The Luck Of The Wheels (24 page)

'What do you want from us?' Ki asked quietly.

No one answered her. They were already moving around the wagon. She heard the side door open, felt the weight of an intruder rock the wagon. 'Just follow the plan,' one of them reminded the others. 'Everyone knows his own part.'

'Rebels!' Goat breathed.

'Quiet!' the leader barked again. At least Ki assumed he was the leader. He was the only one who had spoken, and he held the knife at her throat. In their flowing brown robes and hoods, they all looked remarkably alike. His shapeless hood had a slash for his eyes. She saw their glitter, but could not tell what color they were, nor anything else about the man. 'Climb down,' he ordered gruffly. And put your hands in front of you.'

'Take whatever you wish and leave us in peace,' Ki suggested. 'We won't report this to anyone. We were just leaving this area anyway. There will be no trouble from us. We have business that takes us far from here.'

'Your business has become our business,' the man said sternly. The knife pressed more firmly, and she became aware of the figure holding a blade to Goat's throat. She rose carefully, clambered down in the shadow of the knife-wielder. They walked Goat over to stand beside her. 'Clasp your hands together, palm to palm,' the leader directed.

Ki glanced at Goat. The boy's trembling hands were clutched before him. His face was drawn. She copied him, joining her hands together and holding them in front of her. The hooded man bound her wrists with a strange, flat rope that only tightened when she flexed her muscles against it. Goat was already bound. Behind her someone mounted the box of her wagon, took up the reins. Then a bag came down over her head.

The sack smelled of grain, and she nearly choked on loose chaff that shook free from its rough weave. The hands that seized her elbows were not rough, but neither were they gentle. She was hurried forward, sent stumbling through the dry grass and rocks for a good distance. She heard Goat cry out, the sound cut off short. 'Goat?' she called out, and a hand slapped hard against her belly, making her lose her breath. She was pushed up against a large, warm animal.

'Mount it,' an unfamiliar voice ordered, and as she struggled to do so, someone large caught her around the waist and heaved her up on the animal. The only harness she could find was a rough blanket strapped over the horse's back. She gripped the edge of it, wrapped her legs around its barrel body. It started forward without any warning and she lurched backward, nearly losing her seat. 'Hold on,' a gruff voice warned her, and then the beast was jerked into a jolting canter, and her ears were filled with the sound of moving horses around her. If she slipped down, she'd be trampled.

Blind and powerless to control her fate, she was carried forward in a nightmare journey. She gripped the edge of the horse's blanket tightly, using every bit of strength in her legs to keep a firm seat. She drew a deep breath, imposed an artificial order on her mind. One thing at a time, she decided. These horses couldn't keep up this pace for long. They were farm plugs, not warriors' horses. So they couldn't be going far. Once they arrived, she might have an opportunity to free Goat and herself. It was the best plan she could think of now. She gripped the thought and hung onto it, pushing all else out of her mind.

'What is this place?' Goat's voice was eerie in the darkness.

'I don't know. Some kind of a root cellar, maybe?' Ki put her hand on the boy's shoulder and patted it. She could feel him vibrating with nervousness.

She wondered what time of day it was. She had no idea of how long they had ridden, blinded and bound, nor how long it had taken her to work free of her bonds and get the bag off her head. It hadn't helped much. It was as dark without the sack as it had been with it.

The smell of earth was all around them. She had already discovered that the ceiling of rough slab wood was but a handspan over her head, and that to touch it brought down a shower of soil. The chamber itself was small, no longer than a tall man lying down, and about half again as wide. Her jaws ached from chewing the rope from her wrists, and her wrists were chafed raw where the bonds had worked against them.

'I'm thirsty,' Goat said suddenly.

'Not much we can do about it,' Ki observed quietly. She was groping her way along the wall. There had to be a door, but if there was, she kept missing it. All her hands found were earth and occasional tangles of roots. Once she stepped in something that might have been vegetables gone bad. She certainly hoped that's what it was. And around the fourth corner and down that wall again. And here it was at last. The door. She had missed it before because she hadn't remembered how her head had been forced down before she'd been pushed in. It was a very short door, no more than waist high. She groped for a handle, found none, pushed on it. It didn't yield at all. Probably barred from the outside. She sat down slowly, put her back against it.

