Chapter VI The Weight of the Road
«There is no loneliness deeper than that of one who walks accompanied by someone they do not wish to see.»
The road stretched before him like an open wound in the earth. Yellowish dust, parched, cracked by weeks without rain, rose with every step and clung to Estus's boots like a second skin. The midday sun fell mercilessly on his back, and the wind —that constant wind blowing from the east, carrying the smell of burnt straw and dead earth— dried his lips and filled his eyes with a fine grit that forced him to squint.
He did not stop. He did not look back. He had been walking since before dawn, when the last houses of the village had disappeared behind a rise covered in dry thistles, and he had not turned his head once. He did not need to. He knew the boy was still there.
He knew from the sound. An irregular shuffling of feet too small for the road, a disjointed rhythm that betrayed exhaustion and stubbornness in equal measure. Every few minutes the sound stopped —the boy paused, panting, hands on knees— and then resumed the march with an obstinacy that would have seemed admirable if it were not so stupid.
Estus did not feel admiration. He felt a dull irritation, like a stone inside a boot, that grew with every kilometer covered. The boy was a problem. A burden. An unnecessary noise in an existence that had learned to function in silence. Every step the child took behind him was a reminder of something Estus did not want to remember: that the world kept producing children who had nowhere to go.
The landscape offered no consolation. On both sides of the road stretched abandoned cropfields, with parched furrows where wheat or barley had once grown and where now only stunted weeds grew that even goats would not want to chew. Here and there, the remains of a rotted wooden fence marked the boundaries of properties that no one claimed anymore. An overturned cart, with its wheels in the air like the legs of a dead animal, rotted at the edge of the road covered in moss and cobwebs.
War, thought Estus without breaking stride. Always war. It did not matter which empire governed, which flag flew over which castle; the result was always the same: empty fields, empty houses, empty roads along which only those with nowhere else to be would travel.
The wind picked up. It brought with it a whirl of dust that enveloped them both —him and the small shadow following thirty paces behind— like a dirty veil. Estus covered his mouth with his forearm and kept walking. Behind him, he heard a coughing fit. Small. Sharp. The cough of a chest that has not yet finished growing.
He did not stop.
The hours passed with the thick slowness of honey in winter. The sun traced its arc overhead and began to descend toward the west, tinting the horizon a sickly orange that mixed with the dust hanging in the air. The shadows lengthened. The temperature dropped a few degrees, enough for the dried sweat on Estus's skin to produce a shiver he ignored with the same ease with which he ignored everything else.
The boy had stopped coughing. Now all that could be heard was the shuffling of his feet, slower, heavier, as if each step cost an effort his body could no longer afford. Estus calculated mentally: they had been walking for about seven hours. He could walk twelve without stopping. A trained adult could manage eight. A child of that age and constitution —thin, malnourished, with legs that were more bone than muscle— should not have lasted more than four.
And yet, he was still there.
⁂
Estus stopped.
It was not a considered decision. It was a reflex, like that of an animal tired of hearing a fly buzzing around its head. He turned with a brusque movement, and the boy —who had been looking at the ground, dragging his feet across the cracked earth— nearly collided with him before stopping himself, raising a cloud of dust that hung floating between the two like a dirty curtain.
He looked down at him. The boy was even smaller than he remembered. The clothing he wore —if those rags deserved to be called clothing— hung from his body like a sail without wind. He had cracked lips, eyes reddened by the dust, and an almost imperceptible trembling in his legs that betrayed he was on the verge of collapsing.
But he did not collapse. He stood there, looking up at him with a mixture of fear and something Estus could not interpret. Hope? Defiance? The simple inertia of someone who does not know what else to do?
—If you keep walking behind me, you are going to die.
He said it without inflection. Without emphasis. Like someone stating a meteorological fact. Tomorrow it will rain. The river is dry. If you keep walking behind me, you are going to die.
The boy swallowed. His Adam's apple —too prominent for such a thin face— moved up and down with difficulty.
—I have nowhere to go.
Four words. Spoken with the hoarse voice of someone who has not drunk water for hours, with the crushing naturalness of one who states a truth so obvious it does not deserve to be debated. As if the absence of alternatives were reason enough to follow a stranger down a road that led to nowhere safe.
