Fortress in the Eye of Time

CHAPTER 8

Morning came as the frogs predicted, with a sprinkling of rain through the leaves, a gray dim dawn, at first, with a slight rumbling of thunder. He ate most of the bread, fearing it might be ruined if the skies opened and poured as they had a habit of doing at Ynefel.

But before he was quite through, the sun was breaking through the clouds and shining through the leaves, dappling the gray stone of the roadway in patterns of light and shadow. Rain dripped at every breath of wind.

The birds sang, his clothing dried on his body and his hair began to blow lightly in the wind as he plucked the leaves and twigs from it.

And before he quite realized what he was seeing, with the cresting of another hill the trees grew thinner, gave way to brush, and then — a vision fraught with Words — to broad Meadows, where the Road ran, mostly overgrown with grass. The sky was dotted with gray-bottomed clouds that occasionally obscured the sun and sent patterns of shadow wandering the smooth hillsides.

He had never seen a meadow. He only knew the Word. Everything he saw was marvelous and new. He walked the Road, picking his way along the grass-chinked stones, listening to new birds, Lark and Linnet, marking their flight across an open sky.

Then, as his Road crossed between two hills, he saw a different land spread before him — a patchwork like the quilt on his own bed, in green and brown. Fields, he thought, and knew he had come indeed to something different, and a Place where Men lived.

He walked down to that land until it became browns and greens around him. His Road in places became a muddy track lined with fences some stones of which were white, like the Road — so the men had stolen them to make their own stoneworks, and he hoped they had not removed all the Road ahead.

Men were working in the fields. They stopped, mopped their brows and stared at him from a distance, but they came no closer.

In time he came to a Village that lay some distance from the Road. But his Road did not lead him toward it, so he decided that this was not the Place he was looking for. The houses were squat, and the color of their stonework matched the thatch of their roofs. He saw people very distantly, and a track did lead that way, but he had come to grief once from leaving the Road, so he did not let curiosity or hunger lead him aside.

He walked until dusk, and found green Apples on a tree and had two, leaving the Road just to cross a fence. He supposed that no one would mind. He slept by the roadside, under the shelter of that rough stone wall, as much shelter of stone as he had yet found on the Road, and in the morning had another apple, and one to take with him. They made his stomach hurt, but it was a different kind of hurt than having nothing at all to eat, and they eased his thirst.

He found berry bushes, and had a handful of berries. He found a brook, and drank.

He passed other villages, which never sat near the Road, as the fences never blocked it. He met a man on the Road, once, the only man he had seen on the Road at all. “Good day,” he said, and that man dropped his load of sticks and climbed over the rubble wall and ran away rather than pass him, so he thought that he had been in his proper Place, but the man had not been in his, and the man had run for fear of consequences. He was sorry. He would have liked to ask questions. But at least the man had flung nothing at him, nor brandished a knife, and he walked as quickly as he could to be away from the village toward which the man had run.

But no one chased him and no one else appeared on the Road.

He passed another night beneath a berry hedge, and smelled woodfires on the wind, until the stars were turned in their courses. Remembering the man running and now smelling bread baking made him feel lonely and hungry, and reminded him that a few apples and a handful or two of berries was a very small sort of supper. The bread he had had from the men by the fire now seemed a very fine thing despite the grit, but it was long gone, and he hoped for more apples or more berries.

He walked in the morning, hungry and finding nothing at all to eat. His clothes, he had noticed, hung loosely on him, and despite his washing, showed increasing mud stains. He shaved every day. He had the razor and the little mirror, and when he found water to drink, as he did find frequently now, daily he would shave and wash and make himself presentable as Mauryl had taught him. But his face was going more hollow about the cheeks and more shadowed about the eyes, and he knew he looked more desperate and more untidy than he had begun.

On the third day since the Bridge, he came to a high place from which he saw the fields divided up in a great circle about a hill and a sprawl of walls and higher walls.

Fortress, he thought, and in his experience of strangers by now, he stood in some dread and doubt what he ought to do next.

