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 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.
10
Of Bronze, Brews, Dragons, and Dinners
… the French people hated aristocrats about to lose their power more than it had ever hated them before, precisely because their rapid decline in power was not accompanied by any considerable decline in their fortunes … When noblemen lost their privileges, among others the privilege to exploit and oppress, the people felt them to be parasites, without any real function in the rule of the country. In other words, neither oppression nor exploitation is ever the main cause of resentment; wealth without visible function is much more intolerable because nobody can understand why it should be tolerated.
HANNAH ARENDT
The Origins of Totalitarianism
It reared, lopsided, at the crossroads’ southeast corner.
Pryn looked at it, scrambled behind it, came out, walked away from it several times in several directions – now on all four rutted paths, now off in the bushes – and came back. Eventually she decided that what was currently the junction’s southeast corner had once been the center of a large, circular enclosure. Here and there the undergrowth paused at the edge of flat, uptilting stones that once, how long ago, had paved it all. Several stones were still set precisely together. And there were large cut ones off to the side that, with interruptions, defined a kind of rim. The traffic circle must once have been almost twenty meters in diameter. And on either side of the four rutted paths that joined here, hewn rocks off in the bushes suggested that all four had once been at least three times the width they were now.
It took Pryn a good forty minutes, scrambling around in the underbrush, to ascertain all this. She was looking at the dragon – half off its pedestal and leaning to the side – trying to envision it, free of vines and lichen, as the center monument in the crossing of two great highways, when she heard hoofbeats along the west
ern route.
Automatically, she stepped back behind the pedestal’s half-buried corner.
A minute later, the first six-horse wagon, shaking gilded fringe, swayed and thundered around the turn. Next came an open cart full of soldiers. The half-dozen closed wagons behind it were large as the mummers’ portable stage and prop conveyances. The horses went at a light canter – though not faster than a person might sprint. For now Pryn saw a lithe runner leap from the draped portals of a rear wagon and overtake one, another, and a third wagon, to swing up on the running board and disappear within – while from another wagon at the front another runner dropped, to let the caravan overtake him, wagon after wagon passing, till he swung up into a rear one – delivering what messages, among what personages, Pryn could not imagine.
The caravan clattered around the turn and rumbled away north – the road down which, not an hour before, Pryn had come strolling.
Certainly, Pryn decided in the returning silence, those loud wheels were the ones the time-obliterated highways had been built for. Once, no doubt, caravan runners could sprint on smooth pavement instead of beating through the bush along the road’s shoulder.
Pryn came out and sat on the pedestal’s ivied corner, wondering where the caravan was coming from and what might be its business. Taking the north road like that, it could only have one destination: Kolhari – perhaps even the High Court of Eagles itself.
She pulled a leaf from a vine that clutched the rocky base beside her.
Through the settling dust, Tetya was coming down the road. He was the nephew of the local brewer, Old Rorkar, whose hotsheds and cooling caves were perhaps a mile up, where Pryn had been working now almost a week.
‘Did you see them?’ Pryn called.
Tetya nodded, ambling.
‘Who do you think it could be?’
‘Lots of people.’ Tetya crossed the juncture. ‘The Usurper of Strethi, perhaps – only his wagon colors are blue and orange, I think. And it could have been the Princess Elyne – though she hasn’t made a trip to these parts during my lifetime; uncle says she used to come here quite frequently. Or it could have been Lord Krodar and his entourage, which is sometimes rumored to include the Child Empress Yrielgo herself – though we’re never certain exactly when she comes. It’s always very secretive. The only way to be sure who it is, of course, is if they stop at uncle’s office and order a shipment of beer. They frequently do. But also they ride in wagons purposely painted with colors associated with great houses other than their own – to confuse the likes of you and me.’ Tetya dug a forefinger in his ear. ‘So unless they stop to order a few barrels from uncle, there’s no way to be sure.’
Tetya was a gangling, good-natured boy. Pryn had found herself completely able to relax with his rural openness. But he also had his bothersome side. He seemed terribly young to Pryn – all elbows and ears and knees, like one of the gangling puppies lolloping about behind the brewery’s equipment shed. His beard lay in little curls over his face, with great gaps of baby-smooth cheek between. Pryn had laughed at the changing voices of the twelve-, thirteen-, and fourteen-year-old boys of her own mountain town. But Tetya’s voice seemed to have snagged permanently on those awkward intervals, still cracking and creaking at an age when most boys she’d known at home had made at least the physical part of the passage to manhood. If only from the things she’d been through since her flight above the Falthas (for, after all, she had traveled and murdered and talked with the Liberator, been shown the memory of water by Madame Keyne and had made love with a smuggler), Pryn felt she had a right to consider herself a mature woman. But once, she and Tetya had actually sat down and worked it out (with Yrnik’s help): Tetya was nineteen days older than Pryn.
‘What do you think they were here for, Tetya?’
Tetya turned to sit on the pedestal beside her. ‘To visit the Earl Jue-Grutn.’
