Torien did not say anything.
“Normally it would be possible to buy him off,” the young priest said, “but I think someone must be paying very handsomely to see you dead. Otherwise even Brevade would not try to kill a nobleman in daylight in the street, especially on Sagrado’s ground.”
Torien bent very carefully to pick up one of the saddles. “I thank you for the warning.”
The young priest stood motionless at the stall door. “But you have no intention of heeding it.”
Torien straightened and slung the saddle over the horse’s back, leaning into the shoulder to buckle the girth strap. “I should confess, you mean? Wait and hope for mercy from a court martial in the morning?”
“I mean there is another way out of the city,” the young priest said. “A longer way, but unguarded—at least by the living.”
Torien glanced up. “There are tombs under the city?”
“The tunnels run for miles. Some have collapsed in earthquake, but a good many remain. They come out above Baralla. During the siege, they served as conduits into the city for food and water from the hills. Since then they house the dead, Modigni and Vareni alike. In death, at least, we are all equals.” The young priest smiled.
“Baralla is on the northeast road?”
“Five or six miles distant, yes.”
“Can the horses go by the tombs?”
The young priest shook his head. “In places the tunnels are not tall enough for a man to stand upright.”
“No use to me, then. I’ll need the horses.”
“I will bring the horses to Baralla, and I will wait for you there at the inn.”
Torien looked up again. This time, he studied the young priest’s face carefully. “Why?”
“I have sworn myself to help those in need.”
“Criminals?”
“If you could be convicted justly, Lord Risto, the fort would not need pay the jente to kill you. I do not know what you have done, but it is perhaps easier for me, for the old one—easier to understand that justice is not always as our Imperial authorities define it.” The young priest smiled again. “We are not Vareni.”
“The old one—no. But you?”
“Of Volenta, though I have lived among your people since I was a boy.”
“You lost family in the fighting?”
“Not in the fighting. My father and mother were among those who—paid, afterward.”
Torien did not say anything. There was only so much that could be said in euphemism. The Imperial garrison at Volenta had been overrun and massacred following some squabble over the harvest tax; afterward four thousand Volenti, ten for each man of the garrison, had been chosen indiscriminately and executed in reprisal. It was fourteen years ago, and he had not been old enough then to know anything other than that it had happened—and even that was a child’s knowledge pieced together imperfectly and embellished over time. There had always been a comfortable distance to it, and looking it in the face now he found the argument for necessity less compelling than it had been in the classrooms at Vione.
The young priest said, quietly, “It is easier for us, I think—for the ones who have been defeated. The Empire stands or falls. God’s work goes on regardless.”
“Dangerous words,” Torien said.
The young priest’s eyes went briefly to Torien’s ribs. “You say this because you know?”
“I’m not doing God’s work.”
“One need not vow oneself to the orders to do God’s work.” The young priest turned away. “Come. I will show you the tombs.”
They went by torchlight. More than once they had to stop and struggle with the flint in numb fingers to rekindle the flame: there was a cold sea wind blowing down the tunnel, trumpeting in sudden bursts from the mouths of side-passages. Underfoot, the ground was soft loam washed out to silt through long years of earthquake and erosion; in places, there was saltwater puddled to his calves and Ædyn’s knees. Here and there, the brick-faced walls and vaulted ceiling had buckled under swollen sand or had fallen in entirely. The torchlight went over brick rubble and shards of funerary urns and bits of bone and relic strewn across the floor, half-buried in silt. The air stank of brine and seaweed.
It was bitter cold. It was a seeping, wet cold that leached slowly into one’s bones. He had given Ædyn his cloak and sandals—the cloak was far too big, but the boy had only his thin tunic otherwise—and even with his own tunic of good stout wool, and the jerkin and cuirass over it, his lips were trembling and his teeth chattering and his feet so numb that he could no longer feel the blisters where the wet bootstraps had rubbed the skin raw; but they did not stop other than to relight the torch. He did not allow himself to rest. If he stopped to rest, he was not sure he could start again.