But his Road, now a straggle of white stones, went inexorably toward it and, that being what Mauryl had said, as the Road was going, he gathered his courage and kept walking.

The narrow grass-grown track among the fields gave way to a broader path by afternoon, as he came down into the valley: a rough, earthen, common road, it became, running across others, between stone fences. On either hand were fields of sorts he had seen before: he knew Barley and Oats, which one could eat raw, though not pleasantly; he knew Orchards and Apples. He saw Sheep wandering white on the hillsides. He saw the walls in the distance ahead of him, wider and greater than he had imagined, vanishing behind low hills and rising again as he walked.

He saw other men in the fields, and he was anxious when he had to pass them working near the Road. But they were an occurrence more and more common, as if here the Road was permitted to them, or as if they had no fear of strangers.

In time he met a man who slogged along the road under a load of baskets slung on a stick. The man was coming toward him, and for very little persuasion he would have fled the meeting himself, over the fences and across the fields; but as the man came slowly, head bowed, he thought how the Road was his Place, and Mauryl had said go on it. So come what might, he kept walking and waiting for the approaching man to do or say something.

The man, white-bearded as Mauryl, just trudged past, with a glance or two toward him that said the man at least wondered at him, or suspected bad behavior in him, but over all the man with the baskets seemed no threat to him and did nothing.

Further along, he saw a man working and digging in the ditch beside the Road. That man stopped his work and looked at him in some evident surprise, as if he had expected him to do something remarkable.

He made a little bow, as Mauryl had told him was polite, and the man held his Hat in his hand and gazed curiously at him as he passed.

Nearer the walls, much nearer, he saw a double gate in the wall and slowly, the most dazzling, the strangest Word he had yet seen before him, he thought of Town, and then of People and Streets, of Walls and Defense, and gates and bars such as Ynefel had had. He saw a cart come out of those gates, a cart pulled by an Ox and accompanied by two men. It was piled high with straw and great clay jars. Its wheels wobbled and groaned with a squeal of wood on wood as, inevitably, they met and passed. He stepped off the track to give them room, anxious, because one man had a stick which he had no hesitation to use on the ox, for no fault that Tristen could see. He did not like that man and gave that man a straight, steady stare, wary and ready to move away if that man should strike at him.

But that man shied away from him instead, and the men went their way away from the town, as he went his, for his Road took him toward the gates — gates which still stood open, it seemed, to anyone who cared to come in or out, though Ynefelʼs doors and windows had been locked and barred for fear of Shadows.

Here there must not be such a danger, he said to himself; and though men seemed to look askance at him, no one harmed him or threatened him, perhaps being better-behaved men, of a sort Mauryl would approve. He walked, fearful but unchallenged, up to the stone gateway beneath the arch.

But there he saw that men with Spears — a dreadful Word — sat there talking with each other. Guards, he thought: Soldiers. Weapons and Armor, defenses and locks and protections. He was afraid of the guards, though they paid him no attention at all, seeming too busy in their conversation.

And he was not exactly deceiving them when he saw no reason to put himself in the notice of men busy at other matters, especially while he was obeying Maurylʼs instruction. There being a cart with tall stacks of baskets stopped at the side of the gate, it was not exactly dishonest of him to duck behind it and walk past into the town without bothering anyone.

And there — were Streets, exactly as he anticipated them, but, oh, so different. He was confused for a moment, seeing no order in his choices, and settled on walking straight ahead, since it was the direction he had been going. Men stared at him, some very few, but most jostled him in their own urgent haste to be somewhere. He stared after one and the other, wondering whether he should be going there, too — but he saw nothing to attract him. Walking uphill, he entered on a place with narrowing daylight, where buildings increasingly overhung, where men spread out racks and jars on the side of the street and made those trying to pass dodge around the obstacles they posed.

Then his street opened out into a small level courtyard, in which he saw a Well, and men — no, Women — gathered there with buckets and jars.

Of course, women, and Children—Children…racing about the well, chasing and being chased.

