It was raining.
The cart rolled.
Foot propped on a slant trunk, and sword drawn; that’s what he saw first, when the voice barked, harsher and louder than the falling water. ‘Hey, pretty man! Give a tired traveler a ride…?’
Looking up, he thought to ask for iron. But rain splattered his face. Looking down again, he called: ‘Come on! Climb up! You going far?’ Calling, it occurred to him the figure vaulting the log to slog up the sloppy shoulder might be a bandit. There’d been something odd about the blade—which slid back into its soaked scabbard. But water blurred all, made him blink. The figure came on with swinging arms, behind wet veils, which, as the smuggler turned away, thickened.
A rough hand grasped the seat beside him. The cart rocked. The other hand grasped his shoulder (which was how he knew the first was rough). The traveler (or bandit) rose with a snort and a chuckle. ‘Get your ox going! Curse this weather!’
Still hunching, he flicked the reins. A warm interruption in the streaming cold as he rocked forward, the hard hand stayed high on his arm; his new companion’s side hit his, swayed away, hit him again. ‘Where’re you traveling?’ The smuggler glanced over.
There was something tied across his seat companion’s face: a rag through whose two holes, even in this shadowed splatter, he saw blue eyes. A bandit? Behind the rag mask, affably enough she…well, grinned.
He’d been trying to see those breasts as the muscles developed over the chest of some swaggering country man, distorted by blown water; but here, with her sitting up close and leering against the torrent (still holding his shoulder), behind her mask she was, he realized once and for all as he blinked in falling water, a woman.
He started to speak, but an indrawn breath as a gust blew drops into his mouth made him cough—which only saved him embarrassment, he decided. He had nothing to say. Wiping his face with his wrist, he turned to his beast.
They rocked on through the rain.
Perhaps the seventh rock jarred her hand loose. He glanced up. With both, now, she grasped the bench by skirted hips, leaning forward to gaze through masking cloth, pelting drops, raging leaves. Half an hour later, when the rain stopped again, she was still silent.
Decisively (though the reasons for the decision he could not have spoken), he looked at the brush and rubble on both sides of the road before he said: You from around here?’
‘Do I look like a native of this wet and woebegone land?’ She snorted with an expression below her mask that, on a man, he would have known as a laugh. ‘And where do you come from? You look like you might be bringing your cart down from Kolhari. What are you hauling? No—’ She leaned away from him. Within the frayed holes, her lids dropped halfway down eyes of ceramic blue. ‘You don’t really want to tell me about what you carry, do you? I don’t blame you—though I could give you some advice on how to ease your load along its way. You’re probably in a profession I know more than a little about.’ She laughed again. ‘My name’s Raven.’ She put out her hand.
He dropped one rein and reached across to shake.
What are you called? But no…’ She held his in a hard grip, her small fingers more callused than his own, fleshy and thick-knuckled. ‘You pretty men of this country, the ones with enough meat on you to make it look as if you might be comfortable to cuddle after sunset, you’re too modest to tell every wandering woman your name. Well, that’s as it should be, even in a land like this, where the men act as odd as you do—and the women are too beaten down to be believable.’ She pulled her hand from his and looked around at streaming pines, at leaves all droplet struck.
A black-haired, blue-eyed, be-masked woman; as far as he could tell she didn’t have a freckle on her. Tell her my name…? And having committed himself to withholding it, he felt a sudden surge of camaraderie. ‘You’re a foreigner, yes? I couldn’t say for sure, and foreigners—I admit it—are nothing I know much about, but you look as if you find the most ordinary thing we do here in Nevèrÿon odd.’ He grinned. ‘Is that it?’
‘My home is in the Western Crevasse. Now, what I find odd the little woman said, all grave behind her mask, ‘is that the terribly odd things you do here all the time, most of you find so hard to laugh at.’
‘What do you find laughable here?’ He was prepared to chuckle at whatever serene normality she might cite under the salting drops.
