Passages

by Olan Thorensen

  Mark turned to Erlon. “You say you’ve seen this Sloffland?”

  “Yes, over by the krykor exhibits. His family raises them on a ranch northeast of here. Maghen made Fenon and me promise not to do anything to him, but when I saw him, I thought I should warn Maghen.”

  Mark looked at the two Lorwell siblings. Erlon looked frustrated, Fenon’s jaw was clenched, and Maghen’s earlier good mood was gone.

  “This seems like a problem that needs to be gotten rid of,” said Mark. “Show me this Sloffland, Erlon.”

  “Now, Mark, I asked my brothers not to make trouble, and I don’t want you to either. The Sloffland family is important around Nurburt, and I handled the problem before.”

  “Sorry, Maghen,” Mark said, briefly hugging her, “but you only delayed handling it. It’s time to do it permanently. There won’t be any trouble.”

  Erlon grinned and led on, a worried Maghen trailing along. Mark held Alys until they got to the krykor area, where he gave the child to her mother.

  Erlon scanned the area. “Ah, there he is,” and led them to a strikingly handsome man in his mid-twenties. He was an inch shorter than Mark and well built. Mark instantly, and he knew foolishly, felt jealous that this man had been with his wife.

  Sloffland noticed them when they came to within ten feet, his eyes widening on seeing Maghen. His mouth curled in a leer and his lips began to form words, until Mark’s fist flattened them against his teeth. Sloffland’s body hit the ground.

  Mark jerked him erect, gripped the man’s fastened coat, lifted his feet off the ground, and carried him twenty feet to slam him against the wall of a barn.

  Sloffland struggled, until Mark rammed his forehead into Sloffland’s nose. It bled profusely.

  “Listen carefully, you pile of shit. Pay attention. My name is Mark Kaldwel. Maghen is my wife. If you ever bother her again, if I ever hear of you saying a word or anything about her, or if I even suspect you’re thinking about saying things about her, you will regret it for the rest of your life. Mark Kaldwel. Don’t forget the name. Ask around about my name. Ask around and think very carefully about whether you want me to come looking for you.”

  Mark turned, still holding Sloffland off the ground, and threw him over a three-foot rail fence into a krykor pen. He landed on the backs of a cluster of the animals.

  Mark whirled around to see the laughing Lorwell brothers and Maghen fighting opposite urges to either frown or grin in delight.

  “See,” said Mark. “I told you there wouldn’t be any trouble.”

  “There still may be,” said Maghen. “He’s a mean man with a nasty temper.”

  “You two go on,” said Erlon. “I’ll stay to be sure Sloffland finds out about Mark’s visit to the festival two years ago and how he’s a man who goes destrex hunting alone.”

  Maghen’s mood returned to its earlier state, though Mark caught her looking around every few minutes for the first hour, probably checking for Sloffland. When they met Fenon later, he updated them.

  “Erlon tells me Sloffland suddenly left for urgent business back at the family’s ranch and was last seen riding north.”

  They enjoyed the rest of the festival without incident.

  Mark made two more trips to Landylbury, each time with three hides. Their stash of gold coins grew enough to make Mark uneasy about hiding it all in their cottage. He transferred a third to the storage bin he used in Nurburt for hides, and he buried another third two miles from the ranch. He then covered the small hole with a rock that he believed only he could move.

  Rumors of a man who hunted destrex alone spread within fifty miles of Nurburt. Mark deflected inquiries about how he survived. He created a story that portrayed him as both extraordinarily lucky and stupid at the same time. One extended family, the Ostyns, pressed him hard for answers, provoking a brawl in a pub. Mark first knocked out one of the men and then fought two others to mutual exhaustion. The result was a respectful truce. It had been all he could do to avoid serious injury to himself, while trying not to kill one of the Ostyns, despite pulling his punches.

  Mark and Maghen celebrated Alys’s second birthday with a party and allowed her to eat all the honeyed cakes she wanted. She consumed the final one witnessed by an audience of amazed adults. Alys finally wound down and fell asleep in her small bed, next to her parents’ larger one.

