‘Like sleeping in a coffin,’ Ki grumbled. She dragged off her boots, blouse and trousers so that she was clad in loose cotton drawers and chemise. Shivering, she burrowed into the quilts and settled against Vandien. He was warm. She curled her body around his, her belly to his back. She could smell his hair and the warm skin of his neck.
‘These children,’ he said softly, ‘make me feel old.’
‘Um,’ Ki agreed. She kissed the nape of his neck experimentally.
He sighed. ‘Very old. Ki, did you hear me earlier? Dictating, chastising, directing, warning. I sounded just like my uncle when I was a child.’
‘Your guardian?’ she asked. With the tip of one finger, she wrote her name on the warm skin of his back.
‘Yes. He was always directing me, never letting me do anything on my own. Not even choose which women I’d bed.’ Vandien’s voice trailed off as his mind went back to those painful times, to his futile efforts to sire an heir for his line. He moved slightly apart from Ki, and she, knowing his old pain, let him. He wouldn’t want to be touched just now. Damn. Well, that’s how it was, then. She closed her eyes, sought sleep. ‘I’d hate to think I had grown to be just like him,’ Vandien said suddenly. ‘Ki, did you hear what Willow said earlier? That she didn’t think any one as old as I am could understand why she’d run away to her lover? Do I look that old to you? Old enough to be her father?’
‘Depends on how young you started,’ Ki replied sleepily. Then, ‘Sorry. Not to me, Vandien. Only to someone as young as Willow.’
He rolled onto his back and stared up at the bottom of the wagon. ‘How old do I look to you?’ he asked quietly.
The weariness of the day had suddenly found Ki. ‘I don’t know,’ she sighed. She opened her eyes a slit, stared at him. He was serious. Traces of lines at the corners of his mouth. A few hints of grey in the dark curls, mostly from old scars. Weathered skin that was more the work of sun and wind than years. She thought, as she had the first time she saw him, that it was not a bad way for a man to look. She’d rather die than tell him that. ‘Old enough to be smarter than you act most of the time. Young enough to worry about foolish things.’
‘Mph.’ He rolled to face her, dragging her covers away. ‘That’s not a very satisfactory answer.’
She tugged at the covers, opened her eyes. His face was inches from her own, his hand on the curve of her waist. ‘Not a satisfactory answer?’
He shook his head, the curve of his smile beneath his moustache barely visible in the dwindling light from the fire.
‘Then let me put it another way.’ She seized the curls at the nape of his neck and pulled his face to hers.
In the coolness before dawn, Ki’s strangely vivid dreams broke and dragged against her like cobwebs. Gently she drew away from Vandien and pulled on her clothes. The camp was silent; Gotheris slumbered deeply by the dead ashes of the fire, his arms flung wide in sleep. Ki took the kettle and water bucket and headed for the spring. She considered waking Vandien to share the quiet with her but decided against it. She needed this solitude; the rest of the day would offer her little enough.
On her way back to camp she passed Vandien. His hair was tousled, his eyes vague with sleep. He greeted her silently and moved on toward the spring. In camp, she found a few embers buried in the ash and coaxed them into blossom. She set the dripping kettle atop the small fire and mounted the wagon step.
The door was jammed. She tugged at it futilely several times before she realized that Willow had latched it. Suddenly irritated that anyone could lock her out of her own wagon, she pounded on the door. There was no response. ‘Willow!’ she shouted. ‘Unlock this door!’ Goat rolled over and opened his eyes.
There was a muffled reply, but Ki fumed on the step for several moments longer before a yawning Willow slid the door open. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked sleepily.
‘Why didn’t you open the door?’ Ki demanded, pushing in past her. ‘And why was it locked at all?’
‘I wasn’t dressed.’ Willow sat down on the tousled bedding. ‘And you know why I locked it. Because he’s out there.’
Ki glared at the girl, who sulked back at her. The silence was thick as Ki shrugged into a fresh tunic. Ki gathered up travelling bread and cheese from the food bins. Willow was still pouting on the bed when Ki left the wagon. The door slammed and latched behind her. Almost she turned back; but she set her teeth and let it pass. Foolish, to make a fuss over a latched door. But she hated its assumption, that the wagon space was Willow’s, and Ki could be locked out of it. Forget it. Ki made a conscious effort to loosen the muscles in her shoulders and set her irritation aside.
She set the bread and cheese on a wooden platter from the dish-chest, and had just found the tea when an arm fell across her shoulders. ‘I’m hungry!’ Gotheris announced in her ear. The sack of tea leaped from her hand as she startled.
‘You spilled it all over!’ he exclaimed, pushing forward to gaze at the wrinkled balls of leaves and herbs littered across the jumbled dishes.
Ki’s hands were fists at her sides. She spoke each word separately. ‘Don’t creep up behind me and grab me like that.’
‘I didn’t!’ Goat protested. ‘I only …’
A thudding of many hooves interrupted him. Ki held up a hand for silence while her eyes grew wide. Stepping around the tail of the wagon, she stared up the long flat road. Her heart leaped painfully, then began to hammer in her chest so that she could hear nothing else. Rousters.
There were six – no, seven – Brurjans, and two stout, ugly Humans, all mounted on great black horses with scarlet hooves. She gripped the corner of her wagon, watching them come, knowing there was no place to flee to, no place to hide. Childhood memories flooded her mind, of wagons set ablaze in the dark night, of Romni women fleeing with their children caught up in their arms, of men struck down by flying hooves as they stood, not in hopes of defending their lives, but only to buy their families time to escape. Rousters, come by nightfall or in the bright day, to put the Romni trash on the road again, to steal their bits of things and drive them away.
The Brurjans rode high and catlike on their peculiar saddles. Their huge jaws were wide with their hissing laughter, and their myriad pointed teeth flashed in the new sun that stroked their glossy hides. Their quilled crests were high. They did not pull up as they approached the camp, but rode full tilt into it, great hooves tramping Goat’s bedding and the small fire, and sending the hissing kettle flying. Vandien emerged from the trees, a strangely small figure before the tall horses with their massive riders. The riders milled through the camp. Ki could not speak. Goat was plastered up against the wagon, his eyes wide, his mouth hanging open. The world tilted around Ki. One of the Humans rode close to her, sneered down at her disdainfully. Let Willow remain silent within the wagon, she begged the Moon. Her beauty was too fresh for one such as that to resist bruising.
One of the Brurjans snarled something, and the sea of rousters and horses was suddenly still. All eyes went to him, a great black-pelted creature with deep-set black eyes. His battle harness was scarlet and black leather, broken by threads of silver. A red cloak spilled down his furred back. His black-nailed hands gripped his mount’s reins lightly. His horse had wicked eyes, and its ears were tilted back toward its master, waiting for a command to lash out with hooves or teeth.
Like a stray cat strolling insolently into a strange butcher shop came Vandien. He slipped between two great horses fully as large as plow beasts, unmindful of their restive scarlet