Some of the herdsmen carry shotguns. One, I notice, has a businesslike army rifle. They say a few tyrs still prowl the upper reaches of the mountains. I do not know whether that is true, but they say it. I know pters of prey wheel in the cloud-dappled sky, because I see one every now and then. Without the herdsmen, the flocks would take bad losses from them. They lose some animals as things are, but not so many.
We stop at the border to clear customs. An inspector looks through our luggage. Then, with great formality, he stamps our passports. Obert Ohn tries to talk with him in Astilian. The look the inspector gives Obert says he is not there to chat. He gravely goes on to the next compartment.
“Not a very friendly fellow, is he?” Obert Ohn sounds crestfallen.
“No, not very,” I say. If anyone is less likely to be friendly than an Astilian customs inspector, I cannot imagine who he might be.
A few minutes after the train starts up again, we roll past several bulls cropping grass near the tracks. Their tails switch back and forth as their beaks open and close, open and close. Their horns are long and sharp. They have crests along the ridges of their backbones. One raises his when the train goes by, as if the engine were a rival.
Obert Ohn stares at them. He might never have seen a bull before. “Do you suppose they will be at Amblona for the festival?” he asks after they are out of sight at last.
“They may,” I answer. “But even if they are, how will you know them among all the others?”
“That big, tough fellow will stand out in a crowd, don’t you think?” he says. “The one whose crest went up.”
Maybe he never has seen bulls before. “He’s not a bad animal—not half bad, in fact,” I say. “He’s nothing special, though. Plenty bigger. Plenty meaner, too. They don’t have to be big to be mean, you know. They’re like people that way. Sometimes a mean one won’t just raise its crest at a train. Sometimes it will charge.”
“What happens then?” Obert Ohn asks in a small voice.
“About what you’d expect. Once in a while, the train gets derailed. Whether it does or not, the bull winds up dead.”
“I guess he would,” Obert says. He is a good guesser, Obert Ohn is.
Late that afternoon, the train pulls into Ganelon, the little town where we are going to fish. No one would ever have heard of Ganelon if they had not fought a battle there a long time ago. Knights in armor hacked away at one another till one side won and the other side lost. Years later, someone wrote a famous poem about it. So now next to no one has heard of Ganelon.
The hotel is across the square from the train station. It is not a fine hotel, but who needs a fine hotel to fish from? If we were after fine hotels, we would stay in Sirap. But you cannot fish in Sirap. Old men do drop lines into the Neise, the river that runs through the city. They drop in their lines, and they sit in little folding chairs waiting for a bite. I have never seen one of them catch anything.
We hike to the trout stream the next morning. Our luck is better than decent. I catch more trout than Obert does, but his are bigger. You cannot beat the eating they make. You cannot beat getting away from everything but the water and the grass and the trees and the sun and the sweet mountain air, either.
After a couple of days, Obert Ohn takes off on his own side trip. I go on fishing. Being by myself never bothers me, and Obert is not the best company I could have. These days, the best company I could have keeps company with Kime Kelbam instead.
I will say that Obert is better company when he gets back. I have never seen him so happy. He does not dance in the square or sing silly songs or anything like that. But the little annoying habits he has because he usually cannot stand himself have gone missing. I cannot decide whether I like him more or less because of that. He annoys me now in different ways.
By the time we are supposed to head on to Amblona, we have eaten as many trout as we will hold. We pay off the hotelkeeper and go back to the station. The southbound train is late. Obert Ohn grumbles. I just buy myself a glass of rough red wine. Everything in Astilia always runs late. If you cannot get used to that, the country will drive you wild. A while ago, a general seized power and promised to make the trains go on time. Making promises is easier than keeping them. He could not do it, so the Astilians threw him out.
I am halfway down my third glass of wine and Obert is back to being annoying in all the old ways when the train chugs up at last. We climb aboard. “On to Amblona!” I say gaily.
“On to Amblona.” Obert does not sound so gay. Yes, he is back to his old self, all right.
Most of the year, Amblona is as sleepy a place as Ganelon. When the festival comes, though, it swells like a boil. If we had not reserved our rooms—and if I had not made friends with the hotelkeeper the year before—we would have had nowhere to sleep and to stow our trunks.
Ett and Kime Kelbam are in the hotel dining room when we get there. Kime waves to us. Lady Ett smiles and flutters her fingers. “Come eat with us!” Kime calls.
“I want to freshen up first,” I say, and start for the stairs. Obert stands there gaping at Ett and Kime as if he is turned to stone. I wonder if I will have to kick him in the ankle to get him moving. He unfreezes just before I haul off and do it.
He is in room 102. I am in room 101, across the hall. We have to go up the stairs to get to them because what would be the second floor in Dubyook is only the first floor on this side of the ocean. What we call the first floor is the ground floor over here.
I toss my trunk in a corner and take a fast shower. Nothing wrong with the hotel’s plumbing. It is as modern as next week. But when I slide back the curtain and start to step out of the tub, the first thing I see is a rat sitting on the sink by the faucet.
I have always hated rats. They disgust me more than anything else I can think of. I do not say there is anything special about this. Of course most people feel the same way. Men and rats. Rats and men. We are of two different kinds, and foes forever. The beady black eyes, the gnawing teeth, the skinny tail—anyone will shudder at just a glimpse.
For me, the hair is the worst. It sticks out all over them, but sometimes you can still see their soft, pink skin through it. The idea of having hair touch me . . . I cannot begin to tell you how chilling that is.
And it has happened to me. You always have trenches in war, and where you have trenches you will have rats. Rats are made for trenches, much more than people are. They feast on scraps and rubbish. They feast on the dead, too, and they will start to eat wounded soldiers. They scramble over you while you sleep, not that you can stay asleep after you feel that skittering touch and the furtive brushiness of their horrid hair.
We used to hope the enemy would gas us. We truly did. That put down the rats when nothing else would, for a little while anyhow. Rats have not figured out gas masks. When they do, we are all in trouble.
This flashes through my head in a lot less time than it takes to tell you. I look around like a wild man for something to smash the rat with. I throw a little bottle of liquid soap at it. If I catch it square, I may stun it long enough to let me grab something bigger and kill it.
But I miss. I suppose I am lucky not to smash the mirror over the sink. The rat jumps down and disappears. When I look under there, the hole does not seem wide enough for it to squeeze through. It does, though.
So before I go to the dining room, I call on the hotelkeeper. His name is Tonmoya. He is a fine fellow. In Dubyook, a man in his job would deny that rats could ever get into his hotel. In Dunlin, a man in his job would deny that rats exist. He listens to me. He sighs. He says, “Under the sink, is the hole? I’ll send a man to plug it up. Enjoy your supper, sir. He’ll fix it by the time you finish.”