Eventually Alec smugly discovered a trail just where he expected it to run along the southern slope of the hills, and his pace picked up as Walnut carried him through the light mist that still fell. The track was not wide, but had been leveled and cared for.
Throughout the day Alec rode through the forested lands, without seeing another soul or sign of habitation. He began to grow suspicious that he was headed in the wrong direction, for surely there had to be outlying communities along the approach to Stronghold.
By late afternoon he calculated that he should be less than a day’s ride from Stronghold, if he was heading in the right direction. The clouds remained thick, the rain fell sporadically, and he continued to guess that the road must be headed in the right direction, despite the evidence to the contrary. His stomach growled with hunger, and he turned his attention to scavenging for food. He got off Walnut and walked along with his head down, looking for edible plants. He found a few stringy weeds to chew on, and as he did so he remembered the many times he and Leah had eaten river plants and fish, and it brought a smile to his face.
Those few mouthfuls of bitter weeds were all he found before the sky darkened and he could no long see clearly. He led Walnut off the road into the trees to care for him and prepare for another lonely night, thankful that at least the rain had stopped. As he brushed the horse and softly talked to him, he stopped in midstroke. He heard a noise, a faint music.
Alec listened intently, swiveling his head to try to locate the sound and to see any visible evidence of its source. Far off, through the murky air, flickers of light reflected off tree trunks, showing that a fire had been started by someone.
Alec fumbled about repacking his equipment on Walnut, then walked the horse carefully back out to the road, and headed cautiously towards the light. He wasn’t sure how to approach, or if to approach, whoever was ahead. In the deserted forest, most travelers would be likely to be wary of strangers showing up, and he would be wary of trying to enter a large group of strangers when trapped by the darkness.
As he got closer he heard more distinctly the sounds of the music. It was a lively tune with jovial lyrics, one that Alec had heard played in the carnival many times. Treena had played it, sometimes on three instruments at once, and Noranda had enjoyed it, singing it to herself at times when she was distracted.
Alec slipped down off the saddle as he rode close enough to see the tree trunks around the circle where two wagons boxed in one half of a campsite. Several men and a handful of women were sitting around the fire, one with a fiddle and one that pumped a small organ to carry the tune. They were beginning the second verse of the song, and clearly no one knew the words, because their chorus was faltering.
Alec had a sudden recollection of Ari in Walnut Creek, when he had manufactured a tale of being a lost prospector. A bold thought came to Alec. Perhaps he could just as brazenly make up a story and join this group for the evening, so that he’d get directions from them in the morning and perhaps a bite of food, the prospect that most motivated him in these circumstances. With two wagons to carry supplies, they were likely to have much, and there were no obvious guards posted, something that surprised him.
He walked into the open roadside fringe of the circle of campfire light, and began singing the second verse loudly, knowing that he wouldn’t win points for the quality of his singing voice. All heads jerked quickly to look at him, and three men rose rapidly from their seats. The organ player stopped, but the fiddle player kept on playing the tune, picking up the pace to match Alec.
Alec looked at her, directly in her eyes, and faltered for a long moment. “Don’t you know the words after all?” she challenged him. He responded by concentrating on the words of the verse, then waved his hands to motion to all the others to chime in with him as the rowdy chorus came to a climax.
As the song ended, Alec tried to prepare himself for the conversation he knew was about to ensue. No amount of preparation could settle his rattled nerves completely however, after seeing the face of the fiddle player. The girl looked like Noranda’s identical twin. He felt the blood drain from his face, as he turned pale with emotion.
Chapter 7 – The Wayward Letters
The longshoreman at the docks in Oyster Bay looked at the leather bag that was hidden behind a stack of crates. “This says it was supposed to be delivered to the bank in Goldenfields more than a month ago,” he called up to his foreman. He handed over the pouch full of letters, including Alec’s, and went on about his business.
The foreman knew that the bank rarely sent its internal messages astray. The discovery of this misplaced pouch would be trouble for someone. The bank’s accounts needed regular communication to keep their funds in balance. Although this pouch showed it had only come from Redwater, a smallish branch of the bank, it still meant money was at stake. He didn’t know that some of Alec’s letters, including the love letter for Bethany, were also astray within the bag.
Bethany by this time had actually been in Oyster Bay for almost three weeks, and was starting to look forward to the regular visits Tritos paid her. She was just a couple of miles away from where the heart-revealing letter sat - the letter that was meant to give her assurance of Alec’s love.
The foreman knew that the bank’s next ship to Goldenfields would not leave for another four days, and then be a week to ten days in transit up the rivers towards Goldenfields. It would pass right by its origins in Redwater before it got to the destination it should have reached five weeks earlier.
And so it happened that several days later the Pierpont Bank branch in the impressive building facing the traders market received two pouches on a day when it expected only one. The bank branch manager opened the regularly scheduled pouch and sorted out the reports to deal with them as expected. He then opened the tardy bag and pulled out the first report to examine it. The date on the report showed its age. The manager had already asked for and received a replacement report two weeks earlier, so he left the rest of the contents inside the bag and placed it at the back of his shelf.
