The Caravan Road (4 page)

“Ezten, it’s good to see you again,” Alec greeted the leader and gestured him to have a seat after they shook hands.  “Can I pour a drink for you?” he asked his guest.

“You don’t have anything stronger that water, do you?” Ezten the leader asked mournfully, as he did every time he stopped in to visit with Alec, whose reputation as a teetotaler was widely known, and considered one of the most striking things that made him such an oddity among the stops along the caravan route.

As always, Alec pulled out a bottle of distilled spirits that he kept just to serve to Ezten, and placed the bottle on the desk, then motioned for the man to pour some into the glazed tumbler that sat next to the water jug.

“What excitement has erupted in the civilized lands?” Alec asked in an ironic tone.  He had left Avonellene voluntarily three decades earlier, dissatisfied with the governance his own grandson had imposed upon the empire in the years following Caitlen’s death.  Alec had withdrawn from Vincennes to Valeriane, where he held the title o
f duke as a result of a long-prior
reward from Caitlen, a title she had given him in the earliest days of their relationship.  From Valeriane Alec had tried to ignore the oddity and inconsistency that his grandson, Vancove, had imposed on the empire as he and his cronies had turned the palace into a seat of frivolous entertainment and public plundering.

Alec had sat in the ducal palace in Valeriane and listened to the pleas of visiting merchants and minor nobles who came to ask Alec to intervene and admonish his grandson the emperor.  Even though Alec had resisted doing so, Vancove came to hear rumors that Alec was making Valeriane the center of dissent within the empire, so that increasingly cold relationships between the two had finally caused Alec to leave, to wander westward on the quest for a better environment that had taken him first to a long visit to Warm Springs, then to a stop at Black Crag, and finally to the journey that had ended at the
Ridgeclimb
site where he presently lived.

“The new emperor has begun to make some changes,” Ezten told Alec, referring to the grandson of the emperor who Alec had left behind, a man who Alec had never met.  “He’s a weak one.  The nobles are flexing their muscles, and
Lugust
isn’t stopping them.

“He tried to appoint some new nobles from his advisors to give him some counterpunchers, but that isn’t helping.  He appointed a new Duke of Valeriane,” Ezten told Alec, causing his ears to perk up.

“Can he create a new Duke for Valeriane?  Has the old Duke renounced his seat?”
Alec asked.

“No one’s seen the old Duke in years.  He’s a mythical figure; the man would have to be well over one hundred years old.  We’re talking about someone who was married to the Empress Caitlen, and she passed on two or three generations ago herself.”

“Still, the old Duke was a special person,” Alec tried to rebut, speaking about himself to the unknowing Ezten.

“I know, I know,” Ezten replied immediately.  “Everyone in the city is crying about how wonderful the old Duke was – his generosity and his manners and his values, not to mention his God-like powers.  The new Duke has stirred them up; he’s raising levies to go fight on behalf of the emperor, and he’s not gentle about how he recruits.  A lot of families are losing sons to the Duke’s army, and some of their daughters are being treated none-too-respectfully.  And there’s the taxes that have to pay for it all.  The Duke’s already burned through all the riches the old Duke’s steward had saved up and that had just sat unused in the local banks.

“I tell you, the city is a powder-keg, ready to erupt,” Ezten summed up.  ‘I imagine that by the time we haul this load to Oolitan and return with an eastbound load, the city will have something happen – revolt, fire, slaughter, siege…maybe all of them.”

Alec felt his stomach churn at the thought of Valeriane suffering through a tyrant’s rule.  “Is there anything you need from us before you head west?” Alec asked.

“A guarantee of good weather?” Ezten suggested.

“I wish we could offer that,” Alec laughingly responded.

“You’ve done enough, tending to the merchant who got sick.  Ambitious!  That strong-willed one will want to join the next caravan that travels west as soon as possible,” Ezten spoke as he stood.

