by Andre Norton
The stranger said: What you will.
The neighbors said: What’s his name?
Her father said: We call him Old ’Un. Fits well enough, he looks older’n the oilberry tree Grandma planted by the string door.
He came out of the dawn. Jezeri (three years of willful mischief) came on him when she was poking about the milkers’ corral, getting underfoot and into a lot of things she had no business bothering with. She was startled but unafraid and curious. He was torn and burned and battered, starved, parched, a miserable tatter of a man with an odd remnant of grace. He used the corral gate to pull himself erect, bowed to her with an elegance that delighted her, and collapsed at her feet.
Tanu crawled from his shirt and tottered to Jezeri, a pathetic bit of bone and fluff. He huddled against her bare foot, clasped her littlest toe with a small black hand, and won her heart forever.
As she lingered with the woods, she searched the silent ships that had brought them for a sign of anyone she could talk to, but their lanterns were unlit, the crews most likely tasting the delights of the fair. Tanu groused with her, then reached up and patted her chin, making her laugh, sang his own laughter in response. “Like I was afraid of,” she said. “Nothing. Oh, well.” She strolled on, leaving the unhelpful wood behind, peering into the barred cells at the treasures sequestered there.
Bales of fine woolens, silk, linens, their glory gleaming through rips in the more plebeian outer wraps. Piles of artifacts from the ancient places. Boxes of porcelains and stoneware. Rolls of tapestry. Scrolls housed in fine vases. Glimmering mirrors and other glassware. A thousand wonders from a thousand places whose names she didn’t know; she didn’t know much of anything outside the Vale. It seemed to her these things exhaled a fragrance that brought all the world crowding into her body when she breathed it in, that once she’d breathed it in she’d never be small enough to fit back into the Vale—then her Vale-bred practicality reasserted itself and she laughed at her fancies.
A cluster of men knelt on a blanket near the end of the line of sheds, stacks of coin in front of them, tossing the bones in a desultory game where skill vied with luck and neither mattered much and the piles of coin were exchanged with good-natured cursing and friendly threats.
Jezeri stopped to watch. She’d played that game with her brothers and the hired hands—till they chased her off because she won all the time. The bones seemed to whisper to her fingers when she threw them. She followed them as they skittered across the blanket and knew how they would land, clapped her hands when the man who threw them raked in the stake.
He looked around, grinned. “Eh, boy, sit in. Just a friendly game.”
Tanu voiced his disapproval in loud and emphatic song. Sometimes he was worse than Mama the way he tried to protect her. She stroked him under his chin to shut him up, wanting to accept the invitation, knowing she could win, but wary of traps. She took a good long look at the men on the blanket.
All but one wore short, striped trousers that ended raggedly at midcalf, sleeveless canvas shirts laced up to the throat. Some braided their long hair, others pulled it tightly back and tied it at the nape of the neck with gray fraying cords. All but one had knotty bare feet, arms ropy with muscle, looked as tough and about as trustworthy as the crippled direwolf that cornered her a few years back. A friendly game all right, she thought. Long as I lose.
All of them sailors off the ships. All but one.
He was staring at Tanu, pale eyes flat and unrevealing as carved eyes in a carved face, fine soft black hair fluttering a little in the breeze that followed the river. He was smaller than the sailors, with a slim body that somehow made her think of supple, slinky things like ferrets or weasels, with a narrow gaunt face that reminded her of someone—she didn’t know who until one side of his mouth curled into a mirthless half smile. Startled, she sucked in a breath and held it. Old ’Un, she thought. Not like he is now, but before. Bloodkin? She let the breath trickle out. No. His kind, but not his kin. She narrowed her eyes, searching for a way to ask questions that wouldn’t betray him, but a chill around her stomach warned her off that track.
The sailor rattled the bones in his massive fist. “Not cut loose from your ma yet, boy?” he taunted her. “Eh, be a man.”
She broke her gaze from the interesting enigma of the odd man, grinned at the hopeful gambler, delighted to be taken for a boy. “Find another flat,” she said. She walked off, had a thought, called back an old Vale proverb, laughter bubbling in her deliberately roughened voice. “Do a friend, that’s a shame; do a stranger, that’s fair game.”