—That is not my problem —responded Estus.
He turned and resumed walking. His steps were long, deliberately long, designed to increase the distance between them. He heard how the boy hesitated for a moment and then began walking again, faster, almost trotting to keep up with his pace.
Estus tightened his jaw.
He thought of Frederik. He did not want to, but the image arrived on its own, as it always did: without permission, without warning, driving itself into his consciousness like a splinter that cannot be removed. Frederik at six years old, following him through the lower district's streets with those short, uncertain steps, tripping over the stones, falling, getting up, falling again, but always behind him. Always.
He shook his head. It was not the same. It was not remotely the same. Frederik was his brother. This boy was no one. One more orphan among the thousands that war and poverty vomited onto the empire's roads like waste that no one wanted to collect.
It was not the same.
He kept walking.
⁂
The first sign of human life appeared shortly before dusk: a farm, or what remained of one. A low stone building with a half-sunken roof, surrounded by an adobe wall crumbling at the corners. Behind the wall, among weeds that reached his waist, the remains of a vegetable garden could be made out: rows of turned earth where a few stunted vegetables still grew, fist-sized pumpkins, carrots that barely peeked their green tops above the parched earth.
Beside the road, a ramshackle cart displayed a few products: a half-empty sack of onions, several bundles of turnips, some loaves of bread so hard they could serve as projectiles. An old man, seated on a stool in the shade of a patched awning, dozed with his chin sunk to his chest and a cudgel leaning against his knee.
Estus walked past without looking at the cart. He was not hungry. Or more precisely: he was hungry but ignored it with the same efficiency with which he ignored pain, exhaustion and any other signal his body sent to remind him he was still human.
The boy did not walk past.
Estus knew before he saw it. He knew from the change in the rhythm of the footsteps behind him: the regular cadence of the shuffling broke off, replaced by a silence that was too deliberate to be casual. He stopped. He turned his head just enough to look over his shoulder.
The boy had approached the cart. He moved with a clumsiness that would have been comical in other circumstances: shoulders hunched, head down, eyes fixed on the nearest loaf of bread with an intensity that betrayed a hunger he could no longer conceal. His hand —dirty, trembling, with nails black with grime— reached out toward the bread.
Estus watched in silence. The boy was clever: he had approached from the shadow side, had calculated the old man's position, had waited for the man's head to drop further toward his chest. It was the same kind of calculation Kael had applied with the trap on the road. Survival instinct translated into geometry, into patience, into the precise reading of when to act.
It was not enough.
The old man was not asleep.
The cudgel struck the boy's hand with a speed that belied its owner's decrepit appearance. The crack of the impact resonated in the quiet afternoon air like the snap of a dry branch. The boy cried out —a sharp, brief cry, more surprise than pain— and stumbled back, cradling the injured hand against his chest.
—Thief! —the old man howled, rising with surprising agility—. You filthy road rat!
He raised the cudgel above his head. It was not a threatening gesture but a real blow, loaded with all the force his thin arms could muster, directed at the boy's skull with the clear and simple intention of breaking it.
Estus's hand stopped the cudgel in midair.
He did not remember having moved. He did not remember crossing the ten meters that separated him from the cart, nor extending his arm, nor closing his fingers around the rough wood of the weapon. His body had acted on its own, as it always did, with that terrifying autonomy that made him seem more like a mechanism than a human being.
He held the cudgel without apparent effort. The old man tried to pull it, but it was like trying to move a stone column. His eyes opened with sudden terror when he looked up and saw Estus's face: covered in scars, with eyes that expressed nothing —no threat, no compassion, not even interest— like two dark stones set into a mask of flesh and bone.
—Let it go —said Estus.
It was not a threat. It was something worse: an instruction. The kind of instruction that does not need to be backed by additional words because the tone —flat, indifferent, absolutely devoid of emotion— communicated with perfect clarity what would happen if it was not obeyed.
The old man let go of the cudgel. He stepped back two paces. Three. He tripped over the stool and fell sitting onto the dust, looking at Estus with an expression that oscillated between fear and the indignation of one who knows he is right but lacks the strength to defend it.
