Destiny's Road

15 The Shire

He was where the springs began to join into waterfalls, not far below the frost line, and several klicks above the Shire.

Just below was a fool cage knocked down and torn apart, and feathers around it, on a hillside covered with tiny Earthlife oranges and berry bushes and black Destiny weeds.

A klick-long stretch of such stuff barred him from the Road. No problem: he could follow the falls and rapids down, and then the switchbacks of the caravan trail. Two klicks farther, houses spread out along the shore.

Tim's first impulse was to creep past the Shire. The Shire had nothing he needed. The caravan didn't seem to be chasing him. No telling when pursuers from the distillery would catch on, though.

At least he didn't have to wrestle that damn speckles can.

It wasn't that you couldn't get speckles out. There were holes in the top for the tiny seeds. You couldn't get them out fast... and it wasn't that slow, because the chef holding the can had to feed seventy people. On the other side of the Crest, Tim had spent most of an hour shaking speckles into his spread shirt.

Then, finally, he'd thought of firing a bullet into the can. Thatworked. Now he had four times what he'd need to get as far as Twerdahl Town. He had left Lyons wagon's empty speckles can in plain sight for anyone who could get to the blind side of the Crab.

He'd watched bandits fanning out from the distillery. Eight of them, split into pairs to cover the Road and the heights in both directions. None at the shoreline.

What did the distillers think had happened to their shaker? They seemed to suspect a lone thief. But if Lyons wagon's shaker marked the thief, then Tim Bednacourt didn't have the shaker.

And he still didn't want to be caught alone, on the Road or off it.

He'd been traveling at the frost line. Seekers from the distillery were ahead of him, traveling by Road and above. He didn't want to catch up with them. The question wasn't how to get around, but how to approach the Shire.

He picked out another fool cage knocked down and torn apart amid scattered feathers.

Now that he was looking for them, he could follow a broken chain of them down along the falls. Some big carnivore had learned to find food this way.

Time to move.

Tim was not trying to hide now. He followed the broken fool cages down. He rather hoped the Shirefolk would approach him.

He was on a slope, fighting through waist-deep brush while he circled a stand of fisher trees being strangled in Julia sets, when he heard brush crackling. A moment later he saw a disturbance in the brush. He dropped below the branches, among the trunks of the low bushes, while he wriggled the gun free of his tunic pocket.

A huge dark shadow came at him out of the fisher trees in a thunder of broken branchlets, head held low, tiny mad eyes. Tim, squatting on his haunches, fired until the gun was empty. It fell thrashing before it had quite reached him.

Four men conspicuously armed with spears and fish clubs came to meet him.

Tim had time to hang the heavy carcass from the tip of a sizable fisher tree. It was a boar pig, and he'd cleaned it. “Yours. Dinner,” he said loudly, and smiled.

They didn't smile back and they were still advancing. Tim shrugged out of his pack, no sudden moves now, hands in sight. The shell fell too.

“And I'll bet you've never seen this before.” One hand held high, he lifted the Otterfolk shell and turned it to show the paint.

That got a reaction, a chorused “Ooo!”

“Feed me,” Tim said, “and I'll tell you all about this.”

“Otterfolk!” said one.

“Yeah. I seen those colors-”

Tim said, “Geordy Bruns?”

The old man studied him. “You're one of those yutzes from the spring caravan. I traded you a shell.”

''I still have it.''

Geordy set down his spear and came forward. Tim gave him room, and he searched through Tim's pack. He found the carved shell and inspected it for damage. He searched further, and said, “You run from the merchants. You take any speckles?”

“No. You can't steal the cans. I ate some before I went.”

“Pouches?”

“They lock 'em up.”

“Where's the gun?”

They'd heard the shots. He said, “Hidden.”

“All right. Come.”

Two of the others took the carcass. Geordy led off. The fourth man trailed behind Tim, spear in hand. Geordy suddenly whipped around and said, “In the morning you're gone.”

