The Caravan Road Read online

  “A guarantee of good weather?” Ezten suggested.

  “I wish we could offer that,” Alec laughingly responded.

  “You’ve done enough, tending to the merchant who got sick. Ambitious! That strong-willed one will want to join the next caravan that travels west as soon as possible,” Ezten spoke as he stood.

  “We’ll take care of him,” Alec pledged. The clinic had harbored invalid merchants before, and Alec knew this one was likely to be like most of the others, unhappy, constantly fretting about the safety of his goods, the costs he would incur during his stay at the clinic, and the unfavorable changes that might occur in the market while his journey was delayed. Alec would have to check on the merchant once the caravan departed, to examine his health and assure him of his security and safety while at the clinic.

  Together the two walked out beyond the courtyard of the clinic structure to the broad open corridor in the center of the settlement, where the caravan road passed through. A double file of oxen-drawn wagons stood ready, surrounded by horses and riders. Ezten climbed aboard a chestnut gelding with an empty saddle, waved farewell to Alec, and rode out in front of the caravan, then gave a shrill whistle that set the whole collection of vehicles in motion. Over the course of several minutes the two dozen wagons gradually departed from the clinic, the last civilized settlement they would encounter until they arrived in distant Oolitan, the exotic city that Alec knew only through the reputation passed along by caravan travelers, a reputation not far above civilized, if the free-wheeling, ungoverned, free-enterprise trade center stories were even partially true.

  Once the final wagon had ceased moving, Alec saw that one wagon remained standing near the clinic yard entrance, a forlorn pair of oxen standing patiently harnessed. Alec walked around the wagon, noting that its bed was neatly covered by a tightly drawn canvas cover.

  “Here now, what are you doing so close to that wagon? Move along,” a shrill voice called. Alec turned to see a short, scrawny man with an oversized wooden staff approaching rapidly.

  “I was just examining it. I presumed this belongs to the ill merchant who will be staying with us?” Alec stood in place and let the guardian of the wagon come to him. The man’s face was thin, deeply wrinkled, and his lips were pursed in an expression of profound disapproval. The staffholder was squinting at Alec as he approached.

  “Are you a servant to the merchant?” Alec asked. “We’ll be pleased to help you arrange storage of the wagon and its contents, and I’m sure there’s a farm nearby where you can place the oxen comfortably.”

  “I want to speak to the head man of this way station,” the man replied. “I want to make sure the very best doctor is sent for; bring one in from Black Crag, or from Vincennes itself.” He placed a protective hand upon the canvas-cover wagon bed, raising his arm almost above his head to reach above the wooden panels that formed the side of the wagon, unintentionally emphasizing his own small stature.

  “Don’t worry friend,” Alec said sincerely. “There are no doctors in the Avonellene Empire better than those we have here. Your master is being well tended, I’m sure.”

  “Mistress, and she’s being seen by someone so young I imagine he was wearing diapers when I was already a grandfather,” the confrontational servant replied. “I’d like to talk to the management of this forsaken pile of stones in the middle of nowhere.”

  Alec paused to readjust his thinking, to accept the notion of a female trader on the caravan road route. He’d never heard of one, but he’d never gone out of his way to know the individual merchants and traders that comprised the passengers and cargo that were led back and forth through the mountains. Given the security the caravan leaders provided, he supposed a lady could take on the role of trader and successfully manage to hold her own among the cut-throat competition that fed off the goods that arrived at either end of the route.

  “Your mistress,” Alec corrected himself aloud. “I’ll be happy to help you,” he said as he saw Partre approaching to either bail him out of the tedious conversation he was trapped in, or to bring some information to Alec. Partre was good at all that he did as second-in-command of the clinic, and he relieved Alec of innumerable small chores, such as handling unhappy servants.

  Today though, Alec felt moved to personally try to help the unseen lady trader and her servant himself. He waved Partre away before the competent man could reach him; he wanted time to contemplate the news he’d received from Ezten regarding the changing circumstances in Valeriane, and the small tasks involved with serving the trader would give him time to think. “What would you like to do first?” Alec asked, turning back to the servant. “Would you like for me to look in upon your mistress, or would you like for me to help you settle the wagon and oxen appropriately?”

  The man gave Alec a suspicious glance, but seemed slightly mollified. “What authority do you have here?”

  “I can get most anybody here to listen to me,” Alec modestly deflected the question. “My name is Alec; what’s yours?”

  “Someone as young as you can call me Mr. Graze,” the man answered.

  Alec chuckled at Graze’s perception of his age. He’d let his body set its own pace for aging his appearance, and it had settled on an apparent age in his early thirties. Yet Alec’s memory around multiple lifetimes of experiences, from his lives in the Dominion, Michian, and as the consort to the empress of the Avonellene Empire; it totaled nearly four hundred years, give or take the decades he had spent trapped in the energy realm struggling with a demon, and the time he had lived in exile, falling into madness as he experimented with necromancy. He had known how to change diapers before Mr. Graze’s own grandparents had been born, but he kept his longevity a secret, except when he returned to Valeriane, where he needed to prove he was still the man who had been the consort to the Empress Caitlen, the man of innumerable superhuman abilities who ruled the city in a modest and judicious manner, even in absentia.

