‘That’s what she said.’
Suddenly Pryn turned around and looked off at her own winged mount swaying at its tree. ‘Brainless, stupid beast! I thought I’d fly you away from home to excitement and adventure — or at least to a ledge from which I could return. But here — ’ she turned back to Norema — ‘she has landed in this silly clearing and can’t take off again!’
‘You want to leave home for good,’ Norema said seriously.
‘Yes,’ Pryn said. ‘And don’t tell me not to!’
‘You aren’t afraid of slavers?’
Pryn shook her head. ‘You’re traveling alone, and you’re still a free woman.’
‘True,’ Norema said. ‘And I intend to stay one.’ She considered a moment. ‘Let me give you two more gifts — besides my tale.’
Pryn looked perplexed. She hadn’t thought much of the story. It had stopped and started, leaving her anxious and expectant precisely where she had wanted answers and explanations.
‘You can be frightened,’ Norema said. ‘But don’t be terrified. That’s first.’
‘I’m not terrified,’ Pryn said.
‘I know,’ Norema said. ‘But that’s the way with advice. The part you can accept is the part you always already know.’
‘I’m not afraid either,’ Pryn said. Then she frowned again. ‘No, I am afraid. But it doesn’t matter, because I made my mind up to it a long time ago.’
‘Good.’ Norema smiled. ‘I wasn’t going to argue. One of my gifts, then, is a packet of food; that I’ll give you out of my provisions cart. The other is some geographical information about the real world over which you’ve just so cavalierly flown — both are things one cannot trust tales to provide. Oh, yes, and another piece of advice: Untie your dragon and let her wander into the mountains where she belongs. Left to herself, she’ll find the ledges she needs, as you must too — but you can’t be tied down with dragons that won’t fly where you want to go, no matter how much fun the notion of flight. Through those trees, maybe a hundred yards on, you’ll find the junction of two roads, giving you a choice of four directions. The one going — ’ Norema glanced at the sun — ‘toward the sunset will take you, with three days’ walk, to a white desert with dangerous tribes who sew copper wire up the rims of their ears. Take the road leading in the opposite direction, down between the mountain hills, and with four days’ walk you’ll reach the coast and a brave village of rough-handed men and women who live from the sea. Take the road running to your right as you approach the crossroads, and you’ll be back at the High Hold of fabled Ellamon in no more than three hours. Take the path that runs away from the junction to your left, and seven days’ hike will finally bring you to the grand port of Kolhari, capital city of all Nevèrÿon — like in my story.’ Norema smiled. (That so famous city had not played much of a part in the tale, Pryn thought; though certainly she knew enough of Kolhari by other reports.) ‘Along with my tale, I think my gifts should stand a young woman like you, off to see the world, in good stead.’
‘Thank you,’ Pryn said, because her aunt, for all her bitterness, had taught her to be polite.
Some hours later, when Pryn was several miles along her chosen route, she stopped a minute. Of all the day’s marvels it was neither her own flight, nor the tale of the dragon and the sunken city, nor the food pack tied on her back — with twisted vines — which held her thoughts. She picked up a stick from the highway’s shoulder and scratched her name in its dust, new capital and eliding mark. She put the stick down. Again she read over her name, which seemed so new and wondrous and right.
Then she walked on.
An hour later a dead branch, blown out on the road by a mountain gust, obscured it beyond reading.
2. Of Roads, Real Cities, Streets, and Strangers
A city sidewalk by itself is nothing. It is an abstraction. It means something only in conjunction with the buildings and other uses that border it, or border other sidewalks very near it…if a city’s streets are safe from barbarism and fear, the city is thereby tolerably safe from barbarism and fear…But sidewalks and those who use them are not passive beneficiaries of safety or helpless victims of danger. Sidewalks, their bordering uses, and their users, are active participants in the drama of civilization versus barbarism in cities. To keep the city safe is a fundamental task of a city’s streets and sidewalks.
This task is totally unlike any service that sidewalks and streets in little towns are called upon to do. Great cities are not like towns, only larger. They are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities, by definition, are full of strangers.
THIS IS HOW, AFTER seven nights’ unchanging stars, eclipsed only by passing clouds or moon glare, Pryn came to be standing on a roadway atop a hill one dark dawn, looking down at port Kolhari.
Fog lay on the city, obscuring detail. But that hulking edifice to the west had to be the High Court of Eagles. East, regular roofs suggested some wide street between — Black Avenue, perhaps, or even New Pavé. She’d heard travelers in the Ellamon market talk of those wonder-ways —
The sea!
Pryn had been looking at the city itself at least that long before the foggy vastness beyond it closed with its right name. It had to be the sea! A mountain girl, she’d never seen so much water — indeed, so much of anything before! Mists lay here and there on gray-flecked black. Obscuring much of the watery horizon, mists became one with gray sky. Well, it was quite as impressive as she’d heard it was. At the shore, like pine needles sticking up through the fog, she saw what must be ships’ masts along the famous Kolhari waterfront. Nearer, roofs of sizable houses lay apart from one another — perhaps wealthy merchants’ homes in the suburb of Sallese or maybe mansions of hereditary nobles in Neveryóna. My fortune, Pryn thought, may hide down there. A memory of her great-aunt returned, in which the old woman wrung her hands. ‘If your father could only see you…’
When Pryn was a baby, her father had died in the army somewhere to the south — of a sudden peacetime fever outbreak rather than wartime wounds. Her mother, when she visited from where she now lived, several towns away, had several times told Pryn the story of the soldier (in her mother’s words) “as black as your father” who had come through Ellamon with the news, much as Pryn’s aunt told the story of the long-dead barbarian. Still, as a child, Pryn had kept some faint fancy of finding that vanished phantom parent.
Down there?
She answered her own dark morning question, as she had answered it many times before, now on a solitary dawn walk through sunny mountain pines, now standing at evening on some shaly scarp, now at a bright trout pool spilling through noon between high, hot rocks: No. (One thing about riding dragons, Pryn reflected; such childish expectations could be, in the momentary wonder of flight, forgotten — not just put aside by active effort.) Her father was dead.
Pryn? That was her own name; and her mother’s — not her father’s gift. Her mother and father had not been overly married before her mother had become pregnant and her father, upon finding out, had gone off to fight for the Empress. “Not overly married” meant that certain bonding rituals had been publicly observed between them, but certain others that would make those early ones permanent had not. Her mother’s abandonment had occurred within a margin of respectability — inconvenient as it was. But then, the army had not been that convenient for her father, either; its stringencies had apparently given him enough appreciation of the domestic life he’d left so that on his death pallet he’d asked a dusky friend to return his sword, shield, and sundry effects to Ellamon — which Pryn’s mother had immediately sold, giving the money to the aunt to maintain her baby while she went to seek work in another town. Growing up with that wise woman and her other cousins had not been so bad.