by G. Howell
I sighed and raked hair back from my eyes. “Ma’am… Ear’rest, you’ve done so much for me and I’m more grateful than I can tell you, but some of my problems I think only I can deal with.”
“A,” she said and hesitated a second before gesturing assent. “I can only wish you the best.”
“Thank you. I wish I could repay you,” I said and just waved my hand helplessly. “You know, I was serious about your cooking. If you ever think about going into the food business, it could be worth it.”
She chittered and I shrugged. “Hey, if you’re ever in Shattered Water, you look me up.”
“Look you…”
“I mean, visit me,” I amended. “I’m not too difficult to find. Just ask after me.”
“People know you?”
“I sort of stand out,” I smiled, carefully. Then reality caught up. “Ma’am, if you do ever go there and I’m not around… for whatever reason, find Chaeitch ah Ties. He works for aesh Smither. Tell him I sent you, that he’s to give you whatever you need. And tell him… tell him he still owes me for the Swampy River bottle.”
“That means something?”
“He’ll understand,” I said. “He can certainly help you.”
“But I just have to jaunt off to Shattered Water?”
“Ummm, if I can, I’ll do everything I can to make sure someone can do something to repay you for your troubles. If I can.”
“I understand,” she said and looked over at where Heksi was standing, waiting uncertainly. “Best of luck.”
“Uhn,” I ventured, glanced down and patted the kilt. “You’re going to want this back?”
She chittered. “Keep it for now. Heksi will be able to find something he can loan you.”
“Thanks.”
And as the wagon rattled and jolted its way down the rutted track from the little farm I looked back up the hill at the shaggy figure watching us. For a second there was a flashback to a time when I’d watched a winter-bound village receding into the whiteness behind another wagon. This time there was no snow, no cold, but nevertheless…
“Déjà vu,” I sighed.
“Sa?” Heksi glanced around. “What was that?”
“Just thinking aloud.”
“Ah,” he sounded a little uncertain.
Silence for a while. The bison plodded stolidly along; the cart rattled; an ungreased axle squeaked like a live thing. I jounced around in the back of the wagon, trying to find some way to sit that didn’t conduct every bump in the road directly to my butt. So I was able to see the red dot that lifted into the morning sky, tugging on an invisible line.
“It works,” I laughed and when Heksi looked around I pointed. “The flying toy,” I said. “It seems he got it working.”
“Ah?” he twisted around the bench and squinted, tilting his head from side to side. “Where?”
“Right the…” I started to say. “Uh, oh. I guess you might have trouble seeing it. I seem to be able to see further than normal people.”
“Really,” he growled, his ears laying back.
“Really,” I said. “I… never mind. Any way, it’s flying. You helped him make that?”
“No,” he said, unblinking amber eyes staring at me. Then he snorted and turned back to the road. “No, he did it by himself.”
I blinked. “All of it? By himself?”
“He heard about a flying toy in Seas-of-Grass and wanted to build one. The storyteller wasn’t able to provide many details.”
“That’s quite… remarkable,” I said. And it was, when you consider that he didn’t have a net or a handy library for reference.
“A,” he said again and I heard him hiss softly before saying. “As is your story. How much of that is true?”
Ah. That was it. “I haven’t lied to you,” I said. “As I told Ea’rest, there are some details that I haven’t told you: they’re too inconsequential, unpleasant or they could cause problems for you. But I haven’t lied.”
His tail lashed. “I keep thinking that it’s one of those details you didn’t tell us that could cause problems.”
“You’re not happy about this,” I said. “Why’re you doing it?”
I saw his head half turn, profiling his muzzle against the morning sun. I couldn’t see his expression. “Because she asked me to.”
“You must respect her opinion.”
“She said she… she believed you. She said you knew some things that … weren’t common knowledge about her highness; things you’d need to have met her personally to know.” I saw his hand wave a shrug. “And you most likely saved Rothi’s life. She thought that if you were out for trouble, you wouldn’t go out of your way to do something like that.”
“Ah,” I nodded. “She was a soldier?”
“She was in a personal guard,” he said. “She never mentioned exactly what her duties were.”
I remembered what she’d said about knowing people who suffered from the same kind of waking terrors I did and had to wonder.
------v------
During the couple of hours we were on the road I got to learn a little more about Heksi. That wasn’t easy: he wasn’t an outgoing character. He was a blacksmith - or rather the blacksmith - in the town of Rath’s Holding. His mother had been a smith as had her father, so it was something of a family tradition that he’d continued. Not that there’d been much choice, I gathered. It wasn’t a large, prosperous town and the range of job opportunities wasn’t expansive.
He asked about me. I answered, and then asked my own question and he reciprocated, slowly loosening up. He’d met with Ea’rest a couple of years ago when she’d come to town and they’d hit it off. She’d helped him with some local problems that he was quite vague about and he’d helped her about the farm. They’d shared spring. He asked me about my home. I asked some more about her but he wasn’t able to tell me much.
“She works hard at that farm,” he said, “But...”
“But?”