Pryn frowned. Like most wanderers in that time, whenever Pryn stopped it was because she’d been suddenly overcome with the notion that if she followed the road further, it would soon give out entirely and she would have to confront the ultimate wildness, the unrectored chaos, the unthinkable space in which the very distinctions between earth, air, and water would soon break down. But here, a few hundred yards or so beyond what she had, once again, assumed to be the end of the world, was a major crossroads – or at least the traces of one. And a great caravan had just rolled by it. ‘Where are we, here, Tetya?’ Pryn asked. ‘What’s down all these … highways?’
Tetya mmmmed and looked about. ‘Well, if you walk along there for half an hour, you’ll get to the castle of Lord Aldamir – though no one has lived in it for more years than you and I’ve got, put together. Straight on, and you come to the ruins of the Vygernangx Monastery, after perhaps a mile, though the last feyer – that’s the old barbarian word around here for priest – gave up trying to live in it half a dozen years back.’ Tetya pointed down the road from which the wagons had come. ‘And along there is where the Earl Jue-Grutn lives. He’s pretty much the most powerful noble left in all the Garth.’ Suddenly Tetya twisted about, grasped some vines on the pedestal behind them, and yanked.
Tendrils popped and chattered; vines tore from the stone.
Surprised, Pryn stood up.
‘Do you know what that says?’ Tetya asked.
Pryn looked at the chiseled markings that had been hidden under the leaves. She reached out to trace one with a finger. Her other hand rose to her astrolabe.
‘I thought you might know, since you’re supposed to be teaching me to read – ’ That was one of the jobs Tetya’s uncle, Rorkar, had assigned Pryn during her first days at the brewery. ‘Those signs look the same as the ones on that disk around your neck.’
Pryn looked more closely. ‘They do look similar … sort of.’
Bracing one hand against the rock, Tetya pulled away more vines.
As leaves came loose, Pryn asked, ‘You think they’re writing …?’
‘How should I know?’ Tetya threw down the foliage and wiped his hand on his leg. ‘You’re supposed to be teaching me!’
‘If it is writing – ’ Pryn lifted the astrolabe from her chest to examine the marks about its rim – ‘it isn’t any that I know how to read. Maybe you should get Yrnik up here, and he could tell you.’ The brewery foreman, Yrnik, could read and write too: he was also the brewery accountant. For some time now, apparently, he’d been asking Old Rorkar for a literate assistant, but none had shown up – until Pryn had wandered by, seeking a laboring job.
Old Rorkar himself was illiterate, and Yrnik had apparently come by much like Pryn, some years back; he had only slowly convinced the old peasant brewer of the advantages of written records. Still, the notion had seemed logical; and the logic had proved profitable. Illiterate though he was, Rorkar was still a clever man. With only one person around possessing the skill, it had not occurred to anyone to pass that skill on; but when it turned out that someone Pryn’s age might, indeed, have the knowledge as completely as Yrnik himself, Rorkar had come up with the notion that Pryn tutor nephew Tetya, as well as assist Yrnik with the records. Pryn asked: ‘Has Yrnik seen these marks?’
‘He ought to have. He’s been around here long enough. They’re on lots of old pieces of stone and old carvings and things.’
‘And he’s never said he could read them?’
‘He told me he couldn’t.’
‘Then why did you ask me?’
‘You’re not Yrnik.’ Tetya turned to look back up the road. ‘Just because he couldn’t didn’t mean you wouldn’t.’
‘Did Yrnik think it was writing?’
‘He didn’t know either,’ Tetya said. ‘I think it is.’
‘It looks very old.’ Pryn turned and sat again on the pedestal’s edge. ‘There’re lots of old things around here. Did you know that this place here, maybe hundreds of years ago, maybe even thousands, used to be the crossroads of two great highways – oh, ten times as wide as they are now!’
&nbs
p; ‘Fifty years,’ Tetya said.
Pryn had expected either to be praised for her discovery if he’d already known it, or challenged if he did not. She glanced at him suspiciously. Fifty years? But then, there was Belham’s Bridge and Venn’s Rock back in Enoch …
‘Fifty. That’s what uncle says.’
‘What was fifty years ago?’ Pryn asked, mocking obtuseness. ‘What does your uncle say?’
‘Fifty years ago these were wide, well-paved highroads; and the dragon stood at the crossing’s center, with wagons and mules and goats and oxen passing about it on all sides.’
‘How old is your uncle?’ Pryn frowned.
‘Almost sixty – almost sixty-five, I guess!’
‘And he remembers it from when he was a little boy?’
‘He says so.’ Tetya shrugged, ‘I don’t know if it’s true or not, but that’s what lots of the old people around here say.’ He stood up. ‘We’d better get back to the brewery – if you want to keep your job.’
‘What do you mean?’ Pryn declared, ‘I finished all the work Yrnik set me!’
‘My uncle,’ Tetya said, ‘expects you, when you’re finished, to ask Yrnik for more – and not to go wandering off on your own. He says if you do it three more times, he’s going to throw you out, whether you can read and write or not.’
‘Oh – ’ Pryn said, a bit more off-handedly than she felt. ‘Everybody else was almost finished, anyway. I just didn’t think that – ’ She sighed. Pryn liked the brewery, with its sheds and barracks and caves; she liked the men and women who worked there. And even if it wasn’t the end of the world – or hadn’t always been – she wasn’t ready to go on just yet. ‘Let’s get back, then.’
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