Читать книгу The Windsingers Series: The Complete 4-Book Collection - Megan Lindholm - Страница 16

Salt meat and cold measured their days. The grays grew thin, Sigurd becoming more snappish, Sigmund more docile with privation. Ki re-bandaged Vandien’s face at intervals with the remaining scraps of tunic. The slash was red across his olive skin, but it stayed closed and did not ooze or swell. The grain bags became empty too fast, but the team traveled much farther in one day than they would have pulling the wagon in two. By days, Vandien sat upon Sigmund’s wide back and wove stories for Ki on his story string. Sometimes she remembered to smile at the amusing parts, and sometimes he told them for the benefit of Sigmund’s flicking ears. At those times, Ki was busy weaving stories for herself. A dozen times she imagined her confrontation with Rhesus. She would deflate that pompous little man, and then he would admit to her who had hired him for his dirty little bit of deception. And Nils. For she was sure it had been Nils. From Nils she would demand her accounting, not only for this attempt on her own life, but also payment for Haftor’s. But there Ki’s thought soon eddied and swirled pointlessly. What could she demand of the old man as fit atonement? Was there anything she could take from him that would assuage that gnawing feeling of injustice within her? Another Ki would have been wolfish for his life. But that Ki would also have burned with a white-hot anger. The Ki that rode in front of Vandien only felt a sense of a task left incomplete. She felt a compulsion to tie up the loose ends, to put a final stamp on this series of injuries and revenges. To be done with it all.

The trail on this side of the mountains was more direct in its route. They came down through wooded country that let them kindle a fire, even though they had nothing to cook over it. Game seemed plentiful on this side, but Ki would allow Vandien no time to pursue it. She pushed on toward her goal relentlessly, counting still the days before her freight would be overdue.

There came a morning when Vandien glimpsed the rising smoke of a chimney far down their day’s path. He gave a whoop that startled both horses. Ki glared at him.

‘An inn, a Human inn! It’s called Three Pheasants. Ah, tonight, Ki, we shall have a fire, and hot food and cold beer, and beds under a roof. And what a tale I shall have to tell Micket, who runs the inn.’

Ki pulled in Sigurd slightly, to sit looking down the slope of the mountain over the tops of the snow-frosted trees. She could make out the clear white of an opening in the trees, a cleared path of ground surrounding the inn. The smoke from the inn’s chimney was a grayish haze against the pale blue sky. She nudged Sigurd on again. ‘We shall reach the inn after noon, but before nightfall,’ she pointed out.

‘With time to order up a hot tub of water and soak before we go to the common room to tell tales and eat fresh meat and drink. And these beasts will have the clean straw and fragrant hay they so richly deserve.’

Ki made a sour face at Vandien’s sybaritic tone. ‘I’m not in the habit of sleeping at inns, and the pass cost me more time than I had reckoned on. I have to keep on my way, Vandien.’

He heaved a sigh of resignation. ‘Well, at least we shall be able to take on some fresh supplies and get a kettle. Must we press on to Diblun so fast, Ki? I tell you, the man will not be glad to see you.’

‘I must.’ Ki accented the pronoun, glanced across at Vandien. ‘And you know, as I do, that our trails part soon. I will be going to Diblun. Your road to Firbanks would be in the opposite direction, if I am not mistaken. I have never been there.’

‘I have no pressing business that commands me to be there by a certain day.’ Vandien forced joviality into his voice. ‘We can settle your business first.’

‘No.’

Vandien looped up his story string, put it into his pocket. Ki tried to see his face, but he turned it from her.

‘You have never rebuked me,’ Ki struggled, picking words. She felt the nails of her fingers digging into her palms. ‘You have never talked of what I owe you, never cast it up to me that your face … that there will be a scar always …’

He did not turn to her. ‘Part of my offer, remember? To never give you anything that I could not give freely.’

‘Damn you!’ Ki hissed. ‘Vandien, cannot you see it? It would be empty between us. I am not ready to take a man. Desire is dead in me. I cannot pretend. I would not.’

