The Caravan Road (26 page)

He strode up to the front of the group, stationed at the gateway of the stableyard, and said his last farewell to Grile and the other Ridgeclimb residents who were out to see them off.   Then he accepted the walking staff Grile presented to him as a parting gift, and led the small, unusual caravan out onto the road, bound for the western lands he’d never visited before.

Chapter 15
– The Warm Pools

After two days of travel under bright skies and light breezes, Alec’s caravan had progressed at a steady pace, and begun to adopt a routine in its duties.  Stacha and Racha had assumed the role of cooks, and done a good job, their initial success augmented by the bread and cakes provided by Trevia.  Alec, Bauer, Jasel and Andi had taken on the guard shifts at night.  Blankets were hung around the sides of the bottom of the wagon after they stopped in the evening, and provided a slightly sheltered common sleeping place for everyone except Merchant Grean and the Grazes, who slept inside the wagon.

Alec had not had to administer any warming touches of Healing power to anyone, and the mules behaved admirably.  They had not yet traveled as far as Alec had traveled on his own in the past sojourns to clear out the western road, when he’d displaced the bandits who had wandered too close to Ridgeclimb for his liking.  On the third day, Alec estimated they would finally pass beyond his previous journeys.

The inclusion of so many travelers on the journey chafed at Alec’s sense of urgency.  Had he traveled with just Jasel, he was sure he would have covered half again more distance, and if he had traveled alone he would have gone twice as far.  But he knew he had mysteriously received direction from John Mark, the first time the saint had spoken to him in decades, and so he accepted the situation as it was, and speculated on what purpose each of the others might add to the journey.

Stacha
and Racha provided an opportunity for him to learn about the Twenty Cities, at least to a limited degree.  On their journey to Valeriane they had left their home town of Stanless and passed through two other of the cities before reaching Oolitan, the city on the edge of the mountains, the city that was a vast and virtually lawless marketplace for the traders who traveled the mountain road.  The two girls told him that their city, Stanless, was famous among the Twenty for its artists and poets.  Their family tradition claimed that their own grandmother had been a famous actress in the theater, a great beauty who had been the toast of the town, and the source of their own good looks, they added modestly.  The girls provided something of an attraction for Jasel as well, as the boy often traveled next to them, talking to
Stacha
in particular, as they walked along.

Alec learned that some of the Twenty Cities had armies, while other cities did not, and the bewildering array of treaties and alliances that entangled the metropolises of the region were beyond the girls’ knowledge.  There was a man called the king of the Twenty Cities, they agreed, but he wasn’t much of a presence as far as they could tell.  There were cities with reputations that made them famous for a variety of identifying traits, such as the city known for its gardens, or the one known for its fountains and canals, or the great tree city with houses built in huge ancient trees that grew throughout the city.  There was a city that was mostly caves and tunnels, the one they liked to talk about the most, because the prospect of living underground frightened them so much.

Alec accepted their knowledge for what it was, mostly the rumors and mythology of two girls without much formal education, and he pondered how they would travel, where they would travel if they got to Oolitan without catching up to the ingenairii.  The Twenty Cities were rumored to be great metropolises, covering a large portion of the world.  Allegedly the kidnappers had mentioned lacertii, leading Alec to ponder the question of whether the Twenty Cities could stretch all the way to the boundaries of the lacertii nation, presumably the boundary on the side away from the Pale Mountains and the Dominion.  He idly speculated on the notion that these ingenairii might have come all the way from the Dominion, and traveled across the lacertii lands, then through the Twenty Cities, and finally across the vast mountain wilderness along the caravan road.  He checked his imagination run wild – what could possibly cause them to come over such a long distance to randomly kidnap a teenage girl?

Why would anyone have come to kidnap Kriste for that matter, he asked himself.  She was a pretty girl, but there were many, many pretty girls in the world
–
few of them as isolated as Kriste had been.  Nothing made any sense to Alec about the whole strange adventure, but it was real, and his feet felt the chill of walking through the mountains in winter, testament to the reality of the mystery.

During their third day of the journey the weather changed, as they climbed in altitude among the high mountains.  The wind blew more strongly, and the temperature dropped towards the profoundly cold regions that made everyone bundle up tighter.  By mid-afternoon Alec was circulating among those who walked, giving each of them a brief stream of Healer energy that raised their body temperature and boosted their blood circulation to their extremities, helping to ward off frost bite.  That evening they did without a cooking fire, and Alec set a number of stones beneath the wagon where everyone was to sleep, and used his Light energy to create a brilliant, intense beam of light that generated heat for the stones to adsorb quickly, and then dispense slowly, making the crowded shelter a more comfortable space to sleep.

Grean and the Grazes grew much less vocal after Alec’s use of his ingenaire energies.  They had originally begun their journey before the onset of winter, and traveled without enough heavy coats and blankets to enjoy full protection from the frigid mountain weather.  Their long hiatus spent at Ridgeclimb after Mrs. Grean’s illness had caused them to miss the last caravan that traveled west before the winter, and none had come through Ridgeclimb since, one of the longest periods without a caravan that Alec could recall on the road over the mountains.

The deep chill continued for the next two days, and even after they crested the high pass the road cut through, a place where Alec’s Air energies help blow away over a foot of powdery snow on the road, the deep wintery temperatures remained with them.  Alec began to use his energies on a consistent basis throughout each day and night, protecting the members of the group from the chill that permeated everything around them.

