“How is Befel?” Bryon asked, nodding toward his cousin who lay close by, breathing slowly in unconsciousness.
“I will tend to him as soon as I am done with Bo,” Dika said.
“His shoulder?” Bryon asked.
“It’s bad,” Bo replied. “He’s lost a lot of blood. The knife struck him just right, it seems.”
“Will he live?” Bryon asked.
“Oh yes,” Bo said with a flinch. He grunted at his wife, and she returned a stern look as she cut the thread she used to stitch his wound with her teeth. “He will live. The question is, will he ever use his arm again?”
“Seriously?” Bryon asked.
“Aye,” Bo replied. “I fear we don’t have the ability to help him as much as I would like here. Especially with our caravan in such disarray. We will probably end up cauterizing the wound; it’s so deep. He will have to get real help in Finlo.”
“He isn’t going to Finlo,” Bryon said. “He’s going to some mining camp in the western part of the Southern Mountains.”
“Aga Kona,” Dika said, spreading a clean cloth over Bo’s chest.
Bo shook his head.
“That won’t do,” he said. “No. He will not heal properly at best and get an infection at worst if he doesn’t go with us to Finlo.”
Bryon shrugged.
“He will have to change his plans,” Bo said matter-of-factly.
“See to him first,” said Bryon, and Dika nodded her understanding.
Leaving them, Dika walked to Befel and patted him gently on the cheek to wake him. Befel groaned as Dika helped him sit up and, even though Bryon knew Befel was pale and groggy from pain and blood loss, something about his look infuriated him. He turned and walked away.
Bryon walked to Erik, who stood and watched as gypsy women gently laid the dead in a neat row.
“They fought well,” Bryon said.
“They lived well,” Erik added.
They watched women clean wounds and men dig graves. It wasn’t just the gypsies who lay there, but miners and other travelers as well.
“They give the others the same burial rites as their own?” Bryon questioned, and Erik nodded.
“What if they don’t want to be buried and prayed over?”
“Why wouldn’t they?” Erik replied.
“I don’t know . . .” Bryon waited a moment, thinking. “I don’t think I would want them to pray over me and then bury me in the ground, only to become worm food. Fire—that’s what you’ll do if I die. Burn my body and leave my ashes so those bloody worms can choke on them.”
Bryon gave a wry, cynical smile.
“Poor Marcus.” Erik broke another short silence. “The pain on his face when his son told him Nadya had passed.”
Bryon crinkled his eyebrows and scowled. “Why would he tell a dying man such a thing?”
“Why not?”
“Let him pass in peace,” Bryon said. “Poor fool is dying. Give him at least a little solace.”
“You would’ve lied to him, even if he asked you directly?”
Bryon shrugged. “Yeah.”
“Then he would’ve known you lied,” Erik said, “when he saw his wife in the afterlife.”
Bryon chuckled and shook his head. “I suppose that is where we differ. I say let him pass to dust in peace. Give him, in his last moments of existence, as much comfort as possible. Afterlife is just a fool’s dream.”
“How can you have so little hope?”
“Oh no, cousin; you misunderstand,” Bryon replied. “I have hope. I have hope in me, in what I can do, in what I can do with my own hands. I know my purpose. I control my destiny. No greater spirit or almighty god tells me what to do or what my purpose is in this life. My purpose is me, and that’s exactly who I will look out for. I won’t work my hands to the bone to end up like Marcus.”
Bryon turned to walk away but stopped when Erik called his name. “Aren’t you going to help dig?”
Bryon shook his head.
“Where are you going then?”
“To search the bodies,” he replied, pointing to the bodies of the dead slavers their brethren weren’t able to pull back to the forest.
“For what?”
“Whatever they have to offer.” Bryon shrugged.
“But they’re dead.”
“Exactly.”
Chapter 23
“WHAT HAPPENS NOW?” BEFEL ASKED, trying not to look at the bloody mass of soiled cloths lying next to him.
He flinched again as Dika probed the wound on his shoulder, making sure it was clean of clothing or other bits of dirt. Bo blew gently on a small fire he had built, waving his hand over it and poking it with a stick. Befel didn’t know whether he really cared, at the moment, about what the caravan’s next course of action would be. He simply tried to take his mind off the iron clincher—an implement used by the caravan’s farrier—sitting in the fire and glowing red from the heat.
“We continue on,” Bo replied. “We keep going as we always have, telling stories, singing songs, and spreading the good news.”
A quiet sniffle came from Dika. Bo rubbed his wife’s shoulder.
“It will be all right, my love,” he comforted. She nodded, the back of her hand held to her mouth, holding back sobs and tears.