'What are they going to do with us?' Goat sounded even shakier than he had earlier.

'I don't know.' Ki pulled her knees up, rested her forehead against them. 'I don't even know what they want with us. If they just wanted to rob us, they should have taken the wagon and gone. Or killed us then. What are they keeping us locked up for? I can't think of any way we're useful to them.'

Goat had been coming toward the sound of her voice. Now he stumbled over her feet, crying out as he fell.

'Careful,' Ki warned him, and heard him scrabble up and crawl over to sit beside her. His shoulder pressed against hers. He was shaking. 'Why are you so afraid?' she asked him quietly.

'I could feel it ... how much they hated me. When they were tying me up and putting me on that horse.'

'Maybe you were just imagining it,' Ki said comfortingly. 'They seemed efficient to me. Like they were moving us somewhere, but didn't particularly want to hurt us.'

'You still don't get it, do you?' Goat asked her. 'Ki, I can feel what other people feel. The pity you feel for me now, the hatred those people felt for me. The way the Brurjan felt as he was dying. That was the awfulest it's ever been. Because Brurjans are so open anyway, like animals, it's like they're always shouting at you what they think of you ...' His voice trailed off. When he spoke again, it seemed to come from a great distance. 'When I was little, I didn't understand. I couldn't separate what I felt from what other people around me felt. People acted one way when they really felt a different way. I felt everything, for everyone ... and then when I got older and more sensitive, it was even worse. At night. When everyone was dreaming into my mind. When people sleep, they drop all the guards, most of them. They just yell it all out, over and over again. We moved away from town after it got so bad, to where I didn't hear as much of it. But some always got through. Dreams are strange. I don't understand how people think of them, how they make them up. I've never been able to dream that way ... not to make up one of my own. The closest I could do was to find ones that I liked, to listen to them the closest and try to ignore the others.'

Goat had stopped talking. Ki had no idea how long the silence had lasted. Or was it silence, for Goat? Was it ever silent? Not a dream-thief, not an eavesdropper. An unwilling participant in others' lives, like a guest forced to listen to his hosts' quarreling through a thin wall. She tried to imagine a small child sharing his parents' emotions, an adolescent subjected to the unfiltered imaginings of the village's night minds.

'Don't feel guilty, please,' Goat begged. 'Guilty is the worst. When people are kind to me because they think they've hurt me. I wish ...'

'What?' Ki asked.

'No.' Goat spoke the word slowly. 'If you ask someone to feel a certain way, and they do it because you've asked them to, it's not the same thing as if they just did it because they wanted to. Do you know what I mean?'

'I think I do. If you have to say to someone, "Please kiss me," there's not much point to the kiss.'

To have someone be kind to you because they liked you, Ki thought to herself. Is that so much for a boy to long for? She leaned back against the door. And waited.

Goat broke the silence with a whisper. 'Someone's coming.'

Ki strained her ears but heard nothing. But of course Goat had not heard footsteps, but had felt the approach of the other person's emotions. 'Someone friendly?' she asked hopefully.

'No.' Goat's voice pinched with anxiety. 'Someone very wary. Don't be too near the door. She's frightened enough to hurt you if you startle her.'

Ki didn't argue. Daylight was a blinding whiteness after the eternal dark of the root cellar. Ki's eyes had no time to adjust. The sack of food was tossed in, the door slammed again before she had any chance to see what was outside. Her jailor had been no more than a dark silhouette against the brightness. She listened to the bars of the door being dropped into place. One, two, three of them. 'They aren't taking any chances on us getting out,' Ki grumbled to herself.

'They're afraid,' Goat explained needlessly. 'Mostly of me. They hate me, too. For you, this one felt guilt ...' His voice trailed off uneasily. He was holding something back.

'You can hear their exact thoughts?' Ki asked as she rummaged in the sack.

'No. More their feelings.' He paused. When he continued, strain made his voice higher. 'I felt... they were thinking of killing us.'

Ki came to her feet. 'Are they coming back now?' Fear brought her back to life. The boy's voice was so certain of the threat.