His pulse became leaden, with a sense of profound wrongness into which he had no wish at all to question further. But wonder he must — as children dashed across his path, cutting him off a moment from his intended course. Two began to skip along beside him, singing some song of Words he failed entirely to understand, except the children in particular seemed to see an oddness in him which their elders ignored or failed to notice, and they sang about his oddness.

He dared not speak to them. They were creatures dangerous to him. He knew it as he knew that water would drown him and height would break him. He was glad when they gave up their game and dropped out of sight behind him, and gladder still when they gave up following. He walked as his street led him after that, with Names and Words ringing in his head: Wagon, Market, Carter, Blacksmith, Forge, Pieman, Pork and Chandler, Tinker, Aleman, Weaver and Warp and Weft — Youth and Age; Blindness; and Beggar and Ragman. Madness tumbled all about him, a confusion of images, of expectations. He had not realized at a distance how complex a Place a town was, how many dwellings it held, all narrowly separated by Streets and Alleys, none of which might ever see full sunlight, so closely they crowded together — and it was now late in the day, with shadows falling all across the streets and creeping up eastern walls, advising him day was ending. He should find a Place soon, but the town went on unfolding to him like a vast cloth spreading out with images and Words all about — Carpenter and Stonemason, Cobbler and Tailor, Fruitseller and Clerk and—

“Thief!” someone yelled, and Tristen jumped back as a Boy, shoving at him, darted past his elbow with a man in pursuit. “Thief!” others shouted, and gave chase down a winding lane.

He stood and stared. Thief, it certainly was. Thief. And Stealing. Theft. And Larceny. Like the mice. Like the birds at Ynefel, stealing blackberries. He picked up a dropped chain of Sausages, and an angry woman snatched it back.

But it was far more serious here. They Hanged thieves…

Even a Boy, a Child…so small, and so mysterious…

The woman stalked back to a Butcherʼs stall, where dead things hung, strange to see, and frightening. Men walked around him as he stared. A man with a cart maneuvered on the cobbles, to have room to pass by him, the man saying not a word, but he realized he had made himself an obstacle, and he began to walk, wiping greasy hands on each other, that being all he had, since Mauryl had said, and most emphatically, never on his shirt.

He was shaky on his feet, after all the uphill walking, and he had found nothing to eat today. He had been hungry so often and so long it had become a condition, not a complaint. But hunger became acute as he smelled bread baking, and saw the basket of bread a woman carried, and saw where others were obtaining it. He saw it as a supper ready to be had — but as he walked closer and watched the exchange of Coin for bread, he realized that he had no Coin to give, and no prospect of having one. The Beggar down the street looked for Coins. He held out his hand as the beggar did, but no one seemed willing to give them to him for the asking. They shied away and looked afraid, and that warned him of harm to come, so he was quick to leave that place, and to dodge away through the narrow lanes.

It was now well toward that hour the Shadows came, and, supperless and desperate, he saw stone abundant, stone of the streets, stone of the gates, stone of the inmost walls of the Place, stone up and up about the great pale stone keep which dominated everything — all of which advised him that here Maurylʼs warning about being indoors might hold true; but he saw nowhere yet to shelter him, no more than he had found anyone responsible to give him supper.

His path had wound steadily uphill, into narrow places where buildings on either side of the streets projected closer and closer in their second stories, plaster and beams above the stone, until they overhung most of the space between — giving Shadows ample refuge at this hour, the more so at the narrowest points of the side streets which extended on either hand. Some lanes were so dark they daunted him. The pavings underfoot were muddy and dirty, as Mauryl would never have permitted, the mortar-courses in many places running with water. He saw a man heave a bucketful out the door of a building — carelessly: children passing by skipped not quite out of the way, and shook their fists at the man, yelling wicked Words in high, thin voices.

The man slammed the door in their faces. The children threw stones at the door. It was not a happy sight.

At least no one threw stones or dishwater at him. A few women standing in their doorways looked at him mistrustfully, and one or two doors shut abruptly — but it was getting dangerously late, and doubtless they were anxious to be away inside, safe from the Shadows.

