Destiny's Road (8 page)

Jemmy looked back toward the swamp. "Can't you see it? They're drifting along. Flame rushing out violet under the skirt." He couldn't really picture that; he'd never seen a flame that hot; nobody had. "They could go faster if they were just trying to get away, but they're just drifting along, leaving a trail of melted rock behind them. Suddenly they're looking at a swamp.

"What can they do? They can boil the water, kill the Destiny weeds, but that won't make it into Road. They could go around it, uphill, but that wouldn't leave a Road for anything with wheels."

"Rocks," Brenda said. "They'd have to roll a line of rocks down across the water."

Curdis said, "We had tractors in Spiral Town, big machines for pulling a plow or pushing down a tree. They don't go anymore. Cavorite might have taken one."

Jemmy nodded, putting it into the picture. "Push a row of rocks across. Like stepping-stones. Then hover till the rock melts and the water boils. Wait till the swamp cools down, then seed-"

"No, T-Tim, that's a humongous thermal mass. You don't throw seeds in boiling water."

He nodded. "Right. They go on, making Road. Week or two later they come back and seed some trees-"

"Maybe a year."

"-and leave the snakes and anything else I didn't see. Damn."

Curdis said, "All right, what damn?"

"They weren't just runaways, the Cavorite crew. I always knew forty crew was too tidy. When you're running away, you don't wait for your numbers to come out neat like that. The Road was the point. If Cavorite came back this far to seed a swamp, why not come all the way back to Spiral Town?"

The Bednacourt sisters led them to a structure that was all one big room. "A lot of us slept here after the storm washed away some houses two years ago," Loria said. "Elsewise it's the House of Healing."

There was nothing like a bed. The Bloocher clan slept on the wide expanse of floor, covered in their own clothes.

In a moment when Brenda was surely asleep, Curdis spoke in the dark. "I had to turn down an offer from Loria."

Offer? Ah. "What did you say?"

"I said I'm married and Brenda's too young, but Timmy's not."

Jemmy's ears burned in the dark.

The sun hadn't risen over the mountains yet. The morning was cold. The water was colder for the first moments; then Jemmy's body stopped noticing. He and Tarzana fought their boards through the waves and paddled out to where others were sitting six in a row.

They waited, talking little. Sound carried very well over the water.

Jemmy asked, "Don't you get sharks around here?"

The pause lasted long enough that Jemmy thought nobody had heard him. Then one boy said, "I don't think they like the taste of the river. Sometimes one comes around. We get a lot of sharks when a caravan stops and three hundred chugs get their attention."

"Wave," Tarzana said.

The idea was to be moving as fast as the wave when it arrived. Paddle without falling off. When the board catches the wave, stand up. Jemmy had tried standing up yesterday. Today he didn't. Kneeling on a board as a wave hurled it toward the beach was tough enough.

Curdis asked the Twerdahl folk for work, and work was found. He and Brenda and Jemmy (make that Tim, start thinking Tim) knew how to garden, knew how to pull Destiny weeds.

"If we leave about now," Curdis said in midafternoon, "we'll get to the guarded bridge about sunset."

"I think they like us here," Brenda said doubtfully. "Uh-huh. I don't guess Margery's worried about us yet, but, Brenda, I told the merchants we'd be coming back today."

Jemmy held up a hand. Hold it. "Sunset?"

"They saw Thonny around noon. Let's let them see you around sunset."

At noon and sunset, two views of "Tim Hann" could look quite different. Curdis continued, "Sunset, not dawn. They'd never believe we marched in the dark."

"Did the merchants tell you about Twerdahi Town?"

"Not a word," Curdis said in some irritation.

"Nothing about people living down the Road? Big surprise?"

"Big joke."

"So," said Jemmy, "we found a surprise and stayed an extra day. That's what they'll expect. Give them another day to forget what Tim Hann looks like."

Curdis grinned. "I like it here too. I didn't have the nerve to try those boards, Tim. How is it?"

Jemmy shook his head. "It's like, I can't tell a Twerdahl how to ride

a bicycle. I can't tell you what surfing is like. Want us to show you? Brenda?"

