by Tim Stead
Hours later they broke for lunch – a hasty meal of cold meats and bread served with nothing more than water. A man brought it to her in the wagon almost as soon as the wheels of the cart stopped turning. He did not speak more than was necessary, and then was gone, moved down the line of wagons. It began to trouble her that she was on her own. In other wagons people talked. She could hear their voices, but not their words. The wagon behind her carried a family; a man and a woman, three children, bags, boxes. She heard tones of command, disagreement, affection, conciliation. The wagons moved again and she still had food in her hand. Time was important. They were in a hurry.
She closed her eyes and let her mind wander. It was something she had begun to do on the long trip to Yasu, practiced on the voyage to Samara and perfected before the ambush on the road to Woodside. It was a warm day and she dozed in the sunshine, rocking with the motion of the wagon. The road was good, and she slept for the greater part of the afternoon so that she awoke after the sun had dropped below the line of the trees and the air had begun to cool. She rubbed her face to clear the muzziness from her head and looked around them. The wagons were pulling off the road onto a grassy area beside a stream, and as soon as they stopped she jumped down to stretch her legs. She felt stiff and full of aches after a whole day wedged into the same position. She stretched as best she could.
It would not do. Three days of such boredom would kill her. She look around at her fellow passengers, all now engaged in the same stretching and loosening of limbs. Some had walked down to the stream, which was almost large enough to be called a river. It chuckled along over shallow stones, catching fragments of the fading sunlight and throwing them out to the world in general. The banks on both sides were thick with reeds, but in two places on this side the reeds were cut away, allowing direct access to the clear water. At these spots people stooped to drink, to splash their faces, and to fill an assortment of containers. It was something that she could do later.
She walked towards the north end of the camp area, towards the guardsmen. She could see that they had already dismounted, tethered their horses, started a fire. They were certainly better organised than the rest of the camp.
Several of them were close to the fire, talking. She saw that one of them was Sabra, and paused, still part of the general mass around the wagons, and watched for a while. They were together, the guardsmen, in a way that only familiar people can be. They were easy in their talk, fluent in gesture, relaxed, but it was very different from a family. Sabra was apart from them, even as she sat in their midst. She was more deliberate in everything that she did. Even when she looked relaxed everything was just as she intended it. Mostly she seemed to watch the others. It was like the dinner in the colonel’s rooms.
One of the men saw her, and caught Sabra’s eye, gesturing slightly with his head. She turned, and saw Felice watching them. She stood and walked over.
“Can I help?”
“I want you to teach me,” Felice said. “To ride a horse, to use a sword.”
Sabra looked sceptical, cast half a glance back over her shoulder at the guardsmen around the fire. They were close enough to hear.
“Walk with me,” she said, and the moved away, down towards the stream. When the distance to the others was greater she spoke again. “Three evenings? That is all we have. I cannot teach you anything worth knowing in so short a time, even if I were a teacher, which I am not.”
“I learn quickly.”
“I am ordered to protect you, not to entertain you.”
Felice ignored the implication, though it was accurate. “How better to protect me than to teach me to protect myself?”
“We do not have the time.”
“I can at least begin to learn.”
“Neither skill is easy. You will be bruised and cut in the learning.”
“I have been both,” Felice said. “I am not afraid.”
Sabra looked away, and Felice was reminded again of the scar that disfigured her face. She touched it with a finger, felt its hardness crossing her cheek. Sabra had spoken thoughtless words.
“I am sorry, Ima,” she said. “I did not mean to offend.”
“Teach me.” She pressed home her slight advantage.
Sabra sighed. “Very well,” she said. “I will show you… some things. We will see what you learn.”
The lieutenant led the way over to where the guard had tethered their horses. They were fine animals, and looked back at Felice, mirroring her curiosity; their ears were forward, eyes bright. She touched the nearest animal on its soft, velvet nose and it bowed its head, calm and accepting. She walked along the line looking at each animal. She stopped by one of them.
“They are all fine,” she said, “But this one is better. I don’t know why.” It truth she thought it looked wiser, but thought that saying such a thing would make her seem foolish, make Sabra think again about teaching her. It was a magnificent animal with a shining bay coat and a white star upon its forehead and a dark brown mane of hair.
“She is mine,” Sabra said. Her tone said more. It said that she and the horse belonged to each other, and there was pride in that. “I bought her. Paid good silver.”
She stepped past the animals to where the saddles had been laid out, putting first a blanket and then a saddle on the horse’s back. She tightened the strap beneath its belly, pulling hard, and then stood back.
“Climb up,” she said.
Felice had seen people mount horses, and she had a fair idea of how it was done. She put her left foot into the stirrup and seized the saddle with both hands, swinging herself up and over, finding the other stirrup. The horse swung its head and looked back at her for a moment.
“The reins?”
They hung forwards over the neck, out of reach. “I forgot.”
“It was a good effort,” Sabra handed her the leather straps. “If you mount from the left hold them in your left hand as you mount, and test your weight on the stirrup before mounting. If the belly strap is loose you might just find yourself sitting on the ground under the saddle. Some horses play tricks, puff themselves up when you tighten the strap, then let the air out. It loosens the strap.”