—The... the brat tried to rob me —he stammered—. I have the right to...
Estus let the cudgel fall to the ground. He reached into his jacket, pulled out a coin —just one, copper, so worn the emperor's profile was barely distinguishable— and tossed it onto the cart. It landed on the turnips with a metallic sound that was too small for the tension of the moment.
He took a loaf of bread. He turned. He threw it to the boy, who caught it clumsily with both hands —the right still swollen from the cudgel's blow— and pressed it against his chest as if it were the most valuable thing he had ever held.
Estus resumed walking without another word.
It had not been an act of kindness. He did not feel it that way. He felt it as a mechanical reaction, a reflex with no purpose beyond preventing a sound —the crack of a child's skull against a cudgel— from being added to the collection of sounds that already haunted him through the nights. He did not need more sounds. He did not need more memories. He did not need more ghosts.
Behind him, he heard the boy devour the bread with a voracity that was almost animal. Large bites torn with small teeth, barely chewed before being swallowed, accompanied by a guttural sound that was half gasp, half groan of relief. It was the sound of real hunger, of hunger that has stopped being a nuisance and become pain, and Estus knew it well. Far too well.
⁂
When the sun disappeared behind the hills and the sky turned a dark violet that would soon be black, Estus stepped off the road and found a place among some rocks to camp. He did not light a fire. He did not set out any equipment. He simply sat with his back against a stone, the sword laid across his knees, and closed his eyes.
He did not sleep. He never truly slept. What he did was descend to an intermediate state, an attenuated wakefulness where the body rested but the senses remained active, like a sentinel who closes his eyes but keeps his ears open. He could hear the chirping of crickets in the brush, the whisper of the wind between the rocks, the distant howl of some wild dog.
And the boy's footsteps. Cautious. Hesitant. Drawing nearer.
The child stopped about five meters away. Estus heard him sit on the ground, on the bare earth, and curl up on himself with a sigh that was too old for such a young body. He did not ask permission. He said nothing. He simply was there, like a stray dog that follows a stranger hoping to be thrown another piece of bread.
The silence extended between the two like a territory neither dared to cross.
Estus opened his eyes. The night was clear. Stars scattered the sky like points of cold light on a dark cloth, and the moon —a half moon, with the sharp edge of a sickle— shed a pale, cold light that bathed the landscape in tones of silver and ash.
Somewhere in his mind, a memory stirred. Not a complete memory, but a fragment: the weight of a small body leaning against his, a tiny breathing that grew slower as sleep claimed it, the warmth of another person in nights that were always too cold. Frederik. Frederik at four years old, at five, at six, curled against his older brother in the corner of that miserable house, trembling not from cold but from fear, and Estus telling him beautiful lies about a tomorrow that would never come.
He closed his eyes hard, as if he could crush the memory with his eyelids.
It was not the same, he told himself. It was not the same.
The boy coughed in the darkness. A dry, rough cough that shook his whole body. Then he went still again.
Estus did not move. But he did not close his eyes again either.
⁂
Dawn arrived with a low mist that crawled along the ground like something slow and damp. Estus was on his feet before the sun appeared, shaking the dew from his shoulders with a mechanical gesture. His body protested —muscles stiffened by hours of stillness on stone, the wound on his arm that still throbbed with a dull ache— but he ignored it as he ignored everything that was not immediately necessary to keep moving.
The boy slept curled in a ball five meters away, exactly where he had lain down the night before. In the grey light of dawn, he seemed even smaller than he was. His clothes, soaked with dew, clung to his body and revealed the alarming thinness of his ribs, the fragility of shoulders that were more bone than flesh. He trembled in his sleep. His lips moved, forming inaudible words, and now and then a spasm ran through his body like an electric current.
Estus looked at him for a moment. Only a moment. Then he began to walk.
He did not wake the boy. He did not wait. He simply left, with the same indifference with which one leaves behind a stone or a bush. His footsteps moved off down the road and were lost in the mist.
Not ten minutes had passed before he heard, behind him, the familiar sound of shuffling. The boy had woken, understood he was alone, and had broken into a run —or something resembling a run, a stumbling trot on weakened legs— to catch up with him.
