Leena felt at times that the world contrived to make her path difficult for its own amusement. This was most definitely one of those times.
Two days later, they reached the main trunk of the trade route.
“Our destination lies some distance in that direction”—Hieronymus pointed along the road, such as it was, to the south—“and we'll be lucky to reach it before the autumnal rains begin, but we're on the path, at least, and that should be counted as a minor victory.” His maps were spread out across his knees as he crouched by the roadside.
“And how many more kilometers beyond that before we reach Atla?” Leena asked sullenly.
Hieronymus rolled up his maps once more, and returned them to his pack. “Trust me,” he said apologetically, “you don't want to know.”
Leena joined Balam, who stood at the center of the road. It was pitted and gouged, with great ruts dug irregularly into the hard ground, looking almost like widely spaced blast craters from mortar explosions.
“What are those?” Leena said, pointing to the nearest pit, which was easily as wide as she was tall.
“Tracks,” Balam said.
Leena whistled low. “What could have made such tracks? Some sort of large machine? A tank's tread of some kind?”
“No.” Balam shook his head, glancing up and down the road nervously, as though worried something might be coming. “Not a machine, but a beast. A very, very large beast.”
“Well, come on,” Hieronymus said, hitching his pack onto his back. “Let's not waste daylight, shall we?” He turned towards the south and started to walk along the roadway, taking care to skirt around the huge craters.
Benu followed close behind, and Balam went to join them. Leena took a few steps along the road before glancing back to see Kakere and Spatha lingering by the side of the road, looking northward with guilty expressions on their faces.
“Aren't you coming?” Leena called back to them, her thumbs tucked through the shoulder straps of her pack.
Kakere and Spatha looked at each other, nodded, and then turned back to Leena.
“No,” Spatha said with a shake of her head.
“Where would you go, then?”
“North.” Spatha pointed up the road with her sheathed gladius.
“Um, sorry?” Kakere smiled sheepishly at Leena, and shrugged.
Hieronymus and Balam came to stand beside Leena, while Benu lingered down the road, impatient to press on.
“Why?” Balam asked, idly tapping the emerald hanging from his ear.
The Nonae and the Ichthyandaro looked to each other again, and Spatha drew a heavy breath before answering.
“When the oracular tree healed my wounded body, it seems also to have mended my broken spirit. I find that I miss my people, and want nothing more than once more to hear the sound of my mother tongue. I may be the last of the Nonae, as I fear, but if I am wrong, and any more of my nation still wander the desert wastes, I would find them, and set about rebuilding. We were a proud people once, with good reason, and there is nothing to say that we could not be so again.”
“And you, Kakere?” Hieronymus asked, crossing his arms over his chest. “Do you intend to head into the north, as well?”
Kakere nodded, and smiled.
“But water is difficult to find as you head north from Parousia, and near impossible once you reach the Eastern Desert. How would you survive?”
“That tree really did a number on me,” Kakere answered, gesturing to his bare, blue skin. “I've had barely a sip of water in the last two days, and I still feel perfectly fine. And on top of that, I've not had a single craving for alcohol since the tree touched me. I'm not quite sure what I am now, but I don't think I'm exactly an Ichthyandaro anymore.”
“That is as it should be,” Spatha said. She reached up and touched her left cheek, now smooth and unmarred. “Thou are no longer the fish man of thy earlier days, and I am no longer the citizen cadet I have been these many years. Perhaps we are each the first of a new model, each a new type of our species.”
Spatha reached out, and her hand found Kakere's. Their fingers laced together, and they turned to Leena and the others, hand in hand.
“I can't really explain it, but it's like some bond has developed between us, these past few days,” Kakere said.
“Since the trees of Keir-Leystall changed you?” Leena asked. She wondered what changes the strange machines might have wrought to their minds, as well as their bodies.
“Perhaps.” Spatha nodded.
“Or maybe even earlier, when you saved me from those Tannim,” Kakere said, looking lovingly at the woman at his side.
