Sailing to Sarantium (23 page)

Vargos was quite certain Martinian would resist.

He was somewhat surprised to feel an equal certainty in himself, a
cold anger overriding fear. As they passed out from the courtyard he
walked past the stablemaster, Pharus, a burly figure in the mist.
Pharus was staring at them in a certain way, no proper respect in his
bearing at all, and though Vargos had known him for years he did not
hesitate. He stopped in front of the man just long enough to swing
the bottom of his staff upwards, hard, hammering Pharus right between
the legs without a word spoken. The stablemaster let out a
high-pitched screech and crumpled in the mud, hands clutching for his
groin as he thrashed on the cold, wet ground.

Vargos bent low in the fog and spoke softly in the ear of the
gasping, writhing man. 'A warning. Leave her be. Find another,
Pharus.'

He straightened, carried on, not looking back. He never looked back.
Not since he'd left home. He saw Martinian and the girl gazing at
him, cloaked shadows on the almost invisible surface of the road. He
shrugged, and spat. 'Private quarrel,' he said. He knew they would
know it was a lie, but some things were best not spoken aloud, Vargos
had always felt. He did not, for example, tell them he expected to
die before midday.

Her mother used to call her erimitsu, 'clever one' in their own
dialect. Her sister was calamitsu, which was 'beautiful one.' and her
brother was, of course, sangari, which was 'beloved.' Her brother and
father had died last summer, black sores bursting all over their
bodies, blood running from their mouths when they tried to scream at
the end. They buried them in the pit with all the others. In the
autumn, faced with winter coming, imminent starvation, and two
daughters, her mother had sold one to the slavers: the one who had
the intelligence to perhaps survive in the harsh world far away.

Kasia had had a reputation already that made her almost
unmarriage-able at home. Too clever by half, and too thin by more
than that in a tribe where women were valued for full hips and soft
figures-promise of comfort in the long cold and children easily
birthed. Her mother had made a bitter, brutal choice but not a unique
one that year as the first snows fell on the mountains above them.
The Karchite slave traders knew what they were doing that season,
travelling the northern villages of Trakesia and then Sauradia in a
slow circuit of acquisition.

The world was a place of grief, Kasia had understood, beyond tears,
after the first two nights journeying south with shackles on her
wrists. Man was born to sorrow, and women knew more of it. She'd lain
on the cold ground, head averted, watching the last sparks of the
dying fire as she lost her maidenhead to two of the slavers in the
dark.

A year in Morax's inn had done nothing to change her thinking, though
she had not starved and had learned what to do to avoid being beaten
too often. She was alive. Her mother and sister might be dead by now.
She didn't know. Had no way of knowing. The men hurt her sometimes,
upstairs, but not always and not most of them. You learned, if you
were clever, to shield that cleverness and gather a blank, stolid
endurance about you like a cloak. And you passed days and nights and
days and nights that way. The first winter in this alien south,
spring, summer, then the coming of autumn again with turning leaves
and memories you wanted to avoid.

You tried never to think of home. Of being free to walk out of doors
when work was done, following the stream uphill to places where you
could sit entirely alone beneath circling hawks and among the small
quick woodland creatures they hunted, listening to the heartbeat of
the world, dreaming in daylight with open eyes. You didn't dream,
here. You endured, behind the cloak. Who had ever said existence
offered more?

Until the day you understood they were going to kill you, and you
realized-with genuine astonishment-that you wanted to survive. That
somehow life still burned inside like the obdurate embers of a fire
more fierce than desire or grief.

On the almost-invisible road, walking east with two men in grey,
sound-swallowing fog on the Day of the Dead, Kasia watched them
dealing with fear and the rawness of their danger and was unable to
deny her joy. She struggled to hide it, as she had hidden every
emotion for a year. She was afraid if she smiled they would think her
simple, or mad, so she kept close to the mule, a hand on its rope,
and tried not to meet the eyes of either man when the mist swirled
and showed their faces.