‘I don’t recall offering myself to you in that capacity.’ Vandien spoke quietly. ‘The offer was made as a friend. Nothing more.’ He looked straight ahead as he rode. A rush of blood dyed Ki’s cheeks, and she was torn between anger and embarrassment.

‘It was a natural assumption for me to make!’ she blazed at him.

‘Only if it was in your mind before I made my offer,’ Vandien countered loftily.

The truth of his words silenced Ki. Damn the man! Must he always voice the words that brought her the most discomfort? His eyes were still fixed far down the trail. She was glad she did not have to meet his eyes. He raised a pale hand to his mouth to cover a cough. Ki stared fixedly between Sigurd’s ears until the noises of his choking fit could not be ignored. Then she turned stern eyes on him, to find that he was barely able to keep his seat and cover his laughter.

‘Damn you!’ she cried in fury, and swung at him so violently that she found herself sliding down Sigurd’s broad shoulder. Vandien’s hand under her arm, hoisting her back to her seat, was no comfort.

Ki jogged her heels against Sigurd, and he moved out ahead of Sigmund. Her back was arrow-straight as she rode on before Vandien. Her hood covered her still reddened ears.

‘In case you have forgotten,’ he called to her in a totally unrepentant voice, ‘my offer specified that I would never give you anything with any thought of repayment, or debt invoked. And that was what I asked of you in return. That you would never give me anything that you did not want to give.’

‘Until you gave me a big belly, and I gave you a child, and we could each accuse the other of violating our agreement!’ Ki did not look back as she spoke.

Vandien clucked his tongue. ‘Are you still thinking of me in that capacity? Don’t give it another thought, Ki. If I had the ability to do that to any woman, I would not be roaming the roads now. I would have inherited my parents’ lands, instead of them going to my cousin. And if I chose to roam, when I returned I would not be an embarrassment to my uncle.’

Ki shrank from the edged affability of his tone. She slowed Sigurd until his pace matched Sigmund’s and the two were abreast. She tried to meet Vandien’s eyes, but he kept them away from her face. The slender story string came out of his pocket as if by magic.

‘And now,’ he orated minstrel-style, ‘I shall tell to thee the tale of the son of the Vandet and Dienli.’

The string leaped and settled on his fingers, and he held it up for her, a sign on each of his hands. ‘Thus was he named, for Van the first son, and Dien also.’ Ki’s unwilling eyes were drawn to the string, captured in its mesh.

‘They were proud at the birth of their son,’ Vandien went on, holding up the complicated star that, for his people, signified birth. ‘He was marked with the sign of the Hawk from his birth, and they judged it a sign of good fortune.’ The string flipped and settled. But for his graven face and stony eyes, Ki could have believed that he was telling her stories with the string, showing her the remembrance keys as he went along, as he had now for days. ‘Vandet and Dienli celebrated their adulthood, their joining, and his birth for many days. But Dienli was to die when the child was too young to even remember the color of her eyes. (But they tell me, Ki, they were as dark as my own.) And Vandet was to fall from his horse in a hunt before the boy was tall enough to pull back the string of a bow. The care of the boy passed to his uncle until the boy was old enough to prove himself a man.

‘Now I digress to tell you the customs of my wondrous people: A boy becomes a man when he sires a child. A girl is a woman when she bears. And until a child is produced, the act of mating is the healthy play of normal children. No binding may occur until a child acknowledged by both is born. No child may inherit until he has supplied the next heir for the property. Now, as the lands to be inherited were large and the boy was the sole inheritor, there was much anxiety that the boy’s hands should be on the reins as soon as possible. An easy matter, to make a baby grow in a woman’s womb. But the boy’s uncle would take no chances. He would permit no young girls who might be too young to bear, or woman who had not proven her ability to reproduce. He selected instead for the boy suitable women, older women, widows whose men had died, women who had proved themselves fertile, some with children nearly as old as the boy. And he was put to them like an unproven bull put to a series of cows. At first it was done with dignity. The boy would first meet the woman, speak to her, know her a few days before it was demanded of him. He found it an awkward thing, to be bedded with women that reminded him of a mother he had never known and to know that the first to conceive by him would become his life’s partner. It made the boy’s task … difficult. As months passed, and women passed, the pace became more frantic, the uncle constantly reminding the boy of the shame he risked if his failures became known. The boy had a long string of names to pass on – it was a matter of honoring his forebears. The boy became unsure. The women the uncle could find became less tolerant, and more mocking. Until at last a woman went to the uncle and told him that she would waste no more time waiting to be studded by a young gelding.’

