Karavans (5 page)

Gillan, the oldest son, heir-in-waiting to whatever they might make of the new land, knotted a sixteen-year-old fist into a hank of Torvic’s tousled fair hair. “Be still, sprat. Do you think Mam needs to hear such talk? Da said to wait here, and be still. So—
be still.
”

“I
am
still,” Torvic retorted, very carefully not moving at all so he wouldn’t actually be lying. “But I can talk. Da didn’t say I couldn’t talk!”

Ellica muttered, “Da should have.”

Megritte, whose braids were loosening into freedom, tried a question of her own. “When are we going home?”

“We’re not!” Torvic snapped, transforming his own reprimand into one for his inferior. “Didn’t you hear Ellica? Didn’t you hear Mam?”

“Oh, stop.” It amazed Audrun most days that she had birthed such headstrong children, since in her youth she had been praised for her kindness, sweetness, and grace. Now, queasy, hot, weary, and completely bereft of such things as kindness and grace, it meant nothing but extra effort to control her equally hot and weary children. “I haven’t the patience for this. Your da will be back soon; until then, be still. Be
quiet
,” she persisted, seeing the look in Torvic’s eye. It would last perhaps the count of ten fingers, she thought, before someone spoke again. And she couldn’t blame them. They had been on the road for days, either cramped in the wagon or walking alongside it. There had been no time for leisure, and no settlements offering other children to talk or play with. As difficult as it was for her to uproot her life, it was worse for the children. They had no voice in the matter.

Upon approaching the tent settlement, Davyn had halted the wagon yards away from the outskirts, carefully not infringing upon it or the dusty, tree-cradled area where departing karavans gathered. Both settlement and karavan area were a matter of paces away, but the wagon nonetheless remained isolated, clearly part of neither tents nor karavans.

Before Davyn went off to find a karavan-master, he and Audrun rolled up and tied the yellow-painted oilcloth sideflaps stretched over the curving roof-ribs so they might benefit from fresh air, but he made it plain they were all to remain inside the tall-wheeled, closely packed wagon containing what was left of their belongings. Not to set foot, Davyn warned, on the ground without his say-so.

Immediately after his father’s departure, Torvic asked his mother what they were to do if they needed to pee, at which point Gillan reminded him that they, as males, need
only aim over the sideboards. This observation resulted in cries of disgust from Ellica and Megritte, and a reprimand from Audrun.

Though she might have preferred that option herself, in place of the chipped crockery pot shoved under one of the narrow cots.

Now they sat and fidgeted amid bedding, furniture, foodstuffs, pots hanging from roof-ribs, and clothing trunks, with such farming implements as they retained attached to the exterior sideboards, tailgate, or hanging beneath the floorboards of the huge, high-sided wagon. But what Davyn hadn’t considered in his attempt to keep them safe was that this settlement, with its floodplain of colored tents, offered such enticements for bored and curious children as Audrun had never seen.

Megritte asked, in the smallest of her voices, “Where did Da
go?
”

“To see the karavan-masters,” Gillan answered, “so he can find us room in one of the karavans.” He waved an arm in the direction of the nearby grove of broad-crowned, thick-trunked trees where wagons and livestock waited. “They’re over there; see them? Those are the karavans, meeting up with the karavan-masters.”

“Horses,” Megritte observed, peering through dust at the mass of conveyances and beasts some distance away. “
We
don’t have horses. We only have fat old oxes.”

“Ox
en
,” Torvic corrected. “Don’t you know anything?”

But the “fat old oxes” were not so fat anymore. Their journey from the family’s home in the midst of the province to this place at its edge had worn the fat away. And it concerned Davyn, who knew they needed strong, healthy oxen to get them overmountain.

“Can I go see Da?” Megritte asked.

“No,” Ellica said sharply. “We’re all to wait here. Da said so.”

Megritte voiced what her mother very well knew all of them wondered. “Why?”

“Because,” Audrun said succinctly, intending to leave it there; then relented because she had detested that answer
herself in childhood. “Because we know nothing of this place, or the people in it.”

