Authors: Pamela Freeman
And they faded.
“Just like that?” Ash squeaked, and then coughed to clear his voice. “That’s it?”
“That’s all,” she said. “They were generous, those two. I suppose they recognized a fellow professional. Knife cuts knife, as he said.”
That made him feel worse than anything else he had done. “Those
voices,
” he said, shuddering. “I hate those voices worst of all.”
Martine looked at him and repeated the Traveler proverb, “From the grave, all speak alike.”
“Well, they shouldn’t,” Ash said.
Ash stood at the bottom of the Moot Hall steps looking up. The Moot glowed orange at every window with lamp- and firelight. The music was loudest here, drums thumped out a jig-and-spin, an old one that he recognized, the “Drunken Tailor.” There were very few songs or dances that he didn’t know, though he couldn’t play any of them himself. He’d been no better a flautist than a singer. He could feel the music in him, but he couldn’t bring it out. He couldn’t even dance in time.
His parents had tried to make the best of it by getting him to drum for them. He’d been able to do it, barely, but not by feeling it. He had to watch his father’s hands on the strings or the note holes and match his own hands to their stroke. It had been good enough for taverns and country towns, but not for places like Turvite and Carlion, not for warlords’ courts, where they made a good deal of their money.
Then one night, not far from Turvite, the three of them had met up with another Traveler, a drummer, who was camped at the site they had planned to use, a common with a stream and a copse nearby for firewood.
His parents had hesitated as they caught sight of the stranger already encamped, but he had looked up and smiled and said, “Fire and water” — the Travelers’ greeting. “Fire and water and a roof in the rain,” Ash’s mother had said. So they moved down to the campfire and shared their food and some stories as well. Inevitably, after dinner his father had drawn out the flute, and the other drummer, after waiting politely for Ash to find his drum, had pulled out a small tambour.
They had started with songs everyone knew: ballads and drinking songs, cradle and teaching songs. The drummer had played with his blood and his soul, and Ash had known by the end of the second song that his parents needed someone who could play like this, who could lay down the dark heart of the song behind the melody, could call out the dancing feet. By the third song he had known that he would never play the drum again, never pretend that he might be good enough someday, with enough practice. By the fourth song they had forgotten him altogether, and after the fifth they had started talking excitedly of where they could go next, to play together.
Ash had gone off, away from the fire, and fallen asleep wrapped in his blanket, as he had almost every night of his life, but this time knowing that the next day would be the end of the only life he had known.
Over breakfast, his mother had noted his quietness and hesitated, clearly weighing what to say. He hadn’t wanted to hear it.
“I’d better find something else to do with my life, right?” he said. Though he had tried to keep the bitterness out of his voice, he hadn’t quite succeeded. It had banished any softness from his mother’s face.
“You heard. You have ears, even if you can’t play,” she said. “He’s what we need.”
“It will free you to do something else,” his father said. “After all, lad, how can you be happy doing something you don’t love?”
Ash had stared at him, astonished that he hadn’t understood, that he mustn’t have understood Ash at all to be able to say that.
“I do love it,” he said. “I just can’t do it as well as you.”
It had taken both mother and father aback — they were musicians born, not made, and although they practiced daily, obsessively, it had never occurred to them that someone could love the actual making of music and yet not be good at it. To love music was the basis of being human, of course, but to love the making, the crafting — they had thought the love and the skill went together.
Typically, his mother had been the first ro recover. “We’ll find you another trade that you can love,” she said.
But they hadn’t, of course, because no one except Doronit had wanted a gangly nineteen-year-old whose only skills were a poor hand on a drum and a memory crammed with every song known on the Road. So Ash had learned to be a killer, and wondered, now, if this was a craft that those who practiced it loved.
He stopped on the first step of the Moot as a rush of warm air and perfume and food smells swept over him. It was packed; latecomers spilled down the steps and out onto the street, all dancing and singing along. Silver and red and blue painted faces grinned and kissed and warbled,
“He was drunker than a wine vat, drunker than a rotten fart, ooooh, he was the drunken tailor of Pii-ii-say
. . .”
“An’ I loved her, Arvid, I really did,” a man wept on his friend’s shoulder at the bottom of the steps. “But she was a lying vixen, just like her mother.”
The silver paint was rubbing off on Arvid’s jacket. He stroked the man’s hair, hand curiously tender, then looked up and met Ash’s eyes, and blushed. He stuck his hand back into his pocket.
“Don’t worry about her, Braden,” he said. “Come inside and get drunk.”
“You’re my best friend, Arv, my very best friend in the world . . .”
