The Wild Road (7 page)

“Sweet Mother,” Mikal said hoarsely, staring at the mass of canvas and broken poles, “how much more can we endure? How long before this stops?”

Falsehood served nothing. Rhuan gave him the truth. “Weeks. Months. Possibly even years.”

“
Years
!”

Rhuan hung onto his patience with effort; he wanted badly just to
tell
Mikal how he knew the answers. But not yet, if ever. “There is no predicting it, Mikal. Alisanos does as it will do.”

“Then we should leave,” Mikal said sharply. “We should pack up and go as far from here as possible.”

Rhuan shook his head. “As I told Jorda, until we know the precise boundaries of Alisanos, it's too dangerous to test its borders.”

“But Brodhi made his way here,” Mikal protested. “There must be a safe way in.
And
out. He can show us.”

Rhuan clamped his teeth closed on a sharp retort. Patiently he said, “There is danger here from Alisanos, of course, and we should leave when we know more. Remember when Brodhi arrived accompanied by Hecari from Cardatha? Would you have us risk culling parties? That's precisely what will happen if we leave.”

“And in the meantime we risk Alisanos?” Mikal shook his head. “At least the warriors gave us clean deaths.”

“Clean?” Rhuan asked. “You saw what they did, Mikal. Is it truly a clean death for a child to have his brains dashed out by a warclub?”

Beneath a coating of dust, Mikal's face was anguished. “Then what can we do?”

“We wait,” Rhuan said, “until we know a safe route out of here. Then we can leave. But for now—” Rhuan squatted down and took into his hand a cracked pole. “—we'll raise this tent again.”

DAVYN FELL TO
hands and knees as the earth shuddered beneath him. He was aware of movement, of people once again running who had run from the flying beast. Cries and screams filled the air, as did shrill protests from horses and the barking of dogs. Tents began leaning. He saw the ale-tent shaking, heard the cracking of poles, saw canvas begin to billow into collapse even as men ran from the tent.

And then he saw Rhuan. Sweet Mother, he would get answers from the guide. Even now.

Davyn thrust himself to his feet, staggering as the earth shifted beneath his boots. Then it steadied, and he ran.

“Rhuan!” he cried. “Wait—”

The karavan guide turned toward him, holding a broken tent pole. Breathless, Davyn slowed to an ungainly stop beside Mikal. “Wait,” he repeated, showing the flat of his hand in a gesture of delay. “He said you were in Alisanos, too. The other Shoia.” For a moment color suffused Rhuan's face, then faded. “And
she
said so. The woman courier.” Davyn tried to regain self-control, but all he wanted to do was shout at the man, to demand an answer. “The courier said they were there, all of them. My family. Did
you
see them?”

The guide's face bore an expression of compassion. It struck Davyn that he knew very well what he said offered no hope. “I did.”

“And they were alive?”

Rhuan nodded. “They are in a safe place.”

Davyn expelled a rush of breath and words upon it and closed one hand around his string of charms. “Oh, thank the Mother! Oh Mother, bless you!” He reached toward Rhuan, then recalled how Brodhi had reacted. He let his hand fall back to his side. “Please,” he said. “Are they all right? Are they—whole?”

“They are safe. When last I saw them, they were safe.”

Davyn's belly felt tied in knots. “But—you couldn't bring them out? “

“I could not.”

He attempted to keep his tone casual, not accusatory, but failed. “
You
came out. You and the courier both. If you could do so, why not my family?”

Mikal frowned, looking at Rhuan. “What's he talking about? Where were you? Where
are
his folk?”

“In Alisanos,” Davyn declared.

“But—” Mikal's frown remained, “You and Brodhi came out. You told us that.”

Something flickered briefly in Rhuan's eyes. His face was still, composed of angles and hollows. “Alisanos occasionally gives up what it has swallowed.”

“And they're no longer human!” Davyn cried.

