Neveryóna, or The Tales of Signs and Cities

9. Of Night, Noon, Time, and Transition

‘GIVE IT TO ME, little spy!’

Pryn jerked away and, with a foot she’d gotten free, kicked at the Ini, missed — struggling, she glimpsed the dark face, backlit by moonlight through pale hair.

‘Give it to me! You don’t know how to use it! It will only get you in trouble! It’s mine…!’

Still wedged into the opening, Pryn felt for the knife with her free hand and jerked the other loose from Ini. Between the rocks, she could not get it out — and wedged in further to escape the Ini’s yank and punches.

‘Give it to me now! I saw you spying on Madame Keyne! Jade and Madame Keyne! This morning and this evening — didn’t you think I saw you? When I tell Madame, she’ll know what you are! Give it to me — No, don’t go back in there! No, it’s dangerous in there! It’s terrible! Horrible! Anything might happen — come back with my…’

But Pryn was again out the other side, standing, stumbling back in brambles, waiting for the white-blond head to emerge. She breathed, hissing between her teeth. Her side had begun to ache again. She took another breath…

Silence.

She waited.

But the Ini, murderous to those she thought powerless — again, Madame Keyne had been right — was terrified of anything she perceived as authority. And this untenanted house of power and all the grounds around it had become, at least for the dwellers over the garden wall, the authoritative center of the city.

Pryn wondered if she ought to throw the knife back through the hole; but she was afraid to get too close, in case that was the moment Ini chose to overcome terror and emerge.

If I see her, Pryn thought viciously, I’ll kick her head —

She didn’t see anything.

At least not coming out of the wall.

Calmer now, with none of the elation she’d felt before, Pryn made her way along the rock, her hand on the knife in her sash, now and again glancing over her shoulder.

If there were breaks in Madame Keyne’s walls, given the conditions here there must be great gaps leading out every which way…

After the wall turned, many meters along (it must be facing on the main avenue by now, she thought; and still wasn’t sure), Pryn found a place where, indeed, some stones had fallen and a tree had grown up close enough to allow her to climb. And she was too tired to search further.

She climbed, clambered across leaves fallen on the top stones, knocked small pebbles to the ground, and jumped.

On the high road in the moonlight, she brushed off her dirty hands, rubbed her sore knees, and looked about at the groves of palms, at the walls around her, at the roofs beyond them.

…to the south? Pryn laughed on the empty avenue; and walked, not sure whether she were wandering into or out of the city. For all her tiredness, she felt quite lucid. She could write down the salient points of her situation clearly tonight. She was a mountain girl, new in the city, with a strange astrolabe, a few coins, and a stolen knife at her belt. Adventurer, warrior, thief…? (True she wasn’t sure which way she was going.) It would be exciting to leave the city by some unknown direction, turned out onto the land to wander wherever she might…

Forty minutes later, she knew she was definitely moving toward the city’s center. Once she turned up a dark street she thought looked familiar. Several times she turned up others that were completely unknown. Then, from an unexpected direction, she came out of an alley at the familiar bridge.

As she strolled onto it, the moon hung just over the ragged roofs beyond.

The bridge was nearly deserted.

All that actually lived in the city seemed to have retired for the night. She looked down over the stone wall at the water, to see moon-flicker here and there between rocks. From somewhere she remembered an old tale of night in Kolhari with throngs of merry-makers, high-held torches, songs in the alleys, revelers moving from party to party, house to house…What traveler in the Ellamon market had she overheard voicing such lies? Certainly that was not this city, nor this night, nor this neighborhood.

Ahead, by the wall, she saw two women in tense, quiet converse. The younger kept touching the broad white collar-cover worn by the older, then dropping her head to shake dark hair, which now and again the older would stroke with a wide, work-scarred hand.

She heard footsteps behind her and male voices, slowly overtaking her. For moments she was sure that she would be grabbed, that someone would push her down on the stone, that the coins would be ripped from her pocket: the men broke around her — boys, really, she saw now, though no less frightening because of it — and passed ahead.

They continued, walking, talking.

On the other side of the bridge she saw a man, unsteady with drink, stop and look at her. In the same way she had felt herself the center of attention with the unseen boys who’d come up behind, now she tried to tell herself that, no, he wasn’t really staring at her. As she passed, he turned, looking. The moment he was out of eye-sight, Pryn felt an overwhelming urge to look back and see if he were following — and at the same moment felt that that, above all, was what she must not do. It would only make some horrible and unnameable and inexplicable thing occur.

As she walked on, the conflict inside her grew, filling up her head, then her whole body, reaching toward some unbearable level till she groped for her knife —

He ran around the newel ahead of her, came a dozen steps onto the bridge, stopped a dozen steps in front of her — a naked barbarian boy. Suspended in a moment of astonishment, he paused, like someone running to keep an appointment only to realize, on arrival, that the person ambling by the appointed corner is not the expected party but only a passing stranger — that, indeed, the appointment itself was for a different day, if not a different street, at a different hour, in a different town altogether.

The boy blinked, turned, ran off down the Spur-side quay. Carefully, Pryn looked behind her. (Her hand had gone up from her knife hilt. Her knuckles knocked bronze.) The drunken man was walking away unsteadily.

Here, thought Pryn, I can follow every story, image, and bit of misinformation to its source in memory; yet I have no notion where such contradictions come from. Not look back? I’d best learn when to, or — better — just shake such contradictions from my head; if I don’t, and still I stay in such cities, I shall be dead of them!

Pryn walked from the bridge out onto the empty market’s worn brick. (She could be afraid. But what was it she must learn to fight…?) Crossing the square in the night-breeze, she stopped by the stone fountain, bent, drank, then looked up, trying to decide which of the hills about her fed this foaming basin.

She bent to drink again.

Were this another story, what we have told of Pryn’s adventures till now might well have been elided or omitted altogether as unbelievable or, at any rate, as uncharacteristic. In that other story, Pryn’s next few weeks might easily have filled the bulk of these pages.

Such pages would tell of a dawn’s waking in the public park. They would recount a day of watching beggars along the waterfront — and the three not very profitable hours Pryn spent begging herself. The coins Madame Keyne had given her, without hope of adding to them, did not seem much to live on. Those pages would chronicle the evening she carried baskets of yams and sacks of grain from store to kitchen in a large eating establishment frequented by doggedly hungry, dirty men, most among them barbarian laborers who’d managed to secure jobs in the New Market. (The food most popular among them was a kind of vegetable stew which, when Pryn tasted it, proved almost inedible because of some pungent spice whose flavor glimmered all through it.) They would describe the two young women Pryn met working there, who dissuaded her from her plan for the next day: to go to the New Market and ask for a job as a bucket carrier. For didn’t Pryn know? Only barbarian women took such jobs. That was no way to climb the social ladder.

One, about twenty, was a short girl with immense energy and a thick accent (non-barbarian), who would not say where she was from. Her name was Vatry, and she told Pryn she was a dancer. Instead of the rich nut brown Pryn assumed the normal complexion of all around her not specifically foreign, Vatry’s face and shoulders had a yellowish cast, and she was spotted, hairline to hands and feet, with coppery freckles. Her hair was black and wild, but in direct sun, from certain angles, it glimmered with red — not the brickish hue that sometimes rusted the locks of that rough-haired people (especially the outlying islanders), but a red that seemed to Pryn, who knew as little of henna as she did of kohl, impossible for hair!

The other was taller, older, heavier, slower, less insistently friendly; still, Pryn found herself taking to her. She was a second cousin, or a friend of a second cousin, of the woman who managed, but did not own, the eating hall. Much later, when Pryn was quite exhausted and had been assured neither she nor Vatry could work there tomorrow because the two brothers who usually did the job would be returning the next day from a family funeral out of town, it was she who said, once she discovered that Pryn had some money of her own, that Pryn could come with her and sleep in her room.

Vatry seemed relieved.

Since there was an extra pallet and lots of blankets, it turned out to be as comfortable a sleep as Pryn had gotten in a while.

That story would tell how Pryn met Vatry, as planned, the next afternoon in the Old Market. Vatry knew the mummers who performed their skits there. Pryn and Vatry watched one of the comic extravaganzas from inside the mummers’ prop wagon, crouched among old musical instruments, with mountains and flowers and clouds and waves painted on leather and canvas roped to wooden frames and stacked about them. Actors offstage pulled cords to make an artificial beast with metal eyes open and close its mouth — while another offstage actor roared — then lowered a wooden eagle whose wings could be flapped by other actors pulling other cords. (A girl, who, in false white hair and beard at the beginning of the skit, had hobbled about the platform in a very funny imitation of a crippled geezer, crouched beside them now, hands cupped to her mouth, cawing and shrieking and cawing.) It would tell how Vatry, five years older and a head shorter than Pryn — who, after all, was not tall — performed for the mummers between two skits. The performance was called an ‘audition.’ Pryn was given a clay drum with a leather head to pound, and sat, pounding it, with the other musicians at the stage edge, making a simple rhythmic music, while Vatry grinned and gaped and bounced and bent and turned impressive cartwheels and finished with an astonishing backflip. Later, Pryn must have asked her twenty-five times how she did it and where she’d learned it; but Vatry just laughed. Everyone was very friendly and told Vatry to go walk about the market for an hour while they made their decision. Pryn was nervous, but Vatry thought the whole situation very funny and kept darting off to look at that or this — once Pryn used the opportunity to buy a piece of sugar beet for herself. Then she decided that had been a silly way to spend one of her coins; but it was done. Once Vatry ran up holding a chain on which was…Pryn’s astrolabe! She explained that, while, minutes ago, the two of them had been watching a man with a trained bear, Vatry had seen someone lightly lift it from where Pryn had stuck it into her sash that morning and make off with it. Vatry had gone after him and, as lightly, lifted it back! To Vatry it all seemed amusing, but Pryn found herself wondering, as she put the chain once more around her neck, if the tiny, freckled, frenetic girl weren’t more talented as a pick-pocket than as a dancer. She gave Vatry the last of her beet. Then they returned to the mummers where, as they stepped up on the by now half-dismantled platform, the corpulent man, who had done a silly dance himself in the first skit with a tall woman who could bend every which way, announced perfunctorily: ‘More cartwheels and flips; less bumping and bouncing. If you want supper, go back to the wagon there. You can take your friend’ which meant Vatry had been hired. Pryn ate that evening with the mummers, terribly excited about Vatry’s coming tour — which is mostly what the other mummers talked of as they passed food along the benches under the darkening sky, bruised green and copper along the market’s western edge. Vatry herself did a lot of complaining, mostly under her breath and to Pryn, about the director’s instructions. ‘Does he think I sell my dances the way a prostitute sells her body on the bridge at the other side of the market? What he wants me to cut out are all the magic parts, the truly wondrous parts! But nobody understands magic in this vicious and vulgar land!’ The troupe, apparently, would soon travel to markets throughout Nevèrÿon. What wonderful people, Pryn thought as she leaned on her knees and ate fruit and a mush of grain and fried fat that the leading lady said was practically all they ate in her home town when she was growing up, though Pryn was as unsure where that was as she was of Vatry’s origins. They drank beer from clay buckets and passed around platters of roasted potatoes. Indeed, the only thing that seemed to interest these odd and exciting people more than travel, past and to come, was sex, about which they joked constantly and in several languages. But the jokes — the ones she could understand — made Pryn laugh, and only now and again did she feel any apprehension about what the night might bring.

Though she’d eaten with the mummers, it wasn’t Pryn who had been hired to dance, or who could now blanket off a section of one of the cramped prop wagons to sleep, or who had the wonders of all Nevèrÿon’s markets promised her for the season.

What the night brought was mass confusion.

Pryn went back to her other friend’s room and was just at the door when she heard scuffling inside. At first she started to move away. Then she heard her friend cry out. Pryn pushed the door open and ran in. A very drunken man was hitting her friend, who had a large yellow and red bruise on her face already and who was making a piteous sound. Pryn opened her mouth and grabbed her knife, both without thinking. She cut the man deeply on the arm and not so deeply on the buttock — and when he tried to grab a workhammer with which he’s already hit the woman, or at least had been threatening to, Pryn slashed the back of his shoulder. This time he got out the door and stumbled down the steps. Her friend was very upset and said they couldn’t stay there because, first, he might come back and, second, there was blood all over everything and, third, the landlord, if he saw any of it, would throw them both out — so they went to the room of one of the woman’s friends, three streets away.

The story would certainly tell of the two young men Pryn met who were also visiting there that evening. It would, no doubt, record the intense conversation, much later that night among all the young people, about the city’s violence. ‘You say you’re scared every time you hear people walking up behind you on the street?’ said the younger of the two men, who had a Kolhari accent so thick that for the first minutes Pryn had to restrain herself from laughing, for it sounded like something you might hear from a mummer in a comic skit. ‘You can’t live like that! You have to develop strategies. Now you — ’ he pointed to the woman who worked in a harness house and whose room it was — ‘suppose you were walking alone, at night, and you heard footsteps behind you. What would you do?’ Pryn didn’t know and, with the young woman addressed, said so. ‘You’d listen, that’s what!’ the young man cried. ‘And if the people behind you were talking among themselves, men alone or mixed men and women, you’d know it was all right. If they weren’t talking, then you’d move!’

‘What if they’re talking about you?’ asked a pretty girl who’d given Pryn’s friend a rag dampened with vinegar to hold against her bruise.

