"Otter Boy wants some," Win explained. Win was a little boy of perhaps seven years with a broad, happy face. Nearby, his mother, Ghaj, watched with evident amusement as she spun cotton onto a wooden spool. Hearing his name, Otter Boy stood, wagging and panting hopefully.
"Reminds me of my old dog, Kume," Perkar remarked. "When I was this hungry, I wouldn't give him any, either."
"They have dogs where you come from?" Win asked.
Ghaj snorted, glanced up from her work to show them her thick-featured face. "They have dogs everywhere," she opined.
"She's right, they do," Perkar agreed.
"Tell me more about where you're from," Win exclaimed.
"Don't be rude," Ghaj chided her son.
"It's all right," Perkar said.
Ghaj puckered her face in consternation. "He's my boy," she informed him. "I'll decide what is and is not acceptable."
"Oh," he said sheepishly, "sorry."
She nodded her forgiveness, but it was clear she had more on her mind. "I can't invite you to stay with us tonight," she told him. "Me a widow and you a foreigner—I don't need that sort of talk. There is an inn in town—sort of—L'uh, the stable master, rents a few rooms. You understand, I hope."
"I understand," he assured her. He also understood the suspicious way she kept eyeing his sword and the faded brown stains on his clothes.
"You do have some money?" she inquired.
He stopped with his spoon halfway to his mouth.
"What is money?" he asked.
Ghaj rolled her eyes. "A foreigner who doesn't even know what money is," she muttered. "Strange things the River sends me."
"Why can't he stay with us?" Win complained. "He can show me his sword."
"A sword isn't something to play with or to unsheath lightly," Perkar told the boy.
"How long will you stay in Nyel?" Ghaj asked.
Perkar considered. "Not long. I'll leave in the morning, I think."
Ghaj clucked her disapproval. "You must be in a big hurry to leave that soon. You're in no shape to travel."
"I have something to do," he told her. "Something I want to get finished as soon as I can, so I can go on with other things."
"I didn't ask for your life story," Ghaj chastened sourly. "I only wanted to know how long I have to put you up for."
Perkar finished off the soup and set the bowl down. Without hesitation, Otter Boy nosed down into it, tongue slurping. "I thought you just said…"
"Let them talk," Ghaj decided. "It'll only be out of jealousy anyway. Strangers don't stop here—they either stop in Wun or go on to Nhol, and the overland routes are nowhere near here."
"There is a path to Nhol, though?"
"A path, not much more. Most people go by boat."
"I lost my boat," he explained.
Ghaj grinned broadly, with genuine amusement. "So I guessed," she said, gesturing with the back of her hand at his still-damp and muddy clothing. "You know," she mused, "some of my husband's old clothes might fit you."
As it turned out, the shirt fit loosely and the kilt needed taking in. He accepted them gratefully, though he didn't much care for the kilt. How could one ride a horse in such a garment?
Ghaj was quick to suggest ways he could repay her kindness. She was low on firewood for cooking; two of her crawfish traps needed repair, and a new trash pit needed digging. He saw to all of these things, with the often dubious aid of Win. These chores he completed by evening, and when Ghaj served the late meal— River rice and steamed crawfish—he ate it with gusto. His muscles were beginning to ache, but to Perkar it was a delicious soreness, earned by doing something real and worthwhile. It reminded him of long days in his father's pasture, cutting hay and thatching it together for the winter, of hard work on a neighbor's damakuta and then a heavy meal and woti afterward. He had experienced pain enough, aching muscles to last a lifetime in the past few months—but that soreness had never brought him satisfaction.
"Tell me," Win begged. "Tell me more about your adventures."
"There isn't so much to tell about me," he told the boy. "But I can tell you some of the things I saw, coming down the River. I can tell you about the old Mang man I met."
"Tell me!" Win exclaimed delightedly. "Did you have to kill him with your sword?"