  Mark sat with Maghen on the cottage’s porch.

  “When will you go to Landylbury, Mark? I assume it’s soon because you have three hides.”

  He patted her leg. “I appreciate how patient you’ve been. We could have started our own ranch months ago, but I wanted to wait until we had enough coin. I didn’t want us to struggle by making the move too early. The piece of land I have in mind is larger than you imagined we would begin with. It’s both beautiful and well located—about equally distant from your family, Nurburt, and here. We have enough friends on the ranch that it would be a shame to lose contact with them.”

  “You’re still thinking of giving our new ranch a name? It seems odd. Here it’s the Toodman Ranch. Why would Keeslyn and Leesta need to give land and buildings a name?”

  “It’s not necessary, but it’s something commonly done where I come from. I’ll never see my original people again, but I still miss things about them and my homeland. The land we’ll buy reminds me of where I came from.”

  Maghen shrugged and laughed. “Oh, I don’t mind if we call our land Colorado or Ponderosa, whenever you make up your mind. When people ask, I’ll just say it’s your idea and go ask him.”

  “Good solution,” Mark said and kissed her. They were still deciding on which brand to use on their horses and cattle. Maghen favored using the letter “K” for Kaldwel, while Mark wanted two “M’s,” though he hadn’t come up with a simple design he liked.

  “And no changing the subject,” she said. “When will you leave for Landylbury?”

  “Not for a while. I’m going to do one more hunt and try to get two hides this time. I’ll have to bring extra horses, so I’ll take more time. But whether I get one or two hides, this will be the last hunt. We’ll have enough coin then to buy the land, build a house, a barn, fencing, and begin stocking with more animals than we originally planned. It’ll also let us hire more workers before we start having income from the ranch.”

  Maghen clutched Mark and gave him a smacking kiss. “Oh, Mark, I can’t wait. I know you wanted to wait a little longer to give us a better start, but I would have rushed to do it sooner and likely regretted it later. Now I can begin seriously thinking about what we’ll need, even if it’s still early. And as soon as we know when a house will be ready, I want to try having another child. I keep telling you your house plan doesn’t provide enough rooms for all the children I want.”

  “Don’t worry about that. The design provides for a way to expand a wing with bedrooms.”

  He stroked her cheek. “Speaking of bedrooms, Alys should be sound asleep, and we won’t wake her if we practice making babies.”

  Two months later, Mark left for Landylbury.

  CHAPTER 26

  AN UNFORESEEN DANGER

  Mark Kaldwel pushed open the swinging doors of the Wasted Zernik pub. Sounds of patrons talking and a small group of musicians at the opposite end of the large room washed over him. It wasn’t the dregs of Landylbury’s pub options but was distant enough from the commercial section of the city that he believed it minimized his being recognized by any Brawsea guild members who happened to be in Landylbury. Not that there had been any sign he was still being sought since fleeing Brawsea, the Frangel capital, after things turned bad. Nevertheless, why take risks when he didn’t have to?

  He looked around for an empty table, though the large crowd argued against success. It wasn’t that he was naturally unsocial, but he strove to leave as small a memory footprint as possible in Landylbury. Tonight, the attempt failed.

  “Kaldwel, just saw you come in,” called a gruff voice behind him, above the general din of patrons. A h
and rested on his shoulder. “Come join me and my cousins. We’re a stein ahead of you.”

  The Ostyns were a family of ranchers and hunters thirty miles from the Toodman ranch. They were amiable sorts and held no animus about the fight he’d had with them. However, he would have been more pleased to spend a pub evening with them in Nurburt than in Landylbury, where he strove for anonymity. Sighing, he followed the burly Vernyn Ostyn to a table and ordered a stein of ale.

  “Vernyn told us you came to Landylbury to sell hides, instead of Brawsea or Kaledon,” said the older cousin whose name Mark forgot. “He figured it must be because of better prices, and it was! Almost half again as much as we got the one time we went to the capital. The drinks are on us tonight!”

