The Echidna's Scale (Alchemy's Apprentice) (14 page)

Chapter 10 – The Amber Trade Road

They reached Trestle the next evening.  The city was slightly smaller than the Lion City, and not as glamorous or sophisticated.   It dealt with a different type of trade than the Lion City, which created different attitudes and different expectations.  Trestle was the terminus of the Amber Trade Road, bringing gems and furs and raw products from north of the Glacial Mountains down to the ships that carried the goods to cities on harbors hundreds of miles away.  The traders who came to the city were not interested in fashion or art or culture; they needed resources to take back to their settlements in the mountains and beyond, and Trestle catered to their expectations.

“We will get a room at an inn tonight,” Marco agreed to the badgering that Pesino, and even Kate, had deluged him with throughout the day of their journey.  The weather had turned more typically autumnal on them, with cool, misty weather and occasional rain showers sweeping in off the seafront, elements for which they were not prepared adequately.

Marco thought that an inn would provide warmth and dryness and a last chance at relief before they faced the real rigors of traveling north along the Amber Trade Road.  Cassius had been a stalwart traveler through the first days of the trip, complaining about nothing, even when he lagged behind; Cassius deserved a chance to sleep soundly to rest up.  They had been traveling slowly, but the road north would require them to increase their pace, or risk being caught in the high passes of the Glacial Mountains when the snows grew heavy, the winds howled fiercely, and the temperatures plummeted to dangerous lows.

Pesino would insist that she deserved a chance to sleep soundly in an inn as well.  Marco knew, because she had been staking that claim ever since the first drizzle had dampened their clothes during the morning walk.  Pesino had pretended – or at least Marco thought it was pretense – to want to take her damp clothes off and walk naked, though Kate and Marco had forcefully dissuaded her.

Before the sky overhead had surrendered its last small patches of red gleams that showed through the gray evening clouds, Marco led the quartet into a respectable-looking inn, one located on the thoroughfare that led towards the Lion City.  Inns in the direction of either the harbor or the Amber Road were likely to have a rougher clientele, he guessed, and so he decided to avoid them by staying on the western side of the city.

“We’ll take two rooms, please,” Kate surprised him by stepping up to the counter next to him and pre-emptively speaking before him as the clerk listened.  “And we’ll have a tub and hot water delivered to my room,” she informed the clerk.

“That’ll be a half silver and two brass fortins,” the clerk replied.

“Pay the man, Marco,” Kate said in a forceful voice.

Marco looked at her, then pulled the coins out of his purse and laid them on the desktop.  The clerk placed two keys on the counter in return, and Kate immediately grabbed one.  “Take the tub to this room,” she jingled the key for the clerk, who nodded.  Then she turned; “Let’s go, Pesino, to get our bath and get warm,” she said.

The group of travelers spent two nights in Trestle, to Marco’s surprise.  They spent a full day shopping for clothing, supplies, and weapons.  Marco acquired a bow and arrows, though he knew he was only marginally competent with them.  Cassius decided on a pike, and Kate wore a pair of daggers.  Only Pesino ended the shopping spree without arms to use; “I can be dangerous without using those kinds of weapons,” she told Marco when they argued over a suitable knife for her to carry, and she stubbornly won the battle of wills.

They switched inns the second night in the city, and stayed close to the north gate to the city, staying among the traders and travelers who were familiar with the Amber Trail Road.  Pesino proved her ability to stave off trouble without overt weapons that evening, when they sat at long common tables and benches in the dining hall.

The dining room was inhabited not only by Marco and his companions, but by dozens of others as well, mostly composed of men who were toughened by the challenging life of hauling goods up and down the Amber Trail in all kinds of conditions.

“That’s my leg you’re touching under the table,” Pesino told the man who sat beside her on the bench at their dinner table, as Marco sat on her other side.

“It is, and it feels good – softer than my leg.  Want to rub mine and compare?” the man with the creased face agreed in a coarse voice.

Marco immediately started to rise from his seat to confront Pesino’s antagonist, but she placed a restraining hand on his arm.  “Let me handle this,” she said calmly.

She turned to face the man, and from his seat across the table, Cassius watched with interest as the former mermaid looked at her neighbor with a sultry, half-lidded expression in her eyes, while her body’s posture subtly shifted to press itself forward towards him as if it were an offering.  She spoke in a provocative tone, one that made her neighbor’s loins stir with desire.

“I’d like to meet you alone down by the harbor, in a secluded little cove where no one will interrupt us for hours,” she told the man.  “Would you be willing to go to a lonely spot with me?” she asked.

His eyes grew wide, and he nodded his head emphatically.

“There’s a man who’s been keeping me locked up in a room here.  I was forced to stand
with him in a fake wedding ceremony so that he could claim to be married to get a job, and ever since then he’s been harassing me.  I want to be free, so that I can do things.  Will you help me?” she asked breathlessly.

The man who sat one seat beyond her neighbor was staring at her over the shoulder of the man she spoke to, also drawn into the hypnotic quality she exuded.  She had entranced them both, and Cassius could practically see their hearts racing with anticipation of the promised rewards that were implied by her demeanor, despite the ridiculous nature of the impromptu tale she was spinning.

“I want you to go find the man who is standing in the way of us being together.  He is wearing a red hat, a blue coat and a yellow belt,” she described the uniform of the local police, which Marco had explained to her during their day in the city shopping.  “Go find that man, who will be walking with another man dressed just like him, and go up to him and tell him that you want to make love to the woman he calls his wife passionately all night long.

“Go now, so that we can go be alone as quickly as possible,” she commanded softly, and she pursed her lips in the shape of a kiss.