The Town was not at all like Ynefel. There were so many people, and it was not so clean as he had imagined. Not so noble as he had imagined. Not so helpful as he had hoped. His stomach ached with hunger, and he was afraid of the coming dark. He thought of going up to a door of anyone, man or woman or even child, who looked kinder than the rest, and asking if he could have supper and stay the night — but he feared their anger, too.

Now the sun was gone even from the highest walls, long past that time that Mauryl had always said he should lock the doors and come inside. Prudent men and women were doing exactly that quite rapidly now, and it all said to him that he should find his own shelter for the night, and quickly. Whatever Mauryl feared had not touched him in the woods, so either he had been fortunate, or perhaps Mauryl still somehow looked over him, since Mauryl had had power over the Shadows.

But perhaps, equally to be believed, keeps and towns were the unique abode of Shadows. He saw a great many lurking in the narrow streets and in the rare spaces between houses, and he feared he had never been in such danger in the woods as he was now.

He kept walking, that being all he knew to do while he formed some plan for the night. He became aware, then, of a sound following him.

He looked back in apprehension — looked down into the small, dirty face of a child, a boy with ragged sleeves and breeches out at the knees, who had been copying his steps through the twilight. The boy tucked hands behind him and grinned up at him.

He was hopeful then, but not too hopeful, and ventured a smile in turn. The boy stood fast, rocking on his bare feet.

“Where ye from?” the child asked.

“From the Road.” He had learned to be cautious with Names, ever since the men at the fire, and the first man he had met on the Road.

And sure enough the boyʼs eyes widened in alarm. “Gods bless, Yer Lordship, — ye are a gennelman, are ye not?”

“Tristen,” Tristen said, fearing the boy would run and accounting that he heard Words of respect, but equally of fear from the boy. He reached out, but dared not touch him or hold him. “My name is Tristen. Is there a place safe to spend the night? Might I stay in your room, boy?”

The boy looked surprised, and began to rock again, hands behind him, then gave an uneasy laugh. “My room, Yer Lordship? I hainʼt got a room, but I knows them as has.”

“A place to sleep, something to eat. Please. Iʼm very tired. And hungry.”

“Oh? So why donʼt ye go uphill? Up thereʼs for lords like you. Hainʼt ye spoke to them at the Zeide?”

The Zeide. He looked up at the walls. But Zeide was wrong. It was only half a Word. Kathseide. The Kathseide was the fortress of the Amefin — and it echoed with other Words: Eswyllan and Sadyurnan…Hênasámrith…

“I could take ye there, Yer Lordship,” the boy said.

“Thank you,” he said fervently. “Thank you, boy.”

He was profoundly relieved, having met practical-minded rescue at the very last before the dark. The boy, for his part, wasted no time, but bobbed a sort of bow, turned on one bare foot, and swung along extravagantly in front of him — it was more alley than street where the boy led him, darker and fouler yet than the gate-road he had generally been following. Every shutter and almost every door here was shut. But the boy swaggered his way ahead with a bold, a confident step, as a vast, somber sound boomed out, brazen and measured and frightening.

“What is that?” Tristen asked, recalling the hammering and wailing of the Shadows in the keep, and looked up at the strip of fading daylight above them. The sound seemed, like the groanings in the keep, to come from the very walls.

“Naught but the Zeide Bell, Yer Lordship,” the boy said, in a tone that said of course it was that, and he was a silly fool to wonder at it. “The Zeide bell tells folk the lower gates is shut.”

“But not the Zeide gates?” he said, concerned for their safety, and distracted by the thought of Bell, Alarm, and warning. “Are they shut, now, too? Are we too late?”

“Nay, nay, Yer Lordship, she donʼt never shut most times. Ye follow, — ye follow me, Yer Lordship, is all.”

He caught perhaps half of that, except that the boy would guide him, and no, there was no danger. He followed, reassured and relieved when the alley let out on a broader, cleaner street, upward bound. The boy strode along, and he walked briskly beside him, with hope, now, that things might turn out as Mauryl had wished. There would be some wise man, there would be someone Mauryl knew, there would be stout doors and clean sheets and supper and a bath.