He waved a hand in a shrug. “She’s not a farmer. It shows.”
“It’s not that bad, is it?”
“She’s been there for several years,” he said. “Last years’ crops failed. She’s had to slaughter prime cattle just for food to see her through the winter. There was nothing to sell come market time.”
“Oh.”
“And she has her pride.”
“Oh, that,” I said again. “She is a good cook though.”
“A,” his hand waved agreement. Then a minute later he said, “What you told her, about opening an inn, you were serious about it?”
She’d told him? “A, quite.”
“And you’d be able to assist?”
“If she were willing to make the effort, then absolutely.”
“I mean, you can assist? You have the finances?”
I hesitated. “Before this incident I had not inconsiderable finances. Now... they are still there, but I don’t know what ability I have to access them.”
“Huhn,” I heard him rumble thoughtfully. “You know, it’s not the first time someone made a suggestion to her along those lines.”
“Not surprising. She didn’t listen, obviously. That pride again?”
“Obviously.”
An hour or so later I got my first glimpse of Rath’s Holding. The castle.
At first there were just grey stone crenellated towers rising from behind the crests of green trees, jutting against a blue sky. Then the walls crept into view, clinging to a promontory at the confluence of the Lazy River – the one I’d been following – and Wideweather Way. The Way was the larger river, the marine thoroughfare between the lakes of Highchi’s Grief and Season’s Door. The castle commanded a position overlooking the juncture of both rivers. Heksi told me it’d been built o
ver a hundred years ago by the original Lord Rath to impose tariffs on waterway traffic, which seemed to be the thing to do at the time. His family had maintained their own little fiefdom by a subtle mixture of delicate politics and outright brutality until it was absorbed by Cover-my-Tail.
We continued on our way. The forest gave way to well-tended farmland and the rutted track turned to something that could be mistaken for a road. Farms dotted the landscape, tucked away within hedgerows and windrows. I watched the towers on the skyline gradually drawing nearer. Strange to think that it was built only a hundred years ago. Back home the only castles I’d seen had been in pictures, and those had been several hundred years old. All those hundreds, thousands of old fortifications; all the time and effort and expense and suffering that’d gone into building them. And then a new technology goes and renders them obsolete in an historical eye blink.
The wagon jolted its way over the crest of a final low hill and gave me a look at the town itself. It wasn’t a big place. Farmland ran right up to the outskirts. There were walls enclosing the crowded town center, but they were in the same state that so much of Shattered Water’s were: cannibalized over the years for building material. Inside the perimeter delineated by those fortifications the buildings were crammed close together in a mess of steep rooftops and chimneypots; outside, they spread out, the streets becoming wider, the buildings a mixture of residential and industrial: affluent and ramshackle. Smoke trickled into the sky from dozens of chimneypots. A flock of large birds of some kind launched into the sky and winged away across the river.
As we got closer to town there was more traffic on the roads. A couple of times I ducked down out of sight in the back as carts trundled by in the opposite direction. When we hit the outskirts I tucked down behind the drivers bench, between that and a bale of hay. As I pulled the improvised hay mat over myself I saw Heksi glance back and then all I could see was straw and faint slivers of sunlight. Dust tickled my nose: I sneezed, twice, then all I could do was lie and wait.
It was hot and stuffy and uncomfortable. Every bump in the road seemed to go straight through to my spine. I could hear the world around me, the sounds of Rris voices coming and going. Once I heard Heksi call out and I felt my heart lurch, but he was just greeting someone. Thank god his place was on the outskirts of town. I was only in that stifling cubby for about half an hour.
Eventually the cart stopped. I lay still and waited while dust trickled down on me. I felt it sway slightly as Heksi hopped off and there was a conversation at the edge of hearing. Another wait and then my heart pounded as the cart rocked again as someone climbed into the bed. A pause, then the straw covering was pulled away. “Into the workshop,” Heksi hissed, gesturing. “Over there. Quickly.”
We were in a small courtyard cluttered with debris of various kinds: broken wagon wheels, barrels, hoops of metal, a stack of cut timber posts the size of railway sleepers. Behind us was a brick wall and arched gateway, a slatted wooden gate pulled across the entrance. The wall off to the left was the front of a single-story pale stone building, small glazed windows in the unplastered façade. Beneath the eaves protruded the ends of structural timbers, hung with what looked like the handles of various tools. The workshop he was referring to was a wooden building ahead of us that had probably been a barn at some time. When we got inside I saw it still was. There were stalls for animals. There was also a forge and an anvil and a considerable clutter of metal tools and scraps piled on workbenches, on the dirt floor, hanging from the rafters and hooks on the walls. I watched as Heksi hurried to close the doors, swinging the rickety things shut on crooked hinges. The bump as they closed shook dust loose to drift down through the slats of light sifting through cracks in the wooden walls. It was the only light, crisscrossing the floor. When he moved back across the room he was just a stalking silhouette against vertical threads of daylight.
