Page 72 of Into the West

It was a snout. She froze.

But before she could react or pull away, a Hawkbrother in mint green moved purposefully toward her. “Relax,” the person said in Valdemaran, with a voice that was either a high-pitched male or a low-pitched female voice—or neither, or both—took her left arm, braced her shoulder, and turned her face to theirs. They were more androgynous than anybody she’d ever seen! She couldn’t tell, if she spent days on it, which gender they began as, nor which they were now. It was a fascinating look, and she’d never seen the like before. She’d seen actors done up in face paint for a part, but this was their own person, not a role. “Relax. There’s no special danger here,” they went on. “My name is Calmwaters. Take a deep breath.”

Calmwaters gently touched her in the middle of her forehead.

What happened next was like no sensation she had ever felt before. Suddenly she was overcome, tumbled and flailing among a wash of words, and images she didn’t recognize, and sensations so mingled together she couldn’t sort them out.

She staggered for a moment, blinded, deafened, and very disoriented. Calmwaters kept a firm hold, and Delia felt that grip as her center, grounded by it, not her feet. She steadied emotionally and physically at around the same rate, and with a roaring sound that abruptly stopped, she heard shouts and chatter in two different languages, and understood both of them!

“Better now?” the Hawkbrother asked politely. Calmwaters touched her again at the elbows and shoulders when she nodded. “Good. You may feel like your head is too full for a while, but it gets no worse than that. Ask anyone for me by name if you feel like something is wrong. I’ll be here for the next two marks.”

“Y-yes,” she stammered. “You’re beautiful.”

Calmwaters smiled at her blush and just replied, “Or at least new. Life is different when you understand the language. Know the language, know the people. I’ve given you our tongue, and that will help you understand the meaning of things here, not just the names.” The mint-green woven straps sewn into Calmwaters’ outfit told her that they were a Healer, and the charms in a row down the left breast meant skill in bonesetting, painkilling, mental support, and Cleansing—management and removal of magical symptoms. “This is Jelavan. He’ll be your guide. He’s a hertasi. I need to go give more of you folk our tongue.” And with that, the Hawkbrother stepped aside as one of the lizards—

—hertasi—

—took her elbow and patiently waited, his big clear eyes friendly and eager.

Delia looked down. “Um. Hello, Jelavan,” she said, blinking, as the word hertasi conjured up an entire world of information about the lizard-folk, who were—

—-the helpers, partners, and sometimes caretakers of the Tayledras. Craftspeople, houseworkers, cooks, valets, they did all the things that servants would, but were not, themselves, servants. They traded their skills for protection among the Hawkbrothers, a bargain everyone was happy with.

“I’m Delia,” she finished, as the information settled itself into the front of her mind and made itself at home.

“Greetings, Delia!” Jelavan said cheerfully. “Very sorry we had to wake you all so early, but we want to get as many of your folk on this side of the Gate as we can before we close it for the night. Our mages have to sleep too, you know!”

“Oh! Of course!” she replied, blushing, although she wasn’t sure what she had to blush about. “Am I out of the way now?”

“For now,” Jelavan said. “Would you like to have a look around before I escort you to where we’ll be stacking your boats? Side by side, not on top of one another,” he added with what sounded like a laugh. “I should have said ‘arranged.’ New language!”

“Yes, please.” She took a deep breath to steady herself, and peered through the dim morning light. She murmured, mainly to herself, “Three months ago I was a girl in a manor.”

“That must have been exciting! I hope you’ll tell me all about it,” Jelavan replied. It dawned on her—at dawn, she noted—that her breath was not fogging. It was warm here. The ground she was on was dry, but not two horselengths away, there was a blanket of snow. Jelavan reached up, presenting Delia with a orange-and-purple plum.

Snow here but warm; wintery but a ripe plum? If the sun comes up green I don’t think I’ll be surprised! It wasn’t a plum as she knew them, but one bite told her it was delicious, and surprisingly juicy. It must have showed on her face, because Jelavan beamed the most happy, broad smile she’d ever seen. Especially on a lizard face.

The river was about as wide here as it had been where they’d been camped, and hopefully it would not flood here in the spring. There were a lot of hertasi around, and about two dozen Tayledras. Most of the Tayledras were on the riverbank, and in a moment she saw why. As the “raft” of barges came through the Gate, one tall Hawkbrother would touch the one nearest the bank—

And she gaped as the barges rose up in the air, to about waist high. The Hawkbrother—Calmwaters—who had touched her confronted the Valdemaran driving the horses, and did to the hoggee what he had done to her. The hoggee swayed and flailed, unbalanced, like she had. Then as soon as the drover shook off his confusion, a hertasi stepped up beside him, said something to him, unhitched his Tow-Beast and plow horse and led him and the horses off, away from the river. Meanwhile, the tall Hawkbrother (he must have been a mage) began walking away inland, the raft of barges obediently following him.

She saw immediately why the Dolls had roped the barges together; by doing so, they were getting these “rafts” through the Gate in a fraction of the time it would have taken to bring them through single-file. At this rate, it might only take a couple of days before everyone was on this side!

The opposite shore seemed to be heavily wooded, and mostly pines. Big ones, too; the sky had slowly turned to a dim blueish gray, and they stood against it like row after row of sentinels, somber and dark, but giving off the very opposite feeling of that Red Forest. This forest made her feel peaceful, and there was no sense of any kind of a “presence” here. Actually, it was not unlike Crescent Lake.

This side of the river was more welcoming still. There were plenty of trees, and they were giants of their kind, but there were paths among them, and signs of dwellings that somehow blended into the landscape. Despite the early hour, she spotted a lot of odd-shaped patches of yellow light that were probably windows.

The barges were being taken deeper into that inviting landscape; she glanced down at Jelavan, who nodded with encouragement, and she followed the third set of barges and their mage downriver, past the—were they cottages? Houses? Whatever they were, they didn’t correspond to any building style she could think of. There were not many straight lines; mostly the houses were constructed of curved shapes blended with tree trunks and sheltered under enormous vines that covered them like the wings of a protective bird.

She took off her coat, aware she was feeling awfully warm. It felt like a morning in late spring! How can this be?

The trees ended in a broad meadow, and in the meadow was—well, it looked for all the world as if someone had laid out a city, except no one had bothered to actually build anything. There were straight paths mowed into the turf, and lanterns placed at intervals along those paths. The paths were broad, too, as big as any city streets she’d known, and they curved around among the largest trees. There was birdsong in the air, along with the birds to go with it. Astonishingly to her, great birds of prey shared the sky with birds that should have been their meals, and bolts of bright colored feathers shot by, flitting in straight lines with purpose. The smell of smoke and cooking mixed in.

The area they walked in was longer, running along the riverbank, than it was deep. The tall Hawkbrother steered his “charges” to the rear of the meadow, where hertasi awaited. One jumped up onto the barge nearest to them and began untying all the ropes that had held them together. Taking the mooring ropes, more hertasi pulled and pushed the barges into what must have been a pleasing configuration in their eyes, then dropped the ropes, as if they were “ground-tying” a horse. The Hawkbrother mage lowered his hand, palm down, and all the barges softly settled into the grass. The barge hulls creaked, and the barges that weren’t flat-bottomed tilted. The tall mage leveled them with minor gestures, and hertasi streamed in with timber to provide temporary support.

Satisfied with the work, the Hawkbrother ran back to the river, and as she turned, Delia spotted another mage with a raft of barges swiftly approaching. She didn’t need Jelavan’s urging to get out of the way.

“Where are the herds being taken?” she asked the little lizard.