Pathfinder sw-1

by Orson Scott Card

  “Do we have enough money?” asked Olivenko. “Because I don’t have enough to buy shoes for a one-legged man.”

  “We have enough,” said Loaf.

  Param merely stood beside Rigg, eyes downcast, looking demure. It had been her survival strategy in Flacommo’s house. And it occurred to Rigg that this continued to be her best disguise. No one knew what the princess looked like—she hadn’t been seen by the public in a long, long time. And nobody would expect a royal to act so humble.

  And Father had trained Rigg to act however he needed to. He could command the eye, impose his presence on others so they couldn’t take their eyes off him. He could also disappear, becoming hard to notice even when he was the only other person in the room. “People treat you as you expect to be treated,” Father had said. Rigg had complained that since all their work was with animals, this was hardly important. Now Rigg could only wonder if Father had known everything, planned everything.

  “We could use a map,” said Rigg.

  “I know how to get to the Wall,” said Loaf.

  “It’s not hard anyway,” said Olivenko. “Any direction you go, eventually there it is.”

  “But they’ll be chasing us soon enough,” said Loaf. “We’re getting out of town today, but once they know we’re gone, how long before General Citizen’s men overtake us on the road? It doesn’t look like the lady is ready for a long pursuit.”

  “What I need,” said Rigg, “is a place where the ground hasn’t changed its level in eleven thousand years.”

  “Oh, are there maps with that information?” asked Loaf.

  “I need a stony place without a river, fairly smooth ground. Grass and no trees, if we can help it. As few trees as possible.”

  “I can think of a few places that might answer,” said Loaf.

  “What’s the closest one?” asked Rigg.

  “In the east. And well south of here.”

  “Do you or Umbo remember how the boundaries were on that globe in the Tower of O?” asked Rigg. “We don’t want to end up in the same wallfold where Father Knosso was killed.”

  Loaf stopped, closed his eyes a few moments. “It’s well south of the boundary of the next wallfold. It won’t be the same one.”

  “Good,” said Rigg. “The people there are not . . . nice.”

  “Saints forbid we should go to a place where people aren’t nice,” said Umbo.

  “We want them to be nice enough not to kill us immediately.”

  They were walking again, and soon arrived at the shop Olivenko had been looking for. “Not that I’ve ever bought anything here,” he said. “But the clothes are nice—even if they weren’t made for anyone in particular. We don’t have time for tailoring.”

  They explained to the shopkeeper what they wanted. “Good, practical traveling clothes for all of us.”

  The shopkeeper looked them up and down, especially taking note of the difference between Loaf and Umbo on one hand, and Rigg and Param on the other.

  “We don’t want to be conspicuous when traveling,” said Rigg. “These two went to an extreme, I think.” He indicated Umbo and Loaf.

  “And you haven’t even started trying yet,” said the shopkeeper.

  “We don’t want to look so poor that innkeepers won’t trust us to pay, or so rich that robbers are tempted.”

  The shopkeeper gave a sharp bark of a laugh. “With two soldiers like these with you, it would take a bold band to make a try for you.”

  “We aren’t going to look like soldiers,” said Olivenko.

  The shopkeeper looked him and Loaf up and down again. “Good luck with that. I don’t have any magical clothing that will make you look wan and sophisticated.”

  “What about making me look tall?” asked Umbo.

  “Now, that I can do—if you don’t mind walking in very tall shoes.”

  It took an hour, but they emerged with reasonably well-fitting and comfortable clothes. They still looked like money—but not like really big money. A trading family, perhaps.

  “So who are we?” asked Olivenko, when they were on the street again. “I’m too young to pass for anybody’s father. And you, sir, are frankly too old.”

  “We did well enough before,” said Loaf.

  “Loaf is Param’s and my father,” said Rigg. “And Umbo is your cousin from upriver, who was sent to Aressa Sessamo to get an education under your supervision.”

  “Oh, yes, I’ll fool everybody with that,” said Umbo.

