Sarah Avery - [BCS319 S01] Read online

  “Ugly and cruel are everywhere. If you’re lucky, you get some say in what kind you live under.”

  “So I might as well have stayed, is that what you’re saying? Let that child who started out as innocent and loved as Gentle pay the price of everything for me?”

  Paper wiped her eyes with her free hand, but her voice was steady. “No.”

  “Why put up with ugly and cruel? Why not try to make things better? With our own work, our own suffering, to pay our own way in the universe?” It was the argument Crocus had had with her mother since she turned thirteen. Now that argument was over. She’d never have it with her mother again. And now she could cry, small angry tears.

  “That’s one thing I’ll credit to the walkers from the blessed city,” said Paper. “What you want is virtuous. And you do try, so that’s two things. Oh, you’re smug, you think you know better than all the rest of us what a well-run city looks like. You’re constantly trying to build a city just as blessed, only where nobody pays any price at all.”

  Crocus wanted to protest that she intended to make up for the price that had been paid for her, that to do so had been her one goal for as long as she’d been able to read by herself. But she knew Paper had seen things she hadn’t, so she set it aside and listened.

  Paper looked long at her, as if to assess her silence, before she went on. “Can’t entirely blame you people. It’s a pretty dream. I tried dreaming it once, too. Every few years, the walkers give it another go.”

  “And what happens?”

  Squinting into the fire, Paper said, “They flail around trying to live up to whatever they felt when they walked out, but there are so many ways to fall short. Maybe they start a new religion, it lasts a generation, and then their children turn on each other. Or they try to take over some city that’s been running messily but half-decently without them, and they wreck it, any of a hundred ways. A few of them over the centuries became spectacularly cruel tyrants in their efforts to fix the world. Most often, they try building a city from scratch, but they never have money to get beyond the beginning, and nobody wants to do the messy, dangerous jobs. The walkers are always surprised about the danger part. Villages would be cheaper, but apparently villages don’t scratch the itch. I don’t even know how many new cities walkers have started and abandoned. At least they left you a lot of ruins to shelter in.”

  Crocus shook her head. “Is there no good story to tell? Have none of my people done anything useful?”

  “Some have.” Paper’s baby had fallen asleep. Carefully, she laid the child on the driest of Crocus’s garments and set about working the kinks out of her shoulders. “Here’s a story I grew up with. Once long ago, there was a terrible earthquake in the capital of the land where I was born. People traveled from all over the world to offer aid. A hundred walkers came to our new ruins to help dig out the wounded. Only they’d never seen broken bodies before, and half of them fled before they did a lick of work. The other half stayed until all the survivors were either saved or not, and did work that won them the whole world’s respect. But most of that half who stayed to help, they never wanted to see another wound again, so when the rebuilding was well underway, they fled, too. The few who remained started a school and spent the rest of their lives learning and teaching medicine. Actual heroes, that bunch. They built something that outlived them by a couple hundred years, and the school’s still running, teaching all kinds of things now.” Her brows creased. She shook away some unwelcome thought. “Or a year ago it was, anyway. Out of the original hundred, there were seven walkers who stayed. Seven. So, if you were one of a hundred like that, would you be one of the fifty, one of the forty-three, or one of the seven?”

  Crocus dried her eyes. “Surely there’s somewhere I could go and make clothing to keep people warm and shield them from sunburn, and maybe sometimes make them feel pretty, too, and not add to the harm in the world? If I never let myself hope for anything bigger, can I hope for that?”

  “I’m sorry, child. I shouldn’t blame you for your predecessors’ mistakes. You set out to make fresh, different mistakes, or you wouldn’t be here in the first place. And maybe you would have been one of the seven.”

  Crocus watched Gentle sleeping. Gentle was a lanky baby, nothing chubby about her. “How old is she?” Surely that was a safe subject.

  “A little over a year.”

  “Really?” It seemed impossible. Much too small.