‘Enough,’ said Ki quietly. Vandien turned a cool, empty eye on her above his smiling mouth.

‘Do not interrupt the story, Ki. Did you like the last sign I showed you? It means gelding. Like the horse you bestride. Now, attend while I finish.

‘Word spread, of course. To keep as much of the name intact as possible it was necessary that the boy’s cousin inherit. He had produced a fine, fat baby a year before by a sweet and wild little girl in a nearby village. (It seemed to give neither of them any problem.) The inconvenient boy left quietly, and when he infrequently returns, he is given enough money to let him disappear again. One does not encourage family disgraces to hang about the doorstep. And so the story has a happy ending.’

Vandien snapped the string flat between his hands. It snaked back into this pocket.

‘Vandien, I am sorry …’

‘That I am a gelding? But I am not, of course. It was only a surfeit of overripe sweets. I tell you the story just to show you that I would not ask of you anything you would not give willingly. I would not ask such an act of anyone.’

‘Enough, man!’ Ki snapped. Then she went on more gently. ‘To say I am sorry is not enough. It is the greatest cruelty I have ever heard done to a child. But my pity …’

‘Keep your pity. That isn’t what I asked for.’

‘I will not take anyone into my life. I have no room for it. I will not offer that which I cannot deliver. The tasks I have before me are for me alone. I have no life to share.’

‘Choose life, Ki. Choose it one more time.’

The inn yard came into view. A light snow lay on the frozen ground. Wheel tracks and hoofmarks scarred the open yard, and a very young stable boy swung on a gate. It was a battered, homey place, more welcoming than the Dene inn had been. The stable boy stared at them as they pulled in their huge mounts. Ki slid down Sigurd’s shoulder. Vandien attempted a dignified dismount, only to have to drop the last part of it.

‘Shall we go in?’

‘No. I have unfinished business to attend to.’ She stepped forward, embracing Vandien quickly, awkwardly. She stepped back to Sigurd quickly. ‘You will be able to reach your home?’ Her words seemed to care more than her voice.

Vandien stared at her. He did not offer her a leg up, but forced her to clutch Sigurd’s mane and scramble up him in a most undignified manner.

‘Of course,’ Vandien dropped his words softly in the snow. ‘There are folk enough hereabouts that know my name, if not my face anymore. I shall be fine.’

‘I am glad of that. Fare well.’ She did not look back. Vandien stood in the frozen inn yard, watching after her. Sigmund trailed obediently behind Sigurd without need of a lead rope. A small smile came to Vandien’s lips. He knew Ki better than she knew herself. Any moment now, she would rein the horses in, would pause, and then would turn back for him. He would be waiting. A knowing smile flickered over his face. He hastily wiped it away. The grays were growing smaller in the distance. Ki’s words had had a fine ring to them, but he knew what was in her heart. Ki sat straight and ridiculously small on the immense beast. The stubby tails of the grays, docked for their pulling, switched as they walked.

Vandien watched the empty trail, waiting for them to come back from around the bend. The cold began to nibble at him. He pulled his hood up tighter, thrust his hands deep into the cloak pockets. He drew one hand out slowly in disbelief. He looked at the three silver minteds on his palm and remembered the awkwardness of Ki’s hug. He turned eyes of pain and anger to the empty road. He raised his hand high to dash the coins into the snow. But instead, his fist sank slowly in defeat. He tossed the coins instead to the amazed stable boy. His shoulders slumped as he wandered to the door of the inn. Unfinished business, indeed.