Oh, very much a bath. He could never lie on clean sheets as dirty as he was. There might be hot bread and butter and ale and turnips; but he would be, oh, so content with a piece of bread and a bit of cheese, and he would invite the boy in, who badly needed a bath and clean clothes, too. Surely the wise master to whom they were going could find something for the boy, a good dinner, a room to sleep in, and the boy could show him all manner of things and talk to him when the master was busy, as wizards often were.

He saw a high stone wall before them, and indeed a gate that swallowed up the street. That — a shiver of recognition came over his skin — that was the Kathseide, he thought when he looked through the gates and saw the keep inside. The fortress on its hill. The Place like Ynefel.

There was nothing crumbling or ramshackle about these stones. There might be grime in the streets outside its wall. There might be washwater thrown carelessly in the town streets, but not here. The buildings below on the hill might be shuttered in fear of the coming night, but the Kathseideʼs windows showed bright with colors, a beautiful notion. He thought how it would have brightened the old gables and the shuttered windows of Ynefel had even his humble horn window stood unshuttered to the night.

He saw before him what Ynefel might have been.

Except for the people. And women and children.

Except for the smoothness of the walls, which showed no faces, none. It was pristine. Beautiful.

His knees ached as they climbed the last steep stretch of cobbles, this road being steeper than Ynefelʼs, as the walls were taller than Ynefelʼs. Within the open gateway he saw stones pale gold and clean, unweathered, a cobbled courtyard, beyond a thick archway, and inner buildings, pale stone glowing in the twilight.

He was looking at that instead of watching around him, when dark movement came from the side and, out of nowhere, metal-clad men suddenly confronted him.

“I brung ʼim,” the boy said. “I brung ʼim, master Aman.”

He was frozen with fear, facing such grim expressions, like Maurylʼs expression when he had done something wrong. The boy was looking quite proud of himself and seeming to expect something of the men, who were holding weapons and waiting, he supposed, for him to account for himself.

“My name is Tristen, sir. Are you the master here?”

One of the men grinned at him, not in a friendly way. The other:

“The master, he wants?” that one asked, leaning on what spoke other Words: Pike, War, and Killing. “Which master in particular, Sir Strangeness?”

“I suppose…the master of all this Place.”

They laughed. But the men seemed to be perplexed by him. The one leaning on the pike straightened his back and looked at him down a nose guarded by a metal piece, eyes shadowed from the deepening twilight by a metal-and-leather Helm. The third, helmless, had never smiled, not from the beginning.

“Come along,” that one said, and motioned with his pike for him to enter the arch of the gates.

“The boy,” he said, remembering his manners, “the boy would like supper, if you please, and a place to sleep.”

“Oh, would he, now?”

“He has,” he said, finding himself wrong, and chased by one of Maurylʼs kind of debates, “he has nowhere to sleep. And he wants supper, Iʼm sure, sir.”

“He wants supper.” The man thought that strange, and dug in his purse and flipped a coin to the boy, who caught it, quite remarkably. “Off wiʼ ye. And no Gossip, or Iʼll cut off your Weasel ears.”

Weasel was four-footed and brown.

And there was, clearly, another way one found coins. The guards had coins to give. For himself, he saw no such chances, but he was prepared to go where they asked and wait until the men could make up their minds what to do about him.

“Come along,” said the one the boy called master, and another shoved him, not at all kindly or needfully, in the shoulder. He thought how pigeons fluttered and bumped one another. If this man was indeed master here he seemed a rough and rude sort. But he remembered how the men at the fire had behaved, and how they had grown quite unfriendly once they became afraid of him, and the weapons these men had were far more threatening than knives.

So he thought he should do what they asked and not give them any cause to be afraid; and then, he thought, he might find out whether this man was the master of the Kathseide, or whether he was only master of these men. Perhaps there was someone else, after all, who might ask him inside and talk to him much more reasonably than men outside, and perhaps even be expecting his arrival.

