Plain Kate

FIVE THE ROAD AND THE RAIN

Despite what Drina had said, it turned out you could go the Roamer way without riding. Mostly, you walked.

The caravan bunched and inched down the road. People on foot went first, where the road was merely sticky and rutted with water. Then came the loose horses, with the horsemen among them. And finally, churning up the mud and the new horse dung, came the wagons. And last of all came Plain Kate.

Walking at the back was Daj’s idea, to keep Plain Kate out of sight until they were far from town. “Harder for some fool to turn you loose, then,” she’d said. Plain Kate had been taken aback; she’d thought her place among the Roamers was Daj’s to give. But, no, explained Drina. Big decisions like that were a matter for the men. “Never fear, kit,” said Daj. “Trust Mother Daj. I know how to lead from the last wagon.”

So Kate walked in the back. It was hard going. She’d lived her life on cobbles, and the mud of the road was new to her. It clutched at her heels like a dying thing. Her boots grew dark with water. Her tall socks got wet and her feet squelched and soon blistered. But she said nothing, and kept walking.

Her little town sank behind her. Samilae. She had never left it before, and had never had to think of its name. Her father when he was alive had been only Father. Dead he was Piotr Carver, and she had to say his name sometimes. And now her home was Samilae. She looked back and saw it become a huddle of roofs, with the tall spire of the weizi above them—her father’s handiwork, casting its finger of shadow after her. She did not cry, and kept walking.

Drina spent the day walking beside Plain Kate and then dashing forward to be among the horses, then dashing back again. She turned cartwheels for no reason, and sang like a lark tossing up ribbons of tune into the air. Once she made Plain Kate’s hair stand on end, singing the song Linay had been singing by the docks, long ago but only yesterday, a sad tune about ghosts in the river.

The rain drizzled down. Plain Kate got soaked and began to ache: She was strong, but walking was unfamiliar work. The straps of her pack basket rasped her thin shoulders. Taggle spent the day asleep inside the basket, just between her shoulder blades. His warmth made her hurt less.

Finally they stopped, deep in the summer evening.

Through the day the country had thinned into a strip of fields between the river and the heavy, wooded darkness of the hills. And now there was nothing but woods and water.

They stopped in a patch of meadow, sending deer leaping into the woods and rabbits scampering. There was a scrambling between Kate’s shoulder blades, and, a moment later, a cat on her shoulder. “Rra—” he started, and Kate was sure he was going to say “rabbits,” but he stopped, peered at Daj watching them, and said, “Meow.”

“Now that,” said the old woman, “is a soft way to travel. Hello, king of cats.”

Taggle preened and leapt down, heading over to twine around Daj’s ankles.

The Roamers set camp in two rings and built two big fires. Plain Kate and Drina were sent to fetch water, then again to find fallen branches for the fire. When they came back the horses were picketed and the chickens were loose, the rugs laid, the pots bubbling. Trestle benches had appeared. Plain Kate sank onto one of them and pulled off her damp socks. Her feet were wrinkled with wet and had a dozen dead white blisters big as thumbprints.

“Goose grease,” said Daj. She was squatting by the fire, stirring a sliced onion around in a pan. “Tomorrow I’ll get you some grease for your boots, to keep the water out. Silly not to think of it before.” She gave the pot of goulash a poke and stood up, creaking. “Tonight we will go tothe men’s fire. Let me present you to Rye Baro.”

Plain Kate was startled bypresent. People got presented to the mayor or the guild masters or the lord executioner.“Who is Rye Baro?” she said.

“Baro means big man, and Rye is ourBaro: the leader of thesevardo—wagons, that is. If you go our way, you’re his to judge, his to keep or turn loose.”

Kate stood up and squared her thin shoulders.“Will he turn me loose?”

“Oh, no,” laughed Daj. “He’ll not say no to me.”

Kate thought she didn’t sound entirely sure.

“Sit and let me see those feet, kit,” rumbled Daj. Kate sat. Daj lifted her feet in her hands. “You can’t go among the men bleeding,” she said, and Kate saw that, indeed, her heel was blistered deep and seeping blood. It didn’t hurt much more than any other part of her feet, and she hadn’t noticed. But Daj was wrapping it with a scrap of green scarf.