'No. They're both gone now. I think they're afraid to stay too close to the cellar. For fear of what I might be able to do, I suppose.' He paused thoughtfully. 'They must be riding horses, to get so far away so fast. I can't feel anyone at all out there now. Only you.'

'Oh.' Ki wondered what impressions he was receiving from her, then buried the thought. There were some apples in the sack, a skin of water, some round meal cakes. That was all. Apple?' she asked, proffering it to the darkness, and felt Goat take it from her hand.

She heard him bite into it, chew, then ask, with his mouth full, 'I've been so hungry. How long do you think we've been here?'

'I don't know,' she answered softly. She wasn't really concerned with how long they had been here so much as how much longer they would be kept here. Already the small room stank of sweat and wastes. And why were they being kept at all?

'About what you felt... just now. Are you certain of it? Maybe they were just...' She couldn't think of what else they might be thinking.

'I've felt it before,' Goat said. The pause grew very long. 'It's the same as what Kellich felt for Vandien. What Satatavi felt for us. It's like a way of classifying how much to feel. Animal. Rock. Tree. Soon-to-be-dead-person. They didn't want to feel too much about us.'

Ki pressed the apple she still held against her cheek, felt the coolness of its smooth skin. She bit into it, chewed methodically. Soon-to-be-dead-person. She was not hungry, but if they had given them food, then she probably should be hungry. What was it Vandien was always saying? 'If there's nothing else you can do in a tight spot, it's always a good idea to eat or sleep. To be full and rested for when there is something you can do.' But there wasn't going to be anything she could do, and he wasn't going to turn up to help her. Not this time.

Vandien. She tried to call up his face against the darkness, but only got the image of him as she had last seen him, thrown over the horse like a meal sack, the blood drops falling swift from his hair. He was dead. She knew it. She eased down to her haunches, her back braced against the sandy wall. She forced herself to think about it, very carefully. He was dead. She was soon-to-be-dead. Then everything would be gone, not even someone left to remember it. There would be no touch of his hand on her face, no warm breath on her shoulder in the darkness. No deep voice spinning long tales in the evening by the fire. His scent would fade from the coverlets on her bed. It wouldn't matter. Strangers would use those blankets, and never think of the way his lips moved against hers. Gone and ended.

'Ki?' Goat asked cautiously.

She lifted her head. 'What?'

'I ... I couldn't feel you. It was like you were ... gone. Like the Brurjan.'

'No. I'm here.' But she felt the truth of his words. She was gone. Her life hung limp as an empty sail. She tried to convince herself that there were important things to be done. She and Goat must escape, she must regain her horses and wagon, she must get the boy to his uncle in Villena. 'And then what?' some sardonic voice within her kept asking. And then resume her life, she told herself. Find a cargo, deliver it, get paid. Why? So she could eat, rest and find a cargo, deliver it and get paid. The triviality of it overwhelmed her. A purposeless round, like a song sung endlessly over and over. Until it stopped. It had no more meaning than sitting in a root cellar and waiting for someone to kill you. But sitting in the cellar was easier. Until it stopped. Just as Vandien had stopped.

It was not, she suddenly knew, that Vandien was gone from her life. She could have lived with that, if he had ridden away, let his life lead him elsewhere. She did not love him that selfishly. She would have known that somewhere he existed, that somewhere he continued. That was all she wanted of the world. To know that somewhere in it, he existed. He didn't have to be hers, had never really been hers at all. But even when he had not been by her side, she had known that he was somewhere, and it had pleased her to think of him riding through the rain on his horse somewhere, or telling tales by an inn-fire, even standing on a hillside looking over the lands that should have been his but were not. He had ended. Nothing more of him, ever. His line had ended with him; no child carried his precious names. He was gone as completely as the song is gone when the singer closes his mouth. She suddenly comprehended the void.

She sank completely to the floor, pressed her eyes to her knees. She opened her mouth, tried to breathe but could not. Grief and anger filled her. The truth rounded on her. Damn it, it did matter! He'd left her, damn him. Died and left her howling in the dark for him. The fabric of her life was torn across, and she hated herself for ever letting Vandien became a part of it. She'd always known it would come to this. Her eyes burned but tears would not come.