  “I didn’t say you actually got one,” said Rigg, smiling. But the smile didn’t work. Umbo was a little surly and Param was getting shyer. Maybe they were uncomfortable in their new clothes. Or maybe they were just frightened about what lay ahead.

  “Look,” said Rigg. “I know what I’m asking of all of you. Only two of us are in any serious danger. But we can’t get to safety—if that’s what it is—without the rest of you. Especially you, Umbo.”

  “Am I complaining?” asked Umbo.

  “I’m just thinking that maybe you’d rather—”

  “Stop apologizing for being alive,” said Umbo. “Don’t you know who your friends are? Don’t you know what friendship is?”

  “You didn’t seem very happy.”

  “I’m not happy,” said Umbo. “I don’t know this guy, but I know he works for the city guard, and here we are trusting him with our lives.”

  “He’s late showing up for duty—by tomorrow he’s a deserter,” said Rigg.

  “Unless he’s on assignment right now,” said Umbo.

  “You came to me,” said Olivenko stiffly.

  “My father trusted him—my real father.”

  “And look where that got him,” said Umbo. “Could he be deader?”

  Rigg watched Olivenko as he calmed himself. Rigg decided not to intervene, but rather to let Olivenko handle this himself. “You don’t know me,” said Olivenko, “but I loved his father and grieved for him when he died, more than anybody.”

  “Not more than me,” said Param softly.

  “But nobody saw you grieving,” said Olivenko. “So how could I know? All I can say is, with the passage of time, you’ll see who I am, and I’ll see who you are. I trust you now because Rigg trusts you. I’m betting my life and career, my whole future on you. And Rigg is asking you to make the same bet on me. Has Rigg shown bad judgment before?”

  “Yes, I have,” said Rigg. “I trusted my mother.”

  “No you didn’t,” said Param.

  “Well, no, never completely. But I wanted to believe in her.”

  “Is it that way with this Olivenko?” asked Loaf. “Do you want to believe in him?”

  “No,” said Rigg. “It never occurred to me that one of my guards might be somebody—a person, somebody I could talk with. But he became my friend during my time in the library. He never tried to ingratiate himself with me.”

  “That only means he’s really good at it,” said Umbo.

  “You’re way too young to be so cynical,” said Loaf.

  “When we get across the Wall,” said Rigg, “I’m going to need you all. We’re going to need each other. But I don’t give much for our chances if you’re not able to work together.”

  They all looked at each other, at the ground, at each other again.

  “Let’s get out of the city,” said Param. “We have plenty of time to work things out among us on the road.”

  They took a city carriage to the outskirts of town, where they paid off the driver and then bought a good traveling coach and four horses. “The purse isn’t infinite,” Loaf grumbled, but Rigg saw that there was plenty of money left. They also bought some supplies—food, tents, water bags, tools, a few weapons, nothing unusual for travelers setting out into rough country. One of the outfitters warned them that if they were going to a place where the roads weren’t maintained by the government, they’d want to have spare wheels and axles with them. “And a fifth horse tied behind,” he said. “Without good roads, even the best-made coach isn’t going
to hold up forever, and you may have to leave the coach at some point. You’ll want five horses then.”

  “Next you’ll try to sell us saddles.”

  “It’s your buttocks and thighs that’ll do the riding,” said the man with crude amusement. “It’s not so much the saddles as the stirrups that you’ll be wanting, if the horse decides to trot—and that’s the favorite gait of a good carriage horse.”

  Rigg wasn’t sure what he was talking about—he had done precious little riding in his life. And that was only being perched atop an old nag when he was a little boy. “I wish we could ride the river,” said Rigg.

  “River doesn’t go where we’re going,” said Loaf.

  And then both of them realized that they had probably said too much in front of a stranger. In a day or two, General Citizen’s men would no doubt be questioning this man, and now he knew that they weren’t going home.

