The first leg of the journey past Kegsum was made in silence. The shock of what they'd witnessed - and likely caused, Ryou reminded himself grimly - had cast a pall. But he didn't have the leisure to think back on the episode extensively; a somber Darius pushed them on hard, pressing both Ryou and the horses down small rutted roads, occasionally cutting across fields, fording streams and skirting hills amidst a countryside vibrant with heat and sunshine. There was something a little exaggerated about the hurry. Later that evening, when an exhausted Ryou had finished currying an equally exhausted horse that only half-heartedly tried to nip him, it occurred to him that maybe Darius had been trying to distract him and get his mind off of what had happened to the Passer this morning.
Their rapid trek had taken them into the middle of an olive grove, with only a deserted stone shack nearby, empty until laborers would come later that year to collect their crop. The two of them stayed there that night, sleeping in turns as Darius had promised. Thus Ryou was awake to watch the dawn rise through eyes gritty with fatigue. He missed coffee so much in these moments... unlike tea, which he missed all the time.
The countryside coming to light around him was dry, with bracken and small trees pushing their way up through rocks and reddish dirt. Goats bleated from a distant hill, though Ryou couldn't see any sign of human habitation other than the small shack in which his companion was still sleeping. Ryou breathed in deeply. The air was still fresh at this time of day, but rich with a fragrant, resiny smell that promised heat to come. A single bird sung high and fluty in the nearby olive grove. Ryou watched the sky turn a beautiful blue touched with purple, the stars winking out. The fate of the Passer still weighed on him, but this moment in time lifted his spirits despite himself... He shook his head, focusing once more on the here and now, and went to wake Darius.
Two hours after dawn, they crested a hill and found themselves looking down at a road winding through the valley below. It wasn’t a sophisticated Imperial highway like the one they'd used back in the Province of Tot, their previous location. This road was a wide stretch of beaten dirt; Darius had found it by spotting the clouds of dust rising from its traffic. Because it might be more primitive, but it was also much busier.
"Didn't you say this country was at war?" Ryou asked, watching the streams of people below them.
"Their southern regions saw a lot of battles. They were one of the areas where the Alliance stopped the progress of the Legions. But the Palisians never joined the Alliance; they're merchants, not warriors. Whenever they get attacked, they open their coffers, pay a bunch of Greeks a small fortune and let them do the fighting. In the meantime, their citizens go on making money by trading. Still..." Darius's gaze was fixed on the dozens of people on the road, and he looked puzzled. "That's a lot of travelers even for Palis. All going in one direction, but they're not refugees...Wait." Darius put his hands up to his eyes to shield them from the morning sun and focus his vision. He squinted for awhile, before muttering, "Those magically ground spectacles on the end of your nose have to be good for something. Can you see that paddock near the crossroads?"
"Yes, I magically can."
"Don't be smart with me...Those are oxen in there, can you describe them? They're all black, right?"
"Yes. There's, um, five or six of them. They've got..." Ryou narrowed his eyes and tilted his head to figure out what he was seeing. "I think their horns are painted yellow, and they've got something red around their necks."
"Garlands," said Darius with intense satisfaction. "Part of a hecatomb. Sacrifices," he added, when Ryou looked blank. "The priests will keep them at the crossroads so that travelers can pay an obol in honor of the gods, then they'll march them to wherever the other animals are being assembled. Don't you have this back in your land?"
"No, we tend to sacrifice nothing bloodier than rice."
"I bet Palis has organized Games," Darius said, not really listening to Ryou's answer. "Either that or the king's dead, and I don't think people would be quite so happy to travel around if that were the case. This is great, the way south will be safe while the truce is in effect, and there'll be so many travelers, we'll never get noticed. Inder favors me again. I'm going to have to put something on His altar too when I get back. Come on."
Ryou nudged his horse to follow, making his way down the bluff towards the road where they joined the steady trickle of people heading southwest.
There were other riders on mules and horseback, but most people walked or lead oxen-pulled carts. Ryou watched them discreetly as he passed them by. In ten minutes he saw twice as many people as he had in all his travels up to date, including the five who had tried to sell him for bounty.
Everything and everyone looked exotic to Ryou's eyes, particularly the richer people dressed in fine clothes riding in some of the carts. The teamsters leading their oxen were dressed more plainly and uniformly, in brown linen tunics and sandals, many of them wearing thin leather straps around their wrists as well. Slaves, Darius mentioned in passing when he caught Ryou's curious glance, reminding the latter of one of the more horrible aspects of antiquity he'd managed to forget until now.
They ate a lunch of lamb stew and unleavened bread at a series of stalls that had sprung up around a stream without any town to call their own. While Ryou was stretching his legs and trying to find a discreet corner to pee in, he saw at the back of a stall an elderly woman armed with a rod savagely beating a young girl, barely a teen. The girl was crying and wailing, as well she might, but Ryou had the feeling from the lack of frantic or shocked note in her cries that this had happened before. The girl did not have a slave mark. The woman could be her mother. Ryou opened his mouth - his first instinctive words were going to be a simple 'what's going on?!', banal for sure but he had never had to even think of interceding in this kind of scene before-... But they died on his tongue. If he tried to stop this, the consequences could rapidly spin out of control. He and Darius were trying to stay discreet for reasons of life and death. More savage than the beating was the sudden jarring memory of Gaius punching him in the face, threatening to make him talk. The residual pain days later could still make him wince as much as the recollection of the thudding agony and the fear. And before that, Ryou had stared down at drying bones and broken skulls, thinking his own body might be rotting out here one day, and his parents would never know...
