by Tim Lebbon
Konrad paused for a while and refilled his mug. This time there were no calls, no shouts to continue. He had cast his spell, and Nomi's attention was fully focused on the story. Is this a tale of love or of loss? she thought. Perhaps both . . .
Konrad drank some wine, sighed appreciatively and continued. “We wanted to kill them all. Though the frequency of raider attacks had dropped off drastically, we still knew them for what they were. Yet the younger ones among them did not have the look of raiders, and they mostly spent their days farming the fertile lands around the village, or fishing out in the bay from boats that looked barely seaworthy. The older ones, still bearing the scars, were friendly toward us, offering us food and shelter. Though they seemed confused as to why we were there, they opened their village to our presence.
“And then I met Neria. One of the few true raiders left among them. A lover.”
Konrad stopped pacing and stared down into his mug. “I need more wine,” he said. Lowkie stood and poured, and worked his way around the group refilling mugs. There was no talk, no banter, because nobody wanted to interrupt Konrad's tale. It hung in the air unfinished, like a rock about to fall or a horse set to leap. Nomi sensed that the heart of the story was yet to be told, and everything up to now had been the preamble.
“Neria,” Konrad said. “She looked a little like Lulah. Small, strong, rarely a smile on her face. She came to meet us down at the beach, and she arrived armed with all her raider weaponry. They used swords like us, and bows and arrows sometimes, but their favorite weapons were their throwing knives and stars. She had a belt of knives around her waist, straps of stars around each shoulder and down across her breasts, and more strapped to her thighs. As she came along the beach, the youngsters of the village ran to her, shouting in a language we had not yet heard them speaking. But I'd heard those words before. They sounded like waves hitting rocks, and it was the sea-banter of the raiders.
“We prepared to fight, though we knew this would not be much of a battle.
“The raiders were incredible warriors. We Mancoserians know how to fight, but our enemy is normally a seethe-gator. Strong enemies, cunning and vicious and powerful, yet they are animals, and they're all similar in how they fight. You could learn to fight seethe-gators by listening to elders and their experiences. Raiders were different, because each raiding party had its own methods, and sometimes even its own aims. Some came just to kill because they liked killing. Others came to steal Mancoserians for slaves, or to take women to rape, or men to work repairing their boats.
“One time, seventy years before I was born, a raider party landed and drove quickly inland, hitting a settlement that no longer exists today. But it was not the raiders who wiped it from the map, it was us. We fought back, so the telling goes, and when the raiders threatened to slaughter everyone in the settlement, we attacked, killing everything that moved—raiders and Mancoserians alike—chasing the last of the raiders back to the coast and pinning them to their boat with iron spars before sinking it. Some say that boat still sails, crewed by wraiths. It was one battle won, at terrible cost, but it led to three more lost, because the raiders grew more vicious with each attack that followed.
“How do you fight such an enemy? How can you hope to defeat people like that?” He drank, and Nomi could see that his eyes were glistening. It could have been the root wine, but she thought it more likely to be the story still to tell.
Konrad walked around the fire, turned and went the other way, as if trying to warm both sides.
“Neria stopped a dozen steps from us and stared us down. She didn't go for any of her weapons—she knew that she'd be killed before she could draw them—but she was defiant, and angry, and when she and I first locked gazes, something in the world changed.” He shook his head. “I don't know how else to describe it. Even now, I don't think of what we had as love. It was more basic than that. I think it was more like respect. Two warriors, face-to-face, and if it had been fifty years earlier, our instincts would have driven us to fight until one or both of us were dead. But now there was something else happening, and I think we both felt a powerful sense of having moved on. I had left Mancoseria to find my way in the world, carrying these scars as a badge of my adulthood. And Neria, armed like the fiercest raider I had ever heard of, lived in a place where the raiders seemed to have found peace. Even their boats were sunk in the bay, like monuments to past crimes.
