But the habits of the last months were still strong in Lissar; furthermore all the noises she heard here were unfamiliar and therefore suspicious. She half-woke when the rooster crowed, which he did at intervals, without any reference to the position of the sun in the sky; half-woke when Ammy went in and out of the house-door, when she called the chickens for their food, when she answered a friend's greeting from the road. The farm dog barked once, perhaps at some whiff of Ash's presence; Ash bristled and growled briefly in her sleep.
One noise in particular disturbed her, dredged her up farther than half-sleep, almost to waking, till she recognized it: the crunch and creak of wagon wheels. She had not heard that sound for a long time, and its echoes rang off other memories she did not want disturbed. She dozed and drifted, and then came fully awake on the instant when Barley came home and entered the barn to hang up his mended tool.
She slid down from her crackly perch, pulling hay-stems from the neck of her dress. "Ah," said Barley. "Ammy said you were here." He was smiling at her, but there was a puzzlement, almost a wistfulness, in his eyes similar to the way his wife had looked at her. "I thought perhaps you would have slipped out the back way and gone on-to save the trouble of talking to them old folks again. Old folks can be real meddlesome."
She surprised herself by saying almost angrily, "I would not have left without saying good-bye. I am grateful for your help and kindness and welcome. I do not see you as meddling."
The half-anxious, half-curious look faded, and he said, "Never mind me. Ammy's always telling me I talk before I think. Since you're awake now, come in for supper-it's rabbit stew. Isn't that something?"
The stew was better than anything Lissar had made last winter in their hut; the onions and herbs were fresh, and obviously added by a hand that knew what it was doing. They ate by firelight; Lissar listened to Barley's story of his day's adventure without paying attention to the meaning of the words. It was fascinating to her merely to hear language spoken again, to listen to the rise and fall of a voice speaking intelligibly, hands gesturing now and then to support or illustrate a point. It did not matter what the point was. It was enough-more than enough-that this sort of communication went on; that there were sounds that were not creaks in the bushes, however meaningful, or the fussing of chickens, however meaningless. She noticed that Barley used a word now and then that was unknown to her, but she felt no desire to ask him to explain, whether from a gentle indifference to unnecessary particulars, or from a fear of exposing too much of the extent of her own strangeness, she did not know.
She came back to full attention when Ammy said, "Our guest was asking about the yellow city-how far it is. I couldn't tell her."
"The yellow city?" said Barley. And he repeated what his wife had said earlier:
"The king's city?" And again the word king made Lissar want to look behind her, throw pebbles in the shadows to see what would be flushed out.
Barley ran his hand over his head. "I haven't been there in thirty years. There isn't enough grass there, and too many people, and the vegetables ain't really fresh, even in summer. What do you want with the city?-Wait," he added hastily, "I'm not asking, it's just my way of talking. I ain't used to anybody who ain't used to me. It took us, well, near a month to get there; but the wheel-horse threw a shoe and went lame with it, and we lost a few days. The roads are better now; it's one of Cofta's pet projects, the road system."
"Cofta?" said Lissar before she thought to stop herself.
The other two stared at her. "King Cofta," Barley said, after a moment. "It's his city you're wanting." Lissar looked up from the table, through the unshuttered window, where sunset still kept the darkness at bay. The entire world was rose-colored with this day's end, the same rose color as the hangings of a small round room.
"Ah, well," Barley went on, "both of us know from listening to you that you ain't from around here." The pause this time was anxious, trying not to be expectant and failing.
"No," said Lissar. "I'm from ... a place beyond the mountains."
Barley hastened into the pause that followed this statement. "You might never have heard of our king as Cofta anyway, for he's King Goldhouse the Seventeenth; but they've all been Goldhouses, all seventeen of them in a row, and Ossin will be Goldhouse the Eighteenth when his time comes.
"Their great house is yellow brick, and the door is covered with gold leaf, and the creatures carved into the arch of it have golden claws and eyes and tail-tips. Most of the town is built of the same brick, so it's called the yellow city, although there ain't any other gold except the door-handle of the guild hall, where there's always a doorkeeper, just like at the king's door."
Lissar declined her hosts' repeated offer of the mattress, or a return to the warm haystack. She was tempted, for the weariness the bath had awoken deep in her bones was still strong. But she felt that she had lost the knack for sleeping under a roof, and that, now she knew the name of the place she had chosen as her goalthe king's city, the yellow city-she wanted to keep on toward it as steadily as she could.
"Come see us if you come back this way," Ammy said hopefully.
"I will," Lissar said, surprising herself by meaning it.
It was full dark as she and Ash stepped onto the road again-with two loaves of bread, tied up in a kerchief, under one arm, for Ammy had won that argument-and fell into their familiar loping pace, Ash silent at her left side. The weariness, strangely, dropped from her as they ran, as she breathed deeply of the cool night air.
SEVENTEEN
LISSAR WAS MORE WARMED AND SHAKEN BY HER ENCOUNTER with Ammy and Barley than at first she realized. She often remembered the sound of their voices, the words they used, words a little different from the ones she or Rinnol would have chosen, and differently pronounced. But she rolled the sound of their voices around in her head like coins in the hand. And she decided, without ever deciding, that she would continue travelling by night..It was too important a matter, this talking to people, and listening to them, to do it lightly or often.
The weather grew warmer, both, she thought, as they came farther and farther from the mountains, and as spring progressed toward summer. There were the first pale shoots of witchgreen growing by the streams they camped by, tender and sweet, and nothing like the huge dark intensely bitter leaves the same plant would have produced by midsummer. Lissar risked tastes of plants she did not know but that looked and smelled plausible; one of her guesses gave her a day of belly cramps, but the rest were good, and provided some welcome variety. Nothing was as good as Ammy's rabbit stew however, and her bread was gone far too soon.
But the morning came when they could find no wildness to retreat to, not even any semi-cultivated hedgerow to sleep under. The road had grown wider and wider yet, and there was traffic on it sometimes even at night, though when anyone hailed her she merely raised a hand in acknowledgement and kept on. At night, usually, other travellers were in a hurry, bent too urgently on their own business to take much note of who shared the road with them. Once, one twilight, someone's dog had leaped off a wagon and tore after them, barking briefly in a businesslike manner that Lissar did not like; it was big and black and it ran like it was nobody's fool. But before she had done anything but touch her stone-pocket, Ash had turned and hurled herself silently on their pursuer. Something happened, very quickly, and the other dog fled, howling like a puppy. Lissar barely had had time to break stride. She paused, but Ash gave her a look as if to say: why do you bother?-and Lissar thought perhaps she did not want to enter into a conversation with the men on the wagon who were-she glanced at them-staring at her and Ash with their jaws visibly hanging.