“Well, maybe at one time they did,” I objected. I had never thought of that, though indeed the old story did have a wagging tail in it. That was the point of the story for children, for it was the wag of our bottoms as we acted it out which made it fun.
“Pombis don’t have tails,” she continued. “Cats do. Mice do. Owls and hawks do, but flitchhawks don’t. Horses do. But zellers don’t.”
“We don’t,” I said.
“I know. That’s what’s confusing, because I think we belong with cats and horses and faithful-dog. But we don’t have tails and they all do. Anyhow, it’s as though there are two kinds of animals and birds and creatures, one kind from here and one kind from somewhere else. Only I don’t know if we’re the kind from here or the kind from somewhere else. Do you?”
In the place of the magicians, I had learned an answer to this. “We’re from somewhere else.” She accepted this, as she did almost everything I said, very soberly. “The shadowpeople are from here, however. And they have no tails.”
“Have you seen them?” She was as excited as a child seeing the Festival Queen for the first time. I told her I had seen them, and what they were like, and she laughed when I told her of their songs, their flutes, their dances, their huge eyes and wide, winged ears, their appetite for rabbits (which have tails) and bunwits (which don’t). I told her of their language, the sound of them crying “Peter, eater, ter ter ter,” in the caverns of the firehills. The water oxen had found a convenient wallow at the side of the road where a canal spilled into a little slough, and they refused to plod another step. I shook Silkhands awake, and we burned charcoal in the clay stove I had bought to heat our food. Somewhere to the north of us a shuddering growl came out of the earth, and we felt the vibrations under us. “Groles,” said Silkhands. “Have you ever seen them, Peter?”
I told her I had not, though I had heard the roar often as a child when I had lived in Mertyn’s House.
“Sausage groles?” asked Jinian eagerly, and both Silkhands and I laughed.
“No. Rockeaters. From Three Knob. For sausage groles, one must go on up to Learner, where the Nutters live. Only rockeaters make that noise, and there will be no fustigars or pombis within sound of it, for it drives them away.”
“Do they have tails?” This from Jinian, so sleepily that I knew she would not hear the answer. And she did not, making a little sighing noise which told me she was asleep. I covered her with a blanket and let her lie where she was. The ground was at least as soft as the wagon bed, and probably cleaner. I didn’t know whether groles had tails or not. I thought not. I went to sleep making an inventory of all those birds and beasts with tails, thinking how odd it was that I had learned this from Jinian when none of my Gamesmasters seemed to have known or thought anything about it.
On the morning, we composed ourselves to ugliness once more and got back into the wagon. If the water oxen could be kept to a steady pace, we would arrive at the Three Knob turn off by midday. I hoped Chance had arrived there safely, and I wondered what guise we might travel in as we went farther north which would not betray us to the Boneraisers. I had no doubt they still searched for me, and I had not yet thought of any convenient way to go through the minions which had been sent against me to reach Huld, who had sent them. It would do no lasting good to Game against mercenaries. Huld could wear me to a nubbin sending bought men against me. So, thinking this and thinking that, we rolled along. Almost I missed seeing the skeleton train ahead, but Jinian thrust a sharp elbow into my ribs and began to sing. Silkhands picked up the song, and they two began nodding their heads in time to their hushed la, la, la as I dived deep and grasped Didir to cover me.
“Larby Lanooly went to sea,” they sang. “Hoo di Hi and wamble di dee. Did not matter he would or no, did not matter the winds did blow, put him into the boat to row, Oho for Larby Lanooly.” There were at least thirty verses to the song, and Silkhands knew them all. While I drove, letting Didir manage Peter while Globber held the reins, the skeleton train came toward us, back down the road from the north. Old Clobber was terrified, as he should have been. He clucked and cried and drove the wagon off the road, almost into a canal. He sat there and shivered in his socks while the bones danced past him, the two women next to him clinging together and singing under their breath, “Larby Lanooly went to farm, Hoo di Hi and wamble di darm. Did not matter he knew not how, put him behind an ox and plow, he’ll do well or not enow, Oho for Larby Lanooly.”
If Karl Pig-face had been wearing the strange cap before, he was not wearing it now. His face was red again, shiny with sweat, and he tugged angrily at a cord which bound him to the Bonedancer on one side of him. As they passed, Didir heard one of them say, “If you will not do as you are told, we can put the cap back on you, Rancelman.”
“I’ve told you,” blustered Karl. “When you had that stupid cap on me, I thought I felt him down the road here. But I couldn’t tell you. You need no cap, nor no cord to bind me. Pay me, as you’d pay anyone, and I’ll seek Peter Priss to the end of the lands and purlieus for you. No love between him and me, and I’m glad to do it.”
“Earn our trust, Rancelman. Earn it if you can, and no more sneaking away in the night. Now, stop tugging at the binding and lead us to the place it was you say you felt him last.” And they went on by us, not looking at us at all. It was many a long moment before Globber got himself together to drive the oxen back onto the road. Meantime we had taken Larby Lanooly from farm to shop to mine to devil-take-it.
“If they have anyone in that group who can track,” I said at last when the Boneraisers were gone and we were plodding northward once more, “we may see them again. I doubt not that Chance left readable tracks when he came north from the copse.”
“Three days’ traffic on the road?” asked Jinian. “Would that not cover?”
I clenched my teeth, trying to remember. So far as I could recall, only the yellow horse had had distinctive shoes, nubby ones such as they use along the River Dourt, but the yellow horse should have been sold or traded or simply set loose long since. “Perhaps,” I said. “Though I would feel better about it if there had been rain and a bit of wind.”
“Well, that may happen soon enough,” said Silkhands. “Watch the sky west of us where the black clouds gather and pour. I doubt not we’ll have more rain than is comfortable before nightfall.”
“Before nightfall, we’ll be at Three Knob,” I promised them. We kept that schedule with time to spare, for the sun stood short of noon when we came to the turnoff to the right which led away toward three bald stone hills grouped above the foundry smokes. Stone pillars marked the turn, and we drove between lines of long, low brooder houses where they hatched the groles. There were few of the creatures about during the day, most of them being down below ground, gnawing their way through the stone with their adamant teeth, chewing the rock into gravel and packing it into their endless gut. At night they would digest it, roaring the while, and on the morn the dung gatherers would wash the night’s gravel for powder of iron and nuggets of occamy and silver, less only the light metals which the groles had nourished themselves upon. As we drove, we began to see large groles feeding on piles of broken stone and bone and charcoal. These were the toothlings, just growing their teeth of adamant, soon to be promoted to work in the mines. Handlers stood beside each, stroking the creatures with long iron-tipped staffs, crooning grole songs to them. I shuddered. Imagine a great gut, as wide as a man is tall, as long as five men laid end to end, with a dozen rows of teeth and no eyes, and that is a grole. Still, how would we have metal for our axles and weapons did we not have groles?