by Kirby Crow
Through all of that, it was his memories that brought him through: Linhona in the kitchen or garden, her competent hands busy at whatever task, Annaya bouncing around, always so small, and Scaja’s solemn face by the firelight. True as rain, they were his life.
A WEEK AND A DAY SCARLET stayed in the village. Then, on the eighth morning, a cold wind began to blow from the northeast and a light layer of frost crunched under his boots when he went to fetch water from the well. If he did not leave soon for Khurelen, he would have a hard time getting through the Snakepath into the lowlands. It was just as well. The soles of his feet had already begun to phantom-ache with the want for travel. The fence was fixed, the roof was patched, and he had helped Scaja put a new wheel on a freight carriage that broke down two leagues from the Salt Road. The night they returned from fixing the carriage, after a long dinner as Scaja lingered over his pipe, Scarlet told him he would be trying Whetstone Pass the next day.
Scaja looked at him through a wreath of smoke, his black eyes narrowed but soft, and he nodded. If he had objections, he knew well enough to keep them inside, and he left to tell Linhona that her son would be leaving.
Scarlet’s bedroom was just a cot behind a curtain next to the kitchen, and later, as he packed and the smell of the waybread baking for his journey filled the house, Scaja pushed aside the curtain. There was a linen-wrapped bundle in his hands. He sat on Scarlet’s bed, unfolded the linen, and began to carefully lay out the bundle’s contents on the covers. Scarlet stared in astonishment, and Scaja gave him a small smile.
“Busy as bees, all of you!” Scarlet exclaimed. He touched the treasures that Scaja had presented: silver-plated pins and buckles, iron needles and tin spoons, and a handful of small, delicate buttons carved from bone. There was more: three linen lapels richly embroidered in blue and green by Annaya, and two lace collars stitched in a dragonfly pattern by Linhona, fully as good as any he had seen in the cities. He touched the buckles, admiring the light chasing of fine scrollwork Scaja had set into the metal.
“How did you ever...?”
Scaja shrugged. “Well, making a buckle is not so different from welding a wheel spoke. Easier, in some ways.” He began gathering the wares up. “Work’s been slow,” he ended the subject brusquely. “I had the time.”
“Scaja, is there anything—”
“Hush, lad, and let me help you pack.”
Scarlet packed as carefully as he could without knowing how rapacious the Kasiri horde would be. Nothing too costly for a trip to Khurelen, except a small bottle of perfume he hid in his boot. The fine lace, the embroidery, and the better silver-plate he stowed under his bed, showing Scaja where it was for safekeeping. He wore his old gray woolen shirt, threadbare at the elbows but still warm, beneath the crimson leather coat and hood that denoted a pedlar throughout the world. It came down to his knees and the red dye was still bright after three years of use. He wrapped a length of faded wool around his neck and pulled on the storm-gray leather gloves that Masdren had crafted to fit his mismatched hands. Scaja nodded his approval at Scarlet’s appearance and kept his doubts to himself.
“Just have a care,” he growled as they stood together in the yard before he set out.
“I always do,” Scarlet answered, knowing that Scaja didn’t believe him. He had half a mind to say that it was Scaja who being reckless now, but again held his temper and kept mute.
Scaja gave him a brief, fierce embrace and Annaya kissed his cheek. Linhona was pretending to be busy in the house, not ready to speak to him yet. She had sent the waybread—round, parched loaves rich with nuts and dry, tough grains that would not spoil so long as they were kept dry—through Annaya. She could be as stubborn as him, sometimes. He wished she would come out to bid him farewell and was angry and resentful over her refusal to see the truth, as well as Scaja’s.
He pinched Annaya’s cheek a last time. She was nearly as tall as him now. “I like your Shansi,” he said.
She gave him a secretive smile. “So do I.”
His eyebrows went up and he grinned. He tapped her nose. “Behave yourself while I’m gone.”
Annaya snorted and tossed her glossy hair over her shoulder. “Take your own advice before handing it to me.”
He left them reluctantly and started on the road that led through the village and up the mountain pass, where the perilous Kasiri and their Wolf-chief were encamped.
