“Please, sirs! If you could only spare a little—”
One threw something at him—it struck him and fell at his feet, a round, light something that he realized was a chunk of bread.
“Away, then!” the man cried. “Ye got what ye wanted, now take yerself away from us! Go back where ye belong!”
He picked up the bread, wary of more things thrown. “Thank you,” he said faintly, and bowed. Mauryl would call it rude, not to give them thank you.
“Ye give us no filthy thanks,” they said. “Ye got what ye asked. Now begone, away! Leave us be, ye cursed thing, in the name of the good gods and the righteous!”
“I mean no harm,” he protested. But one bent and picked up a stick of wood and threatened to throw it, too. “Get on wi’ ye!”
The wood flew. He left the firelight. Something crashed after him through the brush and hit him in the back, painfully.
He began to run, fearing they were chasing him, fended branches with his elbow, the bread in the other hand, as branches tore his hair and his face, snagged and broke against his shirt and trousers. He dodged through the trees upslope and down again the way he had come, and finding the Road, he set out running and running on the uneven stones until he caught a stitch in his side and his knees were shaking under him.
At least, he thought, looking back, the men had not chased him. He walked a while, with his knees still shaky and weak. A spot on his back hurt where they had hit him—the stick of wood, he decided, and was glad it had not been one of their knives. His mouth was dry, and now that he had bread to eat, between the dryness of his mouth and the lump of distress in his throat, he could scarcely swallow. Still, he was hungry enough that he tore off tiny morsels and forced them down, still walking, only desiring to be far away from the men and their anger as soon as possible.
They had had no cause to throw things at him.
They had had no cause to be afraid of him—unless they took him for a Shadow. He thought they should have been able to see he was not.
They called him Names, like Cursed, and Haunt, and spoke of Hanging, all of which made terrible pictures in his thoughts. They were angry with him for no reason at all, but he supposed that they were afraid, and perhaps having had no experience of Shadows, took him for something as dire and harmful as the worst ones, the noisy, hammering kind.
They might, truly, have thrown the knives. The stick had stung, but the knife might have- Killed him, he thought, with a bite of bread in his mouth. Dead.
Death.
Like the ragged black thing they were burning over the fire, Killed.
That was both Meat, and Dead.
Then he could scarcely swallow the bread at all. He forced down a few more bites and tucked it in his shirt along with his Book, and walked a long, long way before he felt like tearing off more bits of the gritty stuff and eating them to make the pain in his stomach stop.
He reached a point after which he no longer feared the men following.
He kept walking, all the same, because he was certain those men were not what Mauryl had sent him to find, and because, all the same, they had waked important Words in him—Lanfarnesse, and Rangers, and Elwynim, that echoed and kept echoing and would not let him sit down and rest. They feared Shadows, which told him the Shadows did come into this place, and therefore he still had them to fear.
He heard frogs still predicting rain. He listened for Owl’s return, and he had a great deal to tell Owl, who, however sullen, was far friendlier to him than men had shown themselves, and whose presence he felt as a bond to Ynefel itself.
If those had not been polite or proper men, there must be better ones.
Words had shown him Houses, and he had not found that sort of men that lived in Houses, not yet, and certainly not at that fireside. Words had shown him Fields, and this thicket was certainly not that place.
Most of all—the thought of Fields had shown him great Walls, and a keep very like Ynefel.
That was what he looked to find. That was what he suddenly believed he was searching for.
He walked until he could scarcely keep his feet under him, rested and walked on. He smelled nothing more of men and heard nothing more of Owl, but he was looking to find Men of gentler kind, and most of all a Place and a Tower like Ynefel.
With a room and a soft clean bed, and a supper, and most of all a wizard who would know what to do next.
Chapter 8
Morning came as the frogs predicted, with a sprinkling of rain through the leaves, a gray dim dawn, a 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 o 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 t wind.
The birds sang, his clothing dried on his body and his hair began t 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 another hill the trees grew thinner, gave way to brush, and then—a vision fraught with Words—to broad Meadows, where the Road ran, most overgrown with grass. The sky was dotted with gray-bottomed clouds that occasionally obscured the sun and sent patterns of shadow walking the smooth hillsides.
He had never seen a meadow. He only knew the Word. Everything I saw was marvelous and new. He walked the Road, picking his way along the grass-chinked stones, listening to new birds, Lark and Linnet, making 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 son thing 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.