The Water Road (22 page)

~~~~~

As the days wore on, Strefer set
herself to a task that she should have done long ago. Sitting in her small
room, she made copies of the red notebook, down to keeping the page number references
and archaic spellings intact. She had no intention of giving up the original,
but recognized that it might happen without her consent. Regardless of any
claims of forgery or fraud if the original escaped her hands, having the
content of the red notebook secure in some other way would at least mean the
story would come out, one way or another.

She made two copies, squeezing the
words down as much as possible. Rangold favored the large stylized script that
was popular in his day, rather than concision. It was neat, thankfully, and
easy to read. It was also easy to take the words and shrink them down. After a
bit of practice, Strefer had compressed things so much as to fit six of
Rangold’s pages on one side of a sheet of parchment. It allowed her to take
down the whole of the red notebook on ten pages. The thin sheets suited her
purpose perfectly. These two copies would not be put in a bag and forgotten
about. Strefer had something sneakier in mind.

After she had completed one copy,
Strefer poked around in the stores in the common room. Rurek had abandoned the
room for the deck, where the afternoon sun was beating down. She found what she
expected, a small kit with sewing needles and thread. She returned to her room
and removed her tunic. With practiced precision that she had thought was lost
to her youth, Strefer quickly sewed one copy of the red notebook under the
inner layer of her tunic. The thread color was not a good match for the natural
fabric’s deep brown, but that wasn’t important. If someone got so far as to
look for something in that location, they would tear it apart regardless. Once
the job was done, she briefly surveyed her handiwork, then slipped the tunic
back on. The thread, while discolored, was of fine quality and, after a few
moments, she could not feel it against her skin. She stood up and walked around
the little room. Before long, she easily forgot the copy was there. She took
the other copy, folded it, and put it in the satchel that she carried with her
everywhere, and walked up on deck.

Rurek was where she had last seen
him, sitting on the deck, legs straight out in front of him, back resting
against the pilothouse. The sun was strong and warm, even though the breeze
caused by the boat’s movement up the river still carried a chill. Rurek’s short
coat that marked him as a Sentinel was folded across his lap, his arms bare in
the sun. His pikti stood up beside him, leaning against his shoulder. He was
looking out at the passing north bank of the Water Road, as if he had been
hypnotized. If Strefer didn’t know any better, she thought she could see tears
welling in his eyes.

“Everything all right?” Strefer
asked, sliding down onto the deck beside him.

“Hmm?” he said, as if she roused
him from some deep trance. “What did you say?”

“I said, is everything all right?”

“Sure,” he said, not altogether
convincingly. “Why do you ask?”

She shrugged. “Just looked like you
were zoned out a bit, like you weren’t really here. I’ve never seen you like
that before.”

“Just tired,” he said.

“It’s more than that,” Strefer
said. “Here, give me your coat,” she said, reaching for it before he moved to
hand it over.

“What for?” he asked.

“You’ll see,” Strefer said. She
took the coat, took another needle and some thread from her satchel, and got to
work. “But you’ll have to tell me what’s going on.”

They sat in silence for a few
moments, Rurek apparently unwilling to unburden himself. He watched her work
for a while, then said, “You’re pretty good at that. Who taught you to do that?
Your mother, I guess?”

“How would she have done that?”
Strefer said, without looking up from her task.

“Right,” Rurek said, nodding. “I
keep forgetting you’re from the Guildlands, Strefer. But surely you don’t learn
how to sew in the Guild of Writers, do you?”

Strefer chuckled. “Of course not.
Why?”

He shrugged. “I guess I never
thought about what your childhood was like. Things like that—sewing, cleaning,
mending things—are what I learned from my mother and father as a child. It was
just, I don’t know, expected. Where did you pick those sorts of things up?”

Strefer paused from her work and
looked at him. “It’s kind of complicated, if you didn’t grow up with it. Are
you really that interested?”

“Sure,” he said unenthusiastically.

“I’m not convinced,” Strefer said,
returning to the needle and thread.

“All right, if you must know,” he
said. “It came to me this morning that the longer we’re on this boat and the
further up the Water Road we go, the further away I get from home. I mean home
as in where I come from home, not Tolenor.”

Strefer gave him a puzzled look.

“I know it’s silly because once we
get off the boat we’ll be heading back that direction. Closer to Kerkondala
than I’ve been in a long time. Made me think about my family. My parents. My
sisters—I’ve got one who is just a bit younger than you, you know.”

