“No straw?” our captain asked.
“None, I fear, here. But they’ll have aplenty in the village, never doubt it. They lay it in the road to silence the horses’ hoofs when a woman’s with child, as I’ve seen many a time. You’ll have a cartload as a gift from me, if you can use that much.” The baron smiled as he said that; he had a friendly face, round and red as an apple. “Now tell me” (he went on) “how it is to be a floating sword. I always find other men’s trades of interest, and it seems to me you follow one of the most fascinating of all. For example, how do you gauge the charge you will make your employer?”
“We have two scales, Lord,” Miles began.
I had heard all of that before, so I stopped listening. Bracata was next to me at table, so I had all I could do to get something to eat for myself, and I doubt I ever got a taste of the pheasant. By good luck, a couple of lasses— the baron’s daughters—had come in, and one of them started curling a lock of Derek’s hair around her finger, so that distracted him while he was helping himself to the venison, and Bracata put an arm around the other and warned her of Men. If it had not been for that I would not have had a thing; as it was, I stuffed myself on deer’s meat until I had to loose my waistband. Flesh of any sort had been a rarity where I came from.
I had thought that the baron might give us beds in the house, but when we had eaten and drunk all we could hold, the white-haired fat man led us out a side door and over to a wattle-walled building full of bunks—I suppose it was kept for the extra laborers needed at harvest. It was not the palace bedroom I had been dreaming of, but it was cleaner than home, and there was a big fireplace down at one end with logs stacked ready by, so it was probably more comfortable for me than a bed in the big house itself would have been.
Clow took out a piece of cherrywood, and started carving a woman in it, and Bracata and Derek lay down to sleep. I made shift to talk to Miles, but he was full of thoughts, sitting on a bench near the hearth and chinking the purse ( just like this one, it was) he had gotten from the baron, so I tried to sleep too. But I had had too much to eat to sleep so soon, and since it was still light out, I decided to walk around the villa and try to find somebody to chat with. The front looked too grand for me; I went to the back, thinking to make sure our balloon had suffered no hurt, and perhaps have another look at those mules.
T
here were three barns behind the house, built of stone up to the height of my waist, and wood above that, and whitewashed. I walked into the nearest of them, not thinking about anything much besides my full belly until a big warhorse with a white star on his forehead reached his head out of his stall and nuzzled at my cheek. I reached out and stroked his neck for him the way they like. He nickered, and I turned to have a better look at him. That was when I saw what was in his stall. He was standing on a span or more of the cleanest, yellowest straw I had ever seen. I looked up over my head then, and there was a loft full of it up there.
In a minute or so, I suppose it was, I was back in the building where we were to sleep, shaking Miles by the shoulder and telling him I had found all the straw anyone could ask for.
He did not seem to understand, at first. “Wagonloads of straw, Captain,” I told him. “Why, every horse in the place has as much to lay him on as would carry us a hundred leagues.”
“All right,” Miles told me.
“Captain—”
“There’s no straw here, Jerr. Not for us. Now be a sensible lad and get some rest.”
“But there is, Captain. I saw it. I can bring you back a helmetful.”
“Come here, Jerr,” he said, and got up and led me outside. I thought he was going to ask me to show him the straw, but instead of going back to where the barns were, he took me away from the house to the top of a grassy knoll. “Look out there, Jerr. Far off. What do you see?”
“Trees,” I said. “There might be a river at the bottom of the valley; then more trees on the other side.”
“Beyond that.”
I looked to the horizon, where he seemed to be pointing. There were little threads of black smoke rising there, looking as thin as spiderweb at that distance.
“What do you see?”
“Smoke.”
“That’s straw burning, Jerr. House thatch. That’s why there’s no straw here. Gold, but no straw, because a soldier gets straw only where he isn’t welcome. They’ll reach the river there by sundown, and I’m told it can be forded at this season. Now do you understand?”
They came that night at moonrise.
AFTERWORD
Inventions and scientific discoveries seem to occur almost at random. The people who disagree with that statement say that when technology (or science) reaches a certain point, the same idea will occur to a dozen people. The shorthand for this is
It ain’t so.
They had indoor plumbing in Ancient Crete. It was lost with the fall of that civilization, and did not reappear until long after it was needed. A model airplane, carved from wood, has been found in an Egyptian tomb. (Don’t get me started on the Egyptian girl wearing sunglasses.) Electroplating seems to have been invented at least twice.
And so on. I decided to put the hot-air balloon in the Dark Ages, and I threw in a few other things too. Thus the story you have just read. Was there ever a time like that? No. Could there have been? Certainly.
THE EYEFLASH MIRACLES
—ANATOLE FRANCE,
L
ittle Tib heard the train coming while it was still a long way away, and he felt it in his feet. He stepped off the track onto a prestressed concrete tie, listening. Then he put one ear to the endless steel and listened to that sing, louder and louder. Only when he began to feel the ground shake under him did he lift his head at last and make his way down the embankment through the tall, prickly weeds, probing the slope with his stick.
The stick splashed water. He could not hear it because of the noise the train made roaring by, but he knew the feel of it, the kind of drag it made when he tried to move the end of the stick. He laid it down and felt with his hands
