Error: I'm afraid this is the first I've heard of a "comments" flavoured Blosxom. Try dropping the "/+comments" bit from the end of the URL.
21 (I) - Preparing to leave
In two parts again; this part ends where my notes end. The second part won’t be very much harder, though, as it’s a more linear (travel) story.
In other news, I’ve removed the wide left margin to make it easier on e-readers. Will fix the postinfo when I feel like tweaking stuff — it sort of works the way it is, but I’ll put it in a neat box that can have borders and background without running into the text.
We went to sleep when it was already morning, so when we woke up it was almost evening. We found almost all the children in the kitchen, eating. “He is called Athal too!” Rava’s Athal said. “We were both called after the king.” And in the same year too, because they were the same age. “But he was born in…” “Rizenay,” the white-haired boy said. Then everybody said where they were born, all places we hadn’t heard of. The eldest boy, Jeran, was from Rizenay too, and six-year-old Imri from Trynfarin, and the little girls from Nisele. Jeran told us how they’d crossed rivers and mountains, and he’d tried to escape when they were in a town and after that the children hadn’t been allowed to go into the towns and villages any more, only the men had gone. And he’d tried to count days but when the men had noticed that, they’d beaten him with a stick to make him stop.
“Your skin is the same colour as that man Ayran’s,” Imri said to me. “And he’s a mean person. Does that make you a mean person too?” “No,” I said, “it just means that his father was from Iss-Peran and his mother from Valdyas, like mine. Or the other way around.” But she went on, “And Rakor’s skin is the same colour as hers, and he’s a very mean person.” “Well, someone’s skin is on the outside and being mean is on the inside. You can’t tell from what someone looks like whether they’re mean, it’s what they do.” That seemed to satisfy her, and she climbed into Amre’s lap and put her thumb in her mouth.
Just as I was about to look in on the little girls, who were in Rava’s bed, Jeran came down carrying one of them in each arm. Before I knew it I had one on my lap, feeding her porridge, and Jeran was feeding the other one. They were much less feverish, and had an appetite but couldn’t eat much, they were both too tired for that. “Are you Arvi, and you Aine?” I asked. “or the other way round?” “I’m not Arvi,” one of them said. “She is!” the other said. “I’m Aine!” I’d get that wrong a hundred times more, because they looked exactly alike, with white skin and flame-red hair and eyes that could look grey or blue or green in different kinds of light. We gave them some more willow-bark tea to drink, with a spoonful of honey to follow. “Bitter!” Aine (or Arvi) said. “Ayran gave us bitter stuff too.” “Me too,” Athal said. “Are you going to give me bitter stuff?” “Not unless you have a fever,” I said, and felt his forehead. “You’re not ill so you don’t need it.” “But I wasn’t ill when Ayran gave me the bitter stuff! It didn’t look like that, though, it was yellow.”
Then we went to sleep again even though we’d just got up, and the next morning we weren’t tired at all any more. Even Mazao got up and hauled himself to the kitchen table to eat porridge, and Veh too, walking with two sticks. We set to planning how to go on, and I said that we’d need a cart because to take the children to Valdis. “You can’t use a cart on the Plains!” Mazao said. “Isn’t it all flat?” I asked, but it was only not mountainous, it did go up and down, and the terrain wasn’t smooth and there weren’t any roads at all. You’d need huge wheels to go across all the cracks. But Jeran said that they’d come by cart, why couldn’t we go by cart?
Then there was a knock on the door— and for one moment I was afraid it was Lyase, but that was impossible of course, it was Lochan and his wife. “Master Lochan?” I said. “Thank you.” “Why, it’s you that I should be thanking,” he said, “for getting rid of those… well, I won’t say bad words to maidens.” And when he heard we were thinking of a cart, he said that the village would probably want to give us one, we’d done so much!
