by John Dalmas
The storm-dimmed daylight had graded through dusk into twilight. Someone, probably a stable boy, had hung a lantern inside the stable's front entrance. A clutter of old single-trees, eveners, pack saddles and the like was piled outside a box stall, cleared from it to make room for the two of them.
A soldier entered the stable carrying a stack of large coarse blankets provided by the innkeeper. He took off the piece of canvas protecting them, then came over and handed a pair to Varia. She looked at them with more than her cat vision, then began to pass her hands over them.
"What are you doing?" Hermiss asked.
"Killing the vermin."
"Really?"
"Certainly."
"What kind of vermin?"
Varia paused, concentrating. "Let's see. There are lice-and fleas. No bedbugs."
Hermiss giggled. "You're fooling."
Varia shrugged and made her final passes, then spread the blankets side by side on the thick hay. The air was pungent, but not unpleasant, with horse urine and manure blending with the smell of hay-clover and timothy. From their cubby she could hear the low easy talking of the half-ylvin soldiers, the sound somehow comforting as they climbed the ladder into the hayloft. There are worse places than this to be, she told herself.
Earlier a soldier had brought their oiled leather bags from a horse pack and hung them on harness pegs. She pulled dry clothes from hers and changed into them, draping her wet breeches and socks on the edge of the manger, and her tunic over a horse collar still hanging on its peg. Her wet boots she stood near the stall's entrance. Hermiss followed her example.
Then they lay down on their blankets. Varia willed the girl to be quiet and go to sleep, and lay quiet herself, her eyes closed, waiting for the drumming rain to still her mind, a mind beset by unwanted thoughts. Of Idri. Of Liiset, who'd abandoned her. Of what Tomm had said about Sarkia's plans for her. Of how far they were now from where she wanted to be. Interrupted by the sound of a man running in through the stable door-a man alone-bringing her out of herself. Cyncaidh, she decided. He'd probably been talking with the innkeeper. She closed her eyes again.
"Were you fooling about killing vermin?" Hermiss murmured. The question almost made Varia jump; she'd thought the girl was sleeping. Looking at her, she shook her head.
"I really wasn't. Fooling, that is."
Somehow this brought giggles from Hermiss, followed by a question in, for whatever reason, a conspiratorial tone: "What did you do to that man who tried to kiss you? Really do."
"Our term for it is shock fingers. I gave him shock fingers in his crotch."
Hermiss almost burst, trying to control the giggles bubbling out of her. When she'd calmed again, she murmured, "He had it coming."
"True. But I shouldn't have said what I did. Then he might not have."
"They were all whistling and saying things before you ever said anything."
"True again. But I still shouldn't have. Especially when they were whistling and yowling like that."
There was a moment's silence. Varia lay back and closed her eyes again.
"What do you think would have happened if you didn't know how to do shock fingers? And the soldiers hadn't come in?"
Varia sighed, answering without opening her eyes. "Nothing. Because I'd have turned around and gone back out as soon as the whistling started."
"Do you think they'd have raped us?"
Hermiss, you're a blockhead, Varia thought, but said nothing. Hermiss interpreted her silence, and this time her words were soft, quiet.
"Were you ever raped, Varia?"
Varia said nothing.
"I wonder what it would be like."
"It's ugly. Painful. You feel like shit." Time after time. Night after night.
Silence again for a moment. Then, contritely: "I'm sorry I asked, Varia. I really am."
Varia opened her eyes. Her voice was wooden, a monotone. "It's all right. You're young. Just be careful in a situation like we walked into. Turn around and walk out." If you can. Varia discovered her guts were tied in knots.
"Are you young?" Hermiss asked. "I'd forgotten you're like the ylver; that you can look young for a long time. I thought you might be-twenty."
Varia looked at the earnest face on the blanket beside hers, and felt a sudden pang of-something. Loss. "I have daughters about your age," she said. Had, she corrected herself.
The face looked troubled again, and this time Varia broke the silence. "Tell me what it's like to be a girl growing up in Ternass."
