Medlo fretted. ‘I have been here before, and the priests did not come into the caravansary. I don’t like the feel of it.’
Beside a long line of pack animals came a group of striding men, one among them tall and black, naked except for leather boots and loin guard, his hair tied into flowing tails by bright cylinders of yarn. He carried a spear half again as tall as he from which a cockatrice banner flew, and Leona looked him over carefully as though he were a horse she thought of buying. ‘There’s a passable man.’
Medlo nodded, approached the dark spearman and spoke with him in a quiet mutter which the others could not hear over the clatter of hooves. They returned together, the dark one bowing, intoning his name in a muttering bass as though it were an invocation.
‘Thew-son,’ he rumbled. ‘I will sell-spear if you will give me food and drink this very time. The way south is all dust and salt meat. The bread was sour.’ He spat, then grinned as Medlo began to talk to him about his fee. As they ate together they agreed it was dangerous and unwise to stay in Byssa, even for one night, and yet it was too late to get away.
‘We must buy a room,’ decided Medlo. ‘It will get us out of this dust, noise and confusion, and it will get us out of sight. Something brews here. It has my hair itching.’
‘It feels like a nest of basilisks,’ agreed Thewson. ‘Many places are bad, but this is very bad. It stinks.’
Medlo touched the strings of his jangle into a mockery of Thewson’s phrase. Pling plang. ‘Oh, yes, it does stink. All the dark sewers of Byssa come reeking into the air that the dark warrior may discover how they stink.’
Thewson showed his teeth, ivory on brown. ‘What can be discovered about you, tune twister?’
‘Oh,’ Medlo jeered at himself, ‘that I went from bad place to bad place as you have done, to save my skin. And after that, decided to go seek what I had been sent seeking in the first place.’
‘Luxuf-razh,’ murmured Thewson. ‘Riddles. What thing do you seek?’
‘A sword which carries power. The Sword of Sud-Akwith. But it’s only a casual quest. If I should happen upon it.’
‘I too,’ said Leona. ‘I too have a quest. There is a vessel I would be glad to have, the Vessel of Healing. Though it is probably too late for it to do what I would have it do; still – if I happened upon it.’
‘And I seek the Girdle of Chu-Namu,’ said Jasmine, firmly, forgetting to be old and ignoring their startled glances. ‘I do seek it, purposefully. It is not casual at all….’
‘Wa’osu,’ breathed Thewson. ‘I too seek a thing, a Crown of Wisdom which belonged to the old chiefs of the Courts of the Lions. It is a place so far you do not know of it.’
‘Where all men are warriors, strong as lions,’ sang Medlo.
Thewson lifted his brows. ‘True, tune twister. And where such as you are set to gathering flowers.’
Jaer frowned, but Medlo only shrugged in disdain. ‘So I was, warrior. I gathered flowers, and gathered scorn, and gathered evil intentions, and left them all at last to gather dust upon the road, as do we all. Still, you eat food which my songs have earned, and your spear may keep us alive until we eat again. If we can get under cover.’
They bought a room, locked themselves inside, and divided the night into watches. Leona took the first, Thewson the second. Jaer drifted to sleep lulled by the breathing of the great dogs which lay beside him.
Jaer dreamed. Someone said, ‘Is she a virgin?’ and she was walking among strangers dressed in filmy white with the little pink snouts of her breasts peeking out to see where they were going. Medlo, elegant in green velvet, answered, ‘Yes, she is. Oh, yes. Always.’
Someone said there had been no harvest because there had been no unicorn, no unicorn because there had been no virgin. Jaer shook her long, yellow hair over her shoulders and tried to look remote. She was sitting on a large, sharp rock which was biting its way into her left buttock with sullen fervor. The rock was in a clearing. Concentration was difficult, but Jaer knew that the solemnity of the occasion demanded ritual, motionless purity.
‘Just the one we’ve been looking for,’ said someone. The unicorn at the edge of the clearing tossed its glittering mane in a veil of frost as it turned to get another look at her.
‘I have a sense of technical impropriety,’ said the unicorn in Ephraim’s old voice. Jaer muttered something, and the unicorn went on, ‘What was that? I wish you’d speak up. I hate virgins who won’t speak up.’
‘I said, you’re not the only one. I’ve had a sense of technical impropriety ever since I was born.’
‘I’ve met a lot of you virgins,’ said the unicorn. ‘Well, a lot of nonvirgins, too, if it comes to that. I’ve never had quite this feeling before.’
‘A kind of itch,’ suggested Jaer. ‘Mixed with a little spontaneous and irresolute anger.’
‘Rather like that,’ mused the unicorn.
‘Perhaps if I explained it to you …’
‘I’m not sure I want to know about it,’ said the unicorn, kicking moodily at a rotted stump. Large hunks of punky wood began to fly about the clearing. ‘Still, I need to know whether to go on with this or not.’
‘I was born with a genetic defect,’ said Jaer. In the dream this seemed entirely reasonable. ‘Sometimes I’m male, and sometimes I’m female. I switch. Technically, each new body may be a virgin. I suppose it is. Do you