Rhesus’s man stared at the unkempt woman on the door’s threshold. Two gaunt, gray horses wandered free in the street before the door. The woman’s cloak was rent as badly as any street beggar’s. Her long brown hair was a tangled mass that straggled out on both sides of her neck beneath her hood. Her face was pinched and drawn. Her green eyes burned.

‘He did not bid me to watch for anyone coming to deliver merchandise,’ the man told her suspiciously. Slowly the tall wooden door began to swing on its greased hinges. ‘Wait here. Let me ask him if he expects you.’

‘Exactly what I wish to ask him myself,’ Ki objected. The man recoiled from contact with her dusty clothes as she squirmed past him under his arm. She prowled up the tiled hall like a hunting cat, peering in first one narrow doorway and then another. She gave the waiting man a glare. She had no patience left for civilized behavior. She had not paused since she left the inn, but had forced the grays on, making them subsist on what small pasturage they could find in the snow-sprinkled meadows. She had blotted out thinking by constant action. She had not even taken time to make herself clean. She had pushed on to this confrontation, and would not be cheated of it.

‘Rhesus!’ she bellowed. Her voice echoed strangely. The man behind her scurried away down a side corridor, as if he did not wish to be present when his master found a madwoman loose in the house. Ki padded down the hallway. She heard a sudden rustle of clothing and a woman’s voice raised in a whisper of alarm. She stepped to the doorway of that room, but Rhesus himself suddenly filled it. His pudgy hands danced nervously up the front of his loosened shirt. His fat spider body jounced upon his skinny legs.

‘Ki!’

All the answers rattled across his graying face. It sagged flabbier as she smiled at it. From inside her shirt she drew the small leather pouch, tumbled the gems out onto her hand. Her eyes did not leave his face as she held them out for his inspection. ‘All there, Rhesus. And no doubt fully as lovely and priceless as when I left Vermintown with them.’

‘No doubt,’ he agreed nervously. But he reached no anxious hand to seize them. Ki shifted her hand, let the stones tumble about in her palm.

‘I shall not bore you with the perils I encountered on my way here. You know I have never raised my price because I found a road more difficult than I had bargained it to be. That is the business of a teamster – to know the roads well enough to strike the bargain beforehand. And it is the merchant’s business to know what he can afford to pay for such a job.’

‘Of course, of course.’ He glanced back nervously at the room he had just left, then stepped forward suddenly to indicate another door. Ki watched him quickly gather up the reins of control, saw his face tighten as he convinced himself that she suspected nothing. Already he was regaining his aplomb, taking control of the situation. ‘Would you care for food, Ki, a little wine perhaps? I have ripe fruit from …’

‘No,’ Ki cut in. ‘Money, and a little talk. That would satisfy me best, Rhesus.’

He nodded quickly, his nervousness baring itself again in the tremble of his jowls. He trotted a few steps down the hall toward the doorway he had indicated before. Ki did not budge. She did not care if it troubled him to have her so near his nest. She casually held up one of the gems between a thumb and finger, looked at it critically. ‘I know very little of gems, Rhesus. Of that I am sure you are aware. Where would a person of my background find the opportunity to become a judge of such things? But I have an eye for beauty. Look at it, Rhesus. Blue as the sky. No, bluer than that – blue as a diving Harpy. How shall we value a gem such as this? Worth a woman’s life, or shall we say a man’s blood?’

Rhesus saw it all sliding away from him. His thin legs were trembling under his bulk, threatening to collapse. His pale face went green, in contrast to his gaudy clothing. Ki met his eyes calmly, her face as untroubled as a spring day, her mouth smiling sweetly. She watched his plump face ripple with emotion. But he would retain his bluff to the last coin.

