‘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.
‘Stop!’ Goat begged her. ‘Please stop!’
‘I can’t,’ she whispered.
‘Please,’ he whimpered, and then she heard him break. Horrible choking sobs ripped his throat. He cried as only children can, giving way to hopeless, inconsolable sadness. She listened to the fury of her grief shake the boy, close his throat and reduce his voice to a helpless keening. She sat panting in the darkness, knowing she should go to him, comfort him somehow. But she had no comfort, not for herself and not for him. There was only this suffocating grief that filled the cellar like a palpable thing. Goat became her grief, gave tongue to it with his hiccuping wails, gave form to it as he thrashed on the floor.
Ki drifted. Somewhere a cellar was filled with a grief so abiding that a boy convulsed in its grip while a woman crouched numbly. An ending was coming, bringing peace.
There were noises, a terrible light. A man stood before her, dragged her to her feet. ‘Stop it!’ he cried, and shook her wildly. Ki was dragged from the cellar, thrown onto the rough sod outside it. The man vanished, reappeared a moment later with the jerking boy in his arms. Then Brin lowered the boy carefully to the earth, and spun on Ki. ‘Stop it!’ he roared. ‘You’re killing him!’ Ki saw the raised hand, knew the blow was coming, but could not recall why that should be important.
FOURTEEN
Blood was slick in her mouth. She coughed, spat it out and sat up slowly. The sky slowly cartwheeled around her head and then settled. Gradually she took in her surroundings. There was the gaping black door of the root cellar. Over there, the mounded remains of a sod hut that had fallen in and grown over. In the skinny shade of a dying tree, Brin knelt over Goat.
No. Not Brin. This man was more weathered than Brin, more muscular. Even looking at his back, she could feel the difference in his temperament. Leather-tough and capable, she gauged him. She stood up silently, cast about for a stick or a rock. She didn’t know why he was angry with her, but she didn’t want to face him without a weapon.
‘It’s all right.’ He didn’t turn to face her, and at first she didn’t realize that he was speaking to her, not Goat. ‘I didn’t want to stun you. But it was the only way to force you back inside yourself. Before Gotheris died under your onslaught.’
She hadn’t found a weapon, and as he turned slowly to face her, she decided she probably wouldn’t need one. There was something about his face that was calming. The man seemed to radiate a soothing kindness. She relaxed.
‘I’m Dellin, Brin’s brother. I came looking for you.’
Ki felt suddenly woozy. She sat down, drew her knees up, folded her arms atop them and leaned her chin on her arms. Her thoughts seemed sluggish and numbed. She asked, ‘How did you find us?’
Dellin made a sound between a cough and a grunt. ‘As well ask a Human mother how she knew where her screaming child was. Brin had sent me word that the boy would come to me sometime this season. His message stank of distress; I suspected then that something was wrong. Then I heard from Tamshin that some of their folk had seen a Jore-eyed boy on a wagon coming toward Tekum. So, suspecting trouble, I came to meet you. Once I got past Rivercross, it was not hard to find you.’ Dellin shook his head slowly. ‘The boy has been taught no shielding at all. What was Brin thinking of, to keep him so long? I should have had him ten years ago.’
‘Is Goat … Gotheris all right?’ The boy lay unnaturally still. His arms were folded on his chest, his legs drawn out straight. Composed like a corpse, she thought, and she shivered in the sunlight.
‘I have him asleep, for now. And I’ve pushed him back mostly inside himself. Poor boy couldn’t understand what I was doing, and fought me. Strength such as I never faced before; luckily, he is untrained, and I know tricks he doesn’t even suspect. Still …’ Dellin’s voice trailed off as his eyes met Ki’s. Jore eyes, like Goat’s, but more comfortably dark, more Human.
‘You’re confused. I’m sorry. So Brin didn’t even see fit to make sure you understood the nature of the boy. You’re not from around these parts, are you?’
‘We … I come from the lands north of here.’
Dellin nodded slowly. ‘Then you know nothing of Jores, do you? Never even seen a full-blooded one, I suppose, for they don’t willingly come around Humans anymore, even here.’
‘Why is that?’
‘Humans kill them.’ He fixed Ki with a stare that made her feel uncomfortable, almost guilty. ‘They always say they don’t mean to. But they do it anyway. Humans feel things so strongly, so intensely, and when those feelings become too strong and there is a Jore nearby, they simply empty their pain, or joy, or lust into the Jore.’
‘Is that … is that what I was doing to Gotheris?’ Ki asked faintly.
His eyes met hers. ‘We were not meant to experience such intensity of emotion. It kills us.’
Ki realized abruptly that this man in his Human form did not recognize himself as Human. He was as different from her as a Brurjan or a T’cheria. As he looked at her she realized the depth of his alienness. The very familiarity of his Human shape suddenly seemed monstrous, a mask of clay and twine to deceive the unwary. She felt herself draw back from him.
