The Chaos Balance

XXXI

“Jennyleu said we should try the chandlery this morning.” Ayrlyn tied her mount to the stone post and then tethered the gray gelding.

“People do listen to her.” Nylan gave a short laugh as he dismounted and tethered the mare, and then the gray. With Weryl in the carrypak, he stepped into the chandlery warily. Ayrlyn followed.

Unlike the inn, the trading establishment smelled faintly musty, of oil and old leather. Despite the large glazed front window, the room seemed dim. A row of leather goods lay on a long wooden trestle centered on the left wall.

A square-faced woman in faded blue stood by the counter at the rear. “You two must be the angels. Jennyleu said you would be seeking travel food, and cheese. That be in the case here.”

“Thank you.” Nylan stepped past the neatly arranged leather riding gear, noting a child’s saddle, a pair of saddlebags so large than only a plow horse could have borne them, a folded square of what seemed to be oiled leather-a low-tech waterproof?

“I be Gerleu, and my consort is Jersen. Jennyleu said it might be best were I here for you.”

“Gerleu? Does that mean you’re related?” Nylan asked as he neared the brunette and the case beside her.

“We’re all related, somewise. Jersen’s a good man, but Jennyleu said he had to answer to the other menfolk. Store’s from my pa, and I got the right to serve who I please. I’m pleased to serve angels. Might change some things.” She smiled at Nylan. “Does me good to see a man carry a child. Jersen did, but not when folks watched.” Her head turned toward the curtain to her right, which fluttered, although there was no wind. “That be you, Marleu? Come right on out. The angels are peaceable.”

A girl with brown hair and wide brown eyes eased from behind the brown curtain and sidled toward Gerleu. Marleu’s eyes darted over Nylan to Ayrlyn, and widened as she took in the flame-red hair.

Nylan smiled and slipped to the cheese case. All the cheeses were in cloth bags. He opened one, and found a layer of wax around the square lump.

“The top line-that’s yellow brick. The next is white brick. The white is tastier, but the yellow lasts longer than any journey anyone in his right mind would take.”

“How much?” asked Nylan.

“The white runs around three coppers for two, the yellow a copper each.” Gerleu put an arm around her daughter, whose head barely reached past her waist, but who still looked at Ayrlyn.

The healer smiled gently. “We’re just people, Marleu. It is Marleu, isn’t it?”

The girl nodded solemnly. She opened her mouth, then closed it.

“I can’t guess what you wanted to say.” Ayrlyn’s voice was soft. “Did you want to know about the Roof of the World?”

“It’s…cold…”

“Very cold.”

“Are…you…all women?”

Ayrlyn inclined her head toward Nylan. “Nylan is a man. He is a smith. The ship that brought us from the heavens had more women, but that was an accident. It could have had more men than women.”

“Don’t see men without beards here,” observed Gerleu.

“Some of the other men had beards,” Nylan said, pulling out four white cheese bags and two yellow. “I get too hot with a beard, and my skin itches, especially around the forge.”

“Knew a smith like that years ago. Kerler…I think,” said the chandler.

The smith paused before a glass jar and looked at Gerleu.

“Travel biscuits. Six for a copper.”

“Four coppers’ worth, then.” Nylan thought they might be good for Weryl’s emerging teeth, and they had gathered nearly a gold and a half in silvers and coppers from the bandits’ purses, and from the two who had attacked the afternoon before.

Gerleu extracted two dozen of the biscuits and replaced the lid, then tied the biscuits into a worn scrap of cloth.

“You have two blades,” said Marleu.

“That’s so we can throw one if we have to, and still have one to defend ourselves.”

“Jennyleu said your fellow threw his right through Buil…that so?”

Ayrlyn glanced at Marleu, then nodded. “He doesn’t like to fight, but he had to.”

“That’s what she said.” Gerleu shook her head. “Wish more men were like that. You be fortunate.”

Nylan stepped up beside Ayrlyn and set the cheese on the counter, then quickly caught Weryl’s hands before the boy grabbed at one of the short daggers laid out there. “Those are too sharp for you.”

“Silver and two coppers,” noted the chandler.

Nylan extracted three coins. He almost felt guilty that killing two men had more than paid for their stay in Henspa, but no one had complained about their taking the dead men’s wallets, as though it were the accepted practice in Lornth. He still didn’t feel guilty about the bandits.

