"You can smell bandits?" Whandall could have used that talent in Tep's Town!
"Well, maybe not. But Hickamore can. A good wizard can give warning, and Hickamore's good. Blast! Now Ironfoot's wagon is stuck-"
"Kettle Belly!"
The caravan chief looked around at Whandall's horrified shout. He said, "Ah."
Moving among the mountains, grayed by distance, was a vastness built to their mountains' own scale. Its legs were as tail as redwoods, but so wide that they looked stumpy. Its torso was another mountain. A forest of hair, piebald brown and white, hung down all around it. Ears bigger than any sail. An arm ... a boneless arm where a nose might have been, lifted and fell as the ... god turned to study them.
"It's Behemoth," Kettle Belly said. "It won't come any closer. Nobody's ever seen Behemoth close. Give me a shoulder here, Whandall."
Whandall set back to work. From time to time he looked up at Behemoth moving among the mountains, until the moment when he looked up and the beast god was gone.
The road became steeper, then leveled off. Whandall was glad of it. He and the blacksmith and Kettle Belly were the strongest men in the wagon train, and sometimes it took all three of them to get a heavy wagon over a bad place. "I'll be glad when this day is over," Whandall told Kettle Belly.
Kettle Belly glanced up at the sun. "Two hours and a little more. Only one place to camp tonight," he said. "Four! Run ahead and tell the scouts we'll camp at Coyote's Den. Not that they won't know it."
"All right, Dad!"
"Coyote's Den?" Whandall asked.
"The road forks just up ahead. The right-hand branch goes uphill. We'll take that one." Kettle Belly grinned as Whandall groaned. "Not too steep, and it's a good road. The Spotted Coyotes see to that. They've made a good place to camp, too. Of course they had to."
Whandall frowned the question Kettle Belly had expected.
"They had to because there aren't enough of them to be tax collectors without giving some service," Kettle Belly said. "Look around you. Nothing here but some pasturage, and not a lot of that. Over there, beyond that ridge, there's some better land, but no one ever goes that far off the Hemp Road. For some reason the Spotted Coyote tribe has to live here, something about instructions from their god."
"He told them to live here but he didn't give them anything to live on?" Whandall asked. "What does he do for them?"
"Beats me," Kettle Belly said. "Coyote's a strange one. Nobody really knows what he wants. Anyway, the Spotted Coyotes made the best of it. They found a big ring of boulders, and over the years they've made it into a rest stop. Here we go; that's the fork."
Kettle Belly's number three son ran out with a long curved cow horn. "Can I do it?" he asked excitedly.
"Sure."
Number Three blew six long blasts on the horn.
"That tells the Spotted Coyotes how many of us to fix dinner for," Kettle Belly said. "Thai's how it works. You tell them you're coming, and they cook up stew to be ready when we get up to the top. They teed us and watch out for us." Kettle Belly's lips pursed into a small tight grin. "And they don't charge any more than they ask for just to pass through their territory."
"Are there a lot?" Whandall asked.
"No, not really, but enough you wouldn't want to fight them, and you really wouldn't want them making the road worse than the winter rains do."
"Toronexti," Whandall said. When Kettle Belly gave him a blank look, Whandall tried to explain. "Tax collectors. Toll takers. But they never give you anything for what they take."
"So you organize a lot of people and go kill them," Kettle Belly said. "That's what we do. If a town gets mean enough, we get all the wagoneers together and go burn them out."
Whandall thought about trying to organize enough Lordkin to destroy the Toronexti. Nobody knew how many they were, where they lived, nor even who they were behind those masks. They were backed by the Lords, it was said. Nobody could fight the Lordsmen.
The top of the hill was a natural fortress. A spring bubbled up in the center of a ring of boulders that formed a natural castle large enough to enclose a wagon train and all the livestock. Over the years the Spotted Coyote clan had smoothed out the area inside the boulder circle and built corrals and pens and shelters, and big cook fire rings. The smells of bison stew wafted to the wagon train.
Kettle Belly and a small dark man about his age shouted and gesticulated at each other. Whandall thought they were pretending at passion as they went through a ritual. Kettle Belly would throw up his hands in disgust, and the Spotted Coyote leader would gesture outside the circle, grinning as he pointed out a small column of smoke a couple of miles away. Kettle Belly looked worried, then shouted again.... Eventually they came to some agreement, and money changed hands. By then dusk was falling and the stew was done.
They ate dinner around a big campfire. Logs had been arranged in a circle to form seats and backrests. It was pleasant to sit back and relax with the prospect of a night's sleep without need for guard duty.
Whandall pleaded exhaustion when Hickamore wanted to talk about Morth of Atlantis, and soon the wizard was deep in conversation with a man twice his age who wore a mantle of wolf skin. A Spotted Coyote boy came around to fill everyone's cup from a goatskin of wine. Whandall sipped appreciatively. It was not as good as the wine Kettle Belly kept in his wagon, but it was smoother and more pleasant than anything that made its way to Tep's Town.
A pleasant evening. Willow sat next to him, tired because the girls had
been hopping on and oft the wagon all day us I he hills became steeper and they had to get out and push.
Flirting. Courtship is serious flirting. Flirting meant being amusing and funny, and Whandall didn't know how. He looked around to see how others were doing it.
Not far away Carver sat with Starfall, the blacksmith's dark-haired daughter. They sat very close together. Whandall couldn't hear what they were saying, but Starfall seemed to be doing all the talking as Carver sat listening attentively. That seemed like something Whandall could do, but Willow wasn't saying anything!
"Did you like the dress I bought you?" Whandall asked.
"Yes, very much. Thank you."
"You don't ever wear it."
"Well, I wouldn't want to wear it here, with all these strangers," Willow said.
"Kettle Belly says they're safe," Whandall said. "They're not-" He cut himself off.
"Thieves?"
"I was going to say 'gatherers.' "
"Oh." She looked at him with wide eyes. "I keep forgetting," she said.
"That's good."
She smiled softly. "Be right back."
Carver was still listening to Starfall. She moved closer to him. Whandall had no trouble imagining her warmth against his side. The boy said something, and Starfall laughed appreciatively. Other couples were talking softly, boys smiling, girls laughing. If only he could hear what they were saying!
Willow returned. She was wearing the blue dress Whandall had bought, and the gold-and-black onyx necklace.