The following week he sorted through the bag, and found the bundle of letters contained within. The letter to the Duke he gave to a courier to take to the palace, and the letter addressed to Bethany he put into the city’s mail system to be carried to the address on Bakers street. Two days later, Ellen received the letter meant for the girl who had departed several weeks before, and puzzled over what to do with it. A few days later she remembered to mention it to Ellison, who took it back to the palace and delivered it to Merle.
Several days later, Merle put the letter in a pouch, and sent it on a boat down river to Oyster Bay.
Chapter 8 – Meeting The Locksfort Youth
“Who are you, and how did you come to be on these private lands?” the man closest to Alec said as he and another walked up close to him. Neither had weapons displayed, which Alec took as a hopeful sign.
“I am a traveler on my way to Stronghold,” Alec explained, turning his eyes from the hauntingly familiar face of the girl in front if him. “I’ve not seen another person for a long time, so when I saw your fire I thought I’d come see if I could join you. I wasn’t aware this was private land. I’m not from around here.”
“This is a private estate, so you’ll need to move on and leave us,” one of the men still sitting by the fire said.
Alec looked at him, then looked at the men who had approached him, then seyed the others in the group, again making eye contact with the fiddle player for a long moment. They were not much more than his own age, he realized. They were a group of youths, perhaps just out in the woods for a pleasant outing, not travelers on the road, as he had expected.
“I’m sorry. I thought I had just caught up to other travelers on the road this evening,” Alec replied. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your party.”
“You might as well sit by the fire and warm up a little; we owe you for teaching us the second verse of the rooster song,” the fiddle player said, in a voice that was huskier
than Noranda’s. She had the same pert chin as Noranda, giving her face the same elfin, triangular appearance that Noranda had, although Alec realized that this girl’s eyes were set a trifle wider than the girl he remembered.
“He’s a stranger on our lands. I personally don’t think we should reward him for trespassing,” interjected the boy who had spoken before.
“Let the boy warm up, Reuchlin. Maybe he’ll teach us some other songs,” replied another boy, and other heads nodded. Alec had a sense that they agreed mostly because they wanted to undermine Reuchlin, more than they cared whether he got warm or not.
Alec tied Walnut to a tree and moved into the warm inner circle near the fire. “Thank you,” he said to the group in general. “My name is Alec, and it’s been a long, wet day in the saddle. Your fire feels good.”
“Do you know ‘Your Picture Is A Dog’?” he asked the two instrumentalists, looking at each girl.
The fiddler smiled, and the organist chimed in, “Yes, of course,” and the two introduced the first notes of the chorus, then led the whole group in the singing of the nonsensical tale about the man who hired a painter to produce a portrait of the girl who had rejected his advances, while she made various household pets pose for the portrait in succeeding verses of the song.
A round of laughter and clapping followed the end of the song. “Wimpeling, would you get the food out and let’s get dinner started?” the organist said to one of the boys. Several stood up and began to work, while the girls put their instruments down. One of the boys who had approached Alec at his entrance came over.
“My name is Durer,” he introduced himself. “Hello, Alec. What brings you to Stronghold?”
Alec had collected his wits during the singing of the song, and proceeded to tell the tale he had concocted before entering the camp. “I was with a traveling carnival, working as a healer. With all the troubles in the cities out west, the carnival ran out of money and fell apart, and I got the horse as my payment. I decided to leave all the problems and come to Stronghold, because I heard there wasn’t as much unrest up here.”
“No, we’ve managed to avoid the troubles the rest of the Dominion has had this past year,” Durer agreed.
“That’s because we don’t let strangers come and stir up trouble,” Reuchlin added frohe periphery of the group around Alec.
Durer gave a pained look at the thin malcontent, whose voice subsided.
“We’ll be returning to the city tomorrow. You’re welcome to stay with us tonight and ride along tomorrow if you like,” Durer offered.
“Thank you, that’s kind,” Alec said, holding out his hand to thank the other. Durer had thick, curly dark hair above a thin face that smiled easily, and he shook hands with Alec. “I appreciate the offer. I knew I must be lost, since I haven’t seen a village or people, so I could use some guidance to find my way to the city.”
“The river road is several miles farther inland. It travels away from the river to go around our estate. You must have somehow wandered off the road and then stumbled along,” a girl’s voice said, and Alec turned to see the fiddler standing behind him.
“My name is Johanna,” she said. “Did I hear you say you were in a carnival?” Alec nodded, his mouth unconsciously opening slightly as he intently studied the face of the girl.
“Do we know each other?” she asked in response to his scrutiny.
Alec blushed. “No. No, not that I’m aware of,” he replied.
“We learned those songs from my cousin, Durer’s sister, when we visited her in Oyster Bay almost a year ago, last autumn. She used to be in a carnival too,” the girl explained, then said no more as her face paled at the memory.
“Does your family own all these lands?” Alec asked, sensing the discomfort the others were feeling.
“This estate has been in our family for a long time. Everyone’s moved into the city though, so we never come out here. We thought we’d come to take a summer holiday for a couple of days and do some hunting, but the rain made us all decide to head back home,” Durer explained. People were drifting away, stoking the fire, preparing food, and setting canopies over sleeping blankets. “You can put your blankets under one of the wagons to stay out of the rain if you’d like,” he offered to Alec. “I need to go help,” he explained, and walked over to the fire.