Only Hope was able to see the beauty of the mountains around them, despite the cold she suffered.  Having lived all her life in Warm Springs, the girl had never experienced the full impact of winter, living among the thermal warmth of the community surrounded by
snow-capped mountains.  The day-after-
day exposure to the high altitude temperatures wore down her body, but not her ability to perceive the stark loveliness of the high peaks. 
This is so clean and bright,
she spoke in silent wonder to Alec at least once each day, it seemed, causing Alec to smile, and to take a moment to observe the pristine surroundings they were in.

A week after they left Ridgeclimb, Alec judged that they had probably traveled faster than he had expected for the beginning of their journey, but he fretted that they had done little to gain ground on the group of ingenairii they were pursuing, unless a blizzard or other calamity had bogged their unsuspecting quarry down.  The one thing working in their favor was that the kidnappers would surely not expect pursuit, and would not travel at a pace to run away from anyone; he remembered the arrogance of the Warrior ingenairii on the Hill in Oyster Bay, all but Rubicon’s group, who had grown so prideful and arrogant they had killed the king and unleashed chaos in the Dominion because they thought they could do better.

On the eighth day of their journey, Alec discovered that he had invited disaster by thinking about the success the group had enjoyed up to that point.  As the small caravan rolled down a long, long slope away from a pass, a wall of snow hit them in the face when they rounded a northward curve in the road, and proceeded to blast away at them all the rest of the day.  Their progress slowed to a crawl that day and the next, as Alec continually spent his time sweeping away the snow that piled up on the road in front of them, then paused to work his way back through the group, warming them all and himself.  On the third day of the blizzard Alec realized that he was draining far too much of his energy to continue to move forward.

“Jasel, you and Hope go down that valley,” Alec said at midday, “and see if there’s a sheltered spot we can pull into and rest in until the storm passes by.”  He prayed that they would find some convenient grove of trees that blocked the snow and wind, or even find a cave. 
Hope, you stay in contact with me and let me know if you get into trouble,
he added silently.

He called on Hope every few minutes to confirm that they were making progress.  Finally, she responded in a curt tone after his fifth interrogatory.

It’s cold
,
Alec
, she answered acerbically. 
It feels like we’re walking into the wind.  We haven’t seen anything yet, but there’s a grove of trees Jasel sees that he wants to investigate.  But it’s uphill a little bit.  The wagon and the mules won’t be able to reach it, if it’s a good place, and I don’t think Lady Grean will be able to climb there either,
she worried.

If you can’t get there in ten more minutes, just come back
, Alec answered. 
You’ve been gone for almost an hour already, and if you have to come back
,
your body will be getting pretty cold from such a long journey
.

He waited impatiently, huddled under the wagon with the others, as his warmed stones kept the temperature in their small enclosure above freezing.

Bring everyone up here
, Hope’s voice spoke with relief in his mind, just as he started to worry about the two explorers. 
We made it to the trees, and behind the trees there’s a small valley that is green!

What?  How is it green?
Alec asked, astonished by the grendasteusse’s assertion.

It’s like Warm Springs, I think,
Hope answered. 
We’re looking at it, and there are three pools of water that aren’t frozen, and they have plants growing around them.

How easy is the climb to get there?
Alec asked.

It’s not bad.  There’s a path up the hill
, she told him
.  We just followed the valley from the road straight up here, and then climbed into the trees.

We’ll start to make the trip out there.  Be careful when you go down to look at the springs,
Alec warned.

I will.  Something feels…unhealthy
, she tried to find a word to describe what she sensed.

What do you mean?
Alec asked as he started to crouch and emerge from under the wagon.

I don’t know, just, there’s something here I don’t feel good about.  We’ll be careful.  It’s so warm!
She called. 
It must just be nothing; I don’t see anything wrong here.

“Everyone, we’re going to walk up to a valley where there are thermal springs,” Alec told the other four who sat under the wagon looking at him.  “It will take about an hour to get there.  Pack some food on the mules so that we can plan to spend the night at least, maybe longer if the weather doesn’t change.  Start going up the valley while I help get the Grazes and Mrs. Grean,” he directed.

We’re on our way
, Alec told Hope. 
Let me know if anything goes wrong.

I’m going swimming!
Hope called out gleefully.

Alec’s conversation with the merchant and her companions was a long one.

“We can’t just leave our wagon here and walk away,” Mrs. Grean said stoutly.  “What if it gets robbed while we’re gone?  Everything I own is tied up in this venture.”

“There hasn’t been another traveler visible on the road since we left Ridgeclimb,” Alec answered.  “And no one is going to be out in this kind of weather.  Your wagon will be safe.”

“It’s too cold to leave the wagon,” Mr. Graze argued.  “We’ll freeze on the way.  How do you know these hot springs really exist, anyway?”

“We know,” Alec said flatly.  “I am able to communicate with Hope, the girl,” he clarified, not sure the merchant group had paid attention to the names of the others in the caravan.

“How do you communicate with the girl?  That seems preposterous,” Grean argued.

“After seeing me do all the things I’ve done during this storm, do you doubt that I can communicate with Hope?” Alec asked, in a deep and disapproving voice.

“You are going to freeze if you stay here, because there won’t be heat coming up from below into the wagon,” Alec urged.  “You need to come with us.  Your wagon is going to be safe,” and eventually he cajoled them into leaving the wagon.

The rest of the group had already gone, taking the mules with them.  Alec unhitched the oxen at the front of the wagon and took them along the path as well, creating a shield of air in front so that the beasts could walk along the valley bottom with relative, though slow, ease.  He continually added touches of healing warmth to his three companions, and finally lofted Mrs. Grean up on top of one of the oxen to speed up the cumbersome trip.  Three hours after receiving Hope’s report about the warm springs, Alec and the merchant group arrived at the base of the hill that rose to a dark patch of fir trees sitting above the floor of the valley.