Tess of the Road

by Rachel Hartman

  If there were impossible, unpassable roads ahead of him, would Dozerius quail and quake and cry? Indeed, he would not. He’d find another trick to try.

  Tess extracted herself from the bits of Pathka that were still draped over her—a dorsal arm, his tail—and crept down the loft ladder. She opened the barn door slowly, cringing at the vocal hinges, and slipped outside. A slender moon lingered near the horizon, giving a little light, but she had no idea how to gauge the time by it. She hurried across the gravel yard, toward where she remembered seeing a laundry line.

  The time had come, Tess thought, for her own thuthmeptha.

  The clothes were stiff from hanging and damp with dew. She found braes and breeches and a padded jacket, but no shirts. Never mind, this would do. She hustled back to the barn and changed into her pilfered outfit. “Yarr,” she muttered piratically as she pulled the breeches on. They were snug across her behind, but they fastened with adjustable buckles, which helped.

  She solved the shirt problem with her little knife, making a nick in her chemise at mid-thigh level and tearing the fabric along the bias. Years of sewing hadn’t been for nothing. She tucked the shirt into the breeches and tried the jacket. It was padded and fitted, somebody’s feast-day best, and it smashed her breasts encouragingly flat. They’d been nothing remarkable to begin with; post-baby they’d deflated further. She wouldn’t miss them.

  Sin is etched into woman’s very form, St. Vitt liked to say.

  To the devil with her form, then. She would be a new person, with a different shape.

  She climbed the loft ladder, carrying her knife and the spare linen, wondering what to do about her hair. Men often wore their hair long, especially in Ninys, but Tess didn’t have a strong enough chin to pull it off. Her dark waves gave her too soft and feminine an aspect.

  She sat in the loft with her legs dangling down, held out her little knife, and…hesitated. This felt serious, a boundary crossed, no going back. She’d never considered herself that attached to her plait, but apparently it carried symbolic weight. She’d be someone else without it.

  Good.

  She took a breath—determination! decisiveness!—and tried to saw the damned thing off. A few strands severed, reluctantly, but it was like trying to chop down a forest with a hatchet. Tess stubbornly persevered.

  In the farmyard, a cock crowed. Time was passing, and she’d made little progress.

  “Let me.” Pathka’s voice at her shoulder startled her.

  “What will you do?” asked Tess, lowering her hands. “Bite it off?”

  Pathka deftly undid her braid, and Tess soon smelled the sharp reek of burning hair. He was using his flaming quigutl tongue.

  “Do hold still,” he said between bursts.

  Hair drifted down, soft, smoldering snow. Pathka, gentle and precise, took a handful at a time, puffed through the strands, and pinched off the singed part close to her head. Tess never felt a flame lick her scalp.

  When he’d finished, Tess raised trembling hands to her head. It felt like a fuzzy peach. This would take some getting used to. “I should have stolen a cap,” she said.

  “You don’t need a cap,” said Pathka stoutly. “You look lovely.”

  That beggared belief. Tess fell back into the pile of hair, laughing. “I appreciate the thought,” she said at last, wiping her eyes.

  The door of the barn shrieked as it opened; Tess sat up in alarm. A weedy young man, his mouse-brown hair more awake and upright than any other part of him, groggily shuffled into the barn.

  He lifted a lantern, squinted through the dust she’d kicked up, and said, “Who’s larfing?”

  Pathka had scurried up the roof joists and hidden in the rafters, leaving Tess alone in the lamplight, uselessly frozen. She teetered on the edge of panic, but only for a moment. The lad was too young and scrawny to be intimidating. He looked like Neddie, but stretched; his hair had clearly been up all night having adventures without him.

  He’d think she was his peer, not some scared, vulnerable girl. She needed to act the part.

  Tess straightened her shoulders and said haughtily, “Is there a law against laughing in barns? One may not laugh in church, but in a barn one should be free to laugh as one sees fit.”

