"Is that where we're going?" he called out, and wondered if the driver would reply. He hadn't said a word all day; but then, Miel hadn't either.
"Yes."
There was a ditch as well as a stockade. The driver stopped the cart, jumped down and whistled. A gate in the stockade opened; apparently it doubled as a drawbridge. The cart rumbled over it, jarring Miel's knee. The drawbridge went back up again as soon as they were across.
"Hold on, I'll help you down." The driver, now that he looked at him, was a short, stocky man with a fringe of sandy hair round a bald citadel of a head. Miel thanked him-the Ducas always acknowledges help-and leaned on his shoulder as they crossed the yard to one of the barns.
"Live one for you," the bald man called out as they crossed the threshold into the darkness inside. He put Miel down carefully and walked away.
He'd called out to someone, so presumably there was someone there; but it was too dark for Miel to see, so he stayed where he was, leaned up against a wall, like a hoe or a shovel. He was getting used to being property, he decided, and so far it hadn't been so bad. That could change, of course. He decided to resume some responsibility.
"Hello," he called out. "Anybody there?"
"Just a minute, I'll come down." A woman's voice, which made a change. Not a pleasant voice, though. The best you could say for it was that it sounded like it meant what it said. You knew where you were with a voice like that, even if it wasn't anywhere you'd ever want to be.
There was a hayloft, and a ladder. She came down slowly; a tall, red-haired woman in a plain, clean gown, tied at the waist with plaited straw rope. She was much younger than her voice, maybe his own age, a year or two older; nice-looking, too-no, revise that.
The Ducas is trained in good manners from infancy, like a soldier is trained to obey orders. He's almost incapable of inappropriate or boorish behavior. He instinctively knows how to put people at their ease, and he never, ever reacts to physical ugliness or deformity. He keeps a straight face, and he never stares.
Which was just as well. At some point in the last year or so, the woman had lost her left eye. The scar started an inch above the middle of her eyebrow and reached down to the corner of her mouth. If he'd had to give an opinion, Miel would have said it was probably a sword-cut. It hadn't been stitched at the time, and had grown out broad. Her eye socket was empty. In order to learn that aspect of his trade, Miel had been taken when he was twelve years old to see the lepers at Northwood. For the first time, he felt grateful for having had such a thorough education.
"What's the matter with you?" she said.
It took Miel a second to realize what she meant. "My knee," he said. "I got hit there in…" He hesitated. Presumably she was part of the business: doctor, nurse, jailer, all three? "In the fighting," he said. "I don't know if-"
"Hold still." She knelt down and prodded his knee sharply with her index finger. Miel yowled like a cat and nearly fell over. "That seems all right," she said. "The swelling and stiffness won't last long, a few days. You'll have to stay here till it's right again, we can't spare transport to take you back to your outfit. Have you got any money?"
"Excuse me?"
"Have you got any money?"
"Yes. I mean, not very much."
She frowned at him. "How much?"
"Eighteen turners, I think."
"Oh." She sighed. "It's six turners a day for food and shelter, so you'll just have to mend quickly. Not much chance of you working for your keep, is there? What do you do, anyway?"
Now there was a good question. "I'm a falconer," Miel said.
"Are you really?" She looked at him. "Which family?"
"The Ducas."
"Oh, them." She shrugged. "Well, try and keep out of my way." She frowned, creasing and stretching the scar. "What did that to you? One of your birds?"
For a moment he couldn't think what she was talking about. Then he remembered that he had a scar of his own; not as flamboyant as hers, because skillful men with needles had done something about it while there was still time. It had been so long since anybody had appeared to notice it that he'd forgotten it was there.
"A goshawk in a bate," he replied. "I unhooded it too early. My own fault."
She turned away, the set of her shoulders telling him he no longer mattered, and picked up a sack of boots. Then she stopped.
"My brother used to say you should keep them hooded for three days before you start manning them," she said, not turning round.
"Was he a falconer?"
"No." She paused, as though weighing up the issues for an important decision. "You can sew, then."
Of course he couldn't; but a falconer could. "Yes," he said.
"Fine. Something useful you can do. Stay there."
She went out, and came back a little later with a sack full of clothes. Miel had rested his head on it during the cart-ride. From the pocket of her gown she took a thread-bobbin; there was a bone needle stuck into the thread. "Darn the holes as best you can," she said. "Anything that's past repair you can tear up for patches. Don't break the needle."
Bloody hell, Miel thought; then, Well, how hard can it be? "All right," he said.
Apparently, unloading the cart was her job. She came and went with the sacks and the bundled-up weapons, sorting them and stacking them against the walls; no sign of the carter. He tried not to watch her. Instead, he tried desperately to figure out how you were supposed to get the thread to go through the hole in the needle.
As far as he could judge, it was physically impossible. The end, where it had been cut off, was frayed and tufty, not to mention fiendishly hard to see in the poor light, and the hole in the needle was ridiculously small. It was like trying to pull a turnip through a buttonhole. He tried to think; he'd seen women sewing before, you couldn't turn round at home without seeing some woman or other sitting placidly in a corner, her arm moving gracefully up and down. He concentrated, trying to refine a memory. Every so often they'd stop sewing and do something; but they did it quickly and easily-the bobbin would just appear in their hands, they'd run off about a forearm's length of thread, they'd hold the needle steady, and then they'd do something, if only he could remember what it was.
(Come on, he thought; if they could do it, it couldn't be all that hard.)
He tried to squeeze the picture up into his mind. The head would go forward, he remembered that. Something to do with the hand and the mouth. But of course the Ducas is trained not to stare at people, which is another way of saying, trained not to notice things that don't concern him; things and people.
They licked it. That was it; they licked the end of the thread. Presumably, if you got the tufty bit wet, you could sort of mat it down and stop it being all fluffy and hard to manipulate. He tried it, and found he could twist the strands tightly together into a point that would just about go through the needle-hole (there was a word for it, wasn't there? The eye of a needle). He tried that. At first he thought it was going to work. The tip of the point went through easily, and he tried to pinch hold of it with his fingernails as it came out the other side. But clearly it wasn't as simple as that. He'd got most of the strands through, but not all of them, so that when he pulled, the thread started to unravel and jammed. He felt his arms and neck clench with frustration, but he daren't let her see. He tried again, carefully rolling the tip of the thread between his lips; it didn't do to hurry when you were trying something new and complicated. Still no joy; one or two strands stubbornly evaded the eye, like sheep who are too scared to go back into the pen. He was confident that he'd got the technique, but evidently it took both skill and practice to execute. For crying out loud, he thought; human beings are supposed to be resourceful, why can't somebody invent a tool to do this quickly and easily? Or make needles with bigger holes in them, come to that.