“Neria took out a knife, slowly, and cast it down into the sand. I drew my sword and lobbed it, and it landed a handbreadth from the knife. And that ended the brief sense of doubt any of us had for being there.
“Our time in the village was short. My time with Neria was shorter. Though both of us had found peace, our visions were still vastly different. As the days passed, she became more determined to defend her village from anyone who came, and she was terrified that our arrival would herald more explorers in the future. I could not allay those fears, because Jeriglia was already talking of further voyages. And I had left Mancoseria to travel, because I had seen what staying in one place did to people. There were horizons to meet and cross, and I hated the idea of waking to the same view every morning. The life moon gave us legs for a reason.”
He knelt, his knees clicking, and Nomi wondered how far Konrad had already walked on those legs. A long way, she thought. Farther than I have ever ventured.
“What happened?” Ramus asked. Nomi could see how serious his gaze had become, and she was trying to remember where she had heard of Jeriglia.
“It all went bad,” Konrad said. “And it was my fault. Mine and Neria's, at least. I schemed to take her back to Long Marrakash with us. And she had spent much of our time there conceiving an ambush in the hills to stop us from leaving. There were still a few raiders there with their ancestors' hot blood. And so our respect was . . . shattered. False. Even from that first moment when we locked eyes . . . false.”
“You can't be criticized for trying to help,” Nomi said.
Konrad looked at her as though he'd forgotten she was there. “Help? What right had I? No right. She was proud and I was proud. We feigned friendship, but there was something rotten there from the start.
“The raiders had all but stopped striking at Mancoseria. No one knew why. Some thought they had moved farther along The Spine, that our increasing willingness to defend ourselves had driven them off. Others believed they had simply faded away as time went on. But now I knew what had happened to them. They settled; or at least some of them did. But there were always those still proud of their history, ready to honor the raider blood in their veins.
“Neria and I fought. This scar you see here—my seethe-gatorscar—has another knife trail through it. And she scarred me here.” He lifted the right sleeve on his tunic to show the ugly pink welt across his forearm. “And here.” A knife wound on his shoulder. “And when I killed her, it hurt me here most of all.” His heart.
“Jeriglia never came back,” Ramus said.
“Dead, along with three Serians and the dozen raiders Neria had taken to her side. The survivors returned to Long Marrakash. Told the Guild we were attacked by cloud-creatures in the mountains. As far as I know, no voyage has gone to the northern shore of Marrakash since.”
“So Neria protected her village,” Ramus said. “And you keep walking.”
Konrad stared at Ramus for a few heartbeats as though he would draw a sword and slay the Voyager. But then he smiled, shaking his head slightly. “I tell myself so often,” he said. He sat beside Lowkie, picked up another bottle and refilled his mug.
LOWKIE STAYED WITH them for a while longer, finishing the root wine and rashly promising them a dozen more bottles to take with them in the morning. He finally left, swaying his way back across the field to the farm, wolves whining and yapping upon his return.
“One happy farmer,” Nomi said.
“For now, perhaps,” Ramus said. They had been sitting next to each other all evening, listening to Konrad's tale and then chatting across t
he fire with the Serians. Nomi had spent some time trying to decide whether Konrad and Neria really had betrayed each other at all, but the wine had fuzzed her mind, and in the end she gave up.
“Tired,” Ramus said, yawning. “Long day.”
“Lots more to come.”
He smiled, leaned across and squeezed Nomi's arm. “But it's a good feeling to be out here, isn't it?”
She nodded. “A good feeling.”
“Good journeys, Nomi.”
They grasped hands, she returned the blessing, and Ramus went to bed.
RHIANA TOOK FIRST watch, stacking more wood on the fire and sitting close. None of them expected trouble, but that was when it would most likely come, and the Serian kept her weapons at hand.
Nomi slipped past the trees to piss, and when she returned to the influence of the firelight, Beko was standing outside the tent he would share with Noon, stripping off his tunic and undershirt and preparing for sleep. She caught his eyes, he stared back, and then she felt Rhiana watching them both.