“Nice place you’ve got here,” I said, looking around at stacks of wood and charcoal over by the forge, at a bevy of glassless lantern frames slung from a hook. A couple of well-used axes hung from leather thongs beside a grindstone, probably waiting for sharpening.
“You can wait here.” Heksi said as went over to the workbench and sorted through tools. “I’ve got several thing to do before we leave. There’re goods to load and... ah, here.” He came up holding a hammer and sharp metal spike. “Come here.”
I stared.
He looked at the tools, then at me. “See if I can get those chains off.”
Oh. I felt a rush of heat to my face and shrugged. With a mixture of embarrassment and trepidation I laid the wrist shackles on the iron block of his anvil. He reached to touch, hesitated and looked at my face, then visibly braced himself and laid hands on me. For a second he stroked fingertips over my skin, then got down to business adjusting the shackles. Then took up the hammer and chisel, placed the spike against the hinge. The hammer rose then came down sharply and the end of the hinge pin was sheared away. With a few taps the whole pin came out and the shackle was off.
“Ai,” he exclaimed.
My wrist was bruised purple and green, chafed red raw and scabbed and seeping blood in spots. I flexed my hand, grimacing as the circulation started up again. “Ah, the others?”
The other hand was just as simple. The collar... that was an experience: Try laying your head on an anvil while an alien you don’t know that well wields a skull-crushingly heavy iron implement over you sometime. But the hammer struck, once and then again and a few blows later I was able to pry the collar open and cast it aside.
Heksi was staring at my neck. “You should get those seen to,” he said.
I touched and winced. “That could be difficult.”
“A,” he realized and gave a quick shake of his head, then went to put the tools away. “You’ll have to wait here for a while. I’ve got several matters to take care of before we can leave. There’s a loft up there where you can get out of sight,” he pointed to a ladder leading up to an attic area under the peak of the roof. Great. More hay.
“I won’t be long,” he told me as he picked up a satchel from a hook and slung it over his shoulder. At the door he paused again. “And, by my mother’s tail, stay out of sight. I don’t want to be having to explain your presence. Understand?”
“Understand,” I said.
“Huhn,” he snorted and then shouldered the rickety door open and sidled through. The door rattled shut and his silhouette - visible through the cracks – hesitated, then was gone.
------v------
I waited.
Poking around the workshop was a way to pass the time and was certainly more interesting than hiding in a haystack. Although basic, the imposing, sooty stone of the forge with its leather bellows and rusting hammered-brass hood and chimney dominated the barn. The floor was just dirt, but around the forge was littered with small rust-colored beads that at first glance I took for pebbles. No, not pebbles: specks of metal that’d melted with the grit of the floor. There was the anvil, looking very little like the classic Acme product; this thing was a solid lump of iron on a stump of old oak, the flat top of the black metal block chipped and dinged from heavy use. Over by the wall was a treadle-powered lathe and alongside that what looked like a potter’s wheel. On the worktops were various hammers and tongs and neatly arranged in pegholes along the back of the bench a multitude of fine chisels and scrapers, delicate implements with hooks and needle tips that looked more like dental appliances than tools. That lot would be worth a fortune here.
There were blocks of wax wrapped in chamois leathers, pouring pots and molds. A barrel bound with iron hoops was half filled with a reddish clay. It took a while before I figured out it was everything you’d need for wax removal casting. Indeed, the place carried that same smell that’d permeated the foundries in Shattered Water. I’d spent so much time in them that in a way it was familiar.
That...
that was almost funny: Waxing nostalgic over a hellishly hot room that’d reeked of metals and fluxes and scorched fur. I picked up the broken collar, twisting it as much as give would allow. I had other things to worry about besides sightseeing.
I was fairly certain Heksi was going to come back. If he’d wanted to turn me in, he could have simply taken me straight to the authorities and certainly wouldn’t risk letting me out of his sight. So hopefully he’d keep his word and take me on to Open Fields. There was still the question of where I’d go from there. I had a few ideas, but they’d depend on how things went from here. If Heksi’s usual routine worked, fine. Otherwise, things would have to be a bit different.
So, I sat on the anvil in that rickety barn, turning my broken shackles over and over, and waited and thought. There was plenty of time for that, and when given time it’s disturbing what sorts of nasty and paranoid possibilities you can come up with. Which was probably why, when I heard noise outside, I decided to make sure he was alone before showing myself.
The door rattled and squeaked open a couple of feet. Heksi slipped through the gap and used both hands to haul the door shut before turning around and heading for the ladder to the loft. “Mikah?” he stage whispered.
I dropped down behind him from the crossbeam. “A?”
He yowled and lifted off, four feet straight up, twisting and landing in a crouch with fur bottling and ears flat. “You... Rot, what’re you doing?”
“Sorry,” I shrugged. I’d been able to peek through the gaps in the barn walls: he’d been alone. “Just making sure it was you.”
“Huhn,” he growled and scratched at the back of his neck, patting his fur down smooth again.
“How did it go?” I asked. “Any trouble?”
He glanced up from smoothing down the hide on his forearms. “Oh, no. No trouble. You were expecting some?”
