The Jongurian Mission (10 page)

Then she was there.
They came over a low hill, and the city stood in front of them, the most welcome sight they’d seen all day. It was not a large city, compared to Plowdon, but it was certainly the second largest that Bryn had laid eyes on. A large wall surrounded it, made entirely of large logs thrust into the earth. Battlements sprouted along the length of it, and in the center was a large city gate, two large wooden doors framing it. A small keep rose high from the center of the city, the only structure to tower higher than the walls.

They kicked their horses into a fast run and were soon approaching the gates to the city.
They ran through past the guards and continued on down the muddy streets. There were low buildings, none more than two-storeys, and most were shut tight against the rain, which was now coming down in buckets. Halam led them down a few narrow streets, and eventually they stopped at an establishment that appeared to be an inn. The sign outside proclaimed it to be the “
Lazy Plow
.” Halam dismounted and moved quickly for the door, throwing it open and stepping inside before the other two had a chance to get off their horses. He was back out in a moment, a young boy trailing behind him.

“
The inn’s full up,” Halam said upon returning, a sour look on his face. “Seems the rain’s driven everyone off the roads. I managed to secure us a place in the stables, however. Give your reins over to Seldin here and he’ll show us the way,” Halam said, motioning to the boy, “he’ll take the horses around back to the stable where they’ll be fed and groomed.”

They did as they were told, and
were soon led toward the back of the tavern. A large stable stood before them, the doors thrown open and a single lantern illuminating the inside. Straw covered the floor leading to different-sized stalls. Some looked like they could barely hold a horse, while others could probably hold several bulls, by the look of them. The stableboy led their three horses to adjoining stalls and set out a pail of oats in front of them. There were quite a few horses altogether, but it was clear that there was also empty space.

“There, milord,” Seldin said, pointing toward a stall in the back.
“All cleaned out this morning, fresh straw and everything.”

“Thank you lad,” Halam said as the boy went back to his post in the warm common room.

Halam motioned for them to make themselves as comfortable as possible, telling them to get what sleep they could, for he wanted to be out of this barn as early as possible and back on the road. He expected to cover a good amount of distance on the morrow, and they’d ideally be sleeping on the fringes of the Montino Mountains when the next night came. Bryn looked around and picked the best spot he could. It wasn’t much, but it was dry. The other two settled themselves with horse blankets and mounds of straw, and the three listened to the rain hitting the streets outside, eventually drifting off to sleep.

* * * * *

Bryn awoke to the sounds of horses whinnying, straw ruffling, and water dripping. He sat up and rubbed his eyes, looking around. Halam and Rodden were both up and looking to their mounts. Seeing the ground outside, Bryn saw that the street had been turned to mud with large puddles everywhere, although those puddles showed no signs of raindrops this morning. They would ride this day.

“Good, you’re up,” Halam said, looking down on Bryn.
“We’ll go into the inn to eat and then get back on the road.”

After the horses were readied, the three headed back into the common room.
The fire was just embers now, having died down in the night. The room was nearly empty save for a table with two mud-spattered men who were most likely ready to set out early as well. Rodden calling to the serving girl, who looked as though she hadn’t slept a wink yet.

“What’s the food here in the morning?” Rodden asked the girl.

“We have porridge, bread, and eggs for three coppers,” she said.

“We’ll have three plates of that with some milk too, if you have it,” Halam said to her.

“Yes sir,” she said, heading back to the kitchen.

A few moments after she
’d gone and they’d adjusted themselves on the benches, Halam spoke up.

“Road
’ll be bad today, with all the rain we had last night.”

“I know,” Rodden agreed, “I don’t think I heard it let up until early this morning, not more than an hour ago.”

“It’ll slow us for sure,” Halam said, frustration showing in his voice. “But there’s not much to be done for it. We’ll have to do the best we can and hopefully the weather will be kinder to us today.”

