Karavans

by Jennifer Roberson

  The hireling’s massive shoulders hitched. “I can poke around.”

  “Good. Do so. Or Eccul will have my clients.” Hezriah sighed, aware of a sense of oppression not entirely due to the heat and close confines; there were plenty of other bonedealers who could take over when he failed. Eccul was merely one of many, if more annoying than most. “Any Shoia in danger of dying?”

  Merriq shrugged. “Not many in town to die. Not that they ever do.”

  Hezriah scowled. “There’s Rhuan. Disgustingly arrogant young man. Surely someone will kill him soon.” He brightened. “Or possibly Brodhi? I saw him earlier, come in from the road. He was heading for Mikal’s tent. Do you think someone might kill him there? Brodhi isn’t well liked. In fact, I don’t know of anyone who likes him.”

  “No one will kill Rhuan or Brodhi,” Merriq declared. “Shoia can’t die.”

  “Oh, certainly they can die.” Ludicrous legends annoyed Hezriah. “You simply have to kill them seven times.”

  “In a row?” The hireling snapped his thick fingers: click-click-click. “Like this? Seven times?”

  “How should I know? I’ve never seen a Shoia die even once.” The bonedealer slapped at another bite, this one upon his neck. “Cursed horseflies!” He wouldn’t mind them so much if there were a divination denomination that used dead horseflies for augury, because then there would be profit in his misery, but he was aware of none. Perhaps I should invent one, like the charlatans do. “Go on, then. See what you can bring me. Find Arbath—probably drowning himself at Mikal’s or spending himself in a whore—and take him with you. Two of you will serve better than one. Just haul the body out to the anthills as soon as possible, so the ants can do their work.” Thinking, he chewed at his lip as Merriq turned away, then tacked on the ritual promise: “find me a dead Shoia, and I’ll triple your wages.”

  The hireling, halfway through the tent flap, glanced back over his shoulder. Light eyes above the gray-threaded reddish beard were grimly amused. “I find me a dead Shoia in town, and you can sell my bones for the Kantica. Shoia look after their own.” He paused, grimacing. “If any bones are left.”

  The tent flap settled behind Merriq’s departure with a melodic rattle as strings of charms were disturbed. Bird bones. Vermin bones. Rabbit. The skull of a cat. Suspended on thin, knotted twine interspersed with brass, colored glass, and clay beads, hollowed bones pierced to let the wind through. Ordinarily they made a pleasant sound to ears familiar with the song. But just now the noise reminded Hezriah that if more bodies were not to be found soon, he’d likely lose a customer or two.

  “Eccul will be digging them up from the graveyard, despite the punishment for it, and cut out the rest of us entirely,” the bonedealer muttered; Eccul, after all, had no ethics. He took the easy way, rites and permissions be damned.

  Shaking his head, Hezriah squatted on black canvas before the flat sheet of heavy green-gray stone—the bonedealer’s anvil, it was called in the trade—and returned to the work interrupted by Merriq’s arrival. He took up the hammer—a smooth, round, purplish river rock bound by leather onto a sweat-stained wooden haft—and began smashing the heavy thigh bone to pieces. Chips and splinters would show up against the black fabric flooring, so the attrition rate was negligible.

  “Horse will do for now,” he murmured, smashing away, “but I’d rather have a Shoia.”

  Shoia bones were a bonedealer’s lottery. They made the best auguries for the Kantic diviners, who found omens and portents in the bones themselves prior to burning, and in the ash after. But Shoia bones generally remained housed in Shoia flesh, which was, predictably, not particularly amenable to dying for anyone’s sake, let alone a bonedealer’s. Or even a Kantic diviner’s.

  There was Rhuan. And there was Brodhi. Hezriah didn’t personally know of other Shoia, here in the settlement or anywhere in the world. And both were currently in residence, though as likely to leave soon. But Merriq was right. No citizen who knew what they were would attempt to kill either Rhuan or Brodhi. Not even Eccul, who had no ethics; Eccul dug up bones, but did not stoop to murder.

  Hezriah glowered. Yet.

  No, only a stranger might attempt to kill a Shoia, and even if it was true they could die—after six other deaths first—no one knew how to keep count.