"Yeah."

Brenda showed an aptitude for surfing. Curdis gave up early. He didn't like falling off in front of strange males.

The Bednacourt girls returned to the House of Healing with them that night. When the Bloocher clan curled into their blankets, the girls didn't leave.

Voices in the dark, men and women talking together. That was Loria:

"You're good people. You have things to teach us. Some of what comes off the Road are parasites."

"We all do farm work," Curdis said. "We learn to look for what needs doing."

Glind: "We don't let anyone stay a minute if he's alone. Any man alone must be running from something."

"A woman?" Curdis.

"A woman alone might be running from, well, a man." Tarzana's voice.

Loria: "The only women we've ever seen on the Road were merchants. But there was a man called himself Haines-" And he was a murderer who hid in the swamp. He stole from the truck gardens when he could, until Destiny food and no speckles turned him into a skeletal zombie, and then they flushed him out.

"Sounds like Mattoo Haine," Curdis said. "He killed his wife and oldest son when I was little."

Nobody wanted to tell Twerdahls that if criminals could get past where the Road straightened, Spiral Town let them go. There was a silence Jemmy savored. Then he spoke into the dark. "It must have started this way."

"Tim?''

"Tarzana, grown men and women don't talk to each other in Spiral Town. When your grandparents came, maybe they didn't bring lights. They could talk together in the dark where they could be just voices."

"Mmmm."

He must have fallen asleep soon after.

Jemmy taught bicycle riding all morning.

Cooking over a grill fascinated him. He helped some, but watched more.

In midafternoon they retrieved their bikes from Twerdahl riders. Again Curdis said, "Time to leave."

Jemmy said, "I'm not going."

"What?"

"Tell the merchants Tim wants to know where Cavorite went. Tim Hann is on the Road."

He saw Curdis studying him and guessed his thoughts. Is Jemmy crazy? How crazy? He didn't know Jemmy like a brother, and the Jemmy Bloocher he thought he knew wouldn't have killed a merchant. ~

Curdis said, "They'll take a harder look at Tim Hann if Tim comes back alone."

"I don't think I'm coming back, Curdis. I can't run Bloocher Farm. I can't talk down a merchant's price while I'm hiding my face! And if Spiral Town gets in another face-off with the caravans- You see?"

Curdis did. "They'd have to stand without the Bloochers. You'd stand for the Bloochers, but you'd be hiding."

"Curdis, it's unacceptable. Give Thonny two years, he'll be fine running Bloocher Farm. Thonny doesn't have to hide anything."

"That's two years before Margery and I can get our own farm."

"Forgive me."

"Uh-huh." Curdis's eyes were unfocused: still thinking. "Okay, the caravan'll be starting back this way tomorrow or so. I figured we'd meet them just when they were getting organized, and we'd get you through that way. If you stay, they'll be here in, oh, four days. Tim, are you staying here or pushing on?"

"I don't know.''

"You could keep ahead of a caravan. Even on foot."

"Sure."

"Or let them catch you in a few weeks, but now you're a Twerdahl with itchy feet."

"Mmm."

"Is this really your choice?"

"Yes."

"Me, too," Brenda said.

Curdis blew his top. Brenda shouted back, then cried.

Jemmy watched them dwindle, pedaling hard, up the Road.

When he returned to the House of Healing that night, Loria came with him.

Oven Maker

The northwest coast is mountainous. The southeast coast is wider, and rich in beaches. We'll set clown at the far end 0f the peninsula and explore.

-Anthony Lyons, Geology

Twerdahl Town didn't seem to know about bread.

There was grain growing along the Road. There were rocks about. Children of all ages found Tim Hann strange and interesting, and some would do what he suggested.

He showed the younger children how to gather grain. The older helped him carry rocks. Upthrusting banyan knees had flaked a great flat shelf of lava from the Road. Four were able to move that. It became the base of Tim Hann's oven.

His first experiments came out scorched, but two days after his sibs left him, Tim Hann served bread at dinner.

The morning of the third day- The first of the board riders took their boards from where they were propped against the long wall of the House of Healing. Tim Hann trailed the others, watching them, trying to balance the board on his shoulder as they did.