"No, he was very nice to me. He had a dog, too…"
He went on for a while, speaking of the vast open plains, gradually becoming desert, the occasional distant mountains, the night that lightning had raged silently on every horizon without ever a thunderclap or a raindrop. As he did so, a peculiar thing happened. Remembering these things with his voice, he suddenly marveled at them. When those sights had been laid out, actually there for him to see, he had absorbed them with the eyes of a corpse, indifferent. Wonder, long dormant, now quickened, and he felt like both laughing and crying. Instead he talked on, until Win's little eyes, fluttering closed and frantically opening again, finally drooped still and stayed that way. Ghaj carried him up to his loft bedroom.
"Let me show you where you will stay," Ghaj said when she returned. She led him inside the house and motioned to a quilted pallet on the floor. Perkar glanced around, puzzled.
"Where will you sleep?"
Ghaj grinned crookedly with her wide mouth. "The reason people say those things about widows," she confided, "is because they are true." He stood dumbly as she reached to her hem and shucked her dress up over her head. "Besides," she added. "It's not likely I'll meet another one like you anytime soon, and I can't resist seeing how you're put together."
"I…" He felt a familiar shame, one almost forgotten in the past months. How could he explain to her, about the goddess, about his problems?
He was still searching for a way to tell her when she stepped closer, reached out, and touched his cheek. "What's wrong?" she asked. "I may not be as beautiful as you might like, I know…"
Her hand was warm, smelled of garlic and crawfish. Her eyes were kind and just a little hungry, with disappointment already threatening at the edges. Despite himself, despite what he knew, he looked at her, took in her naked body with his eyes. Indeed, she was like no woman he had ever dreamed of having. Her features were broad and thick, lips everted, cheekbones flat, angular. Her body was thick, too, in every dimension, and she was not young. The slightly swelling belly and the curve of her hips were stippled with pale stretch marks, as were her breasts, otherwise generous, enormous nipples charcoal in the moonlight. She was as much a Human woman as anyone could be, nothing like a goddess at all. He gasped aloud, closed his eyes at the sudden rush of blood in his body, at the fierce urge that overtook him then. Ghaj sighed with delight (and perhaps relief) as he sagged forward, embraced her, buried his head in the juncture of her neck and clavicle. She was salty, hot, her skin was a luxury like none he had imagined. He nearly sobbed with ecstasy as her lips closed around the lobe of his ear, as she pushed her hands up under his kilt.
"I…" he gasped as she took control of the situation, gently pushed him back onto the pallet.
"I know," she whispered. "It's been a long time since you were with a woman. It's been a long time for me, too. We have to try and be quiet, though. If we wake Win, we'll have less time for each other."
That made good sense to Perkar, but there were many times that night when he wondered how anyone in the entire world could still be asleep.
Later, when they were both exhausted, they held one another until limbs began to go numb and then settled for nestling. Perkar felt his quickening sense of wonder rise above him like a halo. Ghaj was now a beautiful woman, and he gazed at her through the night, noticed that her thick features had become sensual, her stubby hard fingers tender and evocative. The moon was set, sight replaced by touch and memory, when exhaustion drew up over his joy and hope like a warm comforter and settled him into dreams.
At Ghaj's earnest urging, he stayed another day and night, recovering his strength and enjoying Human company. He spent the day doing more chores and making Win a little bow and arrow so he could be like the great Ngangata of Perkar's stories.
That night, he and Ghaj made love again, and it was even nicer without the weirdness and uncertainty of the first time. He had never imagined that passion and comfort could be combined. After all, one could not be comfortable around a goddess.
He awoke to Ghaj's steady gaze, her dark skin buttered gold by the morning, her hair hanging mussed in her face. She was tracing her finger lightly over his chest, brushing the white mass of scar tissue where the lion had cut him open, the stiff ridge of it where the Huntress' spear had driven through him. When she noticed him awake, she smiled faintly. "So young, to have all these," she said, and lightly kissed the spear wound.
"Thank you," he said a bit later, as they were getting dressed.
"For what?"
"Everything. I know you don't understand, but this has been important for me. I've never…"
"You aren't going to tell me you were a virgin," she teased. "You were clumsy now and then, but not that clumsy."
"No," Perkar admitted, embarrassed. "No, not exactly. But it was important."