They had walked perhaps three miles when the tunnel began to slope gently up underfoot. Ædyn’s last torch had given out and they were walking in darkness, and if Torien stretched to his fingertips he could touch the tunnel walls on either side simultaneously—bare clay now, not brick-faced sand. The wind was not as cold. The air was drier and cleaner, pungent with pine sap. The tunnel rose steeply and came out all at once through a narrow cleft onto a long granite shelf which jutted like a broken bone from the shoulder of a hill. In moonlight, Torien could see the hill falling away below, bristling with pine trees. In the distance, there were lights that must be the village Baralla at the hill’s northern foot. The wind was coming down the hill at their backs, and with it the screech of a wood owl and the reedy chorus of cicadas from the trees.
He kept a hand on Ædyn’s shoulder as they went down the hill and across open wheat fields to the village. The road, empty and silver-blue in the moonlight, ran a northeast-southwest line through the hills, the village clinging tightly to it as though otherwise it might wash away in the runoff from the sheer wooded hillsides. Looking back over his shoulder down the road, Torien could see the lights of Modigne very close and bright in the clear night air across the flatland, the harbor beyond like mirrored glass cradled in the black arms of the earth.
They walked along the road. It was suspicious to be anywhere on foot at this hour, but it was less suspicious to be on the road than to be walking through the wheat fields. There were braziers lit at the gate of the inn yard, the gate doors standing open to the road, but the yard was empty and he could see into the open-faced stable from under the gate arch. Briule’s horses were not there. The priest should have been there two hours gone. Ædyn started into the yard, but Torien pulled him back by the shoulder. “We’ll go up the road,” he said.
The boy did not question it. They walked on the road until the village was gone behind the southward slope of a hill. Then they went up the hillside. Below them, the road snaked back between the hills to the village. He could see the inn yard and the straight line of the road across the flatland, beyond. He let go Ædyn’s shoulder. He sat down stiffly cross-legged with his back to a tree. He studied the lay of the land while he unbuckled his helmet and sword belt. There was a good view of the road in both directions, and the sea wind would carry the sound of traffic to them up the hill.
The boy crouched on his heels some distance away, hugging his knees under the cloak. “You think they’ve killed the priest, Lord.”
He had not, in fact, considered that possibility. His first assumption was that the priest had gone to Brevade or to the fort. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll watch a while. Try to sleep, Ædyn. We may be walking tomorrow.” There was a stabbing pain under his ribs that he had been able to ignore as long as he was moving. He braced his shoulders carefully against the tree and stretched his legs straight. He sat with his heels dug into the clay, his hands tight on the helmet in his lap, breathing long and slowly through his nose—shivering a little in the wind, though it was not particularly cold.
Ædyn was watching him. “Is it much pain, Lord?”
“It’s tolerable.”
“I’ll watch if my
lord wishes to rest.”
“I’d better watch.”
He said it through shut teeth. Ædyn did not say anything. After a moment, the boy lay down on the ground and curled in on himself under the cloak, pillowing his head on his arms. It occurred to Torien only later, in the silence before dawn when his mind was going through the exchange again as a means of distraction, that the boy had understood it as a comment upon himself, as a slave must understand it, and by then there did not seem to be much point in waking him to explain he had not meant it so.
The moon was gone down over the black line of the sea, and the Wolf was faint and far in a gray sky. There was a rooster crowing in the village. The road had been empty all night. He considered and dismissed the idea of sending the boy, once it was light, back down to inquire after the priest at the inn. The priest had betrayed them, or else had paid for his foolishness in trying to help. Either way, there would at some point be searchers on the road.
