The Water Road

by JD Byrne

  Antrey turned a corner—she had just three more to go before the relative safety of the boulevard—and cast a quick glance over her shoulder. She was right. There were two men behind her who appeared to be following her, tracking her, and trying to avoid looking like they were. They made the turn around the corner behind her and averted their eyes when she saw them. They were closing in on her.

  Her mind raced as she thought of what to do. If she kept going towards the boulevard as planned, they would surely catch her. What would they do in such a public place? If they grabbed her off the street and into some dimly lit dead end back alley, would anyone notice? Would anyone care? She did not know the area well enough to know where else she might go. She could dash into one of the shops along the street, but most of them were closing for the evening. In an unsettled moment, she turned right at the next intersection, rather than left, without thinking about it. The moment she made the turn she knew it was wrong, just as she knew that turning back was not an option. She kept walking, only to find that she had actually turned into a dead end. If the two men had continued to follow her, she was trapped.

  They followed her all the way down the alley. They were large for Altrerians, with evident bulk on their frames. Even with her father’s wiry frame, Antrey was still stronger than the average Altrerian, but probably not these two. Certainly not the two of them working together. Brute strength was not going to get her out of this.

  Both of the men that confronted her had fair light-green skin. The one approaching on the right had a scar across his temple. Antrey also noticed that he had a small knife dangling from his belt. Not a dagger, but big enough to hurt. His hand lingered near the hilt. The other one, approaching on the left, did not appear to be armed, but it was impossible to tell what he might be concealing.

  The one on the left was the first to speak. “Well, well, well, Gintie, what we got here, you think?”

  Gintie, the one with the knife, answered as if this was a prepared routine, “Looks like we got one of them halfbreed whores, Myral.”

  “I do believe you are correct, Gintie,” Myral said, with practiced rhythmic precision. “A nice clean one, too. The kind you find in those fancy houses down in the center of town.”

  “You are right,” Antrey said, having decided she needed to talk her way out of this. “I do work in the compound.” She wondered if the weight of the bag on her shoulder, swung properly, would knock one or both of the men down. “But I’m not a whore,” she finished.

  The two men chuckled. “Did you hear that, Myral? She says she’s no whore!”

  “I dunno, Gintie,” Myral said, roaring with laugher. “Sure looks like one. What happened, love?” he asked, turning his attention to Antrey. “Your mother seduce one of them Neldathi bears in a traveling circus?”

  They cackled some more. Antrey found nothing amusing about the situation. “My father was a Telebrian soldier,” she said. “My mother is Neldathi.” She was trying to string them along for enough time to figure out what to do.

  “Well, that is just lovely,” Myral said. “True love, was it, then? How about that, Gintie, we got a romantic here.”

  Gintie struck a pose like he was deep in thought. “I can see it, Myral. I can see it. She is quite a specimen.”

  “That is too kind,” Antrey said, mind still churning.

  “Oh, now, love. One thing you will find about me and Gintie is that we is anything but kind,” Myral said, stepping slowly towards her.

  “Yeah,” Gintie agreed. “True love and all that don’t have anything to do with what we going to do with you, dear.”

  “And what would that be?” Antrey asked. She knew the violent answer, but needed to keep them talking.

  “Why, the only thing you damned halfbreed bitches are good for,” Myral said. “I know the gods are gone, but I think somebody must have blessed this land with all you sterile halfbreed whores. No need to worry about no trouble after, right, Gintie?”

  “No worries about unpleasant surprises, Myral,” Gintie said. They roared with laughter again.

  “No worries for us, mate, that is certain,” Myral said. “Now, miss, if you would be so kind as to turn around, Gintie and I will get to business.” He flashed a sickening smile at her, while Gintie brandished the knife that he had silently slipped from its spot on his belt.

  The image of Gintie’s knife buried in her belly flashed through Antrey’s mind. She closed her eyes, but otherwise stood perfectly still.

  “I said turn around!” Myral yelled at her.

  Antrey began to turn, but then she heard the sharp whack of a hard object on skin. One of the attackers, she thought it was Myral, cried out and sounded like he crumpled to the ground. There were two more quick thumps and she heard another body fall to the ground. She opened her eyes and saw Myral and Gintie on the ground, doubled over in pain. Myral had a bloody gash on the back of his head. He might have been unconscious. Gintie was moaning and clutching his stomach, as if he had been punched. Standing over them were two Sentinels, each with a pikti in hand, ready to strike at either of the men should they move. She did not recognize either of them. They looked at her with a mixture of scorn and pity.

  “Were these thugs bothering you?” one of the Sentinels asked.

  “Yes,” was all that Antrey could say at first, her heart still racing. “Thank you. Thank you very much.”

  “What are you doing out here at this time of the day?” the other one asked.

  She fished out the employment papers from her bag. “I was running errands for my employer,” she said, handing the papers to one of the Sentinels. “I work for Alban, the clerk of the Grand Council.”

  He examined the papers and handed them back to her. “All right, then. Well, there’s no reason for you to be here any longer, is there?” His tone was condescending, without any real sympathy for what she had been through.