They turned back up the steps, arms around each other, and blundered into a couple who were kissing as they came down. For a moment Ash thought it was Doronit; she had the same dark hair, the same kind of silver floating dress. He felt as though he’d been kicked in the stomach. Then he realized it wasn’t her, but was still awash with his reaction: pounding heart, churning gut, sweating and cold at the same time.
He ran. He kept to the back streets, where there were fewer people, and he ran as hard as he did in training sessions when Doronit was waiting for him. He ran through the markets, alive with food vendors’ and winesellers’ calls, away from the shouts of those he brushed past, unheeding, and through the curling streets of private houses, with light and ghost pennants streaming from each window. He kept running until he reached the long hill that led to the cliffs outside town.
Everywhere he ran, he saw ghosts.
On the cliff tops they huddled in groups near the edge, waiting for morning. They watched the city lights. Some of them were fading already, although it was nowhere near dawn. That was the purpose of the festival, to cull out the city ghosts, to scare away the weak and insult the strong so they left forever. Without the festival, his father had told him, there would be many more ghosts than people in Turvite. He wondered now what his father saw when he looked at a ghost.
Old and young, big and small, they clung together. There seemed to be nowhere he could go to get away from them, no place he could be alone to think things through. It wasn’t fair. It never had been.
He had come to Doronit as though to a safe harbor, a place in the world he could finally make his own. But if it meant he had to be a stone-cold killer, like Dukka and his friend, he wasn’t sure he wanted it. Not even for Doronit. He didn’t want to be the knife that cuts the knife. But if he didn’t become that, what else could he become? There were no doors open to him except this one. He wanted to shout, or protest, but what good would it do? He was a Traveler who had lost the Road, and there was nowhere and nothing else in Acton’s land for him.
His mother had taught him never to compel a spirit to speak unless it was really necessary, but that night he didn’t care. He faced the multitude of pale forms and threw up his arms. He could feel the power to make them speak flood through him. He had never opened himself to it like this before; it was like a thousand drums beating together, like the crash of the waves on the rocks below, thunderous, overwhelming.
“Speak!”
he conjured them.
“Speak.”
Instantly a great moan went up from them. It was the strangest sound he had ever heard, for though it came from a thousand mouths, each made the same sound: dead, grating, harsh as stone on stone, it was a cry of pain. Silence followed as each ghost realized that it had made a true sound, that its screams were no longer silent.
“Speak,” he conjured them again, at that moment hating everything, everyone, himself, wanting to hit back, wanting the ghosts to scream his own protests. “Speak all the night through!”
The ghosts cried out again, then turned to the city and began to move toward it. Slowly, then faster. They rushed past him in a wind of cold air, and as they gained speed they made a deep, screeching moan, repeated and modulated. It was the sound of desperation.
He sank down and clasped his hands around his knees. He giggled so that he wouldn’t cry. He felt drunk, crazy, lost.
“Hah!” he said. “It may be I shouldn’t have done that.” And stubbornly, though he knew his voice was harsh, he began to sing “Fly Away Spirit.”
S
O IN MY next life I’m going to get the gods to make me a big blond man,
Bramble thought.
Really big. Really blond. Maybe really stupid, too. Big, blond, stupid men seem to have a good time around here.
The four big, blond and, quite possibly, stupid men were certainly having a good time standing in the middle of the road and not letting her pass. They were having a good time yelling things, too.
“Show us your teats!” was the favorite of the youngest and stupidest. His big brothers — or his inbred cousins — had other ideas.
“Gods, I love taking it from Traveler bitches!” the oldest said with a smirk.
The other two sniggered.
“Come on down, slut, and we’ll show you what real men are like.”
“Wait till you try a taste of my sausage, girlie!”
“Nah, not him, try me!”
“She’ll have us all, and like it,” the oldest said.
The others had just been having fun, but he meant it. His eyes never left her face; he was waiting for fear to show. There was a part of her that wondered what it mattered. She was dead anyway. But another, deeper part answered:
He can wait until hell melts
. The thought and the feeling cut through the fog she had been riding in and sharpened her attention.
“Get her down, Than. Grab her bridle first.” He pushed the youngest forward.
The boy, no more than fifteen, hesitated. “She’s not got a bridle, Cal.”
They blinked, uncertain for a moment. Bramble drove her heels into the roan’s sides and thundered forward. Cal made a grab for her, but she kicked him on the side of the head and was almost unseated when the roan kicked his back legs at the same time to knock over two more of them.
He’s battle trained,
she thought with a chill. Then they were through and galloping. The men were left swearing and cursing her as they picked themselves up.