“I didn’t know that,” she said.

He nodded. “I’ve just been sitting
here thinking about them, whether I’ll ever get to see them again. It’s one
thing to be away from home for years knowing you can go back any time you want.
Once you think you might not be able to do it, it starts to gnaw at you. Or at
me, anyway.”

“See, that seems odd to me,”
Strefer said, returning to her work. “I have friends that I left behind in the
Guildlands when I came to Tolenor, not to mention professional colleagues, but
no real family, as you think of it. Would I like to make it back home someday
to see those people and show them what I’ve done? Sure. But I’m not compelled
to do it because of any kind of blood ties.”

“All right, then, explain it to
me,” Rurek said, shifting so that he was looking at her while she worked. “Tell
me how children are raised in the Guildlands,” he said, pausing. “Is that paper
you’ve got? What is that?”

“Later,” she said, stuffing the
pages into the flap she had begun to sew inside of his coat. “While I finish,
I’ll tell you about how I grew up. You talk about your mother and father, your
siblings? We don’t really have concepts like that in the Guildlands. Sure, some
woman gave birth to me and some man did his part so that I was conceived, but
neither one of them raised me.”

Rurek shook his head. “You don’t
even know who your parents are?”

“I told you, the concept of
‘parents’ really doesn’t exist where I come from. But to answer your question,
yes, I do know who the two people who produced me were. I’ve met who you would
call my mother once or twice. She is in the Guild of Musicians. I met her after
seeing her sing at a concert once. She has a beautiful voice. Shame I didn’t
inherit it,” Strefer said with a laugh. “The one you would call my father was
from the Guild of Soldiers. He was killed fighting the Azkiri, from what I
learned, before I could meet him.”

“I’m so sorry,” Rurek said with
genuine compassion.

Strefer shook her head. “You still
don’t get it. I’m not talking about someone like your father, who helped raise
you, taught you things, protected you. To me he was never more than a name, and
may have always been that way. I’m just answering your question about whether I
knew who my biological ancestors were.”

“All right, then. No more sympathy
from me,” Rurek said jokingly.

“I’ll take sympathy, thank you, but
at the appropriate time and place.”

“Duly noted,” he said. “So, with
that bridge crossed, who did raise you, then?”

“Not surprisingly,” Strefer said, starting
on the final side of the pocket in which the pages had been hidden, “there’s a
Guild for that. It’s called the Guild of Midwives, but it really includes a lot
more people than that. Men and women, both, you know. Midwives, wet nurses,
caregivers, you name it. They’re the ones that do the hard work of actually
raising children.”

“But there’s more to it than that,
surely,” Rurek said. “Parenting is more than just making sure your daughter
gets fed and has a roof over her head at night.”

“It does in Kerkondala, because
your society is structured around individual family units. Families just don’t
exist like that in the Guildlands. Have you ever wondered about my last name?”
she asked.

“Not really,” he said. “I know it
sounds a lot like the city where you’re from, but that’s not uncommon in the
Arbor or Telebria.”

“Except that, in the Arbor or
Telebria, a similarity between a name and place is probably due to that
person’s ancestors naming the town. Quants isn’t a family name, Rurek. It’s a
short way of telling people I was born in Quantstown. My actual full, official
name, as it appears on the rolls now, is Strefer of Quantstown of the Guild of
Writers. Quite a mouthful, huh?”

He nodded. “I guess it is.”

“That Alban who got his head bashed
in? His last name was Ventris, because that’s where he was from. Nothing more.
My point is there is nothing about me that reaches back to some long line of
ancestors, like you have.”

“Who named you, then?” Rurek asked.

Strefer stopped sewing for a
moment, looked out over the water, and said, “You know, I’m not sure. Never
occurred to me to ask. From as young as I can remember, I was Strefer. I could
change it if I wanted to, but it works just as well as any other name, doesn’t
it?”

“No argument here,” he said. “Rurek
is an old family name, goes back generations. I hate it.”

“Why don’t you change it, then?”
Strefer asked, returning to her task.

“Because,” Rurek said, stopping for
a second to think about it, “it’s just not done where I come from. Like it or
not, I do have some connection to my distant ancestors to worry about. Besides,
we were talking about you and your childhood. So the Guild of Midwives did the
care and feeding part, right? Then who taught you to read and write and how the
world works and all that?”