Liall
LIALL, THE WHITE WOLF of Omara, strove always for an atmosphere of calm to reign during his robberies. To meet an enemy in the dark was one thing, to challenge folk in the open, under the blue sky in the melting snow was quite another. There was a trick to keeping order on a highway: keep the road open and paying while preventing the rough and naturally-disorderly Kasiri from running wild through the women and the goods, spreading terror and mayhem. The woman who set up a strident screaming in the early afternoon threatened the fragile peace of the prosperous toll road, and that warranted Liall’s attention.
He looked over his shoulder to check on Peysho’s progress with the short line of journeyers waiting to take the well-tended pass through Nerit Mountain. Peysho Ar’sinu was his enforcer, a handsome, brawny bear of a man in his fortieth year or thereabouts. Whenever he approached, Liall invariably got the impression of a slow tide rolling toward him, but he was never fooled. Peysho had a mind like a precise clock, with never a detail forgotten or mislaid.
Though he kept them hidden by a gaudy Kasiri jacket, Peysho bore on both of his beefy upper arms the red tattoos of Om-Ret: a serpent devouring her own tail. He had recently shaved his hair down to dark brown stubble on his head, and Liall thought this vanity, since Peysho’s hair had lately begun to turn gray from his years of living hard and fast in outlaw camps. His skin was the color of pale bronze and his one undamaged eye was a mirthful hazel.
Peysho’s name suited him, as it meant red-eye. He had a small red star in his left eye from a Minh mace that had crushed his cheekbone twenty years ago, and the eye had filled with blood and never fully healed. He seemed to see well enough with it. On occasion, Liall wondered how he looked to Peysho through such an organ; if his amber skin and white hair was colored with a mist of bloody crimson when he gazed at him. It seemed fitting.
Peysho’s one constant companion was his countryman, Kio, a fellow Morturii many years his younger, deceptively kind of face and slight of body, but an artist with a blade of any type. Kio had wide, tawny-gold eyes like a lion and wore his feathery chestnut hair to his shoulders. There was a scattering of beard on his cheeks that he refused to take off, believing it made him appear more masculine.
Alas, Liall thought, his face is as sweet as a girl’s, and that soft beard only makes him that much prettier. These facts caused Kio a great deal of embarrassment, for he was as much a soldier as rough Peysho, with whom he had roamed untold cities and camps together before landing in Liall’s tribe of Kasiri five years ago. The Longspur krait had been home to them ever since.
Like the Byzans, the Kasiri were a gaudy lot, but rather than show off their artistic inclinations in architecture and gardens, they expressed themselves through dress. Set against the stark landscape, they could blind one with their colors: purple and red and orange silks, black velvets, fine striped linens of blue and silver knotted with pearls. The men wore tasseled coats of satin and gold-cloth over mud-stained breeches and wide-topped, high-cut boots that were a Kasiri trademark. The women wore the boots, too, but under the long dresses of highborn ladies, dripping with rhinestones and ribbons. Their dresses were considerably more worn and patched than any noblewoman would be caught wearing, but Kasiri women took the fading and fraying in stride. When a dress finally fell apart, they simply tore it into rags for patching brilliant quilts or braiding into sleeping rugs. Kasiri girls wore their hair shorter than most, for it was a hard life and a long mane of hair would only complicate things. To compensate, they wove stunning headdresses out of long, brilliant threads of silk and decorated them with bits of semi
-precious stones and flecks of gold and silver and copper. The headdresses were a few inches high, square with a long back that covered the neck, and from the hem hung long strings of faceted crystals and polished crimson beads. Women pinned their short locks under the headdress and swayed their strings of crystal as they walked, arching their necks and preening for the rough, handsome men of the krait.
Kasiri men were simple for the most part; content to take their share of spoils and women and food and wine and mostly never thinking to ask for more. Power and intrigue did not interest them, and they were content that Liall, the strange and powerful Northman, had challenged for the right to lead some twenty years ago. Since then, he had never failed to protect them or lead them wisely. Wisely, to a Kasiri, meant coin and meat and goods, and Liall knew that his authority was secure only as long as the Kasiri were well-fed and warm. If they were not provided for, they would begin to roam and be dissatisfied, like dogs belonging to a careless master who thinks little of their welfare.
