She clambered slowly up onto the seat. She sat down carefully, took up the reins. The pain from her back was a living thing, sucking the strength from her body.
Goat clambered up beside her. He took the reins gently from her hands. 'I think it's finally my turn to drive,' he said.
She nodded, leaned back on the seat and felt the world slide into deep blues and blacks around her. The wagon started with a sickening jolt, and she found it was all she could do to keep a grip on the seat and ride along.
Cooking meat. The smell taunted her. I don't eat meat anymore, Ki reminded herself. I'm too closely linked with all things that move to want to feed on their flesh. But suddenly it seemed a silly resolution, a child's fantasy that by abstaining from meat she could somehow break the cycle of feeding and being fed upon. With or without her it went on. She had killed today, and she did not have to eat of Satativa's flesh to have preyed upon him. She suddenly perceived that eating meat or not eating meat changed nothing. She could not abstain from being Human, nor deny the position Humans held in the slow wheel of life. So she had stopped eating meat. It meant nothing. If she walked about with her eyes closed, would the colors go out of the world?
Her eyes were closed, and had been for a long time. Slowly she opened them. It was evening, the curtains of night fluttering over the world before closing completely. A pall of smoke along the road made the light dimmer and stung her eyes. Burning meat. And hair. And blood spilled new in the dust.
Goat's eyes were fixed on the road, holding the reins as carefully as if they were gossamer. She followed his gaze to where a dim red glow marked a fire by the roadside. Neither one spoke as they slowly approached it. Both sensed there was something momentous about to be revealed; both were too weary to guess what it might be, or to be eager for it.
The scene that greeted them seemed like the ghastly balancing of an earlier one, the counterweight to the scattered Tamshin under the bright sun. The backdrop was the darkening sky and the beginning of stars, the ruddy touching of the firelight upon the still forms. The toppled bodies of the four Brurjans had been stripped of harness and armor, and ignominiously heaped to one side. Their gear burned with the bodies of those who had fallen killing them. They burned with the flare of spilled oil and the tenacity of piled brushwood. No one would ever be able to identify who had fallen bringing the Brurjan guards down. The horses and weapons had been taken.
She got down slowly, walked toward the fire. The Brurjans, she noticed, had been killed thoroughly, several times over. The chest of one had been stabbed so repeatedly that the yellowish shards of its ribs glinted through the mangled flesh. Red sockets gaped where Vashikii's battle fangs had been pulled. The savagery of it bespoke a hatred she did not like to consider.
She drew closer to the fire, wrinkling her nose against the smell, unwilling but compelled. The heat of itscorched her face, and she knew her hair would be full of the smell tonight. She circled it slowly, peering into its depths. Little was left, only the scanty outlines of bodies; two, perhaps three of them. One was clearly too tall; another wore sandals, the leather straps visible against the charred flesh. The third was under the other two, face down, indistinguishable save that he was Human. She stared at the roasting body. About the right height, about the right build ... She knelt by the fire, staring at him, willing herself to notice some grisly clue that would prove her wrong. Goat kept silent. She knelt until her face felt scorched by the nearness of the flames and the burning flesh was an unbearable stench in her nostrils, knowing, but denying.
Something was digging into her knee. She shifted her weight, glanced down. All heat went out of the fire, all living warmth from her body. A horn button. She had knelt on it, and it had dug into her knee. It was still sewn firmly to the scorched cuff that was the sole remainder of a cream-colored shirt. Finely woven stuff, that fabric. Woven by the tiny-fingered Kerugi folk, and it had cost her a shameful amount of coin, but she had loved the way it had felt under her hands when his body heat was seeping through it and her fingers traced the muscles of his back beneath it.
'Vandien,' she said, calmly.
'It was a rebel fighter.' Goat contradicted her. 'They always burn the bodies of their dead. Ever since the Duke ordered some bodies exhumed, and then crucified them ... the bodies, and the families of the bodies. Because the bodies showed the marks of Brurjan weaponry, and he knew they had risen up against his Brurjan guard.'
There was a nervous disorganization to Goat's words. Ki drew back from the fire, stared at him. He was hugging himself as if chilled to death. His eyes were very big. He looked, she thought, as if he had lost everything. Strange that he should feel so much and she should feel so very little. 'Don't believe he's dead,' he pleaded. 'Don't. It's not him. The rebels wouldn't have burned his body. They'd have dumped it with the Brurjans. Vandien wasn't one of their own, they wouldn't care what became of his body or his family. They care only for their own.'
'It's his cuff.' Her throat cracked on the words.
'But it's not him!' Goat insisted desperately.
'Then where is he?' Ki demanded of the night. The darkness pressed close to the fire and filled in the eyes of the swollen dead. 'He was almost dead when the Brurjans took him. If he lived this far, being jolted like that, it would be a minor miracle. But if he did, where is he? What would the rebels want with an injured stranger, a casualty that could only slow them down?'
Goat looked away from her. Something in his posture made her demand again, 'What would they want with him, a stranger and wounded to the death?'
'Not an injured stranger to them,' Goat said haltingly. 'Kellich's killer. The man they probably came after. The one who brought down their plan to assassinate the Duke.'
THIRTEEN
Burning down, the bodies melding, becoming indistinguishable from one another. Little would be left. Whoever had built this fire had known well how to do it. Practice? She supposed.
'Ki?'
'What?'
'Shouldn't we push on, try to catch up with them?'
She pulled her eyes from the fire, saw the boy's genuine concern. 'No, Goat. It's ... too dark now. And the horses need to rest.'
'Here?' he asked in horror.
Where else? she wanted to ask. She couldn't imagine moving on, leaving him here to burn alone. But she watched the boy's eyes go spooking back to the Brurjan bodies, saw how he shivered with dread, not of the imaginary things, but of the final truth he had glimpsed today. The bodies crumpled beneath their burden of burning brushwood. A dragon's tail of sparks whooshed into the air and Ki's eyes followed it, saw the bright bits wink out into nothingness.
She had left Vandien there, finally, got back up on the wagon and left. Pushing on, pretending for Goat that Vandien was not dead and that they were hurrying after him. What should I have done? she asked herself. Waited until the fire died, tried to sort which charred bones had been dear to me?
'There's not much that's fit to eat.' Goat spoke from inside the cuddy through the open door.
'I'm not hungry anyway,' Ki observed, keeping her eyes on the road. The lights of Tekum were yellow sparks. 'Just fix something for yourself, Goat.'
'He sure made a mess of the wagon.'
'Brurjans are like that.' Ki heard the abrupt anger in her voice, tried to modify it. 'Goat, I don't feel much like talking just now. Okay?'