  Except probably the Shoia themselves, who very likely wouldn’t tell.

  Hezriah wondered briefly if Brodhi knew how many deaths Rhuan had left, or if Rhuan knew Brodhi’s count. He’d heard a story that Rhuan had been killed here in the settlement before he hired on as a guide for Jorda’s karavan, but no one knew if it was true. At any rate, neither Rhuan nor Brodhi showed any signs of dropping over dead on their own.

  “Cursed Shoia,” Hezriah muttered, wishing them to Alisanos along with the worthless horseflies. “The world would be an easier place if they died just once, like everyone else!”

  But Shoia did not die just once. And there were numerous tales of how various murdered Shoia, rousing back into life, avenged themselves on their killers.

  “Seven times. Seven times dead, dead for good. Then I could have the bones.”

  The bones, and everything else. He could dole out the body to various divination denominations. Teeth, hair, nails, certainly the entrails. Plus other bits and pieces.

  But Hezriah would be a very wealthy man even if all he got were the bones. The practitioners of the Kantica were supremely generous when it came to buying Shoia bones. Everything else was gravy.

  BRODHI WAS AWARE of others eyeing him as he strode into the ale tent. It never stopped, the watching. Oh, those grown accustomed to his race, to his presence among them, had learned to mitigate to some degree the overt fear, the perverse fascination, but none of them was ever entirely successful at obscuring their fervid interest. They wondered, he knew, how Shoia magic manifested, how it worked, and what it felt like.

  In truth, magic didn’t feel like anything in particular. It resided within his bones and blood the way breath lived in his lungs, the way his heart beat: steadily, unceasing, wholly unremarkable. It was, nothing more.

  But they were human, and thus, like children, attracted by that which they could not understand. By that denied their kind.

  “Brodhi! The usual?”

  He glanced across at Mikal in his traditional spot behind a plank of adze-planed and waxed wood resting atop two ale barrels. The human was big, broad, missing an eye and two of his teeth, but his comfortable equanimity was always present. His opinion of his customers was shaped only by behavior, not by race. Or the presence of magic.

  “Yes.” It was close inside the faded green tent, redolent of unwashed humans, of ale, of dirt, of redleaf chewed and spat. With due deliberation, unrushed by his audience, Brodhi unhooked the heavy silver badge at his right shoulder—a leaping horse surrounded by a flattened circle—and unslung the rich blue mantle of his rank. Summerweight wool, lacking the heft of winter-weave. He tossed it across the nearest unoccupied table, though only an instant before the table had hosted two men. But they had, of course, vacated immediately upon recognizing him—or what he was, if not who. Men, mortals, either hated or feared his kind. Occasionally both. Either response resulted in a swift retreat from Brodhi’s immediate vicinity, lest he be minded to protest their presence.

  Or, he reflected, recalling his kinsman’s comment, perhaps they merely disliked him. Trust Rhuan to know; humans were his hobby.

  Brodhi never protested when it came to humans. They were what they were; dealing with mortals required no small amount of patience, but he had learned that even before arriving in Sancorra province.

  Though Rhuan, upon more than one occasion, declared Brodhi claimed no such thing as patience. But then Rhuan was nothing even approximating something—or someone—to be trusted in his opinions, even if he was close kin.

  By the time Brodhi reached the crude bar, threading his way through the spittle-fouled dirt aisle amid low mutters of protective invocations, Mikal had poured his ale. Foam
mustached the rim of the dented pewter tankard, then spilled over in a lazy, tendriled beard. Brodhi took the tankard, comfortably cool in his hand, tested the foam with his tongue, inhaled the heavy, bittersweet tang, then drank down several deep swallows. A common beverage, human ale, but immensely satisfying in its own way after days spent on the road breathing dust more often than air. Ale was his one willing concession to human habits and affectations.

  At least of those concessions and compromises that his service did not require.

  “News?” Mikal inquired in his deep, slow voice, wiping down the plank with a tattered clump of burlap. Big, divoted knuckles sprouted wiry strands of black hair.