For some reason, that made everybody laugh — except the girl who’d said it and Pryn’s friend. (The vinegar made the whole cramped room smell.) ‘Most of the time they will be talking, too,’ the Kolhari youth went on. (For the two young men, at any rate, the laughter seemed to have dealt with the objection.) ‘But you have to learn things like that, otherwise you’ll be too scared to go out in the street!’

Pryn, who’d never thought about such strategies in Ellamon, was impressed — the objection notwithstanding — and resolved at least to try it.

The story would tell how the two young men that night said they were planning to take a cartload of something they didn’t want to talk about too much someplace in the south they didn’t want to name; and since, with whichever strategies, Pryn didn’t want to wander about the streets in which also wandered some half-mad creature whom she had considerably injured, she asked if she could go with them.

The young men thought it was a fine idea.

The story would tell how the night before they actually left — several days after they’d planned to, which gave Pryn a chance to practice her ‘strategy,’ and find that, more or less, it worked — there was some festival in a neighborhood of the city Pryn had never been in before, but where the younger one (with the comic accent — thought he was getting easier for her to follow each day, if not hour, she spent in the city) said he had some friends. That night people crowded the streets. Bonfires blazed over a small square; and the smell of roasted pig and barbecued goat drifted down every alley.

Pryn and the two youths walked through the throng, passing under high-held torches. And though they never did find the younger man’s friends, twice they were taken into people’s houses and given lots of beer and, once, some roasted pork. The elder now and again met several people he knew; once Pryn thought she glimpsed the man she’d cut. But that was better than the first day, when she’d seen him every twenty minutes, now turning this corner, now standing in that doorway — which finally was what was wrong with strategy, since it didn’t cover that. Still later, over the heads of the crowds, Pryn caught sight of the mummers’ wagon, with its raised stage and torches flaming along its upper edge. Yes, there was Vatry, turning her cartwheels and doing her backflips and, indeed, looking better than she had in her audition, because, for one thing, she now wore lots of small bells around her waist and trailed green and yellow scarves from her wrist and neck. The elder youth stared with a loose-lipped fixity that, as his hand tightened on Pryn’s shoulder, actually made her uncomfortable — till she decided the way to break what she assumed a wholly theatrical spell was to take them up and speak to Vatry, rendering her a real and odd looking little woman with impossible hair and freckles. At Pryn’s urging the three of them tried to work closer to the stage. Pryn was sure Vatry had smiled at her — indeed, the little dancer was always moving stage front and winking here or waving there. Certainly, Pryn maintained, someone like Vatry would have many friends all over Kolhari, all over Nevèrÿon! But the elder youth just laughed and said that was the way with mummers. And he had known his share. Besides, the crowd was too thick to get any nearer. And so was Pryn, quipped the younger one in his Kolhari twang. (He had dull dark hair and was extremely thin.) Pryn smiled and wished he hadn’t said it. Finally, though, because of the crowd, the three gave up. Eventually they found a place by one of the fires, beside which some orange-robed women stood together singing a mournful song in a strange language.

The three young people felt mildly embarrassed — but happy. They all thought the song was moving, even though they didn’t know what it was about. And Pryn, for herself, decided night in the city was not so bad after all. But why, she wondered, were they leaving tomorrow at sunrise?

The story would certainly tell how the elder of the two youths had, till six months ago, worked on a farm half a day’s ride from town. He was twenty-three and, despite his bearded, pock-marked face and huge, apparently uncleanable farmer’s hands, seemed to Pryn the sweetest, gentlest, funniest person she had ever met.

With his comic drawl, nineteen and still no beard yet — and a slight cast in one eye that sometimes reminded Pryn of Noyeed — the scrawny youngster, dirty and dank-haired, had not so long back been a pipe-fitter’s apprentice in a shop off Bronzesmith Row.

Both youths had left their jobs under ignominious circumstances, of which they seemed, nevertheless, quite proud. Both would sit for hours, in company or just with Pryn, alternating anecdotes that dramatized, in the case of the younger, his complete detestation of, and, in the case of the elder his complete incompetence at, anything resembling work. Yet Pryn soon saw, when their canvas-covered cart came to any stream or stretch of rough road, however much he claimed to detest it, the scrawny, wall-eyed one labored with an energetic earnestness that should have shamed his bigger, bearded, pit-cheeked companion. In the evening around their campfire, the elder’s arm about her shoulder, Pryn also learned that the younger had the most repugnant ideas about women and sex she’d encountered since the late Nynx. She leaned against the elder, while across the fire the younger outlined interminable schemes involving women and money, women and money, the one taking the place of the other in his discourse more rapidly even than they might on the Bridge of Lost Desire. At first Pryn tried to argue with him. Later she only half listened, or tried not to listen at all. Also, now, the elder did not talk as much, nor tell his funny, self-deprecating tales, but sat, staring into the flames, while, in the orange flicker, Pryn looked back and forth between the fire and his ruined, romantic face, trying to imagine what he saw — trying also to shut out the other’s droning on about wealth and parts of women’s bodies; for he seemed truly incapable, Pryn finally decided, of talking of women at any one time as other than breasts or eyes or legs or genitals or knees or buttocks or arms or hair. (He had this thing about women’s knees, which he was always explaining.) Occasionally she mustered an amused tolerance for him and his more grotesque strategies. (For every one he had to acquire quick money or avoid urban danger, he had six to start conversations with strange women — each of which he seemed unshakably convinced was as fascinating to Pryn as to himself.) More often, however, she felt simply a quiet disgust. She was thankful that he was only nineteen and had not yet found opportunity to try out any of his more bizarre plans — at least not on the scale he envisioned. She wondered how the elder, whose shoulder she leaned so sleepily against, could tolerate, much less cherish, this distressing youth’s friendship. When she mentioned it during some rare minute when they were alone, he shrugged it off, saying that his friend was really a good sort and worked hard.

The last, certainly, was true.

On the third evening out, when the mutton and dried fruit prepared back in Kolhari for the first two days was gone, Pryn waited to see how the cooking duties would be divided. At her great-aunt’s, she’d done a good deal of it, and after they made camp she was ready to volunteer. But the wall-eyed one had already taken out crocks and pots and had apparently, earlier in the afternoon, put salted cod to soak in a jar at the back of the wagon, and was now cutting turnips and already quite efficiently into the preparation of the food they had brought for later meals. So Pryn horsed about with the bearded elder, who didn’t seem inclined to help at all — until the wall-eyed one made his third (twangy, nearly incomprehensible, but definitely dirty) joke about women too lazy to cook. Pryn said angrily: ‘Why do you say that! I was going to help…’ The elder took her part — while the younger went on cooking and grinning his disfocused grin. The next evening, however, Pryn insisted on helping, and after a few (disfocused) protests that her help wasn’t needed, the wall-eyed one accepted her aid. This became their pattern of food preparation for all the meals they fixed outdoors. Pryn and the younger chopped and soaked and sautéed and fried, Pryn muttering nivu under her breath like an unknown word from a poem overhead in another language. The elder would sit, not watching — once he fixed something on the cart. Sometimes he would get wood. More often he just lounged or ambled about. No one complained. But one reason Pryn kept at it was because when the wall-eyed one cooked was the only time he wasn’t talking about women’s bodies, and Pryn had decided that if they were to be any sort of friends, she’d best do something with him then.

The story would doubtless tell how Pryn finally made love to the elder youth, several times over several days. ‘I love you, and I know that you love me,’ she told him — several times through that glorious season. He liked hearing it, too: it made him smile. (The younger one, when he overheard her once or twice, seemed to like it just as much and smiled just as broadly.) ‘That is all I know. That is all I need to know,’ she would finish; but when she had, she always felt caught up in some play of preposterous contradictions, as if it were a line from a mummer’s skit she could never read aloud with the proper inflection. That was probably why, she decided later, she said it as many times as she did. Still, with sunlight on his bearded, broken face, the elder would smile at her, or nuzzle her neck, or walk with her among the trees, his arm about her shoulder.

He never, however, said much of anything back.

As we have noted, it wasn’t the first time Pryn had had sex, for in mountain towns of the sort she’d grown up in such intercourse was frequently accomplished at an even earlier age than in the cities. But it was not yet her tenth time, either; and it was certainly her first time with someone only two weeks away from a total stranger — and without the support of a society ready with rituals, traditions, and the coercive wisdom necessary to turn the passing pleasure of adolescence straightway into a family at any sign of natal consequence. The story would also tell how, nights later, when they’d decided to stay over at an inn, the wall-eyed one brought back to Pryn’s room two of the Empress’s soldiers from a garrison housed in an old barracks outside the town and argued with her for a solid hour, not loudly but with the same earnest perseverance she’d seen him use to free a cart wheel in a stream when it had caught on a submerged root. Finally she agreed to make love to them.

Synopsized, the hour’s whispered conclave had run:

The elder youth had spent too much money on beer in the inn’s tavern that evening, so that now, even with Pryn’s remaining coins, they did not have enough to pay for their rooms; nor was this civilized Kolhari, where they might be turned out with a scolding on account of their youth or made to stay and work off the debt. It was a backwater province where everyone was related to everyone else and where the locals had proved themselves hostile to strangers in a dozen ways already.

Anything might happen here.

The money the soldiers would give her was the only way the three of them would have enough to pay for their lodging next morning.

It wasn’t — quite.

But the innkeeper finally agreed — angrily — to forfeit the small difference and sent them off. Clearly he did not wish to see them return.

Certainly the story would tell how, some three hours after they were on the road, Pryn managed to get into an angry and perfectly ridiculous argument with the elder — indeed, the argument was so idiotic that, after she’d stalked off in a rage, leaving both of them for good, she was sure, she could not even reconstruct what its points had been. (It wasn’t because of the soldiers. He didn’t even know about them, having been sleeping too soundly because of the beer. And the wall-eyed one had promised…!) She only knew she was glad to leave him, glad to leave the both of them! Then, after tramping for two more hours along the sun-dappled, dusty road, Pryn began to cry.

She was thinking about being pregnant.

Indeed, Pryn now admitted to herself, she had been thinking about almost nothing else for several days, though before last night it had seemed a hazy daydream involving going back to Kolhari, or even Ellamon, with the elder friend, while the younger, in the dream, remained in the south — or vanished!

But now, somehow, there was nothing pleasant left to it. The pock-marked youth from the farm was lazy and the wall-eyed one from the city impossible; and she knew they would not cease their smuggling or dissolve their friendship over some child by her.

The story would tell how, over the next three days, practically every six hours Pryn broke out crying — suddenly and surprisingly, whether she was by herself walking in the woods or passing a yard with people in it.

Once a man said she could ride downriver with him in his boat if she would help him with the fishing. She got into the shallow skiff and sat, looking at the woven reed lining. His hair thinning in front and tied with a thong behind one ear, the fisherman pulled on the wide wooden oars. Pryn looked about the boat’s floor at the coils and tangles of line, the bone hooks stuck along a piece of branch, the woven nets heaped around; suddenly she felt a surge of uselessness and a second surge of exhaustion, which surges battled, burning, in her eyes — tears, for the tenth or the hundredth time, spilled her puffy cheeks.

She sat in the boat, crying, while the fisherman, with his big-knuckled, pitch-stained hands, rowed and watched her, saying nothing.

Finally Pryn coughed, pulled her own hands back into her lap, and blinked. ‘My name is Pryn,’ she got out, ‘and I can…I’m going to have a baby!’

Despite his thinning hair, the fisherman looked no more than twenty-four. He pulled and leaned, pulled and leaned, pulled and leaned. With three bronze claws fastened to the rag wrapped around his waist and between his very hairy legs, the wide strap over his right shoulder went taut, then slack, taut, then slack, over the sunken well in his narrow, near-bald chest, ‘My name is Tratsin,’ he said after a while. I’m going to have one, too.’

Pryn looked up quite startled.

Tratsin pulled on the oars. ‘My wife,’ he added, by way of explanation, ‘I mean. She’s having it. For me.’ Taut; slack. ‘It’s been all girls so far — this will be my third. Well, four, actually. The first was a boy, but she lost him. That was even before she would live with me. In these parts they say it’s a curse to have girls. But you know who takes in the aged parents? The girls, that’s who. My parents lived with my sisters. My wife wouldn’t live with me until after her father passed — though my boy died only a month later. I think that’s because he needed his own father — me. And when I get too old to work, I’ll live with one or the other of my girls, I’ll bet you. And I’ll be a father they’ll want to have live with them. That’s important. Come home with me, girl. Come home. My wife’s name is Bragan. She’s a good girl. About your age, I’d bet. But skinnier. At least she used to be. Certainly no more than two or three years older. Come home, now…’

Somewhere in all this Pryn started crying again.

