A Hero's Tale (11 page)

In the morning we walked in plain sight down the trail beside the stream and into the village. Maara reassured me that we would be in no danger there. Where so many strangers came together, anyone who broke the implied truce that governed such places would become the enemy of all. The dangers we might face in the days ahead would come upon us when we were once again alone, and our main concern while we were in the village was to arouse no one's suspicion and no one's enmity.

To my surprise no one gave us more than a brief glance. We were just two more travelers among a crowd of people who were all intent upon their own pursuits. There were both men and women here, dressed for the most part in woolen clothing, although some, like us, were clad in deerskin. I caught fragments of their speech and couldn't understand a word of it. Each person seemed to be speaking a language of his own. Then bit by bit my ears became attuned to a tongue that, as I listened, transformed itself from something utterly incomprehensible into a speech I recognized. It was my own language, the language of Merin's house, but spoken very badly, full of mispronunciations and misuse of common words, as well as words I had never heard before, whose meaning I couldn't guess.

Maara moved through the village like one who belonged there. I tried to look as relaxed and unconcerned as she did, but it had been a long time since I had been around so many people, and I began to feel hemmed in. All around us men and women shoved their way through knots of people gathered around those with goods to trade. Men dressed as we were stood surrounded by piles of skins and furs. Women traded woven cloth, and a few had metal goods -- cooking pots and knives and axes.

At last we left the marketplace behind for a place where there were fewer tents and fewer people. Some were deep in serious conversation and paid us no attention. Others glanced at us with undisguised curiosity.

The path ran along the riverbank, where dozens of boats were pulled up onto the shore. Most were made of hollowed logs, some big enough to carry half a dozen men and a cargo of their goods, some just big enough for one. Other boats were flimsy things made of hides stretched over frames of wickerwork. A few of the larger boats were made of hewn planks. Too heavy to pull up on shore, they were tied to pilings driven into the mud.

When Maara stopped to examine a log boat that looked big enough to carry the two of us, a man approached her. His smile was friendly, while his eyes took us in from head to foot.

"A fine little boat," he said, in the inharmonious tongue that offended my ears.

Maara prodded the boat with her toe. "A good size, but waterlogged."

Although she knew better, she spoke as badly as he did.

I feared the man might be insulted. Instead he laughed.

"Floats well enough," he said, and gave it a little push away from the shore, so that it bobbed in the shallow water, still tethered with a bit of rope fastened around an anchor stone.

Maara shook her head and gestured at another boat that was a little bigger than the first and appeared to be in better shape.

"Whose boat is this?"

The man resigned himself to keeping his waterlogged craft and led us to a nearby hut made of sticks and twigs daubed with river mud. He told us to wait and went inside. We heard the sound of voices, the man's voice and a woman's, as he negotiated a finder's fee. When he came out again, he gestured to us to go inside.

The hut was dark and full of smoke. Before my eyes could see much more than shadows, the woman asked us to sit down. By the time we settled ourselves by a fire that gave off more smoke than light, I could see a little better.

The woman was the only person there. Her careworn face made her appear to be past her middle age, but there was no grey in her dark hair, and she still had all her teeth. She looked us over with a critical eye.

"My friend tells me you want a boat," she said, "yet you come empty-handed."

It was true we had no goods to trade, but she mistook our lack of goods for poverty, and I resented it. Maara shrugged out of her pack, laid it on the ground, and opened it. She pulled aside our bits of ragged clothing to reveal the sword.

The woman stared at it for a moment, then gave Maara a shrewd look.

"How did you come by this?" she asked.

"I didn't steal it."

"I meant no insult," the woman said. "I only wonder if you are more than you appear to be."

"I appear to be a traveler with a sword to trade for a boat," said Maara.

"If you are skilled in its use, you may regret letting go of it."

"Why is that?"

"Do you intend to go downriver?"

Maara hesitated. Then she said, "Is it the custom now to pry into the business of travelers?"

