The Salt Road

They walked north for three days with Bram tied onto the mule, burning with fever, and on the fourth day, the salt people found them.

Teo saw the dust of them first, a pale plume rising from the north-east in the morning light. Then shapes in the dust... animals, a long line of them, tall and humped and strange, plodding slowly across the plain. Then, behind and among them, people on foot, wrapped from head to toe in pale cloth against the sun, so that only their eyes showed.

He had heard stories of the salt people. Everyone in the Fens had. They came out of the Ashlands once every few years, with their strange humped beasts, and traded blocks of white salt for grain and cloth at the edge of the Fens, and then they went back into the emptiness, and nobody knew where they went or how they lived. The Fen people said they were thieves. The Fen people also said they were the only ones who knew how to find water in the Ashlands.

There were perhaps thirty of them. And they had bows.

"Don't run," said Bram, through chattering teeth, from the back of the mule. "Don't... run. Never run."

Teo did not run.

The salt people surrounded them in a wide, slow circle, the way the dogs had. Their animals stood behind them, chewing and staring with long-lashed, contemptuous eyes. Nobody spoke. Then one of the wrapped figures stepped forward, and pulled the cloth down from its face, and Teo found himself looking at a woman of perhaps fifty, with skin burned dark by the sun and a face carved by wind into deep, hard lines.

She looked at Teo. At Mira. At the feverish giant tied onto the back of an old grey mule. At the mule.

Then she said something in a language Teo did not understand.

"...I'm sorry," Teo said. "I don't..."

The woman sighed, as if he had confirmed something deeply disappointing about the world.

"Grain," she said, in the language of the valley, with a strong, strange accent. "You have grain? Honey? Salt road toll. You pay, you pass. You do not pay..." She shrugged, and glanced at the bows. "You do not pass."

Teo looked at the two sacks of grain on the mule's back. At the crock of honey.

They needed every bit of it. They had perhaps two weeks of food left, if they were careful, and they were at least two weeks from the Observatory. Possibly more.

But there were thirty bows.

He was opening his mouth to bargain when Mira stepped past him.

She was not looking at the woman. She was looking past her, at one of the humped animals at the edge of the circle. A child was sitting on its back... a boy of perhaps seven or eight, wrapped in pale cloth like the rest, slumped against the hump with his eyes half closed. One of his arms was bound up in a filthy rag. And even from where he stood, Teo could see that the hand below the rag was swollen to twice its proper size, and the colour of a bruised plum.

"That boy is dying," Mira said quietly.

The woman's face went very still.

"How long has his hand been like that?" Mira asked. "Since he cut it? Four days? Five? Has the fever started? It has, hasn't it. I can see it from here."

The woman stared at her. Then, slowly, she said:

"You are healer?"

"Yes."

"Our healer... she has gone to the ancestors. In the spring." The woman looked back at the boy, and something in the hard lines of her face cracked, just a little. "He is my son's son. He fell on a broken pot. Four days. We put the dung of the camel on it, and the clay, as our healer did. It does not help."

Mira closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, her voice was very calm.

"Then I'll make you a bargain," she said. "I'll heal your grandson. And you'll help me heal mine." She jerked her head toward Bram, on the mule, who was too far gone in fever to object to being called anyone's grandson. "And then we'll talk about your toll."

The salt people's camp was in a hollow between two low ridges, around a deep, narrow pit that turned out to be a well... a Maker well, Teo realised, lined with grey poured stone and so deep that a dropped pebble took a long time to splash. The salt people had a dozen tents of hide stretched over poles, and fires of dried dung, and they gave Mira the biggest tent and a great deal of space and watched her from a distance, silently, with their bows unstrung but close at hand.

Teo had seen Mira work in the Mercy House. He had never seen her work like this.

She made him boil water first. Gallons of it, in the salt people's great copper pots, until it rolled and bubbled and steamed. She made him boil the knife, and the strips of cloth for bandages, and a pair of iron tongs. She scrubbed her own hands and arms to the elbow in hot water and lye soap until the skin was red and raw, and made Teo do the same, and then she made the boy's grandmother do it too, over her furious objections. Then she knelt down beside the boy in the lamplight and unwrapped the filthy rag from his hand.

The smell filled the tent.

