One of the women dropped another log on the fire.
Sparks spun up into the dark.
In Raven’s hair, for a moment he saw a glint of blue.
Flames settled again.
Another, in her own language, most likely told the one who had dropped the log that it was a waste of time and that they should be on their way. That, at least, was what her gesture suggested.
The idea of moving off in the fog alone appalled him; but the prospect of staying here with these women drained him.
Hating both feelings, he turned from her to walk aimlessly about the campsite, unable to do anything to free himself of either.
9
THE ACTUAL LEAVING, OF course, took quite a while—as if, he decided, darkness with a circle of trees about it confined more effectively than any wall or barred door.
They lingered there a good hour.
He wanted to be on his way, but he had no clear idea of the severity of the bandit’s wound and he did not want to run into the man again, alone on the foggy road, with whatever reinforcements, weapons, or friends he might have picked up in the nearby town.
So he waited with them.
The delay seemed to be some low-key altercation between a barrel-chested woman whose breasts hung flat, low, and far apart, and one, younger, gaunter, the staves of whose ribs bore high only the shallowest nippled cones.
Whatever the argument, from time to time Raven or one of the others would toss in a joke, which would be answered with a snap from one or the other agonists.
The island woman stood off from the others, near the tethered donkey, which now and again glanced over the feed bag’s rim; but it had made no sound since the bandit had approached the smuggler’s cart. Her lighter hair, he realized, was probably red. Redheads often had freckles. He walked over toward her, just to see.
He’d assumed she was his own age, but as he came closer he saw a certain roughness to the skin about her eyes, and a looseness in that at her shoulders. The firelight had confused two colors in her hair; one was red, yes, but the other was probably gray. She was at least a decade his senior. And if she had freckles, they were pale enough so that mist and flickerings lost them in the shadows playing on her breasts, her clavicles, or cheekbones. To say something, he asked, quietly and suddenly: ‘Who are they…?’
She looked at him, frowning.
‘Who are these women?’ He nodded toward the others.
‘They’re my friends,’ she said, shortly. ‘At least that one is.’ She inclined her head toward Raven, who stood at the other side of the fire, her back to them. She had taken out her double sword again and, with one foot on a stone, polished and polished it with a bit of chamois.
She’d been doing it now ten minutes.
‘She’s your friend…?’ His repetition sounded inane. But somehow he could not focus on anything he should be saying, should be doing.
‘Well, right through here—’ The redhead smiled—‘she’s only interested in you. Will be, no doubt, for a while. But we go back a long ways, Raven and I. I’ve been looking for her almost five years now. When I met her fellow landswomen a few weeks back, I thought that traveling with them for a while would be the best way to find her—or for her to find me. And it worked. Only since we met this evening, she’s been full of nothing but the wise and pretty man who gave her a ride on the back road.’ The wryness left her smile. ‘It’s good for you we came along with her!’
The young smuggler looked across the fire at the small, muscular back, at the head bent over the blade—yes, those were blue stone beads in her hair—at the twin tines turning and running on kidskin. He’d had no sense at all of any particular relationship between Raven and the redhead—no more than there seemed at this point (even though she had saved his life!) any relation between Raven and himself.
Is that, he wondered, a woman obsessed?
But with the notion that he himself might be the center of that obsession, the whole idea crumbled and became impossible to hold in his mind.
‘And the others…?’ he asked, turning back to the redhead.
‘Actually,’ she said, ‘they’re rather horrible. At least I find them so. I keep trying not to, telling myself they’re simply from another land, where things are done differently. But then, just when I’ve convinced myself they’re really good sorts underneath, one of them will turn around and do something that…well, I suppose they find me strange and terrible too.’ She gave a little shudder.
‘Then why don’t you leave them?’
She looked around at the damp night. ‘Certainly I’ve done enough traveling on my own in Nevèrÿon. Yet, somehow, when you have a bit of protection, you’re not so quick to give it up. With all this fog—’ She glanced around again—‘I think I’m afraid to. Besides, I’ve only just found my friend. She won’t stay with them too long.’ Again the redhead indicated Raven. ‘That I know. She never does. Oh, she gets lonely for them when they’re not here. But soon she’ll grow restless. And we’ll be off on our own once more, the two of us. At least we will if five years ago is any sign of today.’
The argument on the other side of the fire reerupted. Then the thick-set one he’d suspected might understand his own tongue said something loudly and angrily in hers and threw down a piece of branch from which she’d been restlessly stripping the bark. She stalked around the fireplace and came over to where the redhead and the smuggler stood.
The ox stepped back, hooves squishing and sucking in mud and moist leaves. The donkey turned his long face away and went on chewing.
Planting herself before the young smuggler, the big woman said, brokenly, her impatience edged with anger: ‘Please! You come now? Please? To the bandit’s cart. Take your share! Now! Quick! So we can take ours. You let us go? Now? Please?’ She took his arm and led him firmly forward, as the smuggler realized that, somehow, they’d been waiting for him. His own inaction had been the center of the women’s alien bickerings all along.