The woman made a gesture of impatience. "You mistake me," she said. "Like everyone else, I have my own interests at heart, but I doubt they conflict with yours. You may serve my interests, and your own as well."

Maara waited for her to go on.

"If you're bound downriver," the woman said, "you may run into trouble. Traveling alone is dangerous, and as it happens I have goods to send downriver. Why not keep your sword and buy your passage with your service?"

Once Maara had given her consent, the woman offered us her hospitality, which consisted of a bowl of barley soup and a place to sleep beside her fire. The soup we accepted gratefully, but we preferred to sleep outside, out of the smoky air.

All evening, as we sat by our fire, people joined us to chat, some who wanted only a pleasant way to pass the time and some who tried in subtle ways to learn more about us -- where we came from, where we were going, and the nature of our business. Maara evaded their questions skillfully, and without giving offense. She even lured them into revealing more about themselves than they intended. How foolish were the people of Elen's house, I thought, who had not used Maara's skill with language and diplomacy to their advantage. They should have made her an ambassador.

I listened to the conversation as if I understood not a word of it, and when anyone spoke to me, I smiled and nodded, to be polite, then looked to Maara to tell me, in the language of the forest people, what they had said. They spoke my language so dreadfully that I often did have need of her assistance.

To my ears the language of the forest people sounded lovely, soft and melodious, so I was very much offended when one woman said, on hearing Maara speak to me, "Stars! What a barbarous tongue!"

Maara quickly drew attention to herself, before the woman could see that I had understood her.

"I imagine that to her ears ours sounds just as barbarous," she said.

In the morning, Maara, who had no scabbard for her sword, fashioned a makeshift sling for it out of deerskin and fastened it to her belt. I would have taken my bow from its case and strung it, but Maara stopped me.

"Best not," she said.

Before she could offer me an explanation, a boy came to tell us that the boats were leaving. Half a dozen were to go together. Maara sat at the front of the first boat, and I sat right behind her. Our companions in the boat were three men who had shared our fire for a while the night before. They were traveling together, to look for wives, they said.

After an hour in the boat, I decided I would have preferred to walk. My legs were cramped and stiff, and the boats, heavy with goods and people, rode so low in the water that, although we were bailing constantly, my deerskin trousers were soon soaked through.

It was a long day. At twilight we beached the boats and made camp on the riverbank. The next day was like the first. I tried to occupy my mind with studying the country we passed through. We were now beyond the boundaries of Aamah's map, and the countryside began to feel familiar. Though we still had forest on both sides of us and there was no feature of the landscape that I recognized, the quality of light, the fragrance of the air, and the shape of the hills I caught a glimpse of in the distance all felt like home.

The next morning, not half an hour after we set out, boats filled with warriors blocked our passage. By the style of their clothing and the devices on their shields, I knew them for warriors of the northern tribes. As soon as we spotted them, we beached our boats and stood together, prepared to defend ourselves. I had little confidence in our companions, for they seemed to have little confidence either in each other or in themselves.

Once again Maara prevented me from readying my bow.

The northerners were no more eager for a fight than we were. They sent their leader to speak with us. The man who had assumed the leadership of our ragged band of mercenaries went to meet him and talked with him for several minutes. When he returned to us, he pointed to the boat that Maara and I had ridden in and said, "Leave them this one."

At once our companions began to slide the other boats back into the water. The men who had shared our boat left it and ran in a mad rush to find places in the others. Maara understood what they were doing before I did. She took hold of me and pushed me into one of the boats just as it left the shore, but when she tried to board it, a woman cried out, "She'll sink us," and struck Maara with her paddle.

My mind could not comprehend such a betrayal. I thought at first the blow must have been an accident, that in her hurry to get away the woman had been careless. Accident or not, when I saw Maara fall, I went into the water after her.

No one helped us. No one waited for us. Our fellow travelers paddled for their lives downriver, while I lifted Maara's head out of the water and dragged her onto the shore, where the northerners surrounded us.

