Karavans

by Jennifer Roberson

  “The pain?”

  “Gone,” he repeated. He levered himself up onto one meaty elbow, looking at her in something akin to wariness. “It just—stopped.”

  “Thank the Mother for that!”

  Mikal pulled from the neckline of his tunic the charms and fetishes on a leather thong. He closed his broad hand around it. “I do thank the Mother.” He pushed himself up into a sitting position. He spat out grit from his mouth, taking care not to do it in Bethid’s direction. He blinked at her. “Your face is filthy.”

  “Probably no worse than yours.” But Bethid was too relieved to speak tartly. She grabbed the hem of her long tunic, turned it inside out and bent to wipe at her face. “I suspect a dunking in the river would be more effective,” she muttered. “That is, if the river still exists.” She raised her head, looking around. “It looks the same,” she observed. “The world. Soggy and wind-scoured, but the same.” She squinted up at the sun, visible again now that the clouds and blinding dust were gone. “Doesn’t it?”

  Mikal hung his head and brushed at wet, dark hair, trying to rid himself of sand. As Bethid spoke, he looked up, attempting to peel the grit from his gummy eyelashes. “No trees,” he said, blinking his one eye as it watered. The tear carved a route through the dust on his face. “The grove is down. The karavaner grove.”

  “Are you sure?” She twisted to look. “I thought we’d gone far enough beyond that we couldn’t see it anyway.”

  Mikal readjusted the patch over his missing eye. “We didn’t get that far.”

  Bethid stood up. She saw what he meant. Indeed, the grove of wide-crowned trees that had become the place where all the karavans gathered was down. She saw twisted, broken roots rising high against a horizon that had always been clothed by trees at the tent settlement. The leaves that soon would dry and die were wind-tattered, many stripped away so that the branches were naked. Tall prairie grass had been blown flat, forming an untidy rug of stems over mud.

  “We’re still here.” Relief mixed with astonishment. “We’re safe.” She turned back to Mikal. “We’re still here!”

  Mikal nodded. “The Shoia was right.”

  She had left. And she had lived. She owed the Shoia her thanks.

  Bethid felt at her ears. The wind had not torn the big brass hoops free of her lobes. Then she put both hands into her short-cropped fair hair and scrubbed as hard as she could, attempting to rid it of sand and soil. But it was wet, and debris clung to the strands.

  It occurred to her then to think of Brodhi, of Timmon and Alorn. They too had been in the tent settlement as the wind roared down, as the heated rain fell from blackened skies torn apart by crimson lightning. Were they safe? Were they whole?

  Bethid turned back. “We have to go. Mikal, we have to go back to the settlement. They’ll need our help.” She paused, remembering laggardly that the ale-keep had been on the verge of death. “I’m sorry—you need to rest, of course.”

  He shook his head, pushing to his feet with a grunt. He seemed steady enough. His color remained good. “I’m well, Beth …” He broke off as he saw her expression. “What is it?”

  She frowned, squinting eastward beyond him. “Who is— oh! It’s Jorda and Ilona!” She spared a glance for Mikal, but his color reassured her. Bethid broke into a swift jog.

  Eastward again. But this time toward people she knew. People she valued.

  DAVYN WAS NUMB from the wind, the pounding of the rain, the ear-shattering thunder. When all ceased, it took him long moments to realize it. He lay still, face down, arms wrapped over his head where his fingers interlaced. He kept his eyes closed tightly. He waited, anticipating the rise of the wind again, the burning of the rain, the crashing of thunder on the tail of crimson lightning. But nothing rose. No sound, no wind, no rain.

  There was no part of his body that did not ache. Carefully he loosened his fingers, then scraped his arms across sodden grass. He doubled them, pressed his palms flat, and pushed.

  All of him was wet. Hair was plastered against his skull, dripping into his face. Gasping, he pulled knees under himself. As he rose up, as he made his battered body do his bidding, he realized the skies were clear again. Gone were the boiling clouds turgid with rain. The sun shone as usual. But he had only to look out across the prairie to see miles of flattened grass. The soil ran with rain that could not be taken into already-soaked earth.

