The Caravan Road Read online

  “They’re good kids; they won’t cause any trouble,” he assured her. “You and Jasen can travel without worry. Is there anything I can do to help you prepare for this journey you’re going to make? I’ve never been to the Twenty Cities myself to know what to prepare you for; it’s a long trip, especially for a couple that’s traveling alone. You’re going to be coming home well past the start of autumn, and that’s not a good time for normal folks to try to travel the mountains,” he warned Carmive, unnecessarily, for he knew that she was well aware of the potentially troubling weather than could descend upon travelers when cold weather claimed dominion over the mountains.

  Although he knew the weather grew challenging all along the road, Alec had never gone any further west than the clinic where he resided. His long-ago journey to the clinic site had brought him from the Avonellene Empire to the place where he’d founded his home, and the handful of trips he’d made since settling down in the mountains had been back in that direction, back east to Valeriane or Warm Springs. He didn’t go as far as Vincennes.

  “We hope we’ll have everything settled quickly in Oolitan, and return before the weather’s bad. We may just join a caravan for the return, if there’s one available,” Carmive replied. “There won’t be much to settle other than to make sure Grandfather’s body is properly buried and his spirit is tended to in the afterlife, once we sell the house,” she replied. “Jasen has a notion to try to do some trading, but we won’t slow down for that,” she spoke in a more confidential tone.

  “Thank you for keeping watch over the children. We’ll plan to leave the day after tomorrow, now that that’s settled,” Carmive said gratefully. Minutes later, after a last few words of advice, she was out the door of the room and on her way.

  Chapter 2 – Kriste’s Farm

  Three days later Alec personally went to the farm to visit the stay-at-home teenagers.

  “I think dad should have taken me,” Jasel grumbled as Alec helped him lead the small herd of cattle from one pasture to another. “You never know; he might need my strength to lift something.”

  “He might,” Alec agreed, as Jasel lifted the bar back into place behind them to keep the cattle penned in place. “But he knew he’d need your strength here at home while he was gone,” Alec added. “Who else could he rely on? He didn’t trust anyone better than you.”

  Jasel was silent as he contemplated Alec’s words, and by extending his Spiritual ingenaire powers Alec was able to tell that the boy’s disgruntlement had abated slightly as he considered his situation from his father’s perspective.

  Alec left Jasel to return to the farm house, where Kriste was tossing a handful of feed to the flock of chickens that roosted in the trees by the barn. Alec knew the girl by sight, but had personally tended her infrequent medical needs only a time or two as she had grown up. “Are you comfortable out here without your folks?” he asked her as he tried to make conversation, to get to know something about the girl. What he knew by looking at her was that she was a very pretty girl, almost elfin in appearance with a narrow face and eyes that had the hint of an exotic tilt. Her hair was a very light blond color, but was thick and curly. Alec thought momentarily about his own daughter, Muriel, who he and Caitlen had raised so long ago in Vincennes. Muriel had had similar hair, and had spent hours each day, it seemed, primping and tending her locks to perfect their looks. Kriste was unlikely to have that amount of free time to spend in such a frivolous manner; she had instead probably come by such hair naturally. Muriel would have been insanely jealous, Alec grinned momentarily as he thought about his flighty but sweet-hearted daughter of a long-ago era.

  “Will you be able to take care of your brother?” Alec asked as she stopped tossing the feed upon his approach.

  “I wish I could cook as well as mother; she made it look so easy,” Kriste complained.

  “You’ll get the hang of it; this is good practice,” Alec assured her.

  “And there are so many other chores to do,” she added, then yawned abruptly, and loudly.

  “And I keep having bad dreams that wake me up at night,” Kriste continued in explanation.

  “I’m sure you’re missing your parents; your heart is trying to adjust to their absence. Have you ever been apart from them?” Alec asked. He didn’t know if she was a girl given to anxiety.

  “I’ve never spent a night anywhere but here, with mom and dad in the house, until these past couple of nights. It is strange,” Kriste admitted. “But the dreams don’t seem to have anything to do with them.”