‘Well,’ she said, serious as the rain, ‘now you surely look like a young man on his way to fight beside the Liberator, whose cause is noble and necessary. He’s assembled his forces just east of here. Well, myself, I’ve fought at the Liberator’s side three months now. And I’ve grown tired of his campaign—noble as it is—and have decided to rejoin the sane and sensible women of my homeland and to pursue our sane and sensible ends.’ She paused, drawing back. (He thought she was about to narrow her eyes again, but under and through her mask she gave him a great, sampaku grin.) Above, the trees roared. Rain redoubled. ‘Now you see, I would have expected a man of my own country to find a speculation such as that worthy of a chuckle at least. But you sit on your bench, staring at me with your eyes wide between wet lashes and your mouth hung half open, and not a giggle anywhere in your pretty beard. Of course—’ and here she assumed a lighter tone—‘in my country, sometimes it seems that the men can do nothing but giggle. They laugh at everything and anything, morning and night, as if they believed nothing in the world worth a true thought. Well, perhaps they’re right. Our philosophers are always saying so. People say men don’t have to think for the same reason they don’t have to have babies. But though one doesn’t want to insult you with the point, you have to admit it’s reasonable, yes? Still, lost in this strange and terrible land, sometimes a woman wants to see a man with a little flesh on him act just a bit silly, once in a while…? Say, I bet you’ve been driving that ox in this downpour all afternoon. You look tired to death. Here, give me the reins and rest.’ She leaned forward, reaching out as if he’d directly ordered her to take the ox’s leads.
The smuggler snatched them aside, so that she looked at him with the puzzlement she no doubt turned on all this gray-green country. ‘The Liberator…’ he said. ‘You mean the Liberator—Gorgik the Liberator—is fighting near here? To the east?’
‘I’ve been with his forces three months.’ She pursed her lips and nodded. ‘His troops are assembled on the Princess Elyne’s ancestral lands. She allows him to use her ancient halls for his headquarters. From it, sometimes with his one-eyed lieutenant, Noyeed, sometimes with his most trusted followers, and sometimes totally alone he scouts the land about here, making maps, marking out trails to forage against the earls and barons who still maintain their slave pens. He’s a very clever man, this Liberator. When the evil lords expect an attack from his massed troops, he sends in only a single spy to provoke internal upset. And when the lords have doubled and quadrupled their vigil on their own households and have sent their own spies among their own laborers and infiltrated their own enterprises with invisible ears and silent eyes, paid to report by whisper and writing any and all sedition, driving themselves and all who work for them mad under the anxiety that circles like a kite over the house where betrayal is hunted, then the Liberator’s troops descend on the demoralized estate. Oh, he is a very clever man. But—’ (Her frown, the smuggler saw, was actually a strained smile, showing small teeth behind dark lips.)’—I grow uneasy with your Liberator. Certainly he’s a moral and meritorious man. And his cause is reasonable and right. But I do not like fighting for a man among men.
‘You must understand—’ She laid a hand on the smuggler’s forearm, where his muscles moved as he moved the reins—‘this is not the misandry of some fledgling warrior whose breasts are no bigger than two handfuls of sand one teasing boy might spill on the chest of another asleep on his back at the beach. “No man can wield a blade; no man can be as strong, as agile, as honest, or as brave as a woman.”’ She laughed. ‘Well, when the little hawks have never flown further than the horizon of some fu
ssy father’s eye, what more can you expect of them? I say, if a man can fight like a woman, respect him as a woman. And I admit: I’ve met more than one in this tortured and terrible country whose single blade I’d think twice about crossing my own honed twins with—though that admission would get me only laughter in the warrior barracks of my home.’ (Her accent, he began to hear, was not the slurred elisions and apocopations that, as he moved further and further south, became the barbarian tongue. Apparently, he had been imposing barbaric expectations on an accent that, as he listened to it, began to distinguish itself on his ear.) ‘No, that’s not what bothers me.’ She let her knees fall wide and ran her hands out on her wet thighs. ‘Once all that’s accepted—that a man can be the equal of a woman in war—you still find yourself uncomfortable fighting amidst a bunch of them, relying on them, knowing your life depends on their bravery, commitment, honor, and skill. And always in the off-hours around the cook-fire or in whatever quarters we can commandeer for ourselves on the march, there are the jealousies and minuscule hostilities, over which they laugh and try to mask under the warriors’ bluster they all wear so uneasily. But one can sense in them the same male sulks and uncertainties you find in the men of my own home—where, at least, those uncertainties and sulks can come out honestly and openly and speak their own names, and the men do not have to disguise them as displays of reason and rational right. Now you must know, I’ve fought alongside men in this country who were true fighters and soldiers, yes. But a woman among them always has the feeling that, for all the well-fitted skills they may have been practicing for months or even years, still they haven’t been real warriors for more than a week, so that one begins to realize their laughter and horseplay is to hide the fact that, under all, they remain true sons of Eih’f, still carrying Eih’f’s shame. Oh, the Liberator’s cause is joyous and just. I respect it (and I respect him!) as much as anyone’s (or anyone) I’ve found in this odd and eccentric country. ‘I first met him many years ago. It was on a clear spring night, with not a trace of halo about the moon. And his plans and ambition were clear and sharp as the moon-shot dark. I was sympathetic, certainly. Still, I only trust such clarity about such basically muddled matters just so far. But as the years went, and in my own travels I heard more and more of him, nothing contradicted what I thought was most valid in what he’d said that night. So, finally, some months back, I came to him to offer my fighting services.’ She grunted. ‘I don’t think he even remembered me. But that’s no matter. Still, it’s been rain and fog and mist for the whole time, I tell you!
‘Well, he’s still as fine a fighter as a woman. What’s more, he has something more than dragon droppings between his ears. And I fought my best for him when I was with him.
‘But rumor came by, three days ago, that women of my own country have been sighted traveling through this part of Nevèrÿon. And I grow tired of foreign foibles and failings, and long for familiar ones. I’ve decided to seek the rumor’s source and join them. They say that they were seen in Vinelet. That’s where I’m headed.’
The young smuggler heard this with a controlled and guarded bemusement not much different from yours and mine. It was much the feeling that a point was being put too bluntly, at too great a length—not at all in a ladylike way. But because, for all his disparagement of students, he was not really so far from a student himself, he said: ‘If you want to find your friends, better not go to Vinelet. Not if the rumor’s been about for three days. I’m no certain judge of these parts, and I’d think twice about anything the likes of me said; and I do. But would they likely be traveling north or south? Three days south of Vinelet is the Argini. Three days north is the port of Sarness,’ for in the past two years he’d delivered sacks in all those places.
The masked woman, who was not tall, leaned away from him with an appraising eye. (Just then the rain really stopped.) ‘For such a pretty man, you have a pretty mind. That’s as rare in your country as it is in mine.’ Below her mask, her lips’ set told him he should feel complimented. And because he was a friendly sort, the young smuggler smiled. Me? he thought. Pretty? Well, I wouldn’t go to bed with one like her if she paid me. Unless of course (and found himself wondering what in her unsettling presence he might be responding to) she really would pay. But it was hard enough to pry coin from the men on the bridge. How did one even ask it from such a manly woman, and a foreigner at that, on the road? Still, he pondered, it would be interesting, probably, and different, certainly.
Would that she had a speckle or five.
Raven said: ‘This time of year, they’d be coming north of course. And by now, you’re right, they’d be at the port of Sarness. That’s no more than three hours’ ride from here.’
‘Is it?’ He would have thought it a town for the next day’s stopover. But one always mistook distances in this geography whose organization, if not its very existence, invariably came from the hearsay of strangers. And this masked woman was certainly among the strangest. ‘But you know this part of Nevèrÿon,’ she said with certainty. ‘When we reach the high crossroad, we’ll point out the sights and wonders of Sarness to each other. With the boats set along its waterfront and its houses spread on both sides of the Dragon’s Way the town is beautiful from the hillcrest at sunset. It’s a sight to tell your granddaughters about.’ The woman grinned wickedly. ‘And I’ll find my landswomen there.’
Laughing, the smuggler shook his reins—though the red beast’s gait stayed the same.
They rolled on.
