The Keys to Paradise, page 42
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Petia paused to wipe a drop of perspiration from the tip of her pert, upturned nose. She picked up a clump of brush and threw it behind her. ‘Anji!’ she called. ‘Come and clear the cut brush.’ She moved forward and hacked at the bottom of a particularly rugged salal bush that blocked their progress.
Keja straightened to stretch cramped muscles. ‘Damnable stuff, isn’t it?’ He massaged the small of his back and together they bent again, his eyes on Petia. Although she had ignored him, he felt her nearness and thrilled to it. His attraction for her had grown from simple physical desire to something more complicated, unlike anything he’d experienced before.
He snorted and redoubled his efforts, forcing such thoughts from his mind. So what if he found himself actually admiring her tenacity and courage? She had rebuffed his advances over and over. And weren’t there enough serving wenches, and maids such as the one at the inn for him?
The next time Petia paused for a breath, she looked back to see what progress they had made. The clump which she had asked Anji to clear away still blocked the trail. She raised her voice. ‘Anji.’ No answer. ‘Where did he go?’ she muttered, planting her sword in the soil.
Petia made her way back to the road. The tethered horses grazed contentedly, but of Anji she saw no trace.
‘Anji!’ she shouted, but the sound was muffled by the massive trunks of the ironhorn. She ran back along the road, rounded the bend and saw – nothing. She called again, but received no reply.
Petia hurried up the track. ‘Giles, Keja! Anji’s gone.’
Giles emerged from the brush, wiping his forehead. ‘What? Keja stumbled after him and sat on a stump to catch his breath. Petia arrived breathless, her heart pounding. Between the gasps she managed to get out, ‘Anji… he’s gone… I called… he’s not here.’
‘Easy, now, lass,’ Giles said. ‘Catch your breath and then start over.’ He guided Petia to a place where she could sit. ‘Now what’s this all about?’
Petia gestured weakly. ‘Anji. He’s gone. I asked him to clear some of the brush we’d cut. He didn’t come. I went to look and he’s gone. He tied the horses up neat as you please and then slipped off. He must have. There’s no sign of anyone else.’
Giles gestured to Keja to go look, then returned his attention to Petia. ‘Maybe he’s just gone off to play and didn’t hear you. He’s still a boy, remember.’
Petia looked up at him, despair in her eyes. ‘He’s a boy with experiences that turn young men grey. In eleven years he’s lived forty.’ Petia took a deep, calming breath. ‘He’s not playing, Giles. He’s gone. He said that someone was trailing us the other day. He’s gone back to find out. I know it! You backtracked the other day and said that everything was fine. Then our saddles and packs were ripped open. Anji must still think someone’s behind us. He knew I wouldn’t let him go if he asked, so he’s slipped away when our backs were turned. He’s got courage, but I’ll tan his hide when I catch him.’
‘You’re not going to catch him,’ Giles said. ‘You’re going to wait right here until he comes back.’ He looked up at Keja’s return.
‘No sign of him,’ Keja said. ‘But Petia’s right. No sign of a struggle with anyone, either.’
‘I’m going after him,’ Petia said. ‘There’s no telling what might happen to him.’ She started to get up, but Giles pushed her back.
‘Wait a moment, before you go running off. Never mount a campaign without planning. And sustenance in the belly, Keja, fetch some water from the packs.’
When they finished drinking, Giles settled cross-legged on the ground. ‘Keja says no struggle. You say the boy has gone off to find out if we’re being followed. Could well be. Both you and he have senses that Keja and I don’t. It seems like this would be a good time to use yours.’
Petia stared at Giles for a moment. ‘I’m sorry, Giles. Worry wins out over common sense every time, I guess. Be still while I concentrate.’
She composed herself, closed her eyes, and began to drift mentally. She sensed animals scurrying through forest and open country; Petia had known of the roving catamount for days. She let her mind relax even more, then reached out along the track they had travelled, exploring both sides of the road, attempting to soak up any trace of animal or human.
‘Getting anything?’ Keja asked, but Giles silenced him with a wave of his hand.