“Perhaps,” Spatha said, and smiled.
With that, the pair turned and started to walk towards the north. When they had gone but a few steps, Kakere glanced back over his shoulder, smiling broadly.
“Good-bye, everybody! It was really nice meeting you.” Kakere waved eagerly.
Spatha turned back, too, and nodded. “Best of fortune, Akilina, and may thou find the object of thy quest.”
Leena waved, awkwardly, and turned to Hieronymus and Balam, who watched the retreating pair with expressions intermingling confusion and amusement. Kakere and Spatha were by now dozens of meters away, making good time across the uneven ground.
“Well, that was unexpected,” she said.
“It's like they say, I suppose,” Hieronymus answered, shaking his head. “The heart finds comfort where it may.”
“What?” Balam said. “You believe that this is of their own choosing, and not some desire implanted by the twisted trees of Keir-Leystall?”
Hieronymus shrugged. “Who can say? But I've seen stranger love matches in my time, both here and on Earth, and who am I to judge?”
Balam sighed, and his eyes followed the pair as they walked into the distance. “Pity. She was a magnificent woman, despite her sundry flaws.”
“Ah, take heart, old friend.” Hieronymus clapped the jaguar man on the shoulder. “She was much too dainty for the likes of you. I'm sure we'll find someone more to your tastes when we reach Hele.”
From behind them came the voice of Benu. They turned and saw him standing in the middle of the road a few meters away, tapping his toes impatiently.
“Should I begin work on constructing my next body now?” the artificial man called. “I won't need it for another thousand solar years, but at the pace we're going, we may not have moved from this spot by then.”
Leena, Hieronymus, and Balam joined him, laughing, and the company, now once more a quartet, made their way towards the south.
The area through which the company moved now was broad savannah, dotted here and there with copses of trees, pampas grasslands stretching out to either horizon with only the gray scar of the main trunk road interrupting the waves of silvery stalks.
The sun pounded down on them from above, and the only respite they found was the meager shade from the gnarled trees found irregularly spaced, but the trees were often too far from the road to make the side trip for a brief midday rest worth the time, and they made due with taking tarpaulins from their packs and setting up makeshift awnings propped up with their swords and scabbards, stretching out at full length in the minuscule amounts of shade provided.
Nights, they slept by the side of the road, making surprisingly comfortable beds for themselves by gathering up stalks of grass cut down with Hieronymus's saber and piling them into nests. Their meals were simple: dried, salted fish that Balam had brought with them from the Acoetes Zephyrus, supplemented by the occasional bird or small rodent caught along the way.
As they moved farther south, day by day, it became clear that they were following close on the heels of some large convoy, a caravan of enormous beasts that had churned up the road in their wake. Leena could scarcely imagine how these massive creatures must appear.
The days passed mostly in silence, the company's energy and attentions focused more on locomotion than on communication, but when night fell, and they had
eaten their humble meals, they sat around the flickering firelight in their makeshift nests of piled grasses, the heavens wheeling overhead, and passed the hours in quiet conversation.
To Leena, these nights seemed of a piece with the weeks she had spent with the three men traveling across the Sakrian plains. Though different muscle groups now ached, since she walked instead of sitting astride a trotting horse all day, the pains were familiar, as were the jokes and jests shared across the flickering firelight.
Benu's stories were, typically, the most wide-ranging, since he had a much larger store of experience from which to draw. And Balam knew hundreds of ribald jokes, handed down by generations of Sinaa princes, each more toe-curlingly hilarious than the last. But it was Hieronymus's tales that Leena found the most engaging. Whether he was relating one of the Greek myths his mother had taught him as a child, or recounting one of his own adventures as a naval officer on the oceans of Earth, just the sound of his voice was often enough to keep Leena's rapt attention.
