I was a day out of Banwa town, and I had yet to see another soul on the muddy road beside the river. It likely would not have made a difference—Bran was a steppe horse, an exceedingly rare sight this far south. Any other traveler would have been just as much at a loss as I.
I took him down the riverbank and into the snow-fed water, letting it cool his legs and his belly. He rallied after a few minutes, and we continued on our way, but after an hour he slowed again, panting.
Aysulu would have known what to do. But she was half a world away, and I had not seen her in more than a year, since I had left Phyreios. Bran had been her last gift to me. I considered, briefly, leaving him, or selling him in the hopes that he would find his way into the hands of someone who could better care for him, but as soon as the thought came to me, I pushed it aside. He deserved better, as did Aysulu’s friendship, and I feared he was the only thing keeping me from the madness of solitude as I traveled alone in this strange land.
Still, our progress had slowed. Every hour or two, I had to stop and take Bran to the river to cool him down. Spring was maturing into summer, and the days grew warmer. What was worse was the moisture in the air, something I had not experienced in all my travels. I sweated under my new coat of brigandine, but it did nothing to relieve the heat, and I found that Bran did not sweat at all. It was no wonder he was feeling poorly.
I wanted to go faster. If I could only get to the port, I thought, my quest would be nearly complete. All I had to do was find passage on a ship to the isles, and convince the wise women there to help me. It had already been one long year and two seasons since I had lost Khalim. I feared any delay would carry him further from my reach.
Torr, the First Hero, the god he had served and who had taken him from me, had promised me he would be safe in the world beyond. I did not trust his word. Khalim had trusted him, and Torr had betrayed him, taking the body in which he had lived for twenty years and banishing him to the realm of the dead. It was necessary, the god had said, for Phyreios and for the world. I did not trust that, either.
But I would not give up on Bran. As the sun sank over the hills the next evening, I tethered him to a tree close to the water and took my spear and my javelins into the woods to hunt. I would need food for the road ahead, however long it might take me.
I followed a pair of tiny, swift-footed deer through the trees, keeping the river at my back. I had almost caught them when they changed course and darted away, disappearing into the underbrush.
The ground shook with the footsteps of something large and impossibly heavy. Whatever it was, it was coming closer. I put the spear in the branches above my head and climbed up into the tree after it, hiding among the broad green leaves.
Again, the forest quivered, the branch that bore my weight swaying like a ship in a storm. I held on to the smooth, wet bark and stilled my breathing.
The trees parted, and the creature came into view. It had legs like columns to hold up a roof, and ears like sails. The great dome of its head was as tall as my hiding place in the branches. Its skin was thick and wrinkled, and as gray as a thunderhead. I had seen something like it only once before: the rhinoceros that had trampled a man nearly to death in the Cerean Tournament. This creature was much larger, and in the place where a horn would be there was a long, prehensile arm. It spied me with one eye and blew a discordant, trumpeting note through that trunk.
I would learn, some time later, that these creatures were called elephants. To my surprise, there were two—a second, much smaller creature followed the first, its trunk holding on to its mother’s ropy tail.
Curiosity came over me, and my task of hunting was forgotten. When the elephants had passed, I dropped down from the tree, and I followed the path they had tramped into the undergrowth. I kept my spear low and stayed a respectful distance behind. I did not want to find out what such a beast might do to defend her young, should she come to believe I was a threat.
The trail ended at a rock face, where several more elephants gathered. The one I followed broke off a loose stone with her trunk, dislodging a shower of white dust. This she licked from the end of her trunk, and gave some to her child. I could taste the dust in the air—salt.
Maybe this could help Bran, and me, survive the growing heat. I stayed in the trees and watched as the elephants ate off the rock and bathed themselves and each other in mud, finally moving off as darkness fell.
I emerged from my hiding place. With a stone discarded by the elephants, I broke jagged chunks of salt from the cliff and gathered them into the bottom of my tunic. I dropped several pieces on the way, but I returned to Bran and my camp with enough to last us a few months, if we rationed it.
The next morning, I saw no more elephants, but Bran breathed easily and his pace quickened. We began to see tilled rice fields after two more days of travel, and on the third day from the salt lick, the walls of a town rose into view. I could smell the sea and hear waves crash against the cliff on which the town sat.
Tears came to my eyes, for more than the salt sting in the air. It had been many months since I had left the far northern shore in a hollowed tree, paddling the icy waters with my hands. The tide had carried me to the edge of the steppe, where Aysulu had found me. I had not seen the ocean since.
I collected myself and gave Bran’s inquisitive nose a pat, and together we approached the gate. I recognized the banners hanging from the walls and the deep blue robes and red-plumed helmets of the guards. This port was an Imperial holding.