She rounded the last shed and slouched along beside the ruined warehouse, scratching behind Tanu’s ears, staring up at the massive stone walls that seemed as ancient as the earth under her feet, man-made cliffs with much the same enduring feel as the stone bones of her home mountains. Tanu chittered suddenly, came out of the tunic pouch, and climbed on her shoulder to ride there, peering into the darkness behind them. Jezeri chewed her lip, the darkness frightening now in a way she didn’t quite understand; she walked faster, then broke into a nervous lope as she rounded the warehouse and moved into the temple garden between the Pilgrim Way and the palings that fenced in the merchant precincts. The peeled logs were a foot or so apart and she could have wriggled between them, but there was a gate close by and she could see the brass helmets of the fair-wards. She trotted to the gate, grinned at the aspirant collecting gate-offerings, flipped him a copper, and sauntered into the noise and excitement beyond.
Acrobats, their faces white ovals, glitter paint about their eyes, red mouths like bloody gashes. Three high, hands touching hands, two towers circled with stately grace in a vertical dance. Man on man, the girls on the topmost shoulders waving silversilk to catch the light, round and round the towers went. A rattle of a drum, a flirt from a tin horn, and the towers crumpled, the girls whirling over and over, caught by their partners, whirled over a last time, landing feather light, arms outstretched, red mouths smiling. A clatter from the drum, a blare from the horn, and all six flew about in twisting leaps and tumbles, crossing and recrossing the small open space, wild as wind-tossed tumbleweeds. Then the girls took collecting bowls and walked through the crowd, moving with an oddly touching awkwardness as if uncomfortable when tied so close to the earth.
Jezeri dropped a copper in the bowl as one of them moved past, thinking the pleasure they’d given her well worth one of her scant hoard of coins.
She drifted on, past dancing dogs and fortune-telling finches, past fire-eaters and freaks—and stopped to stare as she caught the glitter of silver swords. She pressed her leg against the side of her boot, suddenly all too aware of the hidden and forbidden knife. She edged closer, elbowing her way through the gathering crowd. When she’d pushed and wriggled to the edge of the low stage, she saw with disappointment and disapproval that the silver was only paint on wood. She watched the fighters posture, attack, retreat, joined the applause of the crowd at the end of a spectacular exchange, rubbed at her neck, swung around to see who was watching her, saw nothing, and decided she was imagining it. After a time she grew bored and pushed out of the crowd.
A dancer. So nearly naked under crimson gauze that Jezeri blushed as crimson as the gauze. A bored man sat at the back of the low stage, tapping a steady rhythm on a small double drum he held between his thighs. Another sat beside him, drawing a humming tune from a fat single-stringed fiddle. Jezeri stared at them, wide-eyed. They were blue. All over. A deep rich blue like the dye her mother pressed from ridda leaves. Where the skin was tight over bone, the blue lightened to a gleaming sapphire. Their eyes were blue. Even their teeth were blue. Their heads were shaved, their bare torsos decorated with white lines that set off the hard, ridged muscles. The music they made was strange, but the woman danced powerfully to it, entranced by it.
Jezeri felt hot and uncomfortable watching her, but she couldn’t help sneaking quick, embarrassed peeks at her. The dancer was a sleek, powerful creature, a rich dark gold with gold-streaked umber
hair, a coarse mane as wild as Nightlord’s tail after a run through thorny brush. Fidgeting from foot to foot, always on the point of leaving, Jezeri stayed until the music stopped and an arrogant young apprentice dancer walked out among the watchers, shaking her tambourine under their noses, demanding rather than requesting payment for their entertainment—and getting it, heaps and handfuls of coin.
Jezeri grinned and drifted on.
Snake dancers. Tanu hissed his disgust, so Jezeri hastened past these, eyes widening at women shaved bald and tattooed all over.
Mouse races—little gray runners scurrying through mazes.
A sly little man with three shells and a pea and a following of adolescent boys, her brothers among them. Jezeri watched a moment, feeling comfortably superior. She had, after all, overcome just such a temptation. She sniffed with disgust as her brother Calley lost a copper bit.
Jugglers.