Hermiss told of school and parties. And about the colonel's daughter, who sounded a bit full of herself but pleasant enough. And especially about the young men of Ternass, and the ylvin soldiers stationed there. Of flirtations, stories of occasional love affairs and briefly broken hearts. The ylver, Hermiss said, were especially exciting because they were supposed to be better lovers, and being relatively infertile, were less likely to get a girl pregnant. But the imperial army had rules against "slipping it to" local girls, and other rules against marrying them without official sanction, which involved a lot of time and trouble.
She also told about her father. "He knows an awful lot. He's read hundreds of books, some of them ten times, I guess, and thought about them all. He knows a lot about the ylver. Some people at home don't like them very much; some don't like them at all. But my father says ylver are just people with tilty eyes and pointy ears. Some of them can't even do magic, he says. And they don't live forever; they just stay young a long time. He says we're lucky they're here. For every person in the kingdom who died during the war, he says probably three have been saved because we don't fight our neighbors anymore."
Varia didn't reply. She was thinking it would be better if there weren't wars at all.
"What was it like growing up a Sister?" Hermiss prompted.
"Different than you told about. We had duties."
"Like what?"
"Whatever work they trained you for, assigned you to. Making jewelry, all kinds of ceramics, taking care of babies, working in the dining room… I was best in the kitchen. I got to be a very good cook."
"Really?" Pause. "Did you, you know-have to make babies?" Hermiss paused, then added, "I've heard…" and trailed off.
"After I grew up, I was sent to Farside to marry a man the Sisterhood wanted me to have babies with."
"Farside!?"
"Farside."
"What happened to him?"
Varia began to cry, quietly as usual. Hermiss could hear something though, and peered intently at her in the seepage of lantern light. "Are-you crying, Varia?"
Varia nodded, fighting now to keep silent.
"Oh Varia! I'm so sorry!" Hermiss too began to cry, and put her arms around her. "I shouldn't have asked. I shouldn't. I've been terrible to you!"
The girl tried to cry quietly, too, but began to sob and hiccup, and now it was Varia doing the comforting, hugging her, patting her shoulder. "It's all right, Hermy, it's all right. You couldn't know. You couldn't know."
Hermiss quieted and they let each other go. After a bit, Varia could see the girl's aura smoothen, softening in sleep, but she herself was wide awake now, listening to the rain drum on the roof. "God, Curtis," she whispered drily, "how I wish! How I wish!"
She became aware of movement then, as if someone had been outside the stall and was moving away. Rolling to her knees, she got up and peered out. Cyncaidh was at the hayloft ladder, a hand on a riser. Realizing he'd been seen, he stopped, stood waiting. Varia walked to whispering distance.
"It's all right," she murmured. "The trouble in the potroom got to her, that's all. And the ale. She's fine now. Sleeping."
Cyncaidh stared at her, his eyes dark in the lantern light, and she realized he hadn't just come down to investigate Hermiss's sobbing. His aura was thick with emotions: embarrassment, grief… something else.
"You were listening," she said.
He nodded.
"From the beginning."
"From when Hermiss sa
id something about killing vermin. Then she asked what you did when the man tried to kiss you. I'd come down to hear your version of what happened in the potroom, so I stayed where I was and listened. And found out. Then-I stayed and heard the rest of it."
She stared long at Cyncaidh and his aura. "If you're to be my jailer," she said at last, "I suppose it's best you know. And I could never have told you directly."
He nodded, stood silent for a moment. "Good night Varia," he said quietly, and reaching, almost touched her face, then turned and climbed the ladder.
She watched him disappear, heard Caerith's voice question softly and Cyncaidh's reply. Then she turned and went back to the box stall, settling onto her blanket again.
To stare blankly into the darkness above her, her mind's eye seeing Cyncaidh's aura as it had been by the ladder. What am I going to do? she asked herself. What in hell am I going to do now? For she realized what another part of Cyncaidh's emotional mix was. She should have seen it sooner, she realized. It had been there all along.
My god, she thought numbly, he loves me! He's not just attracted to me physically, though that's part of it. And he's not attracted because I'm a pretty woman in a trap. He actually loves me!