''All right.”

“We can't give you speckles. We need what we got.”

“All right.”

Shirefolk still formed circles: elders, younger men, older children, women with children, women without; smaller circles within the larger groups, circles of opportunity. Women-without were chefs. Women-with drifted from their circle to help or give orders. Elders were an arc around Tim Bednacourt, and the circle of men was a loose arc around those. Men left it to fetch or carry under direction of the women/chefs.

They seated Tim Bednacourt on a dune and expected him to stay there. Several of the women-without took their turns bringing him food.

Dinner was pork and a variety of vegetables. Tim tasted speckles in the rice pilaf. He talked about the Road, but not about bandits. He described Tail Town and the Neck.

They were watching him.

They hadn't done that when he was with a caravan. The elders and the young men and the children would meet his eye. The women would not. But they lingered near when no task called, listening.

He told of dropping into the bay and swimming back to Tail Town. That made even the women stare for just a moment.

He wasn't being treated as a caravan yutz. The women were watching him askew, not a gaze, just a mutual awareness, as with women and men in Spiral Town. Did the merchants see Spiral Town this way? Genders and cliques forming defense perimeters against the stranger?

“I think the boats are for giving rides to Otterfolk,” he said. “Then the Otterfolk pay off in fish.” And he told of shells along a beach, and newborns crawling into the world while Otterfolk warriors swam ashore to defend them.

In the dark of Quicksilver there was only firelight. Women-withchildren had gone to their beds. Older children were gone too, and women-without drifted off to the river to clean cookware, and the few remaining elders were all men.

Tim taught them a song he'd learned on the Road. Then the men escorted him off to the big building in the crater.

It was one big room. Seventy merchants and yutzes had all slept on the floor in a tangled pile when the caravan was here. Now he had it all to himself. He stretched out in the middle of it all with his pack for a pillow, until the men bade him goodnight and were gone.

Then he left his pack and moved himself into a remembered corner. He lay down again with two walls to guard him and his weed cutter under his hand.

He'd slept some during the day. For the first in many nights, he wasn't cold. The painted Otterfolk shell no longer scratched his back. It had served his need.

The question was whether to run now.

The Shire seemed uncommonly friendly to a man alone.

From the midpoint of the Crab Peninsula to the corner of Haunted Bay, there were no dwellings. Single men or women, couples, whole families running from failure or crime or politics or boredom, must have filtered down the Road in the wake of Cavorite. The distillery/dairy was as far as they'd got except for two sizable communities on Haunted Bay.

But that was one serious leapfrog.

Why wasn't he finding a house or three every step of the way?

Because only strong communities could treat with bandits as equals?

Bandits didn't seem to bother the Shire. And the Shire was friendly to a man on the run, though they watched him like a possible thief. Had they been similarly friendly to messengers from the distillery?

When he heard the rustling, bandits! was his first thought. He stood up in a crouch. They were in here with him!

The giggles-two, three?-didn't sound dangerous. But he hadn't heard the door or seen moonlight. There must be another door, hidden.

A woman's voice spoke with just a trace of impatience. “Runner?”

Another voice: “He's gone,” bitterly disappointed.

“No. Why would he?”

A nearly incoherent wail. “Oh, who knows what lives in a stranger's brain? He knows the merchant women! We don'tdress like they do-“

Tim had been tiptoeing toward the center, toward his pack. He'd gambled his life when he brought a butchered boar to the Shire, and the bet still stood. He asked, “What's it all about?”

A third voice, much calmer, didn't speak directly to him. “We can hope he'd like some company?”

Tim said, “Sit down with me. I have a thousand questions. Shall we make a light?”

Laughter and protest. “Oh, no!” The rustling came close; circled him.

It was seriously dark. He guessed at anywhere from four to a dozen. He slid his weed cutter under his pack and sat on that.

He said, “I know not to touch you, but I'm wondering how this all started. People along the Road don't all do as you do.”

