Karavans (16 page)

She smoothed back straggles of fine light brown hair, trying to maintain a self-control that felt perilously close to breaking. “What would you have me do?”

“In a moment, give me the loan of your hand. But first, you must forgive
my
plain speech.” Her tone and eyes were steady. “Please understand—my concern is limited, it
must
be limited, by the nature of my employ. I will look only for images that have to do with the safety of the karavan. But there may be other things I see as well, on the edges. I will not examine those images because they aren’t pertinent, but they will nonetheless exist. It’s up to you, you see, whether I tell you anything of these other images.”

“Oh.” That thought had not occured to Audrun. “And if I said no?”

The diviner’s smile was brief. “You would be one among many; few karavaners want to think beyond the journey itself. I would tell you only what I read as concerns the karavan.”

Audrun drew in her breath. Fourteen diviners had said
they must go to Atalanda—would this one be the fifteenth? “Then, yes. Tell me what you see for my children…” She placed both hands against her abdomen. “… and for this child as well.” “Then give me your hand.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Audrun extended her right hand palm up. Ilona took it into her own and turned it over, examining the tributaries of blood beneath the flesh on the back of her hand. Aware suddenly of broken nails and roughened cuticles, Audrun wanted to jerk her hand away and hide it in her equally dirty skirts. But the diviner, as if sensing—reading?—the impulse, firmed her grip.

Cool hands, Audrun discovered. Cool, gentle hands. Fingertips traced the tendons and bones hidden just beneath the flesh, the lines across her knuckles, the fit of nailbeds into her fingers. Then Ilona turned the hand over, laying bare the palm with deep and shallow creases, the calluses of work.

“Be at ease,” she murmured.

Under such scrutiny, Audrun believed that impossible. Especially when she was so tired, and an aching back robbed her of forbearance.

The diviner put her own hand across Audrun’s, though she did not touch it. For long moments her hand hovered, palm over palm, then was drawn away. With the long middle finger of an elegant right hand, Ilona gently traced the visible lines.

Audrun did not look at her own hand or at Ilona’s, but into the woman’s face, searching for a reaction that could be read merely because a wife, a mother, learned to do such things with her husband, with her children. It was not a gift, merely experience. But Ilona’s face was expressionless. Almost serene.

A tingle crossed Audrun’s hand. She looked down sharply, thinking the diviner had done something. But Ilona merely cradled the hand palm up as before, baring it to the freckled amber light of the pierced-tin lantern.

From the creases in Audrun’s palm, tingling transmuted to moisture. Sweat, she believed, though she was not over-
warm. But the dampness swelled, welling up to form droplets, then, as Audrun’s stiffened hand trembled, trickled slowly off the edge of her hand to spot her dusty skirts.

Startled, she opened her mouth to demand an explanation. But the diviner spoke first.

“Tears,” Ilona said. “Tears for loss, for grief, for confusion. And blood.” She rolled Audrun’s fingers closed and released her hand with a brief pressure of her own. “There is nothing in your hand that speaks of danger for the karavan.” The diviner’s eyes remained guileless and forthright, offering no unspoken words or warnings in the language of the heart. “You are free to accompany us.”

“But—the other images you saw.” Audrun felt apprehension rising. “There is danger for my children?”

“Tears,” Ilona said softly. “Grief. Blood.” Her eyes were fully aware of what could be inferred from the words. “I saw no more than that.”

Audrun wanted to put to the diviner any number of questions, to request a deeper reading. She was on the verge of asking when Ilona rose.

“I’m sorry, but the night is full. Now we must see what lies in your husband’s hand.” She opened the wagon door onto the night again.

Dismissal. Audrun stood up, pressing the damp palm against her skirts to wipe it free of moisture. She moved past the diviner and descended the few steps, thinking over what had been said. Desperation and frustration had faded somewhat with the knowledge that Ilona saw no danger in Audrun’s company on the journey, but Davyn’s hand might offer different news.

