Shaman's Crossing (5 page)

My father had strictly forbidden my sisters to witness the passing of the penal trains, for the prisoners included rapists and perverts as well as debtors, pickpockets, whores, and petty thieves. There was no sense in exposing my sisters to such rabble, but on that day Sergeant Duril and I sat our horses for the better part of an hour, watching them wend their dusty way along the river road. He did not say that my father had wished me to witness that forced emigration to the east, but I suspected it was so. Soon enough, as a cavalry trooper, I’d have to deal with those whom King Troven had sentenced to be settlers on the lands around his eastern outposts. My father would not send me to that duty ignorant.

Two supply wagons led the penal coffle making its centipedian way toward us. Mounted men patrolled the length of the winding column of shackled prisoners. At the very end, choking their way through the hanging dust, teams of mules pulled three more wagons laden with the women and children who belonged to the convicts trudging their way toward a new life. When a trick of the wind carried the sounds of the prisoners to us, they sounded more animal than human. I knew that the men would be chained day and night until they reached one of the king’s far outposts on the frontier. They’d be fed bread and water, and know a respite from their journey only on the Sixday of the good god.

“I feel sorry for them,” I said softly. The heat of the day, the chafing shackles, the hanging dust; sometimes it seemed a miracle to me that any of the criminal conscripts survived their long march to the borderlands.

“Do you?” Sergeant Duril was disdainful of my soft sentiment. “I feel sorrier for the ones left behind in the city, to continue being scum the rest of their lives. Look at them, Nevare. The good god decrees for every man what he is to do. But those down there, they scoffed at their duty, and ignored the skills of their fathers. Now the king offers them a second chance. When they left Old Thares, they were prisoners and criminals. If they weren’t caught and hanged, they’d probably be killed by their fellows, or live out their lives like rats in a wall. But King Troven has sent them away from all that. They’ll walk a long hard way, to be sure, but it’s a new life that awaits them in the east. By the time they get there, they’ll have built some muscle and endurance. They’ll work on the King’s road for a year or so, pushing it across the Plains, and then they’ll have earned the right to their freedom and two acres of land. Not bad wages for a couple of years of toiling. King Troven’s given them all a new chance to be better than they were, to own land of their own and to live a clean life, to follow in their fathers’ trades as they should have, with their old crimes forgotten. You feel sorry for them? What about the ones who refuse the king’s mercy, and end up with the chopping block taking their thieving hands off, or living in debtors’ prison with their wives and little ones alongside them? Those are the ones I pity, the ones too stupid to see the opportunity our king offers them. No. I don’t pity those men down there. They walk a hard road, and no mistake, but it’s a better road than the one they originally chose for themselves.”

I looked down at the ragged line of chained men and wondered how many truly felt it had been their decision to choose this course. And what of the women and children in the wagons? Had they had a choice at all? I might have pondered longer if Duril had not distracted me with the terse word “Messenger!”

I lifted my eyes and looked toward the east. The river snaked off into the distance, and the river road followed its winding course beside it. Passenger coaches, freight wagons, and the post traveled that road. Ordinary mail traveled in wagons for the most part; letters to soldiers from their families and sweethearts in the west and their replies made up the most of it. But King Troven’s couriers traveled that road as well, bearing important dispatches between the far outposts and the king’s capital in Old Thares to the west. Part of my father’s duty to his king as a landed noble was to maintain a relay station and the change of horses for the messengers. Often the dispatch riders were invited up to my father’s manor for the evening after they had passed on their messages, for my father enjoyed being kept up to date on events at the frontier, and the messengers were glad of his generous hospitality in the harsh land. I hoped we would have company for the evening meal; it always enlivened the conversation.

Along the river road, a man and horse were coming at a gallop. A thin line of dust hung in the still air behind them, and the horse was running heavily in a way that spoke more of spurs and quirt than willing effort. Even at our distance, I could see the billowing of the rider’s short yellow cape that marked him as the king’s courier and notified every citizen of the duty to speed him on his way.

