K. J. Parker - The Two of Swords, Part 17

The horses didnt like her, which was fine, because she didnt like them either. She wondered who they belonged to likewise the cart, a valuable capital asset. Mine now, she decided. Twenty-six gold angels, two horses and a cart; in any town in the empire thatd make you upper middle class, if not downright rich, and shed inherited all that against her will. Made you wonder why anybody bothered going to work. And the sword, of course, shed forgotten that. It had to be worth an angel of anybodys money, though of course everywhere was awash with surplus military hardware these days. I could go somewhere and set up as a carter, she thought: its a good trade, people will always want stuff moved from A to B. Or I could go to Permia; in which case, getting there would burn off every last stuiver of twenty-six angels, and shed have to trade in the horses and rig to pay for her passage, steerage, assuming she could find a ship going there.

Pointless thoughts; so she crumbled the beeswax off the lid of a jar of pickled cabbage and pinched out a couple of mouthfuls of the foul stuff, just to keep her strength up. It gave her raging indigestion, a circumstance which for some reason she found hilarious.

*

The road had kidnapped her. Four days since Porpax died, and she was having to ration the pickled cabbage. Her knowledge of the geography and her memories of relevant maps told her that she should have crossed the Timoin some time ago it ran directly eastwest and it was forty yards wide at Angersford, not something you could easily overlook but apparently the road knew better. She was still climbing a hill that shouldnt be there, invisible from the normal roads, marked on no map, unknown to the Imperial Survey; how could you keep something that big and tall a secret? Maybe it was a Lodge road, and the Lodge had carefully suppressed all knowledge of it a sure sign that she was coming to the frayed end of her rope, when she seriously considered a theory like that.

Besides, if it was the Lodges road theyd have taken better care of it. There were ruts in it eighteen inches deep she didnt like to think what sort of carts had gouged them, or in what frequency; someone had used this road to shift a large amount of very heavy stuff, and nobody knew about it. At least the terror of guiding a seven-foot-wide cart along a road with a six-foot-six span between the ruts kept her busy, and took her mind off the appalling mess she was in.

In the end, the road cheated. It filled up a wider than normal rut with black, brackish water, seeped up from the underlying peat. The first she knew about it was a sudden bone-jarring jolt that made her teeth snap together and nearly slid her off the box into the ditch, as the left side of the cart dropped away. Then the whole rig stopped dead.

She climbed down and took a look. The left back wheel had gone in a pothole, and the force had splintered the axle. The wheel was bent up at forty-five degrees, retained by a thicket of torn wooden fibres. She dropped to her knees and yelled in fury. Then she forced herself to be calm and examined the damage.

In theory in theory she could unlimber the horses, prop the bed of the cart up on stones, lever out the massive iron staples that pinned the broken axle to the chassis, take the backsabre, cut down a sapling and rough-hew it into a new axle, pin it back in place and remount the wheels. Piece of cake. For some reason, though, she didnt fancy that, so she cut a long piece out of the reins and used it to tie the necks of the three remaining pickled-cabbage jars together, slung the water bottle round her neck, picked up the jars and the sword and walked away.

The top of the hill came as a complete surprise, probably because it was artfully hidden in a wood. Shed been steadily climbing all day, and now the sun was just about to set. She looked up, and to her amazement she noticed that the skyline wasnt shrinking away as she approached it. On the contrary, it stayed put, and every step brought her nearer to it. This was significant. From the top of the hill she could look down, possibly even recognise something and figure out where the hell she was. She was too tired to break into a run but she lengthened her stride just a little. Each time her right foot touched the ground, she could feel the blister on the sole of her foot compress and squash. Theyd been very suitable shoes for walking from the inner courtyard of the Department to her ridiculously splendid lodgings, but fifteen miles uphill on mud and flint had robbed them of their youth and beauty.