The rain continued to beat. She willed it to beat forever-beat until it washed the world away; that part of it at least. Then shook her head at what seemed weakness. Just keep us here long enough for me to figure out what to do, she corrected. I'll settle for that.
As if in answer, thunders rumbled, then boomed; another convection cell was moving in. "That's the way," she muttered, and closed her eyes, inviting sleep.
I'm his prisoner, she whispered in her mind, and he loves me. He'll never help me get back to a gate. Not that he ever said he would. I'll have to get there on my own or not at all.
14: A Different Land
" ^ "
Varia awoke in the night needing to relieve herself. Rain still drummed on the roof, and she was reluctant to run sixty yards through it to the latrine; her dry clothes would get soaked. She decided instead to duck out the back door, wearing only her rain cape, and use the wide overhang of the shelter where the packhorses were. They wouldn't mind, and it was only seven or eight yards away.
By the time she got back, she had a plan.
She next awoke to Caerith knocking on the outside of the box stall. Rain still fell, but now it only muttered on the shingles, barely audible. Breakfast was far better than supper, and Varia wondered what Cyncaidh had said to the innkeeper, the night before. There was oatmeal without lumps, crisp side pork, cheese, bread and butter and buttermilk. By the time they finished eating, the rain had stopped. Outside, the sun shone through a broad gap in the clouds.
The soldiers were not energetic this morning, but Cyncaidh pushed them, and in half an hour the pack string was loaded, ready for the road again. Varia was ready before them, tight with nerves and purpose, keeping mostly out of sight, not wanting Cyncaidh to note the tension in her aura.
Her plan, such as it was, included only an overall purpose, a general strategy, and a first step. Mostly it was unknowns and assumptions. When you're desperate enough, she told herself, and the alternatives are unacceptable, you grab whatever opportunity you find, and hope something good happens. The odds, it seemed to her, were at least as good as she'd faced when she'd stepped out the door of the Tiger barracks a few weeks earlier, and that had worked out. More or less. To a degree.
Then Cyncaidh called to fall in and mount up. Varia and Hermiss led their horses from the stable and swung into their saddles, Varia barefoot, her still-wet boots tied to saddle rings-to get them drier, she'd told Hermiss. Cyncaidh, after looking back over the column, shouted another order, and they rode out of the inn's muddy yard.
Until they'd left Fort Ternass, Varia had always been kept in the midst of the mounted men. But since Hermiss had been added to the party, they'd been put behind the remount string, in front of the pack string, with the horse handler the only soldier behind them, back at the very end. Apparently to give them privacy if they wished to talk.
It was Varia who opened the conversation now, telling stories about Washington County and the Macurdies, recounting the funnier things she could remember. Beginning with the time that seven-year-old Curtis had tried to ride a calf and gotten bucked off into a wheelbarrow full of mucky cow manure. He'd run howling and stinking into the house, tracking manure on the linoleum, which enraged his mother. With a grip developed by years of wringing laundry by hand, she'd taken him by the ear to the windmill. It was March, still given to freezing at night, and after stripping him, she'd immersed him in the icy water of the horse tank, which set him howling even louder, then scrubbed him with a gunny sack.
Hermiss' peals of laughter brought a curious glance from Cyncaidh at the head of the column.
Next she told of one of Will's "notions," which struck him during silo filling. For years a neighbor, Deacon Stuart, had pestered Will about his non-attendance at church, hinting at hellfire. Then a skunk had taken residence under Will's barn floor, to make nighttime forays on the hen house, so Will had caught it in a Victor #1 trap. And when the deacon was up in the silo tromping down, Will had thrown the dead skunk into the silo filler. Chopped skunk, along with the content of its scent gland, had shot up the pipe and rained down on the deacon. The silo had been only about five feet short of full, and the overweight deacon, almost overcome by the stink, had clambered over the side and hung by his hands, his feet dangling some twenty feet above the ground. Then, realizing there was little relief in that-the vile smell was as much on him as in the silo-he'd tried to climb back in and couldn't. He'd hung there yelling for help, using language not suited to a deacon, and Will had gone up and rescued him. For two or three years after that, the deacon refused to trade work with Will, but he also stopped badgering him.
