ears.
Matya's wagon was filled nearly to overflowing with all manner of wares, both mundane and curious: pots and pans, cloaks and boots, arrows and axes, flints, knives, and even a sword or two, plus countless other objects she had bought, haggled for, or — most of the time — scavenged. Traveling from town to town, trading and striking bargains, was how Matya made her living. And it was not a bad one at that.
Like the wagon, Matya herself was a bit worn with the years. Her long hair, coiled in a thick braid atop her head, had been flaxen, but now was ash gray. Countless days of sun and wind had tanned and toughened her ruddy cheeks. Fine wrinkles touched the comers of her eyes and mouth, more from smiling than frowning, and so were attractive. And, like the wagon, Matya was clad in a motley collection of clothes representing all colors of the rainbow, from her ocean-blue skirt to her sunflower-yellow shirt and forestgreen vest speckled with tiny red flowers. Her willowy, figure had plumped out, but there was still an air of beauty about her, of the simplest and most comforting kind — when her nut-brown eyes weren't flashing fire, that is.
'Let's be on our way, Rabbit,' Matya told the donkey as she climbed onto the wagon's wooden bench. 'If we hurry, we can reach Garnet by nightfall. There's a merchant there who's an even worse haggler than Belek.' The donkey gave a snort that sounded uncannily like laughter.
Matya tied a bright red kerchief over her graying hair and grasped the wagon's reins in her strong, thick fingers. She whistled sharply, and Rabbit started off at a trot down the dusty highway, pulling the gaudily colored wagon behind.
It was midafternoon when she saw the ravens circling lazily against the azure sky not far in the distance. Matya knew well what the dark birds portended: Death ahead.
'Keep those ears up, Rabbit,' she told the donkey as the wagon jounced down the heavily rutted road. 'There's danger on the road these days.'
Matya watched warily as the serene, rolling hills slipped by. Autumn had touched the land with its frosty hand, coloring the plains of southern Solamnia in a hundred shades of russet and gold. The honey-colored sunlight was warm and drowsy, but Matya resisted the temptation to doze, as she might have done otherwise. The land was beautiful, but beauty could conceal danger. She remained wide awake and alert.
The wagon crested a low rise. Below her, the road split, and it was here the ravens circled. The highway continued on to the north, and a second road led east, toward the dim purple range of mountains marching on the horizon. Scattered about the dusty crossroads were several queer, twisted objects. A raven dived down and pecked at one of the objects before flapping again into the air, and only then did Matya realize what the strange things were: corpses, lying still in the dirt of the road.
She counted five of them as Rabbit — eyeing the dead nervously — pulled the wagon to the crossroads. Matya climbed down and knelt to examine one of the bodies, an older man's, dressed in neat but threadbare attire. A crudely made arrow with black fletching protruded from its throat.
'Goblins,' Matya said in disgust. She had heard rumors that the verminous creatures were creeping down from the high places of the mountains of late to waylay travelers. By her guess, these had been pilgrims, making for Caergoth, to the south, to visit the temples of the new gods there.
'They found their gods sooner than they thought,' Matya muttered. She spoke a brief prayer to speed the dead on their journey, then began rummaging about the bodies, seeing if any of them carried something that might be worth trading. After all, the dead had no use for objects of value. Matya, on the other hand, did.
After several minutes, however, she gave up in disgust. Like most pilgrims, these owned little more than the clothes on their backs. She would not have scorned even these, but they were threadbare and stained with blood. All she had got for her trouble was a single copper coin, and a bent one at that.
'There's nothing for us here,' Matya told Rabbit as she climbed back into the wagon. 'Let's be on our way. Men riding out from Garnet will find these folk soon enough and lay them to rest — hopefully dead with the goblins.'
Rabbit let out a low bray and started into a trot, anxious to be away from the crossroads and the smell of blood. Matya guided the donkey down the east road, but after a hundred paces or so she pulled hard on the reins, bringing the wagon again to a halt.