Puppeteers. She stopped to watch one play but got tired of being elbowed or squeezed near flat. Anyway, what she managed to see embarrassed her more than the dancer had and got worse as the bellows of appreciation from the crowd got louder, men and women alike urging the puppets on. She stared at hot red faces and decided this was some kind of grown-up thing she might appreciate when she was older.
A minstrel strolled by. She sensed his interest, though he said nothing as he walked beside her a moment. He stared at Tanu, but that didn’t bother her after the first prick of fear, since she could feel his puzzlement. Then he quirked a brow at her, bowed quickly, gracefully, and passed on, the only one of them all to see she was a girl in spite of her trousers. His curiosity quickly faded as he moved away, plucking idle chords from his guitar, subvocalizing words as he sought the songs to match the mood of the crowd.
The sense of him trickled off as she left the fringes for the area of stalls and booths where cookshops and sweet vendors turned the air as thick as stew with what they sold, where other vendors sold wine in throwaway clay cups and beer cooled by ice magicked down from the mountains. Jezeri and Tanu drifted along in an ecstasy of sniffing and staring, entranced by the glimmer of mirrors, the shimmering colors of the silks spread out on counters with folk haggling over them, the spices in pots and crocks that perfumed the air every time a customer lifted a lid to test the taste and aroma of what he or she was buying.
A woman with a round sweaty face, her hair tied up in a linen coif, was stirring a glutinous mass in an iron pot, muscles like melons in her heavy arms. She pulled the ladle loose, eyed the brown threads dripping from it. Clucking her tongue with satisfaction, she emptied a cup of white powder into the pot, stirred a moment longer, then stepped back and watched the candy foam up until it filled the inside. She swung the pot off the fire, tilted it over a stone slab, and let the seething mass spread out into a brown puddle. There was another stone slab on the far side of the pot where an earlier batch was already cold. She took a mallet and broke this into pieces.
Jezeri bought a copper’s worth of candy shards, coaxed Tanu from the pocket and set him on her shoulder, gave him a piece of the candy. They both crunched noisily and contentedly on their shards as Jezeri strolled on, immersed in the life around her, ignoring that little itch at the back of her neck.
People stood in clots, talking, arguing, buying, selling, all sorts of dress, all shades of skin—from a translucent white rivaling the moon’s pallor, through shades of gold and brown, to a soft black darker than night.
Their helmets ruddy in torch and lantern light, fair-wards strutted arrogantly through the crowd, forcing others to step aside for them.
Priests were all over the place, like vermin infesting a granary, no two of them alike, from the one who wore an elaborate robe of black velvet thickly embroidered with gold and crimson thread to a dust-and-ash-plastered ascetic whose single garment had less cloth than a lady’s kerchief. They chanted, whirled in off dances, jingled begging bowls, or stood about looking wise if they could, settling for mystery if wisdom seemed unlikely.
The itch got worse.
Jezeri licked her fingers and rubbed them dry on her trousers, spat on Tanu’s hands, and used the hem of her tunic to wipe them clean. “No sticky fingers in my hair,” she told him, smiled as he sang his protest. She eased him back into the pocket, rubbed irritably at her neck, calling herself many names, the kindest of which was fool. Despite Old ’Un’s warning she’d let herself be so caught up in the pleasures assaulting her senses that she’d been slow to take serious notice of the itch. She couldn’t ignore it any longer. Someone was watching her. Worse. Someone was following her, had been following her for a long time. She began walking slowly on, letting the noise and excitement flow unnoticed around her.
What to do? She wished her father was here, or her mother. They always had answers, even if you didn’t like them. Hunt up a fair-ward? Bronze helmets enough about, mostly around the drinkshops.
Mama said first hint of trouble, yell, she thought, but ... well, yell what? I’m being followed? And the ward asks who by. And I say I don’t know, it’s just I’ve got this feeling in the back of my neck. And he says get out of here, kid, I got no time for foolishness or he takes me by the ear and trots me back to camp. No! Anna rot him, I won’t let him chase me off. Besides, what can he do to me with all these people about? Hunh!
She moved her shoulders impatiently. Tanu tickled her jaw with his tail-finger. She grinned and pulled it away from her face and let him curl the finger about her thumb. In a funny way her follower gave a touch of spice to her enjoyment of her first fairing night. “He wants to play games,” she told Tanu. “We’ll play, too.”
