On the breeze he heard the sound of wagons rumbling in, and a few shouts of greeting.
"Farewell, uncle," he murmured.
In the commons, the second caravan had arrived at last, led in by a pair of scouts. It was a bigger company than the one Kesh had traveled with, about thirty wagons and carts in all although it was too dark to get an accurate count even with hirelings and slaves trudging alongside with torches. There was even one heavily guarded wagon, a tiny cote on wheels rather like his own, but he could not be sure what treasure, or prisoner, was held within. There were another hundred of those black-clad guardsmen riding in attendance. Captain Anji led a substantial troop.
Kesh walked back to the Ladytree and his own wagon, where Tebedir kept watch. He dismissed the driver to get what rest he could. After emptying the girls' waste pail out beyond the Ladytree's boundaries and returning it to them, he stretched out on the ground. There he dozed, restlessly, waking at intervals to stare hard into the darkness.
He had to stay alert. Someone was looking for the treasure he was hiding. A thousand needles could not have pricked so hard. But there was nobody there, and all around him in Dast Korumbos the survivors and the newcomers slept the sleep of the justly rescued. If any ghosts walked, he at least, thank Beltak, could not see them.
26
"We keep our heads down," Keshad said to Tebedir that dawn in Dast Korumbos as they harnessed the beasts and stowed the gear. "Stay away from the reeve. Don't let that foreign captain or his wolves notice us. Heads down. Tails down. Walk quietly. Draw no attention to ourselves. Keep in the middle of the group."
As soon as they left Dast Korumbos, a pattern developed: Each night the caravan halted where the reeve met them on the road, and each night Kesh built his fire, fed his slaves, and kept his head down, watching and listening but never venturing farther than he had to from his wagon. He heard the rumor that the faithless border captain, Beron, was being held as a prisoner, hauled along to face justice at the assizes in Olossi, but no one was allowed near that closed wagon, guarded as it was by a shield of grim wolves. Kesh had no desire to investigate. Best not to draw attention to himself. He was pleased to find himself assigned to the last third of the procession. They'd eat dust back here, but were perfectly placed to remain anonymous as the cavalcade lurched down the West Spur, moving north and east.
He looked for signs of that Silvers' wagon that had gone on ahead, alone, out of Dast Korumbos, but he saw no wreckage, no sign of them at all. Either they'd got away free, or they and their wagon had been hauled off into the trees, never to be seen again.
At length the caravan rumbled down the long slope out of the foothills where the high mountain pine and tollyrake forest gave way to an open, grass-grown, and rather dry landscape with few trees. They came to Old Fort, a low hill where the remains of an ancient monument thrust up into the sky, looking rather like the mast of a vast, buried ship. A palisade ringed the community at New Fort, rising beneath the gaze of the old ruin. The Olo'o Sea shimmered in the afternoon sun. The southern hills and eastern upland plains rimmed the waters of the Olo'o, but west and north the inland sea ran all the way to the horizon. Dogs lapped at the water and, finding it salty, shied back. Along the shore, fires burned merrily where families of fisherfolk smoked their catch beside reed boats coated with pitch to make them waterproof.
At Old Fort, the reeve left them and flew north. The merchants, bickering and complaining, found places in the camping ground built just beyond the palisade and its double stone watchtowers. Those merchants who had spent days walking in the rear of the cavalcade brought their grievance to the two caravan masters, and Kesh decided that he, too, had to demand a forward place lest folk wonder why he was content to skulk in the back. Others complained more loudly; he was quickly forgotten as the arguments ebbed and flowed. He waited at the back of the assembly. A man brought a complaint against a guardsman-not one of the Qin-who, the merchant claimed, had had sexual congress with one of his slave girls; three merchants carting oil of naya and barrels of pitch from the west shore of the sea begged leave to join the caravan; a dispute had arisen over payment for a driver and his teams. As soon as Master Iad handed out new places in the line of march, Kesh left. At the camping ground, the fisherfolk were glad to sell their catch at an inflated price. For his party, Kesh cooked rice, with one fish shared between them.
He sat on the steps of his wagon to watch the sun set. Red spilled along the waters, painting a gods' road where no mortal could walk. Much of the company settled down for the night, though a fair number felt safe enough to get drunk and sing.
Kesh was too restless to sleep. He sat late, marking the slow wheeling of the stars. The sigh of the water on the flat shore nagged at him all night, like his doubts and fears. Twice, he thought he heard the soft sound of weeping from inside the wagon, and twice, it ceased as soon as he rose, thinking to look inside. Shadows crawled along the shoreline. He saw a dark figure striding knee-deep far out in the quiet waters, a death-bright white cloak billowing out behind as though caught in a gale. He blinked, and it was after all only the light of the rising moon spilling along the sea. It wasn't even windy.
In the morning, the caravan pushed north along the road, which took the upland route, always within sight of the Olo'o Sea. This good road, which he had walked before, was packed earth. The sights were familiar and comforting, the glassy stretch of sea to his left and the long rolling swells of the grassland to his right, shimmering under a wind out of the east. It was nice to walk in the front for a change. Each of the next five days, he marked the remaining four of the five fixed landmarks of the West Spur: Silence Cliff; the Scar; Rope Tree; the intersection with the Old Stone Road that led to the Three Brothers, the intersection that was the terminus of West Spur, the last mey post.
An hour after dawn, they passed the alabaster gates of the Old Stone Road. Other folk were also on the road and its attendant paths this early, most carting goods toward town: a girl drove a flock of sheep alongside the road; a dog trotted beside a lone traveler with pouches and loose packs hung from his shoulders and belt; a cripple seated on a ragged blanket was selling oranges, but no one stopped to buy.
Kesh stepped aside from the line of march and walked over to touch the mey post that marked the intersection. The gesture made him think of the envoy of Ilu. It was strange how a brief acquaintance could haunt a man, even a man like himself who kept all those who wished to call him "friend" at arm's length. He watched as the point of the caravan turned southwest onto West Track. It had taken nine days to travel the West Spur from Dast Korumbos. Now the three noble towers of Olossi shone in the distance, where the land sloped down to the wide river that snaked along the lowland plain.
Tebedir, making the turn, waved at him, and he left the mey post and hurried after.
On the long slow descent down the gradual incline, they maintained an excellent view of the mouth of the River Olo and its environs. The alternating colors of the patternwork of agricultural fields, cut into sections by irrigation canals, faded into the hazy distance to the north and west on the Olo Plain. The town itself lay upstream. The walled inner city was nestled on a swell of bedrock almost entirely surrounded by a stupendous oxbow bend in the river. There were walls of a sort even around the sprawling outer districts, but although Sapanasu's clerks and Atiratu's poets related stories of sieges and attacks fended off by the impressive inner wall works in days long past, the outer wall was little more than a palisade thrown up in stages to mark the slow outward crawl as Olossi "let out her skirts."