Impressions came to Petia of tiny animals, shrews and voles, and once a stoat. In a moment, as she stretched her mind even further, a deer and fawn made their way cautiously to a secret watering place. But no indication of the boy came, not the slightest clue to show where he had gone.
Petia raised quivering fingertips to her temples and rocked back and forth, attempting to intensify her empathy with Anji. Nothing. At last she opened her eyes and looked at Giles in quiet desperation. ‘I can’t find him. I don’t feel him anywhere.’
Giles touched her shoulder reassuringly. ‘That doesn’t mean he’s not there, Petia. You’ve been training the boy, teaching him how to use his Trans sense. Perhaps you’ve taught too well. The boy may have more natural talent than you know. He may have found a way to conceal his presence from your mind.’
Fear seized Petia. ‘Why would he do that?’
Giles laughed. ‘Didn’t you ever do anything you didn’t want your mother to know about? He knows you’ll be angry with him and will come after him if you find out where he is. It’s just self-preservation.’
‘I’ve got to go after him, find him and bring him back. He may be in danger.’
‘You’d be the one in danger,’ Keja observed. ‘If you can’t reach him, feel him, you’ll never find him. You’ll walk right on past him and be the one stumbling into something. If Anji is right and we’re being tracked, he’ll return to tell us.’ Keja shrugged. ‘For that matter, he’ll come back anyway.’
‘Keja’s right,’ Giles said. ‘Anji will come back. I have no doubt. You told me, Petia, that he’s crammed forty years into his eleven-year life. He knows how to be wary. I don’t like the idea of him going off alone, but we’re not dividing forces further to look for him. Meanwhile, we still have to get around this fallen tree. The best thing we can do is keep working and be ready to continue when Anji returns.’
Petia saw the wisdom in what Giles and Keja said. Anji was no ordinary boy. He had lived by his wits and knew better than to tangle with whomever followed. But she was still angry with Anji, and he’d know it when she got him alone. The two men had convinced her that it was foolish to look for him, but she still worried, and would until he returned. Petia took out her frustration by hacking away at the brush.
They worked steadily for more than half an hour before taking another break. They had barely sat down to rest when Petia jerked upright and twisted, looking back towards the road. ‘Anji!’ she called.
The boy stumbled towards them out of breath. Giles passed him the waterskin. When Anji had recovered, he grinned at the three adults.
‘I told you someone trailed us.’ He saw the anger on Petia’s face. ‘I had to go. I heard something earlier when we stopped to eat. Didn’t you hear or sense it, Petia? It wasn’t really a sound, I don’t think, but I was sure something was back there.’
‘Well?’ Giles asked, impatient.
‘I didn’t go far enough to see them, just far enough to use my senses, like you’ve been teaching me, Petia.’ He looked to her for approval. She signalled for him to continue.
‘Somebody is following us. I got the impression of five men, mounted on horseback, and a pack of dogs, about ten of them, I think.’
‘What sort of men?’ Giles lightly fingered his sword. That many men – and dogs – boded ill for them.
‘I don’t know, exactly. I wanted to get close enough for a good look, and I would have, too, if it wasn’t for the dogs. They would have caught my scent. The men wouldn’t have ever known I was there. I could have hidden from them easy. But I was afraid of the dogs.’
‘Describe the men,’ Giles ordered.
‘One of them was huge, and fat, and sweaty, I could tell that,’ Anji answered. Keja and Giles exchanged glances. ‘Another gave off a feeling of power, but I couldn’t tell anything else. The others were just servants, obeying orders and hating it.’
‘What about the dogs? What kind?’
‘Big, hunting types. In Bandanarra we call them felji.’
Petia’s eyes grew large. ‘Segrinn! He’s found me again!’
‘Don’t worry,’ Giles said. ‘If it is, we’ll deal with him. People like him need to be taken care of. Permanently.’
Anji stared at Petia. Fear haunted her eyes. Something he had never seen before. Petia was strong. Petia had bought him in a slave market and set him free. Petia wasn’t afraid of anything. He knelt by her knee, his eyes searching hers, looking for reassurance. ‘Who is this Segrinn?’ he asked.
