The White Road of the Moon

by Rachel Neumeier

  …and all around them, dust-dry air hissed through dead grasses. The very light in this place was different: chill and bleak, not with winter, but with emptiness. There was no road, no caravan of wagons, no guardsmen, no children. Meridy and Jaift had run together into an empty realm—empty and silent and dead except for that single bone-white tower.

  Meridy pulled Jaift to a stop, gasping with terror of that tower—she wouldn’t have gone another step closer to it for anything, yet they couldn’t stand still, because surely the double-shadowed man would come after them again. She pulled Jaift a dozen quick steps away from the tower, but the empty plain swung dizzyingly around them and the tower rose up in the distance, still before them, now a tiny bit closer.

  Of course it was closer. Meridy understood suddenly. That tower was the only thing truly present in this realm. She saw this ethereal country now as a wide and trackless wasteland on which wandered neither wild cattle nor tame, in whose skies flew neither bird nor dragonfly; so empty that nothing at all existed here save the towering presence of the witch-king himself. The wind sighed through the emptiness. The breeze smelled of heated iron, of blowing dust, of crumbling years and grim silence. And no matter what direction they tried to go, the witch-king’s tower would lie before them.

  Then Iëhiy leaped out of nowhere and ran past the girls, and somehow the dog was running away from the tower, not toward it. Meridy followed him, another dozen steps and a dozen more after that, pulling Jaift along with her, and she flung her handful of dust out into the dead, empty air. With it, she seemed to throw more than dust; she threw light and air, and this light was the familiar comforting sunlight of a real summer, nothing like the bleak, lonely light of this terrible realm. And they ran through the dust and light and out of the dead land…

  …and stumbled to a halt on the shore of a glimmering river of moonlight. Light splashed and tumbled like water, bright currents glimmered out in the fast-running depths—but it wasn’t a river, it was a road, a road of light that flowed like water. The full moon poured down light, and the light flowed like water, and though it was absolutely silent, somehow there was a sound underneath and behind and beyond the light, as though somewhere far away a great bell had been lifted and struck.

  Jaift took a step toward the road, but Meridy held her back and looked around for another way to go, another patch of folded light, of wavering air, a place where the light was the ordinary light of an ordinary summer day. But she could see only moonlight and the White Road.

  Iëhiy barked, not that deep warning bark this time, but peremptorily: Let’s go! His ears were up now, and his tail jaunty. He trotted firmly away. Meridy ran after him, pulling Jaift along with her, and then staggered sideways as the whole angle of the world seemed to change around them, and she fell to her knees in the perfectly ordinary dust of a perfectly ordinary road, Jaift stumbling to a halt beside her, still gripping her hand. For a long moment, both of them stared around, panting and shaking.

  This was the real world again at last, by the grace of the God. There was no sign of the double-shadowed man, which was even better. Here there was no ghost boy, no white tower in a desolate land, no shimmering road of moonlight that ran like water. But there was no sign of the Gehliy caravan either, or of anything familiar.

  Instead, before them, not too far away, rose the bulk of city walls, and above the walls the tops of heavy-looking squared-off buildings with sloped roofs, and before and beyond the walls a distant clamor of life and movement. Mountains stood against the sky to the left, not the jagged peaks of the Southern Wall but rough, low mountains, heavily forested. To the right, where the land was gentler, fields of grain stretched out, tall and green in the warm breeze. The road dust was silky under Meridy’s hands. She nervously gathered a handful, but there seemed nothing to do with it here. Iëhiy had vanished again. Niniol…Niniol was nowhere in sight. She was his anchor, and since she’d left him, he would be lost…but she had to hope he might somehow find her.

  There seemed no immediate peril anymore. Meridy could see wagons behind them, approaching, but a good way off, and men riding horses out from the city, but they were hardly closer. She let Jaift help her to her feet and said in a hesitant tone that hardly sounded like her own voice, “Where do you think we are?”

  “Oh,” said Jaift, a little blankly. She was ash pale, her blue eyes wide and stunned, but then she blinked and swallowed and said, “That’s Riam. That’s Riam up ahead there. We’ve come three days’ travel in thirty steps. How did we—how did you—was that the White Road?”

