Lois Bujold - Barrayar

“My lord’s livery sticks out like a flag, too,” Kly added, looking back at Bothari. “But you’ll pass well enough, in the right clothes. I’ll see what I can do, in a bit here.”

Cordelia sagged, her belly aching in anticipation of rest. Refuge. But at what price to those who gave her refuge? “Will helping us put you in danger?”

His tufted grey brow rose. “Belike.” His tone did not invite further comment on the topic.

She had to bring her tired mind back on-line somehow, if she was to be asset and not hazard to everyone around her. “That gum-leaf of yours. Does it work anything like coffee?”

“Oh, better than coffee, Milady.”

“Can I try some?” Shyness lowered her voice; it might be too intimate a request.

His cheeks creased in a dry grin. “Only backcountry sticks like me chew gum-leaf, Milady. Pretty Vor ladies from the capital wouldn’t be caught dead with it in their pearly teeth.”

“I’m not pretty, I’m not a lady, and I’m not from the capital. And I’d kill for coffee right now. I’ll try it.”

He let his reins drop to his steadily plodding horse’s neck, rummaged in his blue-grey jacket pocket, and pulled out his pouch. He broke off a chunk, in none-too-clean fingers, and leaned across.

She regarded it a doubtful moment, dark and leafy in her palm. Never put strange organics in your mouth till they’ve been cleared by the lab. She lapped it up. The wad was made self-sticking by a bit of maple syrup, but after her saliva washed away the first startling sweetness, the flavor was pleasantly bitter and astringent. It seemed to peel away the night’s film coating her teeth, a real improvement. She straightened.

Kly regarded her with bemusement. “So what are you, off-worlder not-a-lady?”

“I was an astrocartographer. Then a Survey captain. Then a soldier, then a POW, then a refugee. And then I was a wife, and then I was a mother. I don’t know what I’m going to be next,” she answered honestly, around the gum-leaf. Pray not widow.

“Mother? I’d heard you were pregnant, but … didn’t you lose your baby to the soltoxin?” He eyed her waist in confusion.

“Not yet. He still has a fighting chance. Though it seems a little uneven, to match him against all of Barrayar just yet… . He was born prematurely. By surgical section.” (She decided not to try to explain the uterine replicator.) “He’s at the Imperial Military Hospital. In Vorbarr Sultana. Which for all I know has just been captured by Vordarian’s rebel forces …” She shivered. Vaagen’s lab was classified, nothing to draw anyone’s attention. Miles was all right, all right, all right, and one crack in that thin shell of conviction would hatch out hysteria… . Aral, now, Aral could take care of himself if anyone could. So how had he been so caught-out, eh, eh? No question, ImpSec was riddled with treason. They couldn’t trust anyone around here, and where was Illyan? Trapped in Vorbarr Sultana? Or was he Vordarian’s quisling? No … Cut off, more likely. Like Kareen. Like Padma and Alys Vorpatril. Life racing death …

“No one will bother the hospital,” said Kly, watching her face.

“I—yes. Right.”

“Why did you come to Barrayar, off-worlder?”

“I wanted to have children.” A humorless laugh puffed from her lips. “Do you have any children, Kly the Mail?”

“Not so far as I know.”

“You were very wise.”

“Oh …” His face grew distant. “I don’t know. Since my old woman died, ’s been pretty quiet. Some men I know, their children have been a great trouble to them. Ezar. Piotr. Don’t know who will burn the offerings on my grave. M’ niece, maybe.”

Cordelia glanced at Gregor, riding along atop the saddlebags and listening. Gregor had lit the taper to Ezar’s great funeral offering-pyre, his hand guided by Aral’s.

They rode on up the road, climbing. Four times Kly ducked up side-trails, while Cordelia, Bothari, and Gregor waited out of sight. On the third of these delivery-runs Kly returned with a bundle including an old skirt, a pair of worn trousers, and some grain for the tired horses. Cordelia, still chilled, put the skirt on over her old Survey trousers. Bothari exchanged his conspicuous brown uniform pants “with the silver stripe down the side for the hillman’s cast-offs. The pants were too short, riding ankle—high, giving him the look of a sinister scarecrow. Bothari’s uniform and Cordelia’s black fatigue shirt were bundled out of sight in an empty mailbag. Kly solved the problem of Gregor’s missing shoe by simply stripping off the remaining one and letting the boy go barefoot, and concealing his too-nice blue suit beneath a man’s oversize shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Man, woman, child, they looked a haggard, ragged little hill family.

They made the top of Amie Pass and started back down. Occasionally folk waited by the roadside for Kly; he passed on verbal messages, rattling them off in what sounded to Cordelia to be verbatim style. He distributed letters on paper and cheap vocodisks, their self-playbacks tinny and thin. Twice he paused to read letters to apparently illiterate recipients, and once to a blind man guided by a small girl. Cordelia grew twitchier with each mild encounter, drained by nervous exhaustion. Will that fellow betray us? What do we look like to that woman? At least the blind man can’t describe us. …

Toward dusk, Kly returned from one of his side-loops to gaze up and down the silent shadowed wilderness trail and declare, “This place is just too crowded.” It was a measure of Cordelia’s overstrain that she found herself mentally agreeing with him.

He looked her over, worry in his eyes. “Think you can go on for another four hours, Milady?”

What’s the alternative? Sit by this mud puddle and weep till we’re captured? She struggled to her feet, pushing up from the log she’d been perched on waiting their guide’s return. “That depends on what’s at the end of four more hours of this.”

“My place. I usually spend this night at my niece’s, near here. My route ends about another ten hours farther on, when I’m making my deliveries, but if we go straight up we can do it in four. I can double back to this point by tomorrow morning and keep my schedule as usual. Real quiet-like. Nothing to remark on.”

What does “straight up” mean? But Kly was clearly right; their whole safety lay in their anonymity, their invisibility. The sooner they were out of sight, the better. “Lead on, Major.”

It took six hours. Bothari’s horse went lame, short of their goal. He dismounted and towed it. It limped and tossed its head. Cordelia walked, too, to ease her raw legs and to keep herself warm and awake in the chilling darkness. Gregor fell asleep and fell off, cried for his mother, then fell asleep again when Kly moved him around to his front to keep a better grip. The last climb stole Cordelias breath and made her heart race, even though she hung on to Rose’s stirrup for help. Both horses moved like old women with arthritis, stumping along jerkily; only the animals’ innate gregariousness kept them following Kly’s hardy pinto.

The climb became a drop, suddenly, over a ridge and into a great vale. The woods grew thin and ragged, interspersed with mountain meadows. Cordelia could feel the spaces stretching out around her, true mountain scale at last, vast gulfs of shadow, huge bulks of stone, silent as eternity. Three snowflakes melted on her staring, upturned face. At the edge of a vague patch of trees, Kly halted. “End of the line, folks.”

Cordelia sleepwalked Gregor into the tiny shack, felt her way to a cot, and rolled him onto it. He whimpered in his sleep as she dragged the blankets over him. She stood swaying, numb-brained, then in a last burst of lucidity kicked off her slippers and climbed in with him. His feet were cold as a cryo-corpse’s. As she warmed them against her body his shivering gradually relaxed into deeper sleep. Dimly, she was aware that Kly—Bothari—somebody, had started a fire in the fireplace. Poor Bothari, he’d been awake every bit as long as she had. In a quite military sense, he was her man; she should see that he ate, cared for his feet, slept … she should, she should… .