  She spoke in her most highfalutin accent, trying to pitch her voice low. A persona was developing in her mind, someone who would wear these breeches and this jacket with these boots. The boots sharpened her focus. A ridiculous situation was surely no hindrance with boots like these. She could kick her way out of anything.

  The lad, who had maybe fifteen years, looked flummoxed. “What’re you up there for?”

  “I was about to leave, in fact,” said Tess. “I’d hoped to be off before sunrise. I’m running away from home and I’d rather not be seen.”

  The lad’s bovine eyes widened, as if he’d considered running away himself and had a certain respect for it.

  “Won’t your mother miss you?” he said, a bit quieter. His own mother had evidently been the sticking point for him.

  “My mother is Elga, Duchess Pfanzlig,” said Tess, her face dramatically mournful. “I daresay she shan’t miss me, the old harridan.”

  Her audience seemed suitably awed by Tess’s parentage, or by her boldness in calling the duchess names. Doubt crept into his eyes, however, and Tess worried that she’d overstepped. She was dressed in peasant clothes, after all, not like the son of a duke.

  It wasn’t her style that perplexed the lad, however, but a specific garment: “Why’re you wearing my jacket?”

  St. Daan in a pan! Of course she was, and of course he’d recognize it even with bits of straw and hair clinging to it. It was striped, for one thing. She was half inclined to toss it down to him, but feared being known for a girl, even in the semidarkness. Her chemise-shirt was too lightweight to conceal the obvious; the jacket was integral to her disguise.

  “I saw it outside,” she said, keeping her voice stern. “And I liked the look of it, so I took it. I can do that, you know. I’m the son of a duke. A dukeling, if you will.”

  The lad bobbed his head, not daring to contradict her, and for one giddy instant Tess thought, That was easy. What else could I get away with?

  A mean girl might’ve demanded money or tribute. A practical girl might’ve sworn him to silence. Tess, however, was a tenderhearted…boy. She pitied the misplaced awe in his eyes.

  “Listen,” she said, easing off the pomposity, “I need this jacket. I lost mine in a terrible overclothes accident, and there’s no going back. However, my father the duke would not wish any miller to go jacketless. Bring me parchment, pen, and ink, and I will write to my father, enjoining him to repay you.”

  The boy looked horrified, and she wondered what she’d said wrong this time. He soon, and stammeringly, made it clear: “I—I’m not a miller, m’lord. I’m only the grist lout.”

  A servant. She’d seen him at dinner, now that she thought about it, waiting upon the miller’s grown sons. He could not bring her writing materials without stealing from his masters.

  “That’s no good,” said Tess, furrowing her brow. “Do you have a psalter of your own?”

  “My ma does,” said the boy.

  She’d be the cook, most likely.

  “Run and fetch it, then. The Saints surely left me a blank half page to write upon.”

  The boy turned to go.

  “And bring some bread,” Tess called. “Or venison scraps. Or anything edible, really. I’m not as finicky as one might anticipate in a nobleman.”

  Tess had nothing to write with, even if the lad returned with a blank page.

  “You, Pathka,” she called into the eaves. “You can burn my hair off, but can you make me some charcoal?”

  “I have some in my throat pouch,” the shadows replied. “Good for an upset stomach.”

 
; “Do quigutl get queasy?” asked Tess, amused by the notion. “You eat garbage. Surely you have cast-iron bellies.”

  “Indeed,” said Pathka dryly, scuttling down the wall. “But in these modern times, as we affect the trappings of ‘civilization,’ we challenge our digestion with human foods. Cheese, for example. We wouldn’t normally eat mammalian secretions.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me I’ve been poisoning you all these years?” Tess cried, half distraught, half angry with him.

  “Because I really like cheese,” said Pathka.

  Tess had packed, retrieved the charcoal from Pathka, and descended from the loft by the time the boy returned. He gave Tess a day-old loaf and a dry sausage, and then handed over his mother’s book. Tess tried the back cover first, but that page was filled with a hand-drawn family tree. This peasant lad—Florian, by the book’s reckoning—was descended from Samsamese earls on his mother’s side, six generations back. Tess wondered if the knowledge galled him.