The board was a few inches shorter than Tim himself, carved from wood that grew in the swamp. It was heavy and awkward. Playful gusts of wind kept swinging it about.

Far up the Road toward Spiral Town, there was dust.

Jemmy stopped and squinted. A plume of dust, far off. He thought he knew what it meant.

Wend Bednacourt carried her board like a wand. She wasn't stronger

than he was, but she had the balance. The other riders were running, but Wend trailed back a little. She said, "My daughters have taken an interest in you, Tim."

"I know. But all the others-" It had taken Jemmy two days to notice that the Bednacourt women were the only women who would talk to him. In Spiral Town that was normal, but here? "Is it something I'm doing?"

"Tim, do they say marry in Spiral Town?"

"Yes. Of course."

Wend shied back a bit to avoid the wild swinging of his board. "How's it done?"

"There's a ceremony. You invite-"

"Tim, how do you decide?"

This was no casual conversation. Jemmy set his board down and sat on it, thinking it through.

"We kids all pretty much know each other, time the girls stop talking to us. If I'm interested in a girl-" He decided not to mention Tunia Judda. "-why, maybe I've got a friend who dated her, or knows her, or a friend of a friend." He'd learned quite a lot about Tunia and the Judda family. "Or my sister or maybe a cousin probably knows her, can tell me-"

"You don't talk to her?"

"Her. No, not until we're dating. That's-" He'd never thought of it this way. "-like a contract, like you're buying seed corn or a rooster. Like we buy each other on spec."

The older woman also sat on her board. "So, two nights ago, Loria spoke to you-"

He could feel himself blushing. "She did."

"What did she say?"

"She told you?"

"We talked," said Wend.

He couldn't lie. He wouldn't know what to hide. He said, "Loria came with me back to the House of Healing. She brought a blanket. I rolled up in mine. I was tired. There wasn't any light, of course, so I couldn't see her face and she couldn't see mine. Talking's easier that way somehow. I just thought we'd talk until I fell asleep.

"She said, 'Do you want to make babies with me?'"

"What did you take that to mean?"

He looked at Loria's mother. "It means rub up against. F-fuck. How could it mean anything else?"

"Yes. Tim, we say that when we want to talk about marrying. Raising children. How to take care of them, how many you can afford-"

"No, look, she touched me. I would have, but I was a little slow, maybe. She was a little distance away and I couldn't see her face. I didn't see it coming. 'Do you want to make babies with me?' and then a hand came out of the dark and had my knee. I pulled, and she came to me, and we did it."

The other board riders were all out on the water. Leaving them alone. Pointedly?

Wend Bednacourt was smiling, but not at him. "And last night?"

"I couldn't find Loria. All day."

"She went with some others, spice hunting."

"Avoiding me? I told her it was my first time. Wend, there are things we're not born knowing. It's dark in the House of Healing. I hit her jaw with my elbow before I got the knack."-of moving slowly, touching everywhere. Darkness had its good points.

"She wanted to let you talk to the rest of us. What happened last night?"

"Tarzana. She came back to the House of Healing with me after dinner. I didn't know what she had in mind, so I didn't push. I was hoping she'd tell me why Loria, if she didn't want to see me. Why. But I didn't know how to ask.

"She said, 'Tim, do you want children?'

"I reached out and got her hand and she said, 'No, Tim,' and I stopped." His memory raced on ahead. Tarzana's voice in the dark: You do want children, don't you?

He'd laughed and said, What, from way over here?

Aren't you interested?

I was, he said lightly, hiding disappointment. It was as if Tarzana blew hot and then cold, offered and then pulled back. Loria had done that too, then relented. He'd have been angry if a Spiral girl did that. Here, he might be missing some signal, some custom.

Loria says she asked you, but you didn't answer, Tarzana said.

She asked, he told Tarzana smugly. I think I answered- He snapped back to the present. "We weren't talking about the same thing at all, were we?"

"No," said Wend.

"Uh-huh." How could he not be flattered? And horrified! These waters were deeper than he'd expected. "Loria knows I didn't know anything. She just. .