Foundling (13 page)

The monitors must have caught the
Hogshead . . .

When evening came, he put back on his clothes, now dry enough to wear. He gathered his near-dry gear and packed it all once more, tidy and secure, as he had watched Master Fransitart do. Reluctant to leave, he took his time, gently shaking both valise and satchel several times to test for unnecessary rattles, and repacking them again and again till there were none. All the time, a gurgling knot of fear churned in his middle. For a time he was stuck between terror of the dark and the unknown dangers ahead, and the anxiety of still being so close to the Spindle. In the end, out of sheer frustration, he set out from his hide of she-oak needles, his pulse pounding in his ears with every step.

He walked as quickly as he might across the too-soft earth of the plowed, open field that went back from the riverbank. To his left, lantern and limn-thorn lights of yellow, orange and green twinkled in a deceptively friendly way all along walls and in the slit windows of the Spindle. Dark shadows lurked beyond its eastern end—the shapes of the trees that made the small wood there. A distant line of lamps extended east from the rivergate through and beyond this wood, then turned south where flat open field and pasture spread to the horizon. This land offered easy traveling but little cover. The faintly sparkling line was evidence of the road Rossamünd had counted on to take him south to High Vesting, the lights much like those he would be employed to service on the Worm way. It was hard to see, but he went on, keeping the lantern line to his left. When it ceased he did not stop, but kept walking till the last glimmer was lost in the distance and night. He stopped then. There was no point going back, he thought, and certainly nothing to be gained from staying put. He caught his breath for a moment, then sighed. Onward, onward he would go till the path became clear again.

The gloom of cloud was blown northwest, to reveal a high silver moon glittering coldly. Phoebë, the moon was sometimes called—Rossamünd liked that name—and her timely appearance allowed him to set his bearings. He had felt her there, hidden behind the clouds, felt her like the moving of the great ocean tides in his guts. Certain he was going in the right direction, he adjusted the valise once more and went on into the dangerous dark.

As he walked, Rossamünd heard every so often odd, far-off shriekings or infrequent and muffled hoomings, and once a strange rumbling coming from the east. Refusing to be thwarted by fear, the foundling put his head down when he heard any of these, walking faster for a time, every sense tingling with terror, till eventually he tired and then slowed, sure that he could go no further.

He stopped for a moment, took a sip from his biggin and looked to the heavens to get his bearings. The great yellow-green star Maudlin had risen high and bright, proving how late it was and making him feel desperately weary. Putting away the water, he walked on.

A black bulk appeared, silhouetted and obvious on this flat land. His heart leaped! The memory of the terrible beast he had glimpsed several nights earlier reared in his imagination. Ears ringing with tension, Rossamünd crouched low and crept in a wide arc about the shadowy bulk. Several times he was sure, with the cold grip of dread, that it had moved—yet somehow it also stayed strangely still. He was almost upon it before he realized it was a haystack, right in the middle of the field. He nearly collapsed with relief: instead of a threat, here was a place to rest. He staggered through plowed soil so soft it almost tripped him, flopped down on the leeward side of the haystack and burrowed into the straw, dragging the valise with him. He sagged, exhausted. Sleep came quickly. Even when another shriek wailed a little too close, he slept.

A numb ache in Rossamünd’s left shoulder, near where he had been shot, woke him. He rubbed his shoulder, but that only made it hurt more. He was still so very tired. He had survived his first night alone. Crawling cautiously out from his haystack burrow, he peered about. It was early morning, the sun barely over the horizon. Showing against the pale sky were giant windmills marching away to the eastern horizon in long, staggered rows. Although the very flatness of the land made him feel conspicuous, it also let him see if he was being followed. As far as the eye could see in the early dawn, nothing moved on the road or the fields about except the great sails of the mills.

Yet the fear of a patrol from the Spindle still dogged him, and Rossamünd struggled through the fields for an hour. Soon it became too wearisome to tread in the soft soil and he was forced onto the road. He walked on and on but met no one else. After a while the way was intersected by a path. There was a single sign there, pointing down the main roadway.
The Vestiweg
it said—or Vesting Way—the road to High Vesting. He was on the right road and upon it he would stay.

The day became unusually warm and remained so. A southeasterly breeze came, welcome and cool, as luggage and harness began to weigh on him. Eventually the valise became too hard to carry on his back and he resorted to towing it along behind him by the straps, its metal bindings dragging dustily in the sandy gravel. With stubbornness beyond his years, he walked on steadily, his thoughts completely taken with reaching High Vesting. Stops were frequent, and Rossamünd always looked furtively about as he rested. The boy found that he was not as alone as he had first felt: cows in sturdily fenced pastures lowed and chewed; birds of many kinds—warbling magpies, shrilling mud larks, tetching wagtails and silent swallows—dashed about, often calling, chasing off strangers, hunting insects that also flitted hither and thither. Of the insects the birds’ favorite seemed to be the large wurtembottles. These fat black flies from warmer northern lands insisted on bumbling about Rossamünd’s face, neck and especially his ears. No matter how often or how furiously he thrashed and shooed them, these wurtembottles returned to their lazy harassment. There was a moment as he stepped along that he thought he spied a person—a farmer perhaps—cutting across the fields far to his left, but he could not be certain who or what it was and dared not call out. Other than this the road had been eerily empty of any other traffic. Having grown up surrounded by people, crowded with them, he had thought space and solitude a golden prize. Now isolated and far from comfort, he wished very much to be pressed by the crowd once more.

Onward, onward. He had to get to High Vesting.

