Reclamation(50)

Chaos, it was all chaos. This was what happened when there was no vision, no conscious plan. Entropy laid hold of individual minds, and everything that had been built … collapsed.

Jay squinted over the Notouch’s heads toward the longest of the caravans. Its masters, at least, weren’t completely oblivious to the hostile state of affairs between Narroways and the Orthodox world. Men displaying the tin helmets of hired guards balanced on the overfull sledges, clutching their axes and metal-studded clubs so anyone who glanced toward them could see they meant business.

The sight didn’t say much positive for what the local feeling was about the Seablades coming across from First City. Jay forced the frown out of his features and scanned the roadside for Cor.

She was easy to pick out because she was almost the only still figure in the canyon. Cor leaned against the driver’s perch of her sledge, watching the parade. Her oxen chewed the tree branches nearby and she patted the slablike side of the one closest to her absently.

Jay sidestepped toward her. His boots loosened a small scree of stones and Cor tilted her head up.

“You’re looking grim,” she said as he picked his way down to her.

“I’m feeling grim. There are no messages from May 16 and it’s getting later by the second.”

Cor glanced at the sky and at the slant of the shadows. “In more ways than one. I’ll cuss the Vitae and bureaucrats out later.” She unknotted the oxen’s reins from the tree branch. Her hands had been marked with the broken triangles of the Bondless class. Unlike his Noble swirls, her marks were real tattoos. But then, it was her job to immerse herself totally in the local culture. That way, she could bring an intimate picture back to the Family and she could get the locals used to the idea that the odd-looking strangers coming to their world were just like them, really.

Jay clambered into the back of the sledge.

“It’d be easier if you’d just learned to ride,” she remarked, watching him with an amused smile playing around her mouth. “The oxen are slow and quiet. It’s not that tough.”

“I am from an overcivilized and decadent people,” said Jay blandly as he settled himself on one of the boxes that served as seats in the awkward construction. “I just can’t do it.”

Cor shrugged, hollered at the beasts, and they all lurched forward.

The countryside crawled past them behind the jostle of fellow travelers. A path cleared in front of them and closed up behind as people recognized them as Skymen. Jay tried not to wince as the unpadded box jounced against his backside. A river of sweat began to trickle down his cheek. Now that the sun was full up, the day was turning as hot as the night had been cold.

After about an hour, the scraggly wilderness began to give grudging space to tamed patches. The Narroways farmlands were strange places, more cultivated wetlands than fields. Yards of seine nets covered the grains to keep the plants from the worst of slashing sleet and hail that could come at night. The nets were rolled back in places and the Bonded worked in teams, chopping weeds and mucking out the trenches so water could flow between the rice plants and keep them from shriveling into dormancy. Behind a low wall, Bondless carefully tended their orchard. Each precious tree was carefully tented and you could only see the shadows of the workers underneath, pruning and grafting. Fruits and root vegetables were delicacies in this world of grains, grasses, and fungi.

The war did not touch the farms, or the oxen and pigs in their pens. Food and animals would be needed by whoever won. But the houses that could be seen from the road sported red flags, proclaiming there had been war dead there.

Beyond the farms the canyon walls shrugged and shifted and so the world bent toward the left and tilted down a sharp gradient. Cor whistled shrilly to the oxen and hauled back on the reins to check them to a walk as the road sloped sharply in front of them. An overturned sledge had spilled its contents onto the roadbed and the Bondless owners shouted obscenities at each other in between barked orders to the Notouch women scrambling to retrieve the canvas-wrapped packages before they were trampled under foot or hoof. The walls drew closer here, leaving less room for traffic overflow. Even with the wind, it felt more like being inside than outside.

The sight of the Narroways city wall stretching across the breadth of the canyon only reinforced the sensation.

There was, as usual, a line at the city gates. King Silver’s men stopped each sledge, inspected its contents, and leveled the extortionary duty on it. The Kings of Narroways got away with their legalized highway robbery because Narroways stood at the junction of three of the most populated corridors of the Realm. If you didn’t go through the city, you added at least two weeks to your travel time. And if the weather turned bad in those two weeks, your cargo and your life could be washed away down into the Lif marshes.