His eyes drifted to the left, the south side of the road, where the pinkish white stone wall dropped almost fifteen cubits to the nearly dry stream below.
“What else do you know about the wizards’ roads?” he finally asked Rinfur.
“What be there to know?” countered Rinfur, not taking his eyes off the team. “My grandda, he drove the roads, and it be said that his grandda drove them as well.”
“They don’t look that old.” Cerryl looked at the low stone wall to the left. His eyes said that the even edges and slightly rounded corners looked as though they had been quarried and set within the past few years, yet there was a sense of darkness and age about the stone, a sense that he could feel rather than see.
“They be old.” Rinfur laughed. “Some folk say that the black demon Creslin-the whites forced him to build half the road afore he escaped, and that be why he created the black isle, so as to build a land that would bring down Fairhaven. Been generations, and it hasn’t happened. Don’t look as it will, either.”
Cerryl shivered, looking at the road, so straight, so ordered, so perfect. Ahead was a faint mistlike cloud of dust, partly shrouding a wagon rumbling toward them.
“Over now. . now. . Ge-ahh!” called Rinfur. The team edged to the right.
The brown-haired youth watched as the other wagon neared. Two men sat on the seat of that wagon, drawn by a matched team of four grays. Both men wore cyan livery. The driver flicked the reins, almost imperceptibly, and the wagon, larger even than Dylert’s wood wagon, edged toward the wall on the south side of the road.
The brasswork of the oncoming wagon glistened in the midday sun like spun gold, and the cyan paint shimmered metallically, and a brown canvas was strapped over the wagon bed, hiding whatever the cargo might be.
Behind the wagon rode four lancers in the same cyan livery as those who had followed the white wizard to the mill in pursuit of the renegade wizard. Cerryl forced himself to sit erect, to look casually at the wagon as it passed.
White dust drifted up from the wheels of the cyan wagon as it passed on the left, headed toward Lydiar, Cerryl supposed. Neither the driver, nor the soldier beside him, gave Cerryl or Rinfur more than the briefest glance. Nor did the lancers who trailed the wagon.
“Do you know whose wagon that was?” Cerryl asked.
“Mayhap the duke’s-having his colors and his guards,” answered Rinfur, “a-coming back from Fairhaven. If you can’t get it in Lydiar or Fairhaven, folks say you be not getting it anywhere.” Rinfur gave a low chuckle. “ ’Cept on Recluce, and it not be healthy to say that too loud.”
“Why doesn’t anyone talk about Recluce?” asked Cerryl.
“ ’Cause it be not exactly healthy, especially in Fairhaven. The whites have no love of the blacks. Never have, and never will, not since the days of the ancients when the black demon Nylan overthrew ancient Cyador and brought darkness back to Candar.” Rinfur shook his head and glanced over his shoulder. “Enough said, lad. Dylert says you know your letters, and you be going to apprentice with Tellis, the scrivener. Well. . I’d be expecting Tellis has books that be saying more than this poor teamster ever knew. . and reading be safer, too.”
Cerryl glanced back, but the road was clear.
Rinfur flicked the reins. “Now. . the traders’ square in Fairhaven, that be something the like I never saw before. . spices, and blades of metals of all colors, and. .” He shook his head. “That be something you need see. .”
Cerryl nodded and listened as the wagon rumbled westward.
XXVI
WITH THE RUMBLING of the big wheels on the smooth wizards’ road and the hot afternoon, Cerryl found his eyelids getting heavier and heavier. The late afternoon sun, shining directly at his face, offered another incentive to let his eyes close.
“Darkness!”
At Rinfur’s expletive, the team swerved, and Cerryl found himself grasping for the sideboard with one hand and the wagon seat with the other. His eyes popped open.
“Demon-cursed messenger! Think they own the road,” mumbled Rinfur as he guided the team back from nearly scraping the right-hand wall.
Cerryl glanced over his shoulder, but all he could see was a mist of white road dust.
“Course they do. You don’t give them the road, and the wizards have you whipped.”
“Even if it happens on the part of the road in Lydiar, or Certis?” asked Cerryl, shifting his weight on the hard wagon seat.
“Don’t be wagering on that. The wizards rule their roads. And a lot more besides that.”
Cerryl waited.
“Dylert, he was telling me. Years ago, it was. The old line of dukes, the ones in Lydiar I be meaning, they told their traders not to be paying the road tariffs to the wizards. Three days later, there were two-hundred-score lancers on the road outside Lydiar and a score of white wizards. Never said a word, did they. Just marched into Lydiar and cast fire down on the duke’s palace. He was in it, a course. Ruins stood for nigh-on forty years ’fore anyone dared rebuild it-even the new duke the wizards named.”
“If the white mages are so powerful, why aren’t they the dukes of Lydiar and Certis and. .”
Rinfur raised his free hand.
“Used to be a Duke of Montgren, once upon a time. He befriended that black demon-Creslin, I think. The whites killed him and all those in the keep. Then they leveled the keep. Montgren still belongs to Fairhaven.”
“But you said they did that to Lydiar. Leveled the duke’s place, I mean, but there’s still a Duke of Lydiar.”
“Got me,” said Rinfur. “All I know be that no duke or viscount or whatever in his mind be crossing the white mages. No teamster not give way to a white messenger.” He shrugged. “That be enough.”
Cerryl glanced ahead. The almost mountainous hills the road had bored through after they had left Hrisbarg had already dwindled into low rolling hills, half topped with trees, half with meadows, and each line of hills seemed lower than the previous set.
“Won’t be long. Hills about to end,” confirmed the driver.
Cerryl nodded and watched.
Fairhaven rested in a gentle valley, and the road descended ever so gradually toward the mixture of white structures, white road, and green grass. The trees were mainly ever-greens barely again as tall as the roofs they shaded. Cerryl saw no leaf-bearing trees, none. Was that why Dylert could send white oak to Fairhaven?
The paving stones of the road, somewhere along the way, had turned from pinkish granite to slightly off-white gray granite, as had the stones of the walls. As the wagon cleared the last low hill, the road walls ended, replaced with a long curb slightly more than a span high. Beyond the curb was green grass, green still despite the nearing of harvest.
Cerryl had trouble seeing the city ahead against all the whiteness, a white that seemed somehow brighter than it should have been even with the clear sky and the glare of the late afternoon sun in his face. The glare seemed to intensify as the lumber wagon rolled closer.
“Ahead be the gates,” explained Rinfur, gesturing almost directly in front of the wagon, down the avenue of white stone wide enough for at least four wagons abreast.
Cerryl tried to see where Rinfur pointed, but the sun hung just above the horizon, and looking westward only left Cerryl with a headache and an image of blinding whiteness from the sun off the white of the road.
Rinfur began to rein in the team, slowing the wagon gradually until it creaked to a stop behind a mule cart piled with pottery. In front of the mule cart was another wagon, a small one drawn by a single bony horse and filled with gourds or squashes. The squash wagon stood just short of a small white stone building outside the gates. The stone gates did not seem that tall to Cerryl, not more than ten or twelve cubits high, not particularly impressive for a city that ruled, in one form or another, much of Candar.