West of January (30 page)

Taking advantage of some smooth terrain, I had been sleeping. I awoke to the sound of voices. For a moment I thought they were discussing me. When I opened my eyes, however, I saw Jat wearing the new shirt. Another lay discarded at my side, beside his leather coat. He was preening mightily, admiring as much of himself as he could contort into the little mirror. If one’s taste ran to such ostentation, then that shirt was the treasure of a lifetime. Even I could see that it was a masterpiece.

The dealing had started. Misi was sitting on one of the chests, set outside on the step, and had now turned around to plant her big feet flat inside the cab. Her meaty hands rested on her knees, and her eyes had shrunk back into sinister caverns of fat.

“Not one more twenty-seventh!” Jat said over his shoulder. “Pick something else, anything else but—oh, hi Knobil. Anything else at all.”

Misi’s pout became a glare.

“Fourteen sacks of phosphate?” Jat suggested, earning a loud snort. “Well, how about the dapple foal? Kan wants it. Nine-eighteenths of the copper pots?”

She seemed to like none of his ideas. She shrugged hugely. “The rest of the bronze pelts?”

Jat’s attention went to his fingers. “Nineteen thirty-thirds of my twenty-two thirtieths?”

“The molasses and your share of the oats?”

“Thirteen twenty-fourths of the wool and the bag of agates?”

“All the wool and two-thirds of the agates?”

“The bleach, the sickles, and the glass beads?”

They kept this up for some time, while I listened in amazement. I had seen Jat bargaining with Lon and even with some of the other men—it was their favorite occupation. But I never heard it done faster, with less hesitation, or with more authority. Offer and counteroffer went leaping around the cab like a herd of roos; speed was part of the technique. Misi apparently knew the details and values of Jat’s holding as well as he did.

Usually such session ended with an agreement, a handshake, and a repeat of the terms before a witness and in sunshine. But not this one. “Leave it, then,” Misi growled, and she swung around once more to attend to the team.

Angrily Jat pulled off the overpriced garment, threw it down, and flounced off like a sulky child. He was still fastening buttons as he cantered away.

Stunned, I stretched out to catch hold of the discarded shirt. I lifted it and had begun to fold it when I saw that Misi had twisted around to glare her grotesque face in my direction.

“Work those knees more, Knobil!”

“Yes, Misi,” I said humbly. “I will.”

If she had fooled me for so long, which one of us was the smarter?

—8—
BLACK-WHITE-RED

I
BARELY HAD TIME TO ADJUST TO MY NEW VISION OF
M
ISI WHEN
, with no warning at all, there was trouble.

Our train happened to be in the lead. The men had been up ahead on a scouting or hunting expedition. Now they came cantering back with bows strung, with horses steaming and prancing. They were all good horsemen, those trader males, but they were shouting a lot and I could see that some of their mounts were giving trouble, as if anxiety was infectious. When Jat scrambled onto the platform, I saw that his eyes and nostrils were dilated as if he were spooked himself. Then he turned to Misi and began to whisper urgently in her ear.

The country was patchy woodland, rolling in large hills and ridges under dismal low clouds. The rain had stopped, but the air was still full of the feel of it. Odd movements of wind stirred gusts of mist amid the copses, and the twisted white tree trunks hovered like flocks of ghosts on the edges of reality.

Often, as now, I huddled in a blanket for warmth. The sun, when visible, had fallen halfway down the sky, lower than I had ever seen it, and shadows stretched eerily out to the east. I sorely missed the constant cloudless blue of the grasslands.

For several sleeps we had been skirting a large river to the south of us. Jat had spoken of deep jungle beyond it. To the north bare spines of rock rose faintly, higher than anything I had seen since we had left the Andes. Long ago burned off by High Summer, those would now be incapable of growing anything, even when watered. So this might be a natural pass, a narrowing of the borderlands, an obvious place to ambush traders. There was danger—I could smell it.

I could stand on my feet now, but only briefly and not without pain. Walking was still beyond my powers, and I was happier wearing my splints. Whatever lurked ahead of us, I could not flee it at any speed greater than the snail crawl of the hippos, for I could not even sit astride a horse yet.