Over the stades they rowed downstream, three times Tratsin stopped to fish. In the course of it, Pryn learned he was not really a fisherman, but a benchmaker. He’d taken his two days off for the month to travel north, had rented one of the reed-lined boats, and was fishing downstream over the second day toward home. A man has to get away from the women sometimes, he said — though he seemed happy enough for Pryn’s company. He said: His wife, Bragan, was seven months along toward another child. He hoped it might be a boy, but a girl would be all right. Girls could work, too. His younger brother, till only weeks ago, had lived with them — Malot, now he’d been a strange boy. He’d worked at the quarry, but he’d run off to the city. At any rate, that’s what everyone assumed — it was all he’d talked of for the six months before he and Bragan’s household money had disappeared one day. It had wounded Tratsin deeply, his brother’s running away. Wounded him to the heart. They lived, Tratsin and his family, in the town of…but Pryn missed the name; she’d begun to cry again. Probably Malot would come to a bad end, Tratsin went on. (Pryn sniffled and tried to listen.) His wife’s cousin, Gutryd? She lived with them, too. And spoiled the girls and was a silly girl herself. He didn’t understand Gutryd. He didn’t think she was happy.

His boss was good, though.

His working conditions were good.

His wife was a good girl: she let him go fishing on his two days a month off.

He was a happy man, Tratsin reasoned.

With six freshwater perch, one of which Pryn caught herself when Tratsin let her throw in the line, and seven or eight brook trout — they threw back lots of little palmsized fish he said wouldn’t taste good at all — they came that evening to a bank loud with crickets. They pulled up at a muddy beach where half a dozen boats with woven linings had been tied to branches so that their prows were lifted clear of the water. The sky was deep blue, halfway into night. The air was dry and cool. Now and again the bushes and shacks about them flickered into full daylight with hazy lightning.

‘Come with me, now.’ Tratsin’s bare feet sank in black mud, breaking cracks around in it. ‘Come. You’ll like Bragan. She’s a good girl. And she’ll help you. You’ll see.’ Thunder trundled somewhere in the cool summer sky. Again lightning flickered. ‘Come. This way.’

Pryn did like Bragan, who pushed aside the hanging in the shack doorway and, after Tratsin whispered to her briefly, declared: ‘You’re having a baby!’ She clapped her hands to the sides of her own seven-and-a-half-month belly under the sleeveless brown shift while the hanging fell against her shoulder. ‘Come in, now! Come in! Your first weeks? You must be dead tired. My two girls — oh, I carried both of them easily enough. But this one?’ Firelight flickered in her frizzy hair. ‘Well, I was sick as a poisoned dog for the whole first month and a half! That’s why I think it’s going to be a boy — Ah! I want it to be a boy so badly! I had a boy first, but he died, poor little thing. Boys carry harder and higher, they say. Or is it girls? I never can remember! But come in! Come in!’

The shack’s single room was comically crowded, and Pryn was too tired to remember who was who, other than that the heavy one with the dead black hair and beard — Kurvan — was Tratsin’s best friend.

‘You working yet?’ were Tratsin’s first words to him.

‘I wasn’t working yesterday morning when you left.’ Leaning against the wall, Kurvan folded his arms over his fleshy chest. ‘What makes you think I’d be working when you got back?’

‘You haven’t been working for almost three weeks.’ Bragan stepped around a baby basket on the floor. ‘You should have a job!’

‘Until he came home you were happy enough to let me lounge and gossip by your fireplace!’ Kurvan laughed. ‘Now you both start in on me!’

‘You should have a job,’ Tratsin said. ‘I could get you a job. Since Malot’s gone, they need another man at the stone pit. I could speak to — ’ But that actually seemed to get black-bearded Kurvan annoyed.

So Bragan cried: ‘Let’s get this young woman some soup!’ She put her arm around Pryn, heading her around the end of a bench toward the corner fireplace.

‘Get her some beer,’ Kurvan said. ‘Beer’s good for pregnant women. We have fine beer here. It comes from the breweries down on the coast,’ and he turned to help himself from a dripping barrel set back between two plank beds.

‘Soup!’ protested Bragan, then turned to Pryn. ‘Unless you’d rather not — with this one, I couldn’t eat a thing, night or day, for the first six weeks. Though my sister said that’s only supposed to last for three. Ahh! and in the morning! Everything I tried to get down — ?’ She made a spewing gesture. ‘What a mess!’

A baby began to cry, The other woman in the room — the sister? Gutryd? — went to see about it, while Bragan ladled soup, thick as stew, first from one pot, then from another, into one red clay bowl and the next.

The stuff in the first cauldron was brown and meaty; the stuff in the second, which Bragan spilled on top of it so that the two made ribbons across one another in the bowl, was creamy and dotted with yellow vegetables. Filled with the two of them, the red clay heated Pryn’s palm to burning as she raised the bowl to her mouth — to be struck by a memory out of childhood:

The gray-veiled woman traveler from the Ellamon market, who wore the wide silver rings, had told her aunt, ‘And their double soups? The glory of southern cookery, I say — though you must know the people to find any. They won’t serve it at the inns.’ And her aunt had said, ‘Chemistry, medicine, alchemy, and the other branches of charlatanry that sap the purse of our Suzerain today at the wheedling of clever men, they’re all forms of the woman’s science of cuisine — especially that part of it concerned with midwifery. Belham told me that. Do you know of Belham, the barbarian inventor from the south? He stayed here in fabled Ellamon — oh, it was many, many years back — ’

Kurvan handed Pryn a piece of bread, burned in spots on the crust but with (as she took the third bite, she realized) dough still raw in it. She ate hungrily, nevertheless, thinking that it was the kind of loaf people had brought back to her cousin in outrage (or begrudging sympathy) during the first months of his bakery. With it she shoveled soup into her mouth.

The soup was wonderful!

‘That woman is hungry!’ Holding his own bowl, Kurvan squatted down in a clear spot on the floor mat. ‘She’ll have a fat and healthy youngster, with good bones and a worker’s back, if she eats that way.’

‘You should have a job, Kurvan,’ Gutryd said sitting on the bench next to Tratsin, who was almost finished with his bowl. ‘Three weeks without work? Bragan’s right. It isn’t good for you or your family.’ She reached down for the loaf leaning against the baby’s basket. ‘You want to be able to marry and have a fine family of healthy children now, like Tratsin and Bragan, don’t you?’

To wake with straw tickling her cheek and ankle and the smell of damp thatch and babies and last night’s cooking, the pallet below the straw hard under one shoulder and water dripping somewhere from the torrents that had poured loud enough to wake her just before sunrise (Pryn did not open her eyes), was to realize that, before she’d started these adventurings, she’d spent most of her life in such a shack. It was to realize that whenever these adventurings were through, no matter how far away they deposited her, unless life for her went very differently from what she or anyone else might expect, she was likely to spend most of her life to come in such a shack — however better insulated she might make it.

A clay top moved on a clay jar. A woman whispered. A man’s bare feet crunched the floor mats. He said, answering a question Pryn hadn’t heard: ‘Well, it was time to get up. Who sleeps when there’s work to do?’

Pryn rolled over, stretched her feet onto the floor, rubbing her hands’ heels on her eyes.

The woman spoke now. ‘I just thought they might like to sleep a little more, that’s all. Especially the girl you brought in last night, since she’s…you know.’

Pryn let her hands stay over her eyes.

‘Sleep instead of work?’ The man laughed. ‘Now, who would want to do that — except, well, let’s see…a few I could name!’ His next laugh was louder. ‘Besides, the girl’s not sick. She’s only having a baby! You get her to help you with the chores. See, she’s awake at least. Not like this other lazy good-for-nothing.’

Fingering the corners of her eyes, Pryn looked up.

Squatting naked, with her knees wide and her great belly between them, Bragan was doing something at the fire.

Tratsin was bending over her with his hand on her shoulder, the sides of his narrow buttocks hollow, the ligaments standing out at the backs of his hairy knees. ‘Now don’t be afraid to ask her to help you. She’s a good girl — like you!’

At which point a baby cried.

Like a man reminded of a pressing duty, Tratsin lunged for his loin-rag, winding it about his hips, tucking it in on itself here and there, getting it between his legs, while making for the door. Bragan got even busier poking up the coals under the pot and blowing them to brightness.

The cry ran out of breath; in the pause, Pryn pictured the tiny chest filling itself mightily. She looked around, thinking to go to the baby herself. But Gutryd came in through the back door-hanging. The brush of hemlock twigs on the bottom to keep out insects swung in over the mat. Gutryd’s dress was bunched down around her waist, and her hair was wet. She seized the child’s basket up from the corner, to shake it back and forth. The next cry was notably quieter, with, somewhere in it, a movement toward relief.

At the fire Bragan said: ‘Gutryd, get her! Please!’

‘There, there!’ Gutryd said, though whether it was to child or adults, Pryn was not sure. ‘I have her! I have her!’

Pryn stood up on the rush mats and started forward to volunteer her help to Bragan — as the toddler toddled before her. Pryn stepped wide; her foot landed on the corner of a blanket, largely wrapped around large Kurvan. Broad, cracked feet stuck from the blanket’s end, confirming what last night Pryn had only suspected: she’d been given the pallet Kurvan usually slept on when he stayed over.

Then, for some reason known only to those under three, the crawling girl sat back on her haunches, twisted up her face, and let a wail that carried within its knife-tones the anguish of a god before a clumsy, foolish, ill-made, skilless, cracked, and useless world. The pain at that cry’s core seemed something that might be looked away from, more likely suppressed, but that could never be assuaged.

‘Oh, little one,’ Kurvan said from under his blanket, ‘do shut up!’ He rolled away, tugging more blanket over his black, bushy head.

As the blanket corner pulled from under her heel, Pryn took another ungainly step to avoid the baby’s hand and Kurvan’s feet. At which point Kurvan rolled back, thrust his naked arms out, seized the wailing child, and pulled her to him with all the compassion of a man who’d spent a lifetime in such world-sorrow as she now howled of. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, honey!’ He cuddled and rocked with her on the floor, as if he were personally responsible for the profound and universal disorder by which she had just been shattered. ‘I’m sorry!’

Pryn started toward Bragan, who had suddenly become very involved with the fire, food, and crockery in much the same way she’d increased her involvement in the ashes when the baby had first cried.

So Pryn veered toward the door, out which Tratsin was leaving.

She caught the hide hanging as it swung across the doorway. Hemlock leaves, from the branch tied for weight and bugs along its bottom, brushed the door stone.

She stepped outside.

Coppery sun burned on wet leaves.

Other shacks stood near; still others stood across the muddy path down the slope.

Through the break in the brush the river looked substantially narrower at dawn than it had in evening’s half-dark.

More shacks sat on the far bank, a few stone huts among them — in short, the farther shore was much like this one. Tratsin stood a little off on some rocks around which the grass had worn away. He scratched at his thinning scalp so that thong and bound hair shook behind his ear.

Down the slope, someone guffawed in the next cottage. A woman yelled. The other person laughed.

Hemlock leaves shushed.

Naked and disheveled, but without the child, Kurvan stepped out.

Branches dipped slowly across the road, then turned up all their whispering leaves to show gray. The breeze reached a tree near the door.

Droplets hit Pryn’s cheek.

And Kurvan said something like, ‘Aargchh…!’ rubbing the splatter from his face and shoulders while Tratsin laughed and pointed. Pryn grinned — as Kurvan’s stubby genitals contracted within the black hair below the crease under his broad belly. ‘That’s right!’ he announced. ‘Everyone else gets a few drops, but Kurvan gets the soaking!’

‘What you’d better get,’ said Tratsin, ‘is a job!’ He laughed again.

‘Oh, yes — ’ Suddenly Kurvan’s annoyance and brushing turned into a great, open laugh so that his big chest shook. ‘I get the soaking? Well, sometimes I think my job is to give you and your family something to laugh at! Oh, it’s not such a bad vocation. The hours are long. The pay is mostly in kind — ’ Here he leaned toward Pryn in a mocking aside — ‘though he lets me hit him up for an iron coin or two.’ He dropped his hand to his knee to scratch. ‘But I suppose the work has its higher profits — ’

Which made Tratsin laugh again. ‘You mean all the food we let you eat?’ He turned, shaking his head and smiling. ‘What you don’t understand, Kurvan, is the value of work itself. To do work — of any sort, of any kind, under whatever conditions — is important in itself. A body whole, healthy, and able to toil is the most wonderful and carefully crafted of gifts the nameless gods can give. Work is what makes you human. To do, to make, to change something with your hands — ’

‘Certainly any slave must feel better for his slaving, eh?’

‘Well,’ said Tratsin, ‘that’s what you always say to me when we have this argument. And I will say what I always say back: we have no slaves in Enoch, and because one can work — here — as a free man rather than a slave, we have — here — the final sanding and varnishing on an already beautifully constructed thing: labor itself.’

Coming up the muddy road, two men carried a wooden bench, one lugging each end. It was very like the bench Pryn had once sat on against the building her first day in the city, or the bench at Madame Keyne’s reproduced in stone at the back of the hut on the rise in her garden, or the one in Tratsin’s hut. Sunlight through the trees splattered and spilled over and off its seat and carved back.

Running up behind the bench carriers, the knees of his bowed legs knocking forward a leather apron, the leather bib sagging from the strap about his neck, came a third man…

Man?

Boy?

Pryn blinked.

He was substantially shorter than Pryn, though his face held thirty-five or forty years above that sparse gray beard. His forehead was wider and broader than either Kurvan’s or Tratsin’s. He grabbed up the bench in the middle to help carry. His shoulder was as high as the others’ waists.

Tratsin said, oddly soft, to Pryn: ‘That’s some of my work there…’

The dwarf — for it was a dwarf in the leather apron — turned to look over his shoulder up the slope. ‘Hey, Tratsin, come down here and help us carry this back to the shop! That rain last night? They won’t be along the river road to pick this up till evening, now. I don’t want it sitting in that leaky riverside storehouse all day. If it rains again, the roof will cave in on it in that place!’