The ale-keep scrutinized Rhuan. “But you're not human anyway. Is that why you escaped?”

Before Rhuan could answer, a wave of fear and desperation rose in Davyn's breast. “Why didn't you bring them out with you?” He drew in a tight breath and tried to reknit the fraying shreds of his dignity. “Put yourself in my place. If you saw them, if they are well—” He broke off and lifted his arms then let them fall slack. He felt very much like crying. “Put yourself in my place.”

Compassion softened the guide's expression and tone. “I'm sorry. It was not possible to bring them out.”

“I don't understand.” Davyn's mouth felt numb. “How could you leave them there?”

Rhuan glanced briefly at Mikal, then nodded as if to himself. To Davyn he said, “Is your wagon whole?”

“Yes, but—”

“Then let us go there.” Rhuan handed the tent pole to the ale-keep. “There is much to tell you, to explain. Let us do it in private.”

Davyn thrust out an arm in the direction of the old grove. “There.”

Chapter 4

S
TRIATED, RUDDY CLIFFS
rose up from the earth, loomed as concave palisades over the Kiba. Audrun shaded her eyes against the double suns and squinted upward through the spreading limbs of a wide-canopied tree where she and her children had been summarily escorted.

The massive cliff face was infiltrated by a seemingly haphazard assembly of natural caves as well as hollows chiseled by hand into clean, precise lines and angles. Dwellings were stacked side by side and one atop another, interconnected by a skein of staircases running up, down, and sideways, and wide, arched openings that formed passageways leading more deeply into the cliffs. She could not tell how deeply the caves reached into the cliffs, but all of them were fronted by walls formed of chunks of stacked flat red stone mortared together, mudbrick facades, and beamwork. Colored cloth fluttered in many of the square windows, while tall doorways were warded by shimmery scaled hide or loomed hangings.

Audrun could not begin to count how many dwellings the cliffs hosted. The network of caves, dwellings, staircases, and passageways was vaster than anything she had seen, including the tent settlement where she and her family had joined Jorda's karavan. Awed, she could not imagine how long it had taken to build the cliff dwellings, to refine the extant caves and make homes of them. Many years. Many hands. Many tools.

“Mam.” It was Torvic's voice, and plaintive. “Are we just supposed to stay here?”

Here
was the stone bench beneath the tree; the sloping rock table immediately opposite the bench; a pathway of russet paving stone and red-tinged dirt.
Here
were her children, trapped as she was, amid beings she had never imagined even in her dreams. Primaries. Firsts. Gods, they called themselves.

Audrun called them captors.

My poor children
 . . . Yet looking at them one by one, making note of tattered and soiled clothing, fair hair tangled, and a gaunt tautness in their faces, she knew they mirrored her own appearance, her own unspoken desperation. She was exhausted, hungry, thirsty, and had given accelerated birth not long before. Her overused body was beset by trembling. Everything ached. Her skin, hosting uncounted scrapes and scratches, burned. She wanted to collapse into a bed and sleep for weeks. It was what her body needed, but her mind, she knew, would be too busy.

Audrun's mouth twisted as she recalled how she had stood before the primaries assembled in the Kiba and challenged them to act, to find her demon-abducted baby. They clearly held humans in disdain, and she had presented a most unprepossessing figure. But she would do it all again, in the name of the Mother; would do it daily, if necessary. And she would declare to them, repeatedly, that they were not gods at all.

Rhuan's people. The resemblence of one to another was striking, with identical dark-copper hair, clear brown eyes, the faintest ruddy sheen in skin. She wished he were present to guide her, to offer advice on how the primaries thought, on what mistakes she should not make. It was her task, she knew, to change their minds about humans. If she and her children were to be prisoners here—and she believed wholeheartedly that it
was
captivity, regardless of Ylarra's claim—she would make certain the primaries came to understand how humans thought. To understand that difference need not be weakness.

But Rhuan was gone.