  She flipped pages and found space upon the verso of the final hymn to St. Eustace, patron of the dead, who had more pages of poetry than most.

  When Tess and Jeanne had trained to be ladies-in-waiting, their most surprising lesson had been handwriting; knowing different hands enabled one to pass notes at court. Tess, immediately grasping the potential for mischief and intrigue, had eagerly exceeded her twin, learning seventeen hands to Jeanne’s eight. She knew exactly how the sons of a duke would form their letters, so she wrote in her best courtly masculine hand:

  To my revered parents, the Duke and Duchess Pfanzlig of Ducana:

  Please give the bearer of this book two new doublets and three new pairs of breeches (or the monetary equivalent therein) as a reward for kindness shown me on the road. I have vouched for your generosity and rely upon it. Your affectionate and honorable son,

  Tess hesitated over which name to sign, but supposed it could only be Jacomo, who would soon travel back to seminary in Lavondaville. Jacomo (she decided) was the sort of humorless killjoy who would keep his signature square and uptight.

  Too bad she couldn’t have counterfeited Heinrigh, who probably used a dozen flourishes. Tess enjoyed flourishes.

  “Whatever you do,” she admonished the lad, handing back the book, “don’t tell my parents I was hiding in your goat shed. If they demand an explanation, say I was thrown from my horse, but I’m better now and on my way to seminary and they needn’t concern themselves.”

  The boy Florian stared skeptically at the note. “Can you read that?” asked Tess.

  “No. For aught I know, it tells them to have me strung up.”

  He was canny, if illiterate.

  Tess read it to him, accounting for each word with her finger. Doublets were nicer than jackets, and he was to receive more than she had taken.

  He still seemed unconvinced. “I’ll have Father Barnard read it over before I take it, beggin’ Your Grace’s pardon.”

  “You are a prudent and cautious individual, Florian,” said Tess warmly, filled with sisterly fondness. “You’re right not to trust Lord Jacomo on the strength of his lordliness alone.”

  Florian returned to his chores; Tess and Pathka slipped out into the foggy morning.

  “That was cleverly done,” said Pathka after about a mile down the river road. The sun had burned off the mist; gravel crunched beneath their feet. “I’d have bitten him, if need be, but this is better. He was only a hatchling.”

  Tess filled her lungs with clean morning air. She hadn’t slept much, but she was delighted with her new clothes, and her new self.

  “Have you given Anathuthia any more thought?” said Pathka, bounding ahead of her and turning in a circle. “What have you decided? What what what?”

  He was all motion, arching his back, bobbing his head, waggling his head spines hopefully (or maybe plaintively), twitching his tail. These added up to one big emotion; there would be a quigutl name for it, something oddly specific and semipoetic, like when you can’t find your nest because your siblings moved it for a prank, or when your eggshell first breaks and you see the world is distressingly big.

  Tess felt it with him, but the Goreddi word eluded her.

  No, it didn’t. He was anxious. Transcendently so, like he might explode from it.

  He was afraid she’d say no.

  Was this journey that important to him? It looked like it. Tess hadn’t grasped the gravity, and still didn’t fully understand his reasons, but it didn’t matter. Of course she would help.

  She would pretend to herself later that this was a well-considered decision, that she’d systematically tallied up the benefits of traveling with a companion, plus the satisfaction of her once boundless curiosity, and an extra dollop of hope that she might find a World Serpent before Will (wherever he was, Heaven punch his smug face), but that was all retroactive rationalization.

  Pathka, her oldest friend, who’d known her when she was still herself, needed her. Her heart answered.

  “All right,” said Tess. “Let’s go find her.”

  She’d half expected Pathka to start running in circles of unbridled quigutl joy. Instead, he stopped stock-still, a churning, glopping sound coming from his insides, and then he vomited right at her feet.