  The two attackers lay between them. Myral was returning to consciousness, moaning as the pain reached his mind. The other Sentinel poked him with the end of his pikti.

  “No, sir,” Antrey said. “No reason at all for me to be here anymore. I’ll be on my way.” She stepped over her two fallen assailants, slipped between the two Sentinels, and walked briskly out of the alley. Behind her, Antrey could hear the sounds of more violence. The thwap of piktis on skin. The sound of breaking bones. Part of her knew that she should be concerned that they would simply be brutalized, rather than arrested. This was not how it was supposed to work. As she crossed the street back onto her original path home, she couldn’t bring herself to care.

  Chapter 2

  By the time Antrey made her way back to the compound, it was dark. Inside the compound gate, the inner courtyard was bathed in a beautiful combination of moonlight and lamplight. If not for tonight’s full moon, the courtyard could be a dangerous place, filled with flickering gaslight and dark passages. She walked across the courtyard to the front door of the apartment where she lived with Alban and his family. There was no light near it, so even with the moon it was dark enough to make Antrey nervous. She tried the front door, hoping to avoid a search for her key somewhere in the heavy bag that weighed her down.

  Alban had standing orders that the door should always be locked. Although the compound was ordinarily a safe place, it was not immune from occasional violence or petty theft. Alban was not inclined to take any chances. In spite of that, it was not unusual for one of Alban’s young daughters to leave the lock open after they ran inside while playing. Antrey had no such luck tonight. She searched through her bag and then tried, unsuccessfully, to fully engage the key with the lock in the dim light. The noise must have been registered inside, as she heard the lock slide open from the other side of the door.

  When the door swung open, Antrey was confronted by Alban’s wife, Onwen, who was standing in the threshold. She was an imposing woman, even though Antrey was taller than she by nearly a foot. Onwen had the dark-green skin of an Arborian and the hardscrabble personality that
went along with it.

  That she and Alban would find each other, fall in love, and marry was another oddity of Tolenor. Alban was from the Guild city of Ventris, on the continent’s west coast. That society was organized around a dizzying variety of trade guilds, rather than families or clans. Marriages were so rare as to be unheard of. Alban had come from the Guild of Law, but had not been a part of that world for three decades. He came to Tolenor, first as a Sentinel, and then to serve as the clerk of the Grand Council. He met Onwen while he was a Sentinel when she had accompanied her father here on a trade mission. According to Alban it was love at first sight. He never tired of telling the story.

  Onwen had never been fond of Antrey, much less her presence in their home. Tonight she looked particularly displeased. “Where have you been?” she asked in a stern voice.

  “Sorry, missus,” Antrey said, sliding past her into the apartment. “I was delayed after leaving the supply shop.” She took the heavy bag off her shoulder and put it on the small table in the entryway. With her left hand, she massaged her other shoulder.

  “Delayed?” Onwen said. “Wasting time, you mean. And wasting my husband’s time, as well.” She started to say something else, but was stopped by a fit of coughing.

  “I’m truly sorry, missus,” Antrey said. There was no need to tell the story of her confrontation in the alley. It would not do her any good with Onwen. “Is your husband still about?”

  Onwen shook her head while the coughing fit passed. “He went to the Hare with a few others. You should take those supplies to his office as soon as possible. Although I suppose it wouldn’t hurt if you had your supper first.” She motioned towards the kitchen and the small table where Antrey took her meals. “Be quick about it.”