‘Hey, Froc! I haven’t had my breakfast yet!’ Tratsin glanced again at Pryn. ‘And the little man there is my boss — a good boss too.’

‘Aw, what’s breakfast to a worker like you? Let your woman bring you an extra apple with dinner. Come on, now! Don’t be like that! We need you!’

Tratsin chuckled, shaking his head again. ‘Tell Bragan I had to go in early, will you? A worker in Frocsin’s shop sometimes plays the woodpecker — and sometimes the ox. Hey, Bragan…!’

Inside the hut, the baby cried again.

‘You tell her I’m gone!’ Tratsin started down the slope. (Pryn wondered whether the instruction were to Kurvan or to her.) At the bottom he slogged onto the muddy road and grabbed up the bench edge. The dwarf stepped back. ‘There you go — there…! Watch out for it, now!’ They moved on up the road.

Standing beside Kurvan, Pryn watched them.

‘You know’ Kurvan said after a moment, ‘the cut-down one there isn’t Tratsin’s boss.’

Pryn glanced at him, frowning.

‘Froc is just his foreman. Now Frocsin would probably make a better boss than the one he’s got. But he isn’t the boss, much as Trat would like to think so.’

Pryn looked at Kurvan, questioning.

Leaves hissed above them. More drops. But Kurvan did not rub or complain.

‘The boss’s name is Marg, and he has a belly bigger than mine and less hair than Tratsin’s father, and he lives two villages away. He rides by to check out the workshop on Tuesdays and Fridays, and says along with everyone else what a little jewel he has in Froc — Marg says it and his workers say it too. But Frocsin’s no more the boss of that shop than I am!’

Pryn wondered at the bushy bearded man’s insistence. ‘Tratsin seems like a happy man,’ she offered idly. ‘And he’s a good man, too.’

‘A good man, yes. They don’t make better. But happy?’ Kurvan grunted. ‘Well, he’s happy now. But he wasn’t happy a year ago. And I don’t know how happy he’ll be in another year.’ Suddenly he snorted and rubbed his thumb knuckle hard under his nose, leaving his moustache a black cloud with no shape at all. ‘Myself, I’m a simple man — simpler than Tratsin, I think. I don’t like work. I like play — and I only do the one when there’s no way else to pay for the other. But I can remember what happened yesterday, and I can figure a little of what’s coming tomorrow…And that’s never the way to be happy, is it?’

‘What do you think is going to come?’ Pryn asked. ‘For Tratsin? What was it like for him before — last year, I mean?’

Kurvan shrugged. ‘Most of the men hereabouts aren’t benchmakers, you know.’ He nodded off toward the hills. ‘They work in the quarries up at Low Pass. Like Malot used to do.’

Another shout came from the cottage across the road; a man stepped out the door, his head bowed between grizzled shoulders. Two workhammers hung from his leather girdle. Seconds later a boy hurried out after him, overtook him, turned back to wave him on — and became a girl! ‘Come on, Father. Run,’ she called. ‘We’re already late!’

‘You run,’ the man called back. ‘I’m walking!’

‘Now Wujy, there, is a man like me! Me, off to work before I’d had my breakfast?’ Kurvan laughed. ‘But Wujy there’s been sick. Everyone else has been off to the quarry before sun-up — probably in that rain, too. Wujy goes in with his daughter two or three hours late every day. He’s got permission, because of his age and infirmity. The girl picks up chips and gets paid one iron coin for every three days of work she puts in. And they let Wujy come in when he can and work as long or as short as he wants — Tratsin says it’s humane and just. Myself, I call it murder.’

Pryn frowned.

‘You get paid by the weight of rock you dig out. If a man is too sick to dig any more than a green boy can be expected to come up with on his first week at the job when he’s still learning how to swing his hammer, then it’s a green boy’s wage he gets. Even if he’s an old man sick to death.’

‘In the city — ’ Pryn remembered Madame Keyne’s concern for the injured digger — ‘I met someone who was supposed to be a — ’ She began to say ‘a Liberator.’ But then, the Liberator was only interested in slaves…

‘You get paid by the load unless you’re part of the scaffolding crew. Then, as Tratsin used to joke when he was a young scaffolder, you don’t get paid at all! The scaffolders put up the wooden walkways and platforms against the rock faces for high work. Oh, they get a steady wage — but it’s lower than the pickers’. And we haven’t gone a year without one or another eighteen- or nineteen-year-old wood roper falling to his death. Till a year ago, Tratsin swung up and down the rock face putting up scaffolds. I was his friend, and I knew he hated the work, was frightened of it, and was scared to make any moves in life because of it.’ Kurvan humphed. ‘Ask him, and he’ll say, “It taught me the basics of woodworking — without which I couldn’t do the job I do now.”’ He rubbed his bushy chin. ‘Tratsin has the fine job he has now because a fat old tile-layer had a cousin who was a master woodworker who knew some wealthy families who were building new homes and who had taken a liking for a kind of bench they usually build further north. Marg said: “Why not build them here?” and he had enough initiative to get his cousin and half a dozen carpenters — most of them, I might add, like Tratsin, out-of-work scaffolders — and an old grain storehouse and an industrious dwarf, and put them all together just on the other side of the bridge. And behold, a business!’ Kurvan shook his head again. ‘And a happy Tratsin, for whom the only value in life is labor: profitable, satisfying, challenging — till all the orders are filled. And they will be filled, you know, inside a year. Tratsin, with another couple of squalling babies and maybe even a second wife, will go back to the quarry. But already his scaffolding skills have been refined into the delicate touch of a master benchmaker. But he will no longer be able to live on scaffolders’ wages. He’ll have to work as a common digger. His skills will turn rotten in his hands and arms. Oh, he’ll stop talking of labor like some god among gods discoursing on his craft and begin to curse it like a man among men — though he’ll wonder and ponder and fret and try to pretend he’s a god still. For that’s Tratsin. It’s also half the workers in this village. Me, I wonder what Malot’s doing in the city.’

‘Malot — ?’

‘Tratsin’s crazy brother, who ran off from the quarry three weeks ago — always talking about the city — and who, when I’m thinking like this, doesn’t seem so crazy.’ He laughed again. ‘But you were in Kolhari. And all it seems to have given you was a belly that’ll be poking out even beyond mine in a few months, hey?’ He smiled saying it; she knew he meant no harm with it. She felt her cheeks heat anyway. Pryn clamped her teeth and hoped tears wouldn’t come.

‘Well, you’re probably better off than Malot. You’re here; we like you. That’s something. Malot’s there — and he hasn’t Tratsin’s brains or skills. Would you rather be a crudestone worker out of a job in the country or the city?’

Pryn blinked to find her memory flooded with images of the un-hired laborers milling about the New Market.

‘But I won’t be surprised in a year when Tratsin and Bragan are off to the city too. That’s the biggest — and the saddest — possibility, I think. Well, I’m off to do a little hunting — not animals. But I know half a dozen wild fruit trees that the local children haven’t stripped yet. If I net together a vine-fiber sack and bring it back filled with pears, Bragan might make us a fine cobbler with supper this evening, and let that stand me for work — though the kids around here would call it play.’ (Pryn thought: You don’t have to twist vines to net a fruit sack. She’d tied together many such sacks in the mountains…) Work makes a human being…?’ This time when Kurvan shook his head it was as though he’d suddenly discovered some notion caught all over his mind, like woodlice on rough fabric. ‘Play makes a human being! Work just means you don’t have to feel guilty about playing, which I don’t feel much anyway. Mainly work means I don’t have to suffer the taunts of my friends who wonder why I’m playing as hard as I do! What’s it like in Kolhari?’

‘Oh, it’s…’ Pryn hunched her shoulders. ‘It’s different. Confusing. You can’t understand much of anything there. I didn’t, anyway. Maybe because I don’t know what it used to be like. And I couldn’t figure out what it was going to become.’

‘You’re like me,’ Kurvan grinned. ‘You’re not out to be happy either. And you’re serious about your play. That’s what it’s like to be committed to playing. Only the ones who love labor would dare try for happiness. And luckily you’ll be having a little one to take your mind off such difficulties. Well…’ He put his hands on his hips and looked around. ‘I’m into the woods to walk — and think about what’s difficult. That’s a kind of play, too.’ He wandered away, heavy-footed, over the grass.

Which left Pryn to go in and tell Bragan the men had gone.

She turned and pushed back the hanging —

At which point the shack floor rose into the air almost to her chin.

‘Oh…!’ which was Bragan. ‘Catch it!’

Dust puffed from the matting, getting in Pryn’s mouth. She stepped back against the wall.

‘Catch it!’ Bragan cried. ‘Catch it…! Catch it!’

Pryn caught the mat’s edge. Reed-ends rasped her palms. The mat settled heavily against her.

Wielding a stick lashed at its end with straw, Gutryd swept violently at the stones and dried mud beneath.

‘There — no, pull it back further…’ which Pryn did. ‘That’s it — now help me lift the other side…’ which began the morning’s furious housework.

Pryn was surprised it took so much energy to keep the little shack and the possessions of its three permanent adults and two children this side of clean and clutter. Amidst the brushing and scrubbing, the pushing and lugging, Pryn told Bragan that Tratsin and Kurvan were off.

‘Together?’ Bragan demanded, as if it were possible Tratsin had missed work to go with his jobless friend.

‘Tratsin went to work.’ Pryn held a wet rag in one hand and some bowls under her other arm. ‘And Kurvan just…went.’

‘Oh. Well.’ Bragan dried her wet elbow against the gray cloth she’d finally wrapped around herself. ‘That’s better than Kurvan’s hanging about all day and talking. Oh, he’s a good man. But let him, and he’ll explain everything in the world to you and how it relates to everything else. Then, when you tell him we’re just poor working people here, he’ll say it’s because we won’t consider such things that we stay poor.’ She laughed. ‘Now have you ever known anyone like that?’

Pryn thought of Gorgik, of Madame Keyne, and wondered how to speak of them; but, ducking in through the back door again, Gutryd said, ‘Here, Pryn. You can take that jar down to the river and bring some water for me, if you like…’

Pryn made several trips to get water in a large clay jar. At the bank she watched five dark women, filling jars as large and handling them more easily. She carried hers, its neck dribbling, back between the shacks.

‘You know, I always used to wish Tratsin could spend a day home with me.’ In the yard, Bragan wrung out a hank of cloth, then shook fold from wet fold to lay it over the basket’s rim. ‘Only, when he does, it’s always because he’s sick, so it’s just like having an extra baby in the house. Finally, I realized it wasn’t Tratsin I wanted so much as the excitement of going off to the mountains to work, of hiking upriver to fish — something I thought he could bring me just by staying here! But the moment I realized it, I realized — and it came practically with my next breath — he couldn’t bring that! If I wanted such excitement, I would have to go out and seek it. And three days later, as I stand here — ’ She shook out more unbleached fabric — ‘I knew I was pregnant with this one!’

And inside, minutes later: ‘Ah, you see — ’ turning from Pryn, who stood now on the bench to rummage in the purple shadows of an upper shelf under the thatched roof — ‘always I must do the scolding.’ Bragan snatched up the toddler from where she was about to crawl onto the hearth. ‘Tratsin, when he comes home, is either all hugs and cuddles, or he just ignores them; so I’m the bad parent.’ She came back, joggling her daughter, to stand by Pryn’s knee, while afterimages of the sun with a branch through it glimmered before Pryn in shelved shadow. It smelled like figs. Dusty crocks. Bound straw dolls with clay heads and hands. Below: ‘He says he doesn’t want to punish them because he wants them to love him. Which is all very fine, but children must be punished sometimes. So I’m left the great monster to plague their dreams as well as the dream itself they cling to, while he remains just human. Oh, I envy him the ways by which he shirks power and stays only a man. Can you find it?’

‘I don’t think it’s here.’

Then outside again, while Pryn handed Gutryd up the dripping garbage basket which Gutryd dumped over into the smelly cart: ‘So, you’re pregnant. You and Bragan, a pair!’ Standing on the log that ran along the cart’s side, Gutryd pounded the basket’s bottom. Perspiration glittered on her temple. (The cart’s driver had very large, heavily veined ears sticking out of hair as bushy as Pryn’s.) ‘You’re quite different, of course, you two — I mean the way you act. But somehow I don’t think that makes much difference, now, does it?’ Which Pryn hadn’t thought at all. The notion was surprising, if not worrying. (Six years older, she would simply have thought it wrong.) ‘I almost thought I was, three months ago! Pregnant, I mean. Well! When the full moon drove my blood out at last, I was a very happy woman! I don’t think Malot was so crazy to go off to the city. After all, he was in trouble here — though you mustn’t tell anyone I told you. Still, it surprised us all he actually went. One day he was here, and then — like magic — gone! I thought it was magic myself at first, but Kurvan said, no, he’d just run off to Kolhari. And Tratsin agreed. Well, no one will know him there — and often he wasn’t a pleasant boy to know here. But you’ve been there. I’d like to go. Although I wouldn’t like to have a baby there, from what I’ve heard.’