“The Guild of Teachers,” she said.
“I don’t know about Arborians, but I’ve heard Telebrians talk about the limited
role teachers play in the education of their children. Makes no sense to me.
The Guild of Teachers is where the experts are, in everything from how to cook
a meal to how to mend your clothes to how to read and write.”

“So you went to school, then?”

“Of course,” she said. “But that’s
not the only place you learn things. You know that. The members of the Guild of
Teachers work in schools, but also in the dormitories where children live and
all over. They teach adults, too, if they want or need to learn about something
new.”

Rurek did not ask any more
questions and they sat in silence for a few minutes. Finally, he said, “It just
all seems so strange.”

“That’s because it’s not what you
grew up with,” Strefer said, finishing her sewing and handing the coat back to
Rurek. “We are most comfortable with what we know. That’s doubly true when you
talk about things like how we grew up. To me, it sounds strange to hear people
talking about their families and how much they despise a brother or cousin or
whatnot, but will then turn around and defend them from attack by outsiders. It
makes no sense to me.” She stood up and slung her satchel over her shoulder.

“So what is all this, then?” Rurek
asked, holding up his coat.

“Insurance,” Strefer said, before
walking away and back to her cell.

After telling her that they had
much to discuss, Goshen inexplicably had walked away, leaving her alone in the tent.
The time gave her a better chance to become familiar with the periphery of the
common hall. Skins, presumably of beasts killed by Hirrek and his comrades,
were hung at irregular intervals, providing the room with a bit of color, in
addition to further insulation against the cold outside. There were no trophies
of war, at least not that Antrey could tell from a casual examination. It gave
the room a permanence that it did not deserve. She admired the design.

To one side of the room, almost
exactly at a 90-degree angle from where Ushan’s throne sat, there was a small
table with a short stool at one side. Antrey crossed the room and saw that it
was covered with some papers and some other familiar objects—her notebook, the
bottle she had used for carrying water, and the elaborate dagger that had been
Alban’s. She concluded that this must be where Goshen normally sat when
business was conducted here, when he was not in front of Ushan translating.

She was just about to reach out and
grab her things when Goshen came back into the tent, carrying another stool
similar to the one at the table. He sat the stool down across the table from
the one already there and motioned for Antrey to sit. As she did, he scampered
away again, but only after he had taken her notebook with him, stashed under
the layers of his clothing. Curiously, he left the other things, including the
dagger, in plain view. Before Antrey could ask a question, he was gone. She sat
and sighed. She had nowhere else to be, but she hated being out of whatever
loop Goshen was operating in.

When Goshen slipped into the tent
again, who knows how many minutes later, he had a wooden bowl in each hand, out
of which steam was rising. He placed them on the table, one in front of Antrey
and another in front of his stool, before he sat down. In the bowl was a
combination of large chunks of meat—from the elk, Antrey assumed—and
vegetables, all clinging together in a dark thick stew. It didn’t smell good,
but after weeks of dining sporadically on whatever she could find in the wild,
Antrey was not going to complain.

Goshen pulled what looked like a
small loaf of bread from somewhere unseen, tore it in half, and handed one half
to Antrey. “Now,” he said as he sat down, “we may talk.”

“Is that how it works?” Antrey asked.
“You quiz me for all the information you can get before I get thrown out of
camp in the morning?” She tried to slurp some stew out of the bowl but it was
so hot that it nearly burned her. She reached for the dagger, unsheathed it,
and used it to spear a chunk of meat, letting it hang in the chill air until it
cooled enough to be eaten.

Goshen chuckled while he swallowed.
“That is dependent on many things. I will be questioning you, trust me,” he
said, scooping out some hunk of vegetable from the bowl in front of him with
his fingers. “But I do not think you will be leaving the camp so soon,” he
said, downing the bite. “Not if I can help it.”

“Is that so?” Antrey asked. He
nodded, but did not answer otherwise. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Goshen,
and believe me, I’m thankful for all the help you’ve given me, but you don’t
look like you have a lot of authority around here. Ushan was pretty specific
that this clan doesn’t want anything to do with me.”

“That is what seems to be true,
from your view, I am certain,” he said, scooping another bite. “Great Mother is
many things. However, stubborn and unchanging she is not. She is receptive to
the counsel of others, which is one of the things that makes her such an
effective thek.”

