"A sweet boy, despite your scars," she said, kissing him again.
Later, Win and Ghaj helped him get his things together. Ghaj replaced his dilapidated saddle pack with a woven shoulder-net, and after a bit of cobbling reduced some of her husband's too-large shoes to fit Perkar. Win was delighted with his bow. To Ghaj Perkar had nothing to give, save the little charm his mother had made him. He gave her that. "I wish I had better," he told her. "You've been very kind to me."
Ghaj's eyes twinkled. "Come back this way and I'll be 'kind' to you some more." She gave him another hug and a kiss that lingered just a little, and pointed him down the road.
"You'll be to the outskirts of Nhol by nightfall, if you walk briskly. You don't want to enter Nhol at night, so I suggest you go a little more than briskly. I also suggest you find one of the dockside taverns—they're used to strangers there and always have rooms. Take this." She handed him a little pouch. He shook it and it jingled.
"A Royal and a few soldiers," she informed him. "I can spare just that for you."
"It's more than I need. I can't…"
"Hush. In Nhol, without money, you'll be sleeping in an alley and have your throat slit before the first half a night. Take the coins, consider it pay for the work you've done around here, if you insist. And I suggest if you're going to stay long in the city that you find some way to pick up a few more soldiers. What I gave you won't go far at all."
He nodded. "Again, I'm grateful."
Ghaj called out to him once more as he was about to turn a bend in the trail. "Don't trust anyone in Nhol, Perkar."
He waved and called back that he wouldn't. Win followed him a little way, but not much beyond the edge of the bottomlands, where the trail climbed up out of the floodplain and onto the drier land around. He watched as the little boy's stubby legs took him quickly back away.
The sun was hot, but it did nothing to spoil Perkar's mood. Though the hard dirt trail was taking him to an unknown destiny, he felt ready to meet it now, hopeful even. The doom hanging over him like a thundercloud, if not departed, was at least letting a bit of light in.
In that light the day was beautiful, the strange scenery fascinating. It was a landscape of fields, and what fields they were! Grander than most pastures, they rolled out flat on both sides of the road, broken only by an occasional line of trees, the distant levee on his left, and strange streams as straight as arrow shafts.
It was only after he crossed a score of these streams, wondering at their perfect regularity, that he was struck with the idea that someone had dug them. The notion dumbfounded him, for though he could see the use of such unthinkably extensive ditches for watering crops, the labor involved was more than he could imagine. And yet the result was as staggering as the effort, for beyond the fields nothing grew but scrub, while the fields were green with strange plants.
And there were no cattle at all. What did these people do for milk, cheese—more important, Piraku? And yet the fields and their artificial rivers spoke eloquently of determination, ingenuity, and strength. Perhaps that, itself, was their Piraku.
Taking Ghaj's advice, he traveled as briskly as he could, but more than two score days with his butt in the bottom of a boat had not prepared him for a long walk. Near noon he stopped to rest, to eat the leaf-wrapped parcels of smoked catfish Ghaj had given him. In the shade of a cottonwood, he took Harka out to clean his blade.
"You puzzle me," Harka told him.
"I puzzle myself, but go on."
"All of that trouble to escape the Changeling, and yet you still follow the course he plotted for you."
"I said I would finish this, and I will," he replied. "But on my terms. That's important to me, to do things because I choose to."
"Perhaps that is the chief difference between Humans and gods," Harka offered. "We almost always do things because we must, because it is our nature."
"No difference," Perkar said. "Neither gods nor Humans like to be told what to do. Both follow their natures, and both want to be left alone to do it."
"Human nature changes notoriously quickly, however. The nature of gods changes only slowly, through many passing seasons."
"Like the Changeling," Perkar noted.
"He may not be the best example."
"Once I hoped to kill him," Perkar said. "Now it is enough for me merely to frustrate him. He wants something of me in Nhol. Very well, I will go to Nhol. But when I get there, I will be my own man. I will judge the situation for myself."
"Ngangata is right. You are most dangerous when you think."
"Perhaps. But in Nhol, I do not care whom I kill. I have no kin there, no friends."
"There is always me," Harka reminded him.
Perkar was forced to smile at the perversity of that. "If you die," he said, "I will most certainly be dead, too, and so I will not care. No, my only concern in Nhol is that I kill only those the Changeling does not want me to."
"Easier said than done."
"Not at all. I haven't felt even a flicker of guilt for killing those thieves a few days ago." That wasn't quite true, but to his own surprise, it was almost true.
"That isn't what I mean," Harka said. "How can you pretend to know what the Changeling wants?"
Perkar finished the fish and stood. "This girl who calls me. I think she must be one of these Waterborn. I think he wants me to save her from something. And so I will not."
"Perhaps he wants you to kill her. Perhaps it is she who wants to be saved."
"We'll see. We'll see when we get there. Right now I feel good, Harka, so keep your doubts to yourself. I choose to do this now—on the River I was compelled. I could walk back home if I wanted, I could go live with the Mang or become a fisherman. I pick my own doom from now on."
"Let us hope," Harka replied, "that is merely a euphemism and not a prophecy."
He grinned. "I care not!" he shouted, and brandished Harka above his head before returning him to his scabbard.
He reached the city walls not long before dusk, and found that while his dreams might have been competent to teach him a strange language, they were less adept at preparing him for the sight of the city. The walls alone were larger than any Human-made structure he had ever seen, dwarfing the largest damakuta a hundred times over. To that fact he added that they were clearly made of stone and not wood, and the effort put into building the stupendous stockade was, to him, even more difficult to envision than the artificial streams. As he approached it from a distance, he kept expecting that size to be an illusion that would resolve itself when he got closer, reveal that the city was not really as large as it seemed, that the towers and great rising blocks of buildings that peered at him from over that great wall must be of more reasonable dimensions. And yet, the more closely he approached, the clearer it was that he was in a place where magnificent, impossible things were done. He began to understand, with a sinking feeling, why these people insisted on calling his own "barbarians." What he saw here made the difference between the dwellings of the Alwat and his father's damakuta seem insignificant. Small wonder that the people of Nhol thought of his people in much the same way as his thought of the Alwat. And yet that thought gave him a bit of comfort, because he now understood— finally—that what people built didn't make them any more or less brave, worthy, or deserving. No man he had ever heard of had died any better than Digger and her kin or deserved more praise.
The gatehouse was a white-plastered cube the size of his father's stables; Perkar wondered how many warriors it might hold. He was greeted by only two; they looked at him as if he might be something the River had pulled in, something less than savory. Which, in its own way, was true enough.