The Wild Road

by Jennifer Roberson

  And another. “He was in Alisanos? Came out of Alisanos?”

  BETHID CAUGHT UP to Brodhi not far from the couriers’ common tent. She could tell from his posture, an indication she knew well, that he had no intention of explaining anything, but she had to ask. “Ilona told me you’d gone into Alisanos. Are you all right?”

  When he continued his determined striding, Bethid jogged after him and caught at an arm. “Brodhi—I know. I know you’re not Shoia. Ilona told me.”

  He did not tear his arm out of her grasp, as she expected, but he nonetheless impressed upon her, with his expression, the rigidity of his jaw as he halted and turned to face her, that her inquiries were not welcome. She let go of his arm instantly. “The hand-reader knows nothing. She is a charlatan.”

  Bethid shook her head. “No. She’s not.” She drew in a breath and ventured, “You risked Alisanos . . . I simply want to know if you are all right.”

  Before he could answer—provided he intended to answer, and that was not a certainty—the farmsteader arrived. “Did you find them? Are they all right? Did you bring them out?” Restrained desperation was evident in his tone, his face. His clothing was soiled and wrinkled, and his hair lay damply against his head. “Where are they?”

  Bethid saw something briefly flicker crimson in Brodhi’s eyes. The faintest trace of ruddy color suffused his skin. It was the closest he had ever come, in front of her, to overt anger. He could be a cold man; she had seen that. But this? This heat was not Brodhi.

  But Brodhi, she remembered as her belly spasmed with the thought, was unlike anyone she knew. Not Shoia, Ilona had said, but from Alisanos. Of Alisanos. Rhuan also.

  Were they even human?

  Brodhi’s words were clipped. “I did not go into Alisanos to find your family.”

  “I know that, but did you find them? Unintentionally?” The farmsteader put out a hand, as if he intended to touch Brodhi. But the expression on Brodhi’s face repudiated the impulse. Davyn’s hand fell slack at his side. He repeated, “Did you find them?”

  In the face of Davyn’s desperation and Brodhi’s indifference, Bethid blurted, “For the Mother’s sake, Brodhi, tell him if you know something!”

  The faint ruddiness disappeared from Brodhi’s skin. His eyes, once again, were brown, and implacable. “Your wife and your children are together.”

  “Alive?” The farmsteader was hoarse-voiced, close to tears of frustration.

  Brodhi said, “Perhaps not, anymore, as you would describe living.” He shot a glance at Bethid, challenging her to speak again. “They are now of Alisanos.”

  A harsh, inarticulate cry broke from the farmsteader’s mouth. He wavered on his feet a moment, turned unsteadily as if he meant to walk away but abruptly swung back. “You came back! You came out!”

  “So did Rhuan!” Bethid, shaken, stared at Brodhi in disbelief. “How can you say such a thing? Obviously there is a means to leave Alisanos. It’s been done!”

  “Rhuan . . .” the farmsteader said in a flat, stunned voice. “He was with—he was with my family when Alisanos moved.” His eyes on Bethid were abruptly alive with hope. “Rhuan has returned also?”

  Calmly, Brodhi said, “Perhaps you should discuss this with him.”

  Bethid opened her mouth to speak again, but shut it as Brodhi turned and began walking once again toward the common tent. A painful ache centered itself in her chest, right behind her breastbone. She liked Brodhi. In spite of his moods, his self-imposed isolation, she liked Brodhi. He had done her a great favor in seeing to it she could enter the courier trials. But this. . . . In the midst of so much grief and panic, how could he be so indifferent?

  “Do you know where he is?” The farmsteader looked beyond her, toward the fire circle. “Rhuan?”

  Bethid glanced back. “He was right there—” But he wasn’t anymore. Neither Rhuan nor Jorda nor Mikal nor Ilona. “The ale-tent,” she said abruptly. “I would look there.”

  But she did not. She went after Brodhi.