“Dawn?” Nomi asked.
Beko nodded. “Dawn, and a full day's travel tomorrow.”
“Good dreams, Beko.”
“Always,” he said. “I have a clear conscience.”
Nomi nodded at Rhiana, then knelt to crawl into her tent.
Good dreams, she thought. But it took her a long time to get to sleep.
NOMI’S NIGHT WAS unsettled, haunted by dreams of vicious raiders, and seethe-gators trailing the black remembrance cloth strips of the Sleeping Gods. She and Ramus sat by a large pool and looked at the map he had made, and though they had been traveling for years, still their destination was no closer. It seemed that Noreela had stretched to ten thousand miles long, and the dotted line of their progress on the map was almost invisible. Ramus's skin was scarred with seethe-gator stings, his arms crisscrossed with battle wounds, one eye gouged out and all his teeth rotten or fallen from his head. In the socket of his lost eye, there was something moving, and as she urged him closer a small tentacle protruded from the bloody hole, searching this way and that, as if looking for her. Nomi recognized the sickness inside him. She pointed at the map, wanting to shout and scream that it was time to go, but Ramus only laughed. He opened his jacket and showed her the scores of charms he had collected, all of them withered, dead and ineffectual. She looked around the rough camp they had made by the pool, and although there were five tents, three of them had started rotting. She could make out the vague forms of the Serians and she was sure that they were rotting too, the insides of the canvas slick and warm. Ramus laughed again, silent mirth that she could hear in her head even though he made no noise. She looked at the map. They had ten thousand miles to go. And she knew that Ramus, now mad, would voyage forever.
RAMUS SLEPT WELL. When he woke before dawn he sat up in his tent, cricked his neck and sighed. It seemed that his nightmares were now confined to daylight.
Chapter 6
RAMUS SPENT THE first part of the morning—whilst gathering wood for a fire, tending his horse and washing and dressing by the stream—trying to imagine what could be held within the rope charm he had given Nomi.
The old charm breather had asked him whom the knotted rope was for, and Ramus had found it difficult talking about Nomi. The details of why he wanted to buy it for her, what she meant to him and perhaps what he meant to her, none of these were easy to scrutinize or describe. His words had ended up tripping over one another, and in the end he said nothing. But the woman had nodded sagely and reached for the charm, almost without looking. She was fooling with me, he thought, but that did not feel right. The rope had grown heavier the closer he rode to Nomi, and when he finally handed it to her, he had barely been able to hold it up. She had not noticed such weight.
He had met a hundred charlatans for every true charm breather, and he knew they all had their ways and means. A look from the old woman's eyes could have set a fugue of weight in his arms. A sprinkle of certain herbs from her hand could have made him momentarily weak without feeling tired. But he had found this woman to be more convincing than any he had ever met. Most of the alleged charmers in Long Marrakash were there for the money, but camped beside a forest path that was far from busy, she seemed to live for the charm of it.
“But what is it?” he whispered. His horse's ears twitched as it snorted, and he rubbed its nose. Travel charm, friendship whisper . . . ?
Konrad and Ramin came across the field with their own horses, arriving at the stream and giving Ramus a cautious smile and nod.
“A good morning,” Ramin said. “I usually like to start the day with a bath in whores' breast milk, a meal fit for the richest of rich and a good humping. This morning? A wash in cold water, breakfast cooked by Lulah—which if we're lucky won't kill us until this afternoon—and my cock's too cold to rise.”
“Morning, Ramus,” Konrad said.
Ramus smiled. “I enjoyed your tale yesterday.”
“Thank you. Never an easy one to tell, but the difficult ones are always the best.”
Ramus nodded.
“Just look at it!” Ramin said. He had stripped to wash and was staring down at himself, hands held out as if afraid to touch.
“Brisk mornings like this,” Ramus said, “you can almost wonder how we continue as a species.”
Konrad laughed, Ramin grinned and Ramus led his horse back across the field.