As she steered him across the clearing, twice he started to speak, to protest. Everything in him yearned to blurt some appeasing anecdote about how, the last time somebody had been talking about him, it had taken him even longer to realize they’d meant him—about how much trouble it had gotten him into. And that, even, had been in his own language. ‘You know, I remember once…’ But only Raven and the redhead seemed to understand his tongue enough for such a tale as he sought to invent now from bits and pieces of the real, the feigned. Also, the fact was, right now he could remember almost nothing. The story he wanted to tell would not coalesce. His companionable strategies had all shattered before these strangers from the mist.
The woman pulled the poles with their sagging cover away from the side of the bandit’s cart. For a moment they seemed to balance. Then they crashed over, revealing a fur blanket, another pot, a large knife stuck in the ground, and bits of cord—all with the sour smell the smuggler remembered from his own bedding after some particularly exhausting trip where the detours had extended things by weeks.
One sandal on the fur, she reached over the edge, grabbed the cart cover (of impressively tooled leather, full of shadowed, arcane designs), and yanked.
Two of the thongs holding it popped.
Three didn’t.
So she yanked again.
And broke two more.
She made a movement of tossing it away, but it only dropped, mostly rough-out, to hang, by the remaining tie, down over the back wheel.
The young smuggler had expected to see beneath the leather something much like what was under his own canvas. As he gazed into the shadowed wagon, however, a sudden memory struck:
The crone dragging her bag about the bridge.
The pots and furs and rope and—yes—the weapons he made out in the dark below him seemed the mad spillage from such a sack.
‘This!’ the woman demanded, reaching down and bringing it up—it was a pot. And badly chipped. ‘For you?’
The smuggler shook his head. ‘No�
��’ The word was flat and emotionless.
Disgustedly, she grunted—‘For nobody!’—and flung it over her shoulder. ‘Or this?’ (Behind her, the pot shattered on stone.) What she drew out now as an ornately worked blade, perhaps a foot-and-a-half long, the bone handle intricately carved and, here and there, banded with metal that might have been precious, with complex chasing. The woman grunted again. ‘Stupid,’ she declared. ‘A blade like this? Stupid. The swords of this country. All outside. No inside. No…’ She paused for a word. ‘No two blades. No good. Just stupid man sword. Unity. Like a silly penis. Nothing. Not even balls.’ She thrust it toward him. ‘You?’
‘No!’ He said that loud enough to hear his own voice somewhere in the denial.
She leaned over and began to rummage. ‘This junk. What you want? We see.’
‘No,’ he said again, turning from the cart. ‘No, I have to get…’ What, he wondered, was he trying to convince them of? He felt like some new mummer on a wagon platform in the town market, who, in the midst of the skit, had suddenly lost all sense of the part he was supposed to be playing.
Behind him, she said: ‘Or this, yes?’ He did not even look at what she held up now.
His sack lay just off the fireplace. Squatting to pick it up, he reached for one of the fallen metal disks.
He wanted to put it in the bag without looking at it. He wanted to see what it was.
The eyes of the woman at the cart—which, he realized as she went on taking out one thing after the other, would not look at him—generated in him all the anxiety of a disapproving parent.
He stuffed the metal through the tear and picked up two more.
As his clumsy hand carried them through the firelight, he saw each was actually several disks of metal, layered and bolted together, the top one just a rim with a crossbar, the one below that a strange cutout of curlicues with little prick-holes in the points; the disk below was scored with maplike markings that the other two turned over. The rim markings were the sort he’d seen in the barbarian lands. Yes, he remembered, as, with the memory of some young habit, he looked at it: sailors used these. It had something to do with the stars…the word astrolabe came back to him. That’s what they were called. Someone—perhaps his mummer friend—had pointed one out to him, hanging around the neck of some waterfront seaman. (It was one of these, he remembered, suddenly and with astonishing clarity, that the long-gone mountain girl had toyed with on her chain that day!) But their specific use was still mysterious to him, so that the meaning or magic they contained was unknown.
A shadow darkened the disk in his hand.
He looked up as Raven dropped to a squat before him, her face in shadow, firelit fog behind. ‘Here! I’ll help!’ She reached about for the fallen astrolabes and handed them to him. He took them from her, thrusting them through the tear.
Between his knees the sack grew heavier with each clank.
Picking them up here and there, Raven said: ‘So this is what you’re carrying to the south. It’s pretty work—barbarian craft. One wonders what it was doing in the north, yes? Well, that’s not our concern, is it. What will you be carrying with you when you return to Kolhari?’
He took more disks from her, put them in—clink!—and frowned.
‘Nothing.’
‘You mean you make the trip back empty-handed?’
‘They pay me well. For the trip I make south—’
‘But there’re things you could take north. Before you leave, ask around. It won’t be hard for you to find something profitable to return with. Your northern masters won’t punish you if you make a little extra.’
Another time, he would have explained: If I get stopped by an inspector on my way north and my cart is wholly innocent, I have a much better chance, on my next trip south, of being waved on if I meet the same inspector. But for now he only nodded. I’ll remember.’ He took the next handful.
‘And remember, too, what I told you about the lands of the Princess Elyne.’
He took another handful.
From the bandit’s cart, waving half a dozen implements in her grip, the woman barked something down.
