Blood Road

by Amanda McCrina

  “Possibly you’ll go to the slavers. Possibly they’ll decide you’re old enough to face execution. My word means a great deal, either way.”

  “I do not care,” she said.

  “My word can spare you an examination.”

  “I do not care.”

  He glanced over to Alluin, who shrugged very slightly against the wall. Torien could sense his discomfort in his silence. He looked back at the girl. “Speak now and I’ll listen,” he said. “Come tomorrow in the city prison, it’ll be too late.”

  She said nothing. He saw there was no use in it. He said to Alluin, “We’d better set a watch.”

  “I’ll watch,” Alluin said. He seemed thankful for something to do.

  “I’ll take it over in a few hours,” Torien said. “Wake me if you need to.”

  He did not sleep. He lay against his saddle, carefully still on account of the shoulder, watching the sky through the cracks in the lattice and waiting for sleep to come, but his mind was moving on and on through the streets of Modigne, and in the silence he was restless. At length, he got up. The fire had died to embers. Across the room, the girl was huddled shapeless in the darkness. He could not tell if she was asleep. He went over to the doorway, where Alluin sat cross-legged against the corner post. “You sleep,” he said. “I can’t.”

  “Your shoulder?” Alluin’s voice was tight. “You should have let me go for help, Tor.”

  “It’s fine. It’s just that I can’t sleep and you might as well.”

  “Next time you’ll listen to me. Next time when I say I can see enough of Modigne from the fort walls, and you say—”

  “You talk like you’re the one who took the knife.”

  “That’s the difference between us,” Alluin said. “I don’t have to take a knife in my back before I recognize a bad idea.”

  Torien sat with his back against the post, his sword unsheathed across his lap. Through the gap between the post and the curtain, he could see the horses and the moonlit street beyond. He watched a cat come noiselessly down the street. It saw him as it approached the shanty, and it paused and watched him and went on again when it decided he was no threat. Behind him, in the shanty, Alluin was breathing long and steadily in his sleep. It was perhaps midnight or a little past. He heard a noise like a muffled laugh or a cough, and he started, fingers seizing instinctively on his sword grip. At his movement, the noise stopped. Across the room, the girl was struggling to hold herself still against the wall. Her shoulders shook with trapped sobs.

  He pulled himself up to his feet, supporting himself on the sword. He crossed the room to her. She heard him approaching and drew herself stiffly up, but she did not raise her head. He knelt beside her. In the moonlight through the lattice, he could see the tear streaks on her cheeks. Leaning on the sword, he said, quietly, “Tell me why you did it.”

  Another tremor ran through her shoulders. She bit her lip. Alluin’s untroubled breathing was loud in the silence.

  “Give me the truth and I may be able to help you.”

  She shook her head, once, sharply, her eyes squeezed shut. “You lie. I know you lie.”

  “I don’t lie.”

  “All Vareni lie. I know this.”

  “Maybe. But I’m Cesino blood through my father’s line.”

  “Then to your people you are a traitor.”

  She said it flatly, without interest, as though it were as obvious as the weather, and he understood the absurdity of trying to explain to her, in that moment, how one could feel loyalty to homeland and to empire without hypocrisy. He said, instead, “I’m trying to help you.”

  “Why do you want to help me?”

  “I care to see proper justice done.”

  “I know your justice.” She lifted her face to his, finally. Her voice was thick with anger and tears. “I know what you mean when you say justice. You take Mahlan when he does nothing wrong. I know what you mean by justice.”

  The curtain rustled in a draft of cold salt breeze. Torien was on his feet and spinning to the doorway in one motion, his sword ready in his hand. Behind him, Alluin sat bolt upright, flinging aside his cloak. He drew his sword and scrambled up, his back to the wall. The figure in the doorway stood frozen at Torien’s sword point. For a moment, there was silence in the shanty. Then Torien jerked his chin over his shoulder and said, “Sit—slowly. Linta.”

  He kept his blade leveled at the newcomer’s throat while the newcomer slid down beside the girl. He said to Alluin, “Light.”

