They rode north and west and soon passed beyond the edge of the plain into down country, a region of low rocky hills. There were occasional flurries of snow; when it wasn’t snowing, the clouds hung low and mornings were often obscured by swirling fog. Roofed stone circles alongside small huts swam at them out of that fog as they wound among the hills. Now and then, a young boy with a chunky, broad-browed chini pressed into his leg stood in the hut’s doorway and watched them ride past. Sometimes the boy would lift a hand to salute them, more often he watched, silent and unmoving. The stone circles were filled with huddled linadyx, some of them wandering out into rambling pole corrals to chew on wads of hay and scratch down to the winter grass below the snow, their corkscrew fleeces smudges of black and gray and yellow-white against the blue-white of snow. Every fifth circle was empty.
Tuli waved back to one of the boys, then kicked her macain into a slightly faster lope until she was riding beside Rane. “How they going to feed those beasts if it keeps snowing?”
“You saw the empty circles.”
“Yeah. So?”
“The Kulaan have winter steads in the riverbottom. Women and children work the fields there in the summer while the men and older boys are in the downs with the linas; come first snowfall they start bringing the herds down.” She wiped at her thin face, scowled at the slick of condensed fog on her palm. “I’d rather it was snowing instead of this infernal drip. Other years all the flocks would be down by now.”
Tuli shivered as she heard a distant barking and the high coughing whine of one of the small mountain sicamars. It seemed to come from all over, impossible to tell the direction of sounds in this fog. She thrust a gloved hand in her jacket pocket and closed clumsy fingers about the sling. “So. Why not this year?” Her voice sounded thin and lost and she shivered again.
Rane rubbed at her chin. “Well, the Kulaan treat their linas like members of the family. They don’t kill them for meat ever, even if their own children are starving; when they’re so old they can’t get around any more and don’t produce fleeces, they’re very gently smothered and burned on a funeral pyre and the ashes are collected and kept till spring, then scattered over the Downs with drum and song and dance, whole clans going to celebrate the passing of their friends. You can see how they’d feel when Floarin sent her tithe gatherers to the winter steads and claimed whole herds of linas to feed her army. Those that hadn’t brought the linas down yet are waiting until the army leaves Oras, hoping the beasts won’t starve or freeze before then. Kalaan might put on Follower black for policy’s sake, but even before the raids there’d be few convinced among them. Now, there’s no question of that. Floarin has made herself an enemy for her back when she marches south. They’re a dour, proud people, the Kulaan, they don’t forget injuries and they never leave them unpunished.”
“Are we going to stay at a stead?”
Rane shook her head. “I have acquaintances among them, but I wouldn’t be welcome now. Besides, there’s no point in it. Yael-mri knows all she needs to about their state of mind.” Again she passed her hand across her face. “Shayl, how I’d love to be dry. Just a little, even an hour.”
As the day oozed toward its end, Rane angled more directly westward until they were riding almost directly into the veiled red blob of the setting sun. Tuli began to feel a strain in her thighs and back, realizing after a while that they were riding downslope considerably more often than up, leaving the hills and aiming for the Bottomland. When she asked, Rane nodded. “We’re due to hit the river about a day’s ride east of Oras.”
“Why not closer?”
“Traxim. The army. Floarin’s norits. Any one’s a good enough excuse to stay far away from the place.” She slanted a tired grin at Tuli. “And that’s our chance, Moth. Who would figure we’d be so crazy as to sneak into the jaws of a sicamar?”
The punishing ride went on, and on, three days, five, seven. The grain sacks were almost empty and the macain were almost at the end of their strength. On the eighth day the snowfall stopped. On the ninth day they were making their way through the thickly timbered bottomlands, able to hear the sigh of the river they couldn’t yet see, a sort of pervasive brushing that got lost among the creaks and cracks of the denuded trees. They rode through trees stripped bare of leaves, silent, brown-gray-black forms harsh against the blanket of snow. Here and there the snow was marked by the calligraphy of wild oadats, lappets and other small rodents, chorainin and limbagiax and other predators small enough to run on the crust. They saw nothing alive, not even kankas sitting like wrinkled brown balloons in the empty trees.
Near the river, the ground under the trees was a thorny tangle, a mix of saplings, many split open by the sudden cold, suckerlings, hornvines like coils of black wire stark against the white of the snow. Rane got as close to the river as she could, rode west along it for some time. About mid-afternoon, she called a halt. “Give the macain some grain, Moth.” She slid from the saddle, worked her fingers, tugged her cap down farther over her ears. “I’m going to climb me a tree, have to check on some landmarks before it gets dark.”
She went up an aged brellim with an agility that surprised Tuli. While Tuli flattened a sack on the snow and dumped a meager ration of grain on it, Rane sat in a high fork, her head turning as she scanned the river and the bank across from her. After about a dozen minutes she swung out of the fork and came dropping down the trunk, landing beside Tuli with a soft grunt as her boots punched through the snow.
“Find what you want?”
“Uh-huh.” Rane moved to her macai, stroked her gloved hand down over the beast’s shoulder, watched him lick his rough tongue over the sacking, searching for the last bits of grain.
“Well?”
Rane looked round at her, laughed, “A place to sleep and leave the macain while we’re in Oras.”
“A kual stead?”
“No, none of them this close to Oras. Bakuur. Charcoal burners. This time of the year they usually have a camp not too far from here.”
Tuli retrieved the sacking and began rolling it into a tight cylinder. “You seem to know everyone.”
“I’ve been drifting about the mijloc for a lot of years, doing this and that for the Biserica.” She watched as Tuli tied the sacking to the saddle. “Never had a real ward after the first time, Merralis and I.” She swung into the saddle, waited for Tuli to mount. “Getting a little old for all this rambling though.” She started her macai walking. “Biserica’s going to be needing someone familiar with the round, might be you if you choose that way, Moth.”
Tuli looked at her, startled. “Me?”
Rane smiled at her again, wearily, affectionately. “Who better?”
The camp was set up inside a palisade of poles pushed into the ground long enough to have taken root and sprouted new branches, branches that wove together in a complicated bramble along the top of the fence. The poles were set about the length of a forearm apart with hornvine woven through the uprights, hornvine rooted and alive with withered black fruits dangling like tiny jetballs from the fruiting nodes, the thorns long and shiny and threatening enough to keep out the most persistent predator. Inside this formidable living wall more poles had been pushed into the soil, set in parallel lines and their tops bent together to form the arched ribs that supported sewn hides; five of these structures were spread around a stone firecircle like the spokes of a wheel.
The Bakuur were a small dark shy people. They welcomed Rane and Tuli with chuckling cordiality, a spate of words in a language Rane understood but Tuli found as incomprehensible as the murmur of wind through leaves. They stabled the macain with their eseks in one of the longhouses, set out straw and grain for them with a lavishness that oppressed Tuli; she felt she was somehow going to have to repay the favor and at the moment she didn’t see how.