“I’ll take your word on that. But
why should I think that you’re one of the people she listens to? You don’t even
have Dost colors,” she said, pointing to Goshen’s long black braid. “You look
as much the outsider as I do.”

Goshen thought for a moment while
he fished another piece of something out of his stew. “Outsider, insider,” he
said, before slurping it down. “Sometimes those who appear to others as
outsiders are actually the furthest inside. I would think that you, of all
people, would know that.”

Antrey stared at him blankly, chewing
on a tough piece of elk.

“Look at yourself,” he said. “A
halfbreed girl, clearly neither Neldathi nor Altrerian. Yet you journeyed to
Tolenor and became the assistant to the clerk of the Grand Council of the
Triumvirate. You worked and lived with the keeper of their secrets. It was your
position as an outsider that allowed you to get so close. Is that not correct?”

“I suppose so,” Antrey said,
nodding in agreement. “You picked that up from reading my journal, I assume?”
She punctuated the question by stabbing another piece of meat with the dagger.

Goshen nodded, then picked up his
bowl and drank down a long swallow of stew.

“No offense,” Antrey continued,
“but I thought Neldathi weren’t able to read. I’ve heard so much about the oral
traditions of the clans, after all.”

“Typical Altrerian nonsense,”
Goshen said spitefully. “They have the facts right, but draw the wrong
conclusions. Neldathi can obviously learn to read. I have done it. You have
done it, too. There is nothing in our nature that makes it impossible. But ask
yourself this question, Antrey: Is it practical?”

“How couldn’t it be?” Antrey said.

“Look around you,” Goshen said,
gesturing around the great circular tent. “This meeting lodge is the height of
Neldathi architecture. Not just for the Dost, but for all clans. Neldathi
society is one that is ever moving. We constantly roam from place to place to
place, living off the land. We have no libraries. No homes with rooms solely
dedicated to the storage of objects. We have no means to transport books, so we
have no need for reading. Our libraries walk on two legs or ride. They carry
the history of our people, our laws and customs, all in their heads. And they
pass them down from generation to generation. All that, with no wasted space.
Does that make sense?”

“The Speakers of Time,” Antrey
said, in answer to his question. She had read about the Speakers, but only a
little bit, and had only vague memories of them from her youth.

“That is the name they are given,
yes,” Goshen said.

“I can understand that,” Antrey
said, “but then why did you learn to read, at least? I assume you can write,
too.”

“In due time,” Goshen said, sopping
up what was left of the stew in his bowl with the hunk of bread.

Antrey was tempted to press him on
this, but decided to let it go for now. “If you say so. Explain this to me,
then. How does this insider and outsider business apply to you?”

Goshen sat up and ensured that his
braid was on display. “As you have observed, I do not display the colors of
this clan. I do not display the colors of any clan. The clan colors are not
just a mark of identification, Antrey, they are a visual promise. A pledge of
loyalty to the clan, a promise to sacrifice my life for it, if need be. Did you
know that people may move from one clan to another if they choose?”

“No,” Antrey admitted. “I always
thought that the clans were blood relations. If you are born in Dost clan you
remain Dost until you die.”

Goshen narrowed his eyes and
scoffed. “More Altrerian nonsense.”

“Whatever,” Antrey said, sliding past
his condescension. “So people can move from one clan to another, but what does
that tell me about you? I’ve never read about Neldathi without any clan before.
Are you some kind of rogue?”

“I am no rogue,” Goshen said,
astonished by the allegation. “I have chosen to belong to no clan because, in a
way, I want to belong to all of them. My destiny is to serve something greater
than the individual clans, Antrey. As is yours.”

Antrey let that equivalency bounce
off her for now. She had to assume that Goshen had read all of her journal and
interpreted it correctly. “So what is this destiny you’re serving?”

“I serve the one true god, the
Maker of Worlds, she who created all that you see and set it in motion,” he
said, as if repeating a mantra of some kind.

Antrey said nothing, but her face
must have given her away.

“You do not approve?” Goshen asked
with a warm smile. “Has that godless Altrerian society infected you so,
Antrey?”

Antrey sighed. “So you’re some kind
of priest or something?”

“Not in the sense that you mean,
no,” he said, “nor am I a conventional Neldathi shaman. The word I prefer to
use when describing myself is ‘acolyte.’ I am a conduit through which the Maker
of Worlds works her will. There is a similar word in Altrerian—prophet—but I do
not prefer it.”