  “We didn’t follow it,” Meridy said.

  “I know! Obviously! But it was the White Road! Where was that other place? Who was the man with the—with the double shadow? He wasn’t actually Tai-Enchar himself, do you think? Or was he? Tai-Enchar was of Southern blood, isn’t that right? That man wasn’t, obviously, but could the witch-king truly put himself into someone else’s body? Even if he’s been dead for two hundred years?”

  All good questions. Meridy shook her head, let her handful of dust sift away between her fingers, and looked around. Ordinary mountains and green fields and a road that rolled out in an easy hour’s walk to the city of Riam, and nowhere anything uncanny or ethereal.

  “I’ll tell you,” she said. “I’ll tell you everything I know, but I don’t know much. Let’s walk on, all right? And let me think a little, because I’m not sure…I’m not sure about anything.”

  Jaift gave her a close look. “You think about the spooky man with the eyes and the shadow, then, and I’ll think about Riam, because we have to be practical, don’t we, even if there are ghosts and sorcerers everywhere.”

  Meridy nodded. She was intensely glad that the other girl was with her, because there was Riam and she certainly had no idea where to go or how to handle herself in a city. The two of them alone in a big city…She shivered. She would rather think about ghosts and sorcerers.

  But she did wish Iëhiy would come back. And she was worried about Niniol. But there was nothing she could do about either of them now.

  Riam, Gate to the Deep South, was overwhelming. Meridy had known everybody in the Tikiy-up-the-Mountain by name. True, Tikiy-by-the-Water had been bigger than the living village, but not nearly this big. And ghosts didn’t crowd so.

  —

  The people of Riam dressed in bright colors; they shouted and laughed and screamed conversations over the racket. The streets teemed with petty vendors crying apples, pickles, roasted nuts, or hot sausages at the tops of their lungs; and with women carrying baskets and jugs, some escorted by servants in livery who carried bundles for them. Children dashed past in groups of three or four; Meridy watched a pack of ragged children younger than she race by and clamber up the side of a narrow building, pouring over the edge and away over the rooftops just as a pair of guardsmen rounded the corner after them. The men shouted curses after the last of the children and stalked back the way they’d come. Meridy wondered what the children had done, and whether they were all orphans.

  Carriages rattled by, and mounted parties of wellborn young ladies and lords clattered through the streets, some with men-at-arms to clear their paths. Officers of the watch stood alertly on street corners, each with the bronze dragon of Riam on a badge at his shoulder. Jaift and Meridy passed a carpentry yard where men worked at building furniture and a potter’s workshop where women shaped jugs and bowls out of damp clay.

  The noise was disorienting, even a little frightening, though it didn’t seem to upset Jaift. The smells were worse than the noise: horse droppings, at least animal and familiar, but also other things more noisome. And hot cooking oil, and unfamiliar spices, and occasional pockets of sweet, heavy air from incense burners, and most of all thousands of overheated people.

  “Down this way, I think,” Jaift called, tugging Meridy out of the eddying crowd toward a quieter street. On Jaift’s confident advice, they were looking for a bank. This, apparently, was a place where the people would give you money. This
certainly sounded like a good thing, because they’d run away from Jaift’s family’s caravan with nothing but the packet of dried fish, the clothing they were wearing, and the handful of coins Meridy had taken from the brigands. Meridy didn’t quite understand how a girl in a plain traveling skirt was supposed to persuade the people at the bank to give her money, but Jaift seemed confident, and the relative calm of this wider street was welcome.

  In this part of the city, though the streets were still busy, most of the carriages were smaller and fancier, and the road was wide enough for horse-drawn vehicles to keep to the left, so that people could walk safely on the right. Here, the crowded shops and work yards gave way to larger, more graceful buildings painted eggshell blue or soft green, madder pink or rich buttercup yellow. The colors glowed in the afternoon sun. Shops displayed bright bolts of silk or crystal goblets that were, no doubt, ruinously expensive. Strings of prayer bells swayed from the eaves of most of the shops, chiming gently. The sigil of the God was not only carved above most of the doors but often inlaid with silver or mother-of-pearl. Everything looked far fancier and more elaborate than anything Meridy had ever imagined.