There was no rancor or bitterness in Liall when he pondered these facts. Like many scholars of great intelligence, he believed he had learned that men are greedy, soulless beasts, intent only on what they can gain for themselves. There were few men in the camp he spoke to beyond the cursory words of command, and none he considered his true equal. Peysho was the closest thing he had to a friend.
The camp was deceptively scattered-looking and unkempt, but in fact the Kasiri were very well-organized: wagons on the outer rim, armed toll posts at each road leading in, and yurts in the center. The mountain pass was a perfect place for a toll road: a high, clear promontory of windswept dirt and packed snow. At its center was a wide space of eighty paces or more, surrounded by rough monoliths of porous, rust-colored rock thickly veined with white quartz. Chipped into smooth blocks, the stone was excellent for sharpening knives, which was how the pass had derived its name. The stones also kept the worst of the wind from assailing the encampment.
The three roads leading down from the promontory—the Sea Road leading to the Skein River that flowed into the Channel, the Snakepath to Khurelen and the southern lands beyond, and the Owl’s Road leading back to the village of Lysia and the Iron River—were clearly visible from every angle. The pass was a high, flat space stuck like a shelf between two small mountains, but it was the shortest road through from north to south. The only other route to Rusa was the old Salt Road; a lonely, meandering path through the sandy lowland valley between the riverbank and the Neriti hills that took three times longer to traverse than Whetstone Pass. It was also thick with slavers and cutthroats who were not above raping the occasional wife or carrying off a daughter or son to the Morturii slave markets.
Travelers would pay for safe passage through the busier pass rather than risk the Salt Road, and old Dira the whoremaster, bless his black, lecherous heart, had remembered that the Kasiri had an ancient claim to a remote mountain road in Byzantur near Lysia. Dira had a yurt full of pretty male doves and winsome flowers to feed, slaves all, and the old man was anxious about the state of his purse. It had been a thin year for almost everyone in Byzantur, and the Longspur krait had no fodder stored up for their beasts or any amount of coin or goods they could trade to get through the cold season. They came to the pass in late summer, when all other Kasiri were heading back into Chrj and winter pastures. Whetstone pass was their last option before they must admit defeat and disband the Longspur krait to larger, more prosperous tribes. Disbandment meant not only the death of a krait, but of family ties as well, and all Kasiri feared such an end.
Today's travelers were quiet enough. Most had been warned of a well-armed Kasiri krait astride the road and had come prepared to sigh and pay as little as they could get away with. Others, it seemed, were less informed.
The screaming woman was a fat matron with a shock of iron-gray hair stuffed under a billowing yellow bonnet. She had locked hands with one of the Kasiri and was jerking and tugging at him and yowling so loud that several of the men had stepped back to jeer at the poor fellow. The other travelers were growing skittish at the noise and a few were longingly eyeing the western road they had recently ascended from the Channel.
Liall jerked his chin up at Peysho, and the man came to see what he wanted. “Aye, Wolf?”
“What’s amiss? That shrieking will have them all fleeing off the side of the mountain like a horde of verrit.”
“Oh, her?” Peysho jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Her weddin’ ring, I gather.”
“Is it worth much?”
The enforcer shook his head and spat into the snow. His uncouth accent was Falx and grew heavier when he drank, so that at times Liall, himself not a native to this continent, could barely understand him. “Nowt but pewter with a shine o’ gold painted on. I’ve got teeth in me head worth more.”
Liall laughed and called out to the unfortunate Kasiri, who turned out to be cat-eyed Kio. Kio was actively trying to retreat from the shouting, scolding matron, but she had him in a limpet’s grasp and would not let him go.
“Ho! You there! Let her keep her rusty ring.”
Kio ducked a slap aimed at his head and tried to dance further away from her. She was on him like a tick. “I’m trying, atya, but she won’t leave off!”