“Why is that?” Antrey asked. “Too
much pressure to produce accurate prophecies?”

“Precisely,” Goshen said, smiling
slightly. “The most important thing is to manage expectations. Prophets are
very bad for that.”

Antrey fought the urge to say
something clever about prophets and gods, but decided to keep it to herself. If
her best bet for integrating herself into the clan was a deranged holy man, so
be it. “I’ve never heard of this Maker of Worlds. Is she the protector of the
Dost?”

Goshen shook his head. “You
misunderstand me. The Maker of Worlds is not the protector of the Dost. She is
not the protector of any single clan, or even of the Neldathi people as a
whole. The Maker of Worlds is the one true god. She is the protector of us all,
in a sense. Of all Neldathi. Of all Altrerians, whether they believe it or not.
Of all such as yourself, as well, of course.”

Antrey appreciated the fact that he
sidestepped the word “halfbreed” in referring to her. Regardless, this Maker of
Worlds did not fit with her knowledge of Neldathi religious beliefs. “I must be
missing something,” she said. “Everything I’ve read about Neldathi religion, or
even Altrerian religion for that matter, says that each group worshiped an
entire host of gods. The main difference between the Altrerian and Neldathi
views of the gods was that the Altrerians recognized them all equally, while
the Neldathi clans each had a particular relationship with a god or goddess who
acted as a protector. Before the Great Awakening, of course,” she said, almost
as an afterthought.

He nodded. “You are not mistaken.
That is the current state of affairs, I am afraid.”

“Then where does you Maker of
Worlds fit in?” Antrey asked.

“Let me ask you a question,
Antrey,” he said, leaning in over the table as if he had a great secret to
share. “How much do you really know about the gods and goddesses?”

“Not a lot, I must admit,” Antrey
said. “I don’t even remember the name of the protector god for the Kohar, into
which I was born. Not that it matters very much.”

“Of course it matters,” Goshen
said, his face lighting up. “Alun, the keeper of the two moons, is the
protector of the Kohar. He was a favorite of the Lesser Telebrians as well,
prior to the Great Awakening.”

More fascinating to Antrey than the
details of the Neldathi pantheon was how Goshen came to learn all this. “How do
you know what the Lesser Telebrians did before the Great Awakening? Where did
you read about that? How did you read about that? I think it’s time I learned
something about you, Goshen. After all, you know so much about me.”

“Very well,” Goshen said with a
sigh. “It is only right, if we are to embark on this project together, that you
know as much about me as I know of you.” He leaned back and made himself as
comfortable as possible on the wooden stool. “I was born to the Elein, one of
the two original Neldathi clans. They make their circuit around a large area in
the southwest, between the Mosley Range and the Karn Mountains. I was a sick
child. They said I was born too early to a mother who was not favored by
Barhein, goddess of fertility and protector of the Elein. My mother and father
were shamed by me, so they left me in Port Karn, the Islander city on the
southern coast. The Elein pass near there before turning north for the winter.”

“Port Karn?” Antrey asked. She knew
that there were Islander outposts on the Neldathi coast, but never knew any of
the names. “They would take you in there?”

“More Altrerian nonsense,” Goshen
said with a smirk. “They believe that fear of the Neldathi is a natural and
rational state of mind. That is not true. The Islander cities on the Neldathi
coast are just like any other city. Smaller than you found in Tolenor, no
doubt, but they were still centers of trade, commerce, and learning. There is a
small, but vital, Neldathi population that lived in those cities. Some live
free from clan allegiance, as I do. Others maintain their markings. I was taken
in by a kind couple who claimed no allegiance.”

Antrey realized that she and Goshen
had more in common than she could have imagined. She pressed on. “Were you
educated in Port Karn?”

“Not in any rigorous, formal
tradition,” he said. “My parents could read, but only in a basic way. They used
it for work only and taught their children to see it the same way. Then, when I
was grown but still fairly young, I met a trader from the Slaisal Islands with
whom I became close. He came to Port Karn once every year and he would bring me
books. Altrerian books. I read every book be brought me, usually over and over.
I absorbed them like a tree’s roots absorb water. There was one school in Port
Karn back then, run for the benefit of the Islander children who were there. I
convinced the teacher to let me into the building just before or after classes
so I could get books out of the library.”