And inside again, Bragan: ‘You haven’t seen the abandoned huts up near the crossroads yet, have you?’ It was a considered observation. Another mat collapsed between her hands, to be folded, bulkily, again, then again. ‘You can stay in one of them tonight — Kurvan or Tratsin will take you when they get back. But you see how crowded we are here. They’re not as nice as this, of course, but then there’ll only be one of you — at least for a few months more. You can fix it up as nicely as you like.’

‘Oh…!’ It struck Pryn with the surprise of the inevitable. ‘Yes…’ Feelings of rejection contended with feelings of gratitude.

‘But you see how difficult it would be if you did stay with us. For too long. Oh, I don’t mean you haven’t been helpful.’ Bragan smiled apologetically. But she also looked relieved, as if she’d been contemplating saying this a while. ‘You understand.’

‘Oh,’ Pryn said again, ‘I do.’

‘It would be best, I think. And it’s not very far away. Believe me, we’d help you just as much as you’ve helped us. Enoch is not a very big town. You don’t get too far away from anyone here. Old, yes. But not big.’

For the first time Pryn thought of it as an incipient city, a little one with a garbage service and a name and a riverside dock.

‘I’ll be honest. They’re not so large.’ Bragan put the mat down — almost on the napping baby; she cried out, moved it aside, laughed, put her hand to her neck, blinked, and went on: ‘But you’ll have a roof over you. That’s better than nothing. You’ll be near the quarry road. And that’s not bad.’

Which is when Gutryd stepped inside and said: ‘Really, it’s not. From time to time, I’ve thought of moving there myself. Don’t worry.’ (Pryn wondered just how long they’d been discussing her coming move.) ‘It all seems a little strange, I know. But you’re used to the way we do almost everything here. And soon we’ll be used to you.’

Which made Pryn blink and smile.

‘Ah!’ as a memory assailed Bragan. Tratsin didn’t take his dinner — I haven’t even fixed it! Now that’s so like him.’ She sighed. ‘And me.’ She turned to the hearth, where Gutryd already sat on a wooden stump and, with two triple-tined wooden forks, was picking through a bit of wool, teasing it out, by small tugs, to fine fluff, now pausing to pinch loose a twig or leaf-bit, which she tossed viciously into the fireplace before falling back to her carding.

‘Are you going to do that whole basketful?’ Bragan asked. ‘Well, I suppose it has to be got through sometime. But once it’s done, someone should spin it — because if it just sits here for three days, with these children, you know the shape it’ll be in — ’

Against the wool basket lay a flat stone with two irregular holes…

‘Oh, I’ll do it.’ Pryn did not like spinning. ‘I mean I can, if you don’t have anything else for me to do…’ Still, she spun well. And Bragan didn’t have any other job for her right then. So Pryn sat at the other side of the hearth from Gutryd, took up a lapful of carded fleece and the spinning stone, and twisted at one corner of the wool till she had a long enough thread to wrap through the spindle’s holes (not a very well-balanced spindle, either) and began to knock its rough side with her palm, letting it twirl the fiber into a fine yarn, which she fed out evenly from her fist between bunched fingers.

‘You do that very skillfully’ Bragan laughed. ‘You’re one of those women who does it so well you’d think you invented it yourself!’ She turned to a wicker onion bin on top of which sat last night’s loaf, still wrapped in a bread cloth, and began to busy herself with food. ‘Now me, when I spin, it’s all thumbs and knots…’

Thinking of invention, Pryn said: ‘The soup…’

‘Mmm?’ Gutryd looked up, picking.

Pryn glanced at the two empty pots, which had been raised to higher hooks above the fireplace’s ash-banked embers. ‘The soup we had, last night. I was just thinking — ’

‘Ah!’ Bragan exclaimed, tugging the outer leaves down from something that looked like a leek. ‘If we had some more, I’d put a ladle of that in a bowl and send you off to Tratsin with it. He doesn’t mind cold soup. But Kurvan eats enough for three. When he stays here, leftovers don’t.’

‘What about the soup?’ Gutryd looked back at her flying picks. ‘Do let her talk, Bragan. Get you alone and you’re bad as Kurvan.’

‘In my home, in the mountains, in Ellamon, where my great-aunt lives — ’ Pryn brushed her hand at the rock’s edge, its spin finally fast enough to steady its joggling — ‘it’s very much like here. Oh, we knot the edging on our floor mats differently. And we don’t scratch those funny designs into the base of our pots — the food we eat is different. Still, lots in Enoch is very much like home. Except the soup. The double soup, in the two pots, the way you make it.’

‘You don’t have soup in the mountains?’ Gutryd picked.

‘We don’t have soup like that, made in two pots and served in a single bowl. But you see, back in my town, oh, years ago, my aunt met a traveling woman once — she brought her some autumn apples and talked with her. My aunt always liked to talk to strangers — at least she used to. And the woman told us about your soup.’

‘My soup?’ Bragan asked. ‘I learned to make it from my uncle. And Tratsin’s cousin, Mordri, makes it much better than I do — but she won’t tell me exactly what she puts in it. You’d think it was some kind of magic!’

‘But that’s just it!’ Pryn spun the rock. ‘It is magic, or at least it almost is, to me. You see, there I was, out in the Ellamon market, sitting in the shade of the dyer’s stall, maybe ten years old, with a little bit of sunlight through a hole in the thatch falling right into my eyes, while my aunt and the traveling woman sat on the benches out under the awnings, leaning together over large plates with a few bits of cut-up fruit. The woman traveled with a little boy, I remember, about my age, who may have been a slave — but I don’t think so, because he wore lots of copper jewelry around his thighs and wrists and squatted out in the sun making patterns in the dust with a pouch full of colored stones. And she said, “If you ever go to the south, I mean into the head of the barbarian lands beyond Kolhari, you must try their double soups — no, you can’t get it at the inns. They think it’s food only for peasants, not tourists. But in the people’s homes, sometimes it’s served. The glory of southern cookery…Vegetables cooked in one pot, and meat boiled almost to pieces in the other and thickened with goats’ cream — ”’

‘That’s what it is!’ Bragan turned suddenly. ‘Of course — that must be what Mordri uses! And the rest of us, mixing a handful of ground wheat to thicken it — but then you can get goat’s cream in Mordri’s village! No one herds goats around here. If I sent Kurvan after some of the wild ones roaming in the hills — ’

‘Oh, Bragan,’ Gutryd said, ‘Let her finish! She said something about magic!’

‘It’s as though on that odd afternoon, while I listened to the traveling woman in her rings and veils and watched her little boy play with his stones, something was fixed in my childhood by her description, that grew and changed and worked on me, worked secretly in the dark places below memory; her description of your soups here began working and working on me there, pulling me and guiding me, first away from my home, then through Kolhari, then on into the south, till I met Tratsin, and at last, in Tratsin’s boat, here to — Enoch? Yes, to this old, old city.’ Pryn knocked the stone, watching it spin as she talked. ‘As if by magic I was led here…led here by the silent strength of that traveling woman’s words — she sold pictures of the stars that she would make for you on pieces of wet clay, and for an extra iron coin, she would tell you what they had to say of you on the day of your birth — that is, if you knew it. If you didn’t, she would guess at what day that must have been from the way you looked and the things you said, according to what the stars might suggest. Something worked and worked from her words to bring me here and finally to taste the soup, your soup, the soup here that she spoke of — ’

‘Ah!’ Something in Pryn’s eloquence (or perhaps in Pryn’s spinning) seemed to catch Bragan up; she turned from turnips and green peppers.

With her own surprise at her recognition of Bragan’s, Pryn thought: There’s something very wrong with all that.

Trying hard to explain what she might have written (and what is, in a world where many such tales have been read, easy to call ‘her thoughts’), Pryn frowned. ‘But there’s something wrong…’

Gutryd put her picks down and looked confused.

Bragan put down her knife and rag, looking both surprised and interested.

‘All that happened — ’ Pryn stopped the spinning rock between thumb and forefinger; she lowered thread, spindle, and fluff to her lap — ‘is that a traveling woman in gray veils spoke within my hearing — spoke of something as many men and women have spoken of various things to me or near me — and years later, now, last night, something happened — among the many things that have happened to me…I ate your soup; which made me remember what she said, years ago — made it mean something.’

‘Made what the woman was saying into magic…?’ With her confused look, Gutryd suddenly struck Pryn as a woman who’d find anything to do with magic fascinating. ‘Or made the soup magic…?’

‘Made it into a tale,’ Bragan said. ‘Is that what you mean? Made it into a tale you could tell…the tale you just told?’

‘That’s right Pryn said, surprised the understanding came from Bragan when she’d expected it from Gutryd. ‘Made it all into a story. I mean — ’ Here Pryn laughed and lifted her fleece till the rock rose from her lap; she set it spinning again — ‘sometimes I think there must be nothing to the world except stories and magic!’ (She’d never thought anything like that before in her life!) ‘But I guess stories are more common — while magic is rare, I’m afraid. But until I questioned it, I’d just assumed it was the other way around. Which isn’t to say anything bad of either one…’

‘Well.’ Gutryd sounded disappointed. ‘I know something that certainly isn’t a story. In two months you — ’ she nodded toward her cousin — ‘and in seven or eight months you — ’ she looked at Pryn — ‘will deliver yourselves of children. That’s what’s real. But perhaps it’s magic, too — oh, this is all like Kurvan’s talk — very clever, but I can’t really understand it!’

‘Oh, I don’t know…’ Bragan looked quite happy — indeed, the most familiar thing in the whole room to Pryn suddenly seemed Bragan’s expression; because it was the one Pryn used to descry, among all her great-aunt’s wrinkles, years ago, at the advent of an interesting stranger. Well, let me finish this up.’ Bragan nodded toward Pryn. ‘You’d best get back to your spinning — and after you take this to Tratsin at the workshop, you can come back and have something to eat. You’ll eat supper with us here tonight, too, before you go…? Oh, it will be fun to have you living in Enoch. Yes, it is like Kurvan’s talk; and that’s why I like Kurvan! Now the trouble with Tratsin…’ and went on (turning all she’d said of her husband before into a tale, Pryn thought), while Gutryd carded and Pryn spun. Listening to all these familiar complaints, Pryn thought: So many things are thought but never spoken, such as this thought itself — which is exactly when the ache in the hand to hold a stylus comes. She let thread twist through her fingers, feeling the tug in her shoulder.

Gutryd’s forks flew through the wool in her lap as she gazed at her work intently, just as if she saw some amazing magic in each marvelous, fluffing strand — at least, thought Pryn, that’s the tale I’d tell of it.

‘…what rock?’ Pryn took the dinner bowl. ‘What bridge did you say?’

But Bragan was too preoccupied to notice Pryn’s surprise.’…not along the river but up the stream,’ she repeated her instructions. ‘Like I said, you’ll find him sitting under Belham’s Bridge, right by Venn’s Rock.’ Both children were crying. ‘You take the ravine short-cut and you can’t miss him,’ Bragan went on, joggling one baby and looking for the other. ‘He always waits for his food there — to be by himself a while, he says. Oh, it’s just a — well, you go on now. I’ve got to take the girls to play with some friends — where they should have been an hour ago! Venn’s Rock, Belham’s Bridge. I’ll be home in a bit — and Gutryd should be home even sooner…’ So Pryn could only take the clay bowl with the leather cover strapped down over it out into the sunny yard and set off between the shacks. (The bowl reminded her of a mummer’s drum.) And found the stream.

And started up it.

Shacks fell away, while trees and stone rose about her either side of the water to make the current into the bright flooring of a sun-splashed gorge. She walked over a slanted stone, matted with moss that became black mush at the water. Twisting here and untwisting there, a brown vine branched above her, beckoning her to climb the six meters to the leafy rim. She would have, too, if she’d been wandering alone in the mountains and not carrying dinner to a working man.

Perhaps she might put Tratsin’s bowl down for a few minutes and explore that cut there where the gray rock turned out and, losing all vegetation, went russet. Nearing, she saw, it was as if some great block, the height of the ravine wall and meters wide, had been quarried away, revealing the earth’s red marble muscle. As Pryn walked before the sheared face that sloped so steeply, she saw several grooves running the height of it, straight enough and clean enough that they must have been tool made. She looked behind for some obvious stone by the stream to set the bowl near…

Then she saw the wood chips.

One, the length of her little finger, vaulted in the rush between two foam-lapped granite chunks, flushed against a third, then spun downstream — as another, and seconds later another, followed.

Pryn frowned; and decided, really, the red marble face was too steep to climb. She’d better go on with her journey. Belham’s Bridge…? Venn’s…?

White wooden shavings, about three or five breaths apart, floated past her over shallow water floored with red and gray pebbles. She climbed across a log and went round a high slab, gray once more and grooveless.

The stream changed direction, and the ravine wedged out from four or five meters wide to six or seven times that. Rough with last night’s rain, the water rushed back and forth across the ravine’s floor, winding through the spread of round, gray stones.

Ahead, where the canyon grew wider still, she could see a man sitting on a large rock — yes, it was Tratsin.

Holding the leather-covered bowl in both hands, she walked on the sand between the stones. Pryn hesitated at a wide pool, then waded through. Water chilled her to the ankles.

She could see that Tratsin held a piece of wood in his lap. With a large knife — some bench-carving tool? — he was shaving at it. Near her, another chip floated past, turning over the water.

