They had had no cause to throw things at him.
They had had no cause to be afraid of him unless they took him for a Shadow. He thought they should have been able to see he was not.
They called him Names, like Cursed, and Haunt, and spoke of Hanging, all of which made terrible pictures in his thoughts. They were angry with him for no reason at all, but he supposed that they were afraid, and perhaps having had no experience of Shadows, took him for something as dire and harmful as the worst ones, the noisy, hammering kind.
They might, truly, have thrown the knives. The stick had stung, but the knife might have
Killed him, he thought, with a bite of bread in his mouth. Dead. Death.
Like the ragged black thing they were burning over the fire, Killed.
That was both Meat, and Dead.
Then he could scarcely swallow the bread at all. He forced down a few more bites and tucked it in his shirt along with his Book, and walked a long, long way before he felt like tearing off more bits of the gritty stuff and eating them to make the pain in his stomach stop.
He reached a point after which he no longer feared the men following. He kept walking, all the same, because he was certain those men were not what Mauryl had sent him to find, and because, all the same, they had waked important Words in him Lanfarnesse, and Rangers, and Elwynim, that echoed and kept echoing and would not let him sit down and rest. They feared Shadows, which told him the Shadows did come into this place, and therefore he still had them to fear.
He heard frogs still predicting rain. He listened for Owlʼs return, and he had a great deal to tell Owl, who, however sullen, was far friendlier to him than men had shown themselves, and whose presence he felt as a bond to Ynefel itself.
If those had not been polite or proper men, there must be better ones. Words had shown him Houses, and he had not found that sort of men that lived in Houses, not yet, and certainly not at that fireside. Words had shown him Fields, and this thicket was certainly not that place.
Most of all the thought of Fields had shown him great Walls, and a keep very like Ynefel.
That was what he looked to find. That was what he suddenly believed he was searching for.
He walked until he could scarcely keep his feet under him, rested and walked on. He smelled nothing more of men and heard nothing more of Owl, but he was looking to find Men of gentler kind, and most of all a Place and a Tower like Ynefel.
With a room and a soft clean bed, and a supper, and most of all a wizard who would know what to do next.
CHAPTER 8
Morning came as the frogs predicted, with a sprinkling of rain through the leaves, a gray dim dawn, at first, with a slight rumbling of thunder. He ate most of the bread, fearing it might be ruined if the skies opened and poured as they had a habit of doing at Ynefel.
But before he was quite through, the sun was breaking through the clouds and shining through the leaves, dappling the gray stone of the roadway in patterns of light and shadow. Rain dripped at every breath of wind.
The birds sang, his clothing dried on his body and his hair began to blow lightly in the wind as he plucked the leaves and twigs from it.
And before he quite realized what he was seeing, with the cresting of another hill the trees grew thinner, gave way to brush, and then a vision fraught with Words to broad Meadows, where the Road ran, mostly overgrown with grass. The sky was dotted with gray-bottomed clouds that occasionally obscured the sun and sent patterns of shadow wandering the smooth hillsides.
He had never seen a meadow. He only knew the Word. Everything he saw was marvelous and new. He walked the Road, picking his way along the grass-chinked stones, listening to new birds, Lark and Linnet, marking their flight across an open sky.
Then, as his Road crossed between two hills, he saw a different land spread before him a patchwork like the quilt on his own bed, in green and brown. Fields, he thought, and knew he had come indeed to something different, and a Place where Men lived.
He walked down to that land until it became browns and greens around him. His Road in places became a muddy track lined with fences some stones of which were white, like the Road so the men had stolen them to make their own stoneworks, and he hoped they had not removed all the Road ahead.
Men were working in the fields. They stopped, mopped their brows and stared at him from a distance, but they came no closer.
In time he came to a Village that lay some distance from the Road. But his Road did not lead him toward it, so he decided that this was not the Place he was looking for. The houses were squat, and the color of their stonework matched the thatch of their roofs. He saw people very distantly, and a track did lead that way, but he had come to grief once from leaving the Road, so he did not let curiosity or hunger lead him aside.
He walked until dusk, and found green Apples on a tree and had two, leaving the Road just to cross a fence. He supposed that no one would mind. He slept by the roadside, under the shelter of that rough stone wall, as much shelter of stone as he had yet found on the Road, and in the morning had another apple, and one to take with him. They made his stomach hurt, but it was a different kind of hurt than having nothing at all to eat, and they eased his thirst.
He found berry bushes, and had a handful of berries. He found a brook, and drank.
He passed other villages, which never sat near the Road, as the fences never blocked it. He met a man on the Road, once, the only man he had seen on the Road at all. Good day, he said, and that man dropped his load of sticks and climbed over the rubble wall and ran away rather than pass him, so he thought that he had been in his proper Place, but the man had not been in his, and the man had run for fear of consequences. He was sorry. He would have liked to ask questions. But at least the man had flung nothing at him, nor brandished a knife, and he walked as quickly as he could to be away from the village toward which the man had run.
But no one chased him and no one else appeared on the Road.
He passed another night beneath a berry hedge, and smelled woodfires on the wind, until the stars were turned in their courses. Remembering the man running and now smelling bread baking made him feel lonely and hungry, and reminded him that a few apples and a handful or two of berries was a very small sort of supper. The bread he had had from the men by the fire now seemed a very fine thing despite the grit, but it was long gone, and he hoped for more apples or more berries.
He walked in the morning, hungry and finding nothing at all to eat. His clothes, he had noticed, hung loosely on him, and despite his washing, showed increasing mud stains. He shaved every day. He had the razor and the little mirror, and when he found water to drink, as he did find frequently now, daily he would shave and wash and make himself presentable as Mauryl had taught him. But his face was going more hollow about the cheeks and more shadowed about the eyes, and he knew he looked more desperate and more untidy than he had begun.
On the third day since the Bridge, he came to a high place from which he saw the fields divided up in a great circle about a hill and a sprawl of walls and higher walls.
Fortress, he thought, and in his experience of strangers by now, he stood in some dread and doubt what he ought to do next.
But his Road, now a straggle of white stones, went inexorably toward it and, that being what Mauryl had said, as the Road was going, he gathered his courage and kept walking.