His memory of the northeast road was so vague as to be useless. There were other villages before the border, but he remembered nothing of distances and had not paid much attention to the land itself. He had counted on having the horses. Everything had been in his saddlebags, except the acetum and salve and one water-skin which Ædyn had in his pack. He did not want to show his face on the road, and he did not much care to show Ædyn’s face, either. A foreign slave attempting on his own to buy supplies for a cross-country journey would draw unpleasant attention at the best of times. If necessary, they could find food in the hills, but he could not remember any water before the border river, Nona, which was at least four days’ walk and quite possibly more.
Ædyn woke while he was considering this.
For a moment, the boy lay still and silent, blinking up blankly at Torien from the cloak. He turned his chin on the cloak to look around the wooded hillside. It was not yet a full day since they had come off the ship, and Torien supposed it was the first time in a long time the boy had woken on solid ground.
“Baralla,” Torien said. “Five miles out of Modigne on the northeast road.”
The boy sat up slowly with the cloak pulled tight. “It is like Cesin.”
“Hotter and drier. More politically volatile.”
“I mean the hills are like ours. In the dark you can almost think it is Cesin.”
Torien unbuckled his cuirass. He was reluctant to leave the harness, but without the horses he did not see much choice: officers did not travel by foot. He would, however, keep his sword. He glanced at the boy. “How long since you’ve been home?”
“It will be three years at the rye harvest, Lord.”
“I would have written your manumission in Modigne, Ædyn. I didn’t think it would be like this.”
The boy’s face was expressionless. “My lord thinks the jente was acting on the governor’s orders.”
Torien shrugged off the cuirass, holding his tongue between his teeth. He set the cuirass beside his helmet against the foot of the tree and laid the jerkin over it. In nothing but his tunic, he felt oddly vulnerable. He did not dare open the dressing to look at the wound. He buckled his sword-belt and got to his feet, holding on to the tree for support. Dawn was breaking over the hills. He could see a lone ox-cart trundling along the road to Modigne across the flatland. He could see the old city wall in a sunlit white line atop the volcanic rim. He shook his head. “On the Guard’s orders,” he said. He did not think it had been Briule—no matter which way he turned it, that made no sense—but it had been someone in the barracks. He sucked a low breath through his teeth. Pain pushed against his ribs like a caged animal. “We’ll keep off the road,” he said. “Skirt towns and farms. It shouldn’t be too hard, for now. It’ll be harder across the border.”
They walked that day through the pine woodland above the road. By sundown, he judged they had come perhaps ten miles from Baralla. The hills were marching away into the north. Below them, at the feet of the hills, there was a cluster of adobe huts and goat pens which he thought might be the village Gorazo. Beyond the village there was dry, stony flatland stretching to the horizon. They circled the village along the shoulders of the hills and went down onto the plain and walked until the village was a pinprick of light in the twilit distance behind them, the road away to the south across the plain. They made camp in a shallow wash. They had found no water that day, but there had been chestnuts and red currants and figs in the hills, and they had filled Ædyn’s pack because Torien was not sure what they would find on the plain.
After supper, the boy sat on the rim of the wash to watch the road, silhouetted black against the sky. Torien lay shivering under the cloak on the clay floor of the wash. The pain had spread from his ribs all through his body, stabbing sharply and then easing away at intervals, stabbing more sharply now and easing away less often. He was squeezing his eyes shut, holding his cheeks in his teeth to keep himself from crying out, but Ædyn must have heard the groan in his throat because he said, distantly from above, “I’ll go up to the village for help, Lord.”
“I’ll be all right”—through his teeth.
Either the boy was silent or Torien did not hear the reply over the pounding in his head. He opened his eyes to make sure the boy had not moved from the rim. The starlight was as painful as needles. The world was spinning. He shut his eyes again and buried his face between his arms. At some point, overcome with exhaustion, he slept. He woke in brilliant sunlight. It was mid-morning, and the sun was a hard, white ball of flame burning off the mist from the flatland. There were cicadas singing from a line of juniper trees along the road. Ædyn sat cross-legged across the wash, head bowed over his knees, twirling a long pine stick in his fingers.