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘And Gotheris is just as foreign to you as I am, but the poor child does not even know that yet. What Brin was thinking of to keep him, to let him be raised by a Human mother, I do not know. The boy …’ Dellin’s voice faltered. His inhuman eyes bored into Ki’s, seeking her understanding. ‘The boy has no sense of self. He has no personal identity, no idea of where he stops and others begin. He has grown up exposed to a constant flood of emotion. There is no place I can touch him that has not already been scarred over, like a piece of glass abraded by sand until it is opaque.’ Dellin’s voice became strained. ‘He no longer believes what he senses others feeling. You Hum
ans so often act one way when you feel another. He has tried to copy that, and only hurt himself more. Sometimes he ignores what others feel and thus responds incorrectly. And offensively.’ Dellin’s eyes bored into Ki’s as if seeing all she remembered. ‘But most often he becomes whatever he is near, greeting anger with anger, distrust with distrust …’
Ki suddenly had an image of colors spilled from paint pots, of their edges merging, of yellow meeting blue and becoming green, and then red leaching into it, and purple, until all bled into murkiness and no true color was left. Goat. His fickle moods, his suddenly strange behavior as he tried to become acceptable by adopting whatever behavior and personality seemed successful. Wanting to be liked for himself, but not even sure who or what that self was. ‘Didn’t Brin know?’ she asked helplessly.
Dellin shook his head slowly. ‘I am more Jore than he, even though we are brothers. The Human blood flowed more surely in his veins. He felt no discomfort with his Human mate. When the boy was small, I sensed he would be strongly Jore. I asked for Gotheris then, but they denied me.’ Dellin squeezed his eyes shut, opened them again. ‘It was the mother more than my brother, I believe. Even then she was abusing the child, loving him with no moderation, giving him no chance to develop his own feelings. I could not stand to watch it, and it caused many quarrels between Brin and me. Finally, he drove me from his home. And I let my own anger persuade me to do a cruel thing; I left Gotheris there.’ His voice suddenly deepened. ‘This is as much my fault as theirs.’
Ki rose carefully, found she was steady on her legs. The inside of her cheek still leaked blood into her mouth, but it seemed a trifling hurt in light of what Dellin had told her. She moved to stand over Goat. The boy’s face was unlined, his eyes closed. She stooped closer to see the rise and fall of his breast. He seemed so like to dead that she put out a hand to touch him.
‘Don’t!’ warned Dellin. ‘I have quenched your emotions for you, and pushed him back inside himself. But you have been too long together, and touch strengthens any link. You’d kill him.’
Ki drew back. She sat still a moment, wondering why her own thoughts seemed so slow to her. ‘Quenched my emotions?’ she said aloud. She groped within herself, seeking for some difference. Vandien was dead. That was sad, horribly sad. She knew it was tragic, but could not feel it. It was an intellectual grieving she felt now, a keen-edged inventory of her pain that somehow did not cut her. She was very still, considering it.
‘Muffled, perhaps, is a better word. It is a thing we Jore can do for Humans. A kind of healing, for those whose emotions threaten to overwhelm them. Sometimes a Human feels so intensely that he retreats too far from himself, and cannot find his way out again. Then we Jore can enter him, can deaden his pain and bring him out, or erase the memory that is too painful to live with. It is the Jore healing. Surely you have heard of this?’
Ki shook her head. She lifted her eyes to Dellin. ‘What will you do now?’
‘Take the boy to Villena with me. Start the training that should have begun when he was a baby. I will have to keep him insulated from others at first, until he learns to shield himself, but after that, he will be fine. I hope.’ His strange eyes seemed to pin her confusion down like it was a wriggling insect. ‘What will you do?’
‘I don’t know.’ Ki cleared her throat, made a firm decision not to sound so feeble. ‘Find my wagon and team and reclaim it. I can’t make a living without it. Go back north, I suppose, where I understand the folk and know the roads. Start again.’
‘You’re lying to yourself. You have no desire to do that.’
She felt her eyes go flat, knew their green had gone grey. ‘Nevertheless,’ she said quietly.
‘What about the man? This Vandien?’
She stared at him, feeling plundered. He read her again. ‘What I know comes from Gotheris; the poisons I had to bleed from him before I could induce him to sleep. He was full of your images of this man, of your sharings. You have a bond to Vandien, one not easily severed. If he bleeds, you feel the pain, and he takes joy in your triumphs. You will abandon him?’
She touched her tongue to the laceration inside her cheek. Pain. When she spoke, she formed the words carefully. ‘He has abandoned me. He’s dead.’
Dellin stared at her long. She felt him probing her feelings. I should feel invaded, she thought to herself. I should probably feel outraged and angry. But she could not summon the energy to feel anything. So she stood quietly before his penetrating gaze, which fixed not on her, but on somewhere infinitely beyond her. His touch on her mind was light and oddly soothing, reminding her of Vandien stroking her hair. Vandien. For a second she felt her grief, vibrating like the plucked wire of a harp. Vandien. Echoing off into the distance.
‘No.’ Dellin spoke conversationally. ‘He’s not dead.’