  Brodhi took another generous draft, then employed a very human gesture to rid his upper lip of foam: He backhanded it away. “News,” he agreed, and everyone in the tent fell instantly silent. They had been specifically waiting for what he had to say.

  News. It was the coinage with which silver-badged and blue-mantled couriers purchased ale and food on the roads through the provinces. Though his myriad tightly woven braids were weighted with the flat, hammered brass and silver rings that were the currency of the world, they remained threaded on thin leather thongs plaited, Shoiastyle, along with beads, into his waist-length copper-colored hair. For him and his like, who was Rhuan, the rings were ornaments, not coinage.

  “Well?” Mikal asked, dark brows drawing together.

  Brodhi pitched his clear voice, trained to override even the raucousness of drunken revelers, though none here reveled. They waited.

  “The war,” he said, “is over.”

  Tension sprang up among the humans. There came a stirring in the tent. He heard a derisive mutter that mentioned old news not worth hearing; someone else hissed the man into silence.

  Brodhi merely glanced over the tent’s occupants. “The war is over.” This time with a slight emphasis on the final word. “Sancorra of Sancorra has been executed.”

  Save for sharp, startled inhalations, all remained silent and still. Indeed, this news was unquestionably fresh. Fresh as the blood of the province’s former lord. Brodhi himself had seen it spurt but a matter of weeks before. Senior couriers were required to witness all such executions, so their news was accurate and untainted by rumor.

  “Therefore the Hecari of Hecari says,” —he paused and deftly assumed the remembered inflections— “‘If you wish to make war with me, you shall have to find a new lord. The one you had now lacks a head, and is therefore unable to help.’”

  Silence was palpable a moment, then was replaced by the faint, familiar sounds of men reaching for and chanting over protective amulets. Brodhi smiled derisively as he heard the chiming, the clicking, the rattling, the rustling, the muted whispers of renewed invocations. He wore no such thing, trusting to himself rather than to the various false godlings humans worshipped.

  Brodhi tossed back the rest of the ale, then set the mug down with the soft thunk of metal on wood. Even Mikal was stunned.

  Sancorra of Sancorra has been executed.

  He looked upon them even as they looked at him. Expressions were slack with shock, or twisted by worry. Grimy hands clutched amulets and charms strung around throats, wrists, waists. He noted how lips moved, mouthing prayers and petitions. In the doorway, suspended from the ridge pole, a string of bones and beads and feathers stirred in the faintest of breezes. Mikal’s own charm against the hazards of the world.

  This time Brodhi spoke for himself, not in trained courier cadences. “You knew he would do it. It was war, and no one is better at waging it than the Hecari of Hecari, who has, with his armies, already overrun three provinces. Only a fool—or a dreamer—could believe it would fall out otherwise. Sancorra was fortunate to have lasted as long as he did.” He eyed those present, marking the stolid resistance of humankind as their faces closed against his words. He did not take pity on men such as these, mortal and unimportant, but he did offer simple intelligence. “Accept defeat,” he advised, “and you may survive. The Hecari of Hecari is neither a patient man, nor a merciful one.”

  It was as clear a warning as he would ever give. It was suggestion. Simple observation. They would take it as they would, as they were inclined, depending on their substance. But of one thing Brodhi was certain: they would blame him. It was illogical to do so, and wholly bootless; as courier he was sworn to neutrality, trained to divulge no opinion while on the road. But he brought word, and often bad. He was the messenger, and thus proxy for whomever the others disliked, distrusted, feared.

  He was in from the road now, the message delivered. He could now state his own opinion. This settlement, this haphazard assemblage of flimsy oilcloth structures that existed on no maps because it was too new and undoubtedly impermanent, was his final stopping place. Now the province knew.

  Sancorra of Sancorra was executed. The war was truly over.

  The Hecari warlord, called Hecari of Hecari in the fashion of the provinces, was a ruthless butcher, a man proved capable of any atrocity. His victory here was complete, as it had been in the other three neighboring provinces. But while Sancorra the man had lived, even in defeat, hope for Sancorra the province survived. Now hope would die. It made lordship easier for the man who had wrested it—and a province—from a popular hero.

  A hero without a head.