  “Yes, missus,” Antrey said, with a nod. She walked quickly into the kitchen, took a bowl of whatever had been cooking, and sat down at the table. She thought of Alban at The Inn of the Great Antlered Hare, a tavern inside the compound walls. At the Hare, people of importance met to discuss business and the issues of the day. It was all strictly off the record, which Antrey thought was ironic, given Alban’s line of work.

  ~~~~~

  The apartment was said to be the largest in the compound, larger even than those of the nine Grand Council members themselves. Antrey had no way of knowing whether that was true, but she supposed that because the members of the Grand Council came and went so frequently they required less space than those who lived here permanently. It was a practical arrangement, more practical than one would think people called Grand Councilors would allow, in that it gave the greatest benefit to someone who was not a member of the Council itself.

  Alban’s apartment had three floors. A kitchen, dining room, and salon were on the ground floor. The second floor was given over largely to Alban’s office. Onwen also had a small personal study there, but Antrey was rarely given permission to enter it. On the third floor, three bedrooms clustered around the top of the stairs. One for Alban and Onwen, one for their daughters, and one for Antrey.

  When she arrived in Tolenor, Antrey had little hope that she would call a place like this home. Her mother sent Antrey north just after her fifteenth birthday. Before that her mother’s clan, the Kohar, at least tolerated her presence. Antrey had heard the talk about her among the others since she was old enough to walk. She knew that they did not really consider her Kohari. She could never be a part of the clan. At best, she could hope to be some kind of hanger-on, following the clan as it roamed around the Trewavas Valley. She might survive, although that was certainly not guaranteed. Unable to have children due to her mixed heritage, she was useless in the eyes of the clan elders, aside from the few who might want to use her like Myral and Gintie planned.

  Once she became an adult in Neldathi culture, fifteen years of age, she knew it was time to leave. In spite of all she knew, it was harder than she expected. There was a part of her that assumed her mother, or perhaps one of her half-siblings, would do something to try and stop her. Something to prevent her permanent exile. In all the years she had spent in the clan, surely someone had come to love her or at least care about her well-being? But no one spoke up. No one said there must be another way. No one even tried to help her prepare for the journey north by providing supplies or information. And no one seemed to care when she finally left.

  The Water Road makes for a natural boundary, running from one end of Altreria to the other. The Neldathi stayed to the south, in the snow-capped mountains and the rugged valleys. The Altrerians, in their numerous factions, stayed to the north. To ensure that separation, the Triumvirate had built forts all along the southern bank of the Water Road to keep the Neldathi in place. Any Neldathi who was foolish enough to try and cross the river could be shot on sight, without anyone batting an eye. A very few would be captured, to be kept as a curiosity or pet in one of the larger cities.

  It turned out to be the one instance in Antrey’s life where her mixed heritage worked in her favor. Although, as the daughter of a Neldathi woman, she could not legally cross the Water Road, if she could make it through undetected it would be impossible to prove she had not been born on the northern side. It was not as if her appearance could betray her. The appearance of mixed offspring was notoriously random.

  The most pressing problem when she left her clan, however, was that Antrey had no idea how to actually get across the Water Road. Her mother, along with the rest of her clan, could not read or write, nor did they have a firm grasp of geography beyond the clan’s territory. The only thing her mother could tell her was that the river was to the north and point her in the right direction. Armed only with that, Antrey set out the next day. It was a stroke of luck that the clan was at the most northern point in their great circuit and thus at its closest point to the river.

  She arrived at the river after several days of walking, nearly starved, with her legs dragging behind her. Later she would learn, from one of the maps in Alban’s library, that she had come to the river at a point that was almost the equal distance between two of the Triumvirate forts that lined the shores. It was as far away from the high walls and sentry towers as one could possibly be. It was pure luck. She sat by the river, watching it glide slowly and silently east towards the shore while she rested, finished her provisions, and regained her strength. At nightfall, she slipped into the water as quietly as possible and swam for the other shore. Although she had only swum before in the shallow ponds and lakes of the Kohari lands, she struggled across to the northern bank.

  Once on the northern side of the Water Road, Antrey make her way through the Endless Hills, following the river to the sea. She was in Telebria at the time, but had no way of knowing it. It was a good place to travel, gently rolling country with just enough cover to allow her to stay out of sight. That allowed her to shadow groups of other travelers, far enough away to avoid detection but close enough to hear them talking and begin to learn the Altrerian language. She had heard of the island at the mouth of the great river, where it spilled into the ocean, and the city that had been built there. She had only heard it talked about with anger and contempt, but it still seemed like the only place she might be able to survive. When she reached the Bay of Sins and saw Tolenor bustling in the distance, it made all the effort worth it. She crossed the Grand Causeway and entered her new home.

  Once she got to Tolenor, however, Antrey realized that she had no idea what to do. She had no way to earn a living. Where would she live? She scraped by on the streets, carefully avoiding the gangs that ran the less reputable parts of the city. As with her clan, the gangs wanted no part of this odd-looking stranger. There were days when she did not know whether she would survive the night. Other days, she gave serious consideration to walking to the edge of the island and flinging herself into the breakers.

  Then she met Alban. It was near the market where he had just bought fruit. He was practically the most important man in the city and Antrey had no business being anywhere near him. She had been sitting on a street
corner hoping for some chance to eat. Hoping that someone would let their guard down just enough that she could snatch a piece of fruit or a heel of bread from their bag as they walked past. Waiting for someone’s rambunctious child to knock a pear off the fruit stand onto the filthy ground, where she could grab it and run off. Alban saw her there and, for some reason, took pity on her. He stopped and spoke to her, not like she was some oddity but as one person to another. He invited her home for a meal for the simple reason that she looked like she needed one.

  Sitting there at the kitchen table finishing her dinner, Antrey could still remember the taste of that first meal. She could still remember how warm and filling it was. How the spices nearly burned the roof of her mouth. And she remembered the fight Alban had that night with Onwen. A fight about her. They argued in Onwen’s study upstairs and assumed Antrey could not hear them in the kitchen below. But the argument was heated enough that Antrey could hear most of what was said, even if she could not understand most of it. The broad strokes of their positions were clear, however. Onwen was adamant about having one of “those” in her home, must less around their daughter. There was only one, at the time. And what of Alban’s employers? What would the members of the Grand Council say about their most trusted servant harboring a halfbreed?

  In the end, Alban won the argument. From Antrey’s perspective, it seemed like the only time he ever won a battle with Onwen. Perhaps it was important enough to him to let her have anything else she wanted. He made Antrey an offer that night, across the small table in the kitchen. She could come work with him, be his assistant, with the Grand Council. And she could live in his home. Alban would teach her how to read, how to write, give her a safe place to sleep, and warm meals to fill her belly. It was like a dream, except even in her dreams Antrey had never expected so much. She accepted without hesitation. Antrey owed Alban her life.