But he'd not walked more than a few minutes before he met a man leading a donkey, loaded high with brush and wood, climbing up around the curve. The man stopped and eyed him suspiciously.
"The Lady of Spring give you good morning, sir," said Cazaril politely. What harm was in it, for Cazaril toSira farmer? He'd kissed the scaly feet of lesser men by far, in the abject terrified slavery of the galleys.
The man, after an appraising look, gave him a half salute and a mumbled, "B'yer'Lady."
"Do you live hereabouts?"
"Aye," the man said. He was middle-aged, well fed, his hooded coat, like Cazaril's shabbier one, plain but serviceable. He walked as though he owned the land he stood on, though probably not much more.
"I, ah," Cazaril pointed back up the track. "I'd stepped off the road a moment, to take shelter in that mill up there"—no need to go into details of what he'd been sheltering from—"and I found a dead man."
"Aye," the man said.
Cazaril hesitated, wishing he hadn't dropped his cobble. "You know about him?"
"Saw his horse tied up there, this morning."
"Oh." He might have gone on down the road after all, with no harm done. "Have you any idea who the poor fellow was?"
The farmer shrugged, and spat. "He's not from around here, is all I can say. I had our divine of the Temple up, soon as I realized what sort of bad doings had been going on there last night. She took away all the fellow's goods that would come loose, to hold till called for. His horse is in my barn. A fair trade, aye, for the wood and oil to speed him out. The divine said he daren't be left till nightfall." He gestured to the high-piled load of burnables hitched to the donkey's back, gave the halter rope a tug, and started up the track again. Cazaril fell into step beside him.
"Do you have any idea what the fellow was doing?" asked Cazaril.
"Plain enough what he was doing." The farmer snorted. "And got what he deserved for it."
"Um... or who he was doing it to?"
"No idea. I'll leave it to the Temple. I do wish he hadn't done it on my land. Dropping his bad luck all over... like to haunt the place hereafter. I'll purge him with fire and burn down that cursed wreck of a mill at the same time, aye. No good to leave it standing, it's too close to the road. Attracts"—he eyed Cazaril—"trouble."
Cazaril paced along for another moment. Finally, he asked, "You plan to burn him with his clothes on?"
The farmer studied him sideways, summing up the poverty of his garb. " I'mnot touching anything of his. I wouldn't have taken the horse, except it's no charity to turn the poor beast loose to starve."
Cazaril said more hesitantly, "Would you mind if I took the clothes, then?"
"I'm not the one as you need to ask, aye? Deal withhim . If you dare. I won't stop you."
"I'll... help you lay him out."
The farmer blinked. "Now, that would be welcome."
Cazaril judged the farmer was secretly more than pleased to leave the corpse handling to him. Perforce, Cazaril had to leave the farmer to pile up the bigger logs for the pyre, built inside the mill, though he offered a few mild suggestions how to place them to gain the best draft and be most sure of taking down what remained of the building. He helped carry in the lighter brush.
The farmer watched from a safe distance as Cazaril undressed the corpse, tugging the layered garments off over the stiffened limbs. The man was swollen further even than he'd appeared at first, his abdomen puffing out obscenely when Cazaril finally pulled his fine embroidered cotton undershirt from him. It was rather frightening. But it couldn't be contagion after all, not with this uncanny lack of smell. Cazaril wondered, if the body weren't burned by nightfall, if it was likely to explode or rupture, and if it did, what would come out of it... or enter into it. He bundled up the clothing, only a little stained, as quickly as he could. The shoes were too small, and he left them. He and the farmer together heaved the corpse onto the pyre.
When all was readied, Cazaril fell to his knees, shut his eyes, and chanted out the prayer for the dead. Not knowing which god had taken up the man's soul, though he could make a shrewd guess, he addressed all five of the Holy Family in turn, speaking clearly and plainly. All offerings must be one's best, even if all one had to offer was words. "Mercy from the Father and the Mother, mercy from the Sister and the Brother, Mercy from the Bastard, five times mercy, High Ones, we beseech you." Whatever sins the stranger had committed, he had surely paid. Mercy, High Ones.Not justice, please, not justice. We would all be fools to pray for justice.