Of course trader women never rode and would never abandon their wagons. The men, I suspected, might. If the danger was some predatory animals—or men—then I could expect to take part in a collective defense. I had not shot an arrow since I joined the seafolk, but even a sitting man can use a bow.

Or I might be the danger. Jat straightened up and looked back at me again. He smiled automatically, but for once his jauntiness failed him, and his smile was obviously as utterly false as I had always suspected it to be. He jumped down and hurried over to the other men, who had dismounted and were walking their horses, arguing fiercely.

So the trouble did concern me. I laid away my sewing, untied my splints, and began some leg exercises. Misi was keeping her eyes on the team and had not looked around.

Angels?

Slave trading was a forbidden violence. If there was an angel waiting up ahead, then the traders had only three choices—turn back, kill the angel, or dispose of the evidence. I was helpless. Dreams of jumping out the window and running for the woods must remain only dreams.

Jat and the other men were standing in a group just ahead, holding their horses’ reins and still arguing. Lon Kiv cantered up and dismounted also.

Puffing and bedraggled from sleep, Pula scrambled onto the platform to relive Misi, who clambered down, painfully awkward, and plodded forward to join the discussion. The talkers stopped to form a circle in a sheltered spot, the train drawing slowly away from them.

All the trader men had gathered, with only the one woman?

That confirmed my guess: Knobil was the problem. I wondered if I dared hang my head out the window to watch, and I decided that I would be wiser to pretend to be unconcerned. That was not easy.

I lay back, grunting with pain as I gripped and bent each leg in turn. The amount of movement I could tolerate was pitiful, and even short exercise sessions still left the joints puffed and sore. I felt as helpless as I had when Hrarrh had loosed his horrors upon me. I hoped that traders granted quick deaths. A sword thrust would be better than being tossed aside in the bushes and left to die.

The talk lasted a long time. I worked my knees until I thought they would smoke. I even lurched over to sit on the front bench, near to Pula, and tried talking to her, but that was always hopeless. Misi was certainly much smarter than she pretended, but I had not yet discovered whether Pula had a brain at all.

Then Misi returned, wheezing from unaccustomed exertion. She heaved her great bulk up on the platform, evicted her daughter, and took the reins again. Pula dismounted without a word.

“Misi, what’s going on?” I was beside her, still on the chest—barely—but facing backward. Her feet were out on the platform and mine inside, on the floor.

She chewed her usual wad of paka for a while, until she caught her breath. “Nothing.”

“Rubbish! Is it angels?”

That earned no detectable reaction.

I did not wait for the ruminated response. “Misi, I won’t tell! I’m very, very grateful to you. You saved my life! Trust me!”

Pula had somehow found her way into the middle of the team and was doing something with the harness. Misi yanked on the traces, which are attached to the hippos’ ears, reportedly their only tender part and certainly the only place any attachment could be made on their vast brown smoothness. I once tried to steer a team of hippos. It took all the strength I possessed, and much more patience, for if hippos are smarter than woollies, then the victory is narrowly won. They remember no signal for longer than a man could draw a breath. To make a team stand still for more time than that is impossible.

Misi halted the rear pair. The front two continued to plod ahead, bearing their great yoke. In a moment the rear pair began to move again, but now they were pulling the train by themselves. The loose pair advanced more quickly, with Pula following, holding the traces and gradually turning them in a slow arc to the left.

“Trust you to do what, Knobil?”

“Trust me not to tell the angel that I’m a slave.”

Chew…chew…“You’re not a slave, Knobil.” Chew…“What angel?”

I considered trying to strangle her, but my hands would not have girdled her neck. She would have swatted me like a bug anyway.

And she was right not to trust me. One glimpse of an angel and I would start screaming at the top of my lungs, yelling for rescue.

She began to turn the train to the right. We were going back, then? But why divide the team? Seething with mingled anger and worry, I could do nothing but wait and watch. Eventually we had turned to retrace our path, and I saw that the train itself had been divided also. Pula was guiding the loose hippos toward the now-stationary rear wagon. Jat and Lon were throwing open doors, pulling out goods. Now I could guess what had been decided during the long debate—the various partnerships had been dissolved.

