13

"Gently, girl, gently," Garric murmured to the drover's tall bay mare at the watering trough by the well curb. She twitched her head anyway. It wasn't a serious attempt to break free, but if Garric's hand had slipped on the bridle she'd have been gone through the gate before he could blink.

The mare was mettlesome and apt to kick if he tried to feed or water her with the other animals. Though she was easily the finest horse Garric had ever seen in his life, he'd have preferred to ride Liane's gelding if it came to a choice. In fact he'd prefer to ride one of the saw-backed baggage mules.

"Good afternoon, Master Garric," Benlo said as he walked out of the common room. His guards remained inside, where Garric could see them being served by his mother. "A bit of a handful, isn't she? Her name's Bright Angel."

"I'm just not used to her," Garric said, stroking the horse behind the ear with his free hand. "Come on and drink, Angel, you know you're thirsty."

For one reason or another—perhaps she was just bored with being troublesome—the bay lowered her head to the stone trough and began slurping water. Garric rubbed her neck, up and down the side of the spine.

"On the contrary, Garric," Benlo said. "She behaves better with you than she does with anyone else I've seen. You have a talent for animals, don't you?"

Garric was glad he had an excuse not to meet Benlo's eyes. Though the drover was trying to be friendly, his words had a roundness to them that made Garric uncomfortable. He sounded like the underpriest who usually led the Tithe Procession through the borough. He always talked about his sincere affection for Barca's Hamlet, but Garric had the feeling that an aide whispered "Barca's Hamlet" to the fellow just before he spoke. Otherwise he'd get the name of the village wrong.

"Everybody here on Haft is used to animals, sir," Garric muttered, watching the fly that buzzed around Bright Angel's flank. "Here in this borough anyhow."

"You know I'm buying sheep to carry to Sandrakkan," Benlo said. "I'll need a likely lad to badger the flock to Carcosa where my ship's in harbor. How would you like the job, Garric? I'll pay a Haft silver anchor for every day on the road. That's a full man's wage at Carcosa rates."

"No thank you, sir," Garric said, feeling his throat tighten. The mare raised her head from the trough. Garric put his weight against the big bay skull and turned her to the left so that she was between him and her owner. The mare nickered in surprise at treatment rougher than Garric had shown her in the past. "My friend Cashel's the regular badger. He'll do the job for you better than I could; and besides, the pay would help him and his sister a lot."

Garric walked briskly toward the stables, holding the bridle close to the mare's throat. He gave her a sharp jerk when she seemed to lag. Again she complained, though she didn't try to fight him. Strong as Garric was, a twelve-hundred-pound horse could always win a tugging match with a hundred-and-eighty-pound man if she cared deeply enough.

Two fishermen had wrapped the lich in an old tarpaulin and dumped it in a hundred fathoms of water, but the axletree still lay where Garric had dropped it in the early hours of the morning. He led Angel around it, so Benlo caught up with him again.

"Look, boy," the drover said in a voice of command. "Your friend may be a fine badger but it's you I want to hire, not him. Now, I've offered liberal wages, liberal indeed, but if a little more will—"

"Listen, stranger!" Garric said. Maybe it was sight of the axletree, maybe it was just the roiling confusion of his life, but he felt fury rise in him like that he felt in the dreams where he swung a sword. "I don't know where you come from, Carcosa or Erdin or the depths of the sea for all I care! But here in Barca's Hamlet we don't steal each other's livelihoods! If you want a badger, you can hire Cashel."

Benlo's guards spilled into the courtyard in a trampling rush. Garric was seeing through two sets of eyes. He dropped the bridle and reached down for the axletree. The mare shied back but didn't run.

"Go back inside!" the drover shouted. "Rald, get the men inside at once!"

The chief of Benlo's guards, a stocky man with eyes the gray of cast iron, turned and put his hands on the chests of the men closest behind him. "You heard the boss," he said in a loud, tense voice. "Come on, there's no problem. Let's finish our ale."

Garric shuddered and straightened. He was alone again in his head; the laughing figure who'd measured the six guards for a single stroke of the massive axletree had gone back to wherever it was that he watched and waited.

"Come along, Angel," Garric said in a rusty voice. "We'll find you some oats."

"We'll talk again later, Garric," the drover said in tone of glassy cheerfulness. He reentered the inn and shut the door behind him.

