Chapter 8
Merhaven and the Sea
When Precious Wind rode south from the abbey, she kept in mind the direction and placement of the three ruins where Abasio might have hidden his wagon. When the first appeared, a group of half-collapsed buildings off to her right, she at once discarded them as a possibility. The area was too clearly visible from the abbey walls. Looking back, she could see individual guards moving back and forth atop that gray mass, stopping occasionally to use their distance glasses. Seeing people use them always made her wonder why it was that some things had survived from the Before Time while others had totally disappeared. Even in this barbaric place and time, Precious Wind reflected, people made glass and ground lenses, though the ones made in Norland were poor compared to those made in Tingawa. Glassmaking had survived, smelting ores and working metal had survived, though many alloys recorded in the histories were now almost impossible to make. Electronics were no more. Architecture had retreated to a time far more ancient than the centuries just before the Big Kill. No building reached higher now than the towers of the abbey: stone could not be piled on stone interminably, not even with so many flying buttresses that the buildings seemed half-air. Abasio had spoken of much higher towers far to the east, now half-drowned, but Precious Wind had never seen such things.
Her second possible location was identified only by an overgrown road leading away to the right, but the piles of rotted wood and rubbish at its end could have concealed nothing larger than a mouse’s nest. Only the arrangement of the piles in vaguely rectangular shapes spoke of their having been a dwelling, a barn, perhaps a cowshed or stables.
The third possibility noted on the map was to the left along a straight section of the roadway, the only straight section for some miles. When she came to it, she noted the outcroppings of red stone on her left, like a dotted line, and when the road eventually veered to the right, she knew she had missed the ruin shown on the map. She turned the hop-skip, went back almost to the start of the straight stretch, and let the horses stand while she walked along the edge of the forest. If she had not known the wagon must be there she would not have found it as readily. The wagon, with all its paraphernalia, was inside the three-walled wreckage of a house, the drooping roof covering it from the sky, chopped limbs and small trees camouflaging the gap where the front wall had once been. The horse had simply walked through the open side and out the back door, leaving the wagon sitting under the roof, composedly untroubled, its pots and vats tied down, its window and door neatly closed and locked.
Now what? She was looking for a thing she had seen only once, years ago, when she had taken it from the hands of its keepers to wrap both the thing and its sheaf of instructions to be placed among Xu-i-lok’s court dresses: a stiff blue packet holding a gadget about the size of a hen’s egg. Where would Abasio have hidden it? She picked the lock on the door and went in, examining everything carefully and in great detail.
At the back of the wagon, a bed stretched all the way from side to side, long enough for a tall man, wide enough for two sleepers. Either Abasio and Xulai had slept together or Abasio had made a bed on the narrow floor. Precious Wind considered the implications of this, finding a slight embarrassment in the presumption. The relationship between the two was, in one sense, none of her affair. In another sense it was of overwhelming importance and interest to an enormous number of living people and would have been to a greater number long dead. She set the matter aside. If there was nothing one could do to affect a situation, it wasted energy to think about it.
The outside edge of the bed had legs that folded flat beneath it; the back edge was hinged against the wall. When the front side was tilted down, the mattress was held in place by straps. Flat against the wall above the bed was a hinged worktable, and when it was folded down, it revealed a window. The bed, slanted down as it was, left space beneath the table for the worker’s legs. Precious Wind smiled with real enjoyment at the ingenuity. The workmanship spoke of a craftsman’s hands coupled with a nimble, sagacious mind. He had been the son of a farmer’s daughter, she had been told, and his father had been a leader of men—not a particularly evil man by the standards of his time and place, certainly not a good man, but an intelligent one.
Forward of bed and table, cupboards lined the sidewalls, every one of them full of the tools, supplies, and implements that were, she supposed, essential either to the dyer’s art or to Abasio’s survival. A tiny, double-walled stove was built into the cupboards on the side opposite the door, with spaces open at the bottom to allow cool air to flow in, be warmed, rise upward and out a vent above. Atop the stove was an iron kettle, its base fitting snugly into a recess so that it would not slide or tip. The smokestack was carefully held by metal brackets away from the surrounding wood. Every detail spoke of care, and time, and thought. She herself could have lived in this wagon quite comfortably. The only thing she would have done to improve it for herself would have been to add books and a musical instrument, for