He knew that Serians led an extreme lifestyle. In their work, they were often involved in violence and death, and their play was hard as well. As such, their extremes of personality were to be expected. He was used to it. It made him feel as though they really were back out in the wilds, even though they would still be within Marrakash's borders for at least a couple more days.
As he approached the camp, Nomi emerged from her tent. She was the last to wake.
Ramus glanced quickly around the camp, spotting Beko strapping weapons to his horse's saddle. He sighed. Nothing to do with me. She's her own woman, and . . . He could think of no reason why he should care, but every reason why he would.
“Piss, I'm not used to sleeping on the ground!” Nomi said. She stretched in the open, her lithe body twisting beneath her undergarments.
“No heavy mattresses for months,” Ramus said. “All these luxuries we forgo when we're on a voyage! Ramin was just bemoaning the lack of whores' breast milk in which to bathe. I'm just happy with hot food and ceyrat leaf tea.”
“You found ceyrat leaf?” Beko asked.
“Rhiana smelled a spread of it in the next field.” As he spoke the tall warrior approached, waving a handful of fresh yellow sprigs above her head.
“Then I'm with you!” Beko said. “A Voyager's luxuries are hard-won and well loved.” He grabbed a leather skin and jogged toward the farm to fetch water.
BEKO BROUGHT EGGS and bread from the farm as well as the water, and while the ceyrat tea brewed, Lulah made breakfast. Ramus did not expect for a heartbeat that she would be a bad cook, and watching her work seemed to prove him right. She broke the eggs into a wide pan over the fire and whisked them with a frayed stick, adding a pinch of spice from a pouch she fetched from her saddle, stirring until the eggs were lumpy, yellow and delicious-looking. She put the pan to one side and shredded the bread into finger-sized chunks, then she pricked each portion onto a metal skewer and toasted them quickly over the fire. It took five minutes to cook, and she clapped the skewer against the pan to tell everyone breakfast was ready. She truly seemed a woman of few words, and that intrigued Ramus more and more.
The food tasted even better than it looked. He could not identify the spice she had sprinkled into the egg, but it gave it a much more textured flavor, with pockets of heat that seemed to explode individually all across his mouth.
By the time they'd finished eating, the ceyrat tea was ready, and Lulah poured each of them a mug. Ramus watched her as she stood over him and poured, and when she glanced at his face he smiled. She looked away quickly and moved on to Noon.
&n
bsp; The brewed ceyrat leaves—a favorite of predators before the hunt—buzzed into their muscles and limbs and chased away any shred of sleep that remained. By the time they finished, the sun was pouring across the field. Long shadows from last night swayed in the opposite direction, and the light in between was brighter and fresher, and somehow more alive. Dawn breathed a heated promise of the day to come, and Ramus enjoyed the feel of it on his face.
They broke camp, packing tents and cooking equipment and leaving the bundles for Ramin and Noon to load onto the packhorses. The Serians worked efficiently and silently, and it was only when they were ready to move out that the banter began again.
Lowkie and his wife came to bid them farewell. The farmer's eyes were narrow and the skin around them dark, and Ramus smiled. Too much of his own wine.
“Stop by when you return!” he said. “The wine will be better settled by then, I'm sure.”
Nobody answered with anything other than a wave. When we return, Ramus thought. How many of us will there be? He blinked at the weight behind his eyes, but his vision today was good, the pain absent, and if he did not think too deeply, he could even believe that he would see this place again.
They rode out, Lulah and Ramin moving on ahead to make sure the trail was clear. Ramus and Nomi rode side by side, excited that the first full day of their voyage had begun, comfortable in each other's company and relishing the feel of sunlight and open air on their skin.
Ramus noticed the rope charm still hanging exposed on Nomi's saddle.
“A good camp,” he said. “I've not eaten so well in ages.”
“I always think I eat well,” Nomi said. “You know me—the best food, the best wine rooms. But there's something about food cooked outside, the fresh ingredients, the meat just killed, eggs just laid, the smells . . .”