He walked through the gateway, believing they would go through into the courtyard and straightway to the inner halls of the keep, but he was no more than under the gateway arch when the one man dropped the staff of his pike in front of his face and made him stop — a roughness which he was not at all expecting, and which might be misbehavior on their part.

But he was not certain. He might have been in the wrong. He let the other man take him by the arm and direct him toward a doorway at the side in the arch, which his fellow opened, showing him a room bright with candlelight, a plain room with a table and chairs, and another man sitting — curious sight — with his feet on the table. Dared one do such a thing?

Not, he suspected, at Maurylʼs table.

“Weʼve an odd ʼun,” the helmless man said. “Wants to see the master of the Zeide, he says.”

“Does he?” The man at the table wrinkled his nose. “And on what business, Iʼd like to know. — Is this our report from about town?”

“Seems tʼ be our wanderinʼ stranger.”

“Has either of ye seen ʼim before?”

“Never seen ʼim,” one said, and the other shook his head. “Truth tʼ tell, ʼt was Paisi picked ʼim up, led ʼim up to us wiʼ no trouble to speak of.”

“Paisi did. Led ʼim up, ye say?”

“I was surprised meself. I figured the little Rat could find what smelt odd, so I sent him out. But I never figured heʼd bring it himself. Clever little Rat, he is. Anʼ this ʼun—” The man sat half on the table. “Him talking like a Lord,” the man said. “Airs and manners and all. He wasnʼt at all meetinʼ wiʼ anybody of account in town. Talked to some on the streets, as of no account at all, wandered here, wandered there, ainʼt no sense to it, by me, what he was doinʼ or askinʼ.”

“A lord, is he?” The man slowly took his feet off the table — Mauryl would have been appalled, Tristen decided uneasily. He was surrounded by behavior and manners he began to be certain that Mauryl would not at all approve, manners which far more reminded him of the men in the woods. And from one master, now there seemed two, and they wondered whether he was a Lord, which held its own bewilderments.

But, then, they had brought him in under stone, where he was safer. They might have shoved him about quite rudely, but they had not harmed him.

“And what,” the man in the chair wanted to know, “what would be your name?”

“Tristen, sir, thank you. And I came to find the master of the Kathseide.”

The man frowned, the grim man looked puzzled, and the one sneezed or laughed, he was not certain which.

“Is he the Mooncalf all along? Or only now?”

“A mooncalf in lordʼs cloth, to us at least. All up and down the town, nothing of trouble nor of stealinʼ that weʼve heard yet, and the boy had no trouble to win his copper. But he come strolling up from the low town, bright as brass, and he had to be through the gates sometime today, though Ness anʼ Selmwy donʼt report seeinʼ ʼim.”

“So how long have ye been lurkinʼ about the streets, rascal?”

“Not lurking, sir,” Tristen replied, he thought respectfully, but the man at his back fetched him a shove between the shoulders. “Walking.”

“How long have ye been in the town?” the foremost man asked, and he was glad to understand it was a simple question, and anxious to lay everything in their laps.

“I came in from the Road, sir. I walked through the gates down below, and the boy led me up to this gate to see the master of this Place before the dark came.”

“Did you, now?” the man said, leaning back again, and one of the other two shut the door, a soft, ominous thump, after which he heard the drop of a heavy bar.

“Paisi certainly done better ʼn Ness anʼ his fool cousin,” the grim man said.

“And how, pray,” asked the man in charge, “did you pass through the gate, sir mooncalf?”

“I walked through, sir.” He remembered ducking behind the cart. He knew he was in the wrong.

“Is that so?” The man brought the chair legs down with a thump and waved a hand at the two who had brought him in. “Is he armed? Did you make certain?”

One man took him by the arm and held him still while the other ran hands over him and searched his belt and the tops of his boots. That began to frighten him, the more when the man, searching the front of his shirt, discovered the Book and the mirror and razor.

“Now whatʼs this?”

“Mine, sir.” He saw the man open the Book and anxiously watched him leaf through the pages, turn it upside down and shake it. “Please be careful.”