Kate was embarrassed.“It’s not bothering me.”

Daj shook her head.“Among the Roamers blood is powerful,” she said. “A woman’s blood specially. Some women can work great magics while in their blood—scares the menfolk down to their socks, knowing that. When we get our monthly blood, they make us sit where they can keep an eye on us.”

“I’m not, though,” said Kate. “I can’t do magic. I’m not a witch.”

“And I’m not a muskrat,” said Daj. “But neither one of us will walk about bleeding. I’ll explain our ways, town child, when I think of it, but whether you understand them or not, you must respect.”

“I—” Plain Kate began, but Daj silenced her with a finger on her cheek. Kate found herself fixed on the texture of Daj’s hands: so calloused and worn with work that they were glossy-smooth, like the inside of an ox yoke or the edge of an oarlock. Smooth as dry dust. Her father’s hands hadbeen a little like that. Such hands had not touched her in a long time. Daj tucked Kate’s frizzing hair behind her ears. “Come with me now,mira. I’d say be brave, but that I can see you are.”

Daj led the way from one fire to another, and Kate followed her, feeling the soaked, loamy earth give like soft bread beneath her feet, feeling the bandage on her heel grow loose with wet. She was trying to take in the labyrinth of rules Daj was telling her: Don’t pass between a man and a fire. Don’t walk between two men who are facing each other. Ask permission to speak. If you walk near a man, gather up your skirt so that it does not brush him.

“I don’t have a skirt,” said Kate. She was wearing, as always, the striped smock that had been her father’s. It skimmed her knees, but it was no dress. Among the bright layered scarves of the Roamers, the russet and indigo stripes seemed drab.

“Ah, so you don’t,” said Daj. “Well, don’t mind it, child. For here we are.” And Kate followed Mother Daj into the circle of firelight as silently and solemnly as if into a church.

There were only a few men about; Plain Kate could hear them farther off, moving among the horses. But to her surprise, Behjet was sitting on a stone near the fire, whittling. He looked up at her, cold and blank, as if he didn’t know her at all. Could this be courtesy? It was like a door slammed in the face.

Daj led her to where an old man sat on a carved and painted bench. His face was grooved like a winter road. A cane rested at each knee; his feet were almost in the fire. Daj curtsied to him, not elaborately, but the way a sandpiper might dip its beak, natural and fast, without reverence.“If a woman might pass among you and speak,” said Daj. And then, without waiting for an answer, she said: “Rye Baro. I have brought a guest. This is Plain Kate Carver, of Samilae. She would go the Roamer way.”

Rye Baro had eyebrows like caterpillars before a long winter. He raised one.“With thesevardo?”

“Aye,” said Daj. “She’s orphan, I’m told, and has nowhere else.”

Behind them, someone said,“Are we a pack of dogs, then, taking in strays?” Plain Kate turned. The man had Behjet’s face, but the whole way he held himself was different. He sat hunched up like a drawn bow.

“Are we dogs, then, talking piss at the fire?” Daj clouted the man on the head affectionately. “Show manners, Stivo.”

The man—Stivo—shrugged. Twins, Plain Kate realized. Behjet and Stivo were the twins she had seen selling horses in the Samilae market, a few weeks before.

“Well, it wouldn’t be manners to set her loose in wild country, would it?” said Rye Baro. He had a voice like a fine rasp: rough but polishing. “Makes a man wonder how she got into wild country with the Roamers in the first place.”

“Hmmm,” said Daj with a wink in her voice. “That is a puzzle.”

No one seemed puzzled or much surprised.“Behjet says her people want to burn her for a witch,” said Stivo.

“Aye,” said Daj. “He said that to me too.”

The whole circle turned to Stivo, and waited. He poked at the fire, sending sparks spiraling up into the rainy darkness. The fire hissed. Stivo said nothing. A log snapped and crackled. And still Stivo said nothing.

At last Daj spoke again.“Plain Kate is a carver,” she said. “We need one of those.”

“We get by well enough, seems to me,” Rye Baro mused.