“I remember when one of my father’s mules cut its leg on the barbed fence that divided our land from Farmer Jovek’s,” offered Befel. “The animal bled so profusely, Father feared it would die right then and there, so we built a quick fire, heated his scythe until it burned red, and pressed it against the horse’s leg.”
“The best way,” agreed Bo.
“It looked so painful,” Befel added with a heavy sigh, “and I wanted to cry for the poor animal, but the wound closed up, stopped bleeding, and never became infected. Father still uses that stupid animal. Sure as the sun rises, it’s gotten into more trouble since then, trampling through thistle bushes, eating Jovek’s apples, gnawing at Mother’s roses.”
Befel chuckled, and Bo and Dika laughed with him, trying to ease his apprehension.
Bo looked at his wife, and she gave him a slight nod. They tried to do it without Befel noticing, but he saw the affirmation that the clincher was ready, and he began to sweat. His breathing quickened, and he felt his hands shake, just a little.
“Here, dear.” Dika wiped sweat from Befel’s forehead with a damp cloth. “Bite down on this.” She placed a round piece of wood in his mouth. “Bo will be quick, and the pain will be fleeting.”
Befel whimpered and nodded, the way he did when his mother would try to comfort him on a stormy night when he was a little boy.
Bo pulled the iron tool from the fire, the metal steaming in the cool morning air.
“All right, son,” Bo comforted, bringing the clincher closer. Befel looked away. He could feel the heat from the iron radiating against his cheek. Bo gave Befel no more time to think. He pressed the hot iron tool against Befel’s shoulder. The skin and flesh melted, giving off the smell of cooki
ng meat. Befel groaned loudly and then succumbed to screaming as Bo held the clincher in place.
After a few moments, the smell reached his nose, and he retched. The piece of wood fell from his mouth, and the young man slumped to one side, unconscious.
Chapter 24
“THEY’RE BLOODY GYPSIES!” YELLED THE leader of the slavers.
Fox cowered behind a giant elm tree. He knew all too well what Kehl’s anger could lead to.
“They’re worthless cheats! Gutless con artists! What happened?”
“I don’t know, Kehl.” Fox crawled from behind the tree, groveled on both knees. Kehl spat on him and kicked the fiery-haired youth hard in the stomach.
“Your job was to know. Your job was to set them up. Gypsies are not supposed to mount a defense that would claim the lives of my men.”
He kicked Fox again and turned around, scratching the pointed, oiled beard that grew on his chin. Fox rolled on the ground, groaning and clutching his stomach. Dozens of men and women and children, bound together by lengths of hemp rope, cried and moaned as Kehl raged.
“We still captured most of the younger, able-bodied men that traveled with them, Kehl,” a taller, tan-skinned man said. “And we took a fair number of children as well. They will all fetch a good price.”
Kehl turned quickly on his heels, eyes bearing down hard on the man that spoke. “And we will have to use all of what we earn from these swine to replenish our losses, you fool.”
The man cowered just as Fox had. “What shall you have us do then?” he asked, head bowed so that he wouldn’t meet Kehl’s gaze.
Kehl paused, leaving a long several minutes of silence, his troop of battered slavers awaiting his next orders.
“Revenge,” he hissed, venom rich on his tongue. “We will seek revenge and steal back what we’ve lost.”
“And what of him,” the taller man asked. He nodded toward Fox as he withdrew a dagger from his belt.
Kehl eyed the redheaded man then shook his head. He had lost too many men already.
“Kill only the wounded. Load the rest into the wagons,” Kehl commanded Fox who skittered away, almost on all fours. Kehl turned to the tall slaver, his brother.
“Ready the men and wagons. We move at dusk.”
His brother bowed, and Kehl turned and walked away, hands clasped behind his back. When he knew he was just a shadow in the forest, he turned back around to watch his camp. He watched as Fox pulled an older woman to her feet. She limped forward when he commanded her to walk. The redheaded man shook his head and slit her throat. The children screamed. Kehl smiled.
“Power,” he muttered.
Chapter 25
BRYON RODE NEXT TO BO’S wagon. His horse was a little wide for riding. It had, after all, pulled a gypsy carriage only a day before. However, with fewer people, and the need for so many carriages gone, Mardirru ordered horses unbridled and used for riding.
“I can’t believe they buried that scum,” Bryon muttered to himself. “They want to bury their own—sure. They want to bury the miners—fine. But the slavers? As if stealing children to sell as prostitutes isn’t enough . . .”
The vision of three people—a woman and two men—hung in his mind. Bryon had found them as they broke camp. The woman and men’s throats had been cut, and their bodies left to rot.
Bo had explained that slavers discarded those whom they couldn’t sell—the elderly, the crippled, the wounded.
“The leg would’ve healed up,” Bryon muttered to himself, thinking of the first man’s broken limb. “Set it, splint it, and in some time, he would be fine. And the cut in the miner’s stomach could’ve healed as well. I thought they could find a buyer for anything.”