“I just hope we can find another dry spot to sleep if it does continue,” Bryn chimed in.

“No worry about that lad,” said his uncle, “we’ll soon be nearing the mountains, and there’ll be lots of small stands of trees thick enough to keep the weather off our heads for a night.”

“Another night of sleeping on the ground?” Bryn asked.

Rodden laughed. “Your nephew is beginning to learn the truth of the traveling life. It’s not all fancy rooms and fine meals, now is it? No, most of the time it’s the hard earth and even harder bread.”

Even Halam got a chuckle out of that, and Bryn smiled as well.
It wasn’t so bad, he figured, interesting for sure, and it certainly beat hauling stones or threshing grain.

Their food arrived with three tall glasses of milk, and the three set to their plates.
The eggs were hot, the bread fresh baked, and the milk cold. When they’d finished, Halam paid the serving girl and the three headed back round to the stables to collect their horses.

The horses’ hooves made a strange sucking sound when they moved through the muddy streets and toward the gate of Coria.
Unlike Plowdon, Coria only had one large gate on the western side of the city facing the King’s Road. Although the sun was not yet over the horizon, the streets were already astir. Citizens were opening the shutters on the street-front businesses, getting ready for the day’s trade. Vendors were readying their stands, piling fruits and vegetables high from carts and wagons arriving from the surrounding countryside. People of all types and in a variety of clothing, from the most fine to the worst fitted, moved this way and that as they headed off to whatever work they did. The three moved through it all at a steady trot, eager to be back on the road. They should have been much further south by now, well onto the plains of Culdovia. They would need to make up that time on today’s ride.

A few hours after leaving Coria the
seemingly never-ending sight of field after field finally came to an end. The rolling hills gradually flattened out so that Bryn could see to the horizon without interruption. The fields they traveled along became uncultivated and home to more weeds than crops. Eventually the weeds thinned out, revealing a rocky ground underneath. The earth around them went from shades of green to yellow to brown. Soon they were surrounded on all sides by a rocky environment of dirt.

“Welcome to the Klamath Plain, gentlemen,” Rodden said loudly, opening his arms out in front of him in a showman’s gesture.
“This rocky wasteland unfit for life’ll now be our constant companion until we pass Lindonis in, oh, I’d say two days time.”

Bryn looked around him.
He’d grown bored and weary of the landscape of Tillatia, but had had no expectations that the Klamath Plain would be so desolate. Pebbles, small stones, and a smattering of larger rocks dotted the landscape. Weeds grew everywhere that rocks weren’t, with a few patches of a yellowish-brown grass here and there that grew as if some malevolent giant had scattered bad seeds this way and that.

“How does anything
live
here?” Bryn asked.

Rodden chuckled.
“Well, lad, there are all manner of creatures that call these plains home. Many live burrowed underground, and most come out at night. You might not think so by looking at it, but those weeds are really quite nutritious, and many of the wild herds that wander these plains devour them thankfully.”

“Wild herds?”
Bryn asked.

“Oh yes,” Rodden continued.
“There are large herds of horses that wander about, as well as deer and antelope, many types of rabbits, and countless kinds of rodents.”

“You must remember, Bryn,” Halam added, “that not all of the Klamath Plain looks like this.
Many areas in the west have more shrubs and grasses, and small rivers and streams flow through. This particular section in northern Culdovia just doesn’t fit that description.”

“Yes,” Rodden went on, “I think it has something to do with the effect of the Montino Mountains being so close.
For once we get further south tomorrow, we’ll see much more in the way of grasses and shrubs, and even a few smatterings of trees. It’s just that today’s journey will be rather bleak.”

Bryn didn’t like the sound of that, but there wasn’t much he could do about it but press his heels into Ash and continue on down the road.
He daydreamed about what Baden would look like. Tall spires stretching so high they almost touched the clouds; the lake of clearest blue teaming with fish, ready to be plucked right out by hand; marketplaces overflowing with goods, so much that the beggars even had too much.