  “We’ve been traveling to the blessed city since she was barely a month old.”

  Something was odd about that. Crocus took another swig of water, then found herself thinking out loud. “It would take a powerful misfortune to make a mother start a year-long walk with a month-old baby.”

  “It would take a powerful misfortune to make a mother who knows about the luckbringer child set out for your home. It’s not as if anyone, anywhere, approves. There’s a reason nobody else has tried to replicate your city’s results. But. But this is the last child I will ever have. There’s only one way to be sure she grows to outlive me. And if I have to join in the terrible wrong your countrymen do, to do this one right for her, well then. I will spend twenty years as a villain, and if she walks out of the city, I hope she will accept my companionship when she goes. Whatever I need to expiate, I will expiate then.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “Expiation will make a fine life’s work.”

  Crocus blurted out, “What happened to you?”

  Paper harrumphed again. “Crocus, that’s not a question to ask, out in the world. Nobody you’ve ever met yet had a story too bloody for telling. But a lot of us do. Our suffering is not yours to ask for.”

  “I’ve given up more than you or I will ever know, because I saw that other people’s suffering wasn’t mine to take.”

  “Yes, you did. And in saying this I am trying to help you, freely. To ask for another’s suffering is different from taking, but it’s not as different as it might be. Let people offer, unasked.”

  “Fine.” Only her own mother had corrected her so insistently. Your life could depend on it, she would say, when they would talk of the world outside. Mothers were worst when they were right.

  In the long silence, Paper picked through the remains of the provisions, chewed more dried things that hadn’t stayed dry enough. Crocus prodded at her wet belongings and her inside-out pack, checking their progress toward dry.

  Paper yielded first. “You want another story? Once there lived a village schoolteacher,” she said. “In harvest season she worked the fields same as all her neighbors, but in the winter months, she gathered the children, and anyone else who wanted to come, around the meeting-house hearth, where they learned letters and sums together. She owned ten books, and had visited three cities in her life. Messy, wondrous, dangerous, mostly good cities. Lived in the capital for a year of her youth even, cleaning chamber pots in trade for learning at the biggest school in the world. By all reasonable accounts, she was rich. Best of all, she had a good man and five children of her own.”

  Crocus huddled tighter in the loops of hempen cloth. Until, that was the word that would come next.

  “Until an army came marching toward the capital, which was a week’s walk down the valley from us. Us.” She ripped up a hunk of grass and took a turn feeding it into the fire. “All right then. No more cradle stories. I’ll lay it out plain. Everything we had, piled together, was less than the army needed to provision it for a day’s march. As soon as we saw them coming, we emptied our houses and piled our belongings outside our doors, hoping it wouldn’t be worth their bother to torch the village. I was emptying a root cellar on the cold side of the hill when the call came that we were all to gather in the village square. I carried the turnips with me, because I knew from my studies what happened to people who tried to hide their goods from armies. But my baby was sound asleep, and I didn’t want her to wake near the soldiers. Invaders can’t abide wailing babies. So I swaddled her in that cloth you’re wearing now, to keep her warm, and closed her
in the root cellar. And I held to the hope that I’d leave the village square alive, because if I didn’t, I wasn’t sure who would be left to find her.”

  Until. Crocus plucked at the grass stubble with her fingers and tried to make no noise.

  “They picked over our household goods, broke half of them in front of us because it amused them to see us watch. They took the turnips, and the whole harvest, and all the animals who had been led out of the barns. We thought we’d starve for a year and that would be the worst of it. But then they killed all our men, and all our boys, and all our girls too young to follow orders. And then some wizened person wearing a mound of dirty wool said some words over all us girls and women who were left, and we bled. The general told us we’d never have any more children, because he and his countrymen hated us so much they’d rather see us die out than have the extra source of slaves. Since the village belonged to his army now, we had to go dig graves for our dead. It wouldn’t do to leave piles of our corpses littering their land. So we dug.”

