A bird screeched outside, and I realized I must be near the coast.
My axe lay near me, as did my leather hood. Which meant I was somewhere safe.
In a daze I crawled toward a large flap, and as I reached it a hand flung it aside, blinding me with daylight.
“Well, hello there,” someone said gently. “I was just coming to check on you.”
My eyes watered, as if they hadn’t seen sunlight in weeks.
Strong hands gripped my arm. “Careful, or you’ll fall off.”
I sat on the back of a large wagon. A small deck ran around the rim of the vehicle. A woman my age, traces of gray in her hair, held my arm. Her trader tattoos, including a striking purple figure of the elephant god Sisinak holding the triple scales of commerce, ran up and down her forearms. “I’m Anezka,” she said. She squatted on the platform jutting off the back. “I was bringing you some soup. Everyone’s going to be excited to hear you woke up.”
I moved out onto the platform with Anezka, still amazed that my ankle wasn’t hurting. Behind the wagon I was laid out in, another wagon followed.
That wagon behind us was pulled by four massive aurochs. They looked like cattle, but far more muscular, and their long horns swooped well out before them like the prows of ships. Four aurochs also followed the back of the wagon I was on, resting from the strain of pulling, their flanks rippling and hooves thumping the ground as they plodded along.
Behind the wagon following us, was another, and then another, and then another yet again. I counted ten before the long train of wagons curved around a bend in a fine mist of kicked up dust. Each wagon featured its own unique, mottled purples and greens painted in patterns on their wooden sides. Many had carvings: depictions of markets and roads and maps of the world, all expertly chipped into their sides.
“This is a caravan,” I said out loud, realizing it at the same moment I spoke it.
“This is the caravan,” Anezka said. “You’re traveling the spice road on the perpetual caravan. We move along the coast starting in Paika and go all the way to Mimastiva and even a little beyond, until the bramble of the east stops us with its wall. Then we turn back around again. There used to be many, all throughout the old Empire. Now: only us.”
Mimastiva was on the coast, hundreds of miles south of Khaim. Paika lay on the coast as well, far to the west. I knew of a few who’d visited Mimastiva. Paika was said to have fallen to the raiders when I was still a child. These were cities that to me, were almost past the edge of the world.
“You said that people would be excited I was awake,” I said.
Anezka’s eyes widened. “Because you’re the lady executioner, who met four Paikans in mortal combat. Everyone’s been talking about you up and down the line.”
“Paikans?” I asked.
“You northerners call them raiders.”
“I didn’t fight four raiders,” I said with a frown. “I only took on one, and he beat me badly. But yes, there were four of them.”
I looked down at my ankle. “How long have I been asleep?”
“You should see the Roadmaster,” Anezka said.
“Why is that?” I asked.
“Because this is his wagon, and you are his guest,” Anezka said, somewhat formally, but quite firmly.
With her arm to steady me, I grabbed the ropes along the outside of the covered wagon’s rim, and walked toward the front.
As we approached the raised platform from where the aurochs were controlled, I could see up the line of the caravan. We were near the front. Muscled men with brass arquebuses stood on a fifteen paces long war wagon in front of us, with hammered metal shieldwalls protecting them.
Further ahead, a wagon with a large fire crew burned bramble away from the road edges, the roar of the flame carrying back over the air to us. The stench of the burned limbs wafted past.
I was a long way from Lesser Khaim.
The Roadmaster was a successful, rich, mountain of a man, robes draped across the heft of his belly.
But if I thought him jolly, that was a mistake. His smile was tight, controlled, and his eyes shrewd. This man saw more miles pass under the wheels of his home in a year than most ever traveled in a life.
And judging by the lines in his face, he’d had a long life doing this. Like Anezka, trader tattoos ran up and down his forearms, and his ears dangled with earrings.
He had no mustaches, his lips were shaved clean, like a refugee from Alacan.
I’d heard tales of the caravan, and the coastal spice route. Townsmen who travelled south to markets were told tales of the great market of Mimastiva by other townsmen who ventured that far south, and here I was, sitting on a wagon with the Roadmaster of the caravan himself.
“Welcome to the spice road,” the Roadmaster said with a twitch in the corner of his lips. He did not hold the reins himself: that was a job for a young man in a loincloth with massive arms who sat next to him, the thick leather straps leading to the aurochs draped across his lap. He watched the road like an owl, his eyes never blinking.
“Thank you,” I said, and brushed my skirts up to sit by him. Sitting higher than the bramble along the road meant that a soft sea breeze cooled my skin.
From this perch, I could see the road stretching out along the rocky coastline before us. The ocean, hundreds of feet below us, slammed and boomed against the wall of brown rock. And out beyond the spray, the green waves surged around pinnacles of rock shaped like the spires of castles. And beyond the spray and foam, the ocean stretched out forever: flat, unbreaking, the color of winter-green leaves.
“It is a beautiful sight,” the Roadmaster said, noticing my gaze.
“I never thought I’d see it in my life,” I whispered. I wondered if Duram or Set had seen this, as they were being marched west.
I leaned forward and hid my face in my grief, and the Roadmaster leaned close and touched my shoulder. “What is your name, lady executioner?”
“Tana.” I swallowed. “Tana the lost. Tana the homeless. Tana the abandoned. But not Tana the lady executioner. I’m not that thing.”
“I am Jal,” he said softly. “Where are you from Tana?”
“Khaim,” I told him, and then I corrected myself. “Lesser Khaim.”
“Ah, Khaim.” He nodded. “I think I remember Khaim when I was just a boy. I was still sitting on my father’s lap when he led the last caravan through. Sometimes I think I remember the start of that journey, or the greater cities of the Jhandparan Empire. I know I remember seeing a great palace that had fallen to earth, tilted, its foundational plane shattered like a plate! And the bramble, it gripped the city like a giant’s fist, it did.”
My grief broke a little, hearing his memories. “You are that old?”
Jal laughed at me. “I am that old. Yes. Hopefully old enough that I’ll die before I lose the title of Roadmaster to the title of Bushmaster, which is what they will call me when even the spice road on this coast becomes choked by damned bramble.”
I looked out on the road, and thought about what came next. “Where do you head?”
“Paika,” the Roadmaster said. “And you will too.”
He said this so firmly, I jerked to stare at him. “What do you mean?”
“The men who delivered you here said you attacked four Paikans on your own. They said you demanded your family back, and fought to the near death. So I have to imagine that a person who did that, would not then turn around and head back where she came from.”
As he spoke, he turned and looked at me with a larger smile.
“I will not be going back to Lesser Khaim,” I agreed.
“The men who brought you to me thought so. Paika is the greatest city in the west, and where your family most probably will be taken. And Paika is a carefully guarded city. You cannot enter without an examination, and papers, and a writ, unless you are like me and have dispensation. The Paikans fear people like you coming in to try and find their families. Yes, a person who attacks four of them would go to Paika with someone like me, who could get you inside, I think.”