‘Look, girl,’ the rider said from the rags about his dark face. ‘You sit behind me. That way, you can — ’
‘—she can put her hands where she wants!’ cried the bearded youth. His face and the squat one’s held the wide grins of stupid boys.
Pryn decided that, of the three, the bearded youngster was the fool. Till then she’d vaguely thought that, since his age was closest to hers, he might be the easiest to enlist for help. But he talked foolishly and was probably too intimidated by the older two anyway.
Her rider reined. She swung her leg over the horse’s neck and slid down to the road. The squat one backstepped his horse to give her another unwanted hand. (Remember, Pryn thought, as she came up behind one smooth and one scarred shoulder, within the week you have ridden a dragon…) Filthy and frayed vine cord knotted the rags to her rider’s head. Those scars? A mountain girl living in harsh times, Pryn had seen women and men with wounds from injury and accident. What was before her, though, suggested greater violence than the mishandling of plowhead or hunting knife. She put her hands on the rider’s flanks. His flesh was hard and hot. She could feel one scar, knobby and ropy, under her hand’s heel.
Slavery?
The horse trotted.
The flapping headdress smelled of oil and animals. Pryn leaned to the side to see ahead — mostly trees now, with the road’s ruts descending into them. Gripping the horse’s sides with her knees and the rider’s with her hands, she settled into the motion.
Once she thought: A beautiful young queen, abducted on the road by fearful, romantic bandits…But they were not romantic. She was not beautiful. No, this was not the time for tale-teller’s stuff. It was a bit fearful. But as yet, she reflected, she was not full of fear. From the threat of death to the straying hands, it all had too much the air of half-hearted obligation.
Once more she moved her head from behind the flapping cloth and called to the bearded boy, who had been riding beside her almost ten minutes, ‘Where is this Gorgik the Liberator? Go on, tell me.’
Clearly, from boyish excitement, he wanted to. But he glanced at his companions. As clearly, she had been right about his intimidation. ‘You’ll see soon enough,’ he called back across the little abyss of hooves, dust, and wind.
The shift from country to city Pryn never quite caught. Now there was a river by the road. The horses’ hoofbeats changed timbre. She looked down — yes, the road itself along which they trotted was, now, paved with flat stones set in hard mud. She looked up to see green-tiled decorations interspersed with terra-cotta castings on an upper cornice of a wealthy home beyond a stone wall lapped with vines. On the other side of the road she saw an even higher roof, over a higher wall, moving up toward them as the other fell behind.
And the river was gone.
‘You wanted to know where Gorgik the Liberator is?’ her rider called back. ‘Look there!’
They wheeled off the main highway.
Ahead, armed men stood before a gate in another wall. Above, Pryn saw the top story of another great house. Much of the decorative tiling had fallen away. Behind the crenellations a dozen men ambled about the roof, some with spears, some with bows. At the corner one sat on a cracked carving — dragon or eagle she couldn’t tell — looking down into the yard.
The younger and older either side, Pryn’s rider reined at the wooden door in the stone wall, which was half again as high as the youngster on his horse.
The squat one bawled out in a voice much too loud simply to be speaking to the men in leather helmets either side of the gate, with their broad knives hanging at their hips: ‘Go in and tell your master, Gorgik the Liberator, that three brave fellows have come to pledge hands and hearts to whatever end he would put them!’
With the blue eyes and frizzy blond beard of a barbarian — rare enough in northern Ellamon to cause comment when you saw one in the market — a guard stepped toward them, pushed up his helmet; and bawled back: ‘What names might he know you by?’
‘Tell your great and gracious master, Gorgik, that the Southern Fox — ’ he gestured toward Pryn’s rider — ‘and the Red Badger — ’ which was, apparently, the bearded boy — ‘and myself, the Western Wolf — ’ the thick hand fell against his own black rug of a chest — ‘have come to serve him! Ask him what he knows of us, and whether the tales of our exploits that have preceded us are sufficiently impressive to allow us to join his company! Let him consider! We shall return in a few hours to seek admittance!’
The barbarian guard nodded toward Pryn, then said in a perfectly ordinary voice: ‘There’re four of you…?’
In an equally ordinary voice the Western Wolf said: ‘Oh. I forgot the kid.’ He turned back to the gate, took a breath, and bawled: ‘Tell him that the Blue Heron is also among our number and to consider her for his cause!’
Then Wolf, Badger, and Fox, with the Heron behind (thinking of Raven and capital letters), wheeled from the gate. Dust struck up from the road high as the horses’ haunches.
As the great houses drifted by her behind high walls and palm clusters, what Pryn thought was: Here, I am suddenly in this world of men, made to ride when I want to walk, touched when I want to be left alone, and given a new name when I’ve just learned to write my old one, all under some fanciful threat of death because I might be a spy. (Just what tales, she wondered, had they been listening to?) I don’t like it at all, she thought. I don’t like it.
As unclear as the shift between country and city had been, Pryn was equally uncertain — as she was thinking all this — where the change had come between suburb and center. But when the horses clattered across a paved and populous avenue to splash into a muddy alley of stone houses with thatched shacks between, she realized it had.
They crossed another street.
Down another alley water flashed between masts.
They turned onto another avenue. Noise and confusion dazzled her. Living on the edge of a mountain town, without ever really considering herself part of them, Pryn had known the gossipings, prejudices, and rigidities of town life that had played through Ellamon’s quiet streets. But here, the hustle and hallooing made her wonder: How, here, could anyone know anyone?
Twice in one block the Fox’s horse danced aside to avoid someone, first a woman who dashed from the crowds at one side of the street, a four-foot basket strapped to her back, to plunge among people on the other side; second, three youngsters chasing after a black ball. Pryn clung to the Fox’s twisting back. (Naked as Pryn’s rider and muddy to the knees, the little girl grabbed up the black pellet, which had ceased bouncing to roll a ragged course between cobbles. With a barbarian boy in a torn smock tripping behind, the children fled off down another side street.) The horses began to trot once more beside the hurrying men and women; one man hailed a friend across the road; another ran after someone just departed — to tell her one last thing.
When the white-haired woman left the corner, she was deep in conversation with a younger, who wore a red scarf for a sash. A man and a woman servant behind held decorated parasols over them — or tried to. The sunlit edge kept slipping back and forth across the older woman’s elaborate coif and silver combs. Now she pushed bracelets and blue sleeves up her arms and turned to another woman in her party with short hair incongruously pale as goat’s cream. This one — not much more than a girl, really — wore leather straps across bare shoulders; a strap ran down between abrupt, small breasts. She carried several knives at her belt and walked the hot stones barefoot. Pryn saw beyond the scarred shoulder she clung to that another woman servant had despaired of shading this sunken-eyed, cream-haired creature. (Was she yet eighteen? Certainly she was no more than twenty.) She stepped away here, then off there, now looking into a basket of nuts some porter carried by her, now turning to answer the older woman with the combs. A woman at least forty, the servant frowned at her and finally let the parasol shaft fall back on her own shoulder.