When he'd finished, he climbed stiffly back to his feet and looked around. Thoughtfully, he collected the rat and the crow, and added their little corpses to the man's, at his head and feet.
It was Cazaril's day for the gods' own luck, it seemed. He wondered which kind it would prove to be this time.
A COLUMN OF OILY SMOKE ROSE FROM THE BURNING mill as Cazaril started up the road to Valenda once more, the dead man's clothes tied into a tight bundle on his back. Though they were less filthy than the clothes he wore, he would, he thought, find a laundress and have them thoroughly cleaned before donning them. His copper vaidas were dwindling sadly in his mind's accounting, but the services of a laundress would be worth them.
He'd slept last night in a barn, shivering in the straw, his meal a half a loaf of stale bread. The remaining half had been his breakfast. It was nearly three hundred miles from the port city of Zagosur, on Ibra's mild coast, to the middle of Baocia, centralmost province of Chalion. He hadn't been able to walk the distance nearly as quickly as he'd calculated. In Zagosur, the Temple Hospital of the Mother's Mercy was dedicated to the succor of men cast up, in all the various ways they could be cast up, by the sea. The charity purse the acolytes there had given him had run thin, then out altogether, before he'd reached his goal. But only just before. One more day, he'd figured, less than a day. If he could just put one foot in front of the other for one more day, he might reach his refuge and crawl into it.
When he'd started from Ibra, his head had been full of plans for how to ask the Dowager Provincara for a place, for old times' sake, in her household. At the foot of her table. Something, anything at all so long as it was not too hard. His ambition had dwindled as he'd slogged east over the mountain passes into the cooler heights of the central plateau. Maybe her castle warder or her horse-master would grant him a place in her stables, or a place in her kitchen, and he need not intrude upon the great lady at all.
If he could beg a place as a scullion, he wouldn't even have to give his real name. He doubted anyone was left in her household by now who'd know him from the charmed days when he'd served the late Provincar dy Baocia as a page.
The dream of a silent, abashed place by the kitchen fire, nameless, not bellowed at by any creature more alarming than a cook, for any task more dreadful than drawing water or carrying firewood, had drawn him onward into the last of the winter winds. The vision of rest drove him as an obsession, that and the knowledge that every stride put another yard between himself and the nightmare of the sea. He'd bemused himself for hours on the lonely road, revolving suitable new servile names for his new, anonymous self. But now, it seemed, he need not appear before the shocked eyes of her court dressed in poor men's castoffs after all.Instead, Cazaril begs a peasant for the clothes off a corpse, and is grateful for both their favors. Is. Is. Most humbly grateful. Most humbly.
* * *
THE TOWN OF VALENDA TUMBLED DOWN OVER ITS low hill like a rich quilt worked in red and gold, red for the tile roofs, gold for the native stone, both glowing in the sun. Cazaril blinked at the dazzle of color in his blurring eyes, the familiar hues of his homeland. The houses of Ibra were all whitewashed, too bright in their hot northern noons, bleached and blinding. This ochre sandstone was the perfect shade for a house, a town, a country—a caress upon the eyes. At the top of the hill, like a golden crown in truth, the Provincara's castle sprawled, its curtain walls seeming to waver in his vision. He stared at it, daunted, for a little, then slogged onward, his steps somehow going faster than he'd been able to push them all this long journey, despite the shaking, aching weariness of his legs.
It was past the hour for the markets, so the streets were quiet and serene as he threaded through them to the main square. At the temple gate, he approached an elderly woman who looked unlikely to try to follow and rob him, and asked his way to a moneylender. The moneylender filled his hand with a satisfying weight of copper vaidas in exchange for his tiny royal, and directed him to the laundress and the public bath. He paused on the way only long enough to buy an oil cake from a lone street vendor, and devour it.