As she sat and listened to Hieronymus speak, she couldn't help but be reminded of Sergei. The two men resembled one another not at all—not in appearance, manner, or habits—but nonetheless when she looked at Hieronymus, of late, there was something that brought her former love immediately to mind.
Nights, when the conversation drifted off to silence and the company settled down to rest, Leena would look up at the stars overhead, unable to sleep, inescapably aware of the nearness of Hieronymus's sleeping form.
It was midmorning when Hieronymus cried out, slipped, and promptly fell flat on his back. “Ugh,” he spat, lying lengthwise in a deep pile of greenish mud, which had splattered onto his chest and face as he fell. “What is that stench?”
Balam rushed over, but when he saw that his friend was unhurt, just stood back, pinching his nostrils shut and shaking with laughter.
“What?” Hieronymus said, his tone annoyed as he tried unsuccessfully to stand, the green mud seeming to have cemented him in place. “I tripped!”
Leena and Benu came to stand beside the jaguar man, and immediately saw what he found so amusing.
“Oh, Hero.” Leena tried to retain her composure, but her sympathetic noises were laced through with barely controlled laughter. “You seem to have taken a bit”—she ineffectively stifled a laugh—“of a spill.”
“What am I lying in?” Hieronymus tried to lift his arm, but it took effort to pull away from the murky green stuff in which he had fallen, and his arm came away with an unpleasantly loud squelching noise.
“I had no idea, Hieronymus, that you had coprophilic tendencies.” Benu rarely laughed, but even he now grinned broadly, amused at their companion's predicament.
“What?” Hieronymus struggled into a sitting position.
“Dung, Hero,” Balam called out, doubled over with laughter. “You're lying in dung.”
Hieronymus scrambled, trying to climb to his feet, but instead slipped again, this time pitching face-first into the greenish mound.
“Arrgh!” He pushed to his knees, and launched himself forward, clearing the mound and landing in the pitted road. He spat out clumps of the foul stuff, which coated his cheeks and clung to his hair.
“Fresh, too, by the looks of it,” Benu observed, peering at the mound without getting a step closer than was necessary.
“Blast!” Hieronymus climbed unsteadily to his feet, and then reached out to Balam and Leena. “For god's sake, help me get this mess off of me.”
“Oh, no,” Leena said, raising her hands to ward him off as she and Balam danced out of reach.
“Go roll in the grass,” Balam ordered, still pinching his nose shut. “It won't be as good as a proper bath, but it'll have to do.”
Hieronymus staggered into the high grasses, stripping off his soiled clothes and doing his best to rid himself of the clinging clumps of dung. While he did, Leena and Balam stepped as near to the dung heap as they dared, their eyes wide.
“How big must be the monster that laid that?” Leena said, disbelieving.
“Too big,” Balam said warily. “Much, much too big.”
That night, as the sun dipped below the horizon to the west, and the company prepared to make camp for the night, they spied an orange glow to the south.
“The convoy?” Leena asked.
“Quite likely,” Hieronymus said. He'd managed to wash most of the dung from his clothes, face, and hair in a little puddle of brackish water they'd passed that afternoon, but the smell of the foul stuff still clung to him like a shroud.
“Well, shall we go and make our introductions?” Balam said. “If we're lucky, maybe they'll have something besides dried fish or prairie mice to eat, eh?”
A short while later, they approached the firelight of an encampment. As they drew nearer, they could hear the lowing of giant beasts, and saw large shadows hulking on the horizon.
“Approach carefully,” Hieronymus warned, his voice low. “We don't want to startle them.”
Suddenly, above the sounds of the beasts there rose the voices of men and women shouting calls of alarm.
“It wasn't me!” Balam said quickly, raising his hands in protest.
“Hsst!” Hieronymus raised a finger to silence him, and cocked his ear to listen closer. His eyes widened, and his hand flew to the hilt of his saber. “They're under attack!”
Hieronymus didn't hesitate, but charged forward, saber in one hand and Mauser pistol in the other. The others followed close behind, Balam with a knife in either hand and Leena bearing her short sword and Makarov.
