She hesitated a moment, then replied hesitantly, “I—I don’t think I’ve ever been here before. I—I just don’t know.” Tears welled in her eyes.
The two centaurs saw that she was in some distress and rushed up to her.
“What’s the matter?” the girl asked in a high-pitched adolescent voice.
She started to cry. “I don’t know, I can’t remember anything,” she sobbed.
“There, there,” the boy crooned, and began to stroke her back. “Get it all out, then tell us what’s going on.”
The stroking had a calming effect, and she straightened up and wiped her eyes with her hand.
“I don’t know,” she managed, coughing a little. “I—I just woke up down the trail and I can’t remember anything—who I am, where I am, even what I am.”
The boy, who was even larger in comparison to her than he was to his companion, examined her face and head, and felt the skull.
“Does it hurt anywhere when I do this?” he asked.
“No,” she told him. “Tickles a little all over, that’s all.”
He lifted up her face and stared hard into her eyes.
“No glaze,” he commented, mostly to himself. “No sign of injury. Fascinating.”
“Aw, come on, Jol, what’d you expect to find?” his companion asked.
“Some sign of injury or shock,” he responded, almost in a clinical tone. “Here, girl, stick out your tongue. No, I mean it. Stick it out.”
She did, feeling somewhat foolish, and he examined it. It was a big tongue, flat and broad, and a gray-pink in color.
“All right, you can stick it back in now,” he told her. “No coating, either. If you’d have had some kind of shock or disease, it’d show.”
“Maybe she’s been witched, Jol,” the spotted gray centaur suggested, and drew back a little.
“Maybe,” he conceded, “but, if so, it’s nothin’ to concern us.”
“What d’you think we oughta do?” his girlfriend asked.
Jol turned and for the first time Julee saw he had some kind of saddlebag strapped around his waist.
“First we take our shower,” he answered, removing an irregular bar of what must have been soap, some cloths, and towels from the bag, then unstrapping it and letting it fall to the ground. “Then we’ll take our mystery girl here to the village and let somebody smarter than we are take over.”
And they proceeded to do just that. After some more hesitation, she joined them, following their actions and sharing a towel.
“You don’t have to get too dry,” the girl, whose name was Dal, told her. “You’ll air-dry pretty good.”
Together the three of them set off back down the trail.
As they left the forest the village and lands beyond came into view.
It was a beautiful land, she thought. The stream flowed out of majestic, snow-capped mountains which spread out on both sides to reveal a rich valley and gently rolling hills.
The village—a collection of rough but sturdy log buildings by the side of a blue-green lake—bustled with activity. The fields were properly plowed and planted, and she saw a few centaurs checking and tending between stalks of unknown grain.
The whole place didn’t seem as if it could support, or had, more than a few hundred people, she thought and commented on that to her companions.
Jol laughed. “That proves you must be from down-lake,” he said. “Some pretty big communities down there. Actually, there’s close to a thousand in the valley, here, but we’re spread out all over the landscape. Only fifty or sixty live in town all the time.”
The main street was broad and maintained much like the trails, of which she had seen quite a few, a thick covering of sawdust making the paving.
Most of the buildings had an open side facing the street. The largest building was the first one they reached. It contained a huge forge on which several male and female centaurs worked hot metal. She saw with curiosity one woman lift a hind leg while a brawny male, wearing a protective bib, hammered something on her foot, apparently painlessly.
Other buildings proved to be stores selling farm implements, seed, and the like. There was even a barbershop and a bar, closed at the moment but unmistakable in its huge kegs and large steins.
“Is it always this warm and humid here?” she asked Jol.
He chuckled again in that friendly way he had about him. “No, this is a four-season hex,” he explained enigmatically. “Then we all get out our gammot fur coats and hats and gloves and romp in the cold snow.”
A gammot , she discovered, was one of the large rodents she had spied down by the stream.
“It must be a huge coat,” she remarked, and Dal and Jol both laughed.
“You really do have amnesia!” Dal responded. “The hair on our bodies and a nice, thick layer of fat put on in summer and fall are pretty good insulators. Only our hairless parts need protection.”
“You can see the fireplaces and chimneys,” Jol pointed out. “In the fall the fronts are put back on and they become warm as today inside.”
Julee started to ask what happened when it rained, but she saw that the roofs and ledges were angled and the buildings so placed that it would take a really terrible storm to get much rain inside.
“It looks as if anyone dishonest could steal anything he wanted here,” Julee commented.
They both stopped and looked at her strangely. “That just isn’t done here—not by any Dillian,” he huffed.
His reaction startled her, and she apologized. “I—I’m sorry. I don’t know why I think like that.”
“We do get some alien traders from other hexes in once in a while and they’ve tried taking stuff,” Dal put in to defuse the issue. “Won’t do ’em no good here, though. Only way in is by the lake—forty kilometers, almost as deep as it is long. Nobody can beat us in the woods, and anybody who wants to climb six kilometers of mountain at steep grade and below zero temperatures would lose more than he could take.”
They reached a small building about two-thirds of the way down the thirty or so buildings of the town’s lone street. A wooden sign hung on a post, a hexagonal symbol of two small trees flanking a huge one, burned in with some sort of tool. Inside stood an elderly centaur with long, white hair and unkempt beard reaching down below his nipples. He had once been coal black, she realized, but now the body hair was flecked with silvery white.
He would look very officious standing there at his cluttered desk, she thought, amused, if he wasn’t sound asleep and snoring loudly.
“That’s Yomax,” Jol told her. “The closest thing we’ve got to a government in the village. He’s sort of the mayor, postmaster, chief forester, and game warden here. He always opens up at seven o’clock like the duty book says, but since the boat doesn’t get in until eleven-thirty, he usually goes back to sleep until just before then.” He yelled, “Hey! Yomax! Wake up! Official business!”
The old man stirred, then wiped his eyes and stretched, not only his arms but also his entire long body.
“Hmph! Whazzit?” he snorted. “Some damned brat’s always foolin’ with me,” he muttered, then turned to see who stood there.
His eyes fixed on Wu Julee, and he suddenly came fully awake.
“Well! Hello!” he greeted in a friendly but puzzled tone. “I don’t remember seein’ you around before.”
“She’s lost her memory, Yomax,” Jol explained. “We found her down by Three Falls.”
“She don’t know nothin’ about nothin’,” Dal put in. “Didn’t even know ’bout winter and coats and all.”
The old man frowned, and came up to her. Ignoring Jol’s protests that he had done it already, Yomax proceeded to go through the same examination Julee had had earlier—with similar negative results.