Teo had to go outside for a while. When he came back, Mira had opened the wound on the boy's palm — a deep, ragged cut, swollen and full of yellow-green pus — and was washing it out, over and over, with boiled water, while the boy screamed and his grandmother held him down. She cleaned out every last scrap of clay and dung and broken pottery, slowly, patiently, with the boiled tongs. Then she washed it again. Then she took the crock of honey, Ama Tull's honey, and scooped out a great dripping spoonful of it, and packed it thickly into the wound, and bound it up loosely with clean, boiled cloth.

Then she did the same thing to Bram's leg.

Bram did not scream. He lay on his back on the hide floor of the tent and stared up at the ceiling with his jaw clenched, and sweat pouring down his face, and every so often, a low sound came out of him that was much worse than screaming. Teo held his hand. Bram crushed his fingers until they went numb. Teo did not let go.

It was nearly midnight when it was over. Mira sat back on her heels, her hands trembling, her face grey with exhaustion.

"...Honey," the salt grandmother said slowly, staring at the bandages. "You put honey. On a wound. Like bread."

"Yes."

"Why?"

Mira looked at Teo.

Teo had read her the Leaf in the cellar, a long time ago, on one of her first Fifthdays. He had not understood most of it. He had remembered all of it.

"Because the small lives that rot a wound can't live in it," he said. "There's a Leaf of the Makers about it. Honey is almost all sugar, and very little water. When small lives touch it, the honey pulls the water out of them, the way salt pulls the water out of meat when you cure it. They dry up and die. And honey is a little bit sour, which they don't like either. And when it touches a wound, it slowly makes a very small amount of something the Makers called... peroxide. Which kills them too." He paused. "People have been putting honey on wounds for thousands of years. Since long before the Makers. Some of the very oldest healers in the world did it. Nobody knew why it worked. It just did."

The grandmother looked at the bandages for a long time.

"And the hot water," she said. "The washing. Why?"

"Because the small lives are everywhere," said Mira. Her voice was very tired. "On your hands. On the knife. In the dung. In the clay. You can't see them, but they're there, and when you put them into a cut, they eat. Boiling kills them. Washing takes them away." She looked down at her own raw, red hands. "The Makers had a healer, a long time ago, called Semmelweis. In one of their great cities. He saw that the women in his hospital who gave birth with the help of doctors were dying of a fever much more often than the women who gave birth with the help of midwives. And he found out it was because the doctors came straight to the mothers from cutting open the dead, without washing their hands. So he made them wash. In a bowl of lime water, before every birth." She was quiet for a moment. "And the dying almost stopped."

The grandmother was silent.

"Did they thank him?" she asked at last. "His people?"

Mira laughed softly. There was no humour in it at all.

"No," she said. "The other doctors were offended that he said their hands were dirty. They mocked him. They threw him out. He died in a madhouse." She shook her head. "It was years before anyone listened."

Nobody said anything for a while. The fire crackled outside the tent.

Then the salt grandmother reached out and laid her weathered hand very gently on her grandson's forehead.

"I am Sefa," she said quietly. "We will not take your grain."

The boy's fever broke two days later. Bram's took four.

Those were long days. Teo spent most of them sitting outside the tent, watching the salt people go about their lives, and they watched him back. Slowly, the circle of silence around him began to thin. A few of the children started following him around, staring at the strange board with its scratched marks. One evening, an old man sat down beside him at the fire and, without a word, held up a long thin bone carved with a row of notches, and pointed at the Pole Star, and then at the notches, and grinned a toothless grin.

Teo stared at him. Then he laughed out loud and pulled out his own board, and the two of them sat by the fire for two hours, comparing their measures of the sky in a mixture of gestures and broken words, while the children crowded around them.

The salt people had been running down the latitude for six hundred years.

On the fifth morning, Bram sat up, looked around the tent, and said, quite clearly:

"I'm hungry."

Mira burst into tears. Then she hit him on the arm, hard. Then she went to find him some food.

When Teo told Sefa where they were going, two days later, the old woman's face closed up like a door.

"The hill that looks at the sky," she said. "Yes. We know it. Three days east, four, from where the Still Star stands at your mark." She tapped Teo's board, on the scratch between forty and forty-five. "There is a great white egg on the top of a mountain. Very old. A Maker place."

"Have you been there?"

"My grandmother's grandmother went there," said Sefa. "With six others. To find the Makers' treasure." She looked at him steadily. "Only one came back."

"What happened to the others?"

Sefa was silent for a long moment.

"She said," the old woman answered slowly, "that the mountain is hollow. That inside it, there is a door that will not open. And that behind the door, she heard a voice."