Paragaea (17 page)

It took them most of a day to cross the grasslands, during which time Leena insisted that Benu be outfitted with clothing. Their choices were few, and in the end Benu was forced to make do with one of Leena's shirts and Hieronymus's spare set of trousers, cinched at the waist with a belt from Balam's harnesses. Benu assured all involved that he would procure his own supplies once they reached the city, and return their articles undamaged. As ungainly as his costuming was, though, Leena preferred it to the sight of his hairless, sexless nudity.

Leena was curious about their destination, this place called Roam, but neither Balam nor Hieronymus could offer much insight. Each had been visitors in the city, at least once, but while they could wax nostalgic about food tents or tavern wagons they had visited, and could make broad guesses about the economic and social forces that had created such a strange nomadic civilization, they could not address with certainty any of her precise questions. Benu, however, with his encyclopedic knowledge ready at hand, was only too eager to synthesize the facts at his disposal
to provide the answers she sought, though their exchange was perhaps more soliloquy than colloquy, her first question—“What is Roam?”—enough to solicit an hour's worth of responses.

“Roam,” Benu began, “or the Travelers' Nation, is more properly known as Forjus Vardo, or ‘Wagon City' in Roamish, though few know the name and fewer still choose to use it. Most simply call it Roam, and there is no reason why we shouldn't, as well. Roam is a nation always in motion, relocating in some years two or three times, and in other years with every turn of seasons. The laws of Roam dictate that only pure-blooded Roamish can enjoy the pleasures and burdens of citizenship; however, they have relaxed the requirements of what constitutes a Roamish over the generations, so that now anyone who is able-bodied and honest—honest enough, one supposes—can apply to the family of travelers.

“When in motion, the caravan of Roam can be miles wide, and many dozens of miles long. When encamped, the wagons can spread out to cover a hundred square miles. In their numbers, the people of Roam are virtually invincible. They have no standing army or militia, no police beyond a loose collection of distant cousins and demibrothers that regulate interaction between familia and kumpania.

“The arrival of Roam is invariably seen by the more permanent inhabitants of a region as the advent of the greatest circus imaginable, combined with the opening of the world's largest shopping emporium, leavened with the news that a nearby prison for the criminally insane has suddenly and without warning thrown wide its door, releasing all patients and prisoners. The people of the Sakrian plains have a saying: ‘When Roam is in view, take the good with the bad, and win what bargains you may.'”

They reached the edge of Roam by sunset, which Hieronymus insisted was the best time to arrive at any circus or fair.

It was everything Benu had said, and more. Innumerable wagons and caravans, arranged in haphazard patterns of streets or aisles, stretching as far as the eye could see. Lanterns swayed on strands overhead, and firelight danced from bonfires and cooking pits, suffusing everything with a warm, welcoming orange glow. Dogs and children were everywhere underfoot, and the lanes between lines of wagons were thronged with Roamish, the women in swirling skirts that reached to their ankles, their tops often covered with little more than knotted handkerchiefs, while the men wore blousy shirts bound up with broad leather belts over baggy trousers tucked into knee-high boots. And in amongst the Roamish were outsiders, some of them local farmers by their looks, others merchants or travelers from nearby Sakrian villages and townships, all of them with the same slightly bewildered look in their eyes that Leena knew she could not keep from her own expression.

These makeshift lanes of arranged wagons were lined with vendors of every imaginable stripe, peddling everything from weapons, to comestibles, to spirits, to exotic fauna for use either as pets or meat. The vendors worked from the doorways of their own wagons, or from stalls or tents, or even from rugs spread out along the thoroughfare. Some accepted the coins of the nearby communities or the larger Sakrian city-states, some accepted barter or trade in kind, but many followed the traditions of Roam, and accepted only secrets and knowledge. The Roaming Empire was an information-based economy, and with the right hermetic wisdom in hand, anything was available for the asking.

“We'll split up here,” Benu said when they came to the juncture between several aisles. “The Whisper Market, if this incarnation of Roam follows traditional patterns, will be found in that direction”—
he pointed to the north—“and it is there that I am likely to get our best bargains. Here on the periphery the merchants trade primarily in local gossip and trade secrets, but in the Market itself can be found the serious information traders. I should be able to procure both clothing for myself, as well as suitable transportation to bear us further east. Is there anything else I should seek after?”

“The knowledge of how to move between the worlds,” Leena said simply.