Though the soldiers eyed my armor suspiciously—they wore the same thing, and I was so clearly not one of them—they accepted the paper I had been given at Banwa, and to my relief, handed it back to me. They shouted an order to the gatehouse, and the doors opened.
I did not understand the command. Neither could I follow the din of conversation in the bustling town—among the sailors and merchants who did their business between the gate and the harbor, I heard perhaps a dozen different tongues, and none of them were ones I knew. Through signs and gestures, I managed to exchange some of my remaining rations for some fodder for Bran, and then I went down to the harbor to find someone who might understand me.
Imperial banners hung from what I assumed was the harbor master’s office, but the men inside turned me away in a language I did not know. I fared no better with the sailors. The only word I knew that they could understand was Ashinya, but they shook their heads.
I was considering the merits of returning to the forest and creating a raft on which to sail to the isles, and whether I could take Bran with me on such a craft, when I heard a voice behind me.
“Hello there, friend!”
It was not quite my mother tongue, and the accent was utterly unfamiliar, but it was close enough for me to understand. I turned around.
Before me stood a man in an open vest and trousers tucked into polished boots. His skin was darkened by the sun and wind. On his head was a wide hat festooned with multicolored plumage, and from his hip hung a short, curved sword. The ends of the feathers reached my chest, for despite the thick soles of his boots, this man was only four feet tall.
I was astonished. “How do you speak the language of the North?” I asked.
He did not, as it turned out, but he was exceptionally well-traveled, and he knew a tongue close enough in relation that we could communicate some simple ideas. His ship, indicated by a sweeping gesture, was larger than any I had ever seen. It had three sails of striped canvas hanging from two different masts, and a second deck below the first.
I did not catch his name in the torrent of words he said to me, but I understood that he would go to the isles of Ashinya, and he was leaving in a hurry. He handed me an oar to indicate what I would need to do to earn my passage.
The ship might have been a strange craft, but the oar was a familiar thing. The weight of it flooded my mind with the memories of the long ship I had once sailed.
I had little time to reminisce, as he ushered me onto his ship with great urgency. Before I went below deck, I saw ten Imperial soldiers running onto the dock, shouting what I assumed was an order to halt.
The anchor lifted and the ship pushed off into the green sea. I rowed for the afternoon and was permitted to rest and feed my horse when evening came, and I slept in a corner of the upper deck beneath the clear night sky. The captain had, for the time being, managed to evade the authorities.
We arrived at the islands early the next morning. A black volcano stretched into the sky, and around its base grew a jungle of strange trees, with leaves only at the tops of their trunks. Smaller islands, also of black stone, rose up in a half-circle behind this one.
The captain had me row him and a chest he did not open in a small craft to the beach. I could not follow everything he said to me as I pulled the oars, but he did use the word witch, and something that might have been curse, and gave me a warning to treat the women of the island with respect.
I brought us to a weathered wooden dock jutting out from a beach the color of ash, and we disembarked, tying the rowboat to a post. A short distance away, a young girl of about ten, a flower in her long, black braid, stood knee-deep in the surf, checking woven traps for fish.
I called out to her, out of habit, in the language of the steppe. To my great surprise, she answered me in the same tongue.
“Who are you?” she asked.
I held my hands out. “My name is Eske. I’m looking for the seers of the islands. A dragon told me that they could help me.”
She looked past me at the captain, and at his chest of unknown treasures, and her small round face twisted into an angry frown. “You need to leave,” she said, pointing an accusing finger at him. “The grandmothers don’t want you here.”
He set down the box and put a hand to his chest, affronted. When he answered her, he spoke the same language he had used on the ship, the one that was similar to my mother tongue.
The girl shook her head at his argument, and said, “You’re a pirate, and you’re not allowed on this island.”
There was some magic at work here. The captain and I spoke different tongues, and this girl conversed with both of us.
“How can you do that?” I asked.
She gave me a quizzical look. “Do what?”
“Never mind,” I said. “I’ve come a very long way. I need to speak to the grandmothers. Can you show me to them?”
“I don’t know.” She pulled a small silver fish from her trap and added it to a length of string from which several other fish already hung. “The grandmothers don’t talk to just anyone. I’m supposed to keep bad people away. Like him.”
The captain adopted a pleading pose, and he pulled from his vest pocket a pastry wrapped in paper—he had come prepared with bribes for the island’s gatekeeper, it seemed.
She took the offered gift. “I guess I can ask. But you have to stay here.” She put the pastry in a pocket of her loose dress, gathered one more fish, and knotted her string.
The captain sighed and sat down on his wooden chest. “I’ll just…wait here, then,” he said, or something close enough.
The girl put her small, sticky hand in mine, and led me into the jungle.
Back to Chapter IV: The Hills of Maagay
Forward to Interlude One: Citadel Gate
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