  Tess skipped back a step, alarmed. Pathka hurled again, and then a third time.

  “What’s wrong?” Tess cried. “Is it the cheese?”

  “No, no,” gasped the quigutl, “it’s just”—splort—“an excess of emotion.” Glargh. “You do a similar thing when you feel too much. It comes out of your eyes.”

  Tess boggled at him. “You mean—crying? You’re crying?”

  “Obviously, I’m not crying,” snapped Pathka, who was now into dry heaves and growing short-tempered. “That’s the closest analogy. The body can’t hold it in anymore.”

  His fit wound down; he scooped up a mouthful of sand and gravel, gargled with it, and spit it out again. Tess stood over him protectively, but nobody came down the road. They walked on when Pathka was able.

  “You probably want an explanation,” he said after they’d climbed another rise.

  “You don’t have to tell me if it’s too painful,” said Tess, recalling what he’d so kindly said the night before.

  Pathka’s underside rippled with another spasm, as if the sick was returning, but he settled down. “It’s about Karpeth, and how ko died, but whenever I remember the story, I’m there again, and I can’t—”

  “I know,” said Tess quietly. “It’s all right.”

  “I will say, for now, that you are saving my life for a third time.”

  “If this were a children’s story,” said Tess, “the third time would mean I get a wish.”

  “Of course you do,” said Pathka, scampering up the road ahead of her.

  Even though she knew, or thought she knew, that the little quigutl was humoring her, Tess clasped a hand to her heart (she felt it beating even through Florian’s jacket) and wished with all her might. Not for the classical piratical standbys—vengeance, fame, or fortune—but that she might shed the past like a skin and walk on with nothing, empty and new.

  The breeze tickled her newly shorn scalp, as if in answer. It seemed a good sign. She would walk on one more day.

  The world was a failure, at first.

  It had wanted to be useful, kindly, and beautiful, a habitat for the plants and animals it envisioned in its mind’s eye, but it couldn’t bring its ideas to fruition. It collapsed into a petulant ball of fire and water. No air, no land.

  The sun and moon looked down on it pityingly. “You boasted that you could make life,” they sneered. “But what could thrive upon a tempestuous wreck like you?”

  One thing did survive among the flames and storms, though: memory. The world had a memory of what it had once intended and entirely failed to be. The memory hard
ened and cooled into seven strands, and each strand became a serpent. Then the world was frightened, and didn’t want the memory anymore, but there was no stopping the serpents, no controlling them. They ate fire and water and cooled it into earth and air, like worms renewing the soil.

  The world screamed in agony and fought them, but the serpents knew what they were doing.

  “Hold very still,” they advised the world. “Let us do our work, coursing through you like blood and breath. Only when we have carved you into pieces can you be whole again.”

  The frightened world tried to believe them. It stopped struggling, although its fiery heart still trembled, and let the serpents do their work.

  * * *

  That was the first World Serpent story Pathka had told Tess, the beginning of her long fascination. Tess had never heard such a tale, obvious and elusive at once, raw and wild and elemental. It went nowhere, and yet it was everywhere. She demanded to hear it again and again.

  The second time Pathka told it, however, the serpents weren’t memories. They were knowledge. Tess blamed her poor Quootla, assuming she’d misunderstood, until Pathka told the story yet another way. It changed with every telling: the serpents were conscience or calamity, a plague that healed or a darkness that brought light.

  Only toward the end of her time with Pathka, before the war broke out, was Tess brave enough to ask about the changes. “What were the serpents, really?”

  “The word we usually use to describe them is thmepitlkikiu,” said Pathka, “which means ‘something that kills any words you try to put upon it.’ It’s too great, too terrible, too much. You can shout words into the void forever and never fill it up.”

  “So you’ve called the serpents something different each time—”

  “To give you some idea how complicated they are,” said Pathka, throat pouch puffing affirmation. “They ate the entire world, after all. They contain everything.”

  Tess fidgeted, working up her nerve to ask the most important question: “But are the serpents real, or just a story?”