‘You will probably find out,’ she said with some asperity.
‘That is so.’ This seemed to contribute to his satisfaction, for he beamed at her for several minutes without saying anything. ‘One, two more days you stay here with Daingol and Sowsie and Dhariat, rest a little more, so, eat hot food not all full of ashes. Then, you go to Tanner, Gombator. Slow. Seven days, maybe ten. The green men say Tanner is empty of black robes now. All are gone away south. So you wait there for me.’
‘When will you come?’
‘When I find warriors. That is what I go for woman – to find many warriors to fight these black beetles. Then I come to you in Tanner –’
‘Why not Tiles, Thewson? The dog king will come there.’
‘Tanner is closer. Send Sowsie to Tiles if you want to do that. Have her look for Fox there. You wait. When flower month comes, then I come for you, Jasmine. In flower month. That is a … fanul… a sign?’
‘A symbol,’ she said softly. His talk did not fool her. He was spending the day with her because he did not know if he would see her again. She thought of pleading with him that he not go, or that she go with him, rejecting both. He must go. She would only slow him, perhaps make it harder for him to get safely to … to wherever, whatever. He had told her that his gods always repaid. Well, she must trust them, as he did. ‘A symbol, flower month,’ she said smiling and stroking his hand.
During their noon meal, Daingol queried him closely. ‘Do you trust these green-clad men, Thewson?’
‘Do you not?’
‘I have heard no ill of them. I have heard no good, either. You are going far with them, alone.’
‘No. Not alone. I will take Lain-achor.’ He went on to threaten Daingol and the singers with dire harm should they fail to bring Jasmine and the little people (but mostly Jasmine) safely to Tanner. He spent more time than Dhariat thought necessary in warnings and instructions, but she bore it as gracefully as possible. Sowsie seemed only amused.
He left them in the early dawn, riding out of the inn yard with the rising sun making long shadows across the rain-glossed cobbles of the street. A spring wind carried the smells of washed earth. ‘He knows what he is doing,’ muttered Daingol.
‘His gods know what he is doing.’ whispered Jasmine.
More out of boredom than anything else, Jasmine began to learn to weave. The little people did not think it worthwhile to unpack the big loom, but they had back looms with them which they used at odd hours of the day or evening. While Mum-lil strode back and forth (rubbing her own back dramatically and declaiming upon the pains and tribulations of approaching motherhood, much enjoying the drama of it all and the solicitous treatment accorded by Doh-ti) Hanna-lil and the Gaffer taught Jasmine weaving. It seemed that her fingers had always: nown the way of it, so quickly she learned. ‘So,’ said the little woman, ‘you have been joking with us. You were a weaver in Lakland to the east.’
‘Never.’ Jasmine was torn between pleasure and awe at the way her mind and hands responded to the threads before her. ‘Never before today. But it is as if my hands know all about it.’ The shuttle flicked between her fingers, one hand to the other, and the fabric grew between her knees.
‘Well, we will teach you some harder things – some that were hard for us to learn, even after years of weaving. That may slow your hands so that we do not feel outdone.’
Whatever they taught her did not slow her greatly. She wove upon the little loom in the morning, and at noon when they stopped to eat, and in the evenings by the fire. If she could have thought of a way to do it on horseback, she would have woven then, too. When they came to Tanner and found it all but deserted with a quiet inn eager to house them all, she spent every hour not spent gazing northward in weaving. It seemed that the figured belts almost wove themselves, sashes of cream and green, lined in blue and violet. In her mind she saw the belts woven in deeper blue embroidered with silver, like the one Medlo had so often worn, and her fingers ached to try that design in those colours.
Days went by. Mum-lil had a child, a girl baby, blessedly small so that Mum-lil did not suffer in the bearing, but healthy for all her tininess. Between the baby and the weaving they did not become bored with the time though twenty days had gone since Thewson went north. Jasmine forbade herself to worry, told herself sternly that she would not be concerned for him – not yet.
Thewson, Lain-achor, and the company of green men rode hard into the north, crossing the icy torrents of the River Lazentien not far from a place Leona would have recognized, observed by a wandering shepherd who marked them as the second wonder of his life. Six days from sunup to dark they rode, and on the seventh came to a waste blocked by a wall stretching from east to west as far as they could see, a wall of such unexpected and bizarre construction that Thewson and Lain-achor were driven into silence past