Audrun paused, then turned back to look at the woman. She consciously tamed her tone; she did not mean her words as a challenge, but as an appeal for explanation. “None of the other diviners we consulted said any such thing as you have.”

“I read true,” Ilona said, “what is shown to me. But what is shown to one diviner need not be shown to another.”

Audrun could not keep the irony from her tone. “That is—convenient.”

Ilona smiled. “Isn’t it?”

She had expected the woman to deny it, or take offense. Instead, she was amused. Audrun didn’t know if that was ill or good. “Should I be afraid of this journey?”

“There is safety in more rather than fewer,” Ilona said, “and that knowledge has nothing whatsoever to do with your hand. It is merely common sense. You and your family would do better to remain with the karavan than to take the other road.”

“He may have told you that,” Audrun pointed out, driven to debunk. “The guide. You may not have seen that in my hand at all.”

Nor did that offend the woman. Ilona merely shrugged casually as she leaned against the doorjamb. “It doesn’t matter what Rhuan may have told me. I have read your hand. I saw tears, and blood. I saw loss, and grief, and confusion. But it’s true a charlatan could say he saw much the same, knowing you are bound for the road near Alisanos.”

“He told you that, too? The guide?”

Ilona asked, “Does it matter? My reading is never dependent on information given by others. Only on what information the hand itself offers.”

Audrun nodded, once again wiping her right hand against her skirts. She was tense with frustration, but knew that the conversation was ended. “I’ll send my husband.”

ILONA WATCHED THE woman walk away straight-backed into darkness out of fire glow, conscious of a regret that dug more deeply than usual into her spirit. Years before, she had learned how to shield herself against the emotions of others lest she be unable to withdraw from them; the blessing
and
curse of fleshly divination, such as hand-reading, required the sublimation of one’s own sense of self into awareness of the client’s.

Some hands were easily read. Others required more of an investment of her art, more sublimation of herself, and left Ilona exhausted. With this woman, mother of four and
bearer of a fifth, Ilona had driven herself deeply into the sense of self, the inner heart, as hand-readers called it. That sense offered up to those with the art a doorway into the future. Some doorways stood open. Some were half closed, while others yet stood barely ajar. And then there were those individuals whose doors were not only shut, but barred and bolted from the inner heart.

The farmer’s wife had been open, but pregnancy complicated matters. Ilona needed to separate the woman’s self from the unborn’s. She had managed it, just—the baby would be a daughter—but keeping mother and daughter apart had left her own sense of self aching with the effort.

Tears to be shed, and blood. A grief so painful as to harm the heart, the soul. All interwoven with the birth of the child.

But none of it spoke of danger for the karavan, and that was her only duty: to warn Jorda should the presence of anyone threaten the safety of the journey and the welfare of the people. It was not among the terms of her employment to read beyond the journey. Jorda had been explicit. She might spend herself too profligately otherwise, and be used up when Jorda most needed her. But this woman, this wife, was deserving of more. Ilona wished what she saw had promised kindness, not fear.

She sighed, gripping the doorjamb. The day had been long and she was wrung out; she needed rest for her soul as well as her gift. But the husband, the father, was yet to come, and it was imperative that she not only find the doorway into his self, but to push it open should it be closed.

U
NLIKE JORDA OR JORDA’S diviners, Rhuan did not own a wagon. He generally slept in the open beneath the vastness of sky and the cycles of the moon, watching Maiden, Mother, and Grandmother as well as Orphan Sky. But he did own a tent for such occasions as bad weather, and strung the oiled canvas shelter amid trees, binding guy-ropes to branches. When trees did not exist, which occurred often in the grasslands, and the weather insisted he do something more than curse it, Rhuan borrowed the sideboards of Jorda’s supply wagon and pitched the tent to form a simple lean-to.