Garric closed the bay mare in her stall. Another time he would have stayed and fed carrots to both horses, but after talking to Benlo he felt quiveringly weak. He walked out of the stable, glad there was no one in the courtyard to see him, and into the street.

Everything was changing. He'd gotten angry as a way to hide his fear.

A silver anchor a day wasn't just a liberal wage, it was a remarkable one. Folk in this borough only saw silver during the Sheep Fair, and even then most payments were made in copper coins.

Benlo wanted more than a boy to chivy his flock to Carcosa. Garric wasn't afraid of Benlo, but the offer was one more sign of the way everything he'd known for certain was shifting about him. That frightened him terribly.

"I want things to go back the way they were," Garric whispered. He knew that wouldn't happen, that things never went backward. Chickens don't crawl into eggs, the sun doesn't roll from west to east. But he wasn't willing to give up hope of stability even though he knew the hope was false.

He strode along the path with his head down and his shoulders hunched. Folks glanced at him, but they didn't speak or it they spoke he didn't hear.

He needed to think. He'd almost reached the corral north of the hamlet when he noticed that Tenoctris waited there, watching his progress.

"I was just leaving," Tenoctris called. "I come out here to think sometimes."

Garric closed his eyes and shuddered, hugging himself close. He walked the rest of the way to the pen and said, "Mistress, can I talk to you? I don't know who to talk to. I don't understand anything."

"Well, that's the first step to wisdom, they say," the old woman said. She shifted slightly, adjusting her seat on the stone wall. "I only today learned that you were the one who pulled me out of the sea, Garric. I should have thanked you sooner."

Garric threw one long leg over the wall and straddled it, facing her. Shadows were lengthening, and out to sea a bank of high clouds was turning pink.

"One of the fishermen would have brought you in if I hadn't been there," he said. He smiled. "If you like you can thank me for having a father who provides better accommodation for castaways than you'd have found in Tarban's hut, though."

"The inn's roof trusses came from ships' timbers," Tenoctris said with a look of vague marvel. "The wood is full of stories of the far past that's still the future of the person I was. I don't fit in this world. At least I haven't yet found the way in which I fit."

Garric nodded fierce agreement. "I don't fit," he said. "Or the world doesn't. Benlo just tried to hire me to take his flock to Carcosa, but that's not what he really means. And Sharina going off like that...Mistress, what's happening? I don't want things to change!"

"The trouble is," Tenoctris said slowly, looking toward the sea, "that things are going to change. I liked things the way they were a thousand years ago. Most folk did, I think, though they might have wanted a pig of their own or a less grasping tax gatherer. But the Hooded One wanted more than that, and he brought the Kingdom of the Isles down in centuries of war and famine."

She gave Garric a quirked smile. "Times like that make interesting epics," she said, "but they're not the world in which most people want to live. And now that the Isles have finally settled into something closer to peace, Malkar is rising and the changes are coming again."

"I thought you said the Hooded One had drowned," Garric said, pressing his hands together. "That he was dead."

"Malkar isn't dead," Tenoctris said simply. "And the Hooded One lives also, at least in your dreams."

Garric straightened. "Do you think Fate brought you to Haft to fight Malkar?" he said. His voice was harder than a moment ago; self-pity and self-doubt no longer colored it.

"Fate may be a myth," Tenoctris said, firmer also. "The powers aren't myths, and the powers are building just as they did in my own day. I see them, Garric, just as you see the clouds turn black before the storm hits."

She gave him a quick smile to show that she wasn't angry, at least with Garric. "As for Malkar—you don't fight Malkar any more than you fight the sun. But the sun can be eclipsed for a time, and Malkar's influence can be blocked as well."

Tenoctris shook her head and forced a rueful chuckle. "I doubt Malkar's influence can be blocked by a poor stick like me, but I suppose I'm going to try anyway."

Garric leaned forward and gently took the old woman's hands in his. Like holding a sparrow..."Mistress," he said. "What should I do? Should I go with Benlo? And don't tell me it's my decision; I'm asking for help!"

She bobbed her head once, twice, to indicate she was considering the question rather than ignoring it in silence. She took one of her hands from Garric's grip, patted him, and then folded both in her lap as he sat straight.

"If you were to stand in the spillway while the mill was turning," Tenoctris said finally, "the water would sweep you away no matter how hard you struggled. You'd be better off to swim with the flow so that you at least had a little control over where you were going."