Ghaj walked over, gathered him in for a hug. "It was very nice," she said. "I enjoyed our time together. Come back through and if I'm not remarried, we'll enjoy each other again." She took his chin in her fingers, kissed him lightly. "You do know I could never ask you to stay? I like you, despite your foreign weirdness, but as a husband you wouldn't do me much good around here. Despite what I said, I do care what people say."
"I know. I'm flattered that it even crossed your mind, Ghaj."
"A sweet boy, despite your scars," she said, kissing him again.
Later, Win and Ghaj helped him get his things together. Ghaj replaced his dilapidated saddle pack with a woven shoulder-net, and after a bit of cobbling reduced some of her husband's too-large shoes to fit Perkar. Win was delighted with his bow. To Ghaj Perkar had nothing to give, save the little charm his mother had made him. He gave her that. "I wish I had better," he told her. "You've been very kind to me."
Ghaj's eyes twinkled. "Come back this way and I'll be 'kind' to you some more." She gave him another hug and a kiss that lingered just a little, and pointed him down the road.
"You'll be to the outskirts of Nhol by nightfall, if you walk briskly. You don't want to enter Nhol at night, so I suggest you go a little more than briskly. I also suggest you find one of the dockside taverns—they're used to strangers there and always have rooms. Take this." She handed him a little pouch. He shook it and it jingled.
"A Royal and a few soldiers," she informed him. "I can spare just that for you."
"It's more than I need. I can't…"
"Hush. In Nhol, without money, you'll be sleeping in an alley and have your throat slit before the first half a night. Take the coins, consider it pay for the work you've done around here, if you insist. And I suggest if you're going to stay long in the city that you find some way to pick up a few more soldiers. What I gave you won't go far at all."
He nodded. "Again, I'm grateful."
Ghaj called out to him once more as he was about to turn a bend in the trail. "Don't trust anyone in Nhol, Perkar."
He waved and called back that he wouldn't. Win followed him a little way, but not much beyond the edge of the bottomlands, where the trail climbed up out of the floodplain and onto the drier land around. He watched as the little boy's stubby legs took him quickly back away.
The sun was hot, but it did nothing to spoil Perkar's mood. Though the hard dirt trail was taking him to an unknown destiny, he felt ready to meet it now, hopeful even. The doom hanging over him like a thundercloud, if not departed, was at least letting a bit of light in.
In that light the day was beautiful, the strange scenery fascinating. It was a landscape of fields, and what fields they were! Grander than most pastures, they rolled out flat on both sides of the road, broken only by an occasional line of trees, the distant levee on his left, and strange streams as straight as arrow shafts.
It was only after he crossed a score of these streams, wondering at their perfect regularity, that he was struck with the idea that someone had dug them. The notion dumbfounded him, for though he could see the use of such unthinkably extensive ditches for watering crops, the labor involved was more than he could imagine. And yet the result was as staggering as the effort, for beyond the fields nothing grew but scrub, while the fields were green with strange plants.
And there were no cattle at all. What did these people do for milk, cheese—more important, Piraku? And yet the fields and their artificial rivers spoke eloquently of determination, ingenuity, and strength. Perhaps that, itself, was their Piraku.
Taking Ghaj's advice, he traveled as briskly as he could, but more than two score days with his butt in the bottom of a boat had not prepared him for a long walk. Near noon he stopped to rest, to eat the leaf-wrapped parcels of smoked catfish Ghaj had given him. In the shade of a cottonwood, he took Harka out to clean his blade.
"You puzzle me," Harka told him.
"I puzzle myself, but go on."
"All of that trouble to escape the Changeling, and yet you still follow the course he plotted for you."
"I said I would finish this, and I will," he replied. "But on my terms. That's important to me, to do things because I choose to."
"Perhaps that is the chief difference between Humans and gods," Harka offered. "We almost always do things because we must, because it is our nature."
"No difference," Perkar said. "Neither gods nor Humans like to be told what to do. Both follow their natures, and both want to be left alone to do it."
"Human nature changes notoriously quickly, however. The nature of gods changes only slowly, through many passing seasons."
"Like the Changeling," Perkar noted.
"He may not be the best example."