Silence. Ragged breath. Then, “The merchants tell us we can't rub up against a stranger.”

“Ever since the first caravan came.”

“And Rashell Star turned down Wayne the speckles man.”

“Rashell the Star. And she slapped him.”

“Bobbitted.”

“A hundred years ago.”

“More.”

“So we keep ourselves to ourselves, men and women both, and we teach our children too. We know what happens if the merchants don't bring speckles.” The woman who had spoken was quite breathless, and a silence followed.

Tim said, “Look, they told me you don't mix with strangers.”

Four hands reached out of the dark. Tim jumped at the first touch. Then he patted the hands (five, six!) and asked, “It's the merchants' idea?”

Laughter. Someone took his hand, and guided it under clothing, and that was a woman's breast, big.

What on Earth-?

They were swathed in layers of clothing. It came off in great soft piles that made a fine extensive bed. They stripped him insistently, and explored him first with their hands, whispering to each other. He never knew if he would touch clothing or skin, and now it was mostly skin.

Once he got the idea, Tim began searching shapes in the dark. His wandering hands found delight-and perfection. No twisted spine or twisted foot. Here a nose like the prow of a ship; here an ear that pro- truded interestingly; he knew them both, women-without-children who had served his food without meeting his eyes. Regular features, no strangeness, no flaws.

Wasn't that what they were looking for too? No point in making babies with a flawed or twisted visitor.

He counted six. And they still wouldn't talk to him, though they whispered to each other.

Tomorrow he wouldn't know them. Tonight the shapes and scents of the women were his whole environment. Tonight they were taking his genes.

Maybe he dreamed it. A hand shook his shoulder and a voice whispered, “Merchant man. Why did the Founders wake the flies?”

Without opening his eyes he asked, “Am I supposed to know?”

“You're supposed to know everything.”

He'd thought that about caravaners. He'd thought about flies too. “Meat has to rot,” he said, and was asleep again.

He woke alone, and stiff everywhere.

He dressed in customary haste, as if he must bake and serve breakfast. Then he took the time to search out a second entrance. It was set in a corner, a miniature maze baffled against light from outside.

He hesitated before going out.

The first caravan, she'd said. There never would have been a first caravan without customers already in place. So the first caravan found this isolated community halfway along the Crab- Rashell the Star? Wayne the speckles man? Likely two or three or six merchants had tried to make babies with the wrong people. In Spiral Town men and women married before they got pregnant, and it might have been that way in the Shire. Then, merchants hadn't yet earned their current reputation. The Shire's need for external genes didn't show yet.

Somebody got slapped, or bobbitted, whatever that was. Then what? Today the Shire was not dying, but Tim had seen some effects of inbreeding here. The merchants and yutzes weren't getting laid. What did anyone gain by continuing this nonsense?

He stepped outside knowing that there would be nobody to ask. The men were gone. The women wouldn't meet his eye, any more than they ever had, and they wouldn't let him help with breakfast. They fed him fruit and speckles bread, then watched him walk off along the beach.

Along the beach until it curved out of sight. Then up into Earthlife trees, a tiny version of the graveyard grove in Spiral Town. He stuffed his pack with citrus fruit and kept moving.

He retrieved his gun and speckles-filled bullet bag. He hadn't stopped moving for an instant. Anyone who tried to follow him would be blowing hard. If someone was waiting above him, well, now he had the gun.

Speckles was in his system. He expected to feel more alert, and he did. Just his imagination? Too much of that could make him careless, make him miss something.

So think it through- Four days up the Road, that was where the spring caravan had been attacked. Two days at the rate he was traveling. It now seemed that bandits' turf ran all the way from there to the distillery.

Two pairs of thief-takers ran ahead of him, traveling by the Road and by the frost line.

He might have tried a boat, or gambled that they couldn't swim. Instead, he climbed. He climbed until he'd reached the crest. Bandits might know the blind side of the Crab, but he'd seen no sign of them. He'd travel that way until he was past Farther.