The Sea of Grass

by Gilbert M. Stack

  “Tribune,” Evorik started speaking at precisely the same time. “You’ve never said—”

  Both men broke off.

  “Please continue,” Marcus, told him. “I was just going to say I have details to worry about it.”

  “As do I,” Evorik agreed. “I was just wondering…I heard about your problems at home and your need to leave the Republic for a time, but why did you choose the Jeweled Hills?”

  “Oh, that?” Marcus made a dismissive gesture. “I have a brother—a half-brother to be precise—on the side of my remarkably polygamous father.” He chuckled. “He only marries one woman at a time, but he’s gone through quite a few of them. So I decided to take him up on a longstanding invitation and visit him.” That wasn’t the actual truth but it was close enough to be believable—and Marcus didn’t want to share his brother’s secrets no matter how much he was coming to like this man. “Before starting this journey,” he concluded, “I didn’t actually know any other people outside the Republic.”

  “So that explains it,” Evorik said, but he didn’t actually look convinced by Marcus’ explanation. “Do you mind telling me who your brother is? Perhaps I have heard of him.”

  “You probably have,” Marcus agreed. “Señor Alberto tells me he’s quite well known. His name is Juan Pablo Cazador.”

  “You’re the brother of Señor Juan Pablo Cazador?” Evorik asked with the same shock of surprise with which Marcus had greeted the news that the Gota’s brother was a thegn.

  “Half-brother,” Marcus corrected him with a smile.

  “You know who he is, of course,” Evorik said.

  “Not as clearly as you northerners think I should,” Marcus admitted. “I’ve been corresponding with him since I was eight years old. We write each other a letter every year or two, but I’ve come to realize on the journey that he really never told me much in his—just the sort of stuff a young man and then a young legionnaire would be interested in. Which cities had gone to war and which of his race horses were winning that year—that sort of thing. It wasn’t until I met Señor Alberto in this caravan that I learned he was a prominent merchant heavily involved in Amatista’s silk trade.” Marcus couldn’t help frowning. He hadn’t realized how much he’d looked up to Juan Pablo or how much it hurt to have a hero tarnished by involving himself in commerce.

  “He’s more than involved with the silk,” Evorik told him. “He’s pretty much responsible for the whole industry now—at least those parts outside of Qing. I wonder if you appreciate just how difficult this task was? His birth made him uniquely qualified for the undertaking but it was still a monumental accomplishment. His Gente blood gave him access to the señors—the merchants among the Gente—whom he needed for their business connections and their wealth. But his Aquila blood let him interact with the Gota—you know we view you as practically our equals. You’re head and shoulders above the Gente scum. So the Gota of Amatista were willing to deal with Señor Juan Pablo when they would never have considered doing so with the Gente. But none of that would have mattered if he hadn’t had the big brass balls to court and marry the Qing woman, Sujean Kang. He risked his own status to elevate hers and this convinced the Qing in Aquamarina that Señor Juan Pablo’s respect for them was no ploy. So they agreed to abandon that city where they had had so much trouble and move to Amatista.

  “It still took years to put it all together. There were many problems.” He laughed. “To hear the Señor talk about it, building the silk industry was even more complicated than fighting a war. He had to build buildings to house his silk worms and great manufactories to spin the threads into cloth and dye the silk. He had to convince Gota lords and Gente dons to start growing mulberry to feed his little spinner. When the Gente refused to work side-by-side with the Qing, he had to build up a Qing labor force which further angered the Gente because it cost them their jobs in the manufactories.” Evorik laughed again. “Can you imagine those fools? They thought he would dismiss the only people who knew how to make the silk!”

  He wiped water from his eyes before continuing. “And that was just the beginning—there were floods and fires and assassination attempts and—but Juan Pablo will want to tell you all of this himself. What is important is that your brother persevered and built an empire that has enriched a great many people more than himself. All of Amatista has benefited from his brilliance as have we in Topacio who are allied with their interests. Many Gota like myself have planted the mulberry bushes on our hills to harvest the leaves for his hungry little silk worms. Who would have thought that this otherwise useless land could produce such a profit? You will see. Wealth springs up wherever he goes.”

