‘Perhaps so.’ Cabal signalled a halt by the simple expedient of stopping and expecting everybody else to follow suit. He took out his telescope and surveyed the terrain. ‘There are a couple of people down there by the road. We shall ask.’
‘Isn’t that risky?’ asked Bose.
‘In this place, even blinking is fraught with peril. Yes, it is risky. They look like a pair of yokels doing whatever it is that yokels do during the day, but they may turn out to be hideous monsters intent on chewing out our spleens.’ He shrugged. ‘It happens, but what is one to do?’ He started walking again.
Bose pattered along in his wake, like an anxious pug. ‘Do you think that is likely?’
‘No. Yes. Perhaps. How should I know? I am a stranger here myself.’ And so, having put Bose’s doubts to rest, or not, he fell back into a ratiocinatory silence from which he would not easily be dislodged.
As they approached the road, Shadrach commented disapprovingly, ‘Look at those sheep. They’re in among the corn. They’ll bloat and die from eating it.’
‘You seem very knowledgeable on the matter, Mr Shadrach,’ said Corde.
‘I come from a farming family,’ said the tall, thin, ascetic and thoroughly unbucolic Shadrach. ‘We kept sheep on the top moor, and Heaven help anyone who let them get into the cornfields down by the river.’
They were now only a few dozen yards from the couple by the road, and conjectures could be made without recourse to a telescope. If they were hideous monsters with a penchant for spleen, they carried it well; Cabal’s guess of ‘yokels’ seemed far closer to the truth. They were young people: he a shepherd in a blue smock and red vest, brown-booted and gaitered, a wooden flagon hanging from his belt, his hair a coarse, wiry brown, his sideburns hedgelike; she equally rustic, though apparently wearing her best red dress and white embroidered blouse. A young lamb lay in her lap, crunching sour apples. Judging from Shadrach’s angry intake of breath, this was also something sheep should avoid. They were sitting by the edge of the road between the trees, chatting and giggling, and altogether unaware of anything else outside their sphere.
‘Excuse me,’ said Cabal, ‘how do we get to Hlanith from here?’ He did not ask if this was the right road for, on closer acquaintance, it clearly wasn’t much of a road at all, just a narrow avenue between two rows of unkempt trees. Perhaps once it had led to a great house or estate, but now it was overgrown and even pitted deeply enough in places to create small shadowed pools, one of which the girl was cooling her bare feet in.
The shepherd boy looked up at them with dull surprise, the natural stupidity in his rubicund face plainly enhanced by drink. Behind him, the girl leaned over to look at the newcomers. Her action was coy, but her expression was knowing, and Cabal disliked her for that just as much as he disliked her beau for his bovine inanity.
The boy scrambled to his feet, belatedly alive to his dereliction of duty. ‘Jus’ a moment, yer ’onours, jus’ a moment.’ He ran off to drive the more adventurous sheep from the corn, leaving Cabal’s party in an awkward silence with the girl. She, for her part, did not rise, but remained seated on the green swathe, idly playing with a strand of her russet hair and smiling slightly at them. Corde smiled back, to Shadrach’s disgust, Cabal’s incomprehension and Bose’s blithe ignorance.
‘I wonder, my dear,’ ventured Corde, eliciting a quiet snort from Shadrach, ‘if you could direct us to Hlanith. It can’t be far from here.’
She did not speak, but replied by pointing at the end of the avenue to the south and gesturing vaguely eastwards. Then she went back to toying with her hair and smiling at him.
‘Thank you,’ said Corde, low and slowly, and there was a definite air of twiddling a thin moustache, if he had been wearing one.
‘Thank you, miss,’ said Shadrach, in a tone of subdued outrage. ‘Come
As they walked away, the shepherd came back, his hands cupped around some interesting insect he had found. He watched them go with a dull lack of understanding or even remembrance. Then their presence slipped from his mind altogether and he sat down by the girl again to show her this new treasure. Corde watched all this over his shoulder and laughed. ‘As pretty as a picture,’ he said to the others.
Shadrach would have none of it. ‘A particularly vulgar picture. The product of a coarse and depraved artist.’ But that made Corde laugh all the more.
The girl, for all her dubious taste in suitors, was at least a reliable guide. The avenue ended beside a road between high embankments and topped with trees and bushes. It was clear and frequently travelled; they met a tinker coming from the east who confirmed that they were on the Hlanith road, and shortly thereafter they got a lift on a wagon taking fodder into the city. The four men perched on the swaying pile of hay with differing degrees of assuredness and dignity, and even gave voice to their belief that the expedition was past its stumbling stage and was now properly under way.
‘Yes, indeed,’ said Cabal. ‘Apart from the trifling facts that we have no idea where the Animus is, whether its whereabouts are known to anyone in Hlanith, or – and this is my personal favourite – if it even exists. Apart from those caveats, yes, everything is going swimmingly.’
Hlanith, however, was no disappointment on first sight. The land around it was low and marshy, but approached from many directions by causeways both natural and artificial. These converged on a great sloping plateau no more than a few dozen yards higher than the surrounding marshland, a plateau that sloped gently down towards its seaward side. The granite walls that ran around the town proper were almost unnecessary to the defences – the approaches could be made very difficult to any enemy – but it seemed that the town architects had felt that walls were necessary, so there they were.
Their wagon clattered up an artificial causeway whose length was broken here and there by bridges to let the highest tides wash in and out of the marshes unimpeded. The illusion of reality was remarkable, Cabal admitted to himself. The sea breeze blew in and brought the smell of brine with it. Gulls, identical to the birds of Earth, as far as he could see, wheeled and cried over the hummocks of harsh sea grass growing across what seemed to be the estuary of a great river that had disappeared. He watched as a gull flipped a fish out of a shallow pool where it had been stranded, immediately starting a fierce squabble among the rest of the opportunistic flock.
The wagon paused briefly at a guard post close to the end of the causeway. The guards’ questions and search were so cursory and disinterested that it seemed Hlanith had little need of any defences at the moment, natural or artificial. The wagon was directed onwards across the drawbridge and under the portcullis of a small keep that was built across the full width of the causeway – an artefact from a less settled time and a precaution against a dangerous future – and ten minutes or so later, they were clambering down and thanking the wagon driver outside a gate in the town wall. He, for his part, surprised them by refusing to take payment, and wished them a pleasant