She began walking slowly, steadily, halted without warning before a stall, darted around it into another line of shops, tried to catch a glimpse of who was following her, but saw nothing. “He’s done this before,” she told Tanu. She strolled casually along, then suddenly squeezed through first one group of chaffering adults, then another; they smiled after her, granting her the first night indulgence her follower certainly wouldn’t receive from them. She felt frustration billowing from him, a frustration reflected in Tanu’s growing uneasiness. He didn’t like this game. He was treading nervously at the bottom of the pocket, the hairs on his tail erected, rubbing stiffly against her neck.
She twisted and turned through the rest of the merchants’ sector, riding a high of excitement and mischief until Tanu’s distress began to rub off on her. The game was going on too long; the man’s persistence began to disturb her. “Enough,” she whispered to Tanu and nodded as he sing-muttered his agreement. She tried to break away from the man, but he was always there behind her. Nothing she did shook him off. She started looking about for a fair-ward and knew a spurt of panic when she saw how quickly the crowd was thinning. There were no wards about, not here. He’s been herding me, she thought. Fool, fool, fool. Breathing hard, she scrambled to a stop as the palings loomed before her. She looked both ways along them, then wriggled through the space between two of the peeled poles and raced through the trees to the Pilgrim Way, which led to the great gate of the temple.
Late as it was, the Way was still crowded. That comforted her and also surprised her. Because she was not a pilgrim, because the folk of Vale were what they were, she had forgotten that the fair was the high point of the pilgrim year. Folk came overland and by sea to pay tribute to the Three Lordly Ones, to atone for sins real or imagined, to beg favor from the gods. To Jezeri all this seemed as much nonsense as the patter of the man with the shells and the peas. Jezeri’s Vale folk paid respect to Aieea the Nurturer and Artna the Hunter; their rites were splendid excuses for feasts and games and general revelry after the hard work of harvest and the gray dullness of winter. There were no priests in the Vale. The folk there—sturdy independent farm folk and stock raisers—thought themselves quite able to manage their relationship with their gods and saw no point in feeding extra mouths. Aunt Jesset would snort with scorn if anyone called her a priestess. She had no authority over the lives of Vale folk and w
anted none; all she asked was to tend Aieea’s shrine, grow her herbs, use her healing gifts when needed, and to be left alone to live her life the way she wanted.
Jezeri plunged into the throng, wove through pilgrims until she thought she’d lost herself; the itch had died away almost completely. She slipped into an opening behind a clot of pilgrims from overseas and began gazing about with curiosity and a regrettable smugness.
She saw a few high ladies with long silk dresses trimmed with fur, jeweled headdresses, and gauzy veils that obscured very little of what they covered. But most pilgrims wore coarse somber robes with only a worn bit of rope as a girdle. Many of them had an exhausted, emaciated look, as if they’d walked barefoot across half the world to get here. Some were simply slogging forward, saving the dregs of their energy to get them to their goal; others had a glowing exaltation and were chanting, the various chants so mixed Jezeri couldn’t make out the words. She rubbed absently at the back of her neck, stiffened as she realized what she was doing.
Her shadow was back. Calm now. Unhurried. Sure of her. She could feel him so strongly it was like a club whammed against her head. Mama, oh, Mama, why didn’t I do what you told me? She shook herself calmer and and began to wriggle between clumps of pilgrims, trying to put more space between her and her shadow, looking anxiously about for a fair-ward. All back haunting the drinkshops, she thought bitterly. Tanu had gone silent, scrunched low in the pocket, his small black hands gripping the cloth of her tunic so tightly she could feel the ache in her own hands. She pushed harder against the bodies blocking her way, ignoring muttered irritation and scolds, brushing off hands that caught at her. If she could get to the temple, if she could just get there ... He wouldn’t dare try anything under the eyes of the priests. . . . Old ’Un warned her against going near them, but he hadn’t known—
A thread of music, soft, tiny, like the singing of the wind. It began weaving in and out of the scattered chanting. A nothing. A bit of wind. But her feet stopped moving. A woman behind her bumped into her, hissed disapproval at her, and waddled around her. She struggled. Her legs were frozen. The music built a wall between her and the priests ahead.