That story hadn't worked as well for Hermiss. She knew about corn and skunks, and was familiar with a concept not greatly dissimilar to hellfire, but Varia had had to stop at intervals to explain "deacon" and "Sunday services," "silo" and "ensilage" and "silo filler."
She'd begun telling of a time when Charley, her father-in-law, had been hauling bundles to the corn shredder, when she saw a bridge ahead. Her guts tightened, but she continued the story until she was well out on the bridge planking. Then, with the reins and a mental command, she caused her horse to rear. Behind her, the horse handler shouted a "whoa" to halt his pack string, while Varia, as if fearing she'd be thrown, dismounted. Before anyone was aware of what she intended, she'd vaulted onto the bridge railing and leaped off.
The river was a large one, and swollen now from days and nights of rain. She knew nothing more about it. Not its name, what towns it flowed past, anything. Her assumptions were that it flowed southward to join the Big River; that it flowed fast enough for her purposes; and that there'd be boats tied to the bank here and there, hopefully with oars or a paddle. And that she could swim long enough to come to one of them.
As she plunged beneath the water, she was astonished at how powerful the flow was, how swift. The water of a normally forty-yard-wide river, now storm swollen, with flooding several feet deep on the flood plain, was pouring with a tremendous surge between bridge abutments no more than thirty yards apart. She stayed under water as she'd intended, swimming with the current to put as much distance as possible between herself and the bridge. Her hope was that the soldiers would wait to see her come up before anyone else jumped. By that time, hopefully she'd be far enough away that no one would, that the odds of reaching her would seem too poor. Maybe they'd even fail to see her, and think she'd drowned.
She was neither a skilled nor a strong swimmer, nor experienced at staying under water more than briefly. She stroked as hard she could, feeling increasingly the need for air, and fighting it. Her water-soaked breeches and tunic were like weights, hampering her movements more than she'd expected, while the water was too muddy to see in. She became desperate for breath, and realizing she didn't know how de
ep she was, fought to the surface, gasping, gulping air.
For just a moment she glanced back. She'd left the bridge farther behind than she'd hoped-perhaps eighty yards, thanks to the tremendous bridge surge-and was almost cut off from view by a curve. Men on horseback lined its railing, but she heard no shouts. Perhaps they hadn't spotted her!
Now she gave her attention to the banks. On the Mustoka River, in Washington County, there'd be rowboats and skiffs now and again, tied or chained to trees along the bank. But this wasn't the Mustoka in any universe, and the water was eight feet above normal. If there were any boats tied there, they'd be swamped. She kept swimming, the current carrying her swiftly. Another hundred yards and she was tiring badly. Some distance ahead and to her left, she saw an oak being swept along, its trunk submerged so that its top resembled a great floating thicket. If she could reach it-But it was traveling nearly as fast as she was. Some distance behind her and near the west shore, she saw a larger tree riding the current, a big silver maple floating higher in the water than the oak, and it seemed to her she could intercept it if she swam hard.
She struck out for it, raising her arms out of the water now in a clumsy crawl stroke, breathing hard. I'm going to make it! she thought. But when she'd almost reached it, a submerged branch struck her, snatching her under. She panicked, struggling, swallowed water, somehow pulled free and popped to the surface, strangling and splashing. And went under again, this time because she wasn't swimming anymore but simply flailing. Her natural buoyancy popped her up again, still strangling on water-and a hand grasped her tunic. Once more she went under-someone was pulling on her-and twisting, grabbed whoever it was, pulling him under, too. Then somehow, through her panic, she realized that she might drown him, might drown them both, and stopped struggling, letting herself be towed. Again her head broke the surface.
Through her choking and coughing, she recognized Cyncaidh. A bank eddy carried them into the floodplain backwater, and his feet touched bottom. Woofing for air, he towed her heavily toward the high bank behind it. A few yards farther, he reached the submerged slope of a natural levee formed by the sediments and back currents of past floods. Varia felt her own feet touch then, and the two of them crawled onto its top, to kneel half out of the water.