  “Aud—” But his voice cracked. Davyn swallowed, moistened his lips, and shouted his wife’s name.

  There came no answer. In a haphazard upward lunge, Davyn pushed to his feet. He caught his balance with care. Rainwater ran from his scalp, trickled down his temples. The clothing Audrun had woven him with habitual care was heavy with the weight of water.

  “Audrun!”

  Still, there came no answer. The skies were blue, the day was bright as if nothing untoward had occurred, but one need only look at the surface of the earth to see the storm’s effects. Davyn slicked wet hair out of his face, slowly turning to look in every direction. And again, repeating it, when his eyes found nothing.

  “Gillan! Ellica!”

  But he was alone upon the land.

  He cried out in pain, the inner pain that tightened a throat and weighted a chest. He found himself mumbling a litany of phrases, of prayers, of promises he meant entire if they resulted in his wife’s well-being and the safety of his children.

  All of them, gone.

  “Audrunnnnn …”

  Mother of Moons, don’t let him be left alone.

  The wagon. He would go to the wagon. It was where his wife and oldest children would go to find one another. Then they all of them could search for the youngest.

  For Torvic, and Megritte. Torvic and sweet Meggie.

  He knew the direction. He knew his way. He prayed his family did.

  But when he found the wagon, he saw that they had not.

  Davyn fell to his knees, his throat clogged with pain. Arms hung slackly at his sides; his head was tipped back, so that the light of the sun warmed his face. Dried away the rain, but not the tears.

  Next to the remains of the storm-stripped wagon, both oxen lay dead, skin scoured away by the winds of Alisanos.

  Chapter 49

  “I LONA!”

  Her eyes snapped open. Some four body-lengths away, pushing himself into a sitting position, was Jorda. His wet homespun tunic was plastered against his broad chest and shoulders, and he stared at her, startled and disbelieving, even as she returned his look. Then his expression, muddied into a mask of grime and rainwater, changed to joy and relief, white teeth parting his beard. Jorda was a big man, but he managed to make his body scramble to her side.

  His green eyes were bright. “Thank the Mother. Are you all right?”

  Ilona could not contain the laughter that bubbled up. It was an unexpected sound, birthed by emotions she only now could release. “Yes,” she said, grinning, “I’m all right.” She held her right hand out and saw the familiar olive tint of her flesh. She remained herself.

  His gaze went to her injured arm. “Broken?”

  She grimaced. “I think so.”

  “Then you’re not all right.”

  “Oh yes,” she said, “I am. Most certainly. I’m alive.” He knelt beside her, concern etching deeper lines into his weary, dirt-grimed face. “I’m alive,” she repeated, giddy with relief. The memory of the lumbering draft horse they rode was clear, as was the fall both of them had taken when it stumbled and went down. Jorda had an impressive knot on his forehead. The horse was nowhere to be seen.

  He noted the line of her gaze and touched the prodigious lump with thick fingers. “The fall stunned me, or I would have searched for you.”

  She had called for him again and again, fearing for his life. But the storm had hidden all from her except its violence.

  Ilona looked around. “Is this—safe? Are we still in Sancorra?”

  Blue skies, now; a sun where it should be; scents she recognized; the stillness of dawn, t
hough it was afternoon. Dust blown by the wind had turned the weave of her clothes the color of mud. Discolored droplets slid sullenly down the wet, wind-tangled ringlets of her hair.

  This couldn’t be Alisanos. It looked, felt, and smelled as the world had prior to the storm.

  She heard Rhuan’s voice again in her memory. Gather everyone and go east. I can’t tell you how I know, but trust me. There had been no further order. Go east, was all he said. And so they had gone east, as others had; where were those others?

  “Safe,” Jorda confirmed, answering her question even as he scraped a damp-sleeved arm across his face, smearing dirt and grime. “As anyone might be, that is, after such a storm.”

  The day was temperate. Despite wet clothing, she felt neither warm nor cold.

  Jorda gestured. “The settlement’s behind us.” He paused, ruddy brows meeting over the bridge of his nose. “If anything’s left of it.”

