A terra-cotta of a bearded face over a door with horns growing from its brow; the wood of a shutter carved into leafy tendrils that seemed to be looking at him somehow; a stone post with a head on top and a phallus jutting from its middle, wrought in knotwork; a set of running and laughing children wearing costumes fantastically shaped and painted…
He snapped his fingers. "It's Halloween, or nearly!" he said. "Kids wear masks and things back home too, on Halloween."
"Samhain, we call it," she said, and spelled it out for him: she pronounced it soween.
He nodded and made a mental note of it; that was the word he'd heard her shout up to the tower. Then she smiled and winked at him and added, "You'll find we take it, oh, a wee bit more seriously than your basic trick or-treat."
Just then a snatch of song came from another group making its way down the middle of the street, youngsters nearly full-grown dancing amid a cold trilling of panpipes. And singing:
As the sun bleeds through the murk
'Tis the last day we shall work
For the Veil is thin and the spirit wild
And the Crone is carrying Harvest's child!
A girl led them, with a half-mask shaped like a raven's head covering most of her face. Her black-feathered cloak flared in the darkness as she danced a twirling mea sure and beat a little drum with snake quick taps of her fingers. Saba made a sign with her forefinger and joined in the chorus:
Samhain!
Turn away
Run ye back to the light of day
Samhain!
Hope and pray
All ye meet are the gentle fae.
Then the raven-masked woman stopped in front of Ingolf, and he had to check to avoid running into her. The dancer's eyes were wide and fixed behind the slits of the mask, holding his locked for a long moment; they were alight with a combination of fear and ecstasy and forgetfulness of self that was not quite like anything he'd ever met before. It made him shiver a little and suppress an impulse to cross himself.
The rest of her group surrounded him, masked as horse and boar, dragon and wolf and elk. She sang again, swaying and beating counterpoint to the words:
Stranger, do you have a name?
Tell us all from whence you came!
You seem more like god than man Has curse or blessing come to this clan?
Ingolf wondered for a moment whether he was sup posed to answer, and then she danced away again, lead ing her band with their leaping shadows huge against a walclass="underline"
Samhain!
Turn away
Run ye back to the light of day
Samhain!
Hope and pray
All ye meet are the gentle fae.
When the band had vanished around a corner Ingolf swore quietly and shook himself. Saba smiled at him.
"Told you," she said merrily.
He asked a few questions; in his experience, that got you further than talking about yourself, at least to start with, and it never hurt to learn. He found that the odd pleated skirts were kilts and the over-the shoulder blan ket things were called plaids; that the ring around her neck was called a torc and that couples exchanged them when they married; that she was a widow with two chil dren, her man killed on the western coast by Haida raid ers a year ago; that she took turns with wall and gate duty and practiced with arms, above all with the longbow, as all fit adults did here; and that she was the eldest of three sisters, worked at her father's inn, and kept his books on that and a vineyard and fulling-mill the family owned.
She asked in turn, "What brought you so far from home? We don't hear anything but fourth-hand rumors from that far east."
"I didn't get on well with my elder brother," he said, which covered a good deal of bitterness. "My father died and my brother became Sheriff of Readstown, and we quarreled. So I joined the Bossman's army, when we Richlanders sent men west to help Marshall against the Sioux."
For a moment he fell silent amid a wash of memory: the shusssh of arrows over the tilts of the wagons in the dark amid the stale smell of dying campfires, a sudden roaring brabble, thunder of hooves and screams of surprise and pain. The panic-stricken tightness of his grip on the rawhide wound hilt of his shete as he ran half-naked through the night away from his fallen tent, slashing at figures that seemed to spring out of the ground before him, fighting his way towards the horse lines.
The ugly shock up his arm as the edge cut muscle and cracked bone, the first time and so different from a practice post. Glaring eyes and bared teeth, painted faces and horned headdresses and the long knives in their hands glinting ruddy with the lights of sudden fires. Voices shrieking:
"Hoo'hay! Hoo'hay! It's a good day to die, Lakota! Kye-eeee-Kye! Hoo'hay!"
Then the guttural "Hoon! Hoon!" of the blood call as the blades went in, the sick-making butcher's cleaver sound of metal hammering home in flesh, the frenzied screaming of a man scalped alive.
"That war took longer than anyone thought it would," he said carefully.
"They usually do," Saba said, with a grim smile.
"And afterwards I couldn't seem to settle down, somehow. Went east and west, north and south-to the dead cities, often, doing salvage."
By then they were in the stables attached to her fa ther's inn; the tavern was a rambling two-story affair seemingly knocked together from several pre Change buildings, but the stables were newer, made of beam and plank with brick floors. He liked what he saw of the ac commodation for the beasts, and he was pickier about that than about where he slept himself. Boy and Billy went into stalls, and he rubbed them down carefully, put on dry blankets and saw to the fodder-good timothy-clover hay without any musty smell, a hot cooked mash of oats and beans, and fresh water.
It looked like the muck was shoveled out regularly, with fresh sawdust and straw laid down; he checked their feet, and made a note to have Bill reshod-the one on his left rear had looked good enough in Bend, but it was a little loose now and definitely getting thin. Pavement wasn't kind to hooves, especially when years of frost and storm had roughened it.
"You boys rest up. You can take it easy for a while," he said, rubbing Boy's forehead as the horse butted at him. "You both earned it."
"You know how to look after horses," Saba said with approval, as she and a teenage boy helped him with the tack and the loads from the packsaddle.
Ingolf grinned. "You have to, if you want the horses to look after you. I had to push these two fellas a lot harder than I liked, but it was that or get stuck in Bend or Sis ters for the winter. I got Boy in the Nebraska country and he's the best all-round horse I've ever had."
She nodded, handed him a room key with a number on the wooden tag that dangled from it, and pointed to a door.
"Bathhouse is through there. Bran here will show you the manner of it hereabouts; the stairs on the right past there go to the rooms. Come down those and turn left to get to the main room. See you there-you'll want to wash up before you eat."
He nodded, though in fact he was so hungry that it was a toss-up. But they seemed a cleanly lot here; so was he, when he had a choice, which sometimes you didn't if you were a wandering man. By the time he stowed his gear in the room and finished his bath-they soaped down and scrubbed with buckets of steaming-hot water poured over the head first here, before getting into the tub to soak-and dressed in his good suit of blue denim jacket and pants and roll necked sweater from the pack saddle, he felt a lot more human and ready to face the Sheaf and Sickle's common room.
And I'm hungry enough to eat an ox, live.
Luckily he'd managed to keep clear of nits despite being on the road for weeks, and didn't need to use the special and very smelly soap provided. That did make him hope the beds would be free of biting company, another thing you had to get used to on the road.