The village lay below them, a mile away down a gentle slope that formed one side of a wide, shallow valley. All they could see was the pattern of the fields, without walls or hedges, and a few paler specks in the distance, the thatched roofs of buildings. The air was chilly and slightly damp-low cloud, probably-and there was a strong smell of rain. From this distance, of course, it was impossible to distinguish anything as small as a living creature.
'If our luck's anything to go by,' Poldarn grumbled, 'when we get there we'll find they're all dead.'
'Don't joke about it,' Copis replied. 'If they're all dead, so are we, unless they've left something we can eat. Look, we can stay up here arguing all day, or we can do as I say. Your choice.'
'I hate choices,' Poldarn said. 'All right, you know best. I wish we'd had a chance for a quick wash before we did this, though. I don't think gods are supposed to smell quite as strongly as we do.'
'Like I told you, they're rubes. They won't notice.'
There speaks a born city-dweller, he thought. Still, it was clear she'd made up her mind, and besides, he couldn't very well spend the rest of his life in the wilderness for fear of meeting an enemy. That'd be like dying of thirst because you didn't trust the water.
The differences between the village and the town they'd been to earlier were quite obvious. The village had only one street, if you could dignify the ribbon of mud between the doorsteps with the name, and the houses (small weather-boarded square boxes under greying thatch, all old-no signs that anybody had built a new house here in the last hundred years) were strung out along it in a straight line, like specks of dust on a worm. That presented a problem-no town square, no obvious place to stop and set up the stall. 'Keep your eyes peeled for a smithy,' Copis said. 'Chances are that's what passes for a public building.' There wasn't one, however, or at least nothing that looked like one from the outside; likewise no mill, chapel or common granary. There was, however, a tower ('That's not a tower,' Poldarn whispered. 'Towers go up. That goes sideways.'
'It's a short tower. Rubes, remember?')
– A square, squat windowless building two story's high, with one massive door and a flat, crenellated roof, right at the far end of the village. It was considerably bigger than any other building in the place, and the walls were made of stone.
'Four dormitories built round a courtyard,' Copis explained, keeping her voice down so as not to be heard by the small crowd of old men, women and children that had been following them all the way down the street, warily keeping their distance, like crows. 'Quite common in places that got torched a hundred years or so ago and then rebuilt. When the enemy show up they drive the stock into the middle and snuggle down till the bad people have gone away. Probably built over a grain-pit. Good idea so long as there's only a few of the enemy; otherwise it's just making their job easier.'
The door was open wide enough to drive the cart through into the courtyard without stopping. The interior was a bare, square cattle pen with a churned mud floor ('Been used recently,' Copis observed. 'Which suggests they've had trouble here lately') and a few post-and-rail fences to divide the space up into compartments-one pen for the cows, another for the goats, another for the pigs, and so on; no problem telling which pen had been which, just look at the floor, or sniff. Copis drove the cart into the goat pen, which was the biggest, jumped down and tied up to a rail. She didn't say anything or look at the crowd, who carried on staring at them both in silence.
So far, all according to plan. Nothing could be done until the kids had run out to the fields and called the men back, during which time, Copis had stressed in her briefing, it was vital that he sit absolutely still up on the box, avoiding all eye contact and not making a sound. He'd thought that would probably be pretty difficult to pull off when she'd first told him about it; in the event, it was the next thing to impossible. Though the old men and women all kept as still as gateposts, some of the children were waving or making faces; he could see them out of the corner of his eye, though he was careful to keep staring at the line between the top of the roof and the sky. Timing, of course, was everything; the critical moment had to come as near as possible to noon. The god outfit was excruciatingly heavy and uncomfortable and he wished that he'd had an opportunity to get used to wearing it on the way here, but it had been raining on and off all the way and, as Copis had pointed out, gods don't drive into town looking like drowned rats. That was another dangerous variable. It didn't look as if it was going to rain in the next hour or so, but after that it'd be touch and go; they could risk rushing the act and losing the thread, or they could play it out at the proper pace and risk a cloudburst, which would scupper their credibility in a few moments, or they could time it exactly right and use the rain as part of the act (really impressive if they pulled it off, disastrous if they didn't). It didn't help his nerves to reflect that the penalty for screwing up was anything between getting pelted with donkey shit and a selection of nasty, painful ways to die; whereas in towns, Copis had told him, charlatans are treated with a certain degree of good humour, out in the sticks they don't take kindly to being made fools of.
Eventually the men showed up and pushed their way through to the front of the crowd. Poldarn was annoyed that he couldn't look directly at these people, since he wanted to study the shapes of their faces, the variations of hair and eye colour, the range of height and build. From what he'd been able to see out of the corner of his eye, they seemed to have more in common with the dead soldiers he'd found next to him when he first woke up than with their enemies or either detachment of cavalry, but there wasn't a great deal in it either way. Mostly the men were wearing plain, light brown shirts, coats and trousers, basic homespun dyed grey and faded by the sun and rain; the women, blouses and long, heavy skirts of the same material, plain, yellow-white scarves and shawls over their heads and wrapped round their necks to cover their hair. Mostly their faces were poor, thin and ugly, though he guessed that that told him more about his background than the reality of their situation. That information, however, was far more useful to him than an insight into the daily lives of a bunch of-what was that word? Rubes? He had a strong feeling that he wasn't one of them.
Now that the men were here, still nothing happened… They watched in silence while Copis carried on with her chores (spinning them out, he guessed, though she wasn't obvious about it) and still the only sounds were the shuffling of feet in the mud, the occasional cough or sneeze, and a little muted chatter among the children, occasionally cut off by a hissed 'Sssh!'
No reason, of course, why it shouldn't go on like this indefinitely. Copis had explained the basic premise-gods are so far above the concerns of mortals that they don't even notice them unless a human intermediary points them out; the god is only partly there, in any event, like the summit of a mountain poking up above a blanket of low cloud. It went without saying that there was nothing the mortals had that the god could possibly want. His human companion, on the other hand, needed food and shelter just like anybody else, and if these weren't provided for her unsolicited, she'd demand them as of right. Saying thank you was out of the question (you don't thank the ground for letting you tread on it) and as for curing warts or telling fortunes…
'You came up the road, then,' a man said.
Copis didn't answer. She hadn't heard him. Probably she was too busy listening to other, better voices inside her head. There was a very good reason why she shouldn't answer, but offhand Poldarn couldn't remember what it was.