“Bad people?” Megritte asked.

Torvic, being Torvic, brightened perceptibly. “Is there danger?”

“Might be,” Gillan observed, affecting his father’s drawl.

Audrun smiled at him, marking how he grew more like Davyn each day, gaining height and width of shoulders even as his voice broke. But she directed her words to Torvic, offering a lesson, though she doubted he would learn it. Not today, not here and now. “But there is also the chance of getting lost. Can you count all those tents? Can you see from one end to the other? Could you find your way along all the twisted pathways? Would you know how to find the wagon if you got lost?”

“I’d ask,” Torvic answered promptly.

“Ask who?” Ellica was definitely peevish. “We’re strangers here, Torvic. No one knows us. They don’t even know Da or Mam. Who could you ask that would know?”

Torvic put his chin up. “Diviners,” he declared. “They know everything.”

Audrun touched her belly, glancing at the nearest roof-rib with its dangling thong of colored beads and bone-carved charms. They had not seen a diviner in all the weeks on the road. Davyn would make sure the spells were renewed for the wagon and oxen before they left, and the omens read, but she would like to find a moonmother who could tell her whether the child was healthy and whole.

And whether it would live. Whether all or any of them would live, on the road winding along the dangerous edges of the deepwood.

Audrun shivered again. They were near the borderlands, Davyn said. Alisanos. Too near, she believed. She felt it in her bones.

“Diviners know everything,” Megritte echoed.

“Then
I
want to know,” Ellica challenged, “who I’m going to marry.”

Torvic made a sound of desperate derision. In that, Gillan joined him.

Audrun blessed their innocence, that the most important thing in their lives just now had nothing whatsoever to do with a journey along a road so close to Alisanos, where devils and demons lived.

IN HIS VIOLATED tent, the Kantic priest and his female client gaped at the disheveled man standing before them whose trembling, outthrust arms so clearly beseeched their aid. Lavetta, swearing by a god she supposedly no longer worshipped with her conversion to the Kantica, leaped up clumsily, overturning Dardannus’ table in her attempt to escape. The diviner heard the faint clang of copper bowl against upended table leg and the anguished protest rising from his own throat as the bone fragments tumbled in an ivory shower to the carpeted floor. He rolled from his bench, wincing as a knee pressed against a knucklebone; he found it, gathered it up, began collecting the others with immense care, as if they were precious gems.

For the Kantica, they
were.

“Please—send me home!” The stranger’s voice, issuing from blackened lips and a spittle-fouled beard, was a harsh, rasping wail.

With more agility than Dardannus expected of her, heavyset Lavetta bent, ripped one sidewall from the ground, wholly heedless of the damage she did to hangings, spell-charms, and artifacts—many of which came down in a tangled disarray of string and beads, cascades of mirrors, wood, and wire—and ducked under it, shrieking about Shoia bones and moonsick men.

Furious, Dardannus glared up from his costly fragments long enough to mark the stranger’s greasy, matted hair and beard, the blood-rimmed eyes, the soiled clothing. The man
reeked
of ordure. And of something else, something more … alien.

Anxious to recapture his priestly dignity and aplomb, Dardannus summoned his most deep and dramatic tones.
“Would that I could, I’d send you this moment to Alisanos itself!”

With a garbled outcry the stranger stumbled forward, fell to his knees before the overturned table. He was shuddering as if beset by palsy, hands reaching out again toward Dardannus in supplication. “Now!
Now!
”

And then Dardannus noticed that the fingers were not fingers at all, but claws. Thick, black curled claws, turned back onto themselves so sharply they cut into the flesh of the man’s wrists, which were themselves scaled and a sickly purplish-green.

The priest nearly vomited.

A man with claws and scales was no man at all.

I thought I was a man
, the stranger had said. As if he once was. As if he knew he was no longer.