"Once I hoped to kill him," Perkar said. "Now it is enough for me merely to frustrate him. He wants something of me in Nhol. Very well, I will go to Nhol. But when I get there, I will be my own man. I will judge the situation for myself."
"Ngangata is right. You are most dangerous when you think."
"Perhaps. But in Nhol, I do not care whom I kill. I have no kin there, no friends."
"There is always me," Harka reminded him.
Perkar was forced to smile at the perversity of that. "If you die," he said, "I will most certainly be dead, too, and so I will not care. No, my only concern in Nhol is that I kill only those the Changeling does not want me to."
"Easier said than done."
"Not at all. I haven't felt even a flicker of guilt for killing those thieves a few days ago." That wasn't quite true, but to his own surprise, it was almost true.
"That isn't what I mean," Harka said. "How can you pretend to know what the Changeling wants?"
Perkar finished the fish and stood. "This girl who calls me. I think she must be one of these Waterborn. I think he wants me to save her from something. And so I will not."
"Perhaps he wants you to kill her. Perhaps it is she who wants to be saved."
"We'll see. We'll see when we get there. Right now I feel good, Harka, so keep your doubts to yourself. I choose to do this now—on the River I was compelled. I could walk back home if I wanted, I could go live with the Mang or become a fisherman. I pick my own doom from now on."
"Let us hope," Harka replied, "that is merely a euphemism and not a prophecy."
He grinned. "I care not!" he shouted, and brandished Harka above his head before returning him to his scabbard.
He reached the city walls not long before dusk, and found that while his dreams might have been competent to teach him a strange language, they were less adept at preparing him for the sight of the city. The walls alone were larger than any Human-made structure he had ever seen, dwarfing the largest damakuta a hundred times over. To that fact he added that they were clearly made of stone and not wood, and the effort put into building the stupendous stockade was, to him, even more difficult to envision than the artificial streams. As he approached it from a distance, he kept expecting that size to be an illusion that would resolve itself when he got closer, reveal that the city was not really as large as it seemed, that the towers and great rising blocks of buildings that peered at him from over that great wall must be of more reasonable dimensions. And yet, the more closely he approached, the clearer it was that he was in a place where magnificent, impossible things were done. He began to understand, with a sinking feeling, why these people insisted on calling his own "barbarians." What he saw here made the difference between the dwellings of the Alwat and his father's damakuta seem insignificant. Small wonder that the people of Nhol thought of his people in much the same way as his thought of the Alwat. And yet that thought gave him a bit of comfort, because he now understood— finally—that what people built didn't make them any more or less brave, worthy, or deserving. No man he had ever heard of had died any better than Digger and her kin or deserved more praise.
The gatehouse was a white-plastered cube the size of his father's stables; Perkar wondered how many warriors it might hold. He was greeted by only two; they looked at him as if he might be something the River had pulled in, something less than savory. Which, in its own way, was true enough.
"That kitchen knife of yours stays in its sheath here, do you understand?" The soldier spoke slowly, as if he thought Perkar might not comprehend him. "If you go near the great temple, any of the fanes, or within four streets of the palace, you may not wear it at all, unless you are employed by a member of the royal family to do so."
"I understand," he replied. "I am seeking employment for my sword, actually. Can you direct me to someone whose business it is to hire?"
The second guard rolled his eyes. "You barbarians. Never been in a city before in your life, have you?"
"No," he confessed.
"Take my advice. Get a job on the docks, if you need money. That's good, honest work. The nobles don't usually hire foreign bodyguards, and when they do it's usually not very good for your continued well-being, if you understand me."
"I'm not sure I do," he said.
"Too bad," said the first guard, smiling in a way that didn't seem very genuine. "That's all the free advice we'll give today."
Perkar shrugged, a little put off by their rudeness, but still too overwhelmed by the city to take it personally.
"Go down to the docks, near South town," the second guard called after him anyway. "If someone wants your sword, they'll come looking for you there."
"Thank you," he shouted back, meaning it.
Passing through the thick, plastered walls, he entered a maze of confusion. His first instinct was to go back out, take several deep breaths, and reconsider his course of action. How could anyone find anything in such cluttered bedlam?