“Careful, eh?” The man laid the Book on the table, showing it, open, to the man in the chair. “It donʼt look proper to me.”

“Foreign writinʼ.”

“Itʼs mine, sir. Please.” He reached to have the Book back, and the man behind him seized his arm and twisted it back, hard.

It hurt, and it scared him. He turned to be free of the pain. The man shoved him into the wall, hurting his other shoulder, and he tried then to make them stop and to have his Book back.

But they began to strike him and to kick him, and they tried to hold him. He had never dealt with men like this, and he had no notion what to do but run: he swept himself a clear space, swept up his Book and fled for the door, trying to throw the bar up.

A heavy weight hit him across the neck and shoulders and smashed his forehead into the door. He came about with a sweep of his arm to make the man stop, but in the same instant arms wrapped around his knees, hands seized his belt, and the weight of two men dragged him down to the floor. A third landed on his side and, setting an arm across his throat, choked him, while the other struck him across the head.

The dark went across his sight. He fought to breathe and to escape, he had no idea where or to what, or even how. But blows across his shoulders and across his head kept on, making the dark across his eyes flash red.

One man ripped the Book from his hand. The other kept sitting on his legs, not hitting him, and the third man had given up hitting him, and rummaged all over him, continuing his search. He was too stunned and too breathless to protest. He was willing to lie still in the dark and catch his breath if they would only cease the blows.

The dark, meanwhile, began to be dim light — and his head hurt, the more so when the man above his head seized him by the hair and hauled him not to his feet nor quite as far as his knees.

“Can ye make aught of it?” asked the man holding him, and the man in charge, turning the Book this way and that:

“Iʼm no Scribe. Norʼs he, by the look of ʼim. A thief, Iʼd say.”

Thief. Stealing. Theft. Crime. Gallows. Hanging.

Dreadful images. Terrifying images, from his position, in pain and unbalanced — the man had a knee in his back, and his eyes were watering with the pull on his hair.

“Well?” the man asked him, shaking him. “Where did ye come by it, thief?”

“The Book is mine,” Tristen said. “I am no thief, sir.”

“It ainʼt like honest writing to me,” the grim man said.

And the other, holding it out in front of his eyes: “Whatʼs it say? Eh?”

“I canʼt read it.”

“Ye canʼt read it, eh? So you are a thief. A brigand. A robber. Who did you kill to get them fine clothes, eh?”

From Stealing to Killing. He shook his head. “No, sir, I killed no one.”

“Another lurking after the Marhanen,” one said to his fellows.

“He might be,” the third man said. “He might, that, but do they send a fool?”

“I am no thief,” Tristen said. The very word was strange to his mouth. He fought to get a foot and a knee beneath him, and the man let him, but no more. “It is my Book, sirs. Please let me up.”

“And what would you do wiʼ a book, hey, if you canʼt read it?”

“A novice priest, by ʼis talk, Iʼd say,” said the man at his head. “Stole a book anʼ run, by me. Killt somebody for the clothes.”

“No, sirs,” Tristen said desperately. “It belongs to me. Iʼm not to lose it.”

“Not to lose it,” the man in charge said. “And who said?”

“My master, sir.”

“Ah. Now His Lordship has finally owned a master. And who would that be?”

“My master said—” He knew dangerous questions by some experience now; and not to name Names carelessly. “My master said — I should follow the Road.”

“And who said this?”

“My master, sir.” He truly did not want to answer that question. He feared that they had their minds made up that he was in the wrong, and the men in the woods had liked least of all where he had come from. He was light-headed from hunger and from exhaustion, and he began to fear they would hit him again. “Please give me the Book, sir.”

“Heʼs mad,” the man on his feet said.

“And never will answer the question. — Who is this master, man? Answer, or Iʼll become angry with you.”

He feared to answer. He feared not to. He had no knowledge how to lie.

“Mauryl,” he said, and by the look on the manʼs face once he said that Name, he feared it would have been far better for him to have kept still, no matter what they did.