Outside, under the clear green-blue sky and the sun that promised a hot day for travel, Nylan slipped the cheese into Weryl’s food pack, now fastened to the docile gray, then all but one of the travel biscuits, which he tucked into his shirt pocket, adjusting the fabric so that neither the carrypak nor the shoulder harness for his second blade crushed it, although he had some doubts that anything could dent the biscuit.

Across the street, the cooper worked on another barrel, and two dogs trotted past the statue. The yellow dog paused and anointed the corner of the low wall before following the black and white mongrel eastward and down the street.

“Quiet,” Nylan said as he guided the mare toward the inn…and the road that led out of Henspa.

“Most places are in the morning.”

From the porch of the inn, broom in hand, Lessa waved.

Ayrlyn and Nylan waved back.

For a time, they rode without speaking toward the northwest end of the town, seeing only a handful of people-a woman struggling with laundry in two wooden tubs, a carter with barrels of something driving his wagon past them toward the square, and two children weeding a garden.

“Is it just male dominance,” mused the healer, “that makes this place the way it is?”

Nylan wondered if he should even think about answering.

She turned in the saddle. “Well? You have that look that says you’ve thought about it, and you aren’t about to answer unless someone hammers it out of you.”

Nylan looked down sheepishly. Weryl looked up with a grin of gums and teeth.

“Out with it. I’m not like Ryba, and I won’t let you hide your thoughts until we can’t talk at all.”

“Well…” Nylan swallowed. “Look at Henspa. One woman changed the town. She’s remarkable, but I’d say that you, Ryba, Istril, Huldran, probably others from the Winterlance, might have acted the same way. The culture here suppresses women, but do they have to accept that degree of suppression?”

“That’s a good question.” Ayrlyn was silent as they rode past a cot where a woman in tattered gray trousers and a faded brown shirt hoed a garden, bearing a child in a backpack. “Then, look at how many women made for Westwind.”

Nylan rubbed his chin, reminded again that he was still being taken for a woman from a distance because he had no beard. “Henspa’s more isolated. Do you think that…” He wasn’t quite sure what he thought.

“Oppression is usually less in any culture where people can leave. Maybe there’s something we don’t know. Maybe, except in places like Henspa, near the borders, there wasn’t anywhere to go.”

“Maybe…” There was something more, Nylan knew, but he couldn’t get his scattered thoughts to focus.

They neared the northwest end of Henspa, where the dwellings thinned out, and then gave way to recently tilled fields on the downhill side of the road, and meadows interspersed with woodlots on the right side.

By a house where a thin line of smoke streamed from the chimney, a youth in brown trousers and a patched shirt stood beside a wood pile, ax in hand. His eyes took in the angels, and their hair, and he looked away, then spat on the ground.

“You see a lot of that. At least, I did before,” said Ayrlyn.

“You think we ought to wear hats, or caps, like you did trading?” Nylan asked. “It’s the hair.” Absently, he let Weryl play with the fingers on his free hand.

Ayrlyn frowned, then shook her head. “I don’t think so. It’s not the same as trading. People would say we were trying to hide something.”

Nylan glanced at Weryl. “When our hair-color sets people off-”

“That’s just here. Once we get farther away from Westwind, they’ll have heard of the angels, but I don’t think the hair will be a problem.”

Nylan wondered, but he wasn’t going to argue with Ayrlyn’s feelings. She was usually right, and she had much more experience in traveling Lornth than he did.

He fingered his chin, then swallowed. “Do you think that the bandits attacked because they thought we were both women, and maybe I was an old woman?”

“That would make sense. Unfortunately.” Ayrlyn looked at the road ahead. “There are a lot of stereotypes in this culture, more than you’d expect to find, and I don’t know why.”

“Don’t most low-tech cultures have stereotypes?”

“Not this many.” Ayrlyn shook her head. “And it doesn’t fit an open agrarian society, which is pretty much what Lornth is. So we’re missing something, and that bothers me.”

Nylan nodded. Missing anything else bothered him, too. It bothered him a lot, because that meant more problems down the road, and the last thing they needed was another set of problems, especially when he didn’t know how long they’d be traveling or where they’d end up.