  Alluin dropped to his knees at the fire pit. There was another stretch of silence while he coaxed a flame from the spent tinder. In the moonlight, Torien could see the newcomer’s arms tight around the girl’s shoulders, head bowed against the girl’s head. He lowered his sword. After a moment’s consideration, he sheathed it. He turned on his heel and went to the curtain and looked out into the street. It lay empty and silent as before. The horses stood tethered at the post. He drew the curtain shut. There was a tightness in him that had nothing to do with the wound.

  Feeble light sprang over the shanty walls.

  “It won’t last long,” Alluin said.

  “Use this.” With one booted foot, Torien prodded the bundle of sticks that the newcomer had let drop in the doorway. The girl watched him over the newcomer’s shoulder. Her face was set as hard as stone, but he saw the flicker of fear in her eyes. He crouched on his heels, facing her, the fire pit at his back. “No family? So it’s not only Vareni who lie.”

  The girl said nothing. The newcomer straightened slowly against the wall and looked at him. He saw the girl’s face in near-exact duplicate, but duplicated as it would be in twenty years’ time: bronze skin prematurely lined, lips cracked by the sun, dark eyes sunken with hunger and hardship and grief. There was neither fear nor defiance in the woman’s face, but rather a resignation which shook him. “I give you what you want. Do not ask it of the girl.”

  “You can give me satisfactory answers. Otherwise the girl goes before an Imperial court for sedition and attempted murder.”

  The woman looked at the girl, the girl at the floor. Neither spoke, but in the firelight Torien watched the color drain from the woman’s face.

  “Dependent upon her age, the penalty is enslavement or death, so I advise you to consider your answers carefully. Who is Mahlan?”

  The woman was silent. The girl raised her eyes briefly from the floor.

  “Silence does your daughter no good,” Torien said.

  “My son. He is my son—Mahlan.” Her mouth contorted as though the name pained her.

  “Where is he?”

  “They take him,” the woman said. She swallowed. “This spring when the harbor open they come and take him.”

  “Who?”

  She said nothing. Her fingers were tight around the girl’s arms. They were bony fingers, bent and blunted from work, the knuckles swollen, the nails split. The backs of her brown hands were traced over with lines like dry leather.

  “Vareni?” Torien said. “Answer me.”

  The woman closed her eyes. “Of the jente.”

  He did not know the word. He darted a glance to Alluin, who was sitting and watching from the other side of the fire pit. “One of the crime lords,” Alluin said, quietly.

  Torien said to the woman, “This jente took your son?”

  “When the harbor open, they take him.”

  He supposed in her mind and in the girl’s the Imperial governing authorities were partially culpable in that they had not stopped it; and he supposed he had made more accessible a target than the jente for the girl’s retribution. It was a stupid reason to be knifed in the street, and a stupider reason to be executed. He was irritated. “You should have gone to the governor. He might have explained to you the difference between justice and vengeance before the girl need hang for it.”

  “I go to your courts.” The woman flung up her head. “I am a citizen. My daughter she is a citizen. My
son he is a citizen. I go to your courts for justice. They say to me I have no case, and they tell me if I am not silent then they will silence me. Always it is the same. Always you pretend you do not see, because the jente he pays you not to see. I know what is justice and what is not justice. What you hang my daughter for it is not justice, and you know this too.”

  “How many others besides your son?”

  There was a moment’s silence. He could sense Alluin frozen behind him across the fire pit.

  He said, “You say always like it’s common practice. How many others?”

  The woman drew up a little. Her eyes were flat, her mouth tight. She thought he was mocking her. “There are hundreds the jente take. You know—”

  “I know nothing. I’ve been two days in Modigne, and despite the fact I just took a knife in my shoulder, I hope to be shipboard and gone tomorrow.” He kneaded his temples with his fingertips. “So the jente takes them—why? As slaves?”

  “He sells them into the salt mines in Tasso. I hear it from the sailors.”

  “And you say the governor knows and does nothing.”