Petia smoothed Anji’s hair. Her anger at him for running off had drained out of her the moment she realised whom Anji described. ‘He’s a bad man,’ she told him. ‘My mother indentured me to Lord Ambrose, his father, something like your mother sold you into slavery. Segrinn wanted me to sleep with him. I ran away, and he’s never forgiven me. He caught me once before but I escaped. It looks like he’s never going to give up.’
‘We’ll stop him this time,’ Keja said with bravado.
‘If it is Segrinn, we had better finish cutting this trail through and be on our way.’ Giles picked up his sword and walked away.
Keja laid a hand on Petia’s shoulder. ‘It will be all right. Come on. Neither Giles nor I will let anything happen to you or Anji.’
She looked at him strangely, then nodded. They returned to their task, hacking away with renewed energy, uneasy about enemies at their backs. They finished the job quickly, not caring that it was untidily done. Anji fetched the horses and they mounted and were on their way.
The road continued to rise steadily towards the haze-hidden pass. Ahead the sky gradually turned grey, the clouds lowering, until by mid-afternoon the light shone more like dusk.
Giles shook his head. ‘It’s going to snow,’ he said. ‘I can feel it in the air. Maybe we can get through the pass before it gets too bad.’ He pulled his cloak closer about his shoulders.
Giles’ prediction came true. Small flakes began to fall and grew larger the farther they went. Anji stared at the white, fluttering crystals in fascination, not knowing whether to rejoice in seeing his first snow or to worry. By good fortune they found a shelter as the snow began to drift knee-high along the trail.
To the right of the road, they found a tiny log hut with a sturdy roof and thick door. Keja pulled the door open onto a sparse interior. Four ledges along the wall provided sleeping space and a small firepit had been dug in the centre of the earthen floor. A small protected vent hole in the roof allowed the smoke to escape.
They made a meagre supper and ate with no real appetite, their minds on Segrinn. The companions settled down to sleep soon after with little conversation. None slept easily.
In the morning they awoke to the baleful whine of wind blowing dry snow against the shelter. They didn’t bother with a fire, eating the cold remains of last night’s supper.
‘Enough of this place,’ Giles said. ‘I want to make the pass before midday.’ Giles stuffed his bowl into his pack and went to open the hut’s only door. It wouldn’t budge. He put his shoulder against it. ‘Snow’s piled up against the outside,’ he said. ‘C’mon, Keja, lend me your body.’
They pushed the door open enough to allow Anji to slip out. He cleared away enough snow for the door to swing open, and stood, his hands clasped between his legs, as the adults sidled out through the opening. ‘Is snow always this cold?’ he asked, and didn’t think it funny when the others laughed.
Giles gazed at the obscured road. It was covered with drifted snow which provided beautiful scenery, but a barely distinguishable track. ‘We’ve got to get through the pass.’ He stared up at the sky. ‘It could snow again at any time. See where the snow falls away at the side of the road? Keep several feet away from that and we should be all right. I don’t want anyone going over the side. Do you understand. Anji?’
‘Yes, Giles,’ the boy said as he swung up onto his horse. ‘Just don’t forget who got us out of our temporary prison. ‘His eyes twinkled.
Giles snorted and watched the silvery plumes hover in front of his face. He mounted and led the way.
They found the going slippery and the road indistinct. At times one or another of them would dismount and feel along the road, picking a safe path for the others to follow. Fog cloaked their progress until the road began to descend, with only an occasional rise in the ground. They had passed the summit. Elated, but tired, they guided their horses through snow deeper than their horses’ hocks. Light snow began to fall again.
‘We’d best find shelter.’ Giles said. ‘I don’t want to be on the trail in a blizzard.’
‘You feel such a storm coming, Giles? What does it feel like?’ Anji wanted to know. Even though the boy’s nose had turned to a cherry-red button, he still stared in wild-eyed awe at the snow.
‘Can’t you tell,’ Giles said. ‘Might just be my joints stiffening on me.’ Anji looked disappointed. Not for the first time, Giles envied the Trans their powers. But he knew others found nothing to envy in unknown power – they hated what they didn’t understand. The Trans War had been fuelled by such prejudices.