Estus did not stop. But something resembling a sigh escaped his lips. Something that, if anyone had been close enough to hear it, could have been mistaken for resignation.
⁂
The second day of walking was worse than the first.
The heat increased with the morning, and the dawn mist evaporated quickly, leaving a white, cloudless sky that pressed down on the landscape like an iron lid. All morning they crossed paths with only a merchant with a donkey loaded with wine skins and a group of three peasants walking in the opposite direction, heads down and shoulders hunched, like people fleeing something without wanting to admit they are fleeing.
The boy started talking.
Not much. Not with the overflowing chattiness of the day before. But with that irregular cadence of someone who has been silent too long and can no longer hold back. Short phrases, thrown into the air like stones cast into a pond, waiting for a ripple that never came.
—Where are we going?
Silence.
—Are you a soldier?
Silence.
—In the village they said you killed twenty men on your own.
Silence.
—I've never killed anyone.
Estus kept walking.
But something in that last phrase —the way the boy had said it, not as a confession of innocence but as an apology, as if the inability to kill were a defect that needed justifying— reminded him of something he would rather not remember. Frederik's voice, years ago, murmuring in the darkness of their house: «Brother, why can't I be strong like you?» And Estus, with ten years and a world of pain on his shoulders, responding with a lie: «You don't need to be strong. I'll protect you.»
A lie. The biggest he had ever told. The cruelest. Because when the moment came, when the executioner's hand pushed Frederik's head toward the wooden hollow and the blade fell with that dry and final sound, Estus had not protected him. He had done nothing. He had stood in the crowd with clenched fists and blood running between his fingers, and he had done absolutely nothing.
And that was the weight. The true weight he carried, heavier than the sword, heavier than the scars, heavier than the years of blood and solitude: the certainty that he had failed the only person who depended on him.
The boy kept talking. Estus did not listen to the words. He listened to the sound —that young and broken cadence, that mixture of fear and absurd bravery— and he hated it because it reminded him too much of something he could not name without it hurting.
⁂
By mid afternoon, the landscape began to change.
The abandoned fields gave way to greener meadows, irrigated by a stream that wound beside the road with a constant murmur. Trees appeared: elms and oaks with dark leaves that cast intermittent shadows on the path. In the distance, against the line of the horizon, geometric shapes could be made out that were not accidents of terrain: rooftops, walls, the unmistakable silhouette of a watchtower.
Civilization. Or what passed for civilization in that part of the world.
The main road forked ahead: one branch toward the north, marked by a wooden post whose inscription —probably the name of some hamlet— had been erased by time and weather; and another toward the northeast, wider, with cart tracks and recent horseshoe marks in the mud. This last one led toward the city that could be made out on the horizon.
Estus stopped at the fork. He studied the tracks on the ground with an expert eye: merchants' carts, riding horses, military boots. The city was not abandoned. It was an active point, a node of trade or military transit. Possibly both.
He knew where he was. He had memorized maps in another life, when he still had access to them, and though the names slipped from him like water through fingers, the geography remained etched in his mind with a cartographer's precision. That city was near the border between Alsius and Ignis. A place of passage. A place where the interests of two empires rubbed together like tectonic plates, producing constant friction that manifested as soldiers, spies, smugglers and all manner of individuals who thrived in the cracks of power.
It was not a safe place. But nowhere was.
He took the northeastern road.
Behind him, with legs trembling from exhaustion and eyes fixed on his back, the boy followed.
Estus did not tell him to leave again. Not because he had accepted his presence. Not because he had changed his mind. Simply because, at some point during those two days of dust and silence, he had understood something that deeply irritated him: that it was not going to be easy to get rid of him. That the boy had a stubbornness that did not match his size nor his age nor his condition, a silent and absolute obstinacy that yielded before neither threats, nor exhaustion, nor indifference.
But he had also understood something else, something he did not allow himself to examine too closely: that beneath that stubbornness there was something more. That the child who detected traps at the edge of the road and calculated shadow angles before stealing was not simply a nuisance. He was someone who paid attention. And in the world Estus knew, paying attention was the difference between staying alive and not.
And that, for reasons he did not wish to examine, infuriated and unsettled him in equal measure.