Above Tratsin, the stone bridge ran from one ravine lip to the other. Under it, behind him, irregular to the left, with a more or less flat surface to the right, a great rock rose like a squat mountain to form the bridge’s central support. The shallow waters, here and there interrupted by boulders like the one Tratsin sat on, ran around both sides of the immense support.

The whole seemed like a more modest Bridge of Lost Desire, though at the stone rail it seemed to carry no traffic at all — at least for the present. Still, it was big enough to erase her picture of the little city and resketch a more complex one. To sport such a public work, Enoch had to be more than the few dozen shacks clustered near the river — which, as they were all she’d seen till now, were all she’d assumed there were.

As Pryn walked forward, Tratsin raised his knife and waved. ‘You been to the huts yet, where you’ll be staying tonight?’

‘What?’ Pryn stepped over crumbly ground, where a plant the size and color of rockweed brushed her wet ankle. ‘Oh…no.’ Only its leaves were not the same star shape as rockweed leaves at all, but thin and in tiny bunches. ‘Not yet.’ She looked at Tratsin, who was smiling. Apparently her coming relocation had been discussed at least as far back as the morning, before she’d awakened, if not whispered about on the previous night after she’d gone to sleep. ‘Bragan said you or Kurvan would take me there this evening.’ She came up to the ribbon of water that lay between his boulder and the sand.

‘Oh.’ The blade caught under white wood. A chip curled on the metal, fell to hit his toe, then dropped to the water and drifted away. ‘It’s not that far from here. Well, I guess when I get home…’ He laid the wood beside him on the stone and put the darkly mottled blade with its leather-bound handle next to it. ‘Come. Show me what Bragan’s sent me for dinner. You sit here.’ He patted the stone on the other side of the blade, then leaned his sunken chest forward to rest one forearm on his hairy knee. He reached out with his other hand.

As Pryn held out the bowl, she looked up. The dark stone bridge cut away clouds and blue sky — and the bowl was taken from her hand.

She looked back at Tratsin, who was pulling aside the cover strap. ‘Wonder what I got.’

Pryn waded over the pebbly stream bed and climbed to the rock beside him. The great knife — not very different from the broad sword the Liberator had swung in the cellars of the Spur, but turned into a tool by the wood beside it — lay between them.

Heels against the stone, Pryn put her head back as far as she could, straining her neck to feel her hair crushed against her back, till she could see the bridge, with clouds drifting a-slant it.

‘You want some of this?’

Still looking up, Pryn shook her head. ‘That’s Belham’s bridge?’

‘That’s what we call it.’

She dropped her head — and rubbed her neck; it had developed a sudden crick, which, in moments, drifted away like a wood chip. On the water, she saw the bottom of her own feet and beside them the bottom of Tratsin’s; way below was the bridge’s dark and dripping underside; and below that wavered the blue sky with its drifting clouds. ‘Is this Venn’s Rock we’re sitting on?’

‘No…’

Pryn looked up.

Tratsin was eating a handful of something oily with onions in it that dribbled down his wrist. ‘Back there, behind us.’ He gestured with his chin over his shoulder, and went back to chewing. ‘That’s Venn’s Rock. The one holding up the bridge.’

Pryn twisted around, getting up on one knee to see. In the bridge’s shadow, it was gray and irregular to one side; then, just behind her, it slanted back, revealing a red marble face. Running up it were those regular grooves. ‘Did this rock come from back down the stream?’

‘It’s supposed to.’

Pryn looked up the six-meter block, almost as wide and nearly as thick. ‘She must have had some job getting it from there to here!’

‘“She” who?’ Tratsin asked.

‘Venn,’ Pryn said, surprised. She turned back.

Tratsin sucked first one finger, then another, watching her and looking almost as puzzled as she remembered him from the boat when all she’d been able to do was cry.

‘I mean, if it’s Venn’s Rock, I just thought Venn must have had something to do with putting it here. Just like it’s Belham’s Bridge — ’ She looked up again. ‘Didn’t Belham build it?’

Tratsin looked at her oddly, and ran another finger in his mouth. ‘I don’t know. Was there someone named Belham? And Venn?’

‘But you’re from Enoch’ Pryn said, ‘aren’t you?’

‘I was born here,’ Tratsin said. ‘So was my father. His father, too.’

‘Don’t you know anything about this bridge? I mean who built it and all? Who got the rock up from downstream?’

‘I know what we call them,’ Tratsin said. ‘But I never thought they might be people — real people, I mean. And a woman, too, you said?’ He glanced back at the great stone support. ‘No, I don’t think any woman put that there.’ He went digging in the dish on his lap with greasy fingers. ‘It doesn’t seem too likely, no…’

‘What do you know about the bridge, then…?’ Pryn looked around and up. Somewhere, out of her aunt’s stories overlaid with Madame Keyne’s revelations, a tale had formed, almost without her knowing it, of some bygone Enoch residents who had called in the great Belham to construct a bridge across their ravine; and, after making his plans and drawings, the barbarian engineer and inventor had at last declared it would be impossible unless there was some support in the middle. But how to get one…? Then the brilliant young woman from the islands had said, shyly, ‘Wait. Here…’ Somehow, through astonishingly ingenious contrivance, the rock had been hewn loose and moved. And a grateful but frustrated Belham had gone on to build his bridge…

‘I know lots of things about it,’ Tratsin said. ‘Just not who built it. How come you think you do?’

‘Um…’ Pryn felt embarrassed. Whatever hearsay knowledge she had, she felt terribly uneasy about squandering it here. ‘Well, I…I suppose I don’t really know, either. What do you know about it? You tell me.’

Tratsin looked back at his bowl, empty now, and licked oil from his forearm. ‘I know when I was a boy they called in the soldiers, and they came marching across the bridge up there, to flush out the quarry workers who’d holed up in the hills — and they killed the leaders and carried their bodies, roped to long poles, back down across it, and we hung out watching from the bushes. Everybody thought they were going to put collars back on the rest of us like there used to be in my father’s father’s time. They hanged Kurvan’s uncle and three of the others on ropes from the wall, so that their corpses dangled right down over where we’re sitting. After a couple of days, you couldn’t come down here to play any more, because it stunk too bad. And once — ’ he glanced up, then looked at Pryn — ‘about six years ago, when the women came over the bridge who worked in the — ’

A breeze moved in Tratsin’s thinning hair as he looked down again over the bowl in his lap. Trying to see his expression, which had changed again, Pryn remembered the Ini’s account of her escape from the western slavers.

Then Pryn happened to glance at the water.

Someone was leaning over the rail above them. Broad head, narrow shoulders, the leather bib of an apron — she recognized the dwarf with whom Tratsin had gone off that morning to work. Tratsin was watching him in the water, too. In the rippling surface the little foreman grinned at them, waiting to see how long it would take them to notice they were observed.

In the silence, Pryn grew uncomfortable, wondering if she ought to look up or not; or whether she ought to go on talking; or —

‘Hey, Tratsin…!’ Finally the dwarf reached out his hand and waved. ‘Is that the mountain girl you said was going to move into the huts across the road from the shop?’

Tratsin looked up now — with an affable enough expression. ‘Hey, Froc! Yes, this is Pryn. Bragan sent her down here with my food.’

Pryn squinted up at the rail.

Grinning, the dwarf bobbed his oversized, bald, and bearded head. ‘Pleased to meet you, there. Come on, Tratsin. Let’s get on back to work, now? Marg doesn’t pay you to sit in the shade and flirt with pretty pregnant strangers!’ He waved again and was gone.

Pryn looked back down, with heat in her cheeks and knees, wondering if everyone in Enoch knew about her and her baby.

On the other side of the blade, Tratsin was running his thumb along the bowl’s edge for a last bit of food.

‘You were talking about things…’ Pryn tried to ignore the discomfort the dwarf’s farewell had called up — ‘things that happened up on the bridge…?

Tratsin sucked his thumb. ‘Nobody wants to remember things like that,’ he said, shortly. ‘Except the soldiers, maybe. The soldiers won, after all.’ He looked at her with a rueful smile that may or may not have held sympathy for her discomfort. ‘But for the rest of us, such things are best forgotten.’ He put the bowl on the leather cover he’d dropped on the rock. ‘You can’t work your best with memories like that plaguing you. Why go over them? I wouldn’t tell such stories to my own girls — nor to a son, either, if I had one. Why should I tell such things to you, eh?’

‘Oh, but I want to know about the — ’

‘Now in the quarries — ’ Tratsin looked off toward the ravine wall, where Pryn saw dirt steps, shored with logs, leading to the rim — ‘from time to time the men will grumble about what went on in Enoch three or ten or thirty years ago — more often just make a joke of it. I don’t like it when they joke. That’s to mix the worst part of forgetting and remembering both. I come down here at lunch so I don’t have to listen to such grumblings — or jokes — from the other men. They make a lot of them in these times, what with so many people going north to the city. But I just want to do my work, you see, and enjoy it as much as I can. Now Kurvan — ’ Tratsin chuckled — ‘he says what’s wrong with Enoch is that we forget too much. He says it’s a town with no memory at all, and that’s where all our problems come from.’ Tratsin dropped his head to the side. ‘Though perhaps we have the names, we certainly don’t remember anything about who built the bridge here!’

Pryn started to say something about memory and writing. But in the same way she knew the alleys and hedges and the people in her great-aunt’s neighborhood in Ellamon, she knew Tratsin and Bragan and Kurvan and Gutryd were illiterate; and she knew from her aunt’s example how much hostility one could create by claiming to know too much among them.

‘You know, I used to work in the quarries,’ Tratsin said, suddenly. ‘On the scaffolding crew. But you wouldn’t know anything about that — ’

‘They put up the scaffolds and wooden walkways for high work…’ Pryn quoted Kurvan from the morning.

Tratsin nodded, a little surprised. ‘Well, yes. They do. Anyway, in the last year I was working there, they were getting ready to send three crews up on the new cliffs for basalt blocks. We were working down from a ledge that hung over a drop that was, oh, a good three times the height of that wall there.’ He pointed to the ravine’s lip where the bridge joined it. ‘The boys were roping wood together and pegging it into the stone face. The digging crews weren’t up yet. Just us scaffolders. There was a big overhang over the ledge where I’d gone up to take some short-planks so we would have them at work level later on. I was standing on a bushy little outcrop with all day down behind me, when I heard a crack and a rumble. Someone shouted, “Tratsin!” I looked up, and saw big brown rocks tearing away from the mother face and sliding toward me — ’

‘What did you do?’ Pryn asked.

‘There wasn’t anywhere to go left or right. And those falling rocks were pretty large…’ Tratsin paused meaningfully. (Pryn took a breath.) ‘So I jumped — right off the ledge! I remember being in the air and the sun in my right eye as I fell, and wondering what it was going to be like to be dead in a second, and whether I’d feel my bones snap on the rocks below. And then I hit — I felt it all right! But somehow I hit rolling; and balled up real tight. I swear I bounced down that slope! I heard a lot of thumps, but I don’t know if they were me hitting earth or the rocks hitting around me. The next thing I knew I was lying against some tree with my back stinging like I’d been attacked by hornets; and my left thigh, too — I’d scraped both of them all up on small stones and twigs. The guys were running up. Everyone was trying to help me stand, and pointing up the cliff to the ledge I’d jumped from — it was very high, and the rocks piled all over it now looked very heavy. I didn’t break one bone! Other than the scrapes, somehow I was all right!’ Tratsin chuckled. ‘For the rest of the day, everybody kept on talking about “Tratsin’s leap,” and how it was certainly some kind of magic that skinny Tratsin was still alive after falling so far — what I’d looked like in the air, and which one of them had seen it happen, and which one hadn’t, and which ones had seen scaffolders fall to their deaths before over less than half that distance. That kind of thing.’ Tratsin looked at his greasy fingers. ‘For three days they talked about it, pointing up at the ledge when anyone passed it. It was “Tratsin’s leap,” “Tratsin’s leap,” “Tratsin’s leap…” For almost three days. I thought they were going to name the ledge “Tratsin’s leap,” only then they cleared the rocks off it — ’ Tratsin pushed himself forward to splash down into the shallow water before the boulder. He plunged his hands in the stream and brought them up covered with mud and sand. With one hand, then the other, he scoured his fingers and forearms. ‘It was just the upper ledge of the basalt face again. “Wasn’t that the one that skinny Tratsin almost got hurt on?” Then nobody even bothered to mention that any more.’ He rinsed his hands again. Mud made its own clouds around his wrists. Mud floated out about his ankles; and Pryn could no longer see the reflected bridge and sky. ‘For a while, though, I thought they were going to name it after me — the ledge, I mean. It would have been nice if they had — for the girls, when they got older. Of course they weren’t born when it happened. But if they knew that their father had jumped from a ledge — and lived. I don’t even have a scar left from it — but then, skinny as I am, I’ve always healed well. Still, I thought it would’ve been a nice thing.’ Tratsin shook water from his hands. Bubbles floated back between his ankles where the hair was wet flat against his calves. ‘But then I guess whoever put up the bridge here might have liked to be remembered too. By more than their names, I mean.’ He squinted up at the stone structure. ‘I mean if those really are names…Well, I want to get back to work.’ He paused a moment, then shook his head. ‘But it doesn’t matter. It was years ago. Why should anybody call it “Tratsin’s leap” today?’ Then he grinned. ‘But they almost did! Hey, take the bowl there back to Bragan for me…?’