  Worse yet, the man saw them exchange glances, indicating that they wished they hadn’t spoken—so that the words would be cemented in the fellow’s mind. The only way they could make it worse would be to ask him not to tell anyone. That would almost surely send him scurrying to the nearest city guards as soon as they were gone.

  But maybe they could give him another reason for that glance. “What we’re wondering,” said Rigg, “is whether you have a map. We’re going into country we don’t know.”

  “I don’t keep maps in stock,” said the man. “People mostly knows where they’re going from here. Traders get their own maps and lore from each other. Other folks is just going home—they knows the road and they knows their turning.”

  “Well, I guess we’ll just have to ask in the roadhouses.”

  “If they know. Remember that roadhouse keepers don’t travel, so they don’t know anything but their town,” said the outfitter, “and if you start asking the travelers you meet in such places, you never know which ones will send you down a blind road where only your valuables will come back out again.”

  “This is a bad idea,” said Loaf.

  “Then don’t come,” said Rigg. He knew that Loaf now understood his ploy, so the act could proceed with confidence. “You’re the one who said the Wall was the only test of a man’s strength, so if you want to back out . . .”

  Loaf rolled his eyes. “Fool boy. We’ll get there.” They left the outfitter behind. Rigg knew that by telling him the truth about their destination, but only after acting stealthy about it, the man would assume that they were lying, and so would the soldiers who questioned him. And even if General Citizen decided to believe the Wall was their destination, there was a lot of Wall.

  Soon the buying was done. It was late enough in the day that they couldn’t very well begin their journey in earnest. But the ostler and the outfitter both recommended several different roadhouses on the way out of town. They reached the second one before full dark, and stayed the night, Param in one room, with the door stoutly barred, and the four men and boys sharing the bed and floor in the other. “If anybody so much as scratches at your door in the night,” said Loaf, “you set up a holler and we’ll have him in a moment.”

  Param shook her head. “If someone tries to break in, they’ll only find an empty room,” she said.

  Loaf looked startled, but then remembered what she could do, and sighed and shrugged. “It’s a strange world we live in now.”

  The farther out into the country they went, the more unusual their expedition was. They weren’t on a main road between important cities, but on a road used mostly for bringing crops and trade goods to market, or for visiting among neighbors. Sometimes the road wasn’t a road at all, but a few ruts here and there in a meadow or pasture, and Loaf had to ride ahead on the fifth horse to see where the road picked up again, so that Olivenko would know where to drive the carriage.

  “We’re too memorable,” said Olivenko one morning, after they had set out from the house of a prosperous farmer who had given Param a room in the house and the rest of them space in the barn. “Maybe for the first few days, Citizen’s outriders were searching for the two royals, or for the royals and their privick friends, a boy and an old soldier. But soon enough they must have found out about your buying of the carriage, and then they’d have a better count of us five, and the carriage makes it easy to follow us. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re only a day behind us, especially with us stopping each night for sleep in an inn or tavern or house.”

  “At least we’re off the main roads,” said Umbo.

  “All the more memorable we are then,” said Loaf. “You’re making his point, lad.”

  “What can we do?” asked Rigg. “If we sell the carriage or give it away, then they’ll find out about it and know they’re not looking for a carriage any more.”

  “Could we hide it somewhere?” asked Umbo.

  “Maybe,” said Olivenko.

  “No,” said Loaf. “I know what I would do as a soldier tracking somebody, and there’s no chance you could hide it where I couldn’t find it.”

  “True enough,” said Rigg. “Father and I were both good trackers.”

  “You with your paths,” said Umbo.

  Param spoke up then. “I think Umbo is right, we have to hide it.”

  “And then what will you do, Param?” asked Rigg. “Have you ever ridden a horse?”

  “As a little girl, I remember once,” said Param, and then she smiled. “I know I’m the reason we’re going so slowly and being so obvious—the carriage is for me because I couldn’t even run a hundred steps without panting, back there in the city on the day we escaped.”

  Rigg nodded with a shrug. “We are what we are, Param. No one gave you a chance to build up any stamina.”