Alec went back to Walnut and got his bedding off the back of the saddle, then spread it on the ground near the fire to warm up and dry out a little.
He walked over to where Johanna was setting out food on a table extending from the wagon-side. “Can I help do anything?” he asked, drawn to the girl’s haunting familiarity.
“Here, spread these out,” she said quietly. They worked in silence for a minute or two as Alec surreptitiously studied the girl, his mind trying to draw all the comparisons with Noranda. “What is it?” She asked finally, aware of the scrutiny. “Why are you looking at me?”
Alec hesitated. “You remind me of someone, very much. When I look at you I see a girl I haven’t seen in a very long time. I’m sorry to stae so rudely,” he added.
“I was always told that I looked like Noranda, Durer’s sister, the one who taught us the carnival songs,” Johanna said. “Were you with her in the same carnival?”
“No,” Alec responded hastily. “There’s more than one carnival traveling around the Dominion, you know,” he added lamely.
“You’re awfully young to have already left a carnival and be traveling across country on your own,” Johanna commented.
“I was an orphan in Frame, and then joined the carnival,” Alec said. “After the carnival, I didn’t have any place to go.”
“I almost feel like an orphan, sometimes,” Johanna said in an absent voice. “I rarely see my parents. My father travels on business, so I only see him if we ship out to visit him, or he comes home to us. We’re going to see him soon, though. He’s on his way home from Oyster Bay.”
“Things have been troubled down there, and there’s no point in him staying in such a troubled town,” another boy said as he walked up to the table with a stack of plates. “I’ll be glad to see Uncle Lapine. He’s got the best personality of any of the uncles or aunts.”
“Rembran, watch your manners!” Johanna said sternly.
“Don’t worry, Durer’s across the camp,” Rembran said.
“Everything’s ready! Come and eat,” Johanna called loudly. “Go ahead and lead the way as our guest, Alec,” she added.
“I learned enough manners to know that ladies should go first,” Alec replied. Despite the little food he’d had in the past day, he had little appetite at the moment. The chance that he would fall in with a group of Locksfort cousins by happenstance was unnerving. He stood back a few steps and let the others line up ahead of him, then fixed his own plate after everyone else had gone.
Wimperling pulled an armful of wineskins from the other wagon and began passing them around. Alec offered his to the boy who sat next to him, and drank water from his own canteen instead. As the others finished their food and the wine flowed freely, the atmosphere grew boisterous. Some sang loudly, while the crowd diminished as a few couples retreated to the shadows away from the rest of the group.
Alec grew tired, and began gathering the dirty dishes, piling them all together on the table. He saw no one else bothering with cleaning up the camp, nor did he see anything to clean with, so he left them stacked up, picked up his warmed blankets, and picked a spot under a wagon near Walnut to spend the night. The campfire crowd was silent now, the fire had burned down to untended embers, and Alec closed his eyes and fell asleep among the crowd of Locksfort youths.
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Chapter 9 – Joining the Locksforts
Alec was the first to awaken the next morning. The clouds had left the sky and the sun came up bright on the eastern horizon. Alec rolled his blankets and put them away, then brushed Walnut quietly while waiting for the rest of the camp to awaken. Durer was first up; he saw Alec and gave a friendly wave, t
hen walked off into the woods. Soon others started to arise, and Durer returned, to make a loud announcement that everyone needed to arise and prepare to make the trip back to Stronghold.
A few groaned, and Alec guessed that they were suffering the aftereffects of too much wine the night before. With a sudden impulsive thought, Alec looked through the medical supplies he had stored in his saddlebags, and found enough to mix some doses that would relieve the headaches and upset stomachs that came from overdrinking.
“Durer, I’ve got a few doses of medicine to sooth the hangovers of some of your friends,” he said, walking over to Noranda’s brother.
“Reuchlin, Brandeis, come here,” Durer said after a quick visual survey of the campsite. The two groaned and slowly meandered over to their cousin. “Alec has fixed a hangover cure; he said he was a medic, remember? You two need this the most, so take it quickly and then get your things put away.”
Without comment, the two held their hands out and took Alec’s proffered cure. “Anyone else who wants a hangover remedy come see Alec,” Durer said loudly to the group in general.
“That’s awfully nice of you, Alec,” he added. “Do you really believe it works?” Alec nodded. “That’s too bad, after a fashion. I always enjoyed knowing those two had to suffer for their degeneracy. Now you’ve taken away even that; there’s no telling how awful they’ll be in the future if they can just visit you and get a cure.”
Four others walked up in rapid succession, and Alec served them all, then put his goods away, and joined the others for a bite of dried fruit for breakfast. He sat apart for several minutes, trying to interpret a strange sensation of joy and melancholy he had experienced when he had given away the hangover cures. The feelings made no sense. The joy was an original feeling, but the melancholy had been deeply pressed into the spirit of one of his patients, he intuited.
The Lifesaving Power: Goldenfields and Stronghold Page 7