Torien sat up slowly against the side of the wash. He had meant to take the watch from the boy at midnight, and he had meant to be five miles gone across the plain by now. “You should have woken me,” he said. It came out in a croak. His tongue was thick, his throat dry.
Ædyn absorbed the rebuke without expression. “The old priest said my lord needs rest.”
Torien sat up on his knees and dragged the pack across the floor of the wash. His hands were shaking. He said, conscious that the boy was watching, “Any traffic on the road?”
The boy shook his head once. “Farm carts for the city, Lord.”
Torien swallowed two mouthfuls of water from the skin. Then he held the pack on his knees while he unbuckled his sword belt. He slipped his tunic over his head and unwrapped the dressing from his ribs. The breath of wind burned like cold iron on the wound. The stitches were sunk in swollen red skin. His hands were shaking badly, but he opened the acetum and dribbled it from his palm onto the raw slit of the wound, flinching at the sting. He spread salve gingerly over the row of stitches. The skin was hot against his fingertips. He wiped his fingers on a tuft of grass and wrapped the wound again, breathing long and softly through his nose, his teeth shut. He tied up the pack and gave it to the boy and put his tunic back on. He buckled the sword belt on his hip as he stood. Squinting against the sunlight, he followed the line of the road across the flatland to the eastern horizon.
The road was empty. The cicadas were singing over the flatland, and he could see gulls wheeling at the coast, distantly southward. In springtime, there would be snow-melt flowing down from the mountains, but the gullies and runlets which cut across the plain to the sea were baked dry under the summer sun. Even with careful rationing, the water-skin would not last them to the Nona. They would either have to give up valuable time to look for water in the hills, or at some point they would have to use a village well.
He tried to weigh this choice in his head while they walked, but instead his thoughts wandered off over the plain—back to the elder Briule’s office in Modigne; to the girl’s shanty at the waterfront; to the quay with Alluin the day they had come in to the harbor at Tasso. The images tangled together and spun out again into confused half-dreams: Espere was there, and the young Espere lying white-faced on the sand w
ith his arm sliced away, and the Modigno ship master smiling over his shoulder at the offer of five hundred eagles, and Alluin in the infirmary with his head swathed in bandages, and he himself asking if it couldn’t be stitched, and the old priest saying it must wait till the fort, and the signo saying he must please breathe and not speak, and Chareste apologizing, anguished, that he had done nothing to ease the pain—anything to ease the pain, threefold God.
Something cool and wet ran over his burning face. He opened his eyes. Above him, Ædyn sat back on his heels with the water-skin in his lap.
He was flat on his back on the ground, the cloak bundled under his head. Lifting his head a little, he ran his eyes in a circle and saw the flatland stretching away from him under afternoon sunlight and the wind tugging at the tufts of esparto grass. He could see the road off to the south, glittering in the heat. He dropped his head back to the cloak. He looked at Ædyn but did not speak. The pain was going through him in spasms, and he was swallowing it down and holding himself tightly still against the earth. The boy put the water-skin carefully on the ground at Torien’s elbow and reached a hand to Torien’s shoulder, then hesitantly to his forehead. The hand was as cold as ice on his skin. Torien flinched. The boy said, “I think it is gone to fever, Lord.”
Torien shut his aching eyes against the flood of sunlight. He did not say anything. He felt the boy shift on his heels. “Lord, let me go for help.”
He managed to say, in a burst through clenched teeth, “How far—how far to the village?”
“Not very far. Five miles, Lord, maybe a little more. I can be back by nightfall.”
Torien did not say anything. The boy either took his silence as consent or else had realized Torien was powerless to stop him anyway. Torien felt the breath of air as the boy left his side. He heard the boy’s footsteps pound away across the gravel of the plain. He lay waiting for the silence to follow and understood only much later that the pounding was his heartbeat in his ears.
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