“I see. I’ll remember that.”
“It’s good, though,” the lieutenant said. “She likes you. She’s not often so comfortable with a new rider.”
The lesson progressed. Sabra untied the horse and led it around the camp, telling Felice how to hold her feet, how to touch her heels to the horse’s flanks to make it move forwards, how to steer with just the pressure of her knees. She was soon walking the horse around the clearing with Sabra watching from a distance. It was the horse, though. The horse did everything, and she felt that she sat atop her by her permission alone. Eventually they stopped. Felice swung down from the saddle, and was surprised at how reduced she felt. Sitting on a horse was a strange thing, like being better than others, a feeling of power.
“Tomorrow night?” she asked.
“As you wish,” Sabra replied. “But understand that the mechanics of riding, the actions, are only the smallest part of the skill. You must understand the horse. It must know that you are its lord, and for that to be true you must believe it yourself. You can ride a doubting horse down a country lane, but when it becomes alarmed it must trust you, or it will look to its own safety as best it can.”
Felice went back to her wagon and a man brought her food, for which she thanked him. She ate, thinking of horses. How could such a great beast know that a small creature such as a man was its master? Not through a stick, that was certain. She had seen beaten horses. There were some in East Scar itself who treated their mounts badly, but not the guardsmen. They seemed to know the secret, and their horses were proud, bold, brave enough to go into war and not betray their riders.
The smell of saddle leather and horses clung to her clothes, and when she slept she dreamed of riding.
* * * *
The next evening the wagons stopped on an open plain below hill
s. It was colder. Most of the passengers were wrapped in their cloaks against a needling wind that rode down from the heights. There was little shelter, and the atmosphere in the camp was quite different. People talked less, kept to their small groups huddled behind the poor shelter that the wagons offered. It was an unfriendly wind, but at least it was dry.
Felice made her way to the guards’ camp. They had chosen a spot beside two trees, or what might have been trees in a better location. They were barely higher than her head. They had stretched a rope between them and tried to make a wind break. It was probably less effective than the wagons. They had tethered the horses behind the wind break, and built their fire in the lee of the animals.
Sabra was waiting for her, wrapped in a cloak, looking uncooperative.
“Not tonight,” she said before Felice had a chance to speak.
“A little wind puts you off?” Felice was bored. She had been bored all day and looking forward to the evening. She would have wanted to ride even if the tiny rills that flowed down from the hills had been swollen and the rain had been beating the trees flat to the ground.
“It is not good for the horses. They may catch a chill.”
Felice studied her, and decided that she was telling the truth, or at least that she had no leverage to prove otherwise. She seized upon the only other possibility.
“Swords,” she said. “Show me how to fight with a sword.”
Sabra looked down at the ground for a minute, then looked up. “This is not a good idea, Ima,” she said.
“Never the less, you will show me, yes?”
“As you wish.” Sabra went back to the men huddled around the fire and came back with two long swords, quite different from the short weapon that she had been wearing herself.
Sabra saw her curiosity. “These are more akin to duelling weapons, and cavalry swords. Better reach, not so good in close quarters or a melee.” She gave one of the blades to Felice, who held it tightly, weighed it in her hand. It was heavier than she had expected. She could feel the weight of it all the way up to her shoulder. It changed her balance on the ground, rocked her back a little.
“Stand with one foot forwards. Not so much. Good. Now hold the blade with a lighter grip, point up, point towards my throat.”
She obeyed, felt her balance improve. Sabra’s blade crossed her own, same angle, tilted at a place just beneath her chin.
“Thrust at me,” she said.
Felice pushed the blade forwards tentatively, but the lieutenant deflected the blade easily and slapped her on the ear with the flat of her own blade. It stung.
“Again.”
She pushed forward more forcefully, but Sabra barely moved and for a second time she felt the slap of the blade against her ear. She tried to work out what was going on, but it was quick. She needed to watch more carefully. Another two times and the same thing happened. She tried moving away from the blade, but it made no difference. Sabra moved with her, read everything that she did and compensated. She stepped back and lowered the blade.
“What exactly are you teaching me here?” She was irritated, both at her own failure and the other’s effortless superiority. Sabra was taking no pleasure in it, it was just an exercise. She looked bored.
“I’m giving you a chance to learn without getting killed.”
“What? That I should leave swords to guardsmen?”
Sabra shrugged, and that annoyed Felice even more. She lunged again, but made it into a feint, pulled back and caught Sabra’s blade on her own. It was the first time she’d heard steel on steel so close. But Sabra switched sides and slapped her other ear. She feinted again, and tried to block the return blow, keeping her blade central and moving her head away from Sabra’s sword. It worked better than before, and the blades rang out twice, but a third pass got through and touched her left ear. She was beginning to get angry, sure that the lieutenant was taunting her. There was no lesson that she could see in this.
She swung the blade in a lateral cut, and that made Sabra jump, but opened her up completely, and she got a stinging blow to the side of her face. She could almost see what was happening. Every time she moved her sword Sabra met its tip with a stronger part of her own blade and pushed it aside, leaving her exposed, and moving forwards at the same time.
