“Oh, I think so.” Gar felt the familiar half sickness, half elation at the thought that she might be so bonded to him as to be able to read only his own mind. He pushed the thought down into the depths from which it had come—he wanted a companion, not a lover.
He straightened, eyes losing focus as his mind opened to others’ thoughts. “Let’s listen here. See if you can pick up any thoughts from the village.”
Alea straightened and stilled, too, letting her thoughts drift, stray, die down, and yield to those of the others on this planet. “Dreams,” she said after a while, “a jumble of images that make no sense… Well, no, that one makes sense, though I doubt any living woman was ever built like that … and a woman who misses her husband badly, though I doubt he was ever so handsome; what happened to him, I wonder?”
“Is there an overtone of grief to the thought?” Gar asked.
“Not really, only longing.”
“Can you work into her dreams a wondering as to where he is?”
Alea stared up at him. “Is that right to do?”
“Not really,” Gar said, “though there’s no harm in listening to the thoughts people let slip, if they’re not too personal.”
“I skipped past those three—though this one is a bit more personal, in its way.”
“Then let it pass, too,” Gar said, “but work into someone else’s dream a picture of a wanderer coming into the town.”
Alea frowned. “That still seems like meddling.”
“It is, but no more so than guiding a conversation toward information you want revealed.”
“I suppose that’s true,” Alea allowed, and formed a mental picture of Gar walking into the village, his staff rising and falling. She was careful to imagine him a bit shorter than he was.
The dreamer’s reaction startled her—a surge of delight, of anticipation, wondering what goods the peddler carried in his pack. Needles, perhaps, and sugar from the north, a few spices, seeds for strange varieties of maize and soybeans, pictures of exotic farm tools for the smith to make, and news, word of what passed in the rest of the world, perhaps even a new fable…
“He certainly isn’t afraid of a wanderer, this dreamer,” Alea said. “It doesn’t occur to him that a traveler could be anything but a peddler.”
“Not even a minstrel? Sounds like a dull land,” Gar said. “Let me try it on another dreamer.” He frowned a moment, then said, “Another … another…” He turned back to Alea. “It’s even as you say. Apparently peddlers are the only wanderers they know of.”
“Let me try another possibility.” Alea chose a teenage girl and worked a quartet of young men and women into her dream, entering the village with laughter and cries of greeting… “Well! I made the wanderers young and the whole village turned out in welcome. Apparently young folk are expected to wander and see a bit of the world.”
“How do the younger locals react to them?”
“With flirtation,” Alea said immediately. “I wonder how many of those young wanderers return home, and how many settle down in a village they discover in their travels.”
“A good way of mixing the gene pool and avoiding inbreeding.” Gar nodded approval. “Still, I would assume you and I are a little old for a Wandejahr.”
“Speak for yourself, mine has just begun,” Alea said. “But I do think the villagers would see us that way, so peddlers we’ll be.” She plucked up her nerve and demanded, “Husband and wife?”
“Or brother and sister, if anyone asks,” Gar said. “For all we know, they may not see anything unusual in a man and a woman choosing to travel together. Was your band of young wanderers all of one gender?”
“No, I was careful to make them evenly split.”
“We’ll let experience teach us, then.” Gar turned back to the spaceship. “Let’s go collect a couple of packs of trade goods.”
Packs they already had, for they had used them on Midgard. Alea told Herkimer what sort of trade goods her dreamer had wanted and the computer fabricated them in minutes, then added a few that had proved popular down the centuries—ribbons and beads, knives and pots, small bars of copper and tin.
“Do you play a musical instrument?” Gar asked. “Why?” Alea looked up at him with a frown that cleared quickly. “Oh! The villagers’ hunger for news and stories. I suppose peddlers here would have to be minstrels, too, wouldn’t they?”
“It would probably give us an edge,” Gar agreed. “I can manage a flute.” For a moment, Alea’s eyes filled with tears at the memory of the lovely pipe with its inlaid flowers that the magistrate had taken from her when her mother and father had died. He had given it, along with herself, to the neighbors who had hated her parents. She thrust the thought to the back of her mind with impatience; there was no time to muse about such things now.
Equipped with everything they could think of, Gar and Alea went forth to conquer the retail trade. Gar turned back at the foot of the ramp and said, “Up and away, Herkimer.”
The ramp slid back into the ship and the air lock hatch hissed shut as the computer’s external loudspeaker asked, “Shall I stay in geostationary orbit, Magnus?”
“Please do,” Gar said. “We have our communicators if we need them, but we may need you to relay.” He didn’t say that they might also need to have the ship drop down and save them from a real predicament—it was an outside possibility, and there was no need to alarm Alea unduly.
The great golden disk rose silently into the night, drifting upward, then suddenly shooting away into the clouds. Gar and Alea watched it go. When it had disappeared, Alea turned away, giving herself a shake and saying, “Three months ago, I never would have believed such a sight.”
“Six months ago,” Gar countered, “I never would have believed in actual living giants. Shall we see if the local folk believe in mixed peddlers?”
They had to wait a few hours for sunrise, of course. Gar brewed coffee, assuming it would be their last taste for some time, but Alea was too excited for more than a few sips. When false dawn came she looked up, listening, then nodded in satisfaction. “They’re up and about.”
Gar nodded; they had both been reared in medieval societies, so it never occurred to either of them that there was anything unusual with people waking at first light. Gar had spent some time in modern cities and knew many people slept later, but to him, they seemed the odd ones. He stood up and walked to the brow of the hill and saw it was part of a long rise in the land. “We can see the village from here.”
Alea came to stand beside him and nodded. “Herkimer chose our landing site well.”
Gar noticed she didn’t mention who had given Herkimer the criteria for the site. To give Alea her due, she probably didn’t notice, either.
They watched the people moving about their cottages for a while—going out to milk the cow, slop the hogs, feed the chickens, and gather eggs. After a while, Alea said, “There doesn’t seem to be any pattern to who does which task.”
“Pattern?” Then Gar understood what she meant. “No. Some of the milkers are men, some are women. I wonder who’s doing the cooking.”
They were both quiet for a few minutes; then Alea guessed, “The old folk?”
“Seems possible,” Gar allowed. “Come to think of it, I wonder how many teenagers are doing those morning chores.”
“Where I came from, you started grown-up work at twelve,” Alea said. “Not all of it, mind you—only men had the muscle to guide those heavy plows—but any teenage boy could chop wood.”
“Here, it seems that the girls do it, too.” Gar nodded toward one long-skirted figure who was wielding an ax.
“There’s one who wishes she had done her chores before dinner!” Alea said. “Well, let’s see what kind of welcome they’ll give travelers.”