Joker was saying, "We're ibn-Rushd. You buy our cookware. I've spent time at Wave Rider, but usually I eat in the restaurant. I see enough of pit barbecues!"
"But it's a new thing to me," Greta laughed. "For twelve years we've worked Dzhokhar's shop in Destiny Town."
Joker had married a woman fifteen years his junior. She was small, pale of skin and hair, a bit plain, too easy to overlook. Jeremy asked her, "You've never been on the Road?"
"No. Dzhokhar has been trying to prepare me."
Jeremy, trying to picture that, said, "We hear interesting rumors," suspecting he already knew more than he was supposed to, and less. Had Joker explained- Joker grinned at them both. "Things not to be told." The tuna must be cooked through by now. Jeremy drafted Lloyd, and together they turned it onto a platter and carved. The Schillings watched. Other merchants gathered to watch the show and to serve themselves.
Jeremy asked Joker, "How was that?"
Joker ate a mouthful. "Skillful."
"I have to ask. Everything I know about pit cooking, I learn by asking. I've sometimes thought of joining a caravan."
"Yes, I see." Joker was amused. "Try grilling your fish when something has delayed the wagons. Cook and carve by dying sunset light, and Quicksilver already gone. You'll know then what a caravan chef's first law is. 'Get more lights!' Stick with the lights, Jeremy."
Turnover was high in the caravans, but there were still familiar faces. Put Jeremy Winslow under blue light, dress him in white, age him, scar him: no merchant would know him from the past. But, even dressed in a merchant's flamboyant garb, Tim Bednacourt still might be remembered in daylight.
Of course he'd be crazy to go now. It was the wrong caravan!
After the spring caravan moved on... Harlow had fallen in love with Wave Rider, not Harold Winslow, maybe not Jeremy either. If Jeremy married her, she'd have his fifth of the inn after he was gone.
Come spring, speckles would be sprouting around the lettuce patch. He'd imposed that time limit on himself. Wave Rider was too public: a speckles crop couldn't be ignored for long. In early summer would come the outbound autumn caravan, and he must go.
But go how?
Hadn't he had this conversation once, long ago, with murderers trying to hijack a wagon? Nobody could cross the Neck alive, nobody could travel the Road, except with a caravan. Even a lone captured wagon would be attacked.
Tim Bednacourt had run the length of the Crab by keeping to the peaks no man had climbed. Now he was nearing fifty and he limped. Now he'd have a secure speckles supply; but could he still climb? Climb along the frost line, dip down for food and water, up and over to circle around any bandits. He'd even considered traveling up the narrow side of the Crab, but on the maps that looked lethal.
He'd need a way to cross the Neck. A boat, a surfboard: the currents ran the right way. He'd 'want a cockade, too. He hadn't found them growing anywhere.
What he was looking for was the least crazy way back.
And that was to talk himself aboard a caravan, if it was even possible. His family was serving dinner in the restaurant, out of earshot. He could sound out a few peripheral people, now.
The slow-cooking part of dinner was taking care of itself. Guests milled and sampled. Waver Rider's people milled and cooked. Jeremy joined a dozen guests out on the pier.
He knelt at the edge of the pier, water lapping just below his knees, and reached out with a slice of sweet potato. To the ten-year-old girl he said, "Shireen, go like this."
Three flattish heads popped up.
"Winston," he said, and one of the Otterfolk came forward to take the sweet potato. Short arms, wide hands with four thick, short fingers.
Jeremy handed sweet potato slices to Shireen. Shireen began distributing them to the other Otterfolk. Winston was still watching Jeremy.
Jeremy curled and uncurled just his fingers, no thumbs. Eight, sixteen, twenty-four fish. Prawns, a double handful. One surf clam. Fingers wiggled: Don't bust your chops, we'll take what you can get.
Winston disappeared. Tomorrow he would be back with what he could collect, and would tell Jeremy what he wanted; but that was easier by daylight and while they were both in the water.
The little girl asked, "Jeremy, can I go in with them?"
"Depends. What are you wearing?"
"No!" cried Greta Schilling, unseen in shadow until now. "Tomorrow morning, yes, dear?"
"Yes, Mommy."
Greta turned to Jeremy. "We wear our good clothes for your first night's banquet, you know." Reproving.
"Mrs. Schilling, you flatter us."
"Please, I am Greta. Jeremy, is it safe for a child to swim with Otterfolk?"
"Absolutely. We depend on it. If we don't entertain them, they don't fish for us. Greta, I know that name. Shireen?"
"Her great-grandmother Shireen died twelve years ago. Dzhokhar and I, we both loved her. So I married Dzhokhar Livnah and gave her name to our first daughter."
It took Jeremy a moment to untangle that in his mind, but the implications-"So Dzhokhar settled with you? In Destiny Town."
"Yes, for twelve years."
And took Greta's surname, of course.
"His wife was with Armstrong wagon, you see, but she retired. Many merchants travel the Road for a time and then retire to a family shop. Dzhokhar could have married another merchant, but we knew each other-"
"Dzhokhar Livnah?"
"Yes. Why?"
"No, nothing." But he'd always assumed that everyone on ibn-Rushd wagon was named ibn-Rushd! Assumed that Joker was single, too. "I only wondered how a man named Livnah joined ibn-Rushd wagon."
She shook her head. "There are things I'm not supposed to tell." If he forced too many merchants to say that too often, it would be noticed. But a caravan trainee was exactly who he wanted to question! He compromised. "Is there anything I can tell you?"
She laughed.
"No, really. I've been listening to fire-pit talk for twenty-seven years. They speak a secret language, but I've picked up a little. Ibn-Rushd cooks, and that is my language."
Shireen tugged at her mother's arm. "The fence," she said.
"Yes. Jeremy, we walked down the beach this afternoon, as far as a razormesh fence. The beach beyond, it looked nice. Private. There were shells. Can you get us past that fence?"
"As I understand it," Jeremy said, "if I could get you past that fence, you wouldn't see a restaurant here next year. That's the local birthground for the Otterfolk, Greta, and the Overview Bureau is very serious about that."
"Oh." She thought a moment, then asked, "After you fillet the tuna, where do you take the bones and head?"
"Soup stock. Everything interesting goes into the cauldron. On the caravans... you won't carry that size cauldron."
"Why do you shudder?"
He shook his head, thinking that a chef could always break off conversation for some convenient urgency- "Is it true that we must get pregnant by men along the Road? And the men make the local women pregnant?"
"That's what they say. They say also that you merchants are almost inhumanly good at doing that with us mortals."
She dimpled. "I thought Dzhokhar might have been having fun with me. Well, I haven't had the training yet."
Most of the merchants had gone up the Road and the rest had gone to bed. The Winslow family cleaned up after them to some extent, then quit. Jeremy went up to bed. He could climb a flight of stairs, now, but not run up it.