  Ilona climbed unsteadily to her feet, wincing against the pain of her arm. Standing there, cradling her arm, she turned in a slow circle. Everywhere she looked, the world was as it had been.

  But no. It was not. It seemed so in the absence of rain and wind and lightning, but when she looked beyond relief, she saw desolation. The grass beneath her feet lay flattened against the earth, smashed down into soil become mud, with scorched and still-smoking holes where the lightning had struck, bleeding splattered clots of earth. Trees had been uprooted and thrown down, branches broken, leaves stripped away, roots ripped apart. The plains, the horizon, naked now of forests, was an uninterrupted line against the sky. She heard no birds, no insects. Only silence. Only stillness.

  Fear bloomed. The world was changed. But it tantalized her with seemingly familiar scents, a familiar sun.

  “Tell me we’re not,” she blurted. Jorda, standing next to her, turned to read her expression. His own was grim. “Tell me this isn’t Alisanos.”

  “It isn’t.”

  She turned in a circle again, seeking something known. “How can you tell where the settlement is?” she asked sharply. “All the landmarks are gone.”

  His mouth crooked in a faint smile as he pointed to the sky. “That landmark is enough.”

  Of course. The sun. Ilona released a breath of renewed relief, tucking tangled, muddied hair behind an ear. Of the tales she’d heard of Alisanos, anything was possible. The deepwood, stories said, was a living being, unutterably alien, with a will of its own. She had been raised on those tales, of horrific punishments there promised by parents if she didn’t do as told.

  Now, she realized, her parents had threatened her with the truth. Like a field of corn scythed down, Alisanos had taken what stood before it and swept it away.

  But not her. Not Jorda.

  “Where is everyone?” Surely she and Jorda could not be the only ones left. The only ones alive. They had passed straggling groups of people heading east, as they had been told to. Had she and Jorda, on horseback while refugees from the tent settlement walked, gone astray from the fleeing inhabitants?

  “Your arm needs tending,” Jorda declared. “We’ll go back to the karavan and find wood and cloth for a splint.”

  She looked at her battered arm. It was swollen between her wrist and elbow, with a knob of shiny skin stretched taut over what she knew was bone turned askew. It had not torn through the flesh, thank the Mother, but was ugly nonetheless, promising trouble.

  Jorda slid a careful hand under her right elbow. “Come, Ilona.”

  Hair hung in tangles to her waist. Her skirts were tattered, and the seams of her tunic had torn. Jorda was no better with soaked, soiled clothing and hair ripped loose from his braid framing his broad face. He looked concerned.

  “I’m well,” she told him, wanting to wash away that concern.

  “Are you?” His faint smile was grim. “You risk fever with that arm. Do you want to survive Alisanos only to die from a broken bone?”

  She felt distant, dreamy. “Jorda …”

  “Yes?”

  “We survived Alisanos.” If she said it, said it aloud, she made it a true thing. “It went elsewhere—I think.” Frowning, she turned in a circle again. “Jorda, this is where we were, yes? Sancorra province? The settlement? Going east, as Rhuan said?” A knot of tension and apprehension took possession of her belly. O Mother, let this not be Alisanos making fools of us.

  “Come along,” he told her patiently, easing her into movement. “You’re fretting because of your arm. We’ll see to it, then do what we can for others.”

  She turned abruptly to the karavan-master. “Give me your hand.”

  His brows rose in surprise. “My hand?”

  “I can’t read my own.” No hand-reader could. “If you’ll allow me to read yours, I may be able to see a little of your future. Enough to know whether we are in Alisanos, waiting with its traps; or if we are east of the settlement, east of all things familiar.”

  “Ilona—”

  “Please.”

  Jorda extended his hand palm up. She could not use both her hands in the reading, but one should be enough.

  AUDRUN LAY ON her side, curled upon herself to safeguard her belly. But it cramped. She felt the pain roll through her, rise up, crest, then recede too slowly.

  Was she to lose the child?

  She cramped again and curled herself more tightly yet upon her side, breathing noisily through an open mouth. The flesh of her abdomen felt overstretched. Felt on fire.