She tried again, moving forwards herself, pushing with a stronger part of the blade, but Sabra met her thrust and pushed it aside again. She was stronger, and Felice could not prevail. It was just a game, then, a humiliation. Her anger became something more, something almost uncontrolled – a shadow of the rage that had possessed her on the ship, in the storm.
One of the guardsmen said something and Sabra’s head twitched slightly to pick up the words. Felice launched herself, not really using the blade at all she thrust her fist forwards with all her strength, driving forwards with every muscle in her body.
She felt an impact. Her fist, strengthened by the pommel within it, struck home, and Sabra went down.
There was a moment of confusion. The lieutenant kept her blade between them and struggled for a moment to get her feet back underneath her, but the look on her face was one of surprise – shock even. The guardsmen were silent, suddenly, and quite still. A twig cracked on the fire. The wind blew.
Felice was as surprised as anyone that her ploy had worked, and the surprise washed away her anger. Sabra stood opposite her again, but now there was a red mark on her cheek and the side of her face. There was blood, too. Not much, but it was blood. She wanted to apologise, but hadn’t it been the point? To score a hit? She knew that she wasn’t supposed to be able to, but there it was. And what was that she had seen in her eyes? Surprise? Yes, and something else. Fear?
But she liked Sabra. Confused, she threw down the sword, turned her back and walked to her wagon. She climbed into the back, folded her face in her arms and wept. Nothing made sense to her any more. She hurt her friends, aided her enemies, lost sight of who she was and her purpose, both on this journey and in the greater scheme of things. She wanted justice for Todric, she wanted to get home. Beyond those goals nothing else mattered, or it should not. She was a trader. She belonged in the Scar. These were the realities.
But how dull a world it was when only realities counted. So much had happened that was different, unexpected, exciting. Todric’s death had been a trigger, a thing that had hurled her across the world. She had never desired these things, these adventures, and yet they were part of her now. She could never again be who she had been, but at the same time she had no idea who she had become, or even if she liked this new Felice. There was a violence in her that could be provoked, a childish violence that paid no heed to consequences. She was impatient, too, which was new. And she was clever. Her father had always said that she was clever, but now she was clever out here in the larger world where she had expected to be foolish. Alder was an idiot by comparison. Powerful, but an idiot. She had saved his life, she had tracked Raganesh, she had talked the Faer Karan out of killing her, she had secured the information that Alder and the Ekloi had wanted. Raganesh was an idiot, too, a simpleton monster.
Was this arrogance? Was she adding that especially unpleasant vice to her other acquisitions?
There was a noise and she looked up. A plate of food had been set down beside her and a man was hurrying away, back to a fire, and friends, and a cup of wine. She called thanks after him, but did not eat the food. These people were lucky to have such simple lives, to have friends to talk with and a fire to sit around. That was all that you needed – to understand your place, to have food, shelter and friends. Everything else was complication, annoyance. It was trouble.
She lay back and looked at the stars. They spread out above her in an unparalleled display. The bare land, the treeless plain, made it easy to see them, allowed them space to shout down their full glory. She had seen other worlds. The old mages, the ones who had ruled before the coming of the Faer Karan, had believed that there were worlds out there among the stars, that the sun was a star se
en close at hand, but not too close. Had she been out there? Were the places that she had visited among the stars themselves? She thought not. It had not seemed far, and they called it stepping. Would you step between the stars? Again she did not think so.
It was all very large, and she was so small. Raganesh had ruled with the other Faer Karan for four hundred years, and before that he had been elsewhere. For how long? He could have been thousands of years old when they came here. The Ekloi, too, were older, almost certainly longer lived. She had seen eighteen years. Of six of them she could recall no more than an image or a word; broken, scattered, unreliable fragments. If luck stayed with her she would know perhaps sixty more, and when she was gone Raganesh would still be there, serving his masters, striving to escape from the Ekloi. Alder, too, she guessed, would still be there, and Todric’s name would be forgotten, and the marker that showed where his bones had been laid would be worn down, broken, illegible.
And yet even her insignificance was glorious. She could act, reach out and touch those around her, and the world would not be the same. If it was some small thing that changed, or some great one, it did not matter in the least. The echoes of that change would be felt for ever. No one would know who she had been, what she had thought or dreamed, but the world would remember her in the simple fact of what it was and how she had changed it.
She picked a piece of cold meat from the plate that had been left and bit into it, savouring the saltiness and the texture of the cooked flesh. Life was what it was, and it was a waste not to enjoy it, so matter how trivial ones triumphs and pleasures.
“Felice.”
She looked up. It was Sabra. She stood at the open end of the wagon, her face a silhouette against the dying fires of the camp, but swollen on one side. Felice did not trust herself to speak.
“I am sorry,” Sabra said. “I was unkind.”
“You were teaching me.” An apology was unexpected.
“So I thought, but it was you who taught me a lesson: to respect whoever stands before you. The colonel has said it to me often enough.” She touched her face. “You have made the point another way.”