  Anger flashed across the sun-cracked face. “I say because I know. We tell him what happens. We tell him the jente he takes us to be slaves in the mines. We ask his protection. ‘We are citizens,’ we say. ‘Help us against the jente.’ But the ones who speak out he gives their name to the jente, and the jente he kills them or he takes them to the ships. I have seen this. The jente he kills us in the street, and your governor and your courts and your garrison they do nothing.”

  “Every ship coming into or going out from an Imperial port is inspected—slave ships more closely than the rest. Every manifest is reviewed, every cargo taxed. So many kidnapped citizens would hardly escape notice. It would take more than the governor turning a blind eye. At the least, it would mean the city guard, and the harbor master and his agents, and the harbor master at Tasso, and every level of the administration at the mines. This jente can’t have bought them all.”

  “The city guard always they belong to the jentes,” the woman said. “Anyway, the jente he doesn’t use the slave ships. I see it myself. In the night they put the slaves on trade ships—hundreds of slaves into hidden holds. In the day they fill the ships with jugs of wine, jugs of oil. That is what the harbor master sees. They put water in some of the jugs so it doesn’t show on the manifests that they carry water for the slaves. I don’t know about the mines.”

  Torien was silent. The girl was looking at him over the woman’s shoulder—unblinking, contemptuous, as though she were daring him to call it a lie. Alluin sat motionless behind him, waiting for him to speak, because in the end the decision was his alone, but he knew Alluin’s thoughts like his own, and he knew Alluin, too, was thinking of the empty streets outside the shanty and the silence like a bated breath—fear hanging over the city like a plague.

  He rocked back on his heels and got to his feet. The shanty spun as he stood. “This is what will happen. In the morning, I take ship for Tasso. You’ll go with me down to the harbor, and you’ll show me the jente’s ships, and I’ll investigate crew and cargo for myself. If I find nothing to convince me of this slaving business, then I’ll leave it for the governor’s court to decide your fate. Otherwise I’ll do what I can from Tasso to see this thing ended and those responsible made to pay for it—Modigno and Vareno alike. In any case, I swear to you I’ll see justice done. If you’ve told me the truth, you’ve nothing to fear by that.”

  The woman’s fingers were tight on the girl’s arms. “I tell you the truth,” she said. Her voice was low and hard, and in it he heard what she left unsaid: that she knew the value of Vareno oaths just as she knew the value of Vareno justice. The truth made no difference to whim.

  He ground out the fire under one boot heel. “I’ll take the watch,” he said to Alluin. It was perhaps four hours to dawn, and he knew he would not sleep.

  They left the girl at the shanty, on account of her ankle. He had weighed this in his head and decided there was no need to bring her along: as long as the woman was in their hands, the girl would not try to run. Nevertheless, it took the woman speaking in impassioned Modigno to persuade the girl to stay behind, and the girl had glared at Torien in cold fury all the while the woman spoke, and he had understood then that neither of them believed the woman would return.

  Heat came with the cloudless dawn. By the time they had come down to the waterfront, there was sweat gathered under the cheek-pieces of his helmet, coalescing on his eyelashes under the brim of the helmet and trickling down his back between his shoulder-blades. The breeze off the water was pushing the heat into his face like a bellows, and with it the tang of salt and the smell of fish and garlic and the clamor of voices and the shrill cries of the gulls wheeling above. Under the bandage, his shoulder was stiff and crusted with dried blood, but there was little pain if he kept his arm very still.

  They were on foot in the crowd along the quay, the woman walking ahead, Alluin beside him leading both horses. He stopped to buy a pomegranate off a dark-skinned girl who swung down her bushel from her shoulders and accepted the bronze with a solemn, wordless bow. Torien cradled the pomegranate carefully in his left hand and pared it into quarters with his belt knife. He gave half to Alluin. The woman had turned around to wait. He saw her eyes follow the fruit into Alluin’s hand. She saw that he had seen it and turned her face sharply away. The girl had vanished with her bushel into the crowd. Torien sheathed his knife. When he came up to the woman, he took her elbow in his fingers and put the pomegranate quarters into her hand when she turned.