People were everywhere, as thick as ants on a piece of meat. They clustered in bunches or darted about, called to each other, all talking at once, it seemed. Beyond the gate was a small, cobbled square, buildings bunched at every side of it, enclosing it so that it more resembled a canyon than a yard. The only exits— save for the gate, of course—were a multitude of claustropho-bically narrow paths between the buildings, cobbled like the square. Cobbled paths? Once again, he felt dismay at the sheer scale of Nhol.
He also felt horribly out of place. People were staring at him, rudely and openly. Some—particularly the children—even pointed and laughed. He grimaced uncomfortably. He was a stranger here, of exceedingly strange appearance, undoubtedly, though he had hoped the clothes Ghaj had given him would help. However, he noted that though the people swirling around him were dressed in a similar manner, most wore much more colorful clothing, and though the sun had darkened his skin considerably, it was many shades lighter than any other he saw.
He had not the faintest idea which of the little paths to take, and so he walked down the broadest one; as near as he could tell it led southeast, and the man had said something about Southtown.
The street was crowded, despite the late hour; night seemed to come quickly in the city, and Perkar was reminded of being at the bottom of the gorge at the River's headwaters. The buildings around him rose far above his head, perhaps four or five times his height. Balconies jutted off of these clifflike faces, here and there, and often people stood or sat out on them. Without fail, all of these upper observers followed Perkar's progress closely, and he wondered at first if they might be watchmen of some sort; but most were actually women, some of them rather old. It occurred to him that they might—strange as it seemed—live in those lofts, though he had originally supposed the upper rooms were for storing hay or grain.
As the sky darkened, the street reminded him more of the tunnels in the mountain than of a gorge. The heavens still held blue and gray, even a hint of crimson and argent, but smoke and shadows ruled the streets. Torches burned murkily in sconces near doorways, and the dragon-eyes of oil lamps stalked and hovered around him, revealing here a face, there a patch of clothing, the dark knots of the hands gripping the lantern handles. A fog of smoke from burning wood, oil, and tar lay heavily upon him, mingling with the stench of Human Beings, strange foods cooking, and a half-dozen other distinct but unrecognized odors.
The path he was on intersected a much larger one, and he finally tried to stop someone to ask directions. The person—a man who looked to be about his own age—disdainfully brushed off his inquiring hand and hurried on his way without even paus-ing. Perkar watched him go, dumbstruck. What manner of people were these? They looked like Ghaj, and Win, and Brother Horse, and yet they had not a smidgen of the same hospitality. He reminded himself that they also resembled the pirates who had tried to kill him, and began to proceed a bit more cautiously.
Two more men and a woman rebuffed him, and so at last he stopped a child.
For an instant, he thought the little girl was the one in his vision; she had the same black eyes and hair framing a heart-shaped face. But then he realized that her nose was a bit too broad, her eyes not as large, other details that he couldn't quite place but that added up to the wrong person. She stared up at him, half frightened, half curious.
"My mother says not to talk to foreigners," she said simply.
"Please," he pleaded, "I only want to know where the docks are, in Southtown."
She regarded him dubiously, but finally gave him an answer that involved a string of turns and unfamiliar street names.
"I don't know those streets," he told her. "Can you be more detailed?"
When she was done, Perkar didn't know whether he was thoroughly confused or knew where he was going. Thanking her, he followed her directions as best he could.
Not much later, he crossed a canal, a channel that had been lined with cut stones. He stared down from the bridge at it, agape. Boats were moving up and down the waterway—it was wider than the stream back home—poled by men and women. Some held cargo—fish, bundles of cloth—but most seemed to bear only a few passengers. He made out stairs descending at intervals from the street to the canal.
Beyond the canal, he turned where he thought the girl meant for him to, and the path climbed a hill. At the crest of it, he emerged from the early night of the streets onto an open plaza. There he was suddenly gifted with a broader view of the city, still visible in the pale and fading illumination of the sky. A thousand flat rooftops sprawled out below him, rectangular islands in an ink-dark sea. Many of the islands were inhabited; he could make out people tending fires, clothes and rugs hung on lines, flapping vaguely in the wind. A few of the roofs even had tents upon them, and he guessed that people might sleep in them, when the weather was warm. From many of the houses, pits of orange-yellow light gaped at his uphill vantage, interior courtyards cheerily lit from within.