Garric nodded.

"You're connected with King Carus, Garric," she continued. "Through the medal at least, and I think by blood as well. Benlo used the royal line of Haft to identify you. If you stay where you are, you'll draw more things to you. To you and to your family and friends."

"The lich," Garric said.

"The lich," Tenoctris agreed. "And other things better unseen. I wish I could tell you that wasn't true."

Garric said, "Telling a man his barn's not on fire isn't a kindness to him if it is burning."

He grinned at her. The situation was funny if you looked at it the right way. He'd laughed when drunken Sil screamed about the invisible spiders that were crawling over his face. If Garric told the other villagers what he was thinking now, Sil could have joined in the laughter and repaid the boy's unmeant cruelty of past years.

"I don't think Benlo's hostile to you, Garric," Tenoctris continued with a frown, "but he certainly isn't your friend. He's seeking you for his own reasons and those reasons may be very like the one that sends a housewife into the yard to fetch a chicken before dinner."

"Will you go with me, mistress?" Garric asked. "To Carcosa or wherever he really has in mind?"

"Yes," she said.

Garric stood. There was light on the bluff, but the hamlet below was in near darkness. "I guess I'll see if Benlo's job is still open," he said. "May I walk you back to the inn?"

"I'll stay here awhile," Tenoctris said. She smiled also. "I came here to view the alignment of a constellation which won't rise for another two hours. I lied in case you wanted to be alone."

Garric walked down the path whistling. It was more bravado than cheerfulness, but it wasn't because he was afraid. If you were out in the rain, you got wet and there wasn't any point in whimpering about the fact. This business, whatever it was, had to be treated just the same.

Candles glimmered through the windows of some of the wealthier houses. The path was as safe and familiar to Garric at night as it was in bright day. He continued whistling through the courtyard and into the common room, where Reise had spelled his wife at the bar.

Local men in from the fields drank together before going home to their families. They noted Garric with only eye flickers; he was a settled and familiar part of their world.

Benlo rose from a table with his guards and called, "Master Garric? I've talked to your friend Cashel and he's agreed to drive the sheep to Carcosa for me."

"Ah!" Garric said in surprise. He'd been so sure that the drover's interest was in Garric or-Reise, not in a badger for his flock. "Oh, well, that's very good. Cashel's the best man in the borough for sheep."

"Let me pour you some of your family's good ale," Benlo continued, picking up a pair of mugs and the leather pitcher from the trestle table. He nodded Garric to the small booth in the corner. One of the guards rose to fetch another pitcher of ale.

"I appreciate your concern for your friend, Garric," Benlo said as he filled the wooden mugs. "But you see, I'm still looking for an extra hand. A man who can drive sheep, talk poetry with my daughter—and incidentally, fight like a demon if the need arises. You impressed my man Rald this morning. Didn't he, Rald?"

The chief guard looked at Garric with a perfectly blank expression. "Yes he did, sir," Rald said. "Yes you did."

Garric drank from his wooden masar instead of responding immediately. The tar that moisture-proofed the pitcher added its own smoky fillip to the ale; an attractive flavor, at least if you were used to it.

Benlo's smile was growing brittle. "The same wages as I offered before, of course," he said.

"I've decided I can't always run from new things," Garric said. "I'd be pleased to take the job."

Reise's head turned slightly to fix Garric with a glance, but neither father nor son spoke to the other.

"Wonderful, wonderful!" Benlo said enthusiastically. "The flock's already arranged, so we'll be leaving tomorrow morning if that's all right with you."

Since when do drovers ask permission from their badgers? Aloud Garric said, "I think Cashel will say we leave after noon. The first day needs to be a short one to get the sheep used to the idea."

"Noon then," the drover said with a slight tensing of muscles at the back of his jaw. "We'll have a chance to get to know each other better, since we'll be traveling at the pace of the flock."

"By the way," Garric said. "There's a castaway, Tenoctris, staying here at the inn till she got her strength back. She'll be going to Carcosa too. I'll be responsible for her expenses."

"The old woman?" Benlo said. He shrugged. "If you like. I shouldn't think she was up to the trip, but it's no concern of mine."

Garric downed the remainder of his ale and stood. "I'll take care of my duties in the stable, then."

He caught the eye of his father behind the bar and added, "And I'll have a few things to pack, I suppose."

Whistling again, Garric left the common room.