In a span of heartbeats, they came upon the encampment, and in the flickering light of the campfire found a dozen men and women fending off a pack of carnivores. Each of the creatures was as tall as a horse, and looked somewhat doglike, but with hooves instead of claws, and a long snout, with meter-long jaws that looked like they were strong enough to crush a human skull in a single bite.
“Fenrir!” Hieronymus spat.
Already men and women lay wounded and bleeding on the ground, and the number of defenders standing against the pack of fenrir seemed to be dwindling.
“Come on,” Balam shouted, racing for the nearest of the huge carnivores, fangs bared and knives out. “This looks like fun!”
By the time morning arrived, the last of the ferocious fenrir had been killed or driven away, and Leena felt that she could not hold her sword point up for an instant longer. Balam's knives, claws, and fangs were slicked with gore from the necks and flanks of the fenrir, and even Benu looked in disarray, the simple tunic and trousers he wore ripped to shreds by the incisors of the creatures, leaving him standing unclothed and naked in the morning light. The defenders of the camp, seeing his odd, sexless parts, shied away from the artificial man, even after Leena insisted that he clothe himself once more with spares from his pack.
Hieronymus cleaned his saber on the pelt of one of the fallen fenrir, and grimly regarded the ruins of the encampment. From the looks of things, several of the men and women who had fallen before the carnivores had since died from their wounds in the night.
“What were those beasts?” Leena asked, coming to stand beside him, holstering her Makarov, from which she'd fired two shots in the intervening hours of the engagement. Her sword she cleaned on the grass, and with it sheathed, she collapsed into a sitting position on the ground.
“Fenrir,” Hieronymus said, his mouth drawn into a line.
“I gathered that much,” Leena said, scarcely amused. “But what manner of beast is a fenrir? They seemed something like enormous wolves, but I found their cloven hooves to be…unsettling.”
“You know as much as I, little sister. I've had a run-in or two with them in my travels, but never a pack that size. These people are lucky to have survived the night.”
“Those of us that did survive, that is.”
Leena and Hieronymus looked up into the face of a man nearly as tall as Balam. His skin was the color of ebony, his head completely hairless. Dressed in a suit of dark b
lue linens with scuffed brown leather boots that came to his knees, he was built like a prizefighter gone to seed, still muscled but with ample layers of fat for padding.
“Yasen Kai-Mustaf at your service,” the man said, extending a massive hand. He spoke Sakrian with an Elveran accent. “Bondsman of the Six Brothers Consolidated Shipping Concern, and master of beasts on this caravan. And you?”
Hieronymus took the man's hand in a firm grip.
“Hieronymus Bonaventure, honest traveler. And this is my companion—”
“Akilina Mikhailovna Chirikova,” Leena said, taking the man's hand and introducing herself. “The Sinaa is Balam, and the newly clad man with the unusual eyes is Benu.”
“You are welcome,” Yasen said as the other two joined them. “And our thanks for your assistance against the dread creatures last night. Had you not joined the fray when you did, I'm not sure that any of us would have survived till morning came.”
“It was nothing,” Hieronymus said with a shrug.
“It was fun,” Balam said.
“Not so fun for those who perished from their wounds,” Leena said, scolding.
“Now, now, my dear lady,” Yasen said, resting a comradely hand on Balam's shoulder. “Do not berate our friend Sinaa, for taking joy in the fact that he still lives. The dead do not envy us, nor should we pity them. Besides, the men who died did so in fulfilling their contracted duty to the Six Brothers Consolidated Shipping Concern. They were bonded guards, they guarded, and their untimely extinction was merely the price of doing business.” He clapped his huge hands together and grinned, ivory teeth showing in his dark face. “Now, is there anything I can do to repay you? Our generosity is limited only by our means, which are meager to say the least.”
“We seek passage to Hele,” Hieronymus said. “Are you taking on passengers?”
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