Rat frowned and shook his head. "If I was as dumb as you, I'd've died before I learned to walk. What names did you give him?"
"None," Xantcha replied. "He didn't ask."
"You need a keeper, Xantcha," Rat muttered as he walked away from her. "You haven't got the sense Avohir gives to ants and worms."
Rat could have run, or tried to, but chose to get out of the town instead. The farmer waved for Xantcha to join them.
"Not saying I believe you, either of you," he said, offering Xantcha his plain woven cloak to wear instead of
her fancier one. "Climb in quickly now. These are strange times ... bad times. A man doesn't put his trust in words; I put mine in Avohir. I'll get you out of Medran, and Avohir be my judge if I'm wrong."
Xantcha considered stowing her sword in the wagon bed where Rat rode, with straw and empty baskets piled all around him to hide the chain. But her slave had a flair for storytelling. His imagination made her nervous.
"You're not wrong, good man," Rat said cheerfully as he rearranged the baskets. "Not about my cousin and me, not about the times, either. Two months ago, I had everything. Then one night I went carousing with friends who weren't friends and lost it all. Woke up in chains. I told them who I was: Ratepe, eldest son of Mideah from Pincar City, and said my father would ransom me; got a swift kick and a broken rib. I'd given up hope months ago, but I hadn't reckoned on my cousin, Arnuwan."
Xantcha jumped when Rat slapped her between the shoulders. Arnuwan was probably a less conspicuously foreign name than Xantcha, and the moment Rat introduced it, the farmer relaxed and offered his.
"Assor," he said and embraced Rat, not her.
Xantcha was used to following someone else. She'd followed Urza for over three thousand years, but Rat was different. Rat smiled and told Assor easy tales of pranks he and Arnuwan had pulled on their elders. He was very persuasive. She would have believed him herself, if she hadn't known that she was supposed to be Arnuwan. Of course, maybe there was an Arnuwan, and maybe Rat's only lie was that he didn't look at her while he was spinning out his tales. Maybe he was harmless, but Xantcha, who was nowhere near as harmless as she pretended to be, hadn't survived Phyrexia, Urza, and countless other perils, by assuming that anything was harmless.
She kept her sword close and palmed a few black-metal coins that hadn't come from any king or prince's mint. Then, as Assor called home to his harnessed horse, she settled in for the ride.
Silence hung thick among them. Ordinary folk going about their late-afternoon affairs looked up as they passed. Xantcha could think of nothing to say except that she longed to be in the air, headed back to the cottage, neither of which were safe subjects for conversation.
Then Rat asked the farmer, "Do you keep sheep in your fallows, or do you grow peas?" He followed that question with another and another until he'd lured the fanner into an animated discussion about the proper way to plow a field. The farmer favored straight furrows. Rat said a sunwise spiral toward the center was better. They were in mid-argument when the Red-Stripes waved the wagon through the gate.
As they cleared the first rise beyond the town walls, even Assor realized what Rat had done and while Xantcha willed away her armor he asked:
"Where are you from, lad? The truth ... no more of your lies. You're no one's cousin, and I'll wager you're no farmer either, despite your talk. You're too clever by half to be village-bred."
Rat grinned and told a different story. "I read, once, how Hatu-san the Blind, had escaped from a besieged city by
talking about the weather. It seemed worth trying."
"Read about it, eh?" Assor asked before Xantcha could say that she'd never heard of Hatusan the Blind. "Then, for certain, you're no farmer. I've never seen a book but Avohir's holy book and I listen 'stead of read. Is your name truly Ratepe, eldest son of Mideah?"
Xantcha was watching Rat closely from the corner of her eye. She caught him flinching as Assor sounded out his name. His rogue's grin vanished, replaced by an empty stare that looked at nothing and gave nothing away.
"It is," he answered with a voice that was both deeper and younger than she'd heard from him before. "And Mideah, my father, was a farmer when he died-a good farmer who plowed his fields sunwise every spring and fall. But he was a lector of philosophy at Tabarna's school in Pincar City before the Shratta burnt it down... ."
If Rat's second recounting of his life was more accurate than his first, he'd had a comfortable childhood and loving parents. But his cozy world had been overturned ten years ago when the Shratta swarmed the royal city, preaching that any knowledge that couldn't be read in Avohir's book wasn't knowledge at all. They had no use for libraries or schools, so they set them ablaze. Rat's father had been one of many who'd appealed to Tabarna for protection against the Shratta mobs, and to Tabarna's son, Catal, who funded the Red-Stripes to protect them. Then Catal died, poisoned by the Shratta, or so said the Red- Stripes, who'd avenged his death. The city dissolved into carnage and riot.
"We tried. Father grew a beard, Mother made jellies and sold them in the market. I stayed out of trouble-tried to stay out of trouble. But it wasn't any use. The Shratta knew our names. They caught my uncle-I called him my uncle, but he was only a friend, my father's closest friend. They drew his guts out through a hole in his belly, then they set fire to his house-after they'd locked his family inside. Our neighbors came to set our house ablaze, too. Father said that they were afraid of everything, ready to believe anything. He said it wasn't their fault, but that didn't stop the flames. We got away through a hole in the garden wall."
Xantcha wanted to believe her slave. She'd been to Pincar City where simple houses, each with a tidy garden, packed the narrow streets. She could almost see a frightened family running through moonlight, though Rat hadn't said whether they'd left by day or night. That seemed to be Rat's charm, Rat's near-magic. When he took a deep breath and started talking, everything he said rang true.
Mishra never stooped to flattery, Kayla Bin-Kroog had written nearly thirty-four hundred years earlier. He didn't have to. He had the gift of sincerity, and he was the most dangerous man I ever met.
"We fled to Avular, where my mother had kin. From Avular, we went to Gam."
Assor grunted; he'd heard of the place. "Good land for flocks and herding, not so good for grain-growing."
"Not so good for city-bred boys, either," Rat added. "But the Shratta didn't bother us. At least they didn't bother us any more than they bothered everyone else. We
paid their tithes and lived by the book and thought we were lucky."
Xantcha clenched her teeth. In all the multiverse, there was no curse to compare with feeling lucky.
"I'd taken two sheep to the next village, to a man who didn't need sheep, but he had a daughter... ." Rat almost smiled before his face hardened. "I missed the Shratta as I left, and it was over when I returned. All Gam was dead: butchered, the men with their throats slit, the women strangled with their skirts, the children with their skulls smashed against the walls... ." Rat's voice had flattened, as if he were reciting from a dull text, yet that lack of expression served to make his words all the more believable. "I found my father, my mother, my brother and sister. I shouldn't have looked. It would have been better not to know. Then I ran to the next village, but I was too late there as well. Everybody I knew was dead. I wanted to join them. I wanted to die, or join the Red- Stripes, if I could get to Avular. I knew the way, but the slavers found me the second night."