"Jennifer Roberson - Karavans - Ending and Beginning" - читать интересную книгу автора (Roberson Jennifer)

ENDING AND BEGINNING
Jennifer Roberson

FOUR had died. Killed ruthlessly. Uselessly. Three, because they were intended as
examples to the others. The fourth, merely because he was alone, and Sancorran. The peop
Sancorra province had become fair game for the brutal patrols of Hecari soldiers, men
dispatched to ensure the Sancorran insurrection was thoroughly put down.
Insurrection. Ilona wished to spit. She believed it a word of far less weight than war, a
insufficiency in describing the bitter realities now reshaping the province. War was a hard,
harsh word, carrying a multiplicity of meanings. Such as death.
Four people, dead. Any one of them might have been her, had fate proved frivolous. Sh
was a hand-reader, a diviner, a woman others sought to give them their fortunes, to tell thei
futures; and yet even she, remarkably gifted, had learned that fate was inseparably intertwin
with caprice. She could read a hand with that hand in front of her, seeing futures, interpretin
the fragments for such folk as lacked the gift. But it was also possible fate might alter its pa
the track she had parsed as leading to a specific future. Ilona had not seen any such thing as
death at the hands of a Hecari patrol, but it had been possible.
Instead, she had lived. Three strangers, leaving behind a bitter past to begin a sweeter
future, had not. And a man with whom she had shared a bed in warmth and affection, if not
wild passion, now rode blanket-wrapped in the back of the karavan-master's wagon, cold i
place of warm.
The karavan, last of the season under Jorda, her employer, straggled to the edges of the
nameless settlement just after sun-down. Exhausted from the lengthy journey as well as its
tragedies, Ilona climbed down from her wagon, staggered forward, and began to unhitch the
team. The horses, too, were tired; the kara-van had withstood harrying attacks by Sancorran
refugees turned bandits, had given up coin and needed supplies as "road tax" to three differ
sets of Hecari patrols until the fourth, the final, took payment in blood when told there was
money left with which to pay. When the third patrol had exacted the "tax," Ilona wondered
the karavan-master would suggest to the Hecari sol-diers that they might do better to go afte
the bandits rather than harassing innocent Sancorrans fleeing the aftermath of war. But Jord
had merely clamped his red-bearded jaw closed and paid up. It did not do to suggest anythi
to the victorious enemy; Ilona had heard tales that they killed anyone who complained, wer
they not paid the "tax."
Ilona saw it for herself when the fourth patrol arrived. Her hands went through the moti
of unhitching without direction from her mind, still picturing the journey. Poor Sancorra,
overrun by the foreigners called Hecari, led by a fearsome warlord, was being steadily
stripped of her wealth just as the citizens were being stripped of their holdings. Women we
widowed, children left fatherless, farmsteads burned, livestock rounded up and driven to
Hecari encampments to feed the enemy soldiers. Karavans that did not originate in Sancorr
were allowed passage through the province so long as their masters could prove they came
from other provincesтАФand paid tributeтАФbut that passage was nonetheless a true challenge
Jorda's two scouts early on came across the remains of several karavans that the master kne
to be led by foreigners like himself; the Hecari apparently were more than capable of killin
anyone they deemed Sancorran refugees, even if they manifestly were not. It was a simple
matter to declare anyone an enemy of their warlord.
Ilona was not Sancorran. Neither was Jorda, nor one of the scouts. But the other guide,
Tansit, was. And now his body lay in the back of a wagon, waiting for the rites that would
his spirit to the Land of the Dead.
Wearily Ilona finished unhitching the team, pulling harness from the
sweat-slicked horses. Pungent, foamy lather dripped from flanks and shoulders. She