  “Mr. Graze, what would you like for me to do?” Alec rephrased his question.

  “You can get someone reliable to stay here and keep an eye on the wagon while we go check on the mistress. I’ll wait here while you run along,” Graze said, leaning his seat against the wagon’s side as he took a firm grasp on the stout staff that he held onto with both hands in front of himself.

  With another grin Alec left the man and went to find a stable hand to wait at the wagon, then he let Graze lead him inside the clinic building and along the hallway of the wing where the sickest patients were kept. The man stopped halfway down the hall and knocked softly on a door, rapping the end of his staff against the wood. A quiet feminine voice inside the room gave a muffled answer than Alec didn’t comprehend, but Graze apparently did. The man opened the door and walked in, leaving the door ajar for Alec to follow him in.

  The room was a typical guest room in the clinic building, with a window providing bright sunlight and a pair of tapestries hanging on the two bare walls on either side. In the bed was a guest who was anything but typical. An extremely large woman was unconscious in the bed. She was large by any measurement Alec could attempt to apply. She was apparently tall, so tall that her feet clearly stuck out beyond the end of the mattress. She was large in other ways too, causing the sheet that covered her to rise high like a circus tent as it rested upon her anatomy. And she was broad, leaving little room on either side of her hips as they spread to the edges of the mattress, a mattress that Alec knew had often seen two people snuggle on together in the past.

  Alec’s examination followed the course of her body, beginning at the feet and rising up to her head, where his eyes lingered to gaze upon her face. It was a beautiful face, even as it rested unconscious and turned to one side, though it was flushed red and marred by a grimace of pain, an expression that remained on her face even as she lay unconscious. The woman was very attractive, Alec could see, and he wondered if that facial beauty was the reason for Mr. Graze’s loyalty to the trader.

  He examined her with his hea
lth vision as he stepped closer, noticing from the corner of his eye that another person sat in a chair in the interior corner of the room. The patient was his focus for now, and as he looked at his patient, he noted with satisfaction that she had been well-tended by the staff so far. Her medical condition, he saw, was serious; she had a ruptured appendix, one that must have burst several hours earlier. She had undoubtedly been in severe pain for some time prior, and Alec concluded that she was lucky to have been as close to his clinic as she had been when the appendix began to go bad.

  Gently, Alec reached out and pressed lightly on the woman’s left side, causing the unconscious woman to groan.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” both Graze and the other woman in the room asked.

  Alec removed his hand and turned. Graze was standing next to the other visitor in the room, a woman who appeared to be close to the man’s age, and who was built remarkably similar to him, petite and aged. “I was confirming the medical condition,” Alec answered. “I believe she has an infected appendix, which has burst, spreading poison throughout her body.

  “It appears that her appendix may have burst just a few hours ago. She probably was in considerable pain for a day or more before that,” he looked at the two companions for confirmation.

  “She was,” the woman agreed. “She lay down on the back of the wagon for the entire past day, just moaning.”

  Alec imagined that the bumps and rattles of the wagon would have been excruciating for a person suffering appendicitis. Turning back to the woman, he gently placed his hands on her abdomen, and began to release his Healer energy, helping her body to battle the infection that was attacking her midsection and coursing through her bloodstream. He enhanced her white blood cell strength by directing his energy to her bone marrow, increasing the release of cells to fight the infection.

  The two attendees were standing behind him, looking over his shoulder, observing his hands gently moving about on her torso. “What are your hands doing there? Watch what you’re doing! We want a real doctor to come see our lady,” he heard both voices protesting his touch to the woman.

  Alec released a last single jolt of his energy to dissolve the worst parts of infection within the appendix, leaving its remnants to be carried away by the woman’s bloodstream little by little, a temporary solution that would begin her healing until he had time to return to address her needs without a skeptical audience supervising and questioning his every motion.

  “I am a real doctor, and I believe we’ll have to treat your lady soon, but for now she’s going to be fine,” Alec removed his hands from the merchant and turned to speak to the two servants in the room.

  “My name is Alec,” he introduced himself to the woman who was standing next to Graze.

  “This is my wife, Mrs. Graze,” the man spoke quickly. “She’s sister to the Lady Grean,” he gestured towards the recumbent figure behind Alec.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Graze,” Alec spoke again. The status of the trio was different than he had supposed, but it was of little real concern to him. Whether they were servants, family, investors, or some combination of the three, didn’t matter to Alec, because he had made up his mind during the minutes he had spent helping them; the minutes of busy-work had allowed his subconscious to evaluate the problem of Valeriane’s situation, and reach a conclusion. He was going to journey back to Valeriane and reassert his role as the Duke of the city.

  He would leave early the following morning, he decided, to give himself the fullest amount of daylight for his journey east on his first day, and to give him the remainder of the present day to settle affairs at the clinic before he left.

  “Would you like for me to help you arrange to take care of your wagon and team now?” Alec asked Mr. Graze.

  “How long will the lady be here? We will need to get back on the road as soon as she’s ready to move,” Mr. Graze responded with a question.