  Evorik’s unusually long speech helped to restore some of Juan Pablo’s luster in Marcus’ eyes. That he was still a merchant was disappointing, but their father had abandoned him to his wife’s mercantile family so what else could he do? But discovering a new way to profit from the land—that was what patricians’ did—so long as others did the actual work. That was an admirable activity, even if the rest of it was rather base.

  “Your mind has gone somewhere else, Tribune,” Evorik noticed. “What are you thinking?”

  Marcus shook his head. “Just wondering how it is that Juan Pablo and I could exchange so many letters and yet I seem to know nothing about him.”

  “Is that not for the best?” Evorik asked him. “Now you will have the honor of getting to know him as a man.”

  Day Ten

  Why Is It Buzzing?

  The wagons rolled at dawn and Marcus still had not managed to get any sleep. There had simply been too many important details to see to as he finally had to personally check each wagon that had decided to go north to make certain they had lowered their weight as he’d ordered. Señor Adán Nacio had been especially indignant at Marcus’ insistence, but Marcus didn’t really care. Assuming the older man’s anger survived the rough trail ahead of them, what influence could the merchant really have over him? It wasn’t like he was going to Amatista to live permanently, and even if he did, by all accounts Juan Pablo would be able to shield Marcus. So he stood at the broken gates of Fort Segundus and watched Lord Evorik ride forth with the half-breed scout, Mataskah and turn sharply north toward the salt pan that had scared nearly half of their surviving caravan into abandoning the journey and turning south. Once out the gate, Lord Evorik sent several of his men ahead to scout the path while Marcus and his legionnaires made certain that all the other wagons traveling with them got onto the trail.

  All told, about sixty wagons chose to make the journey northward. Despite their endless stream of grumbled complaints, the merchants had figured out that this might well be the last caravan to reach the north in a long time. This meant the goods they carried might well bring prices two or three times higher than they would have in normal times and the greed for profits gave the men courage they might not normally have. When Marcus found himself wondering just how much he thought Calidus might be able to get for his wine, he had four more amphorae of them dumped out and filled with water in case their calculation of the time required to cross the salt pan proved badly short. Each wagon was carrying sufficient water for three days.

  When the last wagon rolled through the broken gate, Marcus left a detail of men under Calidus to guard the rear and strode forward to join Evorik in the front. It was the best time of day for marching. The air was not yet hot and even though he was very tired, he still had a spring in his step as he nodded to Alberto and Carmelita with their new baby snuggled in her arms. She nodded back, looking as tired as he felt, but far happier.

  “Seneca,” Marcus greeted the young man as he walked past the wagon.

  Startled, the student wizard dropped the small book he was writing in. “Oh, it’s you, Tribune. How do you keep sneaking up on me like that?”

  “I think you were so involved in your writing that an elephant could have snuck up on you,” Marcus told him. He tried to pass on his way but the young man jumped to the ground and began to
walk beside him. “Is it true, Tribune, that the salt pan resulted from a great battle between magi centuries ago?”

  Marcus wondered how anyone thought he could be an authority on such things. “I don’t know,” he told him, “but I certainly hope not. The salt pan stretches for hundreds of miles and I hate to think that even an army of magi has that kind of power.”

  Undeterred, Seneca asked another question. “Are there really great sinkholes on the pan? I’ve read that they look like solid ground but are really only covered by a thin crust that will swallow a man whole as if he never existed.”

  “Someone mentioned as much to me,” Marcus admitted, “but I’ve never been here and I don’t know.”

  “What about magic?” Seneca pressed him. “Since salt can soak the stray threads of magic from the air, I’ve been wondering if there will be enough left to work spells?”