Both men instantly stood up at their places, and without hesitation, abandoned their meals as they raced through the dining room and went out the door of the inn, in search of a policeman to badger.

Marco watched as Pesino casually shed her siren’s role.  Her shoulders suddenly straightened up, and the atmosphere of undeniable temptation that she had surrounded herself with was immediately gone, as she swiveled around to face Marco.  “See, I don’t need a knife to deal with men.”

Marco swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down.  “I’m glad you never turned that on to me,” he mumbled.

“Well, I did, you know,” she answered in a conventional voice, “but you seemed to have withstood my little test, and you talked about your beloved Mirra.  You accused me of ‘flirting’ if I remember correctly,” she told him with a cocked eyebrow.  “And then I agreed not to take a fling at you, so you have nothing to worry about now.  Unless you’ve changed your mind about Mirra?”

Marco remembered only spotty portions of the time he had been under the influence of Sty’s truth serum, and his memories of his interactions with Pesino were indistinct.

“You certainly can put a man under a spell,” he changed the topic.

“I spent a long time doing that,” she said cryptically. 

“What will happen to those two men?” Kate asked from her seat next to Cassius, having watched the whole performance as well.

“They’ll go out to the streets, and probably fight each other for the right to pursue her,” Cassius said.

“And then the winner will go find a pair of policemen and try to persuade them to let him make love to one of their wives,” Pesino said.

“And by the time they shake off Pesino’s spell, we’ll be miles outside the city,” Cassius finished.  “The sirens have been one of the most effective defenses the merpeople have had against attack or invasion by shiploads of humans, since the ancient times.  Any ship that may pose a threat to one of our villages can be easily lured away to rocks or reefs by a good siren,” he explained.

Marco and Kate looked at one another silently across the table, each entertaining different thoughts about Pesino’s ability.

That night Marco and Cassius shared one room in the inn, while Kate and Pesino shared the other.

The next day they sat at the breakfast table and heard a rumor of a man who had tried to pick a fight with the local police, and was sitting in the jail as a result.  The four of them looked at one another without saying anything, but grinned nonetheless.  And after breakfast they went to their rooms, got their packs and supplies, and left the inn with the first steps of their true journey north, the beginning of their adventure along the Amber Trade Road.

They were a distinct group as they walked through the city towards the North Gate, wearing the clothing they had selected for themselves in the shops in the city. 

Pesino wore leather pants that had been dyed to an impossibly bright yellow.  “I have these legs now, and I want people to notice them,” she had declared as Marco had tried to persuade her to choose another color.  She had a bright red woolen cape, and a green shirt beneath.

Cassius had chosen clothing with a subdued blue color, because, he noted, it represented his heritage in the sea.  He traveled with his pike, using it as a walking stick.  Kate had chosen a green cape and black leather pants, with brown boots that rose high up her calves.  She had a pair of daggers discretely carried beneath her cape.

Marco had grey pants and black boots, and a brown cape.  He carried his sword outside the cape, and his bow over his shoulder.   Each of them carried a pack that held a few articles of extra clothing – a dress in the case of each of the women – covers for bedding, dried fruit and meat, and compressed bread and crackers.  Marco had his alchemy supplies, and Cassius had a tent that would hold all four of them if they were willing to tightly cram in together.

The former merpeople were walking with confidence now, though their legs were still not as strong as Kate and Marco’s were. 

“Do you want me to walk in the lead?” Pesino asked as they left the city gates and began to pass through the buildings outside the city walls.

“Why would I want you in the lead?” Marco asked.

“So I can take care of any robbers we encounter.  You saw how well I did last night,” she winked at him.

“I’ll go in the lead, you follow me, and Cassius will bring up the rear,” Marco instructed, even though they were on a wide and paved and busy road still well within the jurisdiction of Trestle.  They strolled under overcast skies, and by mid-afternoon they had traveled far enough from the seafront to feel the temperature drop.   That night they slept in a farmer’s barn, where Pesino complained about the odors of the animals until Marco pointed out that the alternative was to sleep out in the fresher but cooler evening air.

The following day they reached the end of the coastal plain, and began to climb through foothills, as mountains loomed on the northern horizon before them. 

“How high into the sky can the land climb up?” Cassius asked.

“How deep beneath the surface can the oceans waters drop?” Kate asked him in return.

“We don’t know; we can’t go that far beneath the surface,” Pesino chimed in.

“And it’s so dark we can’t see how deep it goes,” Cassius added.

“I’ve never been in the mountains,” Kate replied.

“I’ve only climbed a small one,” Marco said, thinking of the Isle of Asclepius.

They all suffered from heavy breathing as they began to steadily climb.  There were many other travelers on the road, the last great mass of traders who would try to cross the mountains before winter set in and made the high reaches of the Glacial range too treacherous to traverse.

Kate and Pesino drew attention as they walked the roadway towards the north, for there were very, very few women who were trying to make the trip to Boheme.  Most of the traders were groups of men accompanied by strings of mules, with some traders riding horses.  Although the mules were sedate creatures that traveled as a slow pace, they still passed by the group from the Lion City, which traveled slower still.  And as they passed, the drivers who maintained the mules for the traders, and even some of the traders themselves, found common reasons to comment on or to the two women.

Even patient Cassius grew tired of hearing the drovers offer to trade a mule for one of the women.  Kate ignored all the comments, but Pesino walked a fine line of insulting and encouraging the men as she responded with jibes and double entendres.

“I’ll trade this mule for the gal with the yellow legs,” one muleteer typically said on the fourth day of their trip from Trestle, as they were leaving the foothills to begin the climb into the steep and rugged terrain of the Glacials.  “I’ve been sleeping with the mule for a long time, and wouldn’t mind trying something different for a change,” he offered.