Karavans (25 page)

The Hecari gestured with his warclub. “Again. More.”

“Mother,” Bethid whispered.

Kendic repeated, “What does he want?”

Louder this time.
“Do nothing,”
Brodhi called again.
“Nine left alive is better than ten dead!
”

The warrior grunted and swung his horse away, returning to the winding lines of Sancorrans.

Kendic turned sharply to Brodhi. “What do you mean?”

“One in ten,” Bethid murmured.

It was not the answer the Watch captain desired. “They’ve come for coin before, but they’ve never done this. Why are they doing this?”

Brodhi spoke with excessive clarity, as if to a child. “Too many in one place.”

Kendic’s face was blank with incomprehension. Then abrubtly it drained of color as the first warclub fell, shattering a skull.

RHUAN WASTED NO time returning to the karavan and informing Jorda of the patrol ahead. A single word sufficed:
Hecari.

Atop the high wagon seat, the red-haired man muttered a brief but eloquent curse, applied the hand brake sparingly, then eased his team of horses to a halt. “Go on, then.” Grim, he nodded at Rhuan, digging beneath his shirt for a string of protective amulets. “You know what to tell them.”

Wagon by wagon, Rhuan rode along the line with word of the stoppage and its cause. He had little time for details, but quietly reminded everyone to recall the procedures and suggested behaviors Jorda had explained thoroughly
before they had departed the settlement. Children fell silent at their parents’ sharpened orders while color drained from every adult face. In place of questions were prayers and petitions, forming a chain of low-toned voices and frantic whispers invoking protection.

At last Rhuan reined in at the back of the column, behind the Sisters, noting that the farmsteader now walked while his wife rode the plank seat. The youngest children were not to be seen; Rhuan assumed they napped in the wagon. The husband and his two eldest walked beside the oxen.

Their clothing and hair was coated with road dust. As they pulled down their scarves, they bared the pallor of cleaner features. Also they bared simple curiosity; their late arrival at the karavan had rendered them innocent of such behavior around Hecari as Jorda had described. Rhuan had drawn his map in the dirt and discussed the route with them, but Jorda was always the one who spoke of Hecari, not he. And Rhuan’s concern for their nearness to Alisanos had driven the thought of Hecari completely out of his head.

Now came the grim and unenviable task of acquainting them with such danger and ugliness, and no time at all for courtesy.

“We are stopping,” he told them, though as yet the easing of the wagon line from motion to stillness had not reached the latter part of the karavan. “When the column halts, wait quietly. There’s a Hecari patrol ahead of us.” Expressions were startled, then tensely speculative, and finally apprehensive. “All of you, even the youngest, must line up beside the wagon,” Rhuan continued. “Say nothing. If we are fortunate, they’ll be content with Jorda’s payment; it’s Hecari custom to demand a ‘road tax’ from the karavan-master and Jorda carries coin for that purpose, but occasionally the Hecari expand their demands to personal items as well. Don’t try to stop them. Don’t complain. Don’t even speak to them.” He interpreted the questions forming in six pairs of stricken eyes but raised a silencing hand before anyone could voice protest or question.
“Once you’ve assembled, hold your ground where you are.
Say
nothing,
do
nothing, and let the warriors take whatever they wish.”

Shock, then anger flowed across faces formed of strikingly similar features, fair where he was copper except for the golden-haired wife. And at last, in the face of the eldest daughter, even outrage kindled, slowly but unmistakably.

Rhuan cut her off curtly before she could begin. “No.”

“But—”

“Did you hear me?
No.
”

There was a wagon-length space between the Sisters’ red-topped conveyance and the wagon belonging to the family. Even as Rhuan extended a hand, the oxen team was eased to a halt.

“It may cost you what you hold dear,” he warned them, “but everything in your wagon can be replaced. Lives cannot.” He gestured up the line. “Hold your place here. Either I, Darmuth, or Jorda himself will inform you when it’s safe.” He looked at them one by one, then indicated the farmsteader’s wife and eldest daughter. “If the warriors come to this wagon, keep your heads bowed, and your eyes down. No matter what happens.”

The wife was clearly taken aback. “Why?”

“In Hecari culture a woman never looks a warrior in the eyes.”

The oldest daughter was no more inclined to accept his orders now than moments before, and challenged him. “What happens if we do?”

Her father shot her a hard glance. “Hold your tongue, Ellica.”

Rhuan minced no words; best to let them know the truth if they hoped to survive. “According to the warrior’s whim, a woman may be beaten, stoned, or whipped.” He paused. “Occasionally even to death.”

I
RONIC, BRODHI THOUGHT, that what had begun as a beautiful day should become so tragic.

Amid the settlement pathways, another man died. A woman. Then a child. Those who attempted to run were brought down by poisoned darts. The reek of death-slackened bowels and bladders was a sharp, unpleasant fug underscored by the coppery tang of blood. Yet the sun was bright, the skies clear, the breath of a breeze upon Brodhi’s face temperate and pleasant.

“No!” Kendic cried in horror.
“Stop this
—” Brodhi clamped a tensed hand upon the man’s thick wrist and stepped close, so close his breath touched the other’s face as he intentionally blocked Kendic’s view. “Say nothing.
Do
nothing.”

Kendic tried to wrench his arm free. “Do nothing? Are you mad?”

Behind them, Bethid was speaking fervently to Mikal, begging him to remain where he was, not to interfere.