The watcher at the relay station below us had spotted the oncoming rider. I heard the clanging of the bell, and in the next moment the inhabitants of the station sprang into action. One ran into the stable, to emerge almost immediately leading a long-legged horse wearing a tiny courier’s saddle. He held the fresh mount at the ready while another man dashed out from the station bearing a water skin and a packet of food for the rider. A fresh rider emerged, his face already swathed against the dust, his short bright yellow cape flapping in the river wind. He stood by his mount and waited for the message to be passed to him.

We watched as the messenger approached the station and then saw a frightening thing. The messenger only pulled in when his horse was abreast of the fresh mount. His feet never touched the ground as he lunged from one saddle to the next. He shouted something to the waiting men, leaned down to snatch up the packet of provisions and water skin, and then set spurs to the new horse. In an instant he was gone, galloping down the center of the road and through the penal coffle. Shackled men and mounted guards surged out of his way as the courier passed. There were angry shouts and cries as a section of the chained men were trampled by one of the mounted guards when they did not get out of the way quickly enough to avoid the horse. Heedless of the milling chaos in his wake, the courier was already dwindling to a tiny figure on the ribbon of road leading to the west. I stared after him for a moment, and then glanced back down at the relay station. A stableman was trying to lead the messenger’s horse, but the animal suddenly went down on his front knees, and then rolled onto his side in the dust. He lay there, kicking vaguely at the air.

“His wind’s broke,” Duril said sagely. “He’ll never carry a courier again. Poor beast will be lucky if he lives.”

“I wonder what desperate message he bore, that he rode his horse to death and could not pass it on to a fresh rider.” My mind was already full of possibilities. I visualized night attacks by the Specks on the Wildlands border towns, or a fresh uprising among the Kidona.

“King’s business,” Sergeant Duril said tersely. As we watched, we saw one of the men break free of the group, running toward the manor with something in his hand. A separate message for my father? He knew most of the commanders of the forts on the eastern boundary, and he was kept almost as well apprised of conditions on the frontier as the king himself. I saw curiosity light in the old sergeant’s eyes. Duril glanced at the sun and announced abruptly, “Time for you to go in to your books. We don’t want Master Quills-and-Ink to be looking at me nasty again, do we?”

And with that, he turned his horse’s head away from the river, the road, and the relay station and led me at an easy lope back to the trail that led down to my father’s manor house.

My boyhood home was set on a gentle rise of land that overlooked the river. In an indulgence of my mother, my father had planted scattered trees for two acres around it, poplar and oak and birch and alder. Water hauled up from the river irrigated the trees that both shaded the house and grounds and provided a windbreak from the constant wind. It was a little island of trees in the vast expanse of prairie all around us, green and shady and inviting. Sometimes I thought it looked small and isolated. At other times, it seemed like a green fortress of welcome in the windswept arid lands. We rode toward it, the horses eager now for cool water and a good roll in the paddock.

As Sergeant Duril had predicted, my tutor was standing outside the manor awaiting us. Master Rissle’s arms were crossed on his narrow chest and he was trying to look forbidding. “Hope he don’t wallop ye too hard for being late, young Nevare. Looks like he could be cruel and harsh, him so big and all,” Duril said in quiet derision before we were in earshot of the man. I kept my face straight at his gentle gibe. He knew he should not mock my tutor, an earnest but scrawny young scholar come all the way from Old Thares to teach me penmanship and history and figuring and astronomy. Although Duril would not curb his own disrespectful tongue, he would freely cuff me for daring to smile at it. So I held my amusement inside as I dismounted. I called a farewell to Sergeant Duril as he led our mounts away, and he answered with a vague wave of his hand.

I longed to run and find my father, to discover what news had been so urgent, but I knew that if I did, I would only bring punishment down on myself. A good soldier did his duty and waited for orders from above without speculating. If I ever hoped to command men, I must first learn to accept authority. I sighed and followed my tutor off to my lessons. The academics seemed more tedious than ever that day. I tried to apply myself, knowing that the foundation I built now would support my studies at the King’s Academy.