Ki felt no patience with his attempt to falsely comfort her. ‘I saw the body,’ she said in a cold voice. ‘Look. This was his.’ And from her pocket she drew the singed cuff with the familiar button.
Stepping to her, he took it lightly from her hand. She felt a part of herself go with it. ‘Yes. Yes, this was his, his imprint is upon it. But why do you say he is dead?’ Dellin fixed her with one of his odd stares. Abruptly his eyes narrowed. ‘I suppose it can be so, then.’ He spoke softly to himself, almost meditatively. ‘It is a thing I have never completely believed before, but now I must. As intensely as you Humans feel, as strongly as you bond, out of sight is still out of awareness. This, then, is what his mother feared. This … severance from her child. This gap.’
His eyes left Ki, strayed to Gotheris sleeping still. Dellin lifted his head, stared across the plains. Moments dripped away. Ki was still, content to watch him stare. She felt heavy, filled with the weariness that usually came only from hours of physical labor. Too tired to sleep, she told herself, but needing the stillness to let the body slowly relax. She leaned against the spindly tree that sheltered Goat, her eyes starting to droop. And jerked alert as she felt Dellin’s mind brush hers.
‘Not even Brin,’ he said aloud, sadly. ‘For all his Jore blood, Brin has no more awareness of his child than the mother does. I can find no thread between them. To them, Gotheris is as absent as the dead.’ He met her eyes again. The smile that touched his face now was pitying.
‘He’s alive,’ he told her. When Ki only stared, he repeated himself. ‘He’s alive. Vandien. Tired and ill and anxious, but alive. I tested the bond that links you. He’s alive.’
Ki sat down. For a long time she said and thought nothing. Her mouth was slightly ajar, and as she breathed she tasted the day upon her tongue. So. Another breath. And so. Vandien was alive. Did she dare to believe it? Something surged within her, and she knew she didn’t dare to disbelieve it. He was alive. ‘And so am I,’ she said, and felt the wonder of it. A desire to continue being alive reawakened and jolted through her.
‘We have to get out of here,’ she told Dellin suddenly. ‘Goat … felt … that the people holding us were going to kill us. How did he put it? That they thought of us as “soon-to-be-dead” people.’
There was a slight smile on Dellin’s face. ‘Isn’t that how you were thinking of yourself?’
Ki shrugged. ‘Perhaps. But not anymore. And I don’t want to stay around here to find how they feel about it. We have to get Goat out of here, especially. He seemed to be the main object of their hate.’ She narrowed her eyes at Dellin, considering him. ‘Can you use this “bond” I have with Vandien to help me find him?’
Dellin laughed softly. ‘It is not like a piece of string stretched between you, with him at the other end. It is more like a dream you share, and I can feel that he is still dreaming his part of it. More than that I cannot explain to a Human. You feel it without knowing you feel it. That was one reason you were so taxing for Goat to be near these last days. You were feeling one thing and believing another, while saying to him that you believed that what he felt and knew was true … Do you understand?’
Ki shook her head s
lowly. ‘Days?’ she asked, seizing the only part she could grasp.
‘By my estimate, about two.’
‘How far is Tekum from here?’
He shrugged. ‘For my mule and I, perhaps a day.’
Ki nodded. ‘They’ll have taken Vandien there. And maybe my team and wagon. You’ll come with me?’
‘Of course.’ Dellin looked surprised that she would ask. ‘You still owe the boy the rest of the trip to Villena.’ His eyes grew troubled. ‘And he must be shown what the wrong use of his Jore blood can lead to.’
FIFTEEN
Voices. Talking right by him, pushing their sounds up against him. Shouting in his ears. He tried to turn away from them, but found he couldn’t move. He was bound. No. Not bound. But every part of his body was too heavy to move. Just keeping his eyelids up was difficult enough. He tried to find himself in space and time, could not. He caught at the tattered edges of memories that unraveled beneath his scrutiny. Kellich falling, the ring of Brurjans closing on him, Goat’s yellow teeth bared in terror … he could not put them into any sort of order, and the attempt to do so was making him dizzy and sick.
‘You didn’t give him enough,’ someone whispered.
‘Shut up. I know what I’m doing.’ An angry woman.
‘Do you? Or are you so hungry for revenge that you have lost sight of our true purpose?’ This voice was older than the other two, mature and in command. Vandien instinctively turned his eyes toward it.
‘He’s awake.’ The man had a beard that fringed his jaw, a nose like a hawk’s beak and dark eyes. He moved, coming closer, and Vandien found it hard to keep his eyes focused on him. He crouched by Vandien, and he felt the man’s dry hands touch his face. The world seemed to suddenly flop over as Vandien got his true bearings. He was lying on his belly, cheek to a coarse pillow. The man’s fingers probed the back of Vandien’s head, pressing as if to check for a weakness in his skull. Vandien winced, spun away from the world for a long moment, and then came back to it, feeling like a swimmer surfacing to air and light. They were talking again.
Luck of the Wheels Page 20