Raven barked something back. Then she looked again at the young smuggler. ‘You don’t really want anything out of there, do you?’
What he wanted was the tooled cart cover. But even to say it seemed exhausting. ‘No.’ Oh, why do you go on acting such a fool! More clinks. ‘This is all…’
Raven looked up, speaking in her own language.
The woman at the cart said something gruff and, obviously, uncomplimentary. But it brought the other women over to the bandit’s wagon, laughing. They fell to pulling out this and that.
Looking about to see if any more of the astrolabes had rolled away beside or behind, he stood up with his torn bag.
‘Here. Let me help you,’ and, somehow, it was away from him and up in Raven’s arms. He followed her to his cart, protests weak under his tongue, while she dropped it, clattering, over the edge, and shoved it down, pulling up the cover, pushing it out of sight, stuffing back inside those that had fallen again through the tear. She turned to him, a great smile on her face that asked for nothing but complete gratitude and approval.
‘Thank you.’ He managed a smile. ‘Thank you. But I have to go. Really, we should be on our way.’
‘Come with us,’ Raven said, suddenly, brightly, ‘on our journey. We can offer you protection, companionship, even, perhaps, amusement…?’
‘Where are you going?’ he asked.
‘Oh, now said the masked woman. ‘That shouldn’t concern the likes of you. Such things are not the business of a wise and pretty man.’
‘What is your business?’
‘Now, there,’ said Raven, ‘you’re at it again; asking after things that are not your concern.’
‘But I can’t come!’ he blurted. ‘I mean…I can’t come with you!’ He blinked at her, while she questioned with masked eyes. ‘Thank you—for wanting me to. Certainly, for saving me. I mean, I’m pretty much of a loser; I can stumble into more trouble than any three men you’ll meet. I know it. It’s true, I’ve always been like that. I could be flogged for it, and it wouldn’t change, believe me. I could use your protection, I know. And I’m grateful to you for offering it—’
The masked woman beamed.
‘But I’ve got…my own task to do—’
At which Raven (and one of the others passing by) let a knowing chuckle.
‘I’ve got to go he said. I just don’t…well, I don’t feel safe here! Not with that bandit about in the bushes.’ But what was there to be frightened of, he thought with hopeless illogic (realizing the lack of coherence as he thought it), in another man? ‘Really, it’s dumb of me.’ (Ask her for the cart cover…!) ‘But I…well, I want to go! Please, you have to let me go. Now. I’m sorry. Please!’
‘Please?’ No longer smiling, the little woman dropped her eyes and bowed her head in a manner that spoke of total acquiescence. ‘Come with us…?’
The smuggler was suddenly frightened all over; and angry; and hurt. Because he would have to say, again, no. And because, with all three women he had been sleeping with back in Kolhari, he’d often felt the same, suddenly and naturally he did what he’d done with them when he felt this way, though he experienced less desire now for this hard little woman than he’d felt for any man who, from time to time, he’d indulged on the bridge:
He took her small face in his big hands (her eyes beat, in their mask, lifting, surprised) and pulled her to him. Only (as had the others, toward the angry, unhappy ends) she stiffened and would not come. So he came to her, with his heavy body, and let his hands go down her neck to her shoulders, then behind them, and across them; and he hugged her. Like them, it was like hugging some stone or tree that would not give. (He remembered the last woman he’d put his arms around—the little, stupid one.) And yes, just as rigid, just as stiff. (Are all the women in all the world, he wondered, really alike, no matter the seeming difference…?) Hold
ing her, he tried again to remember her getting on to his cart bench in the rain. When he’d offered her the ride, the signs she’d displayed of aspiring to some masculine power had surely masked, at least for him, something unquestionably and quintessentially feminine, so that the signs of aspiration themselves had been eccentric, amusing, playful; and she’d seemed merely a playful and amusing, if eccentric, creature. But now, with the advent of her friends, it was clear that she no longer aspired to that power; it was—and had been all along—hers. Whatever had been quintessentially feminine was an illusion (in her? in all women?). Certainly he’d had enough experience with the women and men of his country to recognize that the signs she displayed toward him now all spoke of a certain masculine weakness. (He looked down, brushing her forehead, almost inadvertently, with his lips.) Yet they were all saturated with that same astonishing, displaced, and dispossessing power, so that, as he had not with the others, he released her more hurriedly than he had them and stepped back, his heart beating a bit more rapidly than he’d expected, his breath coming a bit faster than it had before. How many women of his own land, he wondered, had stepped too quickly back from their saviors, granting them only a half-measure of what they needed above all things to go on? Where, he wondered, had she, had they—he looked about the clearing at her friends—seized such power? But because there was nothing in the whole of his primitive life from which to construct the lie, from me (as there would have been with any who’d ever before questioned the sources of his own strength), he felt as uncomfortable, as unsettled, as discommoded as a girl.
As had all the others, she smiled.
‘I’m going…’ he whispered. ‘I have to—’
‘Hooop-ah!’ one woman cried as, having finished with the spoils, two others lifted the bandit’s cart, racketing loudly, to overturn it. Its remaining contents crashed out on leaves.
The Complete Series Page 96