14

At a distance from Carcosa, Ilna had wondered to see houses perched at the top of a sheer cliff. As she came closer she realized that she was seeing not cliffs but the walls of the ancient city, built upon by folk of the present day since there was no longer need to defend the provincial backwater Carcosa had become.

Ilna felt her self-confidence shrivel. She'd been thinking of Carcosa as a very much larger version of Barca's Hamlet—the same in everything but size. The truth was that a city was no more like a hamlet than a human was like a frog.

Ilna felt like a frog in all truth as she viewed the magnificent walls.

" 'Nothing can equal you, Carcosa!' " Garric declaimed loudly. " 'No one today could build the equal of the fragments of your walls which remain, nor restore that part which is fallen.' "

In a laughing voice he added, "You see, Liane? There are learned people in Carcosa."

Liane, beside Tenoctris on the gelding two paces ahead of Liane, turned and called back, "There was one in the last century, you mean—and he was an exile from Sandrakkan, don't forget. Besides, 'What a happy city if it could be rid of its residents, or if the residents could be rid of their cheating ways!' "

They both laughed. Ilna felt her heart freeze.

She didn't understand what they'd said or why anyone should think it was funny. She'd lived beside Garric or-Reise all her life; and here he was, joking with a stranger he'd just met and shutting Ilna out completely.

Because of traffic, the flock was closely bunched at the right side of the road. Ilna had never seen so many people in one place before. There were pedestrians, riders, occasional carriages—and most noticeable and dangerous to others, the huge goods wagons drawn by teams of up to a dozen oxen or six horses. The wagons moved at their own pace, and their iron-shod wheels would crush anything that came between them and the stone roadway.

Some of the wagons returning from the city were empty and rattled along the road with small care for what was in their way; others carried the debris of tanyards and the cesspools to be spread on fields. A rural hamlet is a hard school and no one had ever mistaken Ilna for a squeamish girl; despite that, she found herself wondering if the risk of being run over by the empty wagons was worse than the stench of those laden with urban refuse.

Benlo's guards provided the flock with a right of way that other drovers must envy. Cashel was in the rear, an equally solid bulwark against riders who might have thought in their haste to drive straight through the sheep. Garric kept the flock together and eased it past tight places where buildings had encroached or the road had collapsed after a thousand years without repair.

Garric glanced at Ilna's face. Sobering slightly, he said, "There was a poet of the last century, Etter bor-Lavarman, a priest of the Shepherd from Erdin. He got into difficulties at home—"

"Difficulties regarding a woman of the court," Liane said primly. "Though Daughter Rothi didn't explain it in quite those words."

She giggled. The grin returned to Garric's lips, the chill to Ilna's heart.

"Anyway," Garric said, "Etter came to Carcosa for a few years. The city impressed him, its past at any rate. The people didn't impress him at all. Liane and I were trading quotes from Etter's poems."

"I see," Ilna said, shifting the staff with her bundles from her right shoulder to her left.

She saw, all right. She could no more compare herself to this clever rich girl than she could compare Barca's Hamlet to Carcosa. But Ilna hadn't given up before and she wasn't going to start now.

At the foot of the looming walls was a way station with stock pens and a large corral for coach horses. A drove of cattle filled one of the stone pens; the other held a few score sheep of a short-legged breed with white fleece—to Ilna's eyes, as alien as if they each had two heads.

Benlo turned in his saddle and pointed. "Head them into the paddock, Garric," he called. "I'll hire a town badger at the inn."

He kneed his bay mare to a hitching rail where already a dozen horses were tethered. Benlo didn't bother to tie the animal; rather, he dismounted and let one of his guards attend to the business while he and the three others entered the straggling one-story building.

Garric turned the bellwether, a grizzled ram with wooden clackers around his neck. Ilna trotted ahead of the ram and lifted the pen's three gate bars with a cool glance back at Liane. Poetry isn't the only thing of use to a countryman's wife, is it, rich girl?

Garric gave Ilna a quick smile of appreciation. He began counting the flock into the paddock aloud rather than using a physical tally as Cashel, chivying the flock from the rear, would have had to do.

A countryman's wife . . . but would Garric stay a countryman? He didn't belong in Barca's Hamlet, and Ilna didn't belong anywhere else.

The inn's only lodgers would be folk who'd gotten this far in a blinding storm and weren't up to chancing the city's narrow streets in darkness. The trade in ale and hard cider more than made up for it, however, especially on a hot sunny day like this.

Wines too, Ilna supposed. She remembered the soldiers billeted with her drinking wine. They were from Valles, like the drover's fine daughter. . . .

Benlo came out of the inn almost immediately, accompanied by a weedy-looking youth of no more than twenty who wore a broad yellow cummerbund and a bandanna of paler yellow over his head. He had a ginger mustache and wisps of what he probably flattered himself was a beard.

The youth bowed deeply to the drover, then swaggered over toward the sheep pen. He stopped beside Ilna and gestured toward the sheep with his thumb. "Scraggly lot, aren't they?" he said. "Well, not a wonder seeings they come from the back of beyond."

Ilna thought of turning away from him. Instead she asked, "What's wrong with the sheep? Besides five days of travel, of course."

The youth sniffed. "All leg and no meat, that's the first thing," he said. "And look at that wool! All different colors. How are you to dye that, I ask you? Isn't good for anything but stuffing pillows, that trash!"

His tunic was a dull green, but the dye had faded to gray in several patches. That was probably a result of poor preparation of the wool, but Ilna had never trusted artificial colors anyway. With the two shades of yellow and the fact that his leather shoes weren't quite the same shade of red either, the fellow looked to her like a mummer in costume.

"Well, time for me to take over from these hicks," the youth said with an ostentatious yawn. "Really, I think the sheep are usually smarter than the locals who badger them here."

He turned toward Ilna as if becoming aware of her for the first time. "You know," he said, "you're not a bad-looking wench. If you'd care to see the city with a real gentleman—"

He took Ilna's chin between a thumb and forefinger, turning her face to view her profile and then turning it back.

"—I could take time out of my schedule to arrange that."

Ilna smiled pleasantly at him. "I've wrung the necks of chickens I fancied more than I do you, you little weasel," she said. She struck his hand away with a crack like a branch breaking.

"What?" the youth said. He drew his arm back for a punch.

Garric laid the tip of his bowstaff across the youth's throat. "A word of advice, fellow," he said in a voice that could be heard all the way to the inn despite the traffic noise. "Mistress Ilna doesn't need her friend and brother to handle a worm like you; but she has us nonetheless, do you see?"

Cashel put the fingers of one hand on Ilna's shoulder. The other held his quarterstaff.

Garric was smiling; Cashel was not. It was hard to judge which expression the local youth found the more deservedly terrifying. "No disrespect meant, masters," he croaked.

"That's good," Garric said. The last ewe was entering the paddock. He patted her flank and counted "Fifty!" aloud.

Offering Ilna his arm, Garric walked over to join Tenoctris and Liane as Cashel dropped the bars in place.