'Now what on the face of Krynn is that?' Matya asked herself. Something glinted brightly among the nettles and witchgrass to the side of the road. She started to ignore it, flick the reins, and continue on — the hour was growing late — but curiosity got the better of her. She slid from the wagon's bench, pushed through the weeds, and headed toward the glimmer she had seen. The nettles scratched at her ankles, but in a moment Matya forgot the sting.
'Why, 'tis a knight 1' she gasped aloud, staring at the man who lay, unmoving, in the weeds at her feet.
The man was clad in armor of beaten steel, but his visage was more that of a shiftless vagabond than a noble knight. His eyes were deeply set, his features thin and careworn, and the mouse-brown moustache that drooped over his mouth was coarse and scraggly.
Whether he was, in truth, a knight or a looter in stolen armor, it didn't much matter now, Matya thought. His hair was matted with blood, and his skin was ashen with the pallor of death. She said the familiar words to appease the spirit of the dead, then knelt beside the corpse.
The steel armor alone would be worth a fortune, but it was terribly heavy, and Matya was not entirely certain she would be able to remove it. However, the knight wore a leather purse at his belt, and that boded well for Matya's fortunes. Deftly, she undid the strings, peered inside, and gasped in wonder.
A woman's face gazed out of the purse at her. The tiny face was so lifelike that, for a moment, Matya almost fancied it was real — a small, perfect maiden hidden within the pouch.
'Why, it's a doll,' she realized after a heartbeat had passed.
The doll was exquisitely made, fashioned of delicate bone-white porcelain. The young maiden's eyes were two glowing sapphires, and her cheeks and lips were touched with a blush of pink. It was a treasure fit for a lord's house, and Matya's eyes glimmered like gems themselves as she reached to lift it from the purse.
A hand gripped her arm, halting her. Matya froze, biting her lip to stifle a scream. It was the dead man. His fingers, sticky with dried blood, dug into the flesh of her arm, and he gazed at her with pale, fey eyes.
The knight was very much alive.
'Tambor…' the knight whispered. He lay slumped against the wheel of Matya's wagon, his eyes shut. 'She sings… Tambor…' His mumbling faded, and he drifted deeper into a feverish sleep.
Matya sat near the small fire, sipping a cup of rose hip tea and watching the knight carefully. Twilight had descended on the grove of aspen trees where she had made camp, transforming all the colors of the world to muted shades of gray.
Tambor, Matya thought. There's that word again. She had heard it several times in the knight's fevered rambling, but she did not know what it meant, or even whether it was the name of a place or a person. Whatever it was, it was important to him. As important as that doll, she thought. Even now, in his sleep, the knight clutched tightly at the purse that held the small porcelain figurine. It had to be valuable indeed.
While Matya was not one to go out of her way to help others when it was unclear what — if any — reward she might gain from it, neither was she without a heart. The knight would have died had she left him there by the road, and she would not have wanted that weighing on her conscience to the end of her days. Besides, she suspected there was a good chance the knight would die regardless of her aid, in which case the doll would be hers, free and clear. Either way, it was worth her while to help.
Getting the knight into her wagon had been no simple task. Fortunately, Matya was a strong woman, and the knight had roused himself enough to stumble most of the way with her help. She had hoped to make Garnet by nightfall, but she had tarried too long at the crossroads. Shadows were lengthening, and the town still lay many leagues ahead. Knowing night was not far off, fearful of Rabbit stumbling into a hole or missing the trail in the dark, she had made camp in the grove of aspen by the road.
She had tended to the knight's wounds as best she could. The cut on his scalp was shallow, but he had lost a good deal of blood from it. More troubling had been the wound in the knight's leg. She had found the broken shaft of an arrow embedded in the flesh behind his knee. Goblin arrows were wickedly barbed, Matya knew, and there was only one way for her to remove the arrow tip. Steeling her will, she had pushed the broken shaft completely through the flesh of his leg. Mercifully, the knight had not awakened. Blood flowed freely from the wound, which she had