‘This way, Ki. Let us settle our accounts.’ There was a tremble to his trot as he hurried her down the hallway. He led her into a plain room that understated the wealth of the house. The floor was tiled a deep, rich brown. Tapestries of feasts and huntings draped the walls. No window admitted natural light or spying glances. A tall cupboard stood in one corner, its shining dark wood matching the table in the center of the room. The table was littered with scrolls and counters, while several slender brushes rested in an upright stand beside pots of variously colored inks. There was a single, ornately carved chair at the table and a bare, low bench set a distance before it. Ki had played this scene before with Rhesus. Always he sat in the tall chair, protected by the table, and played with counters and talked of increasing expenses, while Ki sat silent on the low bench before him, her legs stretched uncomfortably in front of her until her silence extracted from him the previously agreed-upon price.

But today, when Rhesus let her precede him as guest, Ki crossed the room with a sure stride, pulled out the chair, and sat in it. She watched the last hopeful doubt drip away from Rhesus’s face. His body caved in on the low bench. Sweat broke out in tiny, shining beads on his upper lip.

‘I am, as you say, a merchant,’ he began.

‘I did not know you trafficked in blood,’ Ki interrupted his apologetic tones. ‘Or my prices would have been higher. But seeing that you do, we shall make our settlement now. First, the remainder of what you owe me for these “priceless gems.”’

Ki boldly took up a stack of counters, measured out what was due her in a stack on the table. ‘That is correct, is it not?’

Rhesus scarcely glanced at the pile. ‘It appears to be,’ he mumbled.

‘Certainly it does. But appearances can be deceiving, Rhesus. Let us consider a philosophical question. Goods can be paid for with money. But how shall blood be bought?’

The plump jowls trembled a moment, became suddenly firmer. Rhesus drew himself up straight on the low bench. Watching, Ki was reminded of a toad puffing himself up to croak. But she would have trusted a toad’s yellow eyes more than the round, piggish eyes that fixed on her now.

‘Do you threaten me, Ki? With what? Kill me by your own hand, and you shall not escape the justice of this town. They value me here, for the trade I generate. Shall you bring charges against me? Who listens to a wandering Romni? What evidence do you have? You have not been killed. I see no mark of wounds upon you.’ He folded his fat hands on his knees and met her eyes as if he had made a point.

‘An interesting philosophy.’ Ki slid down deeper in her chair. Her dust-stained boots rose to rest on the corner of the shining table. She gave a slight kick to get more comfortable, and Rhesus flinched as her heels scored the wood’s luster. ‘Surely if you are dead, Rhesus, it will make small difference to you if I am punished for your murder or not. But it might inconvenience you in a small way if a certain Romni driver and his family stopped smuggling perfume jewels into Coritro for you. Although they are illegal there, I have heard they still bring you a good price. It might be an even larger problem for you if all the Romni stopped doing carting for you. But I am not threatening you, Rhesus. I am only showing you that I know how to threaten you. I do not want your blood. I do not consider it of equal value to the blood that was shed. Nor do I want your money, other than what you owe me for the delivery.’

Ki watched with narrow eyes as the plump little man shifted about on the bench. His fat fingers were squeezed by narrow rings, making them look like sausages. The sausages met and tangled together. His little round eyes rolled about the room, looking everywhere but into Ki’s. Ki continued to stare at him silently. His mouth worked in and out.

‘So what do you want of me? Here, I will pay you your money for the delivery, and then you will go.’

He rose and bustled across the room to the cabinet. He fished in his pocket for a small key and unlocked one of the drawers. Ki heard the chink of coin and the shutting of the drawer. He hurried back, to stack before her the silver minteds he owed. No more and no less. Ki nodded and scooped them toward her. She let the gems fall from her hand onto the table with a rattle like gravel.

‘And now you will go,’ he said. His eyes glistened as he watched Ki leisurely transfer the stacks of minteds from the table into her own personal pouch. His lower lip jutted out plump and wet as he considered the scatter of trinket gems he was receiving for it.