  Mark knew the Ostyns sold destrex hides whenever the family needed coin—normally, one or two hides at a time. He had no intention of telling them how many he had sold that day.

  The negotiation over the price for the five destrex hides had been as long and annoying as usual. Still, he knew he had gotten a fair price. He’d been selling to this particular boot maker for a year, following less-than-satisfactory experiences with other trade shops. The hides were highly prized for footwear by men in the upper levels of Frangel society. The cost of destrex boots was well beyond the budget of common citizens. Any hides that weren’t used within Frangel went to lucrative export markets.

  The Ostyns hunted in teams of three or four men, the usual number to be reasonably safe in bringing down one of the armored terrors. That there were any destrex left alive was due to the distressingly high mortality rate of hunters attempting to collect the hides. The creatures were annoyingly clever enough to avoid any snare, pit, or other trap sufficient to hold them. They had an even more disturbing habit of turning on hunters whose musket balls had failed to sufficiently penetrate their armor-like hide. The Ostyn family, along with other hunters, believed that Mark either had a secret or was insane, the only two conceivable motives for anyone hunting destrex alone.

  Mark studiously hid from other hunters the rifled muskets he’d had made in Landylbury. The city was far enough from hunting terrain that he could usually avoid attracting attention from other hunters. The 90-caliber weapons were almost twice the weight of an average hunter’s musket, had three times the effective range, and fired minie balls hand-made by Mark. It took a man of his size, 6-foot, 3 inches, and 240 pounds, by Earth measures, to handle the weight and the recoil.

  His stein arrived just as the younger Ostyn cousin seemed about to probe how many hides Mark had sold. When the female server asked whether the others wanted another stein, Mark hurriedly switched topics the instant she left.

  “Did you hear there’s been a zernik outbreak near White Mountain? A bad one, from what I hear. A pack of twenty or thirty hit a settlement.” The town of ten thousand was in south Frangel, not far from the tree line, and existed only because of mining and trapping.

  “No,” said Vernyn. “White Mountain, you say? I imagine the people there are sweeping the countryside. Can’t let the damn things get a foothold and start breeding. How did they get all the way from Tekleum?”

  “No one seems to know how and where they got over the Urstyl Mountains. Then they had to travel unnoticed across southern Frangel nearly to White Mountain.” The narrow chain of mountains that bisected Drilmar north to south was a formidable barrier, yet a steady trickle of zerniks migrated from their normal range in western Drilmar.

  “Why don’t the Tekleumese and the Rumpasians exterminate the damn things?” asked Vernyn.

  As Mark had intended, the conversation moved away from his hunting success. He only half-listened to the three Ostyns during the next hour. He contributed enough to seem involved, while his mind drifted to getting home. Suddenly, something caught his attention. It was as if someone had said something that didn’t quite reach his consciousness, but he knew it was there. He looked around the full pub, his eyes and ears searching for what he might have missed. Nothing.

  “Excuse me, men, I thought I caught a glimpse of someone I need to see. I’ll be back if I can’t find him.”

  He picked up his stein and meandered among the tables, jostling men and a few women. He heard complaints about bosses, jobs, wives, and the latest news from elsewhere in Frangel.

  As he finished his second circuit of the room and was about to reclaim his seat with the Ostyns, he caught his breath and felt a surge of adrenaline. A knot of eight or nine men stood talking. Most were dressed as local workmen, but two of the men were out of place, with clothing more common in higher-class pubs closer to the city center.

  “No, can’t say as I’ve ever heard of a land called ‘Amerika,’” said a man in work clothes. He turned to the men on his left. “Any of you heard of the place?”

  Head shakes and words confirmed their ignorance.

  “How about you?” asked a voice to Mark’s right. He didn’t respond. A hand gripped his shoulder. “You. I asked if the word Amerika means anything to you?”

  Mark shook himself out of his momentary stupor and looked at the more hard-bitten of the two out-of-place men. The man’s eyes focused on Mark, and all the other men stared their way.

  “I . . . ,” he stuttered. “I may have heard the word somewhere, but I’m not sure where.”