When the long afternoon of lessons were done and my tutor finally released me, I dressed for dinner and descended. We might live far from any cities or polite society on the Plains, but my mother insisted that all of us observe the proprieties appropriate to my father’s station. Both my parents had been born into noble houses. As younger offspring, they had never expected to hold titles themselves, but their upbringing had left them with a keen awareness of what my father’s elevation to lordship required of them. Only later would I appreciate all the courtesy and manners that my mother had instilled in me, for those lessons enabled me to move more easily at the Academy than did many of my rustic counterparts.

Our family gathered in the sitting room until my father entered. Then he escorted my mother into the dining room and we children followed. I seated my younger sister Yaril while Rosse, my elder brother, held a chair for my elder sister Elisi. Vanze, the youngest at nine years old and my father’s priest son, said the blessing for all of us. Then my mother rang the tiny silver bell beside her place setting, and the servants began to bring in the food.

Our family was “new nobility,” my father lifted by the king himself to lordship for his valor in the wars against the Plainspeople. For this reason, we had no dynasty of family servants. My mother was afraid of Plainspeople and my father did not approve of them mingling with his daughters as servants in our household, so unlike many of the new nobility, we had no servants from the conquered peoples. Instead, he offered house and grounds employment to the cream of his retired soldiers and their wives and daughters. This meant that most of the male servants in our household were elderly or crippled in some way that had left them unfit for military service. My mother would have preferred to hire servants from the cities in the west, but in this my father prevailed, saying that he felt a duty to provide for his men and give them a share of his own good fortune, for without them to lead to glory, he never would have merited the king’s notice. So my mother bowed her head to his will and did her best to school them in the proper ways of serving. She had taken it upon herself, in a few instances, to advertise in the western cities for suitable husbands from the serving classes for the soldiers’ daughters, and in this way we had acquired two young men who could properly wait a table, a valet for my father, and a butler.

I managed to contain my curiosity throughout most of the meal. My father spoke to my mother of his orchards and crops and she nodded gravely at his words. She asked his permission to send to Old Thares for a proper tiring maid for my sisters, now that they were both becoming young ladies. He replied that he would think about it, but I saw him looking at my sisters with a sudden awareness that Elisi was approaching marriageable age and would benefit from greater sophistication in her manners.

As he did at every evening meal, he asked each of his offspring in turn how we had employed our day. Rosse, my elder brother and the heir, had ridden down with our steward to visit the Bejawi settlement at the far north end of Widevale. The remnants of one branch of the formerly migratory people lived there at my father’s sufferance. When my father had first taken them in, the villagers had been mostly women, children, and grandfathers too old to have fought in the Plains wars. Now the children were young men and women, and my father wished to be sure they had useful tasks to occupy them and content them. There had been news from the Swick Reaches of an uprising of young warriors who had become discontented with settled ways. My father had no desire to see a similar restlessness in his nomads. He had recently gifted the Bejawi with a small herd of milk goats, and Rosse was pleased to report that the animals were thriving and providing both occupation and sustenance for the former hunters.

Elisi, my elder sister, was next. She had mastered a difficult piece of music on her harp and begun an embroidery of a Writ verse on a large hoop. She had also sent a letter to the Kassler sisters at Riverbend, inviting them to spend Midsummer week with us, planning a picnic, music, and fireworks in the evening of her sixteenth birthday. My father agreed that it sounded like a most pleasant holiday for Yaril and her and their friends.

Then it was my turn. I spoke of my studies with my tutor and of my exercises with Duril. Almost as an afterthought, I mentioned that we had seen the messenger and cautiously added that I was very curious as to what could prompt such cruel haste. It was not quite a question, but it hung in the air, and I saw both Rosse and my mother hoping for an answer.