  “What are your dreams like?” Alec asked. He stepped over to the side of the house and leaned against it. Kriste reacted by sitting on the back step.

  “There’s a man, and he’s coming to get me. He’s coming from far, far away. And I’ve dreamt of the same man every night for the past three nights,” Kriste said. “He seems so real, and he’s chasing me. But I know it’s just a dream.”

  “Is he some boyfriend? Some boy whose heart you’ve broken? You’re a very pretty girl, you know. I’m sure all the boys in the area have been interested in you,” Alec commented.

  “No. And no. He’s not anyone I know; he’s much older than me, way too old – probably as old as you are,” Kriste replied, not appreciating what she said, and too self-absorbed to see the grin on Alec’s face. “And I don’t have any boyfriends; dad won’t let me go anywhere if he or Jasel aren’t with me.”

  “He’s a smart man,” Alec told her soothingly. “You’ll have a boyfriend when the time comes.”

  He reached out gently towards the girl, and placed his hand lightly on top of her head, letting a flow of his Spiritual powers enter the girl, seeking to sooth her soul of its anxiety and take away the cause of her dreams.

  His powers entered her, and began to interact with her soul, whispering gently about the peace and goodness that God offered. He abruptly stopped, and removed his hand from her head, jerking his palm off her crown so quickly that she looked up questioningly.

  “Sorry,” he said apologetically, as he wondered at what he had experienced. He had expected to find the shallow soul of a teenager, and had expected to easily sooth the anxieties that roiled her thoughts. Instead, he had found a teenage soul, wrapped around a mysterious, shrouded heart. The deep center of the girl, the place where a typical person’s core resided, beyond that person’s own awareness in virtually all cases, was impenetrable and indecipherable.

  Kriste’s spiritual composition was a mystery to Alec, something he couldn’t readily understand; she was unlike anyone he could remember making contact with during his many decades of life as an active Spiritual ingenaire. There was no explanation for a teenage girl to have such depth in her soul, nor for it to be so difficult to minister to.

  “Alec!” Jasel called from the far field. Alec turned to see the boy trying to hold back his herd of cattle, which had apparently knocked the gate open and were meandering towards the bean crop.

  “I’ll talk to you later, Kriste,” Alec told the girl, then ran to help Jasel bring his charges under control. Sometime later, sweaty and worn from the labors to re-corral the bovine wanderers, Alec returned to the farm house, on his way back to his clinic. He looked at the steep path that climbed upward from the farm in the bottom of the valley towards the road that followed the ridgetop, several hundred feet above.

  Alec turned aside and entered the farmhouse, where he found Kriste in the kitchen, preparing the midday meal for her brother. “Kriste, hold still for a moment,” Alec commanded her, coming up behind her and placing his hand on her head again. He had been puzzled by the inexplicable configuration of her soul when he had interacted with it before, and had pondered it during the time spend herding cattle back into their pasture. He had a vague sense that it reminded him of something from long ago in his past, something he couldn’t remember clearly.

  He engaged his Spiritual powers, and let his awareness enter Kriste, circling and examining her mysterious, impenetrable center, then he began to
probe, cautiously pressing himself into that darkness, an amorphous, fog-like darkness, through which he could vaguely sense a bright center resting ahead of him at the core of the darkness. As he approached, he felt tangles of awareness and purpose that brushed against his own spirit; the contacts pressed against him, and he had the sense that he was suddenly in a reversed position – he was the one being examined and judged, not Kriste.

  Before he could even pause in his exploration of Kriste’s psyche to react to her examination of him, he heard her spirit speak to his. What are you doing? What do I feel? And then an overwhelming lethargy overcame him, and he felt his body collapsing onto the floor as he passed out.

  Chapter 3 – The Merchant Visitors

  Alec awoke when he heard Jasel entering the house. He found himself sprawling on the floor, with Kriste lying unconscious beside him.