He poured out vaidas on the laundress's counter and negotiated the loan of a pair of linen drawstring trousers and a tunic, together with a pair of straw sandals in which he might trot down the street through the now-mild afternoon to the baths. In competently red hands she carried off all his vile clothing and his filthy boots. The bath's barber trimmed his hair and beard while he sat, still, in a real chair, oh wonderful. The bath boy served him tea. And then it was back to the bath courtyard itself, to stand on the flagstones and scrub himself all over with scented soap and wait for the bath boy to sluice him down with a bucket of warm water. In joyous anticipation, Cazaril eyed the huge copper-bottomed wooden tank that was sized for six men, or women every other day, but which by the happy chance of the hour he looked to have all to himself. The brazier underneath kept the water steaming. He could soak there all afternoon, while the laundress boiled his clothing.
The bath boy climbed the stool and poured the water over his head, while Cazaril turned and sputtered under the stream. He opened his eyes to find the boy staring at him, mouth agape.
"Were you... were you a deserter?" the boy choked out.
Oh. His back, the ropy red mess of scars piled one across another so thickly as to leave no untouched skin between, legacy of the last flogging the Roknari galley-masters had given him. Here in the royacy of Chalion, army deserters were among the few criminals punished so savagely by that particular means. "No," said Cazaril firmly. "I'm not a deserter." Cast-off, certainly; betrayed, perhaps. But he'd never deserted a post, not even his most disastrous ones.
The boy snapped his mouth shut, dropped his wooden bucket with a clunk, and scampered out. Cazaril sighed, and made for the tank.
He'd just lowered his aching body to the chin in the heavenly heat when the bath owner stomped into the tiny tiled courtyard.
"Out!" the owner roared. "Out of there, you—!"
Cazaril recoiled in terror as the bath man seized him by the hair and dragged him bodily up out of the water. " What? " The man shoved his tunic and trousers and sandals at him, all in a wad, and dragged him fiercely by the arm out of the courtyard and into the front of the shop. "Here, wait, what are you doing? I can't go naked into the street!"
The bath man wheeled him around, and released him momentarily. "Get dressed, and get out. I run a respectable place here! Not for the likes of you! Go down to the whorehouse. Or better still, drown yourself in the river!"
Dazed and dripping, Cazaril fumbled the tunic over his head, yanked up the trousers, and tried to cram his feet back into the straw sandals while holding up the pants' drawstring and being shoved again toward the door. It slammed in his face as he turned, realization dawning upon him. The other crime punished by flogging near to death in the royacy of Chalion was the rape of a virgin or a boy. His face flushed hot. "But it wasn't—but I didn't—I was sold to the corsairs of Roknar—"
He stood trembling. He considered beating on the door, and insisting those within listen to his explanations.Oh, my poor honor.The bath man was the bath boy's father, Cazaril rather guessed.
He was laughing. And crying. Teetering on the ragged edge of... something that frightened him more than the outraged bath man. He gulped for breath. He had not the stamina for an argument, and even if he could get them to listen, why should they believe him? He rubbed his eyes with the soft linen of his sleeve. It had that sharp, pleasant scent left only by the track of a good hot iron. It tumbled him back to memories of life in houses, not in ditches. It seemed a thousand years ago.
Defeated, he turned and shuffled back up the street to the laundress's green-painted door again. Its bell rang as he pushed timidly back inside.
"Have you a corner where I might sit, ma'am?" he asked her, when she popped back out at the bell's summons. "I... finished earlier than..." his voice died in muffled shame.
She shrugged sturdy shoulders. "Ah, aye. Come back with me. Wait." She dived below her counter and came up with a small book, the span of Cazaril's hand and bound in plain undyed leather. "Here's your book.