  “But build it I shall,” she said. “And the carriage is no help to me. So hide it.”

  “Where?” asked Olivenko.

  “How?” asked Loaf at almost the same moment.

  “In the past,” said Param.

  Rigg was disgusted that he hadn’t thought of it himself. “Far enough in the past, and either somebody finds it and steals it, or it sits there and rots in the rain and wind for a hundred years and Citizen’s men are sure it isn’t the one we’ve been using.”

  They picked a place where the road led along the crest of a gentle hill, sloping down a mile or more to streams on both sides. Soon the horses were free of the traces and hobbled in the meadow on the left side of the road, grazing peacefully, three of them loaded with their provisions, expertly bundled and tied to their backs by Loaf.

  “Sorry I don’t know how to do any of this,” said Olivenko. “In the city guard we didn’t have much need for loading and unloading animals.”

  “As Rigg said, we are what we are,” said Loaf.

  “All right, then,” said Rigg. “The four of us will go back into the past and push the carriage off the road. If we can get it rolling free down toward the stream, it’ll look like an ancient accident. Param can stay with the horses.”

  “And I’ll stay with her,” said Umbo.

  “You’re not very big, but you can still do your share,” said Loaf.

  “I’m not going into the past with you,” said Umbo. “Not if we mean to get back to the present where Param will be waiting for us.”

  Rigg was surprised. “Why would that be a problem?”

  Umbo looked at Loaf. “Remember what happened when we dug up the stones? At O?”

  Loaf nodded. “That’s right. When Umbo goes himself, and handles things in the past, he doesn’t go right back to where he was. He was a day off, a day early.”

  “And that was after going back only a few months,” said Umbo. “Who knows how far off I’ll be if we go back a hundred years. Or two hundred. What if I miss by a month?”

  “So you wait here with Param,” said Rigg. “But that raises another question. When I pushed Param into the past, I put her hand into the hands of people to whom that time was the present. Whom will we be giving the carriage to?”

  “Can’t we just tak
e it back there and then let go of it?” asked Loaf.

  “This sounds so crazy,” said Olivenko. “Straight out of the Library of Nothing.”

  “I don’t know,” said Rigg. “I’m not even sure if we can ‘take’ something that’s bigger than we are. Why not put our hands on a mountain, go into the past, and then leave the mountain there? Why doesn’t the ground come with us every time we move through time?”

  “Our clothes come with us—which I for one think is convenient,” said Param.

  “I think the ground, and things attached to the ground, they stay in the present because time is tied to the world,” said Umbo. “Remember, Rigg? Otherwise time travel would mean dropping yourself into the middle of the space between stars, right?”

  “So is the carriage attached to the ground?” asked Rigg. “Would we have to lift it up all at once?”

  “Not likely,” said Loaf, “not if we have to hold hands with each other like we did when we were going back to join Olivenko in his time.”

  “Let’s stop talking and try it,” said Rigg.

  In a few moments, he and Olivenko and Loaf were tightly gripping the carriage at various points, using their right hands, while gripping each other’s left hands in a three-handed knot.

  Rigg searched for a useful path, more than a hundred years old. He found one—a cow that had moved through the meadow across the road from where they meant to push the carriage. “All right, Umbo,” he said.

  He felt the familiar change as the paths on the road started to become people—walking, riding horses. But he didn’t let himself get drawn into focusing on any of them. Instead, he kept his eyes on the path of the cow. It moved very differently, and was harder to get a hold on. Rigg had never done this with an animal before, and now he realized how difficult it was. It was as if the smarter brains of people made it easier for him to latch on to them. The cow was elusive. Just a little vague, though the image was always clear enough. Like trying to see through sleepy eyes at the first light of dawn.

  But he locked in with the cow soon enough, and saw the world change around him. The cow was behind a fence now. There were fences on both sides of the road. Rigg hadn’t counted on that. This area used to be more populated, and what were now meadows had once been pastures. The road was also more trafficked—instead of being mostly grass, it was mostly dirt and stones.