  ONCE BEFORE, JORDA and Mikal had found select men among the tent-folk and karavaners. All were older, all unlikely to panic, and all had wits enough to grasp salient points without making judgments or assumptions. Those men, summoned out of the tide of folk who still clustered near the fire ring, now gathered in Mikal’s tent. Seats were found on stools, chairs, and benches. Hastily erected after the storm, the tent showed signs of battering with torn cloth and cracked timbers hastily wrapped with ropes to keep them whole. But then, so did the men show signs of battering; mental if not physical. Mikal found tankards and cups enough to serve them and charged nothing for the ale and spirits.

  The plank across the tops of two heavy wooden barrels was thick enough to support a man. Rhuan boosted himself atop it, legs dangling, boot toes touching the earthen floor. He drank his own share of ale, then set the tankard aside. Quietly he told them what a draka was, described the habits of the beasts, and did not downplay the outcome when a person was taken. “If you see a winged shadow, lie down. Immediately. Wherever you may be. Don’t move, don’t even twitch, until you are absolutely certain the draka is gone. Movement attracts them. Prey attracts them, and that means infants, children, adults, as well as livestock. Crying, shouting, and screaming merely provokes them further.”

  And eventually, as expected, one man asked what all of them were thinking. His hair was a mix of brown and gray. Smile lines webbed the flesh near his blue eyes, though at present no humor touched his face. Rhuan recognized him as a karavaner. Sandic, he recalled. “How do you know so much about Alisanos?”

  As a Shoia, as they knew him, Rhuan replied with casual ease, “Draka are legend among my people. It isn’t Alisanos we know, but the beasts.” Twenty pairs of eyes stared back at him. “There are tales of a time when Alisanos moved, and two draka were disgorged. Many of my people were killed.”

  “And resurrected?” Sandic asked. “It would seem your people have a greater advantage than we do. Those who fell from our sky will never live again, nor the child who was taken.”

  It prompted murmuring among the others. Rhuan nodded. “That is true. But a truth is also that when killed repeatedly, even Shoia die.”

  That, too, roused murmuring. Concerned glances were exchanged.

  It was Jorda who asked the obvious question before anyone else could. “What happened to those draka? Did you find a way to kill them?”

  The lie came easily because it had crossed his mind the moment he saw the draka. “We fed cattle on thornapple,” Rhuan said. “They went mad from the poison. The draka then ate the cattle—” But he broke off. His vision grayed out and all the hairs stood up on his body. Swearing, he swung himself off the wooden plank. His suggestion to the men was succinct. “Out. Now.”

  The earth rippled beneath his boot soles. A shiver shook the ale-tent. A strong shudder followed it, pewter tankards clanking as they tipped over, were knocked one against the other. Others fell and rolled off the tables, spilling ale. Canvas trembled. The earth beneath groaned. The rope holding one of the poles together came unwrapped, and the tautness caused it to whip through the air. One man, struck, cried out.

  Poles cracked. The tent leaned to one side. Shallow guy-line anchor irons were pulled from the ground. Outside, Rhuan caught at poles and billowing canvas, attempting to hold open an escape route. Mikal, as expected, was the last to leave, fighting his way through falling canvas. Throughout the grove so close to Mikal’s tent, amidst the ranks of tents surrounding the fire pit, Rhuan heard screaming. In a matter of moments all of the assembled men had dispersed, running for tents and wagons, seeking families. Dogs barked frenziedly. A horse, broken rope hanging from its halter, careened through the center of the settlement.

  The ale-tent collapsed. Then the undulations of the earth died away. All was still again, save for the sound of weeping and a woman’s raised voice, demanding
explanation of a husband who knew no more than she.

  “Sweet Mother,” Mikal said hoarsely, staring at the mass of canvas and broken poles, “how much more can we endure? How long before this stops?”

  Falsehood served nothing. Rhuan gave him the truth. “Weeks. Months. Possibly even years.”

  “Years!”

  Rhuan hung onto his patience with effort; he wanted badly just to tell Mikal how he knew the answers. But not yet, if ever. “There is no predicting it, Mikal. Alisanos does as it will do.”

  “Then we should leave,” Mikal said sharply. “We should pack up and go as far from here as possible.”

  Rhuan shook his head. “As I told Jorda, until we know the precise boundaries of Alisanos, it’s too dangerous to test its borders.”

