capable, she gauged him. She stood up silently, cast about for a stick or a rock. She didn't know why he was angry with her, but she didn't want to face him without a weapon.

  'It's all right.' He didn't turn to face her, and at first she didn't realize that he was speaking to her, not Goat. 'I didn't want to stun you. But it was the only way to force you back inside yourself. Before Gotheris died under your onslaught.'

  She hadn't found a weapon, and as he turned slowly to face her, she decided she probably wouldn't need one. There was something about his face that was calming. The man seemed to radiate a soothing kindness. She relaxed.

  'I'm Dellin, Brin's brother. I came looking for you.'

  Ki felt suddenly woozy. She sat down, drew her knees up, folded her arms atop them and leaned her chin on her arms. Her thoughts seemed sluggish and numbed. She asked, 'How did you find us?'

  Dellin made a sound between a cough and a grunt. 'As well ask a Human mother how she knew where her screaming child was. Brin had sent me word that the boy would come to me sometime this season. His message stank of distress; I suspected then that something was wrong. Then I heard from Tamshin that some of their folk had seen a Jore-eyed boy on a wagon coming toward Tekum. So, suspecting trouble, I came to meet you. Once I got past Rivercross, it was not hard to find you.' Dellin shook his head slowly. 'The boy has been taught no shielding at all. What was Brin thinking of, to keep him so long? I should have had him ten years ago.'

  'Is Goat... Gotheris all right?' The boy lay unnaturally still. His arms were folded on his chest, his legs drawn out straight. Composed like a corpse, she thought, and she shivered in the sunlight.

  'I have him asleep, for now. And I've pushed him back mostly inside himself. Poor boy couldn't understand what I was doing, and fought me. Strength such as I never faced before; luckily, he is untrained, and I know tricks he doesn't even suspect. Still ...' Dellin's voice trailed off as his eyes met Ki's. Jore eyes, like Goat's, but more comfortably dark, more Human.

  'You're confused. I'm sorry. So Brin didn't even see fit to make sure you understood the nature of the boy. You're not from around these parts, are you?'

  'We ... I come from the lands north of here.'

  Dellin nodded slowly. 'Then you know nothing of Jores, do you? Never even seen a full-blooded one, I suppose, for they don't willingly come around Humans anymore, even here.'

  'Why is that?'

  'Humans kill them.' He fixed Ki with a stare that made her feel uncomfortable, almost guilty. 'They always say they don't mean to. But they do it anyway. Humans feel things so strongly, so intensely, and when those feelings become too strong and there is a Jore nearby, they simply empty their pain, or joy, or lust into the Jore.'

  'Is that ... is that what I was doing to Gotheris?' Ki asked faintly.

  His eyes met hers. 'We were not meant to experience such intensity of emotion. It kills us.'

  Ki realized abruptly that this man in his Human form did not recognize himself as Human. He was as different from her as a Brurjan or a T'cheria. As he looked at her she realized the depth of his alienness. The very familiarity of his Human shape suddenly seemed monstrous, a mask of clay and twine to deceive the unwary. She felt herself draw back from him.

  'Yes,' he agreed. 'And Gotheris is just as foreign to you as I am, but the poor child does not even know that yet. What Brin was thinking of to keep him, to let him be raised by a Human mother, I do not know. The boy ...' Dellin's voice faltered. His inhuman eyes bored into Ki's, seeking her understanding. 'The boy has no sense of self. He has no personal identity, no idea of where he stops and others begin. He has grown up exposed to a constant flood of emotion. There is no place I can touch him that has not already been scarred over, like a piece of glass abraded by sand until it is opaque.' Dellin's voice became strained. 'He no longer believes what he senses others feeling. You Humans so often act one way when you feel another. He has tried to copy that, and only hurt himself more. Sometimes he ignores what others feel and thus responds incorrectly. And offensively.' Dellin's eyes bored into Ki's as if seeing all she remembered. 'But most often he becomes whatever he is near, greeting anger with anger, distrust with distrust...'

  Ki suddenly had an image of colors spilled from paint pots, of their edges merging, of yellow meeting blue and becoming green, and then red leaching into it, and purple, until all bled into murkiness and no true color was left. Goat. His fickle moods, his suddenly strange behavior as he tried to become acceptable by adopting whatever behavior and personality seemed successful. Wanting to be liked for himself, but not even sure who or what that self was. 'Didn't Brin know?' she asked helplessly.

  Dellin shook his head slowly. 'I am more Jore than he, even though we are brothers. The Human blood flowed more surely in his veins. He felt no discomfort with his Human mate. When the boy was small, I sensed he would be strongly Jore. I asked for Gotheris then, but they denied me.' Dellin squeezed his eyes shut, opened them again. 'It was the mother more than my brother, I believe. Even then she was abusing the child, loving him with no moderation, giving him no chance to develop his own feelings. I could not stand to watch it, and it caused many quarrels between Brin and me. Finally, he drove me from his home. And I let my own anger persuade me to do a cruel thing; I left Gotheris there.' His voice suddenly deepened. 'This is as much my fault as theirs.'

  Ki rose carefully, found she was steady on her legs. The inside of her cheek
still leaked blood into her mouth, but it seemed a trifling hurt in light of what Dellin had told her. She moved to stand over Goat. The boy's face was unlined, his eyes closed. She stooped closer to see the rise and fall of his breast. He seemed so like to dead that she put out a hand to touch him.

  'Don't!' warned Dellin. 'I have quenched your emotions for you, and pushed him back inside himself. But you have been too long together, and touch strengthens any link. You'd kill him.'

  Ki drew back. She sat still a moment, wondering why her own thoughts seemed so slow to her. 'Quenched my emotions?' she said aloud. She groped within herself, seeking for some difference. Vandien was dead. That was sad, horribly sad. She knew it was tragic, but could not feel it. It was an intellectual grieving she felt now, a keen-edged inventory of her pain that somehow did not cut her. She was very still, considering it.

  'Muffled, perhaps, is a better word. It is a thing we Jore can do for Humans. A kind of healing, for those whose emotions threaten to overwhelm them. Sometimes a Human feels so intensely that he retreats too far from himself, and cannot find his way out again. Then we Jore can enter him, can deaden his pain and bring him out, or erase the memory that is too painful to live with. It is the Jore healing. Surely you have heard of this?'

  Ki shook her head. She lifted her eyes to Dellin. 'What will you do now?'

  'Take the boy to Villena with me. Start the training that should have begun when he was a baby. I will have to keep him insulated from others at first, until he learns to shield himself, but after that, he will be fine. I hope.' His strange eyes seemed to pin her confusion down like it was a wriggling insect. 'What will you do?'

  'I don't know.' Ki cleared her throat, made a firm decision not to sound so feeble. 'Find my wagon and team and reclaim it. I can't make a living without it. Go back north, I suppose, where I understand the folk and know the roads. Start again.'