There was a scatter of laughter, old Torva and Eraph and a few others, and Peysho grinned and went to settle the fracas. Liall did not stay to watch. There was a smaller line of travelers coming up the southern road from Lysia, and that was his post for the day. Among Kasiri, even a chieftain was expected to do his share of work.
Lysia was the nearest village to the mountain, being nestled right up under the shadow of the Nerit’s belly like a chick to a mother hen. It was not an opulent village by any means, but compared to the bedraggled traffic that drifted in on corked and tar-painted ships from Patra and trundled up the mountain in a steady trickle from the long Sea Road, they were at least prosperous. The travelers had been many of late, for there was much civil unrest in Byzantur and rumors of war on the horizon. Whether it was war with the Bled or civil war amongst themselves, no one seemed to know, but the traffic was heavier day by day as people deserted the virtually undefended northern reaches of Byzantur and headed south to the capital cities.
Liall settled himself in a wooden chair behind a stone bench that served for a bargaining board and began the day’s work. He had dressed for the occasion in a thin, leather hunting jacket over black breeches and high boots with iron buckles up the side. His lean waist was cinched by a studded knife-belt with a pair of very fine Morturii long-knives hanging in their silver-capped sheaths. He wore no hat, and the whiteness of his close-cropped hair drew stares. His face was not the usual face one would see in Byzantur or Morturii or even in the wondrous city of Ajir, for not even the exotic slave markets of Minh had ever dared to hold a Rshani in captivity.
Liall’s cheekbones were like carved shelves of stone and his skin was the color of deep amber. His expressive eyes, thickly lashed in silver, were a pale, washed-out blue, and his angular features were planed so sharply that they could have been carved from oak. His hands were large, long, and graceful. In Byzantur, among the dark-haired Aralyrin and the slight, beautiful Hilurin, who had skin like pearl and hair the color of blackest soot, he was as unusual as a green cat. He did not believe his face held any beauty, but he knew that very few in Byzantur had ever seen anyone like him. For that, they would have to travel beyond the continent to his home in the far, icy north, where all men live in darkness for half the year.
The air was chilly and the temperature dropping rapidly, but Liall had been raised in a far colder climate. He wore no cloak or overcoat, only a ruff made from the pelt of a white wolf to keep his neck warm, and (purely for vanity) a teardrop sapphire from one ear. He looked, he hoped, sufficiently imposing.
The first two travelers, a bard and a female dancer, were well acquainted with toll roads and Kasiri and paid what he asked without blinking. The third was a well-fed Sondek merchant who ple
d dire poverty until Peysho shook him by the neck until his teeth rattled, at which point he produced a half-bit of gold from the lining of his pocket, along with many a stuttered apology. Liall worked through the line of travelers and then waited for the next batch to come through, which they did in small groups broken up by the passing of an hour or half an hour. The day went by that way, and Liall was yawning by the time the last traveler approached.
The last in line was a Byzan pedlar, known by his knee-length leather coat dyed a shade of deepest red, the color of the migrating redbird that travels the entire circumference of Nemerl in one year. He was a slight, pure-blooded Hilurin lad of no more than twenty, with astonishing dark eyes, soot- black hair, and pale, fair skin like the petal of a white rose. Like all Hilurin males, his chin and face were naturally hairless, which often hid the age of Hilurin men and made them appear younger than they were. He also carried a sturdy stave with him, perhaps for walking or perhaps for fighting off bandits.
Liall stared until the young man shifted his booted feet and looked away in discomfort. How small he is, Liall thought. The top of his head would not reach my chin.
Although the pedlar was small, Liall knew better than to judge him by that. The Aralyrin army was the most determined fighting unit on the continent, and this young one before him was partly of that blood. He did not want to admit it, but Hilurins fascinated him. Their proud tenacity, their secretive, aloof nature, and the legends his own people had concerning their ancient origins captured Liall’s enormous curiosity. His natural inquisitiveness stirred the latent scholar in his soul and made him yearn for the days once spent reading gilt-edged books and perusing ancient manuscripts.