  “But Brodhi made his way here,” Mikal protested. “There must be a safe way in. And out. He can show us.”

  Rhuan clamped his teeth closed on a sharp retort. Patiently he said, “There is danger here from Alisanos, of course, and we should leave when we know more. Remember when Brodhi arrived accompanied by Hecari from Cardatha? Would you have us risk culling parties? That’s precisely what will happen if we leave.”

  “And in the meantime we risk Alisanos?” Mikal shook his head. “At least the warriors gave us clean deaths.”

  “Clean?” Rhuan asked. “You saw what they did, Mikal. Is it truly a clean death for a child to have his brains dashed out by a warclub?”

  Beneath a coating of dust, Mikal’s face was anguished. “Then what can we do?”

  “We wait,” Rhuan said, “until we know a safe route out of here. Then we can leave. But for now—” Rhuan squatted down and took into his hand a cracked pole. “—we’ll raise this tent again.”

  DAVYN FELL TO hands and knees as the earth shuddered beneath him. He was aware of movement, of people once again running who had run from the flying beast. Cries and screams filled the air, as did shrill protests from horses and the barking of dogs. Tents began leaning. He saw the ale-tent shaking, heard the cracking of poles, saw canvas begin to billow into collapse even as men ran from the tent.

  And then he saw Rhuan. Sweet Mother, he would get answers from the guide. Even now.

  Davyn thrust himself to his feet, staggering as the earth shifted beneath his boots. Then it steadied, and he ran.

  “Rhuan!” he cried. “Wait—”

  The karavan guide turned toward him, holding a broken tent pole. Breathless, Davyn slowed to an ungainly stop beside Mikal. “Wait,” he repeated, showing the flat of his hand in a gesture of delay. “He said you were in Alisanos, too. The other Shoia.” For a moment color suffused Rhuan’s face, then faded. “And she said so. The woman courier.” Davyn tried to regain self-control, but all he wanted to do was shout at the man, to demand an answer. “The courier said they were there, all of them. My family. Did you see them?”

  The guide’s face bore an expression of compassion. It struck Davyn that he knew very well what he said offered no hope. “I did.”

  “And they were alive?”

  Rhuan nodded. “They are in a safe place.”

  Davyn expelled a rush of breath and words upon it and closed one hand around his string of charms. “Oh, thank the Mother! Oh Mother, bless you!” He reached toward Rhuan, then recalled how Brodhi had reacted. He let his hand fall back to his side. “Please,” he said. “Are they all right? Are they—whole?”

  “They are safe. When last I saw them, they were safe.”

  Davyn’s belly felt tied in knots. “But—you couldn’t bring them out? “

  “I could not.”

  He attempted to keep his tone casual, not accusatory, but failed. “You came out. You and the courier both. If you could do so, why not my family?”

  Mikal frowned, looking at Rhuan. “What’s he talking about? Where were you? Where are his folk?”

  “In Alisanos,” Davyn declared.

  “But—” Mikal’s frown remained, “You and Brodhi came out. You told us that.”

  Something flickered briefly in Rhuan’s eyes. His face was still, composed of angles and hollows. “Alisanos occasionally gives up what it has swallowed.”

  “And they’re no longer human!” Davyn cried.

  The ale-keep scrutinized Rhuan. “But you’re not human anyway. Is that why you escaped?”

  Before Rhuan could answer, a wave of fear and desperation rose in Davyn’s breast. “Why didn’t you bring them out with you?” He drew in a tight breath and tried to reknit the fraying shreds of his dignity. “Put yourself in my place. If you saw them, if they are well—” He broke off and lifted his arms then let them fall slack. He felt very much like crying. “Put yourself in my place.”

  Compassion softened the guide’s expression and tone. “I’m sorry. It was not possible to bring them out.”

  “I don’t understand.” Davyn’s mouth felt numb. “How could you leave them there?”

  Rhuan glanced briefly at Mikal, then nodded as if to himself. To Davyn he said, “Is your wagon whole?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Then let us go there.” Rhuan handed the tent pole to the ale-keep. “There is much to tell you, to explain. Let us do it in private.”