Benu sighed wearily, a very natural-seeming gesture for an unnatural being, and shook his head slightly. “I will ask, but I have no confidence in a favorable response. You might busy yourself, in the interval before my return, by seeking the answer to that question yourself, which may serve if nothing else to help establish in your mind the rarity of the information you seek.” He turned to Hieronymus and Balam. “Would either of you care to accompany me? I can carry out my tasks without assistance, but should either of you find that you doubt my abilities to select suitable transport…” He fell silent, leaving the trailing sentence hanging in the air as a question.

“No,” Balam said eagerly, long tongue playing about his fierce incisors. “I'm for the food tents, to see if I can't locate some clay-baked hedgehog.” He shivered slightly at the thought, eyelids closing in remembrance of past raptures. “Oh, or meat pudding!” he hastened to add. “Oh, gods, I'm hungry.”

“Nor I,” Hieronymus said, stepping over to stand beside Leena. “As much as I trust Akilina to look after herself in adverse situations, my experience is that things in Roam are not always as they seem, and it is an unwise visitor who goes about unescorted, their first trip to the Roaming Empire.”

“Likely a wise precaution,” Benu said. “Farewell for the moment, then. Meet me back at this juncture by sunrise, and we will see where we stand.”

Without another word, the artificial man turned on his heel and
headed towards the north, drawing stares as he went. Balam gave Hieronymus and Leena a little wave, and then turned to head off down the broadest aisle, following his nose to the nearest food tents.

“Well, little sister,” Hieronymus said, laying an arm across her shoulder, “it looks like it's just you and me. What would you like to do first?”

Leena looked around them, taking in the maddening crush of the mobile metropolis, the vendors and the peddlers, the tourists and locals ready to be fleeced. She gave a little shrug.

“I think,” she said matter-of-factly, “that I could use a drink.”

Hieronymus was able to locate a
piav
, a drinking tent, a few aisles to the west, and in short order he and Leena were sitting on either side of a rough-hewn wooden table, tankards of some sort of fortified wine in hand, their packs in the hard-packed dirt at their feet.

“Cheers,” Hieronymus said, raising his tankard in a toast.

“Za vawe zdorov'e,” Leena answered in Russian, clinking her tankard with his.
To your health.

The wine was both sour and cloyingly sweet on the tongue, but it warmed Leena from the inside out as it coursed down her throat, and she could feel her extremities tingle minutely as the spirits did their work.

Leena let out a ragged sigh, and felt herself relax by centimeters, her shoulders slowly slumping, the tension in her neck slowly easing.

“This is such an odd world,” she said, “this Paragaea of yours. So much of it familiar, so much of it strange. Men and beasts such as we knew on Earth, walking side by side with creatures from prehistory, and beings who might exist only in nightmares. How is it possible?”

“That's a question that's puzzled me many a long night, little sister,” Hieronymus answered. “When I first arrived here, washed up
like flotsam on the shores of Drift, I thought myself in a wholly alien land, where I would find nothing like what I had known on Earth. Over the years, though, learning what I have of the gates between the worlds, I've come to understand that countless others have fallen here from Earth. Not just men and women, but animals, plants, and machines. What I still fail to grasp, though, and what no sage of Paragaea has yet been able to answer, is why our two worlds are so connected. It is a mystery that still plagues my thoughts, in quiet hours.”

“I wonder sometimes, Hero, if I'll ever return to Earth and discharge my duty.”

“Why ever would you wonder that?” Hieronymus sipped his wine, looking genuinely confused.

“Well, I suppose because it seems a very real possibility, if not even probability. These long weeks—months, I suppose I should say—that I have been traipsing around this strange world, and I've yet to come near a glimmer of hope that anyone knows the way between the worlds. Lots of hints and opinions, lots of myth and legend, but nothing concrete, nothing substantive. My duty as a cosmonaut and a loyal Soviet requires that I return and report what I have learned about this strange world, but I have begun to fear that that duty will go forever undischarged.”

Hieronymus shrugged. “In the years that I have wandered across this circle of lands, I have had to accept one simple truth of life on Paragaea: Nothing is impossible. Improbable, perhaps, but not without the realms of possibility. I have seen such sights in these years as to beggar the imagination, and been forced time and time again to accept the reality of the most unreal situations. And if nothing is impossible, then given enough time and opportunity, anything can and will happen…including your finding a safe passage back home to Mother Russia.”