Another hill rose to his right, and the structures clustered there loomed enormous. Massive vaults, sky-reaching towers, and long, unbroken walls of stone were somehow all joined into one, and formed a single building larger than the entire city of Wun. It scarcely looked like something Human Beings could live in, and the hair on his nape prickled at the sight of it. How must it be, in the center of such a thing? Like being in the mountain, in the Belly of the Raven, too far from sky and sunlight. He remembered the creatures who lived in the mountain all too well; spidery things, pale and sinister. Might not such creatures dwell there, in that hilltop edifice?
Was this the "palace" the guards spoke of? He remembered Brother Horse and his talk of the clan that ruled Nhol, men and women with a seeming of godhood upon them. Perhaps they were gods of shadow, of depth.
But there was a height, here, too. The hilltop monstrosity—the palace?—rolled down in blocky waves to the River, surrounded the whole of the way by a formidable stone wall. Where it touched the River, a monumental structure of cut stone reared up against the dying light. Perkar recognized it immediately as a mountain, or something made to resemble a mountain, but angular, like a building, as well. Water spewed from its summit, churning and gray, and poured like miniature rivers down its sloping faces. For an instant, Perkar felt dizzy, on the verge of some fantastic revelation. It was as if he were gazing at the very source of the Changeling, the mountain in the heart of Balat, where the gods lived. Yet it was the mountain not as it was, but as Human Beings might make it, of dressed stone, cornered, regular. He stared on, teased by inspiration but never quite comprehending the importance of what he saw. At last he shook his head, let his gaze stray.
The River was even wider here than at the point where the pirates had attacked him, the other shore obscured by distance and twilight. He saw several more canals—they all seemed to run toward the palace. He also made out, against the dim silver light of the water, a jumble of quays jutting out into the River like short, dark trails. They lay south of him, and so he continued on, sure that these were his destination, the false mountain still riddling at his brain.
He attempted to keep the location of the docks fixed in his senses as he descended the hill and lost sight of them. Despite his best efforts, he was soon confused again. He stopped several children to refine his course, and so at last, by the time night was truly pitch, he found himself near the water's edge and a strip of dirty, untidy buildings. There he sat down, his back to a wall, and gazed out at the dark River, freckled with the torchlight of a hundred boats. He sighed, his earlier elation gone with the sunlight. He felt very, very far from home.
"Well," he told the River. "Here I am. You killed my friends, bent my destiny, brought me across the whole world. Now what do you want? Where is this girl?"
His only answer was the sounds of the city, the faint lapping of waves on the quays.
Perkar realized that he had dozed off; someone was nudging him awake with a foot. He gasped and reached for Harka.
"Hey, no, watch that!" a young voice called down. He squinted up but couldn't make out the face. Whoever it was, though, was dressed much like the soldiers who had met him at the gate; he could see that much in the feeble light of a nearby torch.
"I'm sorry," Perkar muttered vaguely, still confused.
"Sleeping on the street is a bad idea, barbarian," the voice informed him.
"I don't know my way around here," he explained. "I don't know where I should stay."
"Oh. Didn't your captain tell you?"
"Captain?"
"You came on a boat, didn't you?"
"Uh, no," Perkar said, rising to his feet. Someone passed close with a lantern, and he caught a glimpse of the soldier's face; very young, it seemed, smooth, kind. "No," he repeated, "I came overland."
"Overland? Well. The guards at the gate should have told you where to go then."
"They told me to go to the docks, near Southtown."
"You're a bit from there," the man told him. "Come along, I'm patrolling that way, if you want a guide."
"Yes!" Perkar agreed, nodding vigorously.
"Come on, then, stay close," the guard counseled.
After they had gone a few steps, Perkar spoke up again. "My name is Perkar, of the Barku Clan," he offered.
