The night was too dark to travel further. The team was plodding on listlessly, their hearts not in their pulling. Ki chose a place where the road widened. Off to one side was a trampled area, muddy in the rainy season, no doubt, but dried now into hard ridges. Beyond, the ground fell away to a dried-up marsh of coarse, hummocky grass and Harp tree scrub. There was no fresh water for the team, but Ki had let them pause to drink from a stream earlier in the day and the dew these nights was heavy on the grass. They would manage.
She climbed down from the seat to free them of their harness. She ran a cursory rag over their hides, talking low to them as she did so, rubbing hard where the harness had rested on their sweating bodies. She did not hobble or picket them, but turned them free to get what grass they could. Their huge bodies demanded a tremendous amount of fodder. Ki worried almost constantly about it. She listened to them rip and chew the rough grasses as she searched around the base of the Harp trees for dead wood. The breeze strummed them lightly.
Ki made her small fire in the shelter of the wagon, away from the road. She drew water into a kettle from her water cask and put it on to boil. From the cuddy, she brought brewing herbs for tea, strips of dried meat and shriveled roots, chunks of hard hearth bread, and three withered apples. She poured off some of the hot water into a pot, adding the brewing herbs. To the rest of the water in the kettle she added the dried meat and roots, chopped into chunks. She hunkered down to wait for her tea to brew, her back against the knobby support of one wagon wheel, and bit into one of the withered apples. Each huge horse drifted over, shuffling and nudging, to claim an apple. ‘Spoiled ones,’ Ki chided them, watching the immense muzzles lip the apple from her hand. They chomped them wetly, then returned to their grass. Ki wiped her hands down her trousers and rose to get a mug from her dish chest.
The chest was strapped to the side of the wagon beside the water cask. Sven had decided to mount it there to save himself the trouble of ducking in and out of the cramped cuddy. He had hated to eat inside the closed cuddy, preferring the roadside as a setting for meals. Ki had not cared. She opened the carved lid of the chest. From it she took a single mug, one shallow wooden bowl, and a single wooden spoon. The lid fell over the rest of the dishes.
She drank her dark tea silently, considering her path tomorrow as the stew simmered the meat to tenderness. She did not like what she had gotten into this time. She did not like her cargo, her client, or the prospect of taking the wagon over an unfamiliar trail at a bad time of year. Here summer was failing, but Ki’s trail would take her up the hills to where it was already fall and into the mountains where winter never totally surrendered to the other seasons. She frowned, wishing that she had not by chance encountered Rhesus, that he had offered her less money, wishing even that he had been unwilling to grant her as much time as she wanted. A week’s travel to the south would bring her to gentler Carrier’s Pass. Ki believed that, even with the greater distance involved, it would be the swifter way to go. But Rhesus insisted that such an obvious route would be watched. He wanted her to use the Pass of the Sisters. He had paid her well for his whim. So well that Ki had let her own common sense be bypassed. Tomorrow she would be among the foothills. By evening, she hoped to be on the doorstep of the pass. She sighed as she raised her eyes to the range that loomed ahead of them. It was a dark shadow that blocked out the stars.
She ate the stew rapidly before it could cool in her bowl. Bowl and kettle she wiped clean with bread and devoured that also. She finished her tea and dashed the dregs onto the fire. With a neatness born of long habit, she stowed all her belongings. She walked once around her wagon, checking wheels and gear. The back of the wagon was filled with coarse sacks of salt. A little of the pink stuff leaked from a battered top sack. A brief check of the team and then she climbed up the wagon and into her cuddy. The candle she carried drove the shadows in the cuddy under the bed. She slid the small door closed behind her. The single window faced away from the road, framing a patch of night sky. Ki sat on the floor. Wearily, she tugged off her scratched leather boots. She rubbed her hands over her eyes, scratching the back of her neck under her mourner’s knots. She pushed her finger into an unobtrusive crack in the cuddy wall and coaxed out a small peg. Its catch released, a small concealed door swung open. Ki took out her cargo.
The little leather sack weighed light on her hand. The contents rattled within as she hefted it lovingly. She tugged the throat of the bag open, shook its contents out upon her palm. Bits of fire – three blue, a red, and two large white ones rolled into her hand. These were what Rhesus had paid so dearly for …
‘Too many know of my purchases here!’ Rhesus confided to Ki. His eyes danced over the walls of his small inn room. His shaking hand slopped her wineglass overfull. ‘I know I am watched. I hear them outside my door at night. I push the table against the door, and still I do not sleep. They will cut my throat! They will rob me! What will be thought of me if I return home with no goods to show from my travels and tradings? I should never have bought those cursed jewels! But the price was too good, the gems too fair to turn them down! Never have I possessed such perfect stones – and the prices I can demand for them in Diblun!’
‘Only if you get the stones there first,’ Ki observed. She was not interested in his flutterings. She wished he would talk business or let her go seek a commission elsewhere. But Rhesus had been so pathetically glad to see a familiar face in the Vermintown street.
‘I have devised a plan!’ He smiled proudly and leaned across the small table, lowering his voice to a whisper. ‘From here to Diblun I shall send three swift couriers, youngsters on fast horses, traveling light and armed. And you. But you shall not leave until they have been gone several days, and you will leave only after we have quarreled loudly at dinner below … Ah, you see how my plan goes?’
Ki nodded slowly, her brows gathering over her wary green eyes. ‘And these young riders of yours? Have you warned them that they may pay with their lives for this little ruse of yours?’
‘Why even divulge my ruse to them?’ Rhesus shrugged eloquently. ‘They shall be given lesser goods to carry. And if a man is careful he can find riders to whom such danger would be a spice. I shall have no problems with that, and they will be paid for their hazard. But you, Ki, shall be the real courier that takes my prizes across the pass. Who would look for such a tiny cargo in such an immense vehicle – especially when you are loaded with sacks of salt to trade on the other side of the mountains?’
Ki sat looking into his small, closely set blue eyes. Round like a pig’s, she thought to herself, and buried above an expanse of pale cheek. All the man’s weight was in his tub of a body, supported by implausibly skinny legs. Yet he persisted in emulating the foppish and elaborate dress of the young men of this town. His short, scarlet cloak matched his tight leggings. His straining doublet was richly striped in gaudy colors. Ki turned her eyes down to the scarred table between them. Could she trust a man that dressed like that to have good judgment in his business affairs? A smile twisted her lips. Had she not been carrying freight for Rhesus for as many years as she had had a wagon, and Aethan before her? He was not her favorite client. He dealt too often in contraband and was grudging of paying what was due. He often cursed her when she insisted he fulfill his contract. But when he needed a trusted carrier again, he forgot their differences. It was a little late to fret about his good sense, or lack of it.
She took half of a generous payment, the rest to be paid on delivery of the goods. Had she been another teamster he might have worried about his jewels’ safety. But he had dealt with Ki too long to doubt her honesty.
She remained in Vermintown for some few days, seeing Rhesus intermittently and restocking her wagon a little at a time. She and Rhesus appeared to be the best of friends, and the host and customers of the inn were shocked one evening when a quiet conversation between the two slowly began to rise in volume, and then became vitriolic. Ki climaxed the quarrel by calling him a pig in rooster feathers. Rhesus responded by slinging in her face the contents of his glass: the palate-stinging brandy of Vermintown. Then Ki left abruptly, upsetting the table and costly dinner over Rhesus as she did so.
Ki grinned hard as she returned the jewels to their hiding place. She was sure he would have words for her about