Fortunately Rossamünd still carried enough food to keep him from desperation, including that day’s main meal: a sludge that used to be the dried must and the now almost gluelike rye bread. Craumpalin had once said that hunger was the best sauce, and Rossamünd could not have agreed more as he took to the bland slop with relish. The supper was still soggy enough to even wet his thirst. This was important, for although he had enough to eat, he had little water. Rossamünd had filled his biggin with the Humour’s dark waters and tried to conserve it on the way. It tasted like composting leaves, yet by the unseasonably hot day’s end it was almost gone. He did not know exactly what would happen when one had no water, though he knew that it had to be bad. By sundown he could see distant trees growing in scruffy stands along the road and hoped a source of water might be among them. When he finally reached them he discovered no water, and so walked on. When, a mile later, he settled to sleep in a cavelike gap between the boughs of a huge boxthorn, he had drunk his last mouthful from the biggin.

Huddled in the shelter of the lonely tree, Rossamünd stared into the gathering dark with equally increasing disquiet. A nameless fear that something or someone dogged him made every shadow jump and loom. As the unfriendly night weighed down, punctuated as it was by distant, frightening noises, he sought to distract himself by humming happy, peaceful hymns, as he had heard Verline do for a troubled child. Still the deep dark oppressed. He hummed on softly, hoarse with thirst, until somehow he coaxed himself to sleep.

 

A sound stirred him. It was early morning, the sky pale, the still air cold again. His throat rasped with pain, but he had survived a second night.

The sound came again, unusual and out of place.

Rossamünd quickly blinked away the sleepy grit and listened. Morning birds welcoming the rising sun with their calls—these had not woken him; the buzzing of the wur tembottles waiting for him to evacuate his thorny room—neither had these. Then it came once more, this sound, and remained, getting louder: a jangling, steady
clop-clop-clop,
then the unmistakable snort of a horse.

The musketeers of the Spindle have come for me!
He turned his body and craned his head as quietly as possible to see if he could catch sight of his pursuers through the spiny tangle of many intertwined boughs. Up on one elbow, neck stretched to straining, he did see something and it was not a company of musketeers, but rather a landaulet—an open four-wheeled carriage with a folding top drawn by a single, heavy-looking and mud-brown nag. It was being driven by a figure with a pronounced hunch, his face hidden behind the upturned collar of a dark maroon coachman’s cloak and beneath the shadow of a thrice-high of almost matching color. Behind the driver reclined an elegant passenger of unclear gender in clothes so fine that Rossamünd could tell the refinement of their cut from his obscure vantage point. As the carriage came near, the elegant passenger called with the clear ring of an educated woman’s voice. “Well, stop here if you must! You know I have places to be and can’t be troubled by every quibble or suspicion. But, stop I say, if it will cease your twittering!”

Accordingly the vehicle was pulled to a halt just before the boxthorn.

Rossamünd froze.

There was a pause, and then the woman’s voice spoke clearly again. “Go on then, I shall wait!”

The driver obediently got down and began to swing his head about as if searching, revealing his face—or what should have been a face. Instead it was a rectangular wooden box pocked occasionally with small round holes on its front and two larger openings, one on the lower end of each side. Thick leather straps held it to his head. A sthenicon! Rossamünd stared, horrified. The driver was a
leer
! Rossamünd knew there was no escaping a leer: the sthenicon revealed every scent of every living thing big or small that moved within an area of a mile or more. What is more, they were reported to be able to see things everyday folk could not, to peer into secrets and search in hidden regions. The box-faced driver shuffled nearer to the overgrown boxthorn bush and peered within, his head swaying and poking forward. He became still. Rossamünd sucked in a breath and lay very still, every nerve and fiber straining, waiting.

How he wished he had not lost his cudgel. How he regretted the spoiled bothersalts.

Eventually the box-faced driver stepped back to the landaulet and appeared to address the elegant passenger, as the latter leaned over and both heads nodded, at times with pronounced emphasis. A conclusion seemingly reached, the woman alighted from the carriage and, straightening her fine clothes, stepped with determined poise over to where the driver had stood before the boxthorn. She wore the most luxurious and unusually cut frock coat of deep scarlet, buttoned and buckled at the side, and the shiniest, blackest equiteer boots Rossamünd had ever seen. The hem of the coat hung low and flared extravagantly, rustling as she approached.

She stopped and squinted vaguely into the little grove. “In
here,
you say?” she asked over her shoulder. Her chestnut hair was gathered up behind her crown in a bun, held with a pointed comb pinned by a hair-tine ending in a clenched crow’s claw. Long wisps of flyaway fringe danced in any small movement of air.

A frown.

A sigh.

She leaned forward. “You in there, little one,” she called quite softly.

Rossamünd did not know what to do.

“We’ve certainly no intention to harm you, so you can stop pretending you’re not there and come out.”

Maybe she spoke the truth? Maybe she had water? Rossamünd was about to act when his leg was gripped and tugged. Involuntarily he screamed and kicked with his free foot. This too was grabbed and he was pulled out from his hiding-hole into the blinkingly bright morning, hanging upside down—valise and all—in the irresistible grip of the driver. Rossamünd squealed like a little piglet, struggling violently—but all his twisting and writhing did not alter his position.

“Put me down, you
looby
!” he spluttered, serving up the worst curse he knew.

The box-faced driver ignored his almost foul language and carried him around to the roadside, where he held him out in much the same way someone might have held a frantic, just-caught fish. Rossamünd continued to twist and writhe.

The elegant woman approached him as someone might approach a cornered snake.

“Now, now,” she soothed, “put him down, Licurius. We’ve said we’d not harm him, so we had better not now, had we?”