‘Well,’ Vatry said. ‘I’ve heard of stranger things in this strange and terrible land.’ She looked at Pryn a little sideways. ‘I tell you what. We’ll go to the director. I’ll ask — just once, mind you — if you can come along. I won’t insist. I’m not going to make a nuisance of myself just for your sake. If he says yes, fine. But if he says no, you’ve got to promise me you’ll go on about your business as best you can and not make any fuss.’
‘If he’ll just let me ride along with you for fifty stades — ’
‘We’ll ask,’ Vatry said. ‘He may say yes; he may say no. Now come on.’ She stood and stepped around Pryn.
On the rumpled bedding, where the sack had lain, was a very long knife. It wasn’t a full sword; but two inches beyond the hilt, the blade became…two blades! Both bore the file marks of sharpening on inner and outer edges.
‘Vatry — Oh, Please…one more question?’
‘What?’
‘That is the kind of blade they use in the west — in the Western Crevasse?’
Vatry looked put out. ‘How would I know such things?’
‘I just thought maybe, with your accent — I mean it isn’t southern, it certainly isn’t northern. And it doesn’t sound like island speech — you might be one of those women from…?’ Pryn suddenly wished she hadn’t spoken. She was overcome with the conviction Vatry would turn on her and accuse her of spying from the bushes. She felt herself start to deny it before the accusation was made, and thought desperately: By all the nameless gods, let me be silent! Let me keep still!
And the real Vatry before her, who after all was as good-hearted and sentimental as it was possible to be in such primitive times and still survive, said: ‘It’s just a prop. For the skits. Like this thing — !’ and she pulled the collar from Pryn’s hand, held it up, then tossed it back on the bed, where it clinked against the twinned sword. ‘Come on. And no more about this silliness or I’ll send you on your way right now!’
Cheeks still rouged, eyelids still gilded, the fat man had doffed his feathers for a cloak of coarse canvas and was directing the loading of the scenery being hauled down from the middle wagon, now the skit was over.
Vatry said: ‘My friend here’s in some trouble, it seems, and needs a ride north. She was wondering if you’d let her come along with us — at least for a while.’
‘I wouldn’t think so!’ the fat man said. ‘We can’t just take up strangers like that. There’s hardly enough room for us.’ He looked at Pryn through his fantastic make-up — then smiled! ‘Oh…the little girl from the Kolhari market! How in the world did you end up in this forsaken backwater?’
The recognition made hope leap. ‘Well, I — ’
But the fat man went on: ‘I’m sorry, my puffy little partridge, but we can’t give a ride to every stray we run into — you understand.’
‘I’ll work,’ Pryn said. ‘I’ll do anything!’
The fat man paused, tongue filling one rouged cheek. ‘Well, as I remember, you don’t play the drum very well. You’re obviously not a dancer. Can you sing?’
‘I never — ’
‘Then you’re not a singer.’ He turned to Vatry. ‘You know, we’re in enough trouble as it is, what with Alyx taking off like that last week. I’m trying to keep all the accounts in my head, as well as work up dialogue for the new skit, which nobody seems to be able to — or wants to — remember lines for. Once I make them up, I can’t remember them. I’ve got too many other things to think about if I want to keep this troupe together. Now if your friend here could write down words and keep accounts like Alyx — but she’s only an ignorant mountain girl who’s somehow gotten herself lost in the country. My heart goes out to her, but — ’
‘But I — !’ Pryn interrupted.
‘But you what?’
This is how, after her days among the changeable mysteries of the barbaric south, Pryn came to be riding with the mummers on the north road at evening. (‘I think she’d better stay out of sight until we’re actually under way,’ Vatry said. The fat man said: ‘Ah, it’s one of those, is it? Well, it’s not the first time for us. I doubt it’ll be the last.’ Besides her dictation, accounting, and dialogue coaching duties, at their next performance stop, the director told her, Pryn would take a few gold coins into the audience. During the collection she would wave one, then another over her head and make a show of tossing them into the passing cloaks or baskets. Pryn said: ‘Oh…!’ And when they were actually rolling down the beach, staring out a chink in the wagon door, she passed as close to Ardra’s face as yours is to this book! He was turning to Lavik, who pulled him aside, laughing, and said, ‘Watch out for the baby — !’ He carried screeching Petal.) They didn’t put her in with Vatry. There were already too many other people sleeping in that wagon.
The bed she got was just above one of the musicians’; yes, the one she’d passed with the coins — who turned out to be as well the third wagon’s driver. When they were a goodly handful of stades along the north road, Pryn climbed up the ladder at the wagon’s end and out the roof-trap. She perched in the corner, dangling her feet inside.
The driver sat forward at the edge, holding the reins and not quite humming.
A wagon joggled ahead, beneath tall trees, toward the hillcrest. Behind fields there was just a sight of sea. Clouds banked before them, silver and iron, walls and pillars, towers and terraces, shape behind shape.
‘It looks like a city,’ Pryn said.
Topping the hill, they started down.
The driver glanced back. She had broad cheekbones under odd, foreign eyes. One of her flutes was strapped behind her shoulder. ‘We still have cities to go through before we reach Kolhari — little cities, to be sure. Towns, is more like it. Villages…’ The wagon joggled. She turned to the horses.
‘That’s the city you must learn to read,’ Pryn said. ‘That’s the city you must write your name on — before you can make progress in a real one; at least I think so!’
The driver laughed without looking back. ‘You’re a strange one.’
Pryn watched the clouds.
‘I hear that you can,’ the driver said. ‘Read and write, I mean.’
‘I do all sorts of thing: read, write, free slaves, ride dragons — kill, if I have to.’ Pryn guessed the driver was about twenty-five.
The foreign musician flipped her reins. ‘I wish someone would figure a way to write down music. That’d be something! Then I could be sure to remember my tunes.’
‘I don’t see why it can’t be done.’ Pryn thought: Now I’ve had all sorts of experiences that might be of use to the Liberator among his causes. (The astrolabe was gone, yes, but she had retrieved the iron collar from Vatry’s bed. Perhaps she could fix the lock.) Perhaps when I get to Kolhari…‘If you can write down words,’ she said, suddenly, ‘I don’t see why we can’t find a way to write down…’ And hadn’t some successful musician been pointed out to her in the Kolhari market? ‘I’ll work on it!’ At Kolhari, she might just stop by to see Madame Keyne — oh, if only for a while…
The driver laughed.
Pryn sat a long time staring at the sky.
Now, old city of dragons and dreams, of doubts and terrors and all wondrous expectation, despite your rule by the absent fathers, it’s between us two!