iv.
Before the ashen night Lidahlia had spoken little, but in the days after she spoke nothing at all. She spent her time cleaning and whetting her daggers. When I met her, her face was nothing so grim as that. It was wary but kind before, yet now it was air become stone, her jaw tightened fast and her eyes set too wide open.
I had wrapped the bodies of the dead—bandits and guardians alike—in cloth wraps. I put them in the back of the least filled wagon. We kept them there for two days. It was enough time to come to a place I knew. I had been shown it on one of my earliest journeys. “Pilgrims’ Rest,” it was called, for hundreds upon hundreds of men had been buried there. This was the Pilgrim’s Road, and so it had been for eons. Kolmas had been the holy city even in the ages before Cheyvelrus came into form. I told the men to watch the goods while I went to lay our dead to rest.
“Why are you burying those who tried to kill us?” Hull asked. I saw Lidahlia’s eyes snap to him in what seemed a flash of anger. “It is Pilgrim’s Rest,” said I. “And we are all pilgrims.” Hull scoffed and turned away. Lidahlia said, “I want to come with you.”
As we went, I told Lidahlia that, if my caravan was small, I would sometimes come to this place and sit awhile. I said I liked looking out over the nameless graves of so many who went before me. I liked to imagine what their stories were when they still had names. I liked to imagine what it was they thought was worth dying for.
She seemed shaken by that but I said nothing more of it and she gave no other answers to me. When I said, “It is time to bury them,” she only nodded, her arms wrapped around her own body. It was an autumn day, but she seemed to feel colder than the day itself. “You can wait in the wagon once we have taken out the bodies,” I said. She shook her head. “I will dig,” said she.
We took the bodies from the wagon and laid them down in the green of the grass. Then Lidahlia took a shovel from the wagon and turned to me. “Anywhere?” she said. I nodded. So she began to dig where she stood. As the shovel’s head pushed down and its iron teeth bit through the grass, Lidahlia stared at the earth as if intent on some strange thing I had not myself imagined.
When the ground was torn open, Lidhalia looked to me and said, “Do we take the cloths off of them?” I shook my head and told her, “They are the least of my wares, and these men have paid far more than the fair price.” “Do we know which are the ones who tried to kill us and which are the ones we killed?” she asked. I shook my head and told her, “In death, we are all the same.”
We put the first and second into the ground in silence. When we laid the third in, Lidahlia looked at it and said, “This is the one I killed.” I do not know how she knew this, but she said it with such certainty that I believe it must have been true.
After the last was put into the earth, I began shoveling dirt while Lidahlia went into the forest to find markers. She did not come back with wood, as I have become accustomed to. In your western lands I have learned that wood is put into the shape of a sword and thrust into the ground where the dead lie. So it is that the blade of Ventius stands vigilant over them. For those I have buried before, I made such clumsy wooden blades. But Lidahlia came back with stones.
I looked to her and then turned my gaze to the rows and rows of wooden swords that had been lodged here. “You were not seeking wood?” I asked her. She looked out over the rows then too, and through her eyes I could see: Some blades strong and tall, but most were wasting and many more had been lost long ago. “These will last longer,” she said to me.
We placed the stones over the broken earth. I had meant to bury them and return, but Lidahlia stood so still over the graves that I did not move to leave. “Have you buried many here?” she asked me. “Seven,” I said. “Seven before today.”
She asked me, “Would you have buried me here if I had died?”
I hesitated but a moment before I said, “Yes.”
Her eyes stared at the broken earth as if she could see to where the bodies now rested. “Good,” she said, then turned back to the wagon and began to walk.
The path was unsettling quiet after we buried the dead at Pilgrim’s Rest. Lidahlia’s voice had turned to stone. Shim’s spry tongue had lost its vigor, and each attempt at laughter was met only with broken smiles. Hull’s silence was too dark a brooding. Samuel was strong and quiet as he had always been. Stelen drifted far from the group and tended to a wound that purpled and swelled in fearful ways. I was lost in thought of the bandits who grew fiercer and fiercer. The rest of our company had been silenced forever.
