Exile’s Return. Raymond E. Feist

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      ‘You take it correctly.’

      ‘I was wondering, where might I go to find work around here?’

      ‘Your trade?’

      ‘I’m a skilled hunter and a soldier,’ Kaspar continued politely.

      ‘If you bring in game, you can sell it at the inns, but the Raj has no need for mercenaries.’

      Feeling as if he had already had this conversation, Kaspar didn’t debate this point. ‘What about labouring?’

      ‘There’s always need for those able to heft a bale or lift a crate at the caravanserai.’ He pointed south. ‘Through the town and outside the gate. But you’re too late today. All the hiring is done at first light.’

      Kaspar nodded his thanks and moved through the town. All at once, he was struck by a sense of the alien and the familiar. These people dressed differently and their accents and voices sounded strange to his ear. He had thought himself comfortable with the language, but now he realized he was only used to hearing Jojanna’s and Jorgen’s two voices. This was a town, a good sized one, on its way to becoming a city. He passed new construction work and saw men eager to be about their business, and found the pace and rhythms of the settlement familiar.

      Reaching the outer gate, Kaspar found that the caravanserai was indeed quiet. As the constable had warned him, most of the business of the day was done. Still, it was still an opportunity to ask questions. He went from caravan to caravan and after a few conversations he had the feel of the place. He discovered that a caravan making for the south would be departing in a week’s time, and the caravan owner said he should return then to seek a position as a guard, but in the meantime he had nothing to offer Kaspar.

      By the time the sun began to set, Kaspar was tired and hungry. There was nothing he could do about the latter, but he could at least find a place to sleep if he was quiet about it. This land was hot, despite it being early spring – if he could judge the seasons on the other side of the world. The nights could get chilly, but they were far from cold.

      He found some workers sitting around a fire and speaking softly, and asked permission to join them. They seemed content to let him, so he settled in and lay behind two men who spoke of things he could only imagine: villages whose names he had never heard before, rivers that coursed through alien landscapes, and other things familiar to them, but foreign to Kaspar. For the first time since coming to this continent, Kaspar wished not only to wreak destruction on Talwin Hawkins and those who had betrayed him, but simply to go home.

      The wagons bumped along the old highway. It was a rugged ride, but it was a ride. Kaspar was glad not to be walking. He had finished an arduous week of work, loading and unloading wagons for scant wages – scarcely enough to pay for food. He had lost even more weight; he had to buy a whipcord belt to keep his trousers from falling down.

      He had supplemented his income by playing knucklebones with some of the other workers, but on the last day his luck had faltered and now he was barely more than a few copper coins ahead. But at least he was ahead, and every little improvement was an advantage. He had endured. Though it had been one difficult week for him, the other men had suffered a lifetime of difficulty. For Kaspar, the most telling characteristic was their complete lack of hope. For these workers, each day was an exercise in survival; tomorrow would take care of itself.

      Kaspar felt a mixture of impatience and resignation. He was anxious to make as much progress as possible every day and to return home as rapidly as he could to settle accounts, but he knew the journey would take time, and that time was also dependent on many factors outside of his control.

      His struggle across the harsh wilderness before he found Jorgen and his mother had been simple physical hardship, but the week he had spent labouring at the caravanserai had been as miserable a week as he had ever spent. It had exposed him to a level of human wretchedness which he’d never experienced before in his privileged life.

      He had learnt that the War, as it was known locally, had taken place when Kaspar was just a boy. The Kingdom of the Isles had defeated the armies of the Emerald Queen at the battle of Nightmare Ridge, when Kaspar had been barely out of nappies. Yet the effects were still being felt decades later.

      Many of the labourers were the children of people driven from their homes by the advancing horde. The enemy had enlisted every able-bodied man they found, giving them the choice at sword-point: to fight for them, or die. Women were taken as whores, cooks, and menial labourers, and even some young boys were forced to serve with the luggage carts.

      Thousands of children had been orphaned, and there had been no one to care for them. The weak had died, and those who did survive grew up wild, without any sense of family outside their gang of thugs, or loyalty beyond a petty bandit chieftain.

      Bringing order to such a place would tax the wits of the most talented of rulers, Kaspar thought. He knew that if he was given the task, he would begin much the same way this Raj of Muboya had: by consolidating a core area, making sure it was stable and prosperous, and then expanding the sphere of influence, turning the influence into control. The young Raj might do this for most of his life before facing any organized opposition to the north.

      As Kaspar had lived with the porters and teamsters for a week, they answered his questions and he had learned a great deal about the local area. To the east lay the Serpent River and beyond that the wasteland controlled by the nomadic Jeshandi; it seemed they had no interest in what occurred on this side of the river. But across the Serpent they ruled supreme; even the Emerald Queen’s army had been sorely pressed on that flank by the Jeshandi. Kaspar had read reports of the war from his father’s archives when he was a boy and given the immense size of the Queen’s army, Kaspar assumed the Jeshandi had to be a formidable cavalry to have avoided obliteration.

      To the west rose the Sumanu Mountains and beyond them vast grasslands that rolled down to the River Vedra and a string of petty city-states. That natural barrier protected the Raj from conflict to the west. To the south, other minor nobles and self-styled rulers held territory, but from the rumours, the Raj was already halfway to winning a happy little war with one of his neighbours in that direction.

      But far to the south, on the coast of the Blue Sea, lay the City of the Serpent River, about which these locals knew little. Once, it had held sway from the sea all the way up to the Serpent Lake, and had been ruled by a council of clans indigenous to the area. More than that, Kaspar didn’t know. Still, that was where ships docked, some from as far away as the Sunset Isles, the southern Keshian cities, and sometimes even Queg and the Kingdom. Which meant a way home for Kaspar. So, that was where he was bound, war or no war.

      The wagons continued to bump along and Kaspar kept his eyes scanning the horizon in case trouble appeared unexpectedly. He thought it was unlikely, as the farther south they travelled from Muboya, the more peaceful the countryside seemed. At least, until they ran into the rumoured war.

      Kaspar sat at the rear of the wagon. The only thing he had to watch, besides the horizon, was the team of horses pulling the wagon behind his, and the dour expression of Kafa: a taciturn old driver with little good to say when he said anything at all.

      The driver of his wagon was a voluble man named Ledanu, whom Kaspar tended to ignore, since his words tumbled out aimlessly as his mind wandered. Still, Kaspar had grown tired of the relative silence and judged he could endure a little of Ledanu’s rambling if he could glean a bit of useful information from among the flood of words.

      ‘Tell me, Ledanu, of this next city.’

      ‘Ah! Kaspar, my friend,’ СКАЧАТЬ