  “Are you alright? What happened?” Jasel asked as he knelt next to his sister and propped the unconscious girl up into a sitting position while he held her.

  “I don’t know,” Alec said, rubbing his forehead, trying to recollect and understand what had happened. He looked over at Kriste with his healing vision and saw no injury that could have made her pass out. Carefully, he switched his abilities to his Spiritual energy, and cautiously attempted to evaluate her. As his consciousness came into contact with her soul again, he saw that the enigmatic shell that hid her center was brightly active, roiling with inexplicable energy, which dimmed and calmed in a matter of seconds as he watched, returning to the somnolence it had exhibited before. The alien energy seemed to both withdraw in upon itself and simultaneously dissipate away, leaving the girl with the same enigmatic consciousness Alec had first puzzled over before going out to the field.

  With the change in her consciousness, Kriste moaned, then fluttered her eyelids before holding them steadily open, while her eyes wandered around the scene in bewilderment. “Jasel, where did you come from?” She looked over at Alec. “What did you do to me?”

  Jasel’s head turned sharply to look at Alec as well, and his eyes narrowed in scrutiny.

  “I didn’t do anything,” Alec protested. “All the sudden I woke up on the floor when I heard Jasel coming in just a second ago.”

  “I felt you,” Kriste responded. “That’s the last thing I remember. You were in my mind; I could feel you.”

  Jasel rose to his standing height. “What were you doing to her Alec?” he asked in a disapproving tone.

  Alec shook his head, and stood too, as did Kriste. “Kriste told me she had had bad dreams. I was attempting to try to soothe them away by calming her spirit. I never had an experience like this one before though.”

  “You can go in people’s minds?” Jasel asked skeptically.

  “I can,” Alec agreed. He calmly raised his hand and gently extended his arm to place his fingertips on Jasel’s forehead. I don’t do it often, and only to try to give people peace, he spoke mind-to-mind to the young farmer.

  Jasel’s eyes opened wide, and he stepped back, startled.

  “Your mind is…unusual,” Alec told Kriste as he drew his arm back to his side. “I’m sorry for causing a scare, and I’m sorry I didn’t do anything to treat your nightmares.” He looked at the angle of the shadows outside, noting the passage of the day. “I wish I could stay longer, and try to examine you, but we were apparently on the floor for some time, and the day is passing away. I need to return to the clinic,” he motioned upwards towards the ridge top.

  “Please come up and see me sometime Kriste, if you keep having bad dreams,” Alec told the girl. “We’ll keep sending someone by here every day to see you, so you two take care, and come up to the clinic if there’s anything you need urgently, anything at all,” he said emphatically. Jasel had relaxed, and seemed to accept Alec’s ability to touch his mind.

  “Mom always told us that you’re a great man, maybe hiding from the world. I never believed her until now, but I guess you do have powers,” Jasel spoke as if to confirm to Alec that he had accepted as ordinary Alec’s ability to reach out and touch him with Spiritual power.

  With a grin, Alec nodded his head slightly, then turned and walked out of the home. He set a fast pace to try to climb to the top of the trail as quickly as possible on his way back to his home, but his legs were aching and he had to stop to treat himself with healing powers before he got to the top.

  Back atop the ridge, Alec quickly walked along the caravan road to his clinic, and resumed his activities there, healing patients and overseeing the administration of the facility, but throughout the late afternoon and early evening his mind wandered back to the wonders of Kriste’s inexplicable mind. There was something about it that seemed to remind him of something from his past life, but he remained frustrated that he couldn’t pin the memory down.

  The next day news came to the clinic that drove curiosity about Kriste away from Alec’s attention. “Sir, the latest caravan from Black Crag just stopped to have an illness tended to. Would you like to speak with the leader?” Partre, his senior apprentice asked; Alec’s on-going interest in the news from the Avonellene empire was known by his staff, who often invited someone from most westward-bound caravans to spend a few minutes with Alec.

