He searched with his hands for a place to rest, a place dry enough that he would not be soaked through by the rising spray. Above him was a cranny where two great roots thrust upward in buttresses against the bulk of shadowed foliage overhanging the river. He climbed into the elbow of the tree and leaned back, his hand resting on a shivering clamminess at his side which he struck away in instant revulsion. The mass fell to the trail and exploded with muffled pops. Jaer shook his head, grinning ruefully. It had been only a mass of seed pods of the pepper-pot tree, clammy and cold from the spray. He resolved to wait for the scattered pepper to get wet before risking streaming eyes and a burning throat. The pepper-pot was sufficiently irritating to serve as a weapon against wild dogs, and the villagers sometimes scattered the dry pods around fields to keep vermin from the crops. He pulled the hood of his cloak forward, hoping that no more pods would drop around him as he munched on a soggy biscuit.
There was another sound in the water sound. Among the bubbling, falling, swirling, repeated sounds of the falling river there was suddenly a new set of noises. Something or someone was coming along the trail up the stream. There were scrabbling sounds and muffled scrapings and what might have been the throaty mutter of a voice or the beginning of a growl. Jaer did not move. His breath locked tight below his throat, and he strained as though he were an enormous, crouching ear listening in the night. The noise came closer. Over the roar of the river he could not tell whether it came on two feet or four, whether it crawled or walked. There was an immense sneeze and a growling mutter which could have been a curse, a strangled animal sound, or something else. The strange sound went on for long moments and then dwindled up the trail. Whatever hadcome to meet him had gone on, through the scattered epper-pot, unable to smell anything for a time. Perhaps it ad not come toward him at all. Perhaps it had only been moving in the opposite direction.
Jaer finished his biscuit thoughtfully and then went on down the trail until it grew almost light. Only then did he find a dry place above the trail among the gnarled roots. Even then, he slept lightly, willing wakefulness to come if there should be any change in the steady roar of the water.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE CITY OF CANDOR
Year 1168-Late Fall
Travelling down what remained of the canyon was a long, sliding dream of slippery rock and wet leaves, a continuing roar of water, constant mists, and dimly filtered light. The air was full of strange smells, and it was almost noon before the last of the fogs burned away to show the narrow line of blue far above at the canyon’s rim. The river plunged between two pillars of stone onto a long slope where it spread and stilled itself, whispering between grassy banks edged with tall grasses, flowing northward toward Candor.
The stream entered bamboo thickets, at first small and delicate, a dancing screen of leaves across the sun. Gradually the stems grew taller and thicker until Jaer had to fight his way among them as his feet sank deeply into the mud. The great stems speared up above him to the height of seven tall men, knocking together with a hollow, mocking sound, their high fronds cutting out the light so that he walked in a green dusk. Instead of one river there were a hundred brooklets scattering away down the slope, gloomed by shade and hidden by arching leaves, full of treacherous, moss-covered rocks.
Tall stems sprang up carrying fleshy blossoms which glowed like candles when the light struck them. Jaer had a blister on one heel, and he stopped to pad his boot with green leaves across the broken skin. He had been wet and cold throughout the night, now he was wet and hot and muddy. There seemed no end to the bamboo and no trail to follow except downward.
Then there was light once more as the streams gathered themselves to run as one between open banks before dropping into another shallow canyon between tall promontories of meadow. Across the chasm a meadow glowed in sunlit green, and two centaurs ran toward him across it, tails flying and arms raised in greeting. Jaer waved, briefly, and then plunged into the canyon. It was only a few hundred paces down the last slope onto the coastal plain.
A rutted road ran along the foot of the hills. Jaer plodded along it, feeling the pain of the blister and the weary ache in leg and thigh. Only a little way along the road he came upon the crossed poles of a Separated village. Sighing, he turned aside to find a copse or glade to rest in. It was late afternoon, and he was too tired to try to get past the village before dark.
In the night he was awakened by an ominous clatter, a kind of thunderous hammering which went by on the road, creaking and pounding. After a long time he thought that it might have been horses, creatures he had not seen but had read of. He lay quiet under the orbansa, thinking about that. There was no fire to lead anyone toward him, so he shrugged and fell asleep once more.
At first light he donned the orbansa again and went around the village, avoiding the margin stones and hiding himself from the watch tower as well as he could. By full light he was beyond the farther edge of it, and by mid-morning he had circled two more.
The orbansa was uncomfortably hot. At noon he found a small, hidden pool at the edge of the river and got thankfully into it, pack and robes hidden in the thicket at the pool’s edge. As he