  Crocus wanted to hear anything good happen. “How did you—”

  “Don’t interrupt people when you’ve asked them to spill their misery for you.”

  She flinched.

  Paper rocked a little. “I’m not mad at you. You’ve only ever met one miserable person before, and I hear luckbringer children are too far gone to speak.” Crocus nodded. “Just, remember this rule. It’ll serve you well no matter where you go.”

  “I won’t forget,” Crocus whispered.

  “To the army, our babies were all interchangeable, but my neighbors had seen that Gentle wasn’t among the dead, which meant she was somewhere else. All the women wanted to save the only child they still could. So when the sun was just set and we were nearly done filling in the big pit, some of my neighbors clustered around me so the soldiers couldn’t see. It was a terrible risk they took for me. They laid me down on the ground and covered me with the thinnest layer of dirt. Nobody had counted us, so nobody noticed I was missing when it was time for all the women to go cook our harvest to feed our conquerors. I lay there until full dark, buried with my good man and four of my children and most of my people. My breasts were swollen and painful with the milk I hadn’t fed Gentle since midday. When the sound of the late-season frogs was louder than the sounds from the resting army, I dug myself out of the grave and went to my baby. My milk leaked all over my bloody clothes.

  “The root cellar walls were thick enough, nobody had heard her. As soon as I opened the door, she gave the worst of the hunger cries newborns have, the one that breaks with little gasps and bleats. I hid with her there in the cool and perfect darkness. Hungry as she was, she refused to nurse again and again. I had to scrub the grave dirt off with my own dripping milk. It was the only thing I had to clean up with, but when was I going to find food again to make her more? I kept her nursing as long as she could, because if I took sick with an infection from all those hours backed up, I might die on the run, and then what would become of her?

  “I couldn’t stay and wait out the invasion, because if the army caught me with a child, well, they’d already shown what they would do. If I tried to race the army to the capital, I’d have to go through it all again when the capital fell. The watch officers in the capital’s towers would see the army coming before I could get there to warn them, anyway, so my help would be for nothing. The invaders would have scouts and outriders—I’d read about things like that at the school—but I might have a chance if I made for the wooded foothills and followed the mountain range out of the army’s path. I thought about every place I’d heard about, every place I’d seen on a map. Where could I be sure an invading force would never go? I knew where, though the road was long. My schooling gave me some skills to trade with, and a few folks here and there took care of us for kindness’s sake. A couple of walkers, even, to be fair. So here we are.”

  Crocus tried to guess what people said after hearing a thing like that. “Thank you,” she said, though she halfway felt as if the story were something Paper had done to her in punishment for judging. But no, that wasn’t fair. She had asked.

  Stars drifted overhead. The waning moon rose, the coming autumn’s sickle for the first harvest.

  “Fire’s nearly out,” Paper observed.

  “If we cut more grass, we’ll have to stay awake to tend it. And we have to sleep sometime.”

  Paper quirked her head at an angle, curious. “You ever heard of taking first watch? Second watch?”

  “Oh.” She’d read about it in books. She was going to have to get better at remembering things like that without waiting for someone to remind her. “What would you do if it were just you and Gentle? There’d be nobody to trade watches with.”

  “Smart question. You might well live to the next town without resorting to banditry.”

  Crocus shrank further into herself.

  “I’m sorry. I meant it as a compliment. Now I think further on it, with no shelter, tonight’s too cold to trade watches. We’ll have to huddle. All three of us, if you don’t mind. Remember what I said to the bandits about tracking them by the blood on my spear? Watch this. We do other magics, outside the luck, and you can learn them if you listen to things. Try to remember this tune.” Paper stood and took her spear, point-down, in one hand. Humming a simple sequence of four notes, she walked a circle around the fire, following the outline Crocus had first found where some creature had crushed the grass for comfort. “If anything comes to hurt us, that’ll wake me before it gets too close.”

