Saturday nodded soberly. When she came out of the tavern, the man with the cap began to finger his crotch, as though it were some instrument he intended to play upon. Rape was not out of the question. Maire had warned her. So had Africa. Saturday gawked and breathed at him through stained teeth, watching his interest dwindle. His vehicle was used to transport livestock. The back of it was full of heaving movement and an evil smell.
“You have a choice,” the driver sneered. “Back there with the beasts or up front, with me.”
“We’ll ride with you,” said Sam, getting himself into the middle of the seat with Saturday on the outside. “She needs the fresh air, you know how girls get.”
“What’s she here for, anyhow?” demanded the driver angrily. “We didn’t ask for her. Didn’t ask for you!”
“I just go along,” said Sam. “She has to see the boy, and then she and the boy have to come back to where the woman is, that’s all I know.”
“The woman’s your mother, isn’t she?”
Sam gave no evidence of surprise. “Maybe you’ve got a different kind of mother from mine. Mine doesn’t tell me anything.”
The driver snorted. They moved onto the road, heavy with traffic. Now there were towns and villages all along the route, with fields and pastures behind, toward the mountains. Along the shore were fishing villages, boats and ships rocking offshore at their mooring lines.
“No bays,” said Sam. “I’ll bet you lose a lot of ships when the weather’s bad.”
“Boats go to Cloud when the weather’s bad. To Cloud or Selmouth or Scaery. Where they’d might as well take them now, for all the good they’ll do us here.”
“Something wrong?”
“The Queen’s ships are out there on the water, and they’ve sent our boats back. A few days of that, and people will go hungry.”
Sam hushed himself and sat silent as the road rolled away beneath them. By midmorning, the mists had gathered, and they could see no farther ahead than the nose of the vehicle. It was midafternoon when the driver pointed ahead and muttered, “Cloudport, there.”
They could see nothing, then something, then a darkness against the ever-present mists. A vagrant wind blew some of the veils between them and the city away. They saw it almost clearly before the fogs closed in again, a gray city piled at the side of the sea with the citadel crouched on a rocky crag above.
FOUR
• Sam and Saturday were met at the gate of the citadel by two robed men wearing elaborate headdresses, which exposed only their ears and the fronts of their faces. These fleshy parts seemed extraneous, like sections of a mask, and the whole effect was monolithic, as though these were not articulated creatures who moved themselves but solid lumps moved by some outside force, as chessmen were moved during play. Saturday recognized the shape of the ponderous figures, the same as the two passersby at the graveyard in Selmouth. She caught herself staring, flushed, and dropped her eyes, but not before they had noticed her doing it.
“Modest women do not stare into the faces of men,” said one with a snarl. He had a face like a vice, narrow and unyielding about the jaws. “An immodest woman is a pawn of the devil.”
“Has the woman no veil?” demanded the other, a petulant creature with pursed rosy lips, thick and moist as a mollusk.
“Young as she is, we did not know a veil was required,” Sam returned craftily. “She has a kerchief she can use. What is supposed to be covered?”
“Her face. All but the eyes.”
Saturday started to object, then drew a deep breath and forced herself to be silent. Maire had said little enough about this. She had talked of priests, of churchy things, of her own life, of children and gardens and the countryside. She had talked much about the Gharm. But she had said very little about prophets or the Cause. With Sam here, it would be better simply to go along, to say nothing, to let Sam handle it, man to man, as it were. She stood quietly as he tied her kerchief across her face, under her eyes, covering her nose and mouth. She had a shawl with frer, which she drew over her head, giving thanks that her clothes were straight and bulky, hiding anything female about her shape. Then she tried to stop thinking of anything, for Sam was being led inside, and she wanted to stay as close to him as possible.
They were brought before a dais with high-backed chairs upon it, the middle and highest one occupied by another of the robed prophets, an aged man with blazing deep-set eyes and a mouth drawn down and bracketed by heavy lines. The seat he occupied was far too large for him, but his fury filled it. The chair pulsed, as though a star burned itself out there. Saturday saw it, then did not see it, a moment’s vision which came and went. She looked at her feet, not wanting her eyes to meet the rage facing her, feeling it would be dangerous to try. Sam gripped her shoulder, squeezing it, saying by that gesture, calm. Be calm. Through the contact she could feel his own flesh quiver. He was no calmer than she.
“Why do you bring this whore of Satan to Voorstod?” the prophet cried. His voice was quavery with age, shaped by years of hostility into a wavy edged dagger of sound.
Sam thought it over. The words the prophet had used were a riddle. The riddle itself was the only clue he had to its answer. What would the answer to this riddle be, in a legend? She was