This night, the final night before departure, the tent was not set up but packed. Rhuan had intended to roll up in a single blanket upon a reed mat beneath the light of Grandmother Moon and the stars. But now privacy was most definitely called for, the need for
apartness
driving him away from humans, even away from friends such as Jorda and Ilona.

The horse he returned to the picket line. Rhuan stopped briefly at the supply wagon, collected a beaded leather bag, and sought that privacy.

He walked away from the cookfires, dying now into ruddy coals; away from the painted wagons, the humans, the people whose lives would, on the morrow, reside in
his hands. For all that his wish was to be
of
them, his current need demanded something other than companionship among the folk who were, no matter how much he liked and admired them, alien to his race. The reason was simplicity itself: they would not understand.
Could
not understand.

Rhuan, walking farther yet, knew Jorda, despite his ignorance of the Shoia race in all but tall tales and legends—and the example set by his senior guide—did nonetheless understand that his guide now and again required that apartness, and asked no questions. Men in these times of civil strife often kept secrets. For Melior and Branca, the two male diviners, Rhuan spared no thought; only Ilona offered empathy as well as threat. Of them all, she knew more of who and what he was. He had told her nothing of himself save the sorts of things with which anyone might be trusted, but Ilona, in one brief moment three years before when Rhuan’s personal wards were down—he was dead at the time—had seen in an instant just enough of his soul to be stunned as well as curious.

This
custom she would never understand, nor be given opportunity to wonder what it was, what it meant to him. And so he continued walking, leaving behind the lantern glow within dyed oiled canvas, the gray-red ash of crumbling coals, the splashes of oily, ocherous lamplight seen in open flaps of such establishments as Mikal’s ale tent, and the red-hued tents belonging to such women as the one named Audrun was not: Sisters of the Night. And when in wagons bound for other places, Sisters of the Road.

In a copse of looming, wide-crowned trees some distance from the karavan grove he found suitable privacy. Kneeling, Rhuan took from the beaded bag a rolled section of thin hide. He spread it on the ground, pausing a moment to pass gentle fingertips across the slick, buttery surface. Beneath the moon the hide glimmered faintly, a rippling herringbone pattern of palest coppery scales.

As sensitized fingertips brushed it again, the thin hide warmed. He felt the loosening of his muscles in response,
the answering heat in his own flesh. Hastily Rhuan drew his hand away, biting hard into his lower lip to regain self-control.

When his breathing steadied, he selected other items from the bag and assembled them in careful juxtaposition upon the gleaming scales: an ivory comb aged to watery yellow, its arched spine carved into the shape of a dragon; a series of small leather pouches, each dyed a different color; a short length of thick, jointed reed plugged with wax at either end; a pale cream gnarled root.

Rhuan settled into a cross-legged position and began to untie and unwrap silken cord, to unweave dangling sidelocks. The rest of his braids remained interlaced in the complex pattern woven together into the thick main plait hanging down his spine. He also took from the sidelocks all the beads, charms, and coin-rings and set them on the hide.

When the sidelocks were loosed, Rhuan took up the ivory comb and began to work through the rippled sections of waist-length hair. It required time, that; rebraiding would take more. By dawn he must be finished with the ritual and back at the karavan to aid Jorda and his travelers. For this reason he elected to undo only the sidelock braids.

Combing tamed the loosened hair, though the ripples remained. Rhuan took up the root, cut into it with his knife, squeezed a pale, soapy liquid into his left palm, then began to apply the thin lather to the unbraided hair. Beneath the moon it shone a deep ruddy copper, verging on bloodied black.

After cleaning the hair thoroughly, Rhuan unstoppered the section of reed, poured a measure of the contents into his hand, and began to work the oil through the loose hair. When the strands of hair glistened in moonlight with a delicate sheen from scalp to tips, Rhuan began the laborious process of rebraiding the sidelocks, weaving back into them all of the beads, charms, and coin-rings he had removed. With the addition of each colored glass bead, he told over the Names of the Thousand Gods.