“Do I look as if I have a garden or orchard hidden in my fashion wear?” snapped the crone, flouncing her tattered clothes.
Camille gritted her teeth, yet she managed a smile. “Nay, madam, you do not. And neither do I have aught in my rucksack to use as a lure.”
“Well, then, dearie,” sneered the crone, “that’s no plan at all, now is it?”
“Madam, perhaps I should simply leave you and your horse to your own devices.”
At this the crone wailed, and once more the nag began to flounder.
Gritting her teeth, Camille whipped off her gloves and cloak and dropped them onto her rucksack, her vest following swiftly after. “There’s nothing for it but that I must wade in and push from behind, while you pull from the front. But I’ll not do it in my clothes.”
The crone was astonished. “You would wade in for me?” “More for your horse, I believe,” replied Camille, plop-ping to the ground and jerking off her boots.
Camille shed her clothes quickly, snatching her jerkin over her head and stripping away her breeks, both jerkin and breeks turned inside out in her haste. At the sight of such, the crone’s mad eyes widened and spittle flew from her gaping mouth, and as Camille disrobed, the crone danced about and in her crackling singsong she chanted:
“For some ’tis like a terrible shout,
When all are worn the wrong side out,
Including cloaks to withstand the weather,
And breeches and vests made of soft leather,
As well as a fine silky-smooth jerkin,
And two leather gloves made for working.”
With each thing named, the crone shuffled her feet and hopped up and down and took up the associated garment, and if it was not then inside out she turned it such and laid it down just so.
“But not a pair of good sturdy boots;
These you must wear upon the wrong foots.
They quail before the horrible sight,
And many will run in headlong fright.”
With this, and jigging to and fro, she set the boots side by side, with the left one on the right, and the right one on the left. Then wild-eyed she looked at Camille, the girl now completely undressed, and the old woman crooned:
“Even when night lies on the sward,
Wrong-side-out stands sentinel ward,
Much like iron for a wicked few,
Better than iron for me and you.”
With that her chant was finished, and she twirled ’round and ’round and crowed madly at the sky.
“Madam, take up the rope, for I am ready,” said Camille, and she gingerly stepped into the dreadful-smelling mire, then waded forward with purpose, slogging through the slime and water and churned-up muck and the squishing sludge beneath. Nearly to her armpits in the reeking quag, and pushing a turgid wake before her, Camille struggled to the rear of the nag. She turned and put her shoulder to the beast’s hindquarters and called out, “Pull!” while at the same time shoving with all her strength. The animal leapt forward, and Camille fell flat on her face into the evil-smelling slough and plunged completely under. Up she came, spluttering and wiping her eyes, and on the shore the crone hooted and pointed at Camille with one hand while slapping her thigh with the other. The nag, now free, stood on the road behind her.
And even as Camille, grinding her teeth, pushed toward the shore, a sluggish wave preceding, the crone leapt to the swayed back of the animal and called out to Camille, “Be thankful for my gift, and remember what I told you!” She dug in her heels and away trotted the nag.
Gift? What gift? And what did she tell me, other than the ludicrous babblings of someone quite daft?
When Camille scrambled onto dry land, she looked down the road after the crone and mare, but they were nowhere to be seen.
Where…?-That broken-down nag simply wasn’t that fast, was it?
Sighing, Camille turned back toward her inside-out clothes and noted for the first time just how they were arrayed: with the reversed-left-right boots standing, and the wrong-side-out cloak upon the ground behind them, the hem toward the boots and the hood away; the inside-out breeks were stretched out on the cloak, legs toward the boots, with the inside-out jerkin just above and dressed in the wrong-side-out vest; the inside-out gloves lay on the ground at the ends of the jerkin sleeves. It was almost as if all the garments had been laid out to represent a person. Shaking her head at the old woman’s madness, Camille wondered just how in sweet Mithras’s name she would ever get clean enough to don the clothes again. She looked down at her slime-slathered, muck-laden body, and that’s when she discovered the leeches.
The bogland echoed with a prolonged scream, followed by some well-chosen words.
After wafting floating scum aside, Camille washed herself in fairly clean water from a pool she found along the opposite berm; then using some of her coursing rags, and a bit of the salve from the jar, she finally stanched the bleeding. With that done, she turned her clothes right-side-out and dressed. In spite of the scent of blood in the air, no mosquitoes nor gnats nor biting flies came to call. “Perhaps, Scruff, it’s the dreadful stench of the churned-up quag. Then again, perhaps not. Another mystery of Faery, eh?” She knelt and opened her rucksack and looked behind the secret panel; just as with her money belt, all was there. “Well, Scruff, at least the old crone wasn’t a thief,” said Camille as she closed the rucksack again, “though I was a fool for undressing and wading into the mire without thinking that she might be. Why, she could have run off with everything I own, and I could have done nought about it. And this after the warnings in Ardon that thieves and such lie along this road. Indeed, I was a fool.”
Camille slung her goods and took up her stave and set Scruff to her shoulder, and smartly down the road she went, completely free of blood-sucking mosquitoes and whining gnats and biting flies, though they swarmed in the sloughs at hand.
Slowly, so slowly, the road ascended, and the mire to either side diminished. In early afternoon, Camille paused for a meal, and she augmented Scruff’s diet of slaughtered insects with a bit of millet seed. But soon she pressed on at a quick-march pace, for she hoped to be free of this dreadful and dismal quag ere the setting of the sun. And still the land continued its gradual rise, the swamp slowly retreating, though here and there stagnant pools did yet lie, where clouds of gnats and mosquitoes and biting flies swarmed, though they bothered not Camille and Scruff.
Toward evening, at last Camille emerged from the bogland and came into a forest, the road now wending among the trees, the land rising here and falling there and running level for stretches. As twilight drew down on the land “Oh, Scruff, did you see?”
— flickering among the trees there sped a flash of white.
Is that a rider? The old woman on the swayback? Ah, no, it moves entirely too fast to be that broken-down nag.
Then the white flash was gone.
Camille continued on a bit more, and she came to the edge of a rugged hill country.
“Enough walking for today, Scruff. Night draws nigh.”
Scruff didn’t answer, sound asleep on her shoulder as he was.
Camille stepped into a small clearing just off the road, and therein she made camp. And she fell aslumber while eating her meal beside a very small fire.
“Oh, Alain,” Camille murmured, as he ran his hands up under her blouse and slipped them about her waist. Whatever else she might have dreamed, only that one thing did she remember when she wakened chill in the night, her cloak gone, her jerkin pulled out from her breeks, her money belt gone as well. Gasping in alarm, she sat up, and, by the light of the waning half-moon and the yet-glowing coals of her fire, she saw that her rucksack and Lady Sorciere’s stave and her waterskin and bedroll were gone as well. Even as she started to call out to Scruff-the bird fast asleep on a nearby branch-in the silence of the night, she heard soft laughter, and the sound of some one or ones scrabbling off through the underbrush in the deep moonshadows, fleeing with the ill-gotten gains.