  Davyn thrust out an arm in the direction of the old grove. “There.”

  Chapter 4

  STRIATED, RUDDY CLIFFS rose up from the earth, loomed as concave palisades over the Kiba. Audrun shaded her eyes against the double suns and squinted upward through the spreading limbs of a wide-canopied tree where she and her children had been summarily escorted.

  The massive cliff face was infiltrated by a seemingly haphazard assembly of natural caves as well as hollows chiseled by hand into clean, precise lines and angles. Dwellings were stacked side by side and one atop another, interconnected by a skein of staircases running up, down, and sideways, and wide, arched openings that formed passageways leading more deeply into the cliffs. She could not tell how deeply the caves reached into the cliffs, but all of them were fronted by walls formed of chunks of stacked flat red stone mortared together, mudbrick facades, and beamwork. Colored cloth fluttered in many of the square windows, while tall doorways were warded by shimmery scaled hide or loomed hangings.

  Audrun could not begin to count how many dwellings the cliffs hosted. The network of caves, dwellings, staircases, and passageways was vaster than anything she had seen, including the tent settlement where she and her family had joined Jorda’s karavan. Awed, she could not imagine how long it had taken to build the cliff dwellings, to refine the extant caves and make homes of them. Many years. Many hands. Many tools.

  “Mam.” It was Torvic’s voice, and plaintive. “Are we just supposed to stay here?”

  Here was the stone bench beneath the tree; the sloping rock table immediately opposite the bench; a pathway of russet paving stone and red-tinged dirt. Here were her children, trapped as she was, amid beings she had never imagined even in her dreams. Primaries. Firsts. Gods, they called themselves.

  Audrun called them captors.

  My poor children . . . Yet looking at them one by one, making note of tattered and soiled clothing, fair hair tangled, and a gaunt tautness in their faces, she knew they mirrored her own appearance, her own unspoken desperation. She was exhausted, hungry, thirsty, and had given accelerated birth not long before. Her overused body was beset by trembling. Everything ached. Her skin, hosting uncounted scrapes and scratches, burned. She wanted to collapse into a bed and sleep for weeks. It was what her body needed, but her mind, she knew, would be too busy.

  Audrun’s mouth twisted as she recalled how she had stood before the primaries assembled in the Kiba and challenged them to act, to find her demon-abducted baby. They clearly held humans in disdain, and she had presented a most unprepossessing figure. But she would do it all again, in the name of the Mother; would do
it daily, if necessary. And she would declare to them, repeatedly, that they were not gods at all.

  Rhuan’s people. The resemblence of one to another was striking, with identical dark-copper hair, clear brown eyes, the faintest ruddy sheen in skin. She wished he were present to guide her, to offer advice on how the primaries thought, on what mistakes she should not make. It was her task, she knew, to change their minds about humans. If she and her children were to be prisoners here—and she believed wholeheartedly that it was captivity, regardless of Ylarra’s claim—she would make certain the primaries came to understand how humans thought. To understand that difference need not be weakness.

  But Rhuan was gone.

  Desolation and despair. She thought she might choke on both as they swept into her chest, rose to fill her throat. Here was her childrens’ future, and her own.

  Audrun closed her eyes as tears threatened. She would not allow the children to see their mother weep. Regardless of how frightened she might be, how overwhelmed she felt, she dared not let the children see it, feel it, sense it.

  And then memory rose to banish those emotions. Her eyes snapped open. While lost in despair, overwhelmed by their circumstances, she had lost track of a most vital and valuable piece of information. It unfolded before her, and in that memory was strength.

  A road would be built. A road leading safely through Alisanos from the settlement to . . . elsewhere. Atalanda? She had seen Davyn’s crude map showing the shortcut edging around the borders of Alisanos. Atalanda province, on that map, lay due west, on the far side of the deepwood. If the road ran from the tent settlement in Sancorra to safety in Atalanda, it offered freedom to those in Sancorra province fleeing the depredations of the Hecari warlord and his people, just as her family had.

  A safe way through Alisanos. That, Rhuan had gained for them; because of her, because of her children, because of the husband who, undoubtedly, was now frantic with the need to find them.