Dardannus swallowed back the bile of fear and horror. In frantic haste he snatched up the nearest bone still dangling from his tentpole and waved it threateningly. “
Away!
”

“Please.” Claws shook and rattled. “Show me the way home.”

The Kantic priest heard the fear rising in his own voice. He squashed it with anger. “Find it yourself.” He wielded the scapula, wishing it were a bit more substantial. “You were there once already … find it yourself!”

The grime-smeared face crumpled. The man was sobbing as he rocked on his knees. “I don’t know how. Once I did,
once
I did, when it took me—but I am lost now,
lost
…”

Emboldened by the stranger’s obvious feebleness—and feeble-
witted
ness—Dardannus decided the scapula was less effective than simple human force. He set the bone down, hesitated to summon the will to put hands upon the filth of madness, then snatched handfuls of the man’s dirtcrusted tunic. With a grunt of effort, he hauled the body to its feet. “Your home’s not here,” he wheezed, stiffening his arms as he swung the man to face the tent flaps. “Look for the deepwood
elsewhere!
” And shoved.

The man was gone. Oh, not entirely; but he was now outside
the tent. Dardannus heard the broken sobs and continued pleading. For that matter, he still
smelled
the man; but no, that was the reek of effluvia left in the madman’s wake even as he staggered away.

For a long, long moment, Dardannus stood frozen in place.
From the deepwood?
Breath tangled in his chest.
He was once a man
—But clearly, so clearly, no longer.
He has claws—he has
claws—

Dardannus gagged, swallowed bile. Aloud, he whispered in horror, “Alisanos took him …
changed him
…”

But the stink of the man remained. It abruptly transformed the experience from one of horror to one of entirely mundane resentment. Easier to deal with. “Holy gods,” the diviner murmured in disgust, then transformed the words into a prayer. “O most holy gods, Mother of Moons, I petition you to cleanse my tent of this taint—” He turned again to the task of collecting the bits of bone he had dropped when snatching the scapula from the ridge pole. “—so I may serve you in purity—”

Even as Dardannus bent, the door flap was pulled aside yet again, rattling the few remaining charms. One of them fell, clacking against those already tumbled upon the rugs. “In purity?” an amused voice asked. “Or in profit?”

Dardannus spun around so quickly he nearly lost his footing in the rucked carpet and the trap of his own overturned bench. He caught himself before falling; it would have been most painful to land atop a wooden leg. “
Mother of Moons
,” he gasped, noting the red hair, brown eyes, and the wealth of coin-rings and beads woven into Shoia braids. Then, in shock, “Rhuan?”

“In the very flesh.” The tone was mocking, as usual; Dardannus recognized it easily. Rhuan was infamous within the settlement for his ironic tongue. “Not what a Kantic priest would prefer to see, I understand, flesh not being in your purview, but I rather prefer it this way. Now—” coppery brows rose, “—show me these Shoia bones Lavetta was shrieking about.”

“That man!” Dardannus toward the tent flaps behind Rhuan. “That man was—he
is
—an Alisani demon!”

“Who? That moonsick fool I saw staggering away?” The Shoia grinned; incongruous dimples appeared. “I think not.”

“He had claws and scales! In place of fingers and flesh!”

The grin faded abruptly.

“He did!” Dardannus insisted. “He came in here begging for me to send him back to the deepwood.”

The mocking was banished now, as was the laughter. “What did you tell him?”

“That I couldn’t. I don’t know how.”

Rhuan’s voice was cool, bereft of its usual lightness.

“You know
precisely
where the borderlands are, Dardannus. We all do.” Then added, dourly, “For the good of our lives.”

The priest felt a knot in his lungs. Tension. A tinge of fear. The Shoia wouldn’t forget what Lavetta had said about the bones. “I told him he could go back without my help. He came from there … he can find his own way back!”

“Maybe he can’t,” Rhuan observed mildly. “If he’s a human once taken by Alisanos and now escaped, he may not have mind enough left to find his way anywhere.” His expression was pensive, turned oddly inward for a man everyone knew as someone who laughed even when he killed.