Women screamed. Children shrieked. Men called out to gods as the warclubs descended and darts flew. On foot, hemmed in by mounted warriors, none of the one in ten escaped.

Brodhi’s fingers bit into Kendic’s twitching flesh. “You
can die. That’s all. Is that what you wish? To die, and be of no help to those who survive?”

Kendic tore his wrist free. “Mother of Moons, how can you expect me to do
nothing
? They are killing women and children!”

Behind them, Mikal was weeping even as Bethid told him over and over again to hold his place. To find and hold his peace.

“I can’t!” Kendic cried. “I can’t do nothing! What kind of man are you, who does nothing to stop this?”

Brodhi said merely, “Nothing I
can
do will stop this.”

Contempt swelled in Kendic’s hazel eyes even as his lips peeled back in a rictus of disgust and disbelief.

“Wait—Kendic—” Bethid stretched out a belaying hand. “Listen to him! Listen to
me:
you must let it go!”

But Kendic could not, would not. He spat at the ground, repudiating them, then roared his challenge to the Hecari and waded into butchery.

Bethid, mouthing prayers, turned her face away.

“Fool,” Brodhi murmured as the Hecari closed in.

Mikal was on his knees. His face was a tear-wetted mask of grief even as Bethid wrapped her arms around his head and turned his face against her abdomen, murmuring words meant to soothe that were nonetheless empty.

Brodhi, dispassionate, looked upon the massacre and absently counted bodies. Neither gender nor age mitigated the Hecari; the goal was to decrease the number of Sancorrans in one place and to teach by example that anyone, any
where
, could be struck down.

Even as Kendic was, smashed beneath the warclubs, feathered with darts.

In the midst of the culling, warriors dismounted to appropriate goods from the tents, then kicked over cookfires to set the oilcloth ablaze. Again, one in ten.

Bethid’s words of comfort to Mikal were broken off abruptly. She stared in horror at Brodhi. “The karavan!”

Brodhi held his tongue.

“Would they track the karavan, do you think? Decimate it as well? It’s only been a handful of days since
they departed.” He knew she expected something of him. Some word. An action. When he neither moved nor replied, she raised her voice. Its tone now was accusing. “Your kinsman is with them. Will you let
him
be a one in ten to die?”

That question he could answer in such a way as she would understand. Brodhi shrugged. “He’s Shoia.”

“So?”

“He may be killed, but it won’t be a true death. A permanent death.”

“And what if he only has
one
life left?” Bethid countered. Below her cropped cap of upstanding hair, her face was a tight, pale mask of grief and shock. “You can’t be so cold, Brodhi. Not even you!”

He could. He was.

“You can do nothing here, that I know, not and live,” Bethid said. “But the karavan should be warned. You can’t know what this party might do once it leaves here.”

Mikal’s tone was frantic as he rose. “You’re a courier; the Hecari will let you go.
Ride
, Brodhi! Warn them!”

He felt neither urgency nor urge to do so, even in the face of Bethid’s and Mikal’s stunned disbelief. But it occured to him that perhaps this was a test. Another of many tests that had passed already, with as many or more to come. In the name of a test, then—in the name of the
possibility
that this was a test—he would surrender himself to human expectations.

Ride? No need. He had other options.

But then he recalled that Ferize was gone. Brodhi believed it likely she had done as he, in his anger, commanded her to do, and returned to Alisanos. Demonkind, so long as they were kin-in-kind, had the ability to touch one another’s minds; it would be a simple thing for Ferize to inform Darmuth of the Hecari actions, who would then inform Rhuan.

But she was gone, because he had dismissed her.

Even riding would be too slow if the Hecari sent a detail to follow him, and that was likely. It had happened before. As a courier, and a foreign-born courier at that, he was
subject to neither decimation nor whim, inviolate because of his duty, but the Hecari did not trust him. Not yet.

Nor would they ever, if they learned what he could do.

Grimly Brodhi unsheathed his knife. Two pairs of tear-reddened eyes watched avidly, hopefully, following his movements. But puzzlement crept into their expessions and he knew what question was asked inside of their heads: Why was he not going for his horse?

Brodhi placed the tip of the knife against the ball of his left thumb, applied pressure, then broke the flesh against the point. As blood ran, he raised his hand, thumb extended, and dabbed both closed eyelids.

“What are you doing?” Bethid breathed.

A tremor ran through his body. Within, the blood-bond rose up singing.

Bethid repeated, “What are you
doing
?”

Brodhi said quietly, “Lending my eyes to a kinsman.”

HIS AWARENESS OF the sun’s continued kindness and his body’s longing for it now displaced by duty, Rhuan rode back up the line of stopped wagons at a slow trot, marking strained looks on faces, the stiffness of bodies as the karvan-folk, following instructions, took their places along the verge of the track. From the oldest to the youngest, the fragile to the robust, Jorda’s people formed a living line that stretched from Jorda himself at the head of the column to the oxen-pulled conveyance of the farmsteaders at the end.

Another man, a human man, riding along that line, might offer jovial words to bolster courage, to promise everyone safety, to dismiss the potential for danger and thus their fears. Rhuan did not. Nor would Jorda, he knew, whose responsibility now was to accede to the demands of the Hecari patrol without provoking the warriors to further action. This task was not new for the karavan-master, had not been since the Hecari invasion, but there was no sense of impatience, annoyance, or complacency about Jorda. And
by such unflagging care and thorough preparations had the human karavan-master earned Rhuan’s respect.