At once I turned off the road and headed straight down into the valley bottom. In the event, my clever supposition, although right, was rendered totally unnecessary. As I slithered and scraped through the trees down the slope I saw below me the same confounded thorn-ivy hedge that surrounds any boundary of cultivated land against the wild. The thorn-ivy was not of recent growth, for what was wild had once been tamed, but it gave me a few nasty jabs and stabs and scratches before I went through.
Cursing, I stood up, and there, coming down smoothly and decently from the road above, was a side road, all neat and clean and easy. And I’d gone headfirst through a thorn-ivy boma!
So much for my cleverness.
“Sink me!” I started off to let rip a whole string of the curses of two worlds and several colorful cultures
— and then I stopped. I didn’t laugh, for as you know I laugh seldom and then in situations that seem not to call for laughter as the correct critical response; but I could see the humorous side of that slide down the valleyside and the crash through the boma. I was still picking thorns out of my shoulders when I walked into the single main street of the village.
The houses were more like huts: bark-logged walls, large leaves of the papishin trailed over a ridge-pole for roofs, mere holes for doors, and of windows not a sign. A pen contained a dozen or so bosks, squealing and grunting. A few ponshos, languid in the warmth, their fleeces, although heavy in poor condition, were actually nibbling the grass growing up between the logs of the huts. There was a well. I walked straight to it. It had adobe walls and a fractured cover, but there was a rope and a bucket. I threw the bucket down, hauled it up, and drank deeply, then plunged my head in the icy water. When I lifted my head and shook it like a ponsho-trag a quavering voice said: “Llahal, dom.”
I turned slowly. I turned carefully. I still held the well bucket in both hands and I could hurl that and draw my sword with blinding speed, if I had to.
The old man confronting me did not look any kind of threat.
He was old, for his hair was white and his thin beard draggled whitely across his shrunken chest. He must be at least two hundred years old, I judged. He wore a simple garment of orange cloth around his middle, hanging to his knees, with a broad fold thrown up and over his left shoulder. For only a single instant could the foolish fancy that he was a Todalpheme attract me; but I knew he was not, for around his waist he did not have a colored tasseled rope; the robe fell loosely.
“Llahal, dom,” I replied.
His weak eyes regarded me. “You are welcome to our poor village. We have little, but what we have is yours.”
The words might have been rote — as I wondered then, they might be a trap — but I sensed in this man that what he said was true; he and his people were friendly to me. I saw a number of other people gathering and saw instantly that they were all old or babes-in-arms, held by their great-grandmothers. I knew these signs of old.
They were desperately poor. The strong young men and the beautiful young girls had either been taken up as slaves or had run off into the central massif. These people were abject. They had been shattered by a continuous succession of slave raids, and they had no fight left. They accepted their fate with a fatalism that, while I could not share its abnegations, I could understand.
The old man, Theirson, led me to his hut and I sat on the packed dirt floor, and they gave me a bowl of fruit, gleaming rounds of the fabulous fruit of Kregen. I picked up a squish. I thought of Inch and his taboos, and then I did not think over those memories again. I munched a mouthful of squishes as old Theirson talked.
“You had best not linger here, Koter Drak. You are most welcome and we would love your help in the fields, for the work is hard and we are old. But no young man is safe. The aragorn, for whom the Ice Floes of Sicce most certainly wait, ride through and take what they will and no man dare say them nay.”
His wife, Thisi the Fair — she was old and stringy and her hair as white as his own — shivered. “Do not speak of the aragorn, Theirson, I beg you. If only the old days were here!”
I felt a peculiar sensation in my stomach, and I rubbed it. I felt hot and yet I felt cold. I drank a cup of water. I wanted all the information I could get; yet the hut walls were receding and closing, swaying, rippling like the bed of a mountain stream. My tongue seemed as thick as a chunkrah’s tongue. Theirson, Thisi the Fair, and others were looking at me with kind expressions, and talking, but their words boomed and echoed and hurt my ears. I fell full length, and lay there, unable to move. They were all looking down on me with worried, concerned expressions, and Thisi felt my forehead.
“It is the sickness,” she whispered. “Koter Drak — you must fight for your life!”
And then I swung away like a surfer on the bottom of a board with only the deep black-green of nothingness beneath me.
CHAPTER THREE
Many visions passed before my inward eye as I lay stricken by the hallucination-fever of the sickness. I saw the smoke and heard the monstrous concussions of the broadsides as I sailed so slowly down on the Franco-Spanish line off Cape Trafalgar; I saw the swirling charge of the cavalry as we held the ridge of Mont Saint Jean; I fought with my clansmen, and swaggered as a bravo-fighter in Zenicce; I battled swifters of Magdag, and swordships with Viridia the Render laughing; I saw many things and I felt many things.
Through it all I, Dray Prescot, Pur Dray, Krozair of Zy, the Lord of Strombor, sunk so low and helpless, did not for one moment imagine that these old folk had poisoned me. In a way that only hindsight can justify I knew I could trust them.
For three days I lay there caught in that damned soup of fevered visions and for all that time they stayed by me and cared for me. On the morning of the fourth day I opened my eyes and looked through the open door and saw the jade and orange light of the twin suns falling in mingled radiance across the street, and knew I was once more myself, once more in control, once more a man. But I was as weak as an infant.
They were surprised.
“The sickness takes a man or a woman and holds them fast bound for a whole sennight.”
I did not tell them that I had bathed in the sacred pool of the River Zelph, in unknown Aphrasoe, and was thus assured of a thousand years of life and a natural constitution to throw off wounds and diseases rapidly. I thanked them. I had been a burden to them. I was still very weak, weaker by far than I had been after those horrific experiences crossing the Klackadrin, and for a space all I could do was sit in the suns-shine at the mouth of the hut and rest and recuperate.
I know, now, that my sickness was the result of drinking the canalwater. Sweet, it was, to be sure, and ever after was to prove so. But, to a man or woman not of the canals, to anyone not of the canalfolk, it was deadly. After the week’s fever-dreams, the victim very often died. That I had not was a tribute to the pool of baptism of the Savanti in Aphrasoe. Three days — half the six that usually constitute a Kregan week, for all that I render it into English as a sennight — was astonishing to them. I just sat in the sun and watched the dust devils on the street and struggled to grow strong. They had taken my Savanti hunting leathers to have them cleaned and I wore a simple breechclout of the orange cloth. The color came from squeezed berries abounding in the forests. I looked up as Theirson came from the hut with a bowl of bosk and taylyne soup. Just as Tilda the Beautiful had said, here in Vallia they did drink their soup hot. I sipped it gently, grateful for the soothing sensations in my abused guts.