  With her eyes closed, Audrun could not see. She wished not to see. That Alisanos had taken her, she knew. But she was ignorant of such details as where in the deepwood she was, what it might do to her, when the changes might begin, and whether she could escape.

  The old man had escaped.

  And begged to go back.

  The ground beneath her was pocked with stone and wood. Sharp-edged leaves scraped her skin. Grass poked, like needles. A shadow of branches bent low over her, shading her, but beyond was light, too-bright light.

  Audrun bit into her lip as she cramped again. She tasted blood. As a deeper cramp took her, as her belly skin burned, she could not hold her silence. A groan escaped, and another. Her world, her human world, was absent. Husband. Children. All absent.

  Except for the unborn in her belly.

  “Audrun.”

  Her eyes snapped open as she rolled her head to look upward. In that first moment the sky visible between branches and leaves wheeled above her. Brownish sky, not blue. Much too bright. And numberless trees surrounding her; twisted, gnarled trees linked together by thorny vines and interlocking branches bearing wide, flat leaves, bluish leaves, speckled with the rust of disease.

  Or merely of Alisanos.

  Pain took her again and she bit once more into her bloodied lip.

  “Audrun, I’m here.”

  He knelt beside her. She heard the chime and click of hair ornaments, sensed his nearness even with eyes shut again against the brightness, the worst of it screened by low-hanging branches dangling large, sharp-edged leaves.

  Her breathing came now in gasps broken time and time again as she caught her breath on a foreshortened grunt of pain. Blood ran into her mouth from her bitten lip. She coughed and gagged. She had refused to drink his blood; now she swallowed her own.

  His hands were on her. “Let me see, Audrun.” Gently he urged her to turn from side to back. He slid a hand beneath her skull and lifted it, then resettled it on earth, not stone.

  The sky above was not blue.

  Cramping, again. Audrun could barely speak. “I’m losing … losing it. The baby …”

  The quality of his silence, the sudden stillness of his hands as he eased her over, frightened her badly. Audrun opened her eyes. She lay now in the shade from the nearest tree, in the shade he made, blocking sunlight.

  “No,” he said. “You are not.”

  How could he say that? How could he know?

  Cramping seized her again. This time she cried out.

  “How am I not losin
g this baby?”

  He took her hands in his own. He guided them to her belly and flattened them there, pressing them against her abdomen.

  Roundness. Pronounced roundness. It was not the belly of a woman at five months, but of a woman nearing term. And she felt it, felt it grow beneath her hands. Her skin stretched, but not enough. She thought she might split open.

  Sweat ran into her hair. She stared in horror at the man beside her. “How is this happening?”

  For a moment he said nothing. She could not read his expression. Then he spoke a single word, very quietly: “Alisanos.”

  Realization sent a wave of fear through her. She was not losing the child. She was bearing the child.

  In Alisanos.

  Her belly spasmed again. She felt it heave beneath her hands. “It’s too soon!”

  “No.” His hands were gentle upon her, stroking hair back from her sweat-filmed face. “No, it’s at term.”

  Cramps transformed into contractions. Her belly now was huge, tight. It writhed beneath her trembling hands. “Why is this happening? How is this happening?”

  He wore no mask now. His expression was grim. “Alisanos wants it.”

  The words stunned her. “Alisanos wants my baby?”

  “Hush now,” he said. “Save your strength.”

  Audrun ignored the instructions. “Why? Why does it want my baby?”

  She saw a kind of grief in his eyes. But his tone was curiously flat. “Your baby is human.”

  The contractions now were harder, closer together. She reached out for his hand, clung as she found it. A question occurred. “Why,” she began on a caught breath, “did you want me to drink your blood?”

  Something flinched in his eyes. She saw grief again, briefly, and surrender. “I believed it might offer some protection.”

  “Your blood would offer me protection?” She tasted her own in the back of her throat. “How?”

  “Alisanos recognizes its own.”

  “Its own,” she echoed. Another contraction took her. She forced the question between her teeth. “You’re not Shoia, are you?”

  “No.”