Desolation and despair. She thought she might choke on both as they swept into her chest, rose to fill her throat.
Here
was her childrens' future, and her own.

Audrun closed her eyes as tears threatened. She would not allow the children to see their mother weep. Regardless of how frightened she might be, how overwhelmed she felt, she dared not let the children see it, feel it, sense it.

And then memory rose to banish those emotions. Her eyes snapped open. While lost in despair, overwhelmed by their circumstances, she had lost track of a most vital and valuable piece of information. It unfolded before her, and in that memory was strength.

A
road
would be built. A road leading safely through Alisanos from the settlement to . . . elsewhere. Atalanda? She had seen Davyn's crude map showing the shortcut edging around the borders of Alisanos. Atalanda province, on that map, lay due west, on the far side of the deepwood. If the road ran from the tent settlement in Sancorra to safety in Atalanda, it offered freedom to those in Sancorra province fleeing the depredations of the Hecari warlord and his people, just as her family had.

A safe way through Alisanos
. That, Rhuan had gained for them; because of her, because of her children, because of the husband who, undoubtedly, was now frantic with the need to find them.

There was purpose in Rhuan's challenge to the primaries, and she had not seen it. Purpose and solution.

Acknowledgment replaced despair. Tension began to subside, replaced by fragile hope. A road meant she and her children could leave the deepwood, could find Davyn and put this nightmare to rest. . . . Rhuan had said he would bring Davyn to her, once the road was built

And if there were a road through Alisanos, they could travel upon it to safety. Away from Alisanos, away from the Hecari. To security, to a new life. Perhaps once on the road any change begun by the deepwood would dissipate.

Except . . . except there was the infant. She must be found. Before anything else.

As she thought of the child, her breasts ached. A glance down showed damp patches where the milk-soaked breast bindings had failed. Her children had seen it before; it meant nothing to them. But Audrun was embarrassed to think of the primaries seeing milk stains. Heat rose in her face. She had defied them in soiled clothing and tangled hair. That, she could do again. But that the obvious signs of lactation were perhaps amusing to the primaries irritated her.

Then again, it reinforced her demand that they find the child. It was difficult to put a missing baby out of one's mind when so obvious a reminder was before them.

“New bindings,” Audrun muttered. Tighter bindings. For comfort if nothing else.

Movement caught her eye. Gillan, perched on the table-like formation of stone directly across the path, tugged his homespun trouser leg back down to his ankle, hiding the the ruin of his leg, the area in the flesh of his calf that resembled an imperfectly stitched patchwork of bruising that was, in fact, scales.

Scales
. Human flesh made into—what?

Audrun recoiled from that picture in her mind. Instead she answered Torvic. “No, we will not stay right here. We are to be given accomodations.” She rose, pulling Megritte up into her arms. The girl was heavy, but at that moment Audrun did not care. “Let us go find whomever is responsible for giving us these accommodations.”

Torvic asked, “Are we ever going home?”

She did not know if he meant the cabin where he had been born, burned by Hecari, or the wagon that had become their home on the way to Atalanda. And she dared not ask him. There was no purpose in frightening a boy.

“Not yet.” Audrun retained a casual tone as she hitched Megritte into a better position on one hip. “But we will. I promise it. The Mother of Moons will see us home.”

And Gillan, shocking her with the raw anger in his tone, said, “This is Alisanos. How do we know the Mother is even here? How do we know any moon is here? Mam—
this is Alisanos.
”

Audrun held Megritte more firmly even as she met her oldest son's blue eyes, his bitter and wet blue eyes. Because of those tears, she modified her own tone from the snap of authority and impatience to a gentler assurance. “We are to have a road, Gillan. Safe passage. When it is built, when enough of it is built, we will walk out of here to your father.” She nodded firmly, settling the topic. “Now, everyone up. Ellica, come along. Without the sapling, please.”