  Because Brodhi knew the humans needed to speak, to curse, to threaten, to complain, to argue over which of their myriad gods might yet save them—and that they would do none of those things in his presence—he calmly collected his courier’s mantle and exited the tent.

  They were all of them fools. Any man was, who put his trust in a lord rather than in himself. Better to trust no one at all, unless he be enemy. Then one knew where one stood.

  But humans were weak. Were fallible. Humans dreamed

  Chapter 2

  THE SETTLEMENT, SUCH as it was, existed because there was water, and also because it was temperate in climate, provided lush pasturage for a thousand head of livestock, and groves of trees for wood and shade. It existed also because the people of a province had arrived to depart, and departure required an appropriate gathering place. A place of farewell. A place of ending as well as of beginning.

  Tents. Hundreds of them, oilcloth and wooden poles, spread across the land like a creeping tide. Dyed every color and pattern imaginable: solid, patchwork, peak-roofed, sun-faded, rain-streaked, poked with holes or intact; the door and ridge poles painted or carved with protective glyphs.

  Audrun, sitting inside a high-sided wagon with her tow-headed, blue-eyed children—they took after their father, not her, with her dark gold hair and brown eyes—supposed once there had been but a few tents, and likely lined up in simple straight rows along either side of the road, just up from the modest river attended by groves of trees. But time and other arrivals had expanded those rows into a flood tide, blots of colored oilcloth interconnected by tangled, skeinlike canyons of foot-packed pathways. People thronged those pathways, weaving in and out and around the tents.

  It was a true settlement, but impermanent. People remained because other people departed. It was a gathering place of refugees, both ending and beginning. The old life discarded. The new life embraced.

  Or the new life dreaded.

  Davyn had called it the “jumping-off point.” Here, her husband said, was where everyone jumped off the main road through Sancorra province to the individual routes that would lead to their destinations.

  Strange, Audrun reflected, shoving a fallen strand of hair behind an ear, that the act of departing a war-divided land united it. Surely the gods would take pity on them all and decide to keep the people whole; could they not see what it was doing to Sancorra province?

  But the gods had not spoken of such things; the gods had, in fact, suggested by silence, by lack of intercession, by speaking to no diviners of any denomination despite thousands of rituals and rites over the months of war, that this was what they intended. Even the diviners had been baffled, for their own
auguries predicted victory.

  But there was no victory, save for the enemy. Thus the province had been sundered. Sancorra of Sancorra surrendered his holdings—and his life. The enemy held the province now, and many had determined in rage, in sorrow, in loss, in bitter admission of defeat, that they could not bear to see worse done to their land than had been done already. It was best to go.

  Just—go. Elsewhere. Away. Where the enemy did not rule. Where the enemy did not take their pasture lands, their fields, their crops, their gardens, their wells; where the enemy did not overprice such things as a family had to have, so that they could afford no better than the meanest portions of what they themselves had grown; where the enemy did not dictate how they should serve the warlordcum-king, be it by taxing them into starvation or taking their sons for its armies. Nothing remained for them in this homeland. It was time they found another.

  But oh, it was difficult to leave! More difficult than she had dreamed. Audrun felt the roots of her heart being torn out one by one, ripped from fertile ground until waste was left in its place, a rupture of the soul. She did not hate, she did not wish vengeance, she did not curse the enemy with every breath, did not buy the time of diviners to find an answer for why her people had lost. But she acknowledged the terrible pain of the ending of what she knew, of what she had known all of her life. What she had expected to know forever.

  Moreover, had she believed it possible that they would leave their home, she would have taken the herbs to keep herself from conceiving. Four children already, and now another in her womb. No, she would have done better to take the herbs, no matter what the moonmother might have said, though it pained her to consider that she would have missed seeing the tiny face, missed counting the delicate fingers and toes.

  And yet it was the unborn child that had caused her husband to decide the time had come to leave, to depart the lands she and Davyn had tilled into bounty, the house he had built into comfort, the room where all of their children had been conceived and born. Tangible things, precious things, but altogether impossible to uproot and pack away for the journey. Only such things as clothing, utensils, tools, the makings of a new life could accompany them.