“If the yellowvardo goes another week before the tongue snaps, it will be by the Black Lady’s mercy,” said Daj. “But I was thinking: She can make real coins to clink together.”

“Do they carve those now?” Firelight played across Rye Baro’s face. “I hadn’t heard.”

“She makes objarka.” Daj wrapped an arm around Plain Kate like a wing around a chick. “Best I’ve seen. They’ll sell, and for silver too, not copper.”

“In the market of Toila?” said Rye Baro.

Daj nodded.“That was my mind.”

“Come here,gadje child,” said Rye Baro. Plain Kate stepped toward him, and—guided by Daj’s hand on her shoulder—knelt. The old man pointed to her objarka, and Kate took it off and offered it up to him. He took it, and as Daj had done, studied it in silence. Kate stayed kneeling, her leggings wicking water up fromthe wet ground, her cheek and ear getting hot where they faced the fire. At last, Rye Baro looked down at her. “The matter of witch burning is not our affair,” he said. “It is your trouble and you must not bring it upon us. But your work is fine. Stand up.”

Plain Kate stood up.

“This is your duty, then, child,” said Rye Baro. “To earn a place by your skill, and coins for your clan.” Plain Kate took a step back, staggered by the weight of the wordsyour clan. She almost didn’t hear Rye Baro add: “Have your objarka ready for Toila. And make them burji. Times are bad.”

Burji. While objarka drew good luck, objarka burji scared bad luck away. They had the faces of demons.

Plain Kate had no interest in ugly things, but she answered,“Yes, Rye Baro.”

And back at her own fire she lifted her face into the kiss of the rain.

Only much later did she remember what Behjet had said:My brother’s wife was burned for a witch. And she wondered what Stivo had been seeing in that fire.

The Roamervardo went on through wild country. The road looped along the river, and where the banks grew too marshy, back into the woods. There were riders or carters, but only occasionally. In the woods, only fingers of chimney smoke going up into the gray sky told them of other people. On the river, sometimes they saw a boat or one of the small painted barges that made Plain Kate think of Linay, standing and watching her catch the enchanted fish. There was a green one that made her head turn sharply whenever she saw it—but it was always trailing them, and never came near.

Plain Kate greased her boots and bandaged her feet, and soon she could walk like a Roamer born. She helped Drina with the water and the wood, and in the long, wet evenings she carved the objarka burji.

Plain Kate carved fast and learned slowly. She learned to ride a horse, or at least hold on to a horse. She learned to cook goulash: a spicy stew of peppers and whatever meat could be scrounged. She learned to snag a chicken with the flick of a crook. She learned the Roamer language and the ways, which were many and complicated. She learned, for instance, how each camp must have a stream, and each stream must have four buckets, and each bucket was used for something different: the first for drinking and cooking, the second for washing, the third for the animals, the fourth for the latrine. But a woman bleeding must use the fourth bucket even to wash.

She was bewildered much of the time, but Daj called hermira again, and when she asked Drina what it meant, the girl replied,“It means she likes you. It means you’re family.”

Family. It could have kept her walking for a hundred miles. And she did walk far. The country grew rougher and quieter, with deer browsing in the middle of the road. The rain kept falling. Thevardo wheels grew thick with mud, and at night socks were propped up on sticks at the fire like toasting sausages. It was miserable, but secretly Plain Kate was glad. She didn’t have to look at her shadow.

Every once in a while, when the rain broke into gusts of drizzle and sun, she saw it: what was left of her shadow. It moved in ways she did not. It stood in the air where no shadow could stand. It was too long and too thin, and it pointed, sometimes, in the wrong direction. She was losing it, and she was not sure what would happen when it was gone.

Plain Kate lay next to Drina at night, with Taggle in the crook of one arm. She closed her eyes and thevardo seemed to spin. She set her back against Drina’s warm back, and pulled Taggle closer to her, and listened to Daj snore. Often she dreamt she had two wings, and one was frightened, and one was happy.

All the time they drew closer to Toila, where the Roamers would decide whether to keep her or abandon her. It depended on her carving.

