Shaman's Crossing by Hobb Robin Read Free Book Online

opening at dawn and closing at sundown. The streets had been engineered so that two wagons could pass one another and a horse and team could turn round in any intersection. Straight roads, like the spokes of a wheel, led out of the village to the carefully measured allotments that each vassal earned by toiling four days a week on my father’s land. The village thrived, and threatened soon to become a town, for the folk had the added benefit of the traffic along the river and on the river road that followed the shoreline. His old soldiers had brought their wives and families with them when they came to settle. Their sons would, of course, go off to become soldiers in their days. But the daughters stayed, and my mother was instrumental in bringing to the town young men skilled in needed trades who welcomed the idea of brides who came with small dowries of land. Burvelle Landing prospered.
    Traffic between the eastern frontier and old Fort Renalx to the west of us was frequent along the river road. In winters, when the waters of the river ran high and strong, barges laden with immense, sap-heavy spond logs from the wild forests of the east moved west with the current, to return later laden with essential supplies for the forts. Teams of barge mules had worn a dusty trail on the south bank of the river. In summer, when the depleted river did not offer enough water to keep the barges from going aground, mule-drawn wagons replaced them. Our village had a reputation for honest taverns and good beer; the teamsters always stopped there for the night.
    But today, the seasonal traffic that crawled along the road was not so convivial. The slow parade of men and wagons stretched out for half a mile. Dust hung in the wake of their passage. Armed men rode up and down the lines. Their distant shouts and the occasional crack of a whip were carried to us on the light wind from the river.
    Three or four times each summer, the coffle trains would pass along the river road. They were not welcome to stop in the village. Not even the guards who moved the coffle along could take the ferry across to my father’s well-run town. Hours down the road, out of view of both my home and the village, there were six open-sided sheds, a fire pit, and watering troughs set up for the coffle trains. My father was not without mercy, but he distributed it on his own terms.
    My father had strictly forbidden my sisters to witness the passing of the penal trains, for the prisoners included rapists and perverts as well as debtors, pickpockets, whores, and petty thieves. There was no sense in exposing my sisters to such rabble, but on that day Sergeant Duril and I sat our horses for the better part of an hour, watching them wend their dusty way along the river road. He did not say that my father had wished me to witness that forced emigration to the east, but I suspected it was so. Soon enough, as a cavalry trooper, I’d have to deal with those whom King Troven had sentenced to be settlers on the lands around his eastern outposts. My father would not send me to that duty ignorant.
    Two supply wagons led the penal coffle making its centipedian way toward us. Mounted men patrolled the length of the winding column of shackled prisoners. At the very end, choking their way through the hanging dust, teams of mules pulled three more wagons laden with the women and children who belonged to the convicts trudging their way toward a new life. When a trick of the wind carried the sounds of the prisoners to us, they sounded more animal than human. I knew that the men would be chained day and night until they reached one of the king’s far outposts on the frontier. They’d be fed bread and water, and know a respite from their journey only on the Sixday of the good god.
    “I feel sorry for them,” I said softly. The heat of the day, the chafing shackles, the hanging dust; sometimes it seemed a miracle to me that any of the criminal conscripts survived their long march to the