  “Send him into the office,” Alec agreed, and he went to the front office room of the clinic, where he was soon joined by a bandy-legged man, a caravan leader who was actively involved in the hands-on management of the caravans he led, one who rode a horse up and down the length of his wagon train, rather than riding in relative comfort inside a wagon. Alec knew the man better than any of the other caravan leaders who traveled the mountain roads; he was a man who succeeded in leading as many as five caravans each year between Avonellene and the Twenty Cities civilization on the far end of the road, and he was considered the most reliable means of transporting goods.

  “Ezten, it’s good to see you again,” Alec greeted the leader and gestured him to have a seat after they shook hands. “Can I pour a drink for you?” he asked his guest.

  “You don’t have anything stronger that water, do you?” Ezten the leader asked mournfully, as he did every time he stopped in to visit with Alec, whose reputation as a teetotaler was widely known, and considered one of the most striking things that made him such an oddity among the stops along the caravan route.

  As always, Alec pulled out a bottle of distilled spirits that he kept just to serve to Ezten, and placed the bottle on the desk, then motioned for the man to pour some into the glazed tumbler that sat next to the water jug.

  “What excitement has erupted in the civilized lands?” Alec asked in an ironic tone. He had left Avonellene voluntarily three decades earlier, dissatisfied with the governance his own grandson had imposed upon the empire in the years following Caitlen’s death. Alec had withdrawn from Vincennes to Valeriane, where he held the title of duke as a result of a long-prior reward from Caitlen, a title she had given him in the earliest days of their relationship. From Valeriane Alec had tried to ignore the oddity and inconsistency that his grandson, Vancove, had imposed on the empire as he and his cronies had turned the palace into a seat of frivolous entertainment and public plundering.

  Alec had sat in the ducal palace in Valeriane and listened to the pleas of visiting merchants and minor nobles who came to ask Alec to intervene and admonish his grandson the emperor. Even though Alec had resisted doing so, Vancove came to hear rumors that Alec was making Valeriane the center of dissent within the empire, so that increasingly cold relationships between the two had finally caused Alec to leave, to wander westward on the quest for a better environment that had taken him first to a long visit to Warm Springs, then to a stop at Black Crag, and finally to the journey that had ended at the Ridgeclimb site where he presently lived.

  “The new emperor has begun to make some changes,” Ezten told Alec, referring to the grandson of the emperor who Alec had left behind, a man who Alec had never met. “He’s a weak one. The nobles are flexing their muscles, and Lugust isn’t stopp
ing them.

  “He tried to appoint some new nobles from his advisors to give him some counterpunchers, but that isn’t helping. He appointed a new Duke of Valeriane,” Ezten told Alec, causing his ears to perk up.

  “Can he create a new Duke for Valeriane? Has the old Duke renounced his seat?” Alec asked.

  “No one’s seen the old Duke in years. He’s a mythical figure; the man would have to be well over one hundred years old. We’re talking about someone who was married to the Empress Caitlen, and she passed on two or three generations ago herself.”

  “Still, the old Duke was a special person,” Alec tried to rebut, speaking about himself to the unknowing Ezten.

  “I know, I know,” Ezten replied immediately. “Everyone in the city is crying about how wonderful the old Duke was – his generosity and his manners and his values, not to mention his God-like powers. The new Duke has stirred them up; he’s raising levies to go fight on behalf of the emperor, and he’s not gentle about how he recruits. A lot of families are losing sons to the Duke’s army, and some of their daughters are being treated none-too-respectfully. And there’s the taxes that have to pay for it all. The Duke’s already burned through all the riches the old Duke’s steward had saved up and that had just sat unused in the local banks.

  “I tell you, the city is a powder-keg, ready to erupt,” Ezten summed up. ‘I imagine that by the time we haul this load to Oolitan and return with an eastbound load, the city will have something happen – revolt, fire, slaughter, siege…maybe all of them.”

  Alec felt his stomach churn at the thought of Valeriane suffering through a tyrant’s rule. “Is there anything you need from us before you head west?” Alec asked.