A voice spoke from the corner of the inn and I was off the zorca and under the eaves before the last words were uttered.
‘Temper, temper!” said this light voice. “If you would accept a Llahal and a drink of wine from a stranger, they are here for the asking.”
Cautiously, the hilt of bamboo in my right hand and the rest of the stick in my left, ready for emergencies, I peered around the corner. A man sat there on a pile of old sacks holding out a leather wine bottle. The spout was formed of balass, black and shining, stoppered with silver-wound ivory.
“Wine, dom,” said this young fellow, smiling.
“It is too early for wine,” I said, somewhat surlily. “But Llahal, I thank you and I will take a sip.”
I took the bottle. It was deliciously cool. I moistened my mouth — a light white Yellow Unction; so this fellow had a few silver coins to rattle in his pouch — and then took two measured swallows. I looked hard at this purveyor of wine. Young, in that way the Kregans, with their better than two-hundred-year life span look young, he had a peaked, cheerful face, with merry eyes and a droll mouth. He was dressed in a simple open-necked buff tunic and decent breeches. His boots were not black, being of a tan color, well-splashed with the white dust of the road. He had a scrip and a staff, and at his belt hung a strong lesten-hide satchel.
I handed the wine bottle back. “My thanks, dom.”
“Oh, I am Covell. Men call me Covell of the Golden Tongue.”
“I have heard of you,” I said, pleased. “All Vondium rings with praises for your latest, Time Lost is Time Gained Hereafter,’ I believe. A fine poem.”
He laughed easily and drank wine himself, moderately.
This Covell was by way of being a poet. I saw that he favored the unconventional life, in order to gain the experiences he distilled into his verses. Some of the older and sterner critics of Vallia condemned his work as trifling, but they were a trifle ossified, or so his supporters said.
“What brings you here? Is Vondium too hot for you again?”
“You know me then? Yes, a tavern brawl and an onker with a knife in his guts, he did not die. But the guards thought to lay me by the heels and question me, and I do not fancy mewing up. So I took to my travels again.”
“Who does? I am Nath the Gnat and-”
“And,” he said easily, laughing, standing up, “and you are no laborer or farmworker, not even a cattleman. Whoever you are, Gnat is not the appellation for you, dom.”
I remembered to bend over at that, whereat he laughed again.
“I have my hirvel tethered in the shade. Should we ride together? I heard uncommon evil stories of Blessed Delphond in these latter days.”
I fired up at this. If my Delia did not know what was going on in her estates, then it behooved me to find out.
“Right willingly, Covell. But I am a laborer. That is true.”
I meant I labored for a living, not that I was a laborer who dug ditches or built walls. I fancied this Covell of the Golden Tongue understood.
“There are fields of labor that demand other skills than brawny shoulders.” He picked up his satchel. “I labor with words, and damned intractable beasts they can be, as well as singing with golden wonder. Why I do so is beyond my limited understanding.”
He mounted up on his hirvel. The animal was a fine beast, superior to Whitefoot, whom I had slapped on the rump and sent off, knowing he would find his own way back to his owner. Covell eyed the zorca.
“You are well mounted for a laboring man, Nath the Gnat.”
“The zorca came to me by way of a bequest from a dead man.”
He laughed again at this and shook his reins; together we rode gently along the dusty white road. He carried a long-knife like Oby’s and, as far as I could see, no other weapon on his person, although a short blade mounted on a shaft some six feet in length was stuck down into a boot on his stirrup. His scrip and staff were slung onto the hindquarters of the hirvel, and rode a trifle awkwardly. So we rode along talking. It is not my intention to regale you with all we spoke of, but you may be very sure I soaked up all the information he gave, and as it bears on this my narrative I will tell you, all in due time.
Covell mentioned the concern felt in Vondium over the continual unrest in the northeast of Vallia. Up there the folk were of altogether a more down-to-earth character, blunt, hardheaded, out for red gold and self- determination.
Using some little skill I introduced a query about black feathers into our talk. He replied as an educated man interested in literature would reply, quoting
I judged that he did not dissemble and had not encountered the Black Feathers of the Great Chyyan. But I would not completely trust anyone in this thing.
So, later, I mentioned the craze for flying fluttrells in Vondium, and suggested that flying a chyyan might be interesting. Whereat he said: “I have flown a fluttrell owned by a comrade, Nath ti Havring — and an experience it was, too! — but I am told by those who know about these things that chyyans are unridable. Surely, Nath the Gnat, it is zhyans you mean?”
“Perhaps it is,” I said. “They are all foreign, out of Hamal. Give me a zorca.”
“Aye. But one day these great soldiers of ours will go up against Hamal, and we poets will be forced to sing their praises. I prefer to tune my songs to sweeter themes.”
“Amen to that.”
I pressed him to recite a line or two of his own, and nothing loath, for he loved an audience, he declaimed his “Ode to Dawning,” in which the red sun Zim and the green sun Genodras are apostrophized as mere balls of colored fire, without sentience, marvels of nature, bringing light to all men over the whole of Kregen. He added, when he had finished, that translating Zim to Far and Genodras to Havil ruined the feel of the piece. “I have a large contempt for religiosity in pious hypocrites. Opaz is well enough, I suppose, given as a sop. But a man’s heart is his true religion.”
I made no direct answer. Rafik trusted in a right arm and a sword, and Covell in a man’s heart. What, then, did I trust in? Anything at all apart from my Delia and the Krozairs of Zy?
When I had first returned to Kregen after that hideous expanse of twenty-one years on Earth I had fancied Kregen had not changed. The more I learned the more I discovered that this marvelous world had changed, was changing and was like to change even faster as the days wore on. When Covell spoke of the emperor he simply laughed and made witty jokes. He did say that the taverns reeked with plots, and then contemptuously dismissed them as wine-soaked dreams. “Trouble is coming to Vallia, Nath the Gnat, and all men can see that plain. There is the northeast. There are the racters. There are other parties and plots. I want none of them! By Vox! I am a poet and as a poet will I live and die a happy man. All else is illusion.”
“You do not share the fear of the locals to travel alone?”
“Do you?”
“Ah, well, I was not fully aware of the situation, being a simple wandering laborer. If there is no work here by reason of the troubles-”
“There are no troubles in Delphond, at least not yet. That is why I chose to travel here. But the lonely traveler is not as safe as he once was and isolated houses, like the inn where we met, are no longer little fortresses of peace. The damned aragorn prowl all the land — aye, and the racters aid and abet them. That is where their money comes from.”
“You do not like the racters?”
“I dislike all political parties. I am an individual.”
“The people take precautions against drikinger.”
“Yes, but Delphond is not an easy province for bandits.”
“So it is the slavers they fear?”
“If the emperor and the Presidio do not act soon no one will be safe. Vallia is like to be torn asunder.”
Deliasmot was its usual charming, smiling self, a typically beautiful, easygoing, life-loving Delphondian town. Yet even here the new edginess was apparent, the more anxious demeanor, the stricter controls at the gates. Here Covell of the Golden Tongue and I parted, for he was contracted to give a recitation of his poetry, a declamation he
