The Windsingers Series: The Complete 4-Book Collection. Megan Lindholm

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СКАЧАТЬ when the wagon was empty of all save Ki’s own possessions, the women would help her unbind her hair from the knots and weavings that proclaimed her mourning. The time of grief would be over. Little mention of the dead would ever be made again, lest it trouble their spirits in the world they had passed on to.

      Ki watched the tall flames of the fire reaching. The tips of the flames seemed to rip free of the fire, to blink into nothingness in the dark above the flames. Ki did not move. The Romni waited.

      Rifa it was who took her courage in her hands and approached Ki. ‘It is time, sister,’ she said firmly. ‘You know how it must be done. When Aethan, your father, went on before you, you did not shrink from what you had to do. Come, Ki. It is time. Let the grieving be over.’

      ‘No.’ Ki breathed the word. Then she rose, to stand beside Rifa, facing the other Romni who stood waiting by the fire. She let the fur drop from her shoulders. The cool of the night prodded her injured shoulder, making it leap to fresh complaints. As she spoke, she felt the drag and pull of the dried cuts on her face.

      ‘No.’ She said it clearly, loud enough to carry to all ears. ‘I am not yet ready to do this thing, my friends. My grieving is not yet over. I respect your ways. I have made them my own since I was a tiny child, playmate to many of you. But I must respect my heart’s counsel as well. And I am not ready, yet, to bid them farewell. I am not ready.’

      The dark eyes stared at her, returning her look steadily. She knew there would be no rebuke, no anger, no raised voices. There was among them only regret for her. They would speak of it quietly among themselves, sad that she insisted on clinging to her grief, on linking her life to the deaths of her family. To Ki they would say nothing. They would speak no words to her, make no sign. She would be as a ghost among them, a person who had set herself apart. They could not have anything more to do with her, lest they and their families should also become contaminated with her longings for things dead. Ki knew the words they would say: ‘With one butt you cannot sit on two horses.’ She must choose between the living and the dead.

      Ki watched them disperse from the fire, drifting away like swirls of smoke back to their own small campfires, their sleeping children, and their gaudy wagons. Theirs were the full wagons of the Romni, who live on the road by their wits and their love of the lands. Ki looked at her own wagon. Two thirds of it was empty and flat, left bare to carry cargo or items she would buy in one place to sell in another. She had never surrendered herself to trusting the road to support her. She had never fully given herself over to the Romni way.

      ‘I am not a Romni.’ She said it aloud to herself, to hear the way the words sounded in her ears.

      ‘Then what are you?’ Ki’s body jerked in surprise. She had not noticed that Rifa still stood in the shadows beside her, had not drifted off with the others. Ki’s green eyes met Rifa’s. The woman’s broad face was in shadow, only her eyes speaking her feelings to Ki. Ki pondered the question. Her mind ranged over the lists of all the peoples she had ever seen, past all the settlements and towns she had ever trundled through on a wagon. No culture came to her mind, no set of customs to claim as her own. She thought of Sven’s people, tall blond farming folk far to the north. She would have to seek them out soon with the news of his death. Were they her people now, whose customs she should share? Her heart shied away from the prospect. No, she had not taken on Sven’s ways when they came to their agreement. Rather Sven had built a wagon, chosen a team, and taken on her own ways. He had lived like Romni, and now he was dead, and his children with him. But Ki did not mourn him as a Romni woman would mourn her man. Because she was not Romni. The question came back to her. Then what was she?

      ‘I am Ki,’ she said. The words came out clearly, with a certainty Ki had not known she possessed. Rifa received her words in the darkness. Her black eyes shone brighter for a moment, and then she cast them down.

      ‘So you are. Return to us when you can, Ki. You will be missed among us.’

      Ki had left the campsite early the next day, before morning had even begun to gray the sky. No one had bid her farewell. No one had watched her leave or seemed to hear the creak and rattle of her wagon as it moved off. Now as she moved down this road in darkness, leaving another camp of the Romni farther and farther behind her, she wondered if there had been any there that knew her. With a wry smile, she revised the question. Were there any Romni anywhere that would know her anymore?

      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 СКАЧАТЬ