‘Oh, I will!’

‘That’s a good girl.’ He reached up, took the knife, the wood, and started away.

Watching him, Pryn thought of her great-aunt, who might like to be remembered as something other than an old, odd woman claiming credit for impossible things. Pryn picked up the bowl, put the leather cover inside it, and slid down until her feet splashed into the hazed water.

Starting up the stairs to the ravine rim, Tratsin waved.

Pryn waved back and walked to the water’s edge. She squatted where the current had cut a finger-deep shelf from the bank, took the leather out, and put it beside her. Digging up a handful of sand, she swished out the bowl with it, swirling the bowl itself in the water. So many things to remember, she thought. So many things to forget. Certainly Enoch, like Ellamon, would have its fables; and, staying here, she would eventually learn them. But fables were the tales a town or a city could bear to recall. Fables taught simple and clear lessons everyone could agree on. Fables were tales that could be put to immediate use, either to instruct or entertain a child, to remind adults of past glories or recurring dangers. But there were always the incidents on the bridge that no one could bear to bring up, or Trat-sin’s leap that, for whatever reason, people just…well, forgot, or women’s talk before the fire, while they carded, cooked, or spun, that no one thought important enough to remember —

Pryn stopped and kneeled back on the sand. She’d been struck with a vision, clear as sunlight on the water before her. Somewhere in Enoch, she knew, watching over some bunch of digging, screeching, rolling children, Bragan would be saying to another Enoch mother: ‘…this northern girl my Tratsin found upriver, who’s staying with us for a day or so — she’s going to have a baby, poor thing. But do you know what she said about my soup — I mean the double soup we make here? She said that as far away as fabled Ellamon, it’s all that anybody can talk of! Travelers speak of it in the markets! She said she’s actually heard them talking — oh, they must be raving in markets all over Nevèrÿon. Imagine…!’ Pryn rinsed the bowl again. Odd, she thought, how words must leave and return, bearing some trace of their journey, for that sort of memory to fix itself. Well, then, she’d done her part to see that something — at least a soup — was remembered.

Certainly it was good soup!

She put the bowl down and began to rinse the leather.

Supper that evening verged on the inedible. Bragan made a paste of yesterday’s fish (a dubious notion to Pryn from the beginning; she’d caught trout at home in her strolls along mountain brooks) with various vegetables and breads and oils. Bragan sat in the corner by the fire with her bowl on her lap. Tratsin sat on the bench along the wall, eating his share with his fingers. He’d brought the carving knife home to work on a bench leg; it leaned against the wall. Gutryd and Kurvan sat on the floor, and Pryn sat on the pallet, eating. The babies took the odd finger full of fishy mush, now from Kurvan, now from their mother. Pear juice bubbled through cracks in the crust of the cobbler cooking at the fire’s edge; now and again Bragan would reach over and turn another side of the bowl to the heat. It smelled quite wonderful. When it was served, though, and Pryn tasted it, she was thrown sharply back to the barbarian eating establishment where she’d worked that night in Kolhari. The spice that had ruined the barbarians’ vegetable stew was all through the fruit. Pryn frowned, said nothing, and tried to eat it anyway.

‘Is Bragan’s cobbler good as her soup?’ Kurvan wanted to know, handing Pryn up a refilled mug that Tratsin, by the beer keg, had just handed him. ‘Maybe her soup will get the same kind of reputation as the fine beers brewed in the south, ’ey?’

Pryn smiled; and drank beer; and nodded; and ate the unpleasant food. The beer, at any rate, she’d begun to enjoy; it made her feel strange and relaxed. There was apparently some joke in the family about Gutryd’s drinking enough to get herself sick at last summer’s Labor Festival. The first three times Kurvan or Bragan made laughing reference to it, Gutryd made jokes in return. But the next time Kurvan spoke of it, Gutryd’s good humor broke. ‘I don’t want some lazy, out-of-work indigent like you saying things like that about me! It was years ago, now. Can’t you forget anything? Stop it, I say!’ She turned sharply. ‘Oh, Tratsin, tell him to stop!’

‘You don’t have to tease her like that…’ Tratsin said seriously to his unserious and grinning friend. Perhaps it was the tone, but the infant, on a pile of cloth in the corner, woke up at that moment long enough to give one cry in the firelight of the over-warm cabin, sigh, and go back to sleep, while the toddler, with mushy hands and dirty face, sat back on her heels in the middle of the floor and giggled. But Bragan pushed to her feet. ‘Now you’ve got to take Pryn over there soon,’ she said, looking about, ‘before there’s no light left at all. Here, I’ll put up some food for you, so you’ll have something for the morning.’

‘Oh,’ Pryn said. ‘Yes. I guess we’d better go.’ She stood up, torn between the discomfort of rejection and the relief at leaving the hot, fishy shack. ‘I’m sure I’ll be all right…’ she added, though no one had suggested otherwise.

Kurvan stood ponderously and picked up Tratsin’s carving knife from against the wall. ‘Yes, we’d best be off.’ He swung it back and forth. ‘You never know what gods, ghosts, and demons we might have to fight, making our way through the ancient and troubled streets of Enoch — ’

‘Not in the house, Kurvan!’ A bowl in each hand, Bragan looked back and forth between them. With a glance at Pryn, she chose: ‘Because you won’t have to bring this one back so soon,’ and began to fill it from the pot. ‘You’ve been awfully helpful while you were here. That was very nice of you. I mean in your condition — for the first month or so, sometimes, you just don’t feel up to doing a thing!’

Five minutes later, after goodbyes and gratitude, Pryn pushed out the hide hanging where Tratsin and Kurvan had already gone.

Kurvan swung the blade and lunged over the grass, heavy and naked in the evening.

Tratsin said soberly: ‘That’s not what it’s for, Kurvan.’

Kurvan walked back up the slope, testing the blade with his thumb. ‘So little happens around here, I bet you wish it was a sword, and you could go off with it after brigands and slavers and horrid monsters!’

Tratsin took it. ‘I need it to work. It’s not for games. Come on.’ He started down the slope toward the road.

Kurvan gave Pryn a great grin. ‘No sense of play at all, I tell you!’ He took the food bowl from her and, holding it against his hip, followed Tratsin down. ‘Must all the good people in the world be like that?’

Under twilight, they walked the same road Tratsin had gone off to work on that morning. Tratsin and Kurvan fell into conversation about people Pryn didn’t know, with problems whose backgrounds she didn’t understand. Sometimes strolling beside one of them or the other, sometimes lingering a step or two behind, she realized that, leading neither to the river nor along the ravine, this road was revising her picture of Enoch again simply by passing through the little city itself. Now here was a row of five shacks almost touching. There were two stone houses with three horses tethered under a thatched awning between. Children crossed ahead, two together giggling, one alone dawdling. A man pushed back his door-hanging to shout, ‘Stop your play and come in now, I say!’

Off among other huts a child answered, ‘I said I’ll be there in a minute!’ while a cart filled with gravel rolled up the street. The drivers made some joke with Kurvan that set all four men laughing. A dog trotted behind the clattering wheels.

They passed a partially paved area, with a tarpaulin over one section and a well in its corner, which, if Enoch were anything like Ellamon at all, would be the market area on specified days of the week. A few buildings here even had walls around them. Through more houses Pryn could see another length of wall that may once have enclosed a section of the town itself, or at least acted as a partial fortification.

Pale lightning flickered over the evening. Pryn looked up, remembering rain. When she looked down again, she said, surprised, ‘We’re on the bridge…!

‘Belhams Bridge it is,’ said Kurvan, ‘propped on old Venns Rock.’

Pryn looked over the stone rail at the ravine and its wide, shallow stream. No, it wasn’t a large town at all. ‘Kurvan, do you know anything about who built the bridge here?’

‘You mean Belham and Venn?’ Kurvan said.

‘Now you see,’ said Tratsin, ‘I’ve lived here all my life and I wasn’t even sure they were people’s names.’

‘I’m not sure they’re names either,’ Kurvan said. ‘At least not of the bridge builders. I used to think they must be a pair of ancient quarry owners who pooled their money to have it put up — they’d be the only people from here rich enough to do it.’

‘Names,’ Tratsin said. ‘Really, that they were names never even occurred to me.’

‘They certainly don’t sound like names from around Enoch. But then,’ Kurvan went on, ‘they may just be old barbarian words for animals or stone. “Belham”—now that sounds like it could be a barbarian word. But up here, nobody has really spoken the old language since before the coming of the Child Empress, whose reign — ’ Kurvan ducked his head and touched the back of his fist to his forehead — ‘is just and generous. So we’ll probably never know.’

As they reached the bridge’s center, Pryn stepped to the low wall and leaned over, trying to see the great support beneath. (Perhaps Belham had built the entire bridge first; then, after a few years, when it became apparent that it would soon crack from its own weight, clever Venn came and found a way to drag the supporting monolith from downstream to prop the bridge up…) What she saw was her own dark head against the darkening sky, reflected on the shallows flowing around the boulders.

‘That’s where I work,’ Tratsin said.

Pryn stood up and looked.

He was pointing with his carving knife to a low, barracks-like building off beyond the bridge.

‘That’s where Tratsin works,’ Kurvan repeated, ‘and that — ’ he pointed to the other side of the road — ‘is where you’ll be living.’

‘Where?’ Pryn asked. With the bridge, certainly Enoch proper had ended. ‘Where do you mean?’ Beyond were trees, a crossroads, the workshop; and it was at the trees that Kurvan was pointing.

As they walked on over the bridge’s leaf-scattered flags, Pryn was sure that to live on this side of Enoch, even if the quarry-men passed here in the morning, even if farms were scattered about, or a workshop sat here, or the odd abandoned hut — this was no longer to be within the town, this was no longer to be a part of the village, this was no longer to share in whatever characterized even the tiniest city.

Rejection had been a personal thing that Pryn had dealt with from a sense of practical strategy. But the feeling now as they came off the bridge was a sense of cutting loose, of disorienting freedom. She rubbed her stomach to knead away the discomfort that, having faded almost to nothing sometime before, returned. Yes, it was anger. But it was a kind of disfocused anger about which she could do nothing. That made her want to cry.

As they passed beyond the workshop, Pryn peered among the dark trees, still trying to see what Kurvan indicated.

Tratsin seemed to be having the same trouble, himself, finding these alleged ‘abandoned huts,’ because he laughed now. ‘They were here a couple of days ago, I know! Don’t tell me someone came along and tore them down…’

‘Now up there’s the north-south road,’ Kurvan said, as if orienting himself. ‘That direction would take you back north as far at least as Kolhari. Down there would take you into the barbarian lands. Along there, let me see…that’s the long way around to the stone works. But usually we go the short route back along the stream.’

Pryn suddenly wondered if a joke were being played — if, really, she weren’t summarily being dismissed from the town…

‘There they are!’ Tratsin said. He strode over the road, hacked his knife high into a thin tree at the road’s edge, and, leaving it stuck there, stepped in among the bushes. ‘See them, in there? I just didn’t remember them being so far in off the edge.’

‘An indication,’ declared Kurvan, ‘of how far the road’s edge has shifted since you and I used to come here as boys!’

Pryn followed Tratsin in among the saplings. Transferring the food bowl to his other hip, Kurvan followed Pryn.

Saplings were widely spaced about the brush. Crickets chittered loudly. Without apparent source for the lightning, the sky flickered again.

‘Oh, yes,’ Kurvan said behind her, ‘in two or three days, what with going for water in the ravine and walking in to market, you’ll wear a natural path here. There was one about a year ago, I remember. But I guess it grew up.’

Tratsin stopped in front of something that looked like a haystack, or perhaps a pile of leaves. It was about Pryn’s height; and there was a dark hole low down in it. A few meters away was another such structure, and a few meters after that was half a one — part had collapsed in on itself. A little way from the one before which Tratsin stood were fireplace stones. Summer grasses spired between them.

Pryn looked at the dark hole, her head a little to the side.

She looked for a long time.

Once Kurvan stepped beside her, squatted, and put the food bowl down in the grass by the door. He looked up at Pryn, his smile giving way to curiosity. Then he stood and stepped back.

Tratsin said: ‘Sometimes kids come out here to play. But once they know someone’s living here, they’ll keep off mostly — except the one or two who come to stand across the road and gawk.’

‘Gawking doesn’t hurt anyone,’ Kurvan added. ‘That’ll only be at first. And there won’t be much of it.’

‘Well,’ Pryn took a breath. ‘At least…it will keep the rain off.’ She stooped and, not wanting to, squat-walked through the opening. Inside, the darkness around and above her was prickled with spots of evening light. (So much for the rain, Pryn thought.) She turned awkwardly, scraping her arm on twigs — a branch had fallen loose from the slanted wall. She grasped it and thrust it outside, with rattling leaves.

She heard Kurvan laugh.

The ground under her was soft and, save the odd leaf, clean. She’d been expecting mustiness or mushiness; but the enclosure was dry and, astonishingly, odorless. And that, she went on thinking, is what makes it so unlike a home! Could one live here, have a baby here at the edge of the town? Running the words through her mind, she felt her stomach knot and her emotion swell, blurring the spots of light about her on the riddled walls. To keep back tears, she scrambled out the door again and stood. ‘You know, I could put some mud over it. And I have a way to mix the mud with oil, so that if I take a hollow reed and blow lots of bubbles into it — ’

Kurvan stood a few steps away.