They might be followed. They might die here on the road. This was a
day of sacrifice and the risen dead. There might be daemons abroad,
in search of mortal souls. Her mother had believed that. But Kasia
had claimed her knife in the mist before dawn, darting through fog to
the smithy and taking it from its hiding place. She could kill
someone, or herself, before they took her for Ludan.

She had seen the shape of Pharus the stablemaster in the courtyard as
they walked past. He had been leaning forward intently, still
watching her as he had for the past two days. And though his eyes had
been almost hidden in the enveloping greyness she could feel the fury
in him. She had wondered suddenly if he was the oak priest here, the
one who offered the heart of the sacrifice.

Then Vargos-who had simply been one of many servants on the road, a
man who'd slept here so many nights without exchanging a single word
with her-had stopped in front of Pharus and clubbed him upwards
between the legs with his staff.

It was when Pharus collapsed with an appalling inhalation of breath
that Kasia had begun struggling not to show the fierceness of her
joy. With every step they took down the road after that blow-wrapped
in fog as in a blanket, a womb, unable to see ten paces ahead or
behind-she felt herself being reborn, remade.

It was wrong, she knew it was. There was death out here today, and no
sane person ought to be abroad. But death had been summoned and
waiting for her at the inn already, a certainty, and it might or
might not find her out in the mist. Any way you looked at it, a
chance was better than none at all. And she had her little knife.

Vargos was leading them, the Rhodian behind. They walked in silence,
save for the muffled snorting of the mule and the creaking of the
weight on its back. They listened. Ahead and behind. The world had
shrunk nearly to nothingness. They moved, unseeing, in an endless
grey on a straight road the Rhodians had built five hundred years ago
in their Empire's bright glory.

Kasia thought about the artisan behind her. She should be ready to
die for him, given what he'd done. She might be, in fact. But she was
the erimitsu, and thought too much for her own good. So her mother
used to say, and her father, brother, aunts-just about everyone.

She wasn't sure why he hadn't touched her last night. He might prefer
boys, or find her thin, or simply have been tired. Or he might have
been being kind. Kindness was not a thing she knew much about.

He had cried a name in the middle of the night. She'd been dozing
herself, on the pallet, fully clothed, and had startled awake to the
sound of his voice. She couldn't remember the name and he'd never
quite awakened, though she'd waited, listening.

The other thing she didn't understand was how he'd known to run to
the courtyard instead of up the stairs with everyone else when she
screamed. The thief might have escaped, otherwise. It had been black
in the room; she couldn't have identified anyone. Pacing along by the
mule, Kasia worried that puzzle like a dog with a scrap of meat on a
bone and eventually gave it up. She wrapped herself more tightly in
Martinian's cloak. The cold was damp, penetrating. She had no shoes,
but she was used to that. She looked over to left and right, couldn't
see a thing beyond the road, could barely see the road itself beneath
her feet. It would be easy enough, actually, to fall into the
ditches. She knew where the forest was, to their left, knew it would
draw nearer as they continued east.

Around mid-morning-at a guess-they came to one of the small roadside
chapels. Kasia hadn't even seen it until Vargos spoke softly and they
stopped. She peered through the greyness and made out the dark
outline of the tiny chapel. They'd have gone right past had Vargos
not been looking for it. Martinian called a halt. Standing where they
were, listening all the time for sounds in all directions, they
quickly ate chunks of dark bread with some beer, and shared out a
wheel of cheese Vargos had taken from the servants' table. When they
finished, Vargos looked an inquiry at Martinian. The red-bearded man
hesitated, then Kasia saw him nod. He led them into the empty chapel
for the invocation to Jad. Somewhere the sun had risen by now, was
shining. Kasia listened to the two men hurry through the litany, and
joined them for the responses she had been taught: Let there be Light
for our lives, lord, and Light eternal when we come to you.

They went back out into the fog, untied the mule, began walking
again. There was nothing to be seen at all. In front of her the world
ended beyond Vargos. It was like walking in a dream, no passage of
time, no sense of movement, the slabs of the road cold underfoot,
walking away and away.

Kasia's hearing was extremely good. She heard the voices before
either of the men did.