Ellica, still seated, glanced up, startled. Pale hair was a rats' nest, with snarled braids and loosened locks in tangled communion. “But—my tree. I can't leave it. It's too young.”

“Sweet Mother . . . it's a
tree
, Ellica, not a child!”

Tears filled Ellica's eyes. “I have to tend it.”

Audrun gritted her teeth. Now she had two children in tears—and the two eldest at that, who should offer strength of will, not doubts, for the sakes of the youngest. It was up to her, then, how everyone fared. “Then bring the tree with you. We'll plant it wherever the primaries see fit to house us.”

AS HE PASSED
by the battered old grove on his left, Brodhi sensed a presence behind him and stopped short. Bethid nearly ran into him as he swung around. “What now?” he asked and felt a brief spark of surprise that he was actually annoyed.
Annoyed.

She re-established balance by taking a step backward. Her delicate features, so incongruous in view of her wiry strength and physically demanding employment, were sharp beneath tanned skin. In her eyes he saw an expression that surprised him: contempt. Anger, he had seen in her; frustration more often, when he behaved in ways she felt were rude. But contempt? Never.

Contempt . . . from a human. For
him
.

The realization delayed his answer until he could summon a tone of nonchalance. “I repeat: What now?”

“That farmsteader has lost everything,” Bethid answered in a clipped voice. “How dare you? How
dare
you? Have you no compassion whatsoever?”

“Compassion,” Brodhi said, his tone bland, “is a useless emotion. I avoid it.” As he avoided all others. Except for that flash of annoyance. He would have to consider that. He would have to consider why Bethid's contempt meant anything to him.

And it had.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I can see that. However—and I may only be able to count the occurrences on the fingers of one hand—you have proved
helpful
now and again. Why not help a man desperate to locate his family?”

“I told him the truth,” Brodhi answered. “Is that not helpful? I understand humans esteem truth.”

“But there are
ways
of telling—”

He overrode her. “Yes, Bethid; yes, I am all too aware that humans also esteem emotions, having a raft of them to use as needed. His family
is
in Alisanos, Bethid. I merely told him so.”

“Brutally.”

He ignored that. “Now he knows. He will come to terms with it.”

“But why did you have to be so cruel? Why say what you said the
way
you said it?”

A brief flicker of amusement at her convoluted question died out. “What did I say?”

She gestured frustration by lifting upturned arms away from her body, then let them slap down against her thighs. “I can't quote you . . . but it was something to the effect that they were no longer living the way
he
would recognize living. Mother of Moons, that's harsh, Brodhi. Is he supposed to accept that with no questions? With no pain?”

“He wanted to know. He knows.” Brodhi lifted his hand in a sharp motion to cut her off as she opened her mouth. “I have learned, among humans, that false hopes can be every bit as painful as hard truths. The truth requires less time and less effort.” He raised his eyebrows. “Would you rather be struck to death by a Hecari warclub all at once, or have your flesh flayed bit by bit over a handful of your days?”

Bethid scowled at him, offering no answer.

“What would you do,” he began, “if this family were to come out of Alisanos?

“Rejoice,” Bethid snapped. “What would you expect me to do? I'd welcome them. Of course!”

“You would mourn them,” Brodhi told her, “once you were over your shock and disgust. No doubt you would send up prayers to your Mother of Moons. Alive the family may be but no longer human. Not anymore.”

“Of course they are still—”

“
No
, Bethid. Here is the truth of it: Alisanos transforms humans. The wild magic seeps into flesh, into bones, into blood. I have seen what humans do when one of their own returns. There is no ‘compassion,' Bethid. There is no kindness. There is no welcome. I have seen humans vomit, so upset by the horror of what their kin have become. I have seen rocks thrown. I have seen backs turned. I have seen a woman screaming at what once was her husband, telling him to go away and never come back. Would you have this Davyn do the same to his wife? To his children?” He shook his head. “My compassion is truer. It saves him from the grief, his family from excoriation and abandonment.”