So there must be a road, but nobody really knew where it was and where exactly it lead to. “Perhaps the priestess of Naigha knows,” Rava said, so that’s where we went, Amre and Tao and I, together with the children who were off to school anyway. Athal took his new friend with the same name along, and Imri wanted to come too because she liked school. The priestess met us at the door and told the children to get their slates, and when Athal said “these are my friends and they don’t have slates! the priestess said that of course they didn’t have to come to school. “But we want to!” Imri said, and Athal was sent to get them slates of their own while the priestess took us to her room where she had the book with all the places. But neither Trynfarin nor Nisele was in it, and she couldn’t tell us how far it was to Valdis either. “But you could ask the old man who sits in the square drinking beer,” she said, “you have to talk to him with your mind because he can’t talk otherwise, but I think all of you can manage that. He was with the army when he was young, and that’s what the road was for, so h probably knows.”
We already knew that old man! And he was glad to see us again. He told us how he’d come to Tal-Borin eighty years ago, when he was fourteen —that meant he was ninety-four now!— with the army, and met a girl who had come along but she had died forty years ago, they’d had six children and eighteen grandchildren and twenty-one great-grandchildren. He could remember the road, yes, the road to Lenay that the soldiers had used. “I can always find something if I’ve been there, or someone’s told me very clearly where it is,” Tao said, and the old man told him to look into his head and he might see something. “How do I look into his head?” Tao asked me. “You know how we practiced thinking to one another? He’s going to think hard where the road is and where it goes, and you’re to listen hard so you know where it is.” Tao listened very hard, and then his face lit up and he said “I know where Valdis is! It’s there!” But the old man said that we’d probably want to go by Lenay, that was easier because it’s where the road goes and from Lenay we’d be able to go straight north to Valdis. “Lenay is there,” Tao said and pointed a bit more to the right.
When we came back to the smithy Rava looked strangely at Amre and me, “I didn’t notice until now! But you’ll really have to find a real master soon, that adventure has made both of you journeymen!” “What does it mean to be a journeyman?” Tao wanted to know, and I stumbled a bit over the words but said eventually “it’s that you’ve learnt so much that you suddenly know how to do something,” and Rava added “you’ve learnt so much that you need to learn more!”
Then Tao took Amre to work on her goat-skin while I went upstairs to care for the wounds we’d been bandaging. Hylse’s arm hurt a lot, and she was still angry, “what shall I do now? They tell me the castle should belong to me because Meruvin was my father —didn’t you know? I thought everybody knew— but I don’t want it, and nobody will marry me now because I’m so ugly with that arm.” “Well, wear a shirt with long sleeves and then when someone already likes you for yourself, you can tell him about your arm and he won’t stop liking you! You know, I’ve got a sister-in-law who is really ugly, and my brother married her anyway.” “Hmm. Well, all that lovemaking is not for me anyway.” “You don’t need to make love!” “When I marry, I will need to,” she said, reasonably. “And when you’re a maid in a big house you can’t really avoid it.” “Well, become a priestess of Naigha then!” “That might be a good idea, really. Perhaps I’m a bit old for it.”
In the middle of my round I met the priestess herself, who had been doing the same thing. “Do remind me to talk to Hylse,” she said. I told her what I’d said, and the priestess went to find her and left me to finish the work.
When I came out to wash, Amre and Tao had just finished a bag that looked like the little goat, with the legs hanging down two on each side! They’d stitched the tail somewhere else than it had grown, but all the rest was in one piece. “It’s the first bag from something you caught yourself,” Tao said, “you have to keep your own special stuff in it. Mine, I use for my needles and really good stones and stuff.” He showed me the horn needles he’d been using, and something that looked like the eye-teeth of a very big cat. There were several children around us, and Tao spread his arms to show how big a cat it had been. “I took it by the tail, and Mazao by the head, and Mazao beat it on the skull until it was asleep, and then we cut its belly open and Mazao’s baby brother came out!” “But babies don’t come from cats’ bellies!” one of the children said, but Tao said no, the cat had eaten the baby brother. “Such a big cat! Such a big mouth that it could eat a whole baby brother in one gulp!” I could tell by now when Tao was bragging. Amre, too, because she punched him in the side, and he was on top of her immediately, they were fighting like kittens! Perhaps Tao is really starting to think of us as just a different kind of boys. It might help that Veh is a different kind of boy, too.
