"Enthusiastically! He daren't let Zath know that, of course. He was hoping that little old me would achieve what all the gods of the world were scared to try. Well, I won't!"
Alice groaned. They had rounded the corner. The road ahead was straight—and straight up.
"Oh, I remember this bit,” Edward said. “The gate's at the top."
"I hope my heart will stand it. Do you think we ought to be roped?"
They began to climb. Edward continued to push both bikes, yet he still had enough wind to talk.
"Karzon shipped us out of the city, disguised as Tinkerfolk. They're very much like our Gypsies, only more primitive, because the whole culture is more primitive. They wander all over the Vales, trading, stealing, spying. They're all blond as Scandinavians. It's said they abandon any baby who isn't, in the belief that it must be a half-breed. I wouldn't put it past them. Dosh was borderline, only just blond enough. He probably had a rough childhood because of that.
"By the time I woke up, he'd already been in a fight. He'd killed one, wounded three others, and was just about a goner from lack of blood himself. I still had some of the mana the army had given me, and I used it to revive him instead of curing my own headache, which at the time felt very altruistic, believe me! They were a rough-and-ready bunch of scoundrels."
Obviously! Alice had no breath to comment.
Edward chuckled. “But I had an interesting summer, that year! We crossed a pass into Sitalvale, then another into Thovale, and eventually wandered over into Randorvale. I passed very close to Olympus, although of course I didn't know that, and in any case Karzon's warning to stay away from it made good sense. Dosh disappeared in Thovale. By killing a man of the tribe, he'd acquired a wife, and she was a genuine, steam-powered firecat. Or perhaps it was just the primitive living conditions he didn't like. I don't know where he went, but I'm sure Dosh will survive. He's incredible."
"How?” She panted. Running with Gypsies! She wondered what Julian Smedley would think of this confession if he knew. Or the masters at Fallow.
"Just tough! All the Tinkerfolk are, but he could out-tough most of them any day. As for morals...” Edward fell silent for a dozen paces, and apparently decided not to discuss morals. “At first they treated me as a baby, but they had accepted gold and sworn oaths to cherish me, and they kept their word. They didn't know the man who had hired them was Karzon, but they knew he was somebody to fear. I wanted to earn my keep, so I became an expert in livestock trading. Every vale seems to have a different collection of herdbeasts, none of which look anything like our horses and cattle, but they're all traded in much the same way. Charisma came in very useful there, and I cheated outrageously—a stranger can be so plausible! I could extract more money for a worn-out useless runt than even old Birfair himself could, or buy a champion for less. Eventually they came to accept me as useful, a real man."
Alice decided that her cousin had depths she had not suspected and would prefer not to know about. Julian's hair would turn white if he heard this, an English gentleman going to the dogs, becoming a vagrant huckster.
"By autumn, though, I'd had enough of rags and dirt and hunger. Ysian was pining. We were in Lappinvale by then, which at the moment is a Thargian colony. And one day I saw a man I knew."
Alice stopped to catch her breath. He looked at her with concern.
"I'm all right,” she said. “What man?"
"You can wait here while I go and see Mr. Goodfellow."
She shook her head. She wouldn't mind being winded were Edward not so confoundedly cool looking and relaxed. He turned to stare up at the hill ahead, and then peered around at the distance they had come, but his mind was away on another world. He smiled in secret amusement.
"I had never met him, but I had been told of him. In the higher, cooler vales, they have a riding beast they call ... Well, there are a lot of different names for it. It's the Rolls-Royce of Nextdoor. It's enormous, big as a rhino. It's pretty much a mammal, but it looks like a cross between a stegosaurus—that's one of the dinosaurs in The Lost World with a row of bony plates down the middle of its back.... It's a bit like that and also like a Chinese dragon. It has scales, yet it's warm-blooded. It eats grass, and it's a wonderful steed—gentle, intelligent, willing, the only thing better than a terrestrial horse. I thought of them as dragons, so that name will do.
"One day I saw a herd of them just outside a village we had been cadging off. There were tents there, and I guessed soon enough that this was the encampment of a man who traded in them. I sauntered over to take a closer look.
"I got shouted at, of course. I was a tinker. I had bleached hair and blue eyes and my clothes were mostly holes held together by hope. I would have made a scarecrow look like a lord. The wranglers tried to chase me away, because I must be a thief and a ne'er-do-well. Most of them had a little gold circle in their left earlobe, and they all wore black turbans. That told me this was the outfit Eleal had described. Ready?"
"Think so.” She began plodding again. He sauntered along at her side, still pushing a bike with each hand.
"So I withdrew to a safe distance and squatted down by some bushes and waited. After an hour or two, the man I wanted came marching back from the village. He was very big, and he had an enormous copper-colored beard. You know the legend of the sailor who has a girl in every port? Well, this fellow has one in every village.... I assume that's where he'd been, but perhaps I'm doing him an injustice. He may have been there on business. I doubt it. Anyway, I cut him off before he reached his tents.
"He barked an obscenity and tried to go round me.
"I said, ‘T'lin Dragontrader? We almost met, once.’ That stopped him!
"He scowled at me and said something I won't repeat.
"I said, ‘How are things with the Service these days?'
"He went back two steps with his eyes almost popping out of his head. I knew that he was an agent of the Service, you see, because Eleal had told me. He's a native, not a stranger, and he spies for the political branch. He threw some sort of password at me then—'The grass grows softer when the rain is cool,’ or some such gibberish.
"I said, ‘Frightfully sorry, but I don't know the answer.’ I gave him another code that I'd been told once. He recognized it, although he didn't know the answer, because it was for the religious branch and he's political. In the end I just said, ‘I am D'ward Liberator.'
"I thought he was going to faint. We sat down beside the bushes, and we had a long chat. He admitted that the Service was hunting for me—they'd heard of the fall of Lemod, too, of course, and realized I was still alive. He knew they were not the only ones after me. I asked him to pass the word. Then I remembered Ysian and decided that being a dragon trader would be nicer than being a tinker. So I informed T'lin that he had just acquired two more hands.
"He didn't argue, actually. He's a very loyal follower of the Undivided—a likable rogue, very shrewd. I went and got Ysian. Old Birfair and the gang were genuinely sorry to lose us, and I had to write a note to Karzon, testifying that they had fulfilled their side of the bargain. I doubt if any of them could read, but they were grateful for the insurance. Then we went to T'lin's camp and put on some respectable clothes and became dragon traders. Look out."
They moved to the side of the road as a car came growling up the hill to pass them. It was a bright red roadster, puffing stinking clouds of exhaust. The driver wore goggles and a sporty cap.
"May his radiator boil and his tires all burst!” Edward said cheerfully as he strode out again. “Only a real bounder would drive a motor that color. We wandered around the Vales a bit, and settled down in little Mapvale for the winter. By then I'd been almost two years on Nextdoor and was getting pretty desperate, but we got no word back from Olympus before the passes closed. I loved the dragons, though."