Inside the house were three or four old women not unlike Murzy herself. They gave me cookies, and honey-sweetened tea, and talked to me about many things. They asked me odd questions, too, which were exciting to think about, and I was sorry when Murzy told me we must go back to the family place. As we left, one old dam, Tess Tinder-my-hand, handed me a silvery trinket on a bit of thong and told me to keep it by me. I have it still. It is a pendant in the shape of a star with an eye in its middle, the pupil and cornea of the eye set in black and green stones, the whole polished flat. I heard the old woman telling Murzy to keep an eye on me (at the time I supposed the eye that was to be kept on me was the one they had given me) and bring me back from time to time to see whether the wize-art would come to me. I overheard this and asked Murzy about it, “Will it come to me, will it?” not knowing what it was that was to come.
She told me to be patient, that it was a slow gift, long in the coming. I escaped to that cottage hundreds of times over the succeeding years, but after the first few times tried to put the whole business of the gift out of mind, resolved not to ask again whether it would come for fear the asking might queer the gift, slow or not.
2
Once I had decided I would rather die than care what Mendost did to me any longer, it was not long before he stopped bothering me much. It was no fun for him if I did not scream or beg. Thus, once I had stopped fighting him, he soon stopped lofting me high above our Demesne, and it was only two or three times more I got to see the world from above. I suppose Armigers get used to it and no longer see the wonder of flight. I know that the day I realized I would not be an Armiger was bitterly sad for me, for I had hoped to see the world often as a bird sees it.
That isn’t the thing I meant to speak of, however. On one of those last times Mendost had me dangling by one foot high above the Demesne, with me simply hanging, refusing to be frightened, I looked away northeast and saw a city there, upside down, hanging against the ceiling of the world like candle drippings. When I had been put down again and had time to do so, I went to old Murzy and asked her what I had seen.
“A city, chile?” she asked. “Not off there. Nothing there but roones.”
It was a short forever before I learned what “roones’ were. That happened thiswise.
One of my favorite rides was to go down through the sammit fields to the much eroded badlands at the northwestern edge of the Demesne where the flood-chucks were at work. Long in the past, according to Murzy, there had been no flood-chucks at all, but there had been two totally different creatures, one a dam builder and the other a dry-land digger. The great ancestors had somehow bred them together—don’t ask me how. What the great ancestors had the power to do is quite beyond my power to explain—to come up with flood-chucks, great fluffy brown beasts who love to cut trees and brush and build dams across gullies where water might one day run destructively. I liked to watch them work. If one bowed to them, they would line up to return the bow, the head-chuck first in line, each one in the line bending a bit more deeply than the one before. Very ceremonious beasties they were, and they liked me, which won me to them completely. They liked me and horses liked me. Sometimes the stablemen would ask me about the horses. “What ails the mare, Jinian? D’ya think she had a gutache, or what?” And I would say, “She’s been into the startle-flower, Roggle. Give her some charcoal and she’ll be fine.” Like as not, she would turn out to be just that. Horses were funny. No other animal we used had so many little sicknesses, almost as though they found the world not totally to their liking.
Anyway, on this particular afternoon, after a day particularly filled with Garz’s bluster and Mother’s screaming—Mother was a screamer; Garz would tease her about it sometimes, calling her Eller the Yeller—Misquick, Grommy, and I set off down along the flood-chuck works, pausing there only long enough for a long, mutually satisfying bowing session, then turned away into the hills north of the Demesne. I had taken my camp kit and the usual provisions, enough for half a day’s wandering, and had not figured on being late to return.
However, a storm came up; Misquick, frightened by the thunder, tried to gallop back to her comfortable stable and ended sliding down a muddy slope into knee-deep water and thence into a kind of twisty canyon which no one of us could find our way out of again. Grommy at once went foraging, the one thing he was good at, and brought us three fresh bunwits. I found table roots growing along the stream, and Misquick made up for losing us by locating a sizable patch of giant wheat. A little bashing with a stone, a little chopping with a knife, and we