‘Giles. There,’ came Keja’s voice. The small man shivered with the cold. ‘Through the snow to the left. A light. Fire! A farmhouse!’
Giles motioned for Petia and Anji to follow. Keja surged on ahead, eager for the warmth promised by the farm.
The reception they received reminded them of their conversation with the peddler. The stout woman who came out to confront them in the barnyard wiped her hands on a greasy apron. She squinted at them and asked in a gravelly voice, ‘What do you want?’ She didn’t wait for an answer. She called her husband from the barn. Silently the pair faced the travellers.
Giles pulled the hood back from his face and tried to smile. His lips cracked from the cold. Wincing at the small pain, he said, ‘We’re looking for a place to stay for the night. We’ve just come over the pass, and we’ve spent the last two days battling the snow. We thought you might have a place for us to spend the night. A place to sleep. And perhaps a meal.’
‘This ain’t no inn,’ the wife said.
Keja took a step forward, but Giles gestured him back. ‘We knew you weren’t an inn, madam,’ he said smoothly. ‘If there were an inn, we would have continued on to it. We’ll pay for accommodations. We understand that it will make extra work for you.’
The farmer’s eyes glinted. ‘Mother, they could sleep in the barn. And we might find some bread and cheese for their supper, eh?’
Giles suppressed his smile at the greed written on the dirty face. ‘Bread and cheese and fresh straw will do us just fine.’ he said, dismounting. ‘If you’ll just show us the way, please.’
There were no stalls for the horses, but they were inside and protected from the snow. The travellers had tasted better than the mouldy bread and bitter cheese, but at least they didn’t go hungry. ‘We know now,’ Keja said, as they wrapped themselves in their cloaks. ‘Strangers are not welcome here, just as the peddler said.’
Three
In the morning, the farmer, with a vicious, snapping barnyard dog at his heel, came to the gate and leaned on it, watching them go. The dog barked at the horses, making them skittish, but the farmer silenced it with several strokes of a gnarled stick.
‘What an awful place,’ Petia said when they got out of earshot along the snow packed road. ‘And despicable people. I don’t think they’ve ever learned to smile. Last night the woman acted as if she were giving away the last morsel of food for their winter, even when they were well paid for it. The man had only money on his mind. And making us sleep in the barn.’ Petia snorted derisively.
‘Did you sleep well?’ Giles asked. He remembered all too well the times he’d slept in freezing mud and was glad for even that. ‘Believe me, you slept better than if we’d been in the house. Unless you like flea bites. I think the man was jealous of us, too.’
‘Jealous?’ Petia said, eyes widened in disbelief. ‘He hated us!’
‘See the way he stared when we rode off? He’d love the freedom we have. There was real envy in his eyes.’
Petia shuddered. ‘Shall we try for an inn tonight? I’d like to wash the straw out of my hair.’
‘The map shows a village called Malor still a good day’s travel ahead,’ Giles said. ‘Any village ought to have an inn, but I make no promise on that score. The map doesn’t show such detail.’
The day turned clear and crisp, with the snap of real winter in it. The snow on the road had crusted from an overnight freeze. The horses’ hooves broke through, making the going difficult until the sun softened the surface and turned the road to muddy slush. Even so, Giles and Anji dismounted periodically to examine the horse’ hooves and fetlocks for ice cuts.
When the road widened, Giles beckoned Anji forward to ride beside him. He questioned him closely about what he had sensed as he backtracked at the fallen ironhorn tree.
‘How far did you go?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know, Giles,’ the boy answered. ‘I can’t tell distances with all these tall trees. If we were in my desert, I could have told you.’
Giles stared at the sharp azure sky, trying to remember how long the rascal had been gone, and doing sums of the distance in his head. ‘You couldn’t have been gone more than a couple of miles in the time you were gone,’ he said. ‘Do you have any sense of them still following?’
‘No,’ Anji answered. ‘I’ve been staying alert. They seem to have disappeared, or at least are beyond my range.’