  “You’re asking me? I thought you were the one studying to be a magus.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Seneca, I have not had any sleep for two full days. I’m tired and I’m grouchy and I’m trying not to bite your head off but it’s really hard to restrain myself. Can you please ask someone else all of these questions?”

  Seneca started to say something, thought better of it, apologized and went back to the wagon.

  Marcus continued up the line toward Evorik. He wanted to see what he had gotten himself and his men into.

  ****

  The salt pan first appeared as a white scar across the Sea of Grass that contrasted starkly with the yellow-brown color of the plain. Over the course of the next hour, the scar grew until it formed a white sea on the horizon bordered by a grassy beach. The pan was slightly lower than the plains leading up to it, making Marcus wonder if once upon a time this had been a shallow lake or sea. Whatever it had been, it was a land of death now, covered so thickly in salt that nothing could grow for miles and miles ahead of them.

  As he took his first step forward into the salt, three things happened that gave Marcus pause. First, the ground crunched in a disconcerting manner, not quite like sand. This was like no terrain he had ever tread before. Second, the temperature of the air around him jumped at least ten degrees as the sunlight reflected off the white surface and back up into the faces of Marcus and the other travelers. Finally, and apparently noticeable only to himself, the pins and needles feeling returned to him, stronger than he had felt it since entering the Sea of Grass.

  There’s something about walking across salt that automatically makes a man thirsty and Marcus immediately began to worry that he had made a terrible miscalculation in coming this way. But rather than give into his fears and insist they turn back he halted the caravan and altered his legionnaires’ accoutrements. “All armor off and in the wagons, including shields. If we have to fight in a hurry, grab only your shields. I’ll tell you if you have time to don the rest of your gear, but the heat in this pan is such I do not want you carrying more weight than you have to.”

  After the armor was stored back in the wagons, Marcus divided his men into four groups and set them at different parts of the caravan to help keep the wagons moving if anyone had trouble. He cautioned them against drinking too much water and reminded them that their stores had to last two days. He was very glad he’d poured out the amphorae of wine to carry more water, only wishing he’d dumped even more.

  They trudged on, wrapping cloth across their mouths and noses to cut down on the salt dust stinging their eyes and making them miserable. Evorik’s people proved worth their weight in gold, not only working with the half-breed scout to find their trail, but teaching the drivers how to preserve the strength of their horses by sponging the salt grime out of their nostrils.

  By noon, the suffering had become intense and the heat was still rising, but as the merchants’ complaints grew Mataskhah the scout only encouraged them to move faster—constantly worried that they were not making enough progress to get across the pan in his promised day and a half.

  Their path was not directly north as Marcus had expected, but it meandered a bit, first northeast and then northwest, the scout altering their directions based upon sign he alone could read.

  By midafternoon, Marcus began to stagger from the dual impact of the heat and his exhaustion. The constant prickling of his skin made him itch as if he had a bad case of poison ivy. And his brain began to shut down so that he could barely think about more than putting one foot in front of the other. He didn’t even realize he had fallen until one of the legionnaires was trying to drown him with a cup of water.

  “Easy there, Tribune,” the man told him. “You’re not drinking enough. You can’t make it in this heat if you don’t drink enough.”

  Marcus coughed and sputtered when the hot liquid touched his lips but this time, at least, he didn’t waste the whole mouthful.

  Severus came running from further down the line of wagons. “Damn it, Sir!” he cursed with unusual disregard for Marcus’ rank. “I told you to get some rest. Two nights without sleep and you think you can walk the salt pan. Didn’t I train you better than this?”

  While Severus worked himself into a good rage, Marcus stopped listening to him. Lying here on the ground he heard something—more with his body than with his ears—something his boots had kept his feet from noticing when he was walking across this patch of salty desert.

  “Give me that cup!” Severus told the legionnaire who was trying to help Marcus. Then the Black Vigil put his hand firmly on the back of Marcus’ head and held the cup to his lips. “Drink this now!” he told the Tribune.

  Marcus covered the hand holding the cup with his own shaky fingers. “Do you hear it, Severus? It’s buzzing.”

  The furrows of concern etched into the older man’s brow deepened dramatically.

  “Drink this—”

  “The ground, Severus, why is it buzzing?”

  Severus lowered his voice to barely a whisper. “You’re going to scare the men, Tribune. They’re just a bunch of green banders. You have to stop talking like this.”

  “But I can hear it,” Marcus whispered before passing out again.

  Day Eleven

  We’re Surrounded by Sinkholes

  “Tribune? Please get up. We have a serious problem…Tribune? I know you’re sick but…it’s bad, Sir. Please! Marcus?”

  Marcus slowly came to his senses wondering where he was that someone would be using his given name. He opened his eyes to find the blurry face of Severus Lupus staring down at him, but with the darkness all around them, he couldn’t recall exactly where they might be.

  Behind Severus a face he was coming to know quite well pressed close to take a look at him. Seneca Liberus was full of his youth and evidently a great deal of fear and concern. The whole dirty business came back to him—the Fire Islands, his exile, his brother’s letter, the long sea voyage and this interminable trip across the Sea of Grass.

  He remembered the buzzing in the earth when he had fallen upon it. He couldn’t hear it anymore and resolved not to ask about it at this time.

  He sat up with a great deal of difficulty and realized he was in his wagon, pressed up against the amphorae of water and wine. “Wh…” He tried to ask a question but his mouth was too parched to make the sounds.

  “Water,” Severus demanded and moments later someone pressed a cup into his hand that he in turn held to Marcus’ lips. The liquid was cool, even cold, like the night air. He took a couple of swallows, licked his cracked lips with his swollen tongue, and drank again.

  “You ought to give him wine,” the familiar voice of Lord Evorik complained. “That will get him moving again.”

  Marcus could feel his strength slowly growing and carefully took the cup from Severus. “What happened?” His voice was still rough, but he could form the words.

  “Heat sickness, Tribune, you’d had no sleep in two days and the heat of the salt pan overwhelmed you.”

  That was not what Marcus had meant, but rather than explain that he asked, “
And what’s happened since?”

  “My gold wasn’t enough,” Evorik growled in a whisper. “That flea-ridden asshole of a scout has run off on us and I lost two good men.”

  While the most likely meaning of the Gota lord’s words was that the scout had murdered the cavalry men, that didn’t seem like a plausible explanation. He took another sip of water before asking, “How?”

  “We’re surrounded by sinkholes,” Severus explained. “We’re really in a very narrow channel surrounded by the things. When Seneca here went looking for the scout to add a note to his journal, he couldn’t find him so he asked Lord Evorik who started a search that quickly spread outside the caravan where two of his men blundered into sinkholes. The ground just broke open and swallowed them up before we could do anything.”

  “And?”

  “We need to figure out what we’re going to do before all the merchants get up.”

  “I don’t know if we can find our way back,” Evorik admitted. “The damn scout moved us east and west enough that it would be difficult to retrace our trail and any mistake might drop into another damned sinkhole.”

  “We also have a problem with water,” Severus said. “You might have drunk too little, but everyone else has drunk too much. I estimate that most of the wagons in the caravan will run out this afternoon. We have to be out of the salt pan by nightfall or we’re going to start losing people to the heat as well as the terrain.”

  “Help me out of the wagon,” Marcus said. He didn’t like asking for such aid, but his limbs were still weak. “I’m going to need some breakfast while we look this over, and I’m afraid I’m going to have to drink more of our store of water.”

  With the Black Vigil’s help, he climbed out of the wagon and looked around. The moment his feet touched the salt the pins-and-needles feeling which had never quite gone away intensified mightily. Interested, he tested the connection to the salt by crouching down and touching the ground with his bare hand. Not only did the pins-and-needles feeling further intensify, but a low buzzing filled his ears as if the earth itself were humming to him.