She let the roan slow, but kept him to a canter until they had passed two more villages. At the next stream she let him drink, and then walked him to cool down while her own trembling subsided.
She hadn’t expected this sort of thing. Oh, from warlords’ men, yes, of course. But not from ordinary men. Those big yokels were just like boys from her own village. She shuddered to think of Carl or Wilf or Eric treating some chance-met Traveler girl like that. Would they? Not Wilf, surely? She remembered lying with Wilf in the shade of a big willow tree last summer, his hands gentle on her, his body a pleasure. They had not been in love, but it had been lovely. Surely Wilf couldn’t act like that?
But another voice, just as strong, reminded her:
To them, you’re just a Traveler. They can do anything they like to Travelers.
In the many full moons since she had left Carlion moving slowly along the coast toward Central Domain, she’d learned a bit about how Acton’s people treated Travelers. She looked the part, of course, except for the horse. On close inspection her clothes were crafter clothes, even if she was wearing breeches. But at first glance she was just another Traveler girl. And that was the way she was treated.
When she’d asked for a room at the inn on the first night, they’d shouted her out of doors. “The kitchen door next time for you, girlie, and the stable’s the best your kind’ll get anywhere in this Domain!” the innkeeper had yelled, then set the boys in the village to throw stones at her as she left.
She had slept in the woods after that; she couldn’t bring herself to go to the kitchen door, not while the spring and summer nights were warm.
She had food. Shops would serve her, she’d found, if she waited at the back until everyone else had been served first. They charged her more though, and if she protested they took back the food.
“Go hungry, then,” the baker had said.
She was tired of being tensed, ready for a harsh word or a thrown stone, tired of being hated for no reason at all. Quite a few people in Wooding hadn’t liked her, partly because she looked like a Traveler, but more, she realized now with a wry smile, because she had been wild to a fault. But even Aelred’s mother hadn’t looked at her with the blank eyes of hate, the eyes that don’t see what’s really there, don’t see a person but only a Traveler. The warlord’s man had looked at her like that before she killed him, but she hadn’t recognized it then. She had thought it was more personal than it really was.
At night she dreamed of the blank eyes and sometimes she kicked out as she had kicked the warlord’s man, and woke sweating and swearing and exhausted. She would turn to the roan for comfort, leaning her face against his warm side while he snuffled curiously at her hair. She dreamed, too, of the dark after death, from where she would be reborn. Those dreams were comforting, reassuring her that even if she were meant to be dead, even if she
felt
dead, there would be a new life someday.
The haze only lifted when the sun was on her back, the track seemed endless in front of her, or when she smelled the hedgerows at dawn as the wildflowers released their fragrance to the new warmth. She loved the sense that no one was waiting for her, that there was nowhere she
had
to be: no goats to be milked, no garden to be weeded, no orphan kid to be fed, nothing needed her except the roan. The idea of freedom was the only thing that seemed real to her. She was still looking through a cloudy glass, and was trying to accept that she might stay like this forever. But thoughts of the Great Forest kept her going.
She came toward Sandalwood halfway through the early autumn afternoon, with the wild geese practicing their flights overhead, calling as they went. In the past, Bramble had listened to those calls with a longing to be off, on the Road, going who knew where. Now the call did nothing to her heart except remind her that the year was turning.
There was a party of pilgrims waiting for the ferry by the river. Sandalwood was a big town, but there were no houses near the dock, just flat green fields. Their leader was carrying the traditional staff with its bunch of green leaves tied to the top, and saw her looking.
“Floodplain this side,” he said. He smiled expansively. “I’m Marp. Used to be a trader, selling rugs and suchlike up from the Wind Cities. Know all of this Domain and a good few others.”
“Not many people as well traveled who aren’t Travelers,” Bramble remarked.
“True, that is, true enough.” He glanced quickly at her black hair and away again. “I take people as I find them, no matter what they are. The Wind Cities is full of people who look like Travelers, and they’re just the same as anybody else, I reckon.”
“What do you do now?”
“Why, guiding pilgrims, guiding pilgrims is my life’s work now, lass.” He beamed beatifically. “Well of Secrets, she told me that’s my life’s work. What she says, you know is true.”
How do you know?
Bramble asked herself. She’d heard the same thing said by people who’d never met the Well of Secrets, and doubted it as she doubted most things. But Marp seemed an intelligent, sensible man who’d thrown up his old life on the say-so of a stranger. Why? They said she could forgive, too, for sins and worse, but sometimes she demanded more changes than people were willing to make.
