again for the breath of direction against her cheek, that she had not felt since she first saw the road; and the voice from the mountaintop was silent. 'Yes,' she said.
'It's a way,' said Ammy doubtfully. 'I've not been there. Barley was, once, when he was a young man; the roads are better now.' Ammy added, allowing herself a twinkle, 'If you stay for supper you can ask him about it.'
Lissar smiled, and felt her face muscles awkward again in the gesture. 'Oh,' she said with a sigh, as what felt like several months' exhaustion fell on her all at once; 'I do feel I could sleep till suppertime twice over.' She thought: No wonder wild animals live such short lives. This is what it feels like, never being quite sure that that crackle in the underbrush isn't something that wants to eat you. She felt suddenly unable to bear all that watchfulness.
Ammy said: 'Stew only gets better for waiting. I'll keep you some for tomorrow night, if you oversleep.'
At that Lissar laughed out loud; and the sound frightened her in the first moment that it broke out of her. Ammy saw the fear, and her friendly heart was shaken by the knowledge that any human creature could fear her own laughter. Without time for thought she reached out and took both Lissar's hands in hers, and said, 'My dear. . .
Lissar grasped those hands firmly for a moment, and they stood in silence. 'I have been, perhaps, too long in the mountains,' she said quietly. And then Ammy took her out to the barn, and Lissar and Ash burrowed deep in the clean sweet-smelling hay and were asleep before Ammy finished pulling the heavy door shut behind her.
But the habits of the last months were still strong in Lissar; furthermore all the noises she heard here were unfamiliar and therefore suspicious. She half-woke when the rooster crowed, which he did at intervals, without any reference to the position of the sun in the sky; half-woke when Ammy went in and out of the house-door, when she called the chickens for their food, when she answered a friend's greeting from the road. The farm dog barked once, perhaps at some whiff of Ash's presence; Ash bristled and growled briefly in her sleep.
One noise in particular disturbed her, dredged her up farther than half-sleep, almost to waking, till she recognized it: the crunch and creak of wagon wheels. She had not heard that sound for a long time, and its echoes rang off other memories she did not want disturbed. She dozed and drifted, and then came fully awake on the instant when Barley came home and entered the barn to hang up his mended tool.
She slid down from her crackly perch, pulling hay-stems from the neck of her dress. 'Ah,' said Barley. 'Ammy said you were here.' He was smiling at her, but there was a puzzlement, almost a wistfulness, in his eyes similar to the way his wife had looked at her. 'I thought perhaps you would have slipped out the back way and gone on-to save the trouble of talking to them old folks again. Old folks can be real meddlesome.'
She surprised herself by saying almost angrily, 'I would not have left without saying good-bye. I am grateful for your help and kindness and welcome. I do not see you as meddling.'
The half-anxious, half-curious look faded, and he said, 'Never mind me. Ammy's always telling me I talk before I think. Since you're awake now, come in for supper-it's rabbit stew. Isn't that something?'
The stew was better than anything Lissar had made last winter in their hut; the onions and herbs were fresh, and obviously added by a hand that knew what it was doing. They ate by firelight; Lissar listened to Barley's story of his day's adventure without paying attention to the meaning of the words. It was fascinating to her merely to hear language spoken again, to listen to the rise and fall of a voice speaking intelligibly, hands gesturing now and then to support or illustrate a point. It did not matter what the point was. It was enough-more than enough-that this sort of communication went on; that there were sounds that were not creaks in the bushes, however meaningful, or the fussing of chickens, however meaningless. She noticed that Barley used a word now and then that was unknown to her, but she felt no desire to ask him to explain, whether from a gentle indifference to unnecessary particulars, or from a fear of exposing too much of the extent of her own strangeness, she did not know.
She came back to full attention when Ammy said, 'Our guest was asking about the yellow city-how far it is. I couldn't tell her.'
'The yellow city?' said Barley. And he repeated what his wife had said earlier:
'The king's city?' And again the word king made Lissar want to look behind her, throw pebbles in the shadows to see what would be flushed out.
Barley ran his hand over his head. 'I haven't been there in thirty years. There isn't enough grass there, and too many people, and the vegetables ain't really fresh, even in summer. What do you want with the city?-Wait,' he added hastily, 'I'm not asking, it's just my way of talking. I ain't used to anybody who ain't used to me. It took us, well, near a month to get there; but the wheel-horse threw a shoe and went lame with it, and we lost a few days. The roads are better now; it's one of Cofta's pet projects, the road system.'
'Cofta?' said Lissar before she thought to stop herself.
The other two stared at her. 'King Cofta,' Barley said, after a moment. 'It's his city you're wanting.' Lissar looked up from the table, through the unshuttered window, where sunset still kept the darkness at bay. The entire world was rose-colored with this day's end, the same rose color as the hangings of a small round room.
'Ah, well,' Barley went on, 'both of us know from listening to you that you ain't from around here.' The pause this time was anxious, trying not to be expectant and failing.
'No,' said Lissar. 'I'm from ... a place beyond the mountains.'
Barley hastened into the pause that followed this statement. 'You might never have heard of our king as Cofta anyway, for he's King Goldhouse the Seventeenth; but they've all been Goldhouses, all seventeen of them in a row, and Ossin will be Goldhouse the Eighteenth when his time comes.
'Their great house is yellow brick, and the door is covered with gold leaf, and the creatures carved into the arch of it have golden claws and eyes and tail-tips. Most of the town is built of the same brick, so it's called the yellow city, although there ain't any other gold except the door-handle of the guild hall, where there's always a doorkeeper, just like at the king's door.'
Lissar declined her hosts' repeated offer of the mattress, or a return to the warm haystack. She was tempted, for the weariness the bath had awoken deep in her bones was still strong. But she felt that she