  His mind cried out with an urge to grab the man and shake an answer out of him. How could he know about a place on Earth? Calm yourself, Mark thought. Maybe it’s just some similar pronunciation.

  The first man pulled the bigger man’s arm off Mark’s shoulder, shaking his head. “Pardon my friend here, but we’ve been looking for information about Amerika, and Lurkyn simply got excited that someone else has heard of the place. But what about you? How is it you’ve heard of Amerika?”

  Mark warred with himself. After years of hiding who he was and where he had come from, to be hit unexpectedly with a connection to home was almost overwhelming. He needed time to think.

  “I’d have to try to remember where I heard about it,” he said. “My mind’s a little addled from the ale. Maybe I can remember more tomorrow morning. We could meet after I’ve had a chance to think on it.”

  “Where are you staying?” asked the smaller of the two men. “We could meet you there.”

  “Uh . . . I forget the name. It’s an inn east of here. Why don’t we meet back here at seven bells tomorrow? They have bread and cheese, and I’ll eat while we talk, then leave for home.” As much as Mark wanted to hear what the men knew, something about them bothered him. He was still skittish after his experience with the guilds.

  “In fact, I think I’ve had enough ale for this evening, so I’ll head over to where I’m staying. I’ll see you here tomorrow.”

  As he made his way through the throng to the main door, he glanced back to see the two men in animated conversation. The big man was obviously unhappy, as the other man seemingly tried to placate him. Outside, Mark hurried to the nearest corner, turned it, and quickly circled the block. If the men were following, he hoped he’d led them in the wrong direction. By the time he was halfway to the inn, he was chastising himself for being paranoid. He didn’t know whether the word that interested the two men was his America, but he would be bitter if it was and he’d lost an opportunity by worrying too much. However, to be safe, he stopped twice and waited in the shadows to watch for the two men from the pub. Finally, he was satisfied he hadn’t been followed. He had all but convinced himself that he’d only heard what his imagination wanted to hear.

  He nodded to the night man at the inn’s front counter and the second man sitting to one side. Both were visibly armed, and there was only the one entrance to the building. It wasn’t a safe situation in the event of a fire, but Mark risked it for a one- or two-night stay in Landylbury. He figured it was a reasonable trade for securing the large bags of silver coins in his room.

  He climbed the wooden stairs to the second-floor hallway, used a key to unlock the sturdy door to his room, undressed, and lay down. After pulling
the thin cover over himself, he fell asleep quickly. A knife sheath lay under the folded blanket he used as a pillow.

  He had always been quick to both fall asleep and wake up at strange noises. He didn’t know what he’d heard, but he awoke to shadows moving toward the bed in the small room.

  “What—?” exclaimed a voice, after its owner pulled back the bed’s blanket to reveal wadded clothing.

  Mark couldn’t justify why he’d needed to sleep on the floor that night. Using extra blankets, he’d made a bed in a corner, partly shielded if the hallway door opened.

  “Get some light,” ordered another voice. Someone opened the door wider to let in faint illumination from a candle in the hallway.

  Mark leaped to his feet the instant he made out three men, two carrying clubs and the third a coil of rope. Hunter’s knife in his right hand, he threw a blanket at one of the men holding a club.

  “Damn!”

  “Get him!”

  The second man with a club swung at Mark’s head and missed.

  “Don’t kill him, you idiot! They’ll only pay if he’s alive!”

  The words made the man hesitate long enough for Mark to move inside another swing of the club. A straight arm to the throat staggered the man, and Mark slashed at the arm holding the club. He recognized the larger of the two men from the pub.

  He didn’t want to kill anyone, and his qualms almost cost him. As the injured man fell back into the hallway, a blow from the second assailant holding a club glanced off Mark’s head and hit between his neck and shoulder. Only thick muscle prevented a broken shoulder or collarbone, but he went to his knees, his left arm numb.

  “Hit him again! The other arm! They don’t need to work.”

  Mark saw the club rise for another blow, and he stabbed the wielder inside his thigh, aiming for the main artery.