  She looked at it in her hand for a moment, frozen, while the crowd streamed heedless around them. Then she shook her head, once, wordlessly. Her mouth was tight. She did not look in his face. She pushed the pomegranate back to him on her palm. He did not take it. “Tell me the last time you ate.”

  Her eyes were away over his shoulder to the harbor and the sea-line at his back. She shook her head again. The pomegranate trembled on her palm. “I do not ask for it. I do not want it.”

  “Tell me how you support the girl. What’s your trade?”

  “I grow up on the sea. I have boat and nets of my own. It is enough for us.”

  “Neither you nor the girl ate last night or this morning.”

  “I sell my fish to pay my debt. When I pay this debt, then we eat. It is enough.”

  He was silent, studying her. There was nothing of pride in her face. Rather, there was a nervousness that came, he supposed, of knowing everything must be repaid one way or another: nothing came freely, not really. He closed her fingers around the pomegranate and pushed her hand back. “Take it as the first part of my payment,” he said. “If you’ve told me the truth, I’ll owe you better than that.”

  She did not eat it. She unwound the woolen scarf from her hair and knotted the pomegranate into it and tucked the scarf into her belt, and he knew she meant it for the girl. When she finished, she bowed to him, quickly, uncertainly, and her eyes came up at last to his and lingered there, for a moment. She searched across his face as though she were trying to read it. Then she turned away again. She said nothing, but there was more in her bow than she might have put into words.

  They went south and east along the quay, the city rising above them on the left-hand side of the street, single-masted fishing boats knocking against the quay on the right, the sea running to the sky beyond. In the distance—through the heat-haze curling off the rooftops along the quay—he could see the lighthouse at the point, and a three-tiered Imperial navy galley lying at anchor just off the point toward Epyris, and the gentle blue curve of the world at the sea-line. After one quick, sweeping glance, he kept his eyes from the water. The vastness of it and the emptiness of it made his heart drop to the pit of his stomach. As on the first day, when he had looked out over the water from the fort walls, he had the sudden, inexplicable urge to fall flat on his face and cling to solid earth for fear of slipping off. He was glad
he had not eaten the pomegranate.

  Beside him, Alluin spat a seed and said, “You’ve thought about what it means—what we’re doing.”

  “You mean if she’s telling the truth?”

  “Do you think she is?”

  “I think I’ve given her a better chance at it than she’d have gotten in court. And I think you know that as well as I do.”

  “Regardless. You’d agree she’s got motivation to lie. She’s got the girl.”

  He glanced at Alluin sidelong. “You think I should have given them up,” he said. It was not a question, but rather a sudden realization.

  Alluin was silent, for a moment. “Because I know you,” he said, finally, “because I know the way you think—because if you didn’t outright assume she was telling the truth, at least you’re going to make sure she gets to prove she was lying.”

  “I thought that was called justice.”

  “I want to know if you’ve thought about what it means if she’s lying.”

  “She and the girl face judgment from an Imperial court. Most likely it’ll be execution. I know what it means, Alluin.”

  “I’m not talking about the court. I’m talking about this—now. You’ve all but asked her to introduce you to the jente. You didn’t give any thought to the fact that she can, that she agreed to do it. For all you know, she’s on the jente’s coin herself. I’m not sure you could have given her an easier way to be rid of you if you’d tried. Whether or not he’s smuggling slaves, I doubt the jente will appreciate your investigation into his ships, and I imagine he has his own way of dealing with nuisances.”

  “She doesn’t eat well enough to be on the jente’s coin.”

  “Then she owes him money, and she figures you’re worth enough as a hostage to make it up. Even if you are Cesino blood.”

  The woman had stopped and was watching them over her shoulder as she waited.

  “You can wait for me at the fort if you think you can find your way back,” Torien said.

  “You can go to Hell,” Alluin said, “but I want you to remember that I’m speaking as the one who hasn’t been knifed. Every once in a while you might listen to me.”