The dreaming ceased when they ate lunch around midday.
The scenery was still the same, and they rode on. The leagues passed under their horse’s hooves, but in the distance the horizon began to lose its flatness. What appeared to be hills grew into mountains, their tops white.

“The Montino Mountains,” Rodden said, pointing.
“We’ll be near their base by nightfall.”

T
he mountains gradually went from specks on the horizon to significant shapes ahead of them. They grew ever larger as the day wound to night. The landscape grew more rocky, and the ground less flat. Soon the mountains were towering on their right, gray slats of stone, jagged and sharp, pushing ever upward toward the clouds. It began to grow dark, but they continued on, even when the road became difficult to see, although Bryn had no worries about stumbling off of it since it had followed a near straight line all day. The mountains loomed up, becoming lost in the shadowy darkness, but Bryn knew they were growing closer and closer. By the time it was near pitch darkness and the only light was that of the half-moon in the sky, Halam pulled a stick and some cloth from his bag, wrapped them together, then took a dagger and struck some sparks on his flint stone to make a torch. The road brightened around them, a small globe of light surrounded by darkness. Halam led them off of the road for quite a ways, and soon they were rising in elevation ever so slightly. He came to a stop and got down from Juniper.

“This seems like a good spot to sleep for the night,” he said.
“We’ve come about as near to the base of the Montinos as we will, and it’s getting too dark to continue on.”

They pulled their bedrolls from their saddlebags and sat down to another night of bread, cheese, and sausage.
They decided not to make a fire as the night was warm and they were all tired. After eating, Bryn lay down and was soon asleep.

* * * * *

The sun was rising when Bryn woke, and he was startled to see the land around him. Sometime in the darkness of the night they had reached the very base of the mountains and now before him lay an immense wall of rock, rising near straight up from the dirt and weeds of the plains around him. They had apparently made camp where large round rocks began to rise from the valley floor, slowly growing higher and forming loose piles of smaller stones, until they suddenly jutted straight up toward the heavens. There was nothing gradual about their ascent. Bryn figured that there were hundreds of feet of sheer rock wall that rose straight up, interrupted only by the rocks moving inward a few feet, then continuing to rise a few hundred more feet before doing the same, all the way to the top, which he couldn’t even see because of the swirling clouds obscuring his view.

Rodden stepped over to Bryn and looked straight up with him.
“They rise sheer from the floor and reach thousands of feet,” he said. “The scholars believe it’s from a transition in the rocks, with an escarpment forming that causes them to jut strait up like this. Quite a sight, eh?”

“Amazing,” Bryn replied.
“They just shoot straight up like needles. Do people climb these?”

“Oh, I suppose they do, but I wouldn’t think so unless they had to,
at least that’s how I would feel about it.”

Bryn agreed.
He couldn’t imagine trying to climb up these sheer faces, or climbing down the hundreds of straight feet with only a rope. Just looking up at them began to make his stomach queasy; he didn’t want to think how looking down from that height would make him feel.

“We’d best get back on the road,” Halam said as he climbed on Juniper for another day in the saddle.
Bryn and Rodden did the same, and they rejoined the road, the same dreary plains on their left, but now with the majestic mountains on their right, rising higher and higher, taking away the boredom of the landscape.

The mountains followed them as they continued to move south.
The peaks were never revealed due to the cloud cover, a swirling mass that kept the unimaginable heights from their gazes. Bryn could understand now why the Montinos had been left to themselves for much of Adjurian history; why would anyone want to tackle those mountains if they didn’t have to? It seemed ludicrous to him to think that the Regidians actually thought they could invade Montino during the first Adjurian Civil War. Did they actually think they could succeed in driving the people from their mountain homes? There were passes that made traversing the mountains easier, Bryn knew, but he couldn’ fathom how the sight of these jagged towers to either side of invading army could do anything but decrease morale.