‘You needn’t look so bitter,’ Ki said softly. ‘I doubt that you are taking a loss.’

‘That’s my business,’ Rhesus snapped.

‘Exactly. The business of a merchant who trafficks in blood. I have no experience of how such a fee is set. Tell me, Rhesus, how much was my life bought for? And by whom?’

He moved briskly to the bench before the table, sitting as alertly as a begging dog. A pink slug of tongue wet his lips. ‘Is that what you would have from me, Ki? It will cost you.’ He settled himself with a wiggle of satisfaction at finally taking control.

Ki could not find the anger she needed to deal with him. Only a weary disgust filled her. She let him rant on.

‘You might like to know, Ki, that at no time was your life, or death, mentioned. I accepted a … a fee, shall we call it? Only to see that you took your wagon through a certain pass. No time limit was set upon me, only my word that at some time I would see that you passed that way. And that was all. How was I to know it would be dangerous to you? So, be not angry with me. We may still do business together, you and I.’ He paused to nibble speculatively at his thumb nail. ‘I think, to be just, that my price for the information will be equal to the minteds that I just …’

Ki did not wait to hear. She felt no anger as she slowly lowered her worn boots from the table. She felt nothing as she swept to the floor the pens, the counters, and a flurry of scrolls. Rhesus screamed high, but Ki’s eyes were cold as she upset the table upon the tiled floor, with a crash that sent splinters of polished wood flying. The carved chair rose lightly in her weathered hands, to arc across the room and cave in the front of the shining cabinet. Rhesus fled from the room, squeaking. Ki followed him with her panther’s stride. He fled without grace or logic, looking back fearfully as he huffed up the hall. Silent and relentless came Ki. She heard a girl’s voice raised in a question as Rhesus darted into the room Ki had first seen him emerge from.

It was a room of whites and yellows, of creamy floors and soft white rugs, of tapestries of flowered fields. A huge divan dominated the center of it, surrounded by filigreed tables bearing an overwhelming assortment of sweetmeats and fruits. A girl started up from the divan as they entered, Rhesus quivering and staggering as he fled. She gasped at the sight of his pursuer, Ki, ragged, dusty, and wooden-faced.

Ki halted at the sight of her. It was not her extreme youth that shocked Ki, though the image of that child in Rhesus’s embrace was a blasphemy against beauty. Nor did the girl’s nudity and carefully erotic body paintings surprise Ki – it was the necklace of circling silver Harpies that adorned the slender throat, and the azure and cobalt Harpies that swung from each pink ear. Ki stopped.

‘From her forge and anvil come the best metal workings the family has ever seen.’ Haftor had said that. He had been right. Once a person had beheld the work of Marna’s hands, ever she would know it. Ki did not realize that she had advanced on the girl until she felt the cold silver of the necklace in her hands. The girl fled, her bare feet pattering across the cream floor, her white neck marred by the burn of metal rudely jerked from it.

Ki could not focus her mind on Rhesus’s shrill cries as he frantically jerked on a summoning bell’s rope. She tried to remember Marna’s face. It would not come to her. She could find only Haftor, battling his madness, his eyes intense with a vengeance he would never satisfy. Haftor had learned to hate too well. Would Ki school Marna to it also? Ki flung the Harpy necklace from her violently. It rattled and slid across the floor to wrap around Rhesus’s foot. He ceased his yammering long enough to stoop and seize his treasure.

‘Give her this,’ Ki said suddenly into the jolt of silence. ‘Tell her she succeeded. Tell her it came from my body. Tell her to be at peace, for it is all over.’

Ki groped in her belt pouch, and the silver hair-comb came readily to her hand. She drew her fist back to fling it at him, but found she could not do it. She strode across to where Rhesus cowered to press it into his wet hands. A twinge of regret at parting with it surprised Ki. She froze the emotion. She spun on her heel and strode out the door, to pass between two bewildered serving men as they hastened to answer Rhesus’s summons. She let herself out.