  “You’re not going to want to try to cross the mountains without a caravan,” Alec cautioned. “That’s an invitation to disaster.”

  “We’re not going to stay here and let these folks gouge us for every penny we’ve got,” Graze shot back, as his wife placed a restraining hand on his shoulder.

  “Who’s trying to gouge you?” Alec inquired.

  The man was silent, as his wife looked at him expectantly.

  “Have you checked on what your costs are going to be?” Alec asked.

  “Alfred, have you asked?” his wife gently prodded him after another silent pause.

  “Gwen, we both know how places like this one operate,” he answered, less insistently than before.

  Mr. Alec, would you help us make arrangements?” the wife asked, her hand still firmly holding her husband’s arm.

  “I can help you,” Alec agreed. “Let’s go look into the arrangements,” he waved at Mr. Graze. They left the room, an imploring glance from the wife conveying to Alec her appreciation for his apparent patience with her crotchety husband. They stopped just outside the door as Alec spoke to one of the apprentice healers, explaining the merchant’s general condition, and promising to come back later to attend to her care himself. Mr. Graze seemed comforted by the deference the young apprentice showed Alec, and walked beside Alec with a less defensive posture as they strolled back across the courtyard to the wagon and the patient stable hand.

  “I’d thought about trying to find space for them with Jasel and Kriste, but the wagon and the oxen aren’t going to make the trip up or down the trail into the valley,” Alec told the helper. “Do you know of any similar situations where they could stay?”

  The handler was conscious of the scrutiny Graze was giving him, making the boy nervous. “Well, my own folks’ place has some extra space in the barn,” he finally offered. “I’d have to talk to dad about it.”

  “You run along and ask him, and ask him how much he’ll charge. These folks are going to need to wait here at least a month until the next caravan comes through,” Alec instructed.

  “Do you really think we need to wait for a caravan? We’ve already made it through the worst parts of the mountains, haven’t we?” Graze asked after the stable boy left.

  Alec realized then that these travelers had no idea of the journey they were committed to. “You’ve been traveling for about eight or nine days since you left Black Crag, right?” he asked.

  Graze nodded his head.

  “The rest of the journey to Oolitan will take a caravan at least a month, probably a few days more, and after you leave the vicinity of our clinic you’ll be in the lands where there is no law; the criminal gangs in the wilderness have an arrangement with the caravan leaders to let them pass unmolested for a fee, but a single, undermanned wagon like yours wouldn’t make it through, period,” Alec said bluntly. “That’s if the wilderness or the weather don’t swallow you up.”

  Graze quailed momentarily under the barrage of Alec’s dismal forecast. “What keeps them from coming in here and sacking your clinic if they’re so tough?” he asked defensively, his distrust of unknown people trying to reassert itself in the face of Alec’s apparent control of the situation.

  “They think we’re protected by ghosts or spirits,” Alec answered. “A few years ago a gang started operating about a day’s ride west of here, and starting spreading the news around that maybe the clinic would need their protection. One day a small squad from the gang went out on a hunting trip, and when they came back, the entire remainder of the gang was dead. No gang’s come closer to the clinic than three days ride since then.

  “We have an arrangement with Black Crag to make sure we keep the road between here and there safe; we each take turns checking it, so there’s no problems to the east, but you haven’t begun to experience anything like what’s waiting for you out west,” Alec lectured. “You need to wait for a caravan.”

  Just then the stable boy came running back, breathless for several seconds before he could speak. “My dad says they can put their wagon in ou
r barn, and their oxen in our valley field. It’s only a hundred feet below the ridge,” he explained to Alec. “He’ll charge them a silver cent.”

  “A silver? A silver a day? In a month’s time that’ll add up,” Graze spoke emphatically, trying to establish a bargaining position.

  “No, not a cent a day,” Alec corrected. “A cent for the month. He has the extra space in his barn, so that’s no trouble to him. He’s just getting some value for the grazing your oxen will do in his pasture.” Alec knew the stable boy’s father as an honest man, and not a greedy one.

  Graze’s finger stroked his chin in astonishment at the low cost. “Where will Mrs. Graze and I stay? What’ll that cost?” he asked after consideration of the proposal.

  “I know a farm where the parents are gone for the next few weeks, and two good teenagers are tending all the chores. If you don’t mind walking an hour up and down a hillside each way, I’ll arrange for you to have room and board there for five cents for the month,” Alec answered. “It’ll give the kids some grownups to watch over them and a way to make a little money, and Kriste is going to be cooking meals for her brother and herself anyway.”

  “And what about the Lady Grean?” Graze was having a difficult time finding problems with the arrangements. No matter how hard he tried to find criminal intent, Alec was providing reasonable answers.

  “I expect the Lady will need to remain in the clinic for a week,” Alec began.

  “And what will the charge be for that?” Graze almost sneered, confident that he had finally found the venial charges he expected.

  “We only offer the opportunity for free-will contributions by those who use our medical facilities,” Alec answered evenly. Graze deflated again. “After she recovers and is ready to leave, she can join you with Jasel and Kriste, if you think the climb out of the valley won’t be too strenuous for her. Let’s go take the oxen to the farm, then we can take a look at the path down into the valley,” he suggested.