  Jaift led Meridy around another corner. Here the street was wider still, the rough cobbles smoothed out to tightly fitted paving stones. Broad ditches and drains appeared on either side of the road, and flowering trees leaned over the walls that separated one graceful building from another.

  “Ah!” Jaift said, nodding toward one particularly large building, its walls painted ivory and dove gray, strings of porcelain bells hanging from the carved portico.

  “That’s a bank?” It looked, Meridy thought, like a particularly intimidating lord’s house. It was set off from all the other buildings by gardens of raked gravel and flowering trees. There were iron grills over the windows, but the bars were shaped into flowers and birds. Private guardsmen, each armed with a crossbow and a short sword, stood at the top of the short stairway that led to the wide double doors, now standing open. The guardsmen were watching the street—one of them was looking directly at the two girls. Meridy stared back uneasily.

  A woman trailed by two servants came out through the doors, gathered up her elaborate skirts—honey gold and very full—descended the stairs, and was handed up into a waiting carriage by one of her servants. The woman, though clearly carrying more than a dash of Southern blood, looked rich and disdainful; Meridy wouldn’t have dared say a word to her. She could imagine a bank giving money to a lady like that but looked askance at Jaift in her plain, dusty traveling skirt. She couldn’t help sounding doubtful as she asked, “They’ll really give you money?”

  “See the owl over the door?” The bird was carved in full relief, its feathers etched with gold. Jaift said confidently, “This is a branch of Tair’s, which is my family’s bank in Tamar. Don’t worry, Mery! It doesn’t matter whether you drive up in a carriage inlaid with gold. What matters is if you know the right codes.”

  “And…you know these codes?”

  “Of course! Accounts are women’s business. My mother gave me the family codes when I took over the candle-wax and honey accounts when I was fourteen. Those are small accounts, good for a girl just learning, but I know the codes for the drawing account, too. Come on!” And she strode toward the door as though she had no doubt in the world about being welcome.

  Perhaps because of that confidence, the guardsmen at the door barely looked at the girls—though Meridy drew a thoughtful glance, maybe for her black eyes or maybe for her travel-worn shabbiness. But Jaift knew exactly how to talk to the people at the bank of Riam, and she rapidly disappeared through an interior door with a cool-mannered young man. Meridy perched on a fancy chair in a corner and waited uncomfortably, watching ladies in lace and satin come and go.

  In a surprisingly short time, Jaift returned with six gold coins and a larger handful of silver. She gave Meridy three gold coins and half of the silver, which Meridy tucked away carefully before they left the bank. Jaift touched her elbow, guiding her down the street, not the way they’d come but the other way, alongside the narrow garden of gravel and flowers. “Now, you know, of course, that twenty-one copper pence make one silver,” she told Meridy. “And ten silver make one thin gold, and eighteen thin gold make one heavyweight gold, except in Tian Sur, where they clip the thin gold so it takes twenty. But prices are different in big cities than in little towns, so you might not be used to gold.”

  Meridy had never seen a gold coin in her life. “The ones you gave me must be thin?”

  “Oh, yes, heavyweight gold is almost always carried as bank drafts and notes of credit, because it is heavy, and anyway no one would want to risk having it stolen. Besides, no one is likely to calculate sums in heavyweight unless they’re buying, you know, an estate or something. Smaller coins are a lot more practical. Now, in Riam, I’d think that one thin gold would probably buy, oh, say, a decent horse. One silver coin ought to buy a meal and lodging at a town inn, or two nights at a public house on the road; one copper penny should be enough for a loaf of bread stuffed with cheese and sausage; one halfpenny a plain loaf.”

  Meridy nodded and didn’t mention that in Tikiy a copper halfpenny would purchase one’s whole supper plus a loaf to take home from Mistress Lireft, a widow who cooked meals for those without the time or inclination to cook for themselves.