Bramble wondered if the Well of Secrets could lead her to rebirth or at least tell her how long she had to endure this half life.
The Well of Secrets was living in the far north at that time, in Oakmere, Marp told her, a small village on the road to Endholme, in the Last Domain. It had been a small village, but what it was after a couple of years of pilgrimages was anyone’s guess. Bramble could imagine what would have happened if the Well of Secrets had moved to her village, Wooding. She could see the hastily built inns, the brothels, the shops with expensive food, the eating houses, the souvenir sellers . . . There was greed enough to go around, even among their handful of families.
The ferry was a flat barge, good for horses and carts as well as people. It wasn’t rowed, but pulled along by a rope between two huge pulleys on either bank. The ferryman and his helper simply heaved on the rope and the ferry moved across as the rope moved around in an endless circle. The ferryman took Bramble over last, even though it was clear that she had been first to the dock. Marp tried to protest on her behalf, but she waved him to not bother. There was no point complaining. The pilgrims walked on through the town, but by the time Bramble and the roan arrived, she was tired and thirsty and headed for the nearest inn.
She wondered if the innkeeper would throw her out, but no one paid any attention to her as she sat down at a small table in the corner. She saw, looking around, that there were other Travelers drinking there. Two, at least, were unmistakable: young men with jet hair and sloe eyes, good-looking and all the more striking because they were twins.
The afternoon had turned a little cool, so she had the wolf skin around her shoulders. It, or maybe something else about her, attracted the twins’ attention and they came over with their drinks.
“Mind if we sit here?” one of them asked. He had a nice smile. She could see that he was the cheeky one of the two, the one who liked excitement and a bit of risk. No wonder he was interested in a girl in a wolf’s skin. A Traveler girl, too. He was someone she might have had a yen for in the days before the abyss. But the part of her that felt desire seemed dead too.
She shrugged and moved down to make room for them.
“I’m Ber,” the young man said, “and that’s Eldwin.” He was nodding his head toward his twin.
“Bramble,” she said.
“So, tell me all about yourself,” he said softly, sliding his hand near hers so the backs of their fingers touched.
She had to laugh, it was so transparent, and he laughed with her, confident in his charm.
Then she shivered as the air suddenly turned cold. All around them it grew quiet and dark, like something was absorbing all the light. Ber grew pale and sweat popped out on his forehead. The others at the table edged away from him. Bramble wondered if a fever had taken him suddenly. His eyes were blank and he started to shake. A fit, maybe. She took hold of his arm to steady him, and saw his brother do the same on the other side. Her hair lifted on her neck, but it wasn’t the presence of the gods. The gods had nothing to do with this. Then he spoke.
“Born wild,” he said, and it was like his voice, and yet not quite the same. “Born wild and died wild, and not fit for this young man,” he continued. “No one will ever tame thee, woman, and thou wilt love no man never. Give over. Begone.”
Bramble snatched her hand away. Ber’s eyes closed and he toppled over sideways. Without thinking, because she didn’t want to think about what he had said, she helped his brother lay him out on the bench. She patted his cheek and, when he roused, his eyes focused but bemused, she gave him water to sip.
Then she slipped away. Still not allowing herself to think, she rode straight through the town, and only when she was on the open road, between fields of ripening oats, did she let herself remember. It had not been the gods who spoke. She knew that, knew their presence as she knew her own voice. But it was something else unearthly. Something more than human, other than human. A demon, maybe, and demons were supposed to know the future and the past. Its words rolled around her mind:
Born wild and died wild. Not fit for this young man . . . thou wilt love no man never . . . begone . . . begone . . . never . . . never
.
She didn’t want to think about them, but the words kept coming back. She was not only dead, but without love. The dead could not love, or be loved, except in memory. They could not find new love, except through rebirth. When she found tears on her cheeks, she urged the roan into a canter, trying to escape the sensation that a knife was carving a hole in her chest, below her breastbone, a hole that would never be filled. She knew that feeling. It was like when her mother said, “If only you were more like your sister,” but somehow much worse. There was no hope in it, no room for change.
Never,
the demon said in her mind, and she pushed the roan into a gallop. But she couldn’t outrun that voice. She had just enough sense to steer the roan onto the soft grass verge so he wouldn’t be hurt by the jarring pace. He slowed on his own eventually, having enjoyed the chance to stretch out after four days of slow walking.
She forced herself to be calm, to take control.
“Enough,” she said out loud. “I won’t think about it again. It might be right, it might be wrong. All I can do is live and find out.” Her breathing steadied. “Forget it,” she told herself. “Forget it. Endure.”