So we bore the weeks on the ancient path in silence. In the many well-traveled inns along the way, I spoke of our encounter to tavernkeeps and fellow merchants. “The legions should march the path and weed them out,” said one merchant to me. “And the High Priest and Grand Legionnaire should show that they truly protect this land and not only their own treasuries.”
I nodded to him and said, “It is so,” but we both knew that the army would not march. They would not leave the city while the armies of Castellon gathered in distant lands. They would not fight a war against shadows on the pathways. They would conduct their thousand ceremonies and speak of honor and glory and goodness from the safety of their own holds.
We followed the curve of the Verisvick all the way to the ferries of Kolmas. When we reached the ferries the world was still being chased by the autumn morning frosts, which scared the golden leaves from nearby branches. The icy spray of the great serpent river was whipped into our faces as we waited for the ferry. I pulled a hooded cloak from my wares. It was a woolen garment, dyed brown, and meant for cold days such as this. When I called Lidahlia to myself and offered her the cloak as a gift, she said to me, “I do not need it.” She shook a little, then, and seldom on our journey had it been as apparent to me how slender she was. “Yes,” said I, “but do you want it?” The shadow of a smile fell across her face and then was gone. She nodded and accepted my gift.
There, leaning over the rail of the ferry as it shoved across the great river, Lidahlia stood with her hair flicking in the wind, the brown cloak dancing behind her, and the white silk of her tunic rippling beneath. She looked on to the city as we neared it, and I wished to God that I could see with her eyes.
I have been surprised in my journeys to learn how many of you western people have never seen the City of Pilgrims, though it is surely true that the danger on the roads makes such a journey hard to undertake. Yet I recall the wonder I felt when I first saw it. There is a place in the western Valdashi called the City of Valley Sands. No men live there, for it is a city the lands themselves have forged. The great brown dunes rise up as if they were monuments. They rise up as if they were ocean waves turned to sand and frozen before they crashed. They rise up in splendor as you gaze down into the valley, and they seem to topple endlessly, and it makes a man feel small to look at them. Yet they are nothing when compared to your Kolmas.
Kolmas is a pale brown, as close to honey as to the sands of my home, yet as the ferry’s journey is made the city itself seems to rise up from the ocean mists. The walls are three men tall, yet the buildings behind them are taller still. As the ferry presses on and the mists part, the high steeples of the hundred temples grasp for the sky. The bell-towers that toll the hours of prayer hover high above. And in the distance, even if the fog is thick, one can see the high steeple of the Great Temple’s spire, its beacon shining out two score as bright as any lighthouse, so high above us that some men think it is a star.
I looked on Lidahlia as she gazed at Kolmas emerging through the mist. She had given few words about the journey ahead and I had begged none of her. I wondered for where her journey would take her. And I hoped that the sight of the City of Pilgrims and its spire star filled her with the same awe that it once filled me with.
When we came to the banks of the city, I had the men escort the wagons to the house of a merchant I knew well. We stabled my horses and warmed ourselves in his hearth-room. As my company dined, I counted coins from my lock-box into several cloth bags. There were fewer men to pay, which is the most somber blessing a merchant of the road may ever have. I put an extra blade in each man’s purse as a gratitude for the service given. I gave an extra blade again to Stelen, for he had truly given blood. I gave an extra blade each to Samuel and Lidahlia, for they had felled our foes. And I thought that I could pay an extra share again to Lidahlia for helping me entomb the fallen.
I returned this last share of coin to my lock-box, chiding myself for the thoughts and knowing that my impulse was a fool’s kindness, not true generosity. It is not my way to care too much for those I hire for my voyage once we have parted ways. We are friends upon the road, and I hope to be always generous with them in our time together. Yet something in the girl called to me for more. Was it pity? Wonder? A certain fear? I did not know. I still do not. The impulse to give to her was strong in me, though my merchant’s wisdom had the learning of many years. And before I locked the coins away, my fingers reached within, clasped a few helms more, and swept them into Lidahlia’s share.
Next section.
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