We stayed for another few days while our cart was being made —the carpenter and other people really did make a cart for us!— and Tao took Jeran and Athal hunting, and Amre and me too; not Imri, who didn’t want to hunt but she did want to learn to fight. It was to get hides for shoes for the children, because it was going to be cold in the mountains. In fact Rava really wanted to stay until spring, but we all thought it would be best to leave as soon as possible and try to get across the mountains before it got really cold. The children had to get back to their parents, and the letters had to get to the king! It was probably more important to get Ayran’s letters to the king than the letters from the emperor, those had already been travelling so long that there was no hurry any more.
We went to Great Tal-Borin to swap our hides for already tanned hides to make the shoes from, and just as we were there a lot of Ishey soldiers arrived! The officers were women all in white, and the ordinary soldiers were men with white blankets over their shoulder. I recognised the leader, she was Ashi, the large fat judge. This must be the people who were going to take the prisoners to the Ishey city! When Ashi recognised us she congratulated us on conquering the castle— as if we’d done the conquering! We’d only called the people who had really conquered it. We had rescued the children, but Ashi didn’t say anything about that. She asked us to come as witnesses, and I said that she also needed to talk to Hylse because she’d worked at the castle and seen much more than we had. “I shall,” she said, and sent us to get her. Hylse shrugged, “yes, I’ll come and talk, no problem.”
When we got back to the village hall the benches had been put in a square, with a couple of stools at one side. All the witnesses sat on a short side, and Ashi and her officer who was writing and the priestess of Naigha on the other short side, and everybody else who wanted to be there (and that was everybody) on the long sides, with soldiers in front of them. In the middle there were the three prisoners, in chains, kneeling. This made the priestess angry, “that’s not how you treat people, even if they’re prisoners! Lord Fian is old, at least let him sit!” Ashi grudgingly let Lord Fian sit on a stool and allowed the other two to stand.
We had to wait a little more because Mazao and Veh were also coming, and they didn’t go very fast yet. When Ashi saw Veh she looked very closely at him, “I know you… aren’t you…” but we managed to divert her, I think, by saying that Veh was probably someone she knew’s relative and looked like them.
I don’t really remember what everybody said, but first the prisoners had to say that they really were who they were, and then they were put in the lockup again and all the witnesses had to speak. First Ashi made Tao and Amre and me tell the whole story, and then Hylse talked, and Rava, and Lochan, and several other people I couldn’t put names to. It took quite some time, and then everybody was shooed out so the soldiers could make their quarters in the hall. Ashi wanted to talk to me and Amre, “did you want to take Hylse with you to Valdis?’— and yes, we’d talked about that because she didn’t want to stay in the village, too many people knew about her. “You must know that she is pregnant —by her half-brother— and she’ll need— well, women’s things, that maidens who are not really women yet can’t provide.” Well, there was that, and also that we knew how to take care of wounds and fevers, but if anything went wrong with the baby we wouldn’t know anything. And the cold, too! “I would like to take her to the city, we need someone who can read and write Ilaini,” Ashi said. Suddenly I had an idea: “Or could she go to Lady Jerna astin Rhydin? She’s got only the one maid, there would be work for her.” “That’s actually a very good idea!” Ashi said, and went to tell Hylti the plan.
Back at Rava’s house I asked “Nobody needs us any more, right? So we can leave tomorrow?” And yes, we’d done everything, the cart was ready, and the weather was still good enough. The priestess of Naigha stayed to talk to us and to have another look at the little girls. “You only know about wounds, do you?” she asked us. “Fever from infection, I mean. Well, they don’t have any infection that I can see, or anything like the flu or a cold either to give them fever, but they still get these fevers, and not all the time!” That was true: one day the girls were running around playing with Imri and the two Athals, and the next day they were shivering by the fire again. “You really have to get them to Valdyas quickly, where there are real doctors. There’ll probably be one in Lenay or Ildis, and certainly in Valdis.” “But be careful in Lenay and Ildis,” Rava said, “those places are of the Nameless!” I’d seen so many people of the Nameless now, some of them really good people like Lochan, that I didn’t believe any more that it always made someone evil, but I said I’d be careful, anyway.
And the next morning we packed, and loaded the cart, and left.
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