The northerners bound Maara's hands. They had no need to. Her sword was gone, lost in the river. She was still dazed from the blow of the paddle, and blood ran down her face from a cut on her forehead. They left my hands unbound. They seemed to think me insignificant, perhaps because I bore no arms. My bow lay unnoticed with my pack, hidden among the cargo in the boat our companions had left behind.

The northerners waited while I tended Maara's wound. After I stopped the bleeding, they ordered us into our boat and took us a short distance downstream, where they beached the boats and hid them. Their encampment lay a short walk from the river. There they unbound Maara's hands and let us dry our clothing by their fire. In fact they were not at all unkind. When Maara began to feel a little better, they fed us, and one of them gave me a scrap of cloth to bandage her head.

At midday another band of warriors arrived at the encampment. Their leader came to speak with us. A tall woman with flaming hair, she reminded me of Taia. I knew that Maara spoke a little of their language, but it surprised me when I found I understood a word or two. I heard Maara speak the word for travelers, which was the same in many tongues, and I heard other words with a familiar sound. Although I couldn't follow their conversation very well, by her face and by her gestures I knew what the red-haired woman wanted. She was trying to discover how to make best use of us.

"Do they have any idea who we are?" I asked Maara after the woman left us.

Maara shook her head. "They believe we came from the north, like the others."

"What will they do with us?"

"We'll have to wait and see," she said.

All afternoon we stayed where the northerners had left us, by the fire at the center of their camp. They left us unbound, but there were so many of them all around us that it was no use trying to escape.

Maara pretended to be unwell. She lay down and shielded her face with her arm, as if the light hurt her eyes. All the while she was listening to the conversations of our captors. I tried to listen too, though I learned nothing of value. It was an odd tongue they spoke, the sound familiar but with an unfamiliar cadence. Unlike the language of the trading village, which was my own tongue spoken badly, this was another language altogether, yet sometimes I felt that I caught a thread of meaning, even if I didn't understand the words.

I tried to take in everything that was going on around me without being obvious about it. From what I could see, at least half a hundred warriors were encamped there. The camp seemed well established. No attempt had been made to hide it, as if no one would challenge their right to be there. I didn't know how far we were from Merin's land or if the warriors guarding our frontier would come this far. Clearly the northerners did not expect them to.

Late in the afternoon they fed us again. After we had eaten, I looked again at Maara's wound. Anger burned in my belly when I thought about the woman who had dealt that treacherous blow. In my mind I judged her, and if it had been possible, I would have punished her myself.

I wondered if we might be able to make our escape at night, while the northerners were sleeping, but when darkness fell, they bound our hands and feet and set a watch, and the watchman kept an eye on us.

For a long time I was wakeful. I worried about Maara's injury and about the northerners' intentions. By now I knew the world well enough to understand how serious was our predicament. Captives were either held as hostages or sold as slaves. Hostages might hope to be treated well, but the value of a hostage was in her ransom, and who would ransom us? We were so close to Merin's house, so close to home, yet the only price Vintel would pay would be the blood price on my head.

In the night she touched me. Because of our situation, we had not gone to sleep in our usual embrace. We lay side by side, with a little distance between us. Her fingertips brushed the bare skin of my forearm. When she saw that I was awake, she took my hand.

"Do you trust me?" she whispered.

"Of course," I said.

"Will you do what I tell you?"

"Yes."

"Good," she said.

I waited for her to tell me what she wanted me to do, but she didn't speak again.

"Do you have a plan?" I asked her.

"Hush," she said. "Hush, before they hear us, and go to sleep."

I hushed, but I didn't sleep. Nor did she. The backs of her fingers rested against my bound hands. From time to time they moved a little in a soft caress. Her touch was a comfort, and I thought I understood it. I thought she meant to reassure me. I should have listened more closely. If I had, I might have heard the good-bye in it.