  Jaift also hired one of the bank’s messengers to take a sealed letter to her father at the Derem house. “Because they’ll be coming along in a few days, and they’ll be so worried,” she said. She didn’t say, Unless that double-shadowed man dragged them all into the dead realm and they’re all lost there…

  Meridy didn’t suggest anything like that, either. Hopefully Jaift hadn’t thought of the possibility. She only asked, “But you’re sure don’t want to go to the Derem house to meet them?” Though if Jaift did want to go to the Derem family for shelter, Meridy wasn’t at all sure she would be welcome there as well. Why would those people welcome her? She wasn’t part of the Gehliy family or promised to a Derem son, and besides that she had black eyes. Not to mention having servitors of the witch-king pursuing her.

  “I’ve never met them, you know,” Jaift said, and paused. Then she said in a lower voice, “It’s true I was looking forward to meeting Timias Derem. From what my father said, I think I would have liked him. But what we need now is a place to think. Somewhere quiet and private and safe. Because your…friend…said something about everyone in your company being in peril. Isn’t that what he said? So I don’t think we dare get near my family. And if you’re marked out, am I, now, too? And did your friend really mean Tai-Enchar himself is after you? Because that seems…”

  It did seem impossible. Meridy had been thinking about that. She shook her head, not in denial but in bafflement. “I know! At least this time the ghost boy explained a little, only I didn’t understand anything. And every time he appears, something terrible happens.” She wondered for the first time whether bandits—or worse, some terrifying black-eyed man out of some dreadful realm of dreams—might have terrorized Tikiy after she’d left, and for the first time she almost wanted to go back just so she could see whether everyone was safe.

  It was a stupid idea, of course. She didn’t even care if Aunt Tarana or her cousins were all right, or whether they’d all been…She couldn’t quite make herself complete that thought, so maybe she did care, a little, after all. She bit her lip and said in a lower voice, “I don’t know.”

  “Right—we both need time to catch our breath, after everything!” Jaift nodded firmly. “So I asked at the bank, and there’s a decent inn up this way. I thought we could have something to eat and a bath and then think what to do.”

  Meridy had to admit that sounded like an excellent idea.

  The inn was a nice one, nice enough that even with gold and silver weighing down the interior pockets of her skirt, Meridy wouldn’t have dared suggest staying there. The smooth plaster walls were painted carmine and ivory, the steep-pitched roof was pine sh
ingle, and the numerous windows were protected by wooden shutters carved into a lacework of leaves and flowers. The courtyard in the front, like the area around the bank, was all raked gravel and flowers; and, as at the bank, there were private guards at the door.

  “That’s how you know it’s safe,” Jaift explained with easy confidence. “It’s a bit pricier than I’d have liked, but mother wouldn’t begrudge it—safe lodging is important! There’s a couturier’s across the street; I asked particularly. We won’t want to wait for tailoring, but they’ll have prepared garments that can be altered.”

  A couturier turned out to be like a dressmaker, such as Meridy had heard they had in Sann and other towns, only even fancier and more expensive.

  In Tikiy, two different families made their living carding wool, making and dyeing thread, and weaving cloth; they’d also make up simple garments for anyone who didn’t have time or good enough eyes for needlework. Meridy had known, or she’d thought she’d known, how much fancier clothing was in towns. But she hadn’t really understood just how much fine cloth and clothing could cost until Jaift dragged her into the couturier’s and made her try on a beautiful new dress that hadn’t been worn by anyone else before, ever.

  Jaift had asked to see only clothing suitable for travel, but even so the dress was the nicest Meridy had ever worn. It was all the colors of autumn, creamy yellow and rust and toast brown, colors that looked good with the brown skin and nearly black hair of a girl with a lot of Southern blood behind her. There was a little embroidery on the bodice and a simple skirt, not too full.

  “Easy to put on and take off, with a skirt meant for riding if the excellent miss should wish, though of course a conveyance may be less dusty,” murmured the woman assisting them. She hadn’t flickered an eyelash at Meridy’s obviously common background or even more obvious Southern coloring.