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The teen yelped and sobbed about being sorry. Ryou stood behind them, paralyzed. He didn't know what to do... and he didn't think he could actually afford to do anything. He left without either of them noticing his presence. If they had, the woman might have stopped out of respect for a customer of this common group of stalls, but he suspected that as soon as he was out of sight, the beating would resume all the more savagely for the small embarrassment he'd caused.
That scene, as much as the notion of slaves and animal sacrifices, drove home how much of a foreigner he and his 21st century notions were here. He finished his business and made his way back to the stalls. But the strong smells of people, animals, garbage and middens, the yells as women haggled over a bundle of grapes, the colors and the clothes and the way so many of the men were armed, hit him with a sense of alienation that he'd not had since he'd first arrived in this country. Darius, holding the horses, with his beard starting to look ragged, his long hair wild and uncombed, the hawk-like scrutiny of his surroundings, the armor on his back and the weapon at his side, looked once more as outlandish and intimidating as the day Ryou saw him facing the Bher Rajin.
The look Darius was giving him was not that of a stranger, though. "What's wrong? Tired?"
There were no words for what Ryou was feeling right at this moment, at least not for someone who liked to treat communication with the exactitude of mathematics rather than waxing philosophical. "Just the heat and the noise. I'll be better once we're on the road again."
Darius nodded and then, out of the blue, gave him an approving clap on the back. It took Ryou completely by surprise and sent him staggering accidentally into the baggage gelding, to the amusement of two naked toddlers watching from the shade of the nearest pavilion.
---
By late afternoon, their voyage had led them to a small town, houses like square boxes of baked bricks painted reddish brown by dust. The highway broke into a multitude of tiny alleys with only one big thoroughfare. Traffic on the road had been getting heavy and the town itself was packed with travelers. The Games were in Palis, the city at the center of this country of the same name, but flocks of merchants and travelers were taking advantage of the truce to move about, and a large fair and market would be held near the temples. People in Palis knew to take advantage of good business when it came their way.
Darius led his horses through the small streets, looking for an inn that wasn't yet packed. Ryou followed with his own animal, staring around as discreetly as he could while avoiding the numerous goats living in back yards and in the houses themselves, and surely outnumbering this town's normal population three to one.
The sheer variety of people walking around was bewildering. Women covered from head to toe in yellow or brown robes walked alongside others dressed in halters and knee-length skirts and more bangles than could be counted. Patriarchal beards flowed over heavy woolen robes worn to the ground; oiled muscles shone beneath the sunshine and armor; boys ran past in loincloths, so did a few young girls; hair length varied from shaved to never cut at all; sandals were commonplace, but boots and bare feet were not rare either; and then there were the really strange things, like a woman in elegant red and green tunic and veils walking past with what appeared to be a melting cone of butter on her oiled and plaited hair. Tattoos, makeup, paint or kohl, crude or elaborate, spread over skin ranging from pale to darker than ebony.
...But if there was one skin tone that did stand out in this riot of colors and styles, it was unfortunately Ryou's.
At first Ryou thought people were staring at him because of the bruises decorating the left side of his face; they didn't hurt much anymore, but they'd exploded into a technicolor palette of red, blue, purple, yellow and black. There were other people sporting black eyes, though, as well as bruises, fresh wounds or scars. Life around here was tough, and a few injuries weren't going to be that startling. A few more pointed stares finally clued Ryou in. His features. In Japan Ryou's straight features were judged 'somewhat handsome once one got past the severity', according to the assessment by the secretarial pool back at Ujiie Trading & Security, and mentioned one night during a business party by Sasaki when the latter was exceptionally drunk. That was back in Tokyo, though. In this region of the Outlands, Ryou was downright exotic. The closest to resemble anyone from the Asian regions were five people dressed in lambskin and heavy robes with features similar to those of Inner Mongolia. Even in this sea of variety, Ryou was getting more than his shares of second glances; intrigued, appreciative, or a little hostile.
The hostility was explained when Darius stopped at a stand selling bread, fruit and honey. The shopkeeper took one look at Ryou and snapped, "Hey, if the fucking Empire of Sung has curled up behind its walls, arrested all foreign traders and stopped all caravans again, why the fuck should I go out of my way to trade with you?"
"He's from Ezo," said Darius without looking up from some figs.
The shopkeeper, a redheaded man with a bushy beard surrounding a brown face, looked sullen and uninterested in the answer, but neither was he in any hurry to argue further with Darius. Darius didn't buy anything and left soon after that. At the next inn that turned him down, he stared at the paved road ahead of them, full of tents and shacks and people.
"Let's move on," he said abruptly.
By nightfall, they'd found an open stone quarry a few miles along the road. Most people had stayed in town, but even here a few travelers had gathered; tinkers and laborers who did not want to pay inn prices. Ryou and Darius picketed the horses nearby and joined the dozen men and a couple of women gathered around a common fire, all chatting energetically, laughing loud and not a little drunk.
Darius stared at the flames for awhile, accepting without much thought the common jar that was being passed around, a mix of alcohol and some sour juice.
"We're going to avoid towns from now on," he said softly for Ryou's benefit alone. "We'll take the herder's high way through the hills. It's slower but not as busy, and it'll skirt Palis. We'll be camping out a lot. We'll go back in town tomorrow and buy some decent bedrolls."
"...Is this my fault?"
"You do stand out a bit," said Darius with his usual offhand bluntness. "But it's safer all around. The closer we get to Aksum, the more I might run into someone looking for me."
Which gave Ryou yet another thing to worry about. Who knew he'd ever feel a faint nostalgia for the chaotic but empty Broken Lands...