She reached back, touched Martinian on the arm, pointed back down the
road. In the same moment Vargos said, very softly, 'They are coming.
Left, just up here. Cross over.'

There was a short, flat cart bridge spanning the ditch, leading into
the fields. She wouldn't have seen that, either. They took the mule
across, went a short way through the muddy stubble in the dense,
impenetrable greyness, and stopped. Listening. Kasia's heart was
racing now. They had come for her, after all. It was not over. They
ought not to have stopped to pray, she thought.

Let there be Light. There was no light. At all.

Martinian stood on the other side of the mule, his red beard and hair
dulled by the greyness. Kasia saw him hesitate, then slip an old,
heavy sword silently free of the ropes that strapped it to the mule's
side. Vargos watched him. They heard the noises clearly now, voices
approaching from the west, men talking too loudly, to encourage
themselves. Footsteps now on the road-eight men? ten?-muffled but
very near, just across the ditch. Kasia strained to see, prayed she
would not be able to. If the fog lifted for even a moment now they
were lost.

Then she heard growling, and a sharp, urgent bark. They had brought
the dogs. Of course. And they all knew her scent. They were lost.

Kasia laid one hand across the mule's shoulders, felt its
nervousness, willed it to silence. She fumbled for her knife. She had
the power to die before they took her, if no other power at all. Her
brief, mad joy had gone, was lost, swift as a bird into greyness all
around.

She thought of her mother a year ago, alone on a leaf-strewn path
with a small bag of coins in her hands, watching the slave train take
her daughter away. It had been a brilliantly clear day, snow gleaming
on the mountain peaks, birdsong, the leaves red and gold, and
falling.

Crispin considered himself an articulate man and knew he was a
reasonably educated one. He'd had a tutor for many years after his
father died, at his mother's insistence and his uncle's. Had
struggled through the classical authors on rhetoric and ethics, and
the tragic dramas of Arethae, greatest of the city-states in
Trakesia: those thousand-year-old confrontations between men and gods
written in an almost-lost form of the language men now called
Sarantine. Writings from a different world, before stern Rhodias had
shaped its empire and Trakesia's cities had dwindled into islets of
pagan philosophy and then, latterly, not even that, as the Schools
were closed. It was merely another province of Sarantium now,
barbarians in the north of it and beyond its northern borders, and
Arethae was a village huddled under the grandeur of its ruins.

Even more than his education, Crispin thought, fifteen years of
working for and then alongside Martinian of Varena would have honed
the thinking of any man. Gentle as his older partner might be in
manner, Martinian was unrelenting and even joyful in chasing a
dialectic down to its conclusions. Crispin had learned, of necessity,
to give as good as he got and to derive a certain pleasure in
marshalling words to guide premises to resolutions. Colour and light
and form had always been his chief delight in the world, the realm of
his own gift, but he took no little pride in being able to order and
formulate his thoughts.

It was therefore with real distress that he had come to understand
earlier this morning that he wasn't even close to having words to
express how uncomfortable he was out here in the fog. He couldn't
begin to say how passionately he wanted to be anywhere else but here
in Sauradia on an almost-invisible road. It went beyond fear and
awareness of danger: his was the distress of a soul that felt itself
to be in entirely the wrong sort of world.

And that was before they'd heard the men and dogs.

They stood now in the wet earth of a bare field, in silence. He was
aware of the girl beside him, her steadying hand on the mule, keeping
it quiet. Vargos was a shrouded shape a little ahead of them, with
his staff. Crispin, on a thought, turned and carefully worked his
sword free of the ropes on the mule's back. He felt awkward holding
it, a fool, and at the same time genuinely afraid. If anything at all
turned on the swordplay of Caius Crispus of Varena . . . He expected
Linon, on her thong about his neck, to say something caustic, but the
bird had been silent from the moment they awoke this morning.

He had brought the sword at the last moment, an impulse, an
afterthought, and only because it had been his father's and he was
leaving home and going far away. His mother had said nothing, but her
arched eyebrows had been-as ever-infinitely expressive. She'd sent a
servant for the heavy footsoldier's blade Horius had carried when
summoned to militia duty.