It was built up on bamboo stilts to the height of the road a double pace away. The only connection between the two was a tracery of cords anchored to a piling and supporting a bamboo “floor” with spaces wide enough for a foot to slip through between each pair of rods. The hut walls were matting, and the roof was thatch.
In the marsh nearby was a circle of cut bamboo as big around as the hut itself. Cashel had thought of a fish weir when he’d seen one by the first place they’d passed, and that was almost what it was. A shoal of carp came to the surface mouth first when he stopped, hoping that the presence of humans meant somebody was about to throw them a handful of grain.
You couldn’t have chickens in a marsh like this: their feet would rot, and they’d die. But you could raise fish and train them to come to be slaughtered at need the same way farmwives back in the borough scattered grain to the hens at the dooryard.
“Hello the house!” Cashel called. Tilphosa waited beside him, balancing on one leg like a stork so she could rub the other foot some more. “We’re travellers who need a bite of food. We’ve got money to pay, but if you’d rather—”
Money wasn’t much used between local people in the borough. Many a time Cashel had taken his day’s pay in fresh bread or shearings that his sister would turn into finished cloth.
“—we’d be happy to work for it instead.”
“Go away!” screamed a voice. It was probably female and certainly angry. “We don’t have any work for you. Or food either!”
“Look, we need food!” Cashel said, changing tack from the dignified honesty he’d used before. That had gotten them nowhere in the past, and it obviously wasn’t going to work here either. “I’ll not harm anyone who treats me decent, but I won’t be kicked around like a stray dog!”
He reached down and plucked one of the ropes that acted as bridge stringers; it moaned in response. Now that he’d touched it, he wondered whether the flimsy structure would even take his weight. The cords were of some unfamiliar material, maybe bamboo fibers twisted together.
“Look, you can’t come in here!” the voice said. “Soong’s just up ahead, and there’s inns there. They’ll feed you and take your money besides.”
“Let’s go on, Cashel,” Tilphosa whispered. “I don’t want a fight.”
Cashel sighed and turned to the road again. He let the girl take his left arm; for support, he supposed, but anyway he let her take it.
“There wasn’t going to be a fight,” he muttered as they strode down the road at a faster pace than usual. Anger was prodding him. “All they had to do was cut the ropes from their side and then drop a storage jar on my head while I was trying to swim in mud.”
He cleared his throat, and added, “Besides, I guess it’s their house. If they don’t want visitors, well, there’s plenty people in the borough who’d act just the same.”
The mist pooled and streaked. Sometimes it gave a clear view for as much as a bowshot, then went so solid that Cashel put his staff out to bump along the side of the causeway. He didn’t suppose they’d drown if they fell in, but he’d been covered with muck often enough to know he didn’t like the experience.
“I hear a river,” Cashel said. “Soong’s on a river, the first fellow said when he ordered us away.”
Water has its own range of sounds, from the plink of drops falling from the eaves after a rain to the roar of a storm-driven surf. This was a sighing and slapping, slow but powerful. The evening air didn’t taste of salt.
A breeze, the first they’d had since midday, swept a channel in the fog. Cashel had taken the glimmers ahead for will-o’-the-wisps. Now they came into focus as lanterns, bright flames haloed by the damp air. Buildings stood out as darker shadows, and sometimes a human figure silhouetted itself against lamplight.
“The city doesn’t have walls,” Tilphosa noted. “That’s a good sign, don’t you think?”
Cashel blinked. He hadn’t thought about it at all, to tell the truth; he hadn’t grown up with fortifications. Since Cashel left Barca’s Hamlet he’d lived in places with walls to keep out enemies, but that wasn’t a part of the city he cared much about.
Sharina said mostly those walls dated from the very end of the Old Kingdom. She also said that they hadn’t kept chaos from destroying the places they were meant to protect.
“I guess it’s good,” he said. “Because it means that people here are peaceful, you think?”
“Yes, even if they aren’t very friendly to strangers,” Tilphosa said. She hugged his arm close, then separated with only the tips of her fingers on Cashel’s elbow to keep contact.
The road going down toward Soong wasn’t steep, but it had more of a slope than they’d seen before all day. The last two furlongs into the city were covered with squared tree trunks, not really paving but better than mud. Some of the trunks had tilted on their bedding, one end higher and the other lower than the pair before and beyond. Once Cashel’s weight squelched a raised trunk down like a sluggish teeter-totter, but there was no harm in that beyond his heart jumping in surprise.
A gust cleared the air, giving them a glimpse of a broad river which flowed so slowly that starlight could glimmer on its surface. There were quays along the near bank. On an island connected by a short causeway stood a temple whose short fat columns supported a tiled roof. Except for the façade, the building was as simple and unadorned as a stone barn.
Cashel looked at the sky; the constellations were unfamiliar. That was what he’d expected, but in his heart there’d been hope that he’d have at least the Byre or the seven blue stars of the Axletree to remind him of nights spent pasturing sheep.
They entered the city. The streets were muddy, but there were board sidewalks for pedestrians. A hunched man passed them, driving out of town in a wagon pulled by a single mule. The contents of the wagon bed rattled under a coarse mat.
“Excuse me, sir!” Cashel called. The man ignored him, except perhaps for touching the mule’s ear with his long bamboo switch.
“It’s quite a big city, isn’t it?” Tilphosa said. She was trying to sound cheerful, but Cashel noticed that she picked at her tunic in concern to minimize the dirt and damage of the past many days. She touched the dagger hilt, then put her left hand over it—for concealment, not because she was afraid of being attacked. She felt a weapon was out of place in civilized surroundings.
“Big enough to have shops that sell clothes,” Cashel said. “In the morning we’ll outfit ourselves and…”
He let his voice trail off. His mind had run to the planned end of the sentence, “…see if anybody can give us directions…” The foolishness of those words froze his tongue.
The stars above Soong were new to him. Nobody here would know how to get to Valles. Nobody here had heard of Valles.
“And we’ll decide where we want to go next,” Cashel concluded, but without the animation that he’d started the sentence with. He didn’t see any path to a place he or Tilphosa wanted to be, and he knew those likely wouldn’t be the same places anyway. The only reason he didn’t give up was that, well, he wasn’t the sort of person who gave up.
They were among the houses now, each of two or three stories. The vacant lots showed that the previous building had collapsed or been torn down. They were more substantial than the huts of the surrounding farms, but all were built of timber with shingle or thatched roofs. The temple out in the river was the only stone structure he’d seen.
Some of the sidewalk planks had rotted through; Cashel walked with a careful shuffle, the way he’d have done on a lake whose ice had begun to soften in the spring weather. Folk bustled by, dressed in baggy trousers and hooded capes. They looked sidelong at the strangers, but none of them spoke.