‘Where’s Tratsin?’ Pryn asked.

‘Oh,’ Kurvan said. ‘He’s gone…’ He rubbed the side of his beard with the ham of his thumb. ‘To get some things for you. He’ll be back. Later.’ He took a step toward her and smiled. ‘Well, I suppose it isn’t much. But it’s something.’ (Tratsin must have left running, Pryn thought. She couldn’t have been inside half a minute!) ‘I know it’s not so wonderful, but once you clear the grass from around it — here, I’ll help!’ He grasped some brush, tugged it loose, hurled it away, tugged loose some more.

‘No,’ Pryn said. ‘No, you don’t have to…’

Kurvan stopped and looked at her, a little strangely.

Pryn looked back at the hut, which was too small to stand up in or stretch out in. To insulate it by her great aunt’s method…? Would it be worth it? She blinked and thought: No, I’m not going to cry. No, not this time.

‘Um…’ Kurvan said, a little closer to her. ‘It won’t be so bad. The quarry workers go by here every morning and evening. There was a woman who worked here for three years, once. She had a couple of children, too. And she was a lot older than you. She didn’t do badly. There’re always one or three men of an evening, with no wives of their own and an extra iron coin or so. You be nice to them, smile, let them stay for an hour — you’ll get enough money to eat, maybe. Maybe even more. I thought — ’ Standing naked in the grass, heavy Kurvan looked at the ground and brushed his hands together, freeing them of the dirt from pulling up the brush — ‘Well, you might start by letting me stay for a while. And being nice to me. For just a bit.’ He looked up again, questioning. ‘Of course I don’t have a coin for you. That’s because I’m not working. So you might not want to. With me. I’d understand.’ He reached up and rubbed his beard again, hard. ‘But you’re going to have a baby anyway…so it wouldn’t matter. Really, I could help you out around here a little, clearing things out, straightening things up…’

Pryn stood before the hut, frowning. The realization of what she was being asked to do — what she had been placed here to do — struck the tears from behind her eyes. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No. I don’t want to — ’

‘Oh, I understand,’ Kurvan said, quickly. ‘My not having a job and all.’ He sounded almost relieved, as though some obligation had been lifted. Then he pursed his lips. ‘Are you sure? I mean, maybe you just want me to stay and argue a little. Some girls, I know, are like that — ’

‘No!’ Pryn repeated, loudly. ‘I really don’t want to. At all!’ Whatever had struck away the tears had also struck away that partial sentence with which she’d begun to protest that it had nothing to do with his working, that she even liked him, that he misunderstood completely. But Kurvan had turned and started away.

Then he stopped. ‘Oh…’ he said, looking back. ‘Tratsin will be coming soon. With the things for you. He was going to stay away for about an hour. To give me time. Then he was going to come. Bragan, you know, isn’t very interested in much right through here, so…he’s probably going to ask you too.’ He turned, stepped up on the road, and started back for the bridge.

When, Pryn wondered, had all these whispering plans been made about where she would go and what she would do when she got there, and who would come to her, and who would wait for whom to finish…

The same times and places, of course, she answered her own query, that they were made in any other little town!

It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t embarrassment. It wasn’t even hurt. Rather it was a tingling coldness that settled, nevertheless, in those places where embarrassment’s fires could prickle: her cheeks, her knees, the small of her back. She stood before the hut, feeling terribly cold, till Kurvan had been out of sight for minutes. Then she walked to the road and took a few steps along it.

She could see the bridge over the ravine, the workshop this side of it, the houses beyond it. After a few moments, she said aloud: ‘But I don’t want this town…!’ Certainly she did not want to be this town’s roadside whore with a dirty baby squalling in the yard. She ran both hands slowly down the stomach of the shift Madame Keyne had given her. First the Fox’s wandering hands, then the pimp on the Bridge of Lost Desire, the coins Madame Keyne had given her for a kiss — the two soldiers at the inn in the night…! This is not where I want to be, she thought. Why has everything conspired to put me here?

Yes, this may be the town she had come from. It might even be the town where she would finally live most of her life. But it wasn’t the town she wanted to be in now. Not the town to have a child in. And certainly not here, in these roadside hovels. The only reason, she realized, that she’d even considered staying was that momentary look of interest from Bragan, and she knew enough of Ellamon to know that Tratsin and Bragan (whether Tratsin stayed here another hour on his return or not) would be among the first friends she would lose if she stayed. Tratsin and Bragan? They were good people, kind people, generous people, both of them. But she was here, on this road, at this hut now, because she was a foreign girl about to have a baby, and they could think of no other place for her.

The thought came like sentences written on some parchment scrap thrust before her eyes to read:

My father once walked into a town like this.

My father once walked out of one, too.

Certainly he had walked into Ellamon, more or less a stranger. He had met her mother and left her with a child — Pryn. He had left, in his case, for the army and death by fever. But he had left, left just such a town as this. Just walked out of it. That was the thing. In her own way, hadn’t Pryn followed him into Enoch? Well, then, she could just as well follow him out again. Of course, she was not leaving a child behind but taking one with her. Very well, she would have her baby where she might. But it would not be in this narrow-minded provincial hold, where all anyone and everyone could think of was labor. Of course there was no army to snatch her conveniently off to adventure — but there was no army to get a fever in, either. What were imaginary fathers for if you couldn’t use them for something…Blinking at the bridge, and the roofs and trees beyond it against the darkening sky, she had a memory of Tratsin that afternoon in the ravine below it: soldiers had once crossed it…? Perhaps her real father, in the real Imperial Army, had walked into this town! And when he’d died his real death, she wondered, what real and unbearable memories had died with him? Somehow simply asking the question, simply realizing that she didn’t have an imaginary father, but rather that she’d had a real one, real as Bragan or Tratsin or herself, leached all her resolve. Wherever he might have died, her own father — the real man she’d never known — had come from a town much like this, like her mother, like herself. Pryn put her arms across her stomach and turned — crying now — on the road. She was very tired. For all the warm, stormy night, she was cold.

If I stay, she thought, there must be work I can do other than this — carry water or slops or collect stone chips at the quarry; perhaps find a job with some richer town family in their garden or house; perhaps I might take care of other children, teach them my lettering skills. (Her aunt had begun with her at age seven.) But these people who had placed her here would not give her their children, she knew, if only as punishment for having her own child so far from home. The master and mistress of any rich home she might work in would cast hard glances in this direction as surely as poor folk like Tratsin and Bragan. That was the way in such towns. And the path to the quarry would lead by these huts daily. It was not even that they (or Pryn) had any inflated notion of the perniciousness of such work itself. Rather, she thought, it’s that I’ve learned the forces that limit me to it all too well at Ellamon. They’d been cut into her the way so many small droplets running along the same path cut a ravine to the sea, so that once within it — as if caught in a wound slashed across one’s own body — there was no leaving.

That was what terrified.

That was what paralyzed.

Shivering a little, tired, she walked back toward the road’s edge.

Tratsin would be coming soon. With things for her. Tratsin was a good man, a kind man. Tratsin had certainly borne his wounds from Enoch’s Margs and Malots, if not the soldiers on the bridge, and he seemed as resigned to them as a man might be who’d never considered the possibility of healing. Maybe she could tell him, and maybe he would understand, how lost she felt in this most familiar of cities. And maybe if he stayed a while it would be better than being so alone…

Once more the sky flickered, this time rumbling.

And Pryn stopped.

The shadow flickered on the printed dust, among shadows of sparse leaves and twigs, flickering with the flickering sky.

It was the shadow of a sword on the ground, there the point, there the hilt. It was as if the weapon itself hung in the air. But the shadow — that was what had made her stop. Because there were two blades running off the hilt, each the same length, and set parallel.

Pryn looked up — at Tratsin’s knife stuck in the thin tree above her. Not a weapon at all, it was only a carving tool. Still, the light falling through the leaves above it (most obligingly, the lightning flared again — yes, there it was on the road) was refracted through the spare leaves above so that, hitting it at the proper angle, it seemed to come from two sources, doubling the shadow that reached the ground.

A drop of rain hit Pryn’s shoulder. She looked about. Perhaps three meters away, another drop cratered the road dust.

What she felt was a kind of chill. The food? No, it was inedible! Tratsin’s tool? No, he needed it, and, besides, she still had the Ini’s blade tucked at her waist. Once again it seemed that, of all the people she had met on her travels, Madame Keyne had again proved right: No, there were no masked women warriors waiting to save her with double swords. The blade was a man’s, a man who would be returning for it soon. Still, its shadow was real enough for the use she needed to put it to. ‘I can’t stay here…!’ she whispered. Then, very simply and not at all like a young woman who had just made an extraordinarily difficult decision, Pryn turned toward the crossroads and began to walk with long quickening steps.

Were this an entirely different story, it would no doubt go on to tell how, later that night, when the sky blackened and the rain began to pour, Pryn found a stony niche off the road and lay in it with her back against rock and dry leaves high around her shoulders and knees, torrents thundering across the opening a foot before her face, the curtain of drops now and again gone glittering blue with lightning.

Presumably the tale would also tell how, the next morning, when she went off a little ways in the woods to urinate, the wet leaves with which she wiped herself were touched with blood.

She stood looking at them for a long while.

Then she cried again, this time with a kind of hiccupping relief.

She didn’t cry much after that. Later that day, when the south road took her through another town, she saw the familiar canvas covered ox-cart, tied outside an inn. She stood, looking at it too, for a time. Then she walked on — only after a couple of minutes, she stopped, turned, and walked back. Ten minutes later, the three young people were laughing together in the inn-yard. The boys kept asking her what in the world had happened, and she kept laughing and saying nothing, really, she’d just decided to go off by herself for a few days; nothing had happened at all! The boys had gotten some money from somewhere, enough to pay for a fine dinner at the inn, where they’d stopped the night before, they told her, to escape the rain.

‘Let’s ask if they have the double soup — it’s quite the best thing in the area, though the inns shy away from the common food. Some of it can be inedible!’

The innkeeper didn’t have the soup, but made much of her for knowing about it. The boys didn’t volunteer to tell Pryn where the money had come from, and once they got the cart under way Pryn decided not to inquire. Making camp that evening, they saw a few flickerings on the sky — but it looked as if, at least for a while, the summer nights were rained out. After cooking as usual with the younger, just as if she’d never been away, Pryn lay (as usual) in the arms of the elder, with his broken face beautiful beside her and his huge hands heavy on her back, thinking for rather a time.

Then, on the other side of the fire, the younger pushed up on his elbow and said in his heaviest city drawl: ‘Look, if you two don’t hurry up and fuck, I won’t ever get to sleep! How do you think I get my rocks off?’

‘Shut up, you be-shitted goat’s ass!’ the elder shot back, sharply enough to startle Pryn, the exchange’s intensity hinting of some recent argument between them that may well, she fancied, have had her as its topic.

The younger one chuckled and laid his dark head down. Soon Pryn heard his breathing across the fire take on the slower rhythms of sleep; then the lightly bullish flutter of snoring began from the youth warm against her — so Pryn slept too.

Light beyond her lids…

She pushed from under blankets and a warm arm, into cool morning. Pryn rubbed her shoulder, pulled the chained astrolabe back around her neck from where it had worked behind her in the night and, standing, looked at the sunlight coming sideways through the trees.

On the ground, her blanket companion turned on his back.

Beyond dead ashes the younger one’s head was completely hidden; but his foot stuck out the bedroll’s bottom.

Pryn rubbed at her waist where lying on her knife had made her side sore. At her feet, brown eyes blinked above pitted, hairy cheeks. (In firelight that face, with its deep, irregular shadows, often looked quite marvelous. Mornings, however, puffy with sleep and occasionally with beer, it reminded her of a broken cheese.) Tousled hair raised an inch. ‘Where’re you going…?

She whispered: ‘…some water, from the brook we passed before we made camp last night…?’ Then she went and got the clay jar from the provisions end of the cart. For the hundredth time she repressed the urge to look under the strapped-down canvas at the other end that hid whatever it was they were taking to wherever it was they were taking it. Once she had looked — only to find another canvas. But, as the elder one had explained, since it could get them in serious trouble if they encountered one of the Empress’s customs inspectors, the less she knew about it, the less likely she was to have problems should something go wrong.

Pryn hooked the jug handle on two fingers and started along the road, repeating: nivu, nivu, nivu…which, among the things she’d thought last night, she’d decided did not have to mean either food or sex.

After walking for three minutes, she set the empty jug on a stump she passed. An hour later, she came out on a kind of road and turned along it. When a horse-drawn wagon came up, driven by an old man with two old women in the back, she asked for a ride and got one.

The old people didn’t talk much, but one of the women gave Pryn some hard bread and an apple out of a tightly knotted bag that took fifteen minutes to untie and retie. About two hours along the road, the man remarked that the astrolabe around Pryn’s neck looked like work of the area to which they were headed. He knew, because he’d seen designs like the one at the disk’s edge on work like that before.

In brief, the story we might have written had things been only a little different would have told of bravery, wonder, fun, laughter, love, anger, fear, tears, reconciliation, a certain wisdom, a turn of chance, and a certain resignation — the stuff of many fine tales over the ages. But in those weeks Pryn did not once think of dragons.

Thus, we review them briefly.