“We’ll take care of him,” Alec pledged.  The clinic had harbored invalid merchants before, and Alec knew this one was likely to be like most of the others, unhappy, constantly fretting about the safety of his goods, the costs he would incur during his stay at the clinic, and the unfavorable changes that might occur in the market while his journey was delayed.  Alec would have to check on the merchant once the caravan departed, to examine his health and assure him of his security and safety while at the clinic.

Together the two walked out beyond the courtyard of the clinic structure to the broad open corridor in the center of the settlement, where the caravan road passed through.  A double file of oxen-drawn wagons stood ready, surrounded by horses and riders.  Ezten climbed aboard a chestnut gelding with an empty saddle, waved farewell to Alec, and rode out in front of the caravan, then gave a shrill whistle that set the whole collection of vehicles in motion.  Over the course of several minutes the two dozen wagons gradually departed from the clinic, the last civilized settlement they would encounter until they arrived in distant Oolitan, the exotic city that Alec knew only through the reputation passed along by caravan travelers, a reputation not far above civilized, if the free-wheeling, ungoverned,
free-enterprise trade center stories were even partially true.

Once the final wagon had ceased moving, Alec saw that one wagon remained standing near the clinic yard entrance, a forlorn pair of oxen standing patiently harnessed.  Alec walked
around the wagon, noting that it
s bed was neatly covered by a tightly drawn canvas cover.

“Here now, what are you doing so close to that wagon?  Move along,” a shrill voice called.   Alec turned to see a short, scrawny man with an oversized wooden staff approaching rapidly.

“I was just examining it.  I presumed this belongs to the ill merchant who will be staying with us?” Alec stood in place and let the guardian of the wagon come to him.  The man’s face was thin, deeply wrinkled, and his lips were pursed in an expression of profound disapproval.  The staffholder was squinting at Alec as he approached.

“Are you a servant to the merchant?” Alec asked.  “We’ll be pleased to help you arrange storage of the wagon and its contents, and I’m sure there’s a farm nearby where you can place the oxen comfortably.”

“I want to speak to the head man of this way station,” the man replied.  “I want to make sure the very best doctor is sent for; bring one in from Black Crag, or from Vincennes itself.”  He placed a protective hand upon the canvas-cover wagon bed, raising his arm almost above his head to reach above the wooden panels that formed the side of the wagon, unintentionally emphasizing his own small stature.

“Don’t worry friend,” Alec said sincerely.  “There are no doctors in the Avonellene Empire better than those we have here.  Your master is being well tended, I’m sure.”

“Mistress, and she’s being seen by someone so young I imagine he was wearing diapers when I was already a grandfather,” the confrontational servant replied.  “I’d like to talk to the management of this forsaken pile of stones in the middle of nowhere.”

Alec paused to readjust his thinking, to accept the notion of a female trader on the caravan road route.  He’d never heard of one, but he’d never gone out of his way to know the individual merchants and traders that comprised the passengers and cargo that were led back and forth through the mountains.  Given the security the caravan leaders provided, he supposed a lady could take on the role of trader and successfully manage to hold her own among the cut-throat competition that fed off the goods that arrived at either end of the route.

“Your mistress,” Alec corrected himself aloud.  “I’ll be happy to help you,” he said as he saw Partre approaching to either bail him out of the tedious conversation he was trapped in, or to bring some information to Alec.  Partre was good at all that he did as second-in-command of the clinic, and he relieved Alec of innumerable small chores, such as handling unhappy servants.

Today though, Alec felt moved to personally try to help the unseen lady trader and her servant himself.  He waved Partre away before the competent man could reach him; he wanted time to contemplate the news he’d received from Ezten regarding the changing circumstances in Valeriane, and the small tasks involved with serving the trader would give him time to think.  “What would you like to do first?” Alec asked, turning back to the servant.  “Would you like for me to look in upon your mistress, or would you like for me to help you settle the wagon and oxen appropriately?”