"Eh? Oh," the man responded. "Hang, son of Chwen, is mine. Where are you from, barbarian?"
"From the Cattle-Lands, at the edge of Balat," Perkar answered.
"Is that far away?"
"It took well over a month to get here on the River."
"I thought you said you came overland," the man said, a trifle suspiciously.
"From Nyel," Perkar amended. "I lost my boat at Nyel."
"Funny," Hang replied.
"How so?"
"Something I just heard—ah, watch them!" Hang stepped over a couple of men lying facedown in the street. They looked like natives; Perkar wondered why Hang didn't warn them not to sleep in the street, too, and said so.
Hang snorted. "They should know better, that's why, but they're too drunk to have any sense, I imagine. I thought maybe you didn't know better."
"That was good of you," Perkar said.
The man shrugged, glanced slightly back at him as they walked along. "Most people don't like foreigners," he admitted. "I find them sort of interesting. My mother was a barbarian, you know."
"She was?"
"She was a Mang captive my father bought and eventually married."
"Bought?" Perkar asked incredulously, wondering if he had misunderstood.
"Paid a fair price, too, twelve Royals, he used to say. That's what he called her most of the time, 'Twelve Royals.' "
Perkar wasn't sure he was following, precisely, but he remembered his father's advice about keeping quiet rather than revealing his ignorance.
"I thought I might go trading up-River one day, so I don't mind meeting strangers, to learn a little about them."
"I see."
"What have you come to Nhol for?"
"To see it, I suppose," Perkar told him, not really knowing what else to say. Then he added, "I was hoping to get a little work for my sword."
The soldier nodded, and Perkar thought he caught a sidewise look of condescension from him. "You'll want to stay at the Crab Woman, then. That's not far, I'll show you to it and bid you good night."
They turned off of the street on the River and crossed several more streets inland. At last the soldier knocked on a heavy wooden door.
"This is the place, Perkar-from-faraway. Don't let them charge you more than a pair of soldiers a night. Remember that!"
"Thank you, I'll remember it," Perkar said. He was watching the fellow walk away when the door opened.
A large, rough man stood there, raking a practiced gaze over him.
"Barbarian sell-sword? Well, keep that thing leathered, you hear me? We get trouble from your kind all of the time, and we know how to deal with it. You've got no clan or brotherhood or tribe or whatever that'll find out what happened to you down here and avenge you, get that straight, right?"
Perkar frowned when he understood that he was being threatened, but let it pass. Piraku and its code of behavior were plainly not known to any of these people, though they insisted on calling him a barbarian. Best he should mostly watch and listen here, until he understood more about what codes of conduct did apply.
"I just want a bed to sleep in," he mumbled. "I've been walking all day."
"Four soldiers, here at the door," the man said gruffly.
At least he understood this. He had never dealt with metal coins before, but he had bargained for cattle often enough.
"A single soldier is all I can afford," he said.
"Well, then you can't afford to stay here," the man snapped. "Though we have a discount for albinos today. Three soldiers."
They settled on two, as the guardsman had indicated, and after paying he entered into the building's courtyard. Here, too, was a bit of familiarity. The courtyard was set up much like the hall of a damakuta, with heavy tables and benches. Men and some women sat at these, drinking from heavy clay bowls.
"You can have the room in the corner," the man indicated. "Beer and wine is a soldier a pint. Tell the serving boy if you want some."
"Where do I go to look for work?" Perkar asked, hesitantly.
"I knew it," the man grumbled. He sighed heavily. "Just stay around in here, keep your scabbard out where people can see it. If anyone is looking, they'll notice you."
"Thanks," Perkar said. Worn out and overloaded with sight, sound, and smell, he wound back through the mass of strangers to the door the man had indicated. It opened into a cell that was no larger than a storage shed, but held a pallet and a small lantern. He closed the door and, after a bit of fumbling about in the dark, found a bolt, slid it shut. He sank down to the mat, which stank of sweat and beer and possibly less appetizing things. He was musing on how a city could be so huge and rooms in it so small when, despite the smell and the constant noise of voices from outside, Perkar was soon deeply, mercifully asleep.