  So Crocus put her now-dry clothes back on, humming the tune to memorize it. Paper lay curled around Gentle, and Crocus curled around Paper. The long winding wrap, they zigged and zagged to cover all three of them and pinned its pivots under their weight against the night breeze.

  Morning came, mercilessly bright. Grass stubble prickled through Crocus’s clothes all up the length of her. Gentle laughed, while Paper tried to shush her. “Let the girl sleep,” she whispered, but the child laughed on.

  “It’s all right, I’m up.” Up, stiff, and sore. Crocus wished for the great bathhouse by the square in the center of the blessed city. It was safe to wish for that, she decided, because she was in no danger of turning back to follow the wish. She brushed bits of grass off her face, stood to get the waterskin. It was nearly empty. She sat on the ground and drank a carefully estimated third of what was left, then remembered the tubers. She dug her walking stick into the cool ashes of her fire. Underneath, breakfast was still warm. “Surprise!” she said, handing the larger one to Paper.

  “Oh!” was all the reply the woman managed before Gentle grabbed it and got a mouthful, and then eating was all anyone could think of until the tubers were gone.

  Salt, then. Crocus remembered salt. She checked the pack, the arrangement of her gear. Maybe she could earn some salt in that farm village ahead.

  “I’ve been afraid to ask,” said Paper. “How much farther to the city?”

  “To the gates? Three days.”

  The wiry woman beamed. “So close! Did you hear that, darling? Almost there!” She lifted Gentle up over her head.

  “You’ll be safe sooner. The blessing reaches out past the farms, and then past the orchards, and then around the woodlots. Everything the city needs to sustain all its people. You’ll see the border plain enough. At my pace, it was just over a day’s walk from here. But you’ll have to cross the river I got soaked in, pretty much right away.”

  “We could sleep in safety tonight? Tonight?” Paper laughed right along with Gentle.

  “If the river doesn’t get you, and the bandits don’t get you. I bet you make better time than I do. Maybe tonight.” The thought that Paper might have traveled so far yet not reach the protection of the city’s luck almost made Crocus want to walk back with her as far as the green edge, to watch over her. But Crocus was probably more trouble than she was worth out here—who would end up protecting whom? “No doubt my trail’s easy enough to follow, and then you’ll see th
e road.”

  “Plenty easy. Six months from now, you’ll look back on the signs you left behind and you’ll laugh with embarrassment.”

  “You assume I’ll still be alive to walk in six months.” So many ways to get killed. She’d read about wolves. With the quality of luck available out here, wolves would probably turn out to be real.

  Paper sat to face her. “I won’t tell you not to despair. But will you believe me if I tell you that you can despair and keep going?”

  “I believe you.” Crocus risked a smile to thank her with. “You’d be an authority on that.”

  “Yes. I would. What kind of place do you want to go? After that first farm village, I mean, because really, you won’t make it anyplace farther if you don’t stop there for rest and resupply.”

  “Someplace cold enough that people need clothes? Someplace where people don’t make all the clothes for themselves. It’s the only practical skill I can offer in a town.” Her eyes went hot, but she didn’t want to burden Paper with her tears.

  “You’ll learn others. But all right, that’s a start. You ever see a map of the world?”

  “My mother made me memorize it. She knew I’d walk someday.”

  “All right, here’s what’s dangerous this year, as best I can figure out the rumors.” And she drew a remarkably accurate map in the stubbly ground with her spear. About three quarters of the world Crocus had heard tell of was home to more trouble than she thought herself ready for.

  “No wonder the other walkers want to start from scratch and make new cities,” she said. “Everything out here is a mess. Is there anyplace that isn’t tainted with misrule and war?”

  “Well,” said Paper, “on this whole stretch of coast over here, everybody got completely wiped out by plague. Rumor says no survivors at all, even in the little villages.”

  Crocus shocked herself by laughing. “That’s what passes for good news?”