The man gave Alec a suspicious glance, but seemed slightly mollified.  “What authority do you have here?”

“I can get most anybody here to listen to me,” Alec modestly deflected the question.  “My name is Alec; what’s yours?”

“Someone as young as you can call me Mr. Graze,” the man answered.

Alec chuckled
at Graze’s perception of his age
.  He’d let his body set its own pace for aging his appearance, and it had settled on an apparent age in his early thir
ties.  Yet Alec’s memory
around multiple lifetimes of experiences, from his lives in the Dominion, Michian, and as the consort to the empress of the Avonellene Empire; it totaled nearly four hundred years, give or take the decades he had spent trapped in the energy realm struggling with a demon, and the time he had lived in exile, falling into madness as he experimented with necromancy.  He had known how to change diapers before Mr. Graze’s own grandparents had been born, but he kept his longevity a secret, except when he returned to Valeriane, where he needed to prove he was still the man who had been the consort to the Empress Caitlen, the man of innumerable superhuman abilities who ruled the city in a modest and judicious manner, even in absentia.

“Mr. Graze, what would you like for me to do?” Alec rephrased his question.

“You can get someone reliable to stay here and keep an eye on the wagon while we go check on the mistress.  I’ll wait here while you run along,” Graze said, leaning his seat against the wagon’s side as he took a firm grasp on the stout staff that he held onto with both hands in front of himself.

With another grin Alec left the man and went to find a stable hand to wait at the wagon, then he let Graze lead him inside the clinic building and along the hallway of the wing where
the sickest
patients were kept.  The man stopped halfway down the hall and knocked softly on a door, rapping the end of his staff against the wood.  A quiet feminine voice inside the room gave a muffled answer than Alec didn’t comprehend, but Graze apparently did.  The man opened the door and walked in, leaving the door ajar for Alec to follow him in.

The room was a typical guest room in the clinic building, with a window providing bright sunlight and a pair of tapestrie
s hanging on the two bare walls o
n either side.  In the bed was a guest who was anything but typical.  An extremely large woman was unconscious in the bed.  She was large by any measurement Alec could attempt to apply.  She was apparently tall, so tall that her feet clearly stuck out beyond the end of the mattress.  She was large in other ways too, causing the sheet that covered her to rise high like a circus tent as it rested upon her anatomy.  And she was broad, leaving little room on either side of her hips as they spread to the edges of the mattress, a mattress that Alec knew had often seen two people snuggle on together in the past.

Alec’s examination followed the course of her body, beginning at the feet and rising up to her head, where his eyes lingered to gaze upon her face.  It was a beautiful face, even as it rested unconscious and turned to one side, though it was flushed red and marred by a grimace of pain, an expression that remained on her face even as she lay unconscious.  The woman was very attractive, Alec could see, and he wondered if that facial beauty was the reason for Mr. Graze’s loyalty to the trader.

He examined her with his health vision as he stepped closer, noticing from the corner of his eye that another person sat in a chair in the interior corner of the room.  The patient was his focus for now, and as he looked at
his patient
, he noted with satisfaction that she had been well-tended by the staff so far.  Her medical condition, he saw, was serious; she had a ruptured appendix, one that must have burst several hours earlier.  She had undoubtedly been in severe pain for some time prior, and Alec concluded that she was lucky to have been as close to his clinic as she had been when the appendix began to go bad.

Gently, Alec reached out and pressed lightly on the woman’s left side, causing the unconscious woman to groan.

“What do you think you’re doing?” both Graze and the other woman in the room asked.

Alec removed his hand and turned.  Graze was standing next to the other visitor in the room, a woman who appeared to be close to the man’s age, and who was built remarkably similar to him, petite and aged.  “I was confirming the medical condition,” Alec answered.  “I believe she has an infected appendix, which has burst, spreading poison throughout her body.

“It appears that her appendix may have burst just a few hours ago.  She probably was in considerable pain for a day or more before that,” he looked at the two companions for confirmation.