Bryon gripped the reins hard as he thought of the woman, no doubt too old. That made him think of his mother, who had more gray in her hair than this woman had.
“Leave them to the crows and worms,” Bryon had told Max as the gypsy oversaw the burials. “So what if it isn’t your way.”
Now, he looked to his left. Max, Mardirru’s brother, rode many paces away from him. Why did he care? Bryon shook his head; he certainly didn’t. He continued to watch Max, thinking he should have punched the man in the face to knock some sense into him.
Even though Bryon had not raised his fist, Max had been needled by what Bryon said, and Mardirru had stopped any fight from happening, stepping between the two. Bryon rubbed his chest where the new gypsy leader had pushed him away.
“I should’ve punched you in the face as well,” he now muttered, looking in Mardirru’s direction where he was riding somewhere in the front of the caravan. “I should have socked you right in the jaw—and then kneed you in your balls.”
He turned to watch Erik and Dika tend to Befel in the back of the wagon. His cousin hadn’t woken since Bo cauterized his wounded shoulder, and fits of shaking overcame him while he slept. Bryon shook his head again.
“You disapprove of my wife’s treatment of your cousin?” Bo questioned.
“No.” Bryon hadn’t realized Bo was watching him. He didn’t mean for that to happen.
“Then what causes that disgusted look? Are you still brooding over the burial of the slavers?”
“No,” but Bryon thought for a moment and corrected himself. “Well, yes, but that’s not it.”
“Then what?”
“My cousin,” Bryon muttered. “He’s a fool.”
“I can see that you two don’t get along so well,” Bo said.
“Like I said, he’s a fool.”
“I’ve seen grudges destroy a family, my friend. I’ll never understand a family that doesn’t love one another,” Bo intoned cautiously.
Bryon shook his head again, a quick scoff at what Bo had said. “It’s true, I guess. I hold no great love for my cousin.”
“I can see that,” Bo added. “You can’t even say his name. What happened between you two?”
“It wasn’t always like this, between Befel and me.” Bryon gave Bo a condescending smirk as he spoke his cousin’s name. “We acted like brothers, once. Even more so than Erik and him.”
“Go on,” Bo encouraged.
“We planned on leaving our home together. We planned on going east and making a name for ourselves. We decided that together,” Bryon explained.
“As we grew older, our fathers began to prepare us, get us ready for taking over their farms when the time came. They gave us plots of land to farm and animals to tend, but that was not our plan. We pooled the money we made from selling our own crops, our own livestock, and we raised enough, together, to make it east. At the last minute, Befel told me Erik was coming, too. Now we needed more money. Where there were two, now there were three. But we still left.”
Bryon paused a moment to take a hearty draught of water from a skin that hung from his saddle.
“We stopped in Venton and sold our labor to this pig farmer named Wittick in order to raise the extra money we needed to buy our way into a caravan and buy the supplies we would need to travel east. That fool Befel . . .”
Bryon stopped again, fuming silently. His face re
ddened despite the coolness of the day, and he clenched his reins so hard that the leather creaked under his white-knuckled grip, and his horse slowed practically to a stop. He kicked the horse’s side, and it trotted back to the front of the wagon.
“That fool Befel bought our way onto a caravan without telling Erik or me. He used all our money to buy our spots on a train, entirely too much, and he believed them when they told him to meet in Venton’s main square the next morning. He gave them our money up front, and when we went in the morning to meet . . .”
“They weren’t there,” Bo interrupted. Bryon nodded. “They saw a naïve young man and conned him.”
“Because of him, we spent over a year knee deep in pig shit.”
“And that is why you harbor a grudge against your cousin.”
“Wouldn’t you?” Bryon defended. Bo didn’t so much ask a question as he made a simple, realizing statement, but for some reason, Bryon felt accosted, attacked.
“Oh, I suppose I would be upset,” Bo added.
“Just upset?”
“Aye,” Bo replied. “It could be worse.”
“Worse?”
“Sure,” Bo reassured. “He could’ve gotten your sister pregnant. Or killed your brother and blamed it on a pack of wolves. Or burned down your barn while it was full of harvest and livestock—even run your family off their land so he might steal it. I’ve seen all those things happen between families. Yes, it could be worse.”
Bryon trotted along silently for a little while longer.
“I won’t think about it anymore,” he said, half to himself and half to his horse. Then, he looked over to see Befel. He lay in the back of the wagon, Erik stroking his hair and Dika pressing a damp towel to his forehead. Bryon’s blood began to boil, and all he could think about was sneering Ventonian nobles throwing scraps of food and taunting him while he worked with his arms sunk elbow-deep in pig shit.
A Chance Beginning Page 12
