“Tomorrow. Not today. Today I want the children to go up there instead. Have ’em bring all the buckets and baskets — there’ll be good berrying there.”
“Yes, our Ma’am.”
They set her down on a pile of fleeces and blankets raised off the floor, propped her up with pillows.
“Did Cuthy beg Brun’s pardon, publicly, like I said?”
“He did, our Ma’am.”
“Paid him twelve goats, too?”
“Twelve goats, our Ma’am. He wanted to include a wether, and Brun wouldn’t have it, but the Elders said a goat was a goat, so he took it, rather than do without.”
She nodded. “That’s right. There’s many a buck with stones that does the nannies no good; this way he won’t have to wonder… Teach Cuthy to leave Brun’s woman alone. All right! All right! Get out, now! Stop vexing me old head with all your questions. Bring enough mutton for the outworld boy, too. Come sit… of whatever way is comfortable for you… over by me. Now, then—”
She took his hand. “We’ll be here long enough for you to mend. What do you think on doing, once you can ride. again?” He said that he thought he’d rather not ride again at all, asked if she couldn’t send a messenger for a flyer to take him back to Peramis. “Ah, me cockerel, but isn’t that part of the question? What do you think on doing, once you’re back in Peramis?”
Seeing that he was still not understanding her, she explained in detail. What did he plan to say about things? The rogue dragon… the mysterious, secretive Kar-chee castle and what it contained… the nomad raid… He began to catch her drift; asked what she thought he should say.
Slowly, the old head nodded.
“That’s the point. Yesindeed, that’s the point. You see, me coney, few things are ever simple. If you go back and talk free, then the wasp’s-nest is stirred up for sure. The armies come out. We don’t want that, for our own reasons. And when the armies are out of the States, what’s then? Riots, I hear, in Peramis. Put down by the army. Maybe the Dogrobbers would just as soon sacrifice their tricks off in the woods, for a chance to burn things up.”
He had to agree that it was not simple. Certainly, he could not forget what had been done to the son of Aëlorix, his former host, to whose salt he assuredly owed something. Certainly, he could not deny that the outlaws had just grievances. More: they, too, had been his hosts. Finding him wandering near their secret place, they had been justified in taking him prisoner; but they had treated him with kindliness, once he was safe inside.
“Is Hue still alive?” he asked.
She shrugged. “I don’t know for sure. The men told me they saw him go down, before they had to withdraw. But they’re not sure he wasn’t in shape to get up again. Why?”
He told her why. “‘They shall all be killed, every one — in the egg, and out…’”
“When things reach such a stage,” Jon-Joras said, “the right which is based on having been wronged becomes a wrong in itself.”
The old woman stooped her chin upon her hands. She sighed. “Well… Well… We have to think. Both of us. But not now. Here they are with the mutton. If there is one thing I don’t have to puzzle about, it’s mutton,” she said, contentedly. “I like it fat. And I like it crisp.”
From time to time in the next few days, Jon-Joras thought about his forcibly neglected duties. He knew that Por-Paulo would not blame him or think less of him; besides, the Hunt Company was experienced enough to fill the gap well enough in making arrangements. Meanwhile, there lay open before him the life of the nomad encampment, utterly strange to him except as a half-forgotten paragraph in half-forgotten books. In a way it was far freer than any life he had ever known, but it was subject nonetheless to the sway of law. The tribesmen elected their council of elders and over the elders was the old queen, Ma’am Anna, who ruled them all as the benevolent semi-despotic matriarch of a family. But even old Anna had to go where the grass was green and the water was sweet; even she could not prevent storm and snow and flood and disease.
She gave Jon-Joras a pony, as casually as she might give a child a sweet; the tribe had plenty of ponies, after all (she said), and she could not burden her litter with him forever. He thanked her for the gift — somewhat fearfully, remembering how sore he had been from his first ride — and somewhat reluctantly, realizing that this probably meant he was not going back to Peramis in the immediate future. But there was nothing he could really do about it… except make the most of it.
He learned how to ride the shaggy little beast, gingerly at first, then with growing confidence and enjoyment, over the low swelling hills and flatlands fresh with new herbage; only a fleecy pad for a saddle, only a braided grass rope for a bridle, the sweetsmelling wind in his face instead of the strong musty odor of sheep which hung around the camp site.
Sheep and shepherds alike fell behind him as, food in his saddle-sack and water in his leather bottle, he set as his goal some distant landmark — a wooded hilltop, a pond glittering in the sun, a valley opening wide in welcome — and headed for it. No one, least of all Ma’am Anna, seemed concerned about his possibly not returning, any more than his earlier hosts, the outlaws, had been. He was after all as bound by his limited knowledge of the terrain as by the encircling high black walls around the castle of the swarming, conquering, and now-vanished Kar-chee.
Both Jon-Joras and the tribesmen, however, were in this guilty of one mutual mistake. Both realized that he did not know enough about the countryside to escape successfully. Neither realized that he knew little enough about it to get lost successfully. But he did.
Born and raised upon the infinitely controlled planet which was M.M. beta, where everything was so complex as to be simple, so controlled, so subdued, so organized, that even a blind man could hardly lose his way; Jon-Joras — despite theoretically knowing better — did not consider the possibility that one wooded hill, one pond, one valley, might well look just the same to him as another. He had always found his way back successfully before. If by nothing else, he guided himself automatically by the almost tidal regularity of the flocks and herds as they drifted back, campwards, as the day drew to a close.
He never thought to ask, and no one thought to inform him, that the lands towards which he rode that day had been so thoroughly grazed that the flocks and herds had been diverted from them, sent elsewhere. Once outside the perimeter of the camp Jon-Joras rode through empty fields — but this meant nothing to him. He noted the brook to leftwards, and headed in its general direction. But much broken land lay between them, and the source of the stream was in one of the many declivities he was bound to avoid. So when, at last, he finally saw a brook to his left, he did not realize that it was not the same brook but another and a farther one. Guiding himself by its course, eventually he turned the pony’s head and began (so he thought) to ride back towards the encampment.
The cooling air and the still-empty landscape told him of his escape. But it was an escape as useless as it was inadvertent, one of which he could make no use. He had no idea of where he was, none of where he wanted to go, and (he realized with some surprise) little of even where he wanted to be. There on the hilltop in the sallow light of lowering day, M.M. B seemed infinitely far off in space and time and reality, Peramis was the mere thin fabric of a dream, and the encampment of the tribe little more than a setting from a 3D drama or travelogue.
He sighed. After a moment he began riding his mount in a slow circle on the rise of ground. He saw nothing and nothing and yet nothing. Sunshine and clouds wheeled in counter-circles, slotted shafts of light broke through the gathering dusk, and in one such thrust of brightness he saw three small figures riding along far away and below. He thumped the pony in the ribs and rode towards them.