Plain Kate obeyed Rye Baro and made her objarka as burji as she could stand, ugly enough to scare off even a return of theskara rok. She made a man with a pig snout, a bat-faced thing with comically hinged ears, a face that was nothing but teeth. She made the screaming face of the woman she’d glimpsed burning in the witch fire. She made the impossible face she saw sometimes in dreams, a blankness with eyes of hair. They would sell, she thought. Surely they would sell.

Taggle, meanwhile, made himself popular, killing rats and bringing a rabbit into camp every evening, preening in the praise—silently, thank God, though at night he recounted choice bits to Kate: “Rye Baro says I am a princeling; he split the leg bone for me so that I could eat the marrow. They love me. And I’m sure they’ll keep you too.”

Mira, she thought, and treasured it each time she heard it.They must keep me. Family.

Thevardo inched down the road, deep in the wild country. Plain Kate had always known that Samilae was a little town, a long way from anywhere. But she hadn’t known what it would be like to walk for weeks and see no one, to follow a road through a wood that seemed as large as the story of the sea. Inside its dripping tunnel of branches, the road was sloppy, and her boots had to be greased every night against rot. She oiled her tools too, but rust still dappled them.

At night the fog was thick and full of lights, and sometimes voices.

One night the river fog came up so thick that thevardo seemed like islands in it, like boats. Plain Kate sat on the steps of the redvardo where she slept with Drina and Daj, carving with Taggle curled over her toes.

The fog was so thick that she couldn’t see the ground. It billowed, and when Drina came walking up, it rippled in her wake. Drina swung up beside Kate and settled in. Taggle cracked an eye open, stood, stretched as if for a long journey, then took the two steps over to Drina’s feet and flopped down over them instead.

“Faithless,” Kate scolded, nudging him with her toe. He leaned his cheek on her foot and rubbed her toe with the corner of his mouth, purring.

Drina reached down and scratched Taggle between his ears.“I wish I had a cat. Before my mother died I had a raven.”

As Drina said it, Kate suddenly remembered seeing it. She had been whittling a top at her father’s feet. The wood she was working had been light birch; it had been that week in springtime when winged maple seeds stuck up between the cobbles; she had been watching Roamers put on a show for coin. How many years ago had that been? She had been careless and cat-less and happy. The show had lifted her spirits: a man playing a fiddle, another man juggling, and a girl—a little younger than Kate—who had a raven on her shoulder, and tumbled.

“I saw!” Plain Kate said to Drina. “You and the raven. And—” Yes, she remembered now: Her father had broken two fingers when a chisel slipped, and Kate had thought it was the end of the world. One of the Roamers was a young woman, who had sad eyes but a quick smile. She re-broke the fingers and set them, singing all the time, a strange, liquid tune.

“That’s worth true silver,” her father said, wincing and holding his hand up, sweat beading on his face like resin coming out of pine when it is very hot. “You sang the pain right under.”

The woman laughed.“And that’s why you’re more pale than me, I suppose.” Kate remembered that she had been a witch-white, like Linay: her hair and skin the color of sunned linen. Before she began her work she’d plaited two rings for Piotr Carver, strange braided things of weeping willow and her own white hair. “I’ll take copper,” the woman said, “and thank you to spread no tales.”

The woman called the girl to her and the raven came flying—and that was the end of Kate’s memory.

“I saw you,” Kate told Drina. “You came to Samilae before my father died, before theskara rok. You had a raven, and you tumbled for coin.”

“I went everywhere.” Drina leaned forward. Taggle half rolled over and allowed her to rub the wishbone hollow under his chin. “I went everywhere with my mother’s clan. We tumbled, and sang, and told the bones and the stars.” She leaned farther forward, touching noses with the cat. “Whenmy mother died, my father took me and came here. This is his clan.” Her hair swung around her and Kate couldn’t see her face. “No one asked me.”

“There was a woman,” said Kate hesitantly, caught by the memory but cautious. “A healer woman, a witch-white…”

Drina’s head flicked up, her loose hair flying. “That was my mother! You knew her?”

“I—” Kate began, but just then Taggle, who was no longer getting petted, rumbled, “Oh, please, don’t stop.”