Reclamation

The countryside crawled past them behind the jostle of fellow travelers. A path cleared in front of them and closed up behind as people recognized them as Skymen. Jay tried not to wince as the unpadded box jounced against his backside. A river of sweat began to trickle down his cheek. Now that the sun was full up, the day was turning as hot as the night had been cold.

After about an hour, the scraggly wilderness began to give grudging space to tamed patches. The Narroways farmlands were strange places, more cultivated wetlands than fields. Yards of seine nets covered the grains to keep the plants from the worst of slashing sleet and hail that could come at night. The nets were rolled back in places and the Bonded worked in teams, chopping weeds and mucking out the trenches so water could flow between the rice plants and keep them from shriveling into dormancy. Behind a low wall, Bondless carefully tended their orchard. Each precious tree was carefully tented and you could only see the shadows of the workers underneath, pruning and grafting. Fruits and root vegetables were delicacies in this world of grains, grasses, and fungi.

The war did not touch the farms, or the oxen and pigs in their pens. Food and animals would be needed by whoever won. But the houses that could be seen from the road sported red flags, proclaiming there had been war dead there.

Beyond the farms the canyon walls shrugged and shifted and so the world bent toward the left and tilted down a sharp gradient. Cor whistled shrilly to the oxen and hauled back on the reins to check them to a walk as the road sloped sharply in front of them. An overturned sledge had spilled its contents onto the roadbed and the Bondless owners shouted obscenities at each other in between barked orders to the Notouch women scrambling to retrieve the canvas-wrapped packages before they were trampled under foot or hoof. The walls drew closer here, leaving less room for traffic overflow. Even with the wind, it felt more like being inside than outside.

The sight of the Narroways city wall stretching across the breadth of the canyon only reinforced the sensation.

There was, as usual, a line at the city gates. King Silver's men stopped each sledge, inspected its contents, and leveled the extortionary duty on it. The Kings of Narroways got away with their legalized highway robbery because Narroways stood at the junction of three of the most populated corridors of the Realm. If you didn't go through the city, you added at least two weeks to your travel time. And if the weather turned bad in those two weeks, your cargo and your life could be washed away down into the Lif marshes.

The sun was fully up over the walls now and beating down on the damp, confined air of the canyon, raising clouds of steam from the mud and the smell of sweat from the oxen, and, Jay admitted ruefully, from him. He tossed his cape back over his shoulder to try to let some of the breeze reach him.

A fresh crosswind bore down out of Narroways and Jay had to swallow against his own bile. The wind carried the scent of spices, sure, and cooking food and burning tallow. But it also carried the scent of acrid smoke, rotting garbage, unwashed humans, and overworked animals, all mixed with the reek from unburied shit, both from the animals and their owners. The stench of the cities was yet another item on the long list of things he had never managed to get used to.

Finally, they drew up to the gates and Cor raised up her hands in the universal salute. The soldier looked at her marks, then at her warmth-reddened skin, then at her startling green eyes and yanked himself back.

"And the Nameless hold you dear, too," she said sweetly and drove the sledge on through.

Despite its location, Narroways had not been built for traffic. The houses huddled shoulder to shoulder, eyeing each other across thread-thin, mud-paved streets. When the floods came, the residents simply slung rope-and-chain bridges from one roof to the next and went about their business.

As in most fixed towns, both business and living was done on the second floor. Shutters the size of doorways opened up from verandas to catch any breeze and light the day decided to give out. Merchants posted their children on the steps to sound off about what waited for sale inside and to tend the torches smoking the worst of the insects away from the doors.

Today the whole world seemed determined to cram itself into the streets. A dozen caravan traders had wedged animals and sleighs into cramped alleys while they bartered and traded insults with the fixed merchants. The accompanying mobs of soldiers and families spread through the streets. Their bold robes spilled color through the solid stream of rust and earth dyes worn by even the Noble born of Narroways. The hot wind wrapped itself around the jarring noise of too many people in too little space, picked up the smells of food, spices, perfumes, and sweat and mixed it all into a dense morass and spread it out again.