Thrice in the past five summers he’d looked down on Sarness’s collection of seaside huts and warehouses. Twice, he’d actually taken his cart into the sleepy port and driven along its somnolent waterfront, looking to buy beer. Under a shoreside canopy at a long wooden table with several landbound fishermen, he’d drunk up four or six or ten mugs of it, while the waters flickered brighter than lightning between the knocking dories. Then, with a light head and a bloated belly, he’d let his ox pull him and the cart back up across the main highway to the side-path, which then, as now, he’d been traveling.
No, it probably wasn’t far.
‘Well!’ the masked woman said, three hours later when the cart had halted on the ridge, and the two of them stood beside the wheel sunk in the soggy earth. ‘It really is a pretty town…But now, I’m afraid, between the fog and the twilight, you wouldn’t know a town was there, much less that the sea lay beyond it.’
8
HAVING DRUNK IN THE rain, the rocks and scrub had, over the intervening ride, breathed out a palpable mist, and the crossway they’d halted at seemed some tiny, fallow garden, furrowed by cart wheels.
They stood by the wagon in the fog.
‘But I guess,’ Raven said, her hand up on the bench by her shoulder, ‘after you’ve looked down on Kolhari, Sarness isn’t much. Still, it’s a city with a history. Some of it might interest you.’
‘Oh?’ The smuggler moved one foot and then the other in the earth, which, once you stepped on it, was rather comfortable, if cold.
‘You’d been asking me about the Liberator…?’
The young smuggler looked up.
‘It’s too bad the weather has made it impossible to see the Dragon’s Way from here; it’s the easiest thing to orient yourself by. But then, you must remember it if you’ve been there before.’
What answered was the faintest memory of a wide, dusty road—the royal north-south highway that ran, here, near the coast and on which, so seldom, he’d traveled, with the city on one side, and, on the other, an astonishing drop below which you could see a few waterside warehouse roofs, fishermen’s homes, taverns; and the sea.
He stared into fog.
‘There was a time, you know, when dragons roamed wild over all Nevèrÿon,’ Raven went on. ‘Before Sarness was built, the ledge along which the main highway runs served the beasts as a perch from which to soar out over the ocean, where they would turn above the waves and glide back to land—or so at least the fables run. Myself, I think that’
s just a story, for I’ve never found a dragon smart enough, once aloft, to find her way back to the ledge she left from. They’re stupid beasts. Nowadays, you only see wild dragons high in the Falthas.’
Fragments of half-attended tales about eagles, about dragons, and their supposed habitats returned to the smuggler. He’d only seen pottery stencils of either beast. Both, he thought, were probably imaginary.
‘When we last came through Sarness to requisition supplies the Liberator pointed out a warehouse toward the lower end of the Way, where, he told us, years ago when he’d made his living for a while by smuggling, the back window had been left loose, and he’d climbed in by moonlight to spend ten minutes in the shadowy storage room, hesitating between a load of metal-headed mallets destined for some shipyard in the Ulvayn Islands and a collection of magic figurines, supposed to go to the quarrymen of Enoch, to protect them from falls on the rock face.’ She snorted. ‘He told us that, today, he doesn’t remember which he actually chose to make off with. All he remembers is that he stood there, caught in indecision—and, of course, the warehouse’s location: between the bakery’s outdoor ovens and the hostelry’s side gate. Both were still there last month. Though he says that the hostelry used to be twice as big as now. They’ve torn down some of its outbuildings.’
‘If he was just an ordinary smuggler the smuggler said, ‘once he made his choice, he probably tried to put the whole thing from his mind. With his load in his wagon, he probably never looked at it again.’
‘If what I know of smuggling is true—’ Raven considered—‘you may be right. Just along the Way, where it rises high above the water, to reenter the rocky stretch, Mad Queen Olin, so local fables tell, once warned General Babàra, then leading a fleet of sailors from the Ulvayns, who’d come in their boats from the islands to hear her proclamation, to be on the lookout for some mysterious sign or other involving a tree and a bird.’ She dropped her hand from the cart and reached round to scratch an elbow. ‘Odd how fables are. I had a friend once: knew all the stories from the islands, she did.’ Raven recited loudly into fog: