The Water Road

by JD Byrne

  “Quite impressive, is it not?” he said finally in the same formal clipped tones Goshen used when he spoke Altrerian. Antrey looked at him without answering. “It was carved over three hundred years ago by one of our clan’s greatest artists. And yet, it makes up only one small part of the beauty of this room.”

  “It’s very lovely,” Antrey said, taking the invitation to examine the carving in more detail. “Is it supposed to say something? I mean, these figures, are they part of a story?”

  “It means many things,” the old man said, rising from his chair and walking slowly towards her. “On the surface it tells the story of when Barhein, goddess of fertility and protector of our people, convinced the snows to retreat just long enough to allow the Elein to escape a deadly mountain pass.” He pointed to the top of the totem, at the jagged valley over which a lithesome Neldathi goddess hung. “But below the surface, it is a story about the many times the Elein have escaped from danger because of our own skill and cunning.” His hand touched the totem and traced its contours down to Antrey’s eye level. “On a level of pure craft, it is the beginning of the golden age of Elein woodwork.”

  “Seems like it means different things depending on who is telling the story,” Antrey said.

  “Indeed,” the old man said, shifting his gaze from the totem to her. “They say the same thing of you, Jeyn Antrey.” He nodded his head, not so much in reverence as simple acknowledgment.

  “It honors me that you know of me, Thek Birkthir.” Antrey bowed in a more formal way towards him.

  He smiled a gap-toothed smile at her. “Child, any thek who did not know of you is out of touch with the world in which he lives.”

  The thought of her fame caught Antrey off guard. It must have shown on her face.

  “Tell me, jeyn, most of what you know about my people, about the Elein or the other clans, comes from the Altrerians books, yes?”

  “Yes,” Antrey said. She added no honorific. He had called her jeyn, she had called him thek. Their relative positions had been established. They were, for the time being at least, talking as equals. “Until recently, I hadn’t spent any time with the clans since my youth. Before…”

  He waved the rest of the sentence away with his hand. “Before you were sent away from your people for,” he paused, as if looking for the right Altrerian words to use. “For being what you are,” he finally concluded.

  She nodded and said nothing.

  “I have no intent to be cruel, child. Only to confirm what I suspected. All your life you learned that our people were isolated brutes, each clan having little to do with the others. Reality is much more complex. In truth, stories move from clan to clan like birds, particularly a story as compelling as yours.”

  “Compelling?”

  “Oh, yes. I believe that word of what you had done with the Dost had already begun to spread amongst the clans before you boarded that Islander ship that brought you here.”

  “Oh,” Antrey said, thrown off her game a bit by the details. “Then you know what I am here to ask you, I suspect.”

  “I know what I have heard,” he said, returning to his seat and motioning for Antrey to sit down in a similar chair across from him. She did, while Naath remained standing near the door where they came in. “Unfortunately, rumor often travels more quickly that truth. I have given much thought to what I have heard about you, Antrey, but before I make any decision, I wish to know if I have all the facts straight.” He leaned back, ready for Antrey to begin her pitch.

  Buoyed by the experience of several of these meetings already, Antrey began her well-rehearsed presentation. She covered her discovery of the history of the Triumvirate’s plans as well as the details of those plans. Depending on the audience, Antrey either emphasized or downplayed the role of Alban’s death in the story. She suspected that, while Birkthir did not seem the type of leader who would value her history as a killer, he would be equally disappointed if she left out that detail of the story to make herself look better.

  When she finished, Birkthir sat for a moment, taking it all in. “So what I have heard about you is true, after all,” he said. “Not only the story itself, but the person who tells it.”

  Antrey smiled slightly. “I can’t tell if that is a good or a bad thing.”

  “It is a very good thing,” he said, leaning forward towards her, “that the story you tell me here today is the same that is working around the clans. It shows that the others telling the story are not changing it to suit their own motives. More importantly to you, I suspect, is that it means I have no need for further reflection on these facts.”

  “Does that mean you’ve made a decision about what the Elein will do?” Antrey asked, more directly than she meant to. She was flush from the ability to ask the question directly to the man who would make the decision rather than some intermediary.

  “That I cannot say,” was his answer. “Not yet, at least.”

  Antrey deflated just a bit.

  “I have no doubt about the just nature of your cause,” he said. “But I worry about your ability to lead this fight. It has nothing to do with your…status.”

  “Status?” Antrey asked, sure what he meant but willing to push a bit. “Do you mean that I’m a woman or that I’m a halfbreed?”

  Birkthir shook his head. “Neither. Women play an important role in the history of my clan, as the Speakers of Time would tell you.” He pointed to another one of the ornate pillars in the corner of the room. “As for your parentage, I am not naive as to how such things happen. But you bear no fault for it. It is not important.”

  Antrey was not certain she believed him, but decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. “Then what is the problem?”

  The old man stood and walked towards Antrey. Instinctively, she stood up. “The fight ahead will require a leader not only of great courage and will. I have no doubt that you possess those qualities. But it will also require someone who is a fearsome, cunning, and ruthless war leader.” He stopped a few paces from her. “I do not know that you possess those qualities, Antrey. I know there are others who share my concern.”

  Antrey backed away from him. “I have not led any army in battle, that is true. Nor do I intend to. I know there are leaders among us already, such as yourself and Kajtan of the Dost, who know more than I ever could about the battlefield. I would not presume to ignore that experience.”

  Birkthir stood for a moment, surprised by her answer.

  “What I will do is draw on all that I learned while living in Tolenor, all I absorbed from the books in Alban’s library. I cannot know what you know, Birkthir. But neither can you know what I know.”

  “Books,” the old man said, curious.

  “Yes, books. You value the stories of your Speakers, do you not?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because the stories that the Speakers tell, about what came before you and how the Elein came to be what they are, they help you learn about the world in which you live, correct?”

  He nodded.

  “Imagine that, instead of having only those stories from which to learn, you could have the stories of every Speaker who ever lived in any clan from which to learn. Different Speakers with different perspectives and ideas about a single event. Think of how much you could learn from those stories. That is what books gave me.”

  Birkthir said nothing. He was clearly not buying into Antrey’s argument.

  “Think of it this way. The Speakers of your clan know the stories of the Elein. But what if they also knew the stories of the Sheylan? What do their stories of the battles with the Elein say? Are they the same as yours? Imagine what a third person—a reader—could learn about the battle and the people who fought it by reading both stories? Are they the same? Are the differences important? What do those differences tell us?”

  He began to nod slowly. “I understand about the stories, but such tales only get one so far.”

  “Let me give you an example, then,” Antrey said. “Many hundreds of
years ago, two great cities of the Arbor fought a long and bloody war. Kerkondala sat on the bank of the River Adon at a place called The Narrows, where the Adon and the River Innis are at their closest. Because of that, Kerkondala controlled all passage from north to south. Maladondala, which lay to the south of The Narrows, wanted safe and regular passage. Two great armies spread out across The Narrows and the war ground to a standstill.

  “The Maladon war leader grew impatient with the stalemate and ordered his generals to find any weakness in the Kerkon defenses and break through. As it happened, the weakest point, by far, was on the Kerkon right flank at a town called Ahldop. Ahldop was a holy site to the Kerkon, but it had no actual strategic value. It could be taken, but the Maladon generals were hesitant to attack and consulted the war leader. They told him that if they attacked a holy site, they worried about what the Kerkon would do in response.

  “The Maladon war leader was outraged, as you might expect. He had given orders to break through wherever there was a weakness, with no exception. He was so angered by his generals that he had some of them executed for insubordination, while others were stripped of rank and sent home in shame. The war leader took on the task of planning the attack on Ahldop himself. With him at the head of the Maladon forces, Ahldop fell easily. Their victory was inevitable, swift, and brutal.”

  Birkthir interrupted her. “That sounds like an odd story to tell as part of this discussion.”

  Antrey smiled and raised a finger to cut him off, as if gently scolding him. “But there is more to the story. As it happens, the war leader’s generals were correct to be worried. The Kerkon had left Ahldop lightly defended because they knew it had no strategic value and assumed that the Maladon would never attack such a holy, yet worthless, location. But the Maladon attack energized the Kerkon army and their people, who had been wavering about whether the war was worth fighting. Now they had something to rally behind, a great wound to their souls. The Kerkon cried to ‘avenge Ahldop!’ Which they did. They retook the town and won the war.”

  She paused for a moment. “That story—which is so old it may or may not actually be true—was used as an example in every kind of book about strategy, military and political, that I read in Alban’s library. Dozens of different people, brilliant thinkers, have analyzed that story, what it means, and what lessons can be drawn from it. I read all of them.”

  Birkthir returned to his seat and thought a moment. Then he said, “I understand your point, Antrey, but I am still not certain about your ability to leads us. Answer me this question: Why did the Rising fail?”

  The question took Antrey by surprise. She had listened to many stories from Otom about the Rising, all of which had been oddly positive. At worst, the Rising was a glorious lost cause, doomed to failure by factors beyond the control of the Neldathi. It was a convenient fiction, Antrey recognized, based on her earlier reading.

  Birkthir noted her surprise. “You did not expect such a question, did you? It is not a topic about which many people want to think, but it is important.”

  “To be honest, I have never really thought about it,” Antrey admitted. “But I know what the Altrerian writers, and the Triumvirate, have said about how the Rising was put down.”

  “And?” Birkthir asked. “What did those books tell you?”

  She swallowed hard. “That the Rising ultimately failed because Sirilo fought the Altrerians on their own territory and on their own terms. Had he drawn the Triumvirate army into the mountains, they would have had to fight not just the Neldathi but the terrain as well. In the mountains, the Triumvirate army would have fallen apart into separate small groups that could have been defeated.”

  He smiled at her. “You have learned well, it seems. But what of the final battle that crushed the Rising for good, the Battle of the Hogarth Pass? It took place in the mountains, did it not?”

  It occurred to Antrey that he was not simply asking these questions for himself. He was asking for others in the clans who might jump to such an obvious, yet flawed, counter example. “That is true, but by the time Sirilo and his army reached the Hogarth Pass, it had already been routed on the Plains of Terrell, north of the Water Road. By the time the Triumvirate army followed them into the mountains, Sirilo had no ability to stop them.”

  Birkthir rose slowly from his seat, clapping slowly. “Exactly correct. And precisely what many people will need to hear.” He walked over to where Antrey was standing and placed his hands on her shoulders. “To the extent that it helps, you may tell any others that the Elein are with you in your cause, Jeyn Antrey.”

  She stood there quietly, trying to contain her joy and fear.

  Chapter 24

  Strefer had to give Rurek some credit. Her complaints about their surroundings had been constant and insistent over the past few days. She was so tired and road weary that she could not even remember what she had said to him or kept to herself. Regardless, tonight he found them a beautiful spot in which to make camp. It was a clearing beside a small stream that burbled up out of the deep woods on its way, Strefer assumed, to the River Innis. The clouds that had been constant companions for the past two days were gone, leaving a stunning veil of blazing stars to poke its way through the canopy of trees overhead.

  The stream ran free and cool, deep enough for Strefer to wade in up to her knees. She rinsed the gunk of however many miles from her feet and toyed with the idea of trying to take something like a bath, but decided against it. For one thing, the sun had set and a chill was settling into the air, so being wet all over was not a particularly attractive notion. For another, it would be just their luck for them to be set upon by someone or something unpleasant while she was dripping and naked. She shuddered at the thought, stepped from the running water, and walked over to the fire.

  The campfire Rurek built that night was small, but sufficient to help keep away the chill. They had not encountered any game today, at least any that Rurek could catch and kill, so there was no need for a larger fire to cook over. They sat on opposite sides of the fire, chewing on some berries and leaves they had found nearby. There was really nothing to say to one another at this point, having so thoroughly exhausted all topics of conversation. They did not yet despise each other, but Strefer felt certain that Rurek yearned for contact with others, just as she did.

  Strefer hadn’t realized she had dozed off until she heard Rurek’s voice, and chided herself for hearing it even in her dreams.

  “Who’s there?” he asked in a hushed yet urgent tone. Strefer awoke to see Rurek standing by the fire, pikti in hand, ready to pounce. He was stepping slowly, carefully, quietly towards the trees just upstream from where he had been sitting. “I heard you in there. Who is it?”

  Strefer shook off the haze of sleep, got to her feet, and found the knife that had become her most often-used object these past few weeks. She let Rurek continue towards the trees while she scanned the area behind him for signs of an intruder.

  “Come out,” Rurek said, swiping at an extended clutch of branches with his pikti. “We know you’re there. You won’t surprise us anymore. Show yourself.” He poked at the branches again, this time prompting a brief, startled shout.

  “Stop!” yelled an old, trembling voice. “Stop, please! I will come out, I will come out!”

  Rurek stepped back and cast a glance over his shoulder at Strefer. She showed him her knife in hand. He nodded.

  The foliage rustled like something was caught in its dry arboreal grasp. A small, stooped old man shuffled out of the dark. “Please, stop!” he said, one hand raised in supplication, the other grasping a rough tall walking stick. “I have no desire to harm you!” On his back was a sack full of something. His skin was a medium green, with a thin half crown of white hair ringing his head. He hobbled about a bit and waited for some kind of instruction.

  Rurek stepped towards him, menacingly brandishing the pikti. The old man tottered away and nearly lost his balance, catching himself on his walking stick. “You still haven’t an
swered my question,” Rurek said. “Who are you?”

  The old man breathed heavily. “Give me a moment, young friend,” he said. “I thought I was alone in these woods tonight, as I assume you did as well.”

  “Answer my question,” Rurek said, pikti still poised to strike.

  “Goodness, young friend. Is it so important that you have a name to hang on me? To associate it with my face, my clothes, my pack here?” He gestured towards the stuffed bundle on his back.

  “Yes, it is, old man,” Rurek said in his best commanding tone. “You aren’t my friend. I’m not your friend. She isn’t your friend. We have business that does not involve you. It will cause me no grief whatsoever to send you on your way. Whatever that might take.”

  “Rurek,” Strefer said, gently pleading with him. The old man’s sudden appearance was curious, but he did not seem to be a threat in her eyes.

  “Ah!” the old man said, his eyes widening. “I now have a name to attach to you, young friend. I can see that does place you at some disadvantage. Very well. I am called Marek. Is that better?”

  “Somewhat,” Rurek said, relaxing just a bit. “Where did you come from?”

  “That is a long tale, young friend. One that I cannot possibly tell while standing. Might I share your fire this night?” the old man asked. “I have provisions.”

  Rurek looked at Strefer and deflated as their eyes met. “All right,” he said, dropping the pikti to his side. “But if you do anything I don’t like, you’ll be on your way.”

  “Of course, young friend,” Marek said, shuffling towards the fire. “Of course.” He nodded politely towards Strefer.

  Before she could say anything else, like her name, she looked to Rurek for guidance. Although he had relaxed, the look on his face told her to be very frugal with any information she doled out to the old man. She put her knife away and sat back down by the fire. “Are you out here all alone?” she asked.