some horseshoe tracks, though it lay empty as far as I could see. Across it was open country, scrubby and nondescript, with a few stands of trees.
I sat down behind a screen of bushes and solemnly cracked and ate ten of my walnuts. That left mi twenty- two, and nine acorns, which I kept only as a last resort, I got up, faced left, and walked boldly down the road.
My mind was busy with what I might tell any carter or drover or horseman who overtook me. I decided the one thing I had that might show me as something more than a runaway slave boy was the little book I carried in my pouch. I was a scholar’s slave, sent from Asion to carry this book to a scholar in Etra, who was ill and wished to read it before he died, and had begged his friend in Asion to send it to him, with a boy who could read it to him, for his eyes were failing…I worked on the story diligently for miles. I was so lost in it I didn’t even see the farm cart that turned from a side track into the road a little way behind me until the jingle of harness and the clop-clop of big hoofs woke me up. The horse’s enormous, mild-eyed face was practically looking over my shoulder.
“Howp,” said the driver, a squat man with a wide face, looking me over with no expression at all on his face, I mumbled some kind of greeting.
“Hop up,” the man said more distinctly. “Good ways yet to the crossroads.”
I scrambled up onto the seat. He studied me some more. His eyes were remarkably small, like seeds in his big loaf of a face. “You’ll be going to Shecha,” he said, as an inarguable fact.
I agreed with him. It seemed the best thing to do, “Don’t see you folk much on the road no more,” the driver said. And at that I realised that he had taken me for—that he had recognised me as—one of the Marsh people. I didn’t need my complicated story. I wasn’t a runaway but a native.
It was just as well. This fellow might not have known what a book was.
All the slow miles to the crossroads, through the late afternoon and the immense gold-and-purple sunset, he told me a tale about a farmer and his uncle and some hogs and a piece of land beside Rat Water and an injustice that had been done. I never understood any of it, but I could nod and grunt at the right moments, which was what he wanted. Always like talking with you folk,” he said when he dropped me off at the crossroads. “Keep your counsel, you do. There’s Shecha road.”
I thanked him and set off into the dusk. The side road led off southwest. If Shecha was a place of the Marsh people, I might as well go there.
After a while I stopped and cracked all the rest of the walnuts between two stones, and ate them one by one as I went on, for my hunger had grown painful.
Evening was darkening when I saw a glimmer o lights ahead. As I came closer, the shining of water reflected the last light in the sky. I came through a cow pasture to a tiny village on the shore of a lake. The houses were built up on stilts, and some stood right out over the water at the end of piers; there were boats docked, which I could not make out clearly. I was very tired and very hungry and the yellow glimmer of a lighted window was beautiful in the late dusk. I went to that house, climbed the wooden stairs to the narrow porch, and looked in the open door. It seemed to be an inn or beer house, windowless, with a low counter, but no furniture at all. Four or five men sat on a rug on the floor with clay cups in their hands. They all looked at me and then looked away so as not to stare.
“Well, come in, boy,” one said. They were dark-skinned, slight, short men, all of them. A woman behind the counter turned around, and I saw old Gammy, the piercing bright dark eyes, the eagle nose. “Where d’you come from?” she said.
“The forest.” My voice came out as a hoarse whisper. Nobody said anything. “I’m looking for my people.”
“Who are they then?” the woman asked. “Come in!” I came in, looking hangdog, no doubt. She slapped something on a plate and shoved it across the counter towards me.
“I don’t have money,” I said.
“Eat it,” she said crossly. I took the plate and sat down with it on a seat by the unlighted hearth. It was a kind of cold fish fritter, I think, quite a large one, but it was gone before I knew what it was.
“Who’s your people, then?”
“I don’t know.”
“Makes it a bit hard to find ’em,” one of the men suggested. They kept looking at me, not with a steady stare or with hostility, but covertly studying the new thing that had come their way. The instant disappearance of the fritter had caused some silent amusement.
“Around here?” another man asked, rubbing his bald head.
“I don’t know. We were stolen—my sister and I. Slave raiders from Etra. South of here, maybe.”
“When was that?” the innkeeper asked in her sharp voice.
“Fourteen or fifteen years ago.”
“He’s a runaway slave, is he?” the oldest of the men murmured to the one next to him, uneasy.
“So you was a little tad,” said the innkeeper, filling a clay cup with something and bringing it to me. “What name had you?”
“Gavir. My sister was Sallo.”
“No more than that?”
I shook my head.
“How’d you chance to be in the forest?” the bald man asked, mildly enough, but it was a hard question and he knew it. I hesitated a little and said, “I was lost.”
To my surprise, they accepted that as an answer, at least for the moment. I drank the cup of milk the woman had given me. It tasted sweet as honey.
“What other names do you remember?” the woman asked.
I shook my head. “I was one or two years old.”
“And your sister?
“She was a year or two older.”
“And she’s a slave in Etra?” She pronounced it “Ettera.” “She’s dead.” I looked around at them, the dark, alert faces. “They killed her,” I said. “That’s why I ran away.”
“Ah, ah,” said the bald man. “Ah, well... And how long ago was that?”
“Two years ago.”
He nodded, exchanging glances with a couple of the others.
“Here, give the boy something better than cow piss, Bia,” said the oldest man, who had a toothless grin and looked a little simple. “I’ll stand him a beer.”
“Milk’s what he needs,” said the innkeeper, pouring my cup full again. “If that was beer he’d be flat on his face.”
“Thank you, ma-io,” I said, and drank the milk down gratefully.
The honorific, I think, made her give a rasp of a laugh. “City tongue, but you’re a Rassiu,” she observed.
“So they’re not on your trail, so far as you know,” the bald man asked me. “Your city masters, down there.”
T think they think I drowned,” I said.
He nodded.
My weariness, the food filling my hunger, their wary kindness and cautious acceptance of me as what I was—and maybe my having to say that Sallo had been killed—it all worked on me to bring tears into my eyes. I stared at the ashes in the hearth as if a fire was burning there, trying to hide my weakness.
“Looks like a southerner,” one of the men murmured, and another, “I knew a Sallo Evo Danaha down at Crane Levels.”
“Gavir and Sallo are Sidoyu names,” the bald man said. “I’m off to bed, Bia. I’ll set off before dawn. Pack us up a dinner, eh? Come along south with me if you like, Gavir.”
The woman sent me upstairs after him to the common sleeping room of the inn. I lay down in my old blanket on a cot and fell asleep like a rock dropping into black water.
The bald man shook me awake in the dark. “Coming?” he said, and I struggled up and got my gear and followed him. I had no idea where he was going or why or how, only that he was going south, and his invitation was my guidance.
A tiny oil lamp burned in the room downstairs. The innkeeper, who stood behind the counter as if she had