Later, when all the rearranging was complete, I found myself riding with Misi and Pula in the cab of a very short one-wagon train and still heading back to the west. All the others had vanished eastward with Jat and Lon driving the other half of what had once been the joint rig, although I had never before seen men handling a team. Apparently Misi and Pula had traded one of their wagons for two of the men’s hippos. Certainly other merchandise had been involved in the transaction, including me.

Among traders, anything was negotiable.

─♦─

My two huge companions sat on the bench at the front of the cab. I was stretched out again on the bed, at the back, and almost ready to weep from frustration. Which woman did I belong to? Or did they each own a part of me? Six clay pots for his right arm… I should be grateful they had not shared me out with a saw. I was certain now that the traders had heard word of angels up ahead, and now I was being borne away from them and from my only hope of rescue.

The rain had started again. Misi and her daughter seemed to converse during their long silences by means unknown to man, for without warning Pula rose and closed the shutters on the north side. Then she hauled a leather cape from one of the chests, swathed herself in it, and went out on the platform to take over the driving.

Misi came in and shut the front shutters. She stared down at me for a moment in silence and without expression. I was wearing a blue wool tunic and a pagne, for breeches would not go over my splints, but I also had a blanket pulled over my legs, and now I instinctively tucked it tighter around me, disconcerted by this calculating study.

My nerves were the weaker—I spoke first.

“How much of me do you own now?”

After a moment she made her peculiar woofing chuckle. “We’re partners now, Knobil.”

I was about to ask what sort of partners, and then I didn’t dare.

Misi stooped to rummage in one of the cubical chests, stretching brown cotton over hips as wide as hippos’ backs. Once I would have reached out automatically to pat or pinch. Now that her pretense of idiocy had failed, I had abandoned any pretense of wanting Misi Nada. Incredible as it seems to me now, at that time I felt a powerful physical revulsion when I looked at heir—her bloated obesity, her coarse greasy skin, her lank gray hair. Herdmen preferred their women small, even tiny, and perhaps that was the origin of my distaste, although Sparkle had been built on generous lines.

I had turned away to stare broodingly at the scenery. Then Misi flopped down heavily at my side as the cab rolled. She was holding two pottery beakers.

“Drink to our new partnership!” she boomed in her deep harsh voice. She curled her mustache in a smile.

I accepted a beaker with poor grace. “I’m no trader, Misi. I can’t ride or hunt…or scout or cook. I can’t even walk yet. I certainly couldn’t haggle—”

“You’re a better man than Jat!” she said and tossed off her drink. Then she looked at me expectantly.

I shrugged and swallowed mine—then gagged at one of the worst tastes I had ever met. Misi leered and pursed her lips so that I might seal our agreement with a kiss. I pretended not to understand. “I’m not a better man than Jat for what you want,” I said, hoping that I was wrong about what she wanted.

“He’s a coward! Trouble makes every one of his parts run.”

“Afraid of angels, is he?”

She heaved her great shoulders in a shrug, took my beaker, and threw it out of the one open window. She tossed her own beaker after it, in what seemed an oddly extravagant gesture. “You’re my partner now.”

“Partner? In business? But I have no skills and no goods—”

“I paid Jat. I’ll pay you,” she said complacently and slid a giant hand under the blanket to feel my left knee. She frowned, for it was hot.

“I was exercising.”

She threw off the cover and began tightening the straps on my splints with quick deft movements, the normal pretense of stupidity now discarded. Her touch brought goose bumps up on my skin. She noticed and chuckled again. She stroked a finger along my thigh, tracing one of the thin red scars.

My heart was pumping furiously. “Misi, why do traders buy wetlanders? And don’t throw manure about luck!”

She smiled mockingly. “Wetlanders are great lovers.”

“That’s not true!! Hrarrh told me you buy men and women, both. And you don’t care what sort of shape they’re in—”

“What sort of shape are you in, Knobil?”

I was sweating. I wiped my forehead. “I’m not… I’m… Misi—
what was in that drink you gave me?”