? ? ?
We trudged on through the heat of the day, forcing a path through a dry and airless conifer forest. Hours later the trees released us, scratched, and sticky with both sap and sweat. As luck would have it, we spilled from the forest’s margins directly onto a broad track punctuated with remnants of ancient paving.
“Good.” Snorri nodded, clearing the side ditch with one stride. “I’d thought you lost back there.”
“Lost?” I feigned hurt. “Every prince should know his realm like the back of . . . of . . .” A glimpsed memory of Lisa DeVeer’s back came to me, the pattern of freckles, the knobs of her spine casting shadows in lamplight as she bent to some sweet task. “Of something familiar.”
The road wound up to a plateau where innumerable springs chuckled from the eastern hills along stony beds and the land returned to cultivation. Olive groves, tobacco, cornfields. Here and there a lone farmhouse or collection of stone huts, slate-roofed and huddled together for protection.
Our first encounter was an elderly man driving a still more venerable donkey ahead of him with flicks of his switch. Two huge panniers of what looked to be sticks almost engulfed the beast.
“Horse?” Snorri muttered the suggestion as we approached.
“Please.”
“It’s got four legs. That’s better than two.”
“We’ll find something more sturdy. And not some plough-horse either. Something fitting.”
“And fast,” said Snorri.
The donkey ignored us, and the old fellow paid scarcely more attention, as if he encountered giant Vikings and ragged princes every day. “Ayuh.” And he was past.
Snorri pursed his blistered lips and walked on, until a hundred yards farther down the road something stopped him in his tracks. “That,” he said, looking down, “is the biggest pile of dung I’ve seen in my life.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve seen bigger.” In fact, I’d fallen in bigger, but as this appeared to have dropped from the behind of a single beast I had to agree that it was pretty damned impressive. You could have heaped a score of dinner plates with it if one were so inclined. “It’s big, but I have seen the like before. In fact, it’s quite possible that we’ll soon have something in common.”
“Yes?”
“It’s quite possible, my friend, that we’ll both have had our lives saved by a big pile of shit.” I turned towards the retreating old man. “Hey!” I hollered down the road at his back. “Where’s the circus?”
The ancient didn’t pause but simply extended a bony arm towards an olive-studded ridge to the south.
“Circus?” Snorri asked, still transfixed by the dung pile.
“You’re about to see an elephant, my friend!”
“And this effelant will cure my poisoned hand?” He held the offending article up for inspection, wincing as he did so.
“Best place to get wounds seen to outside a battle hospital! These people juggle axes and burning brands. They swing from trapezes and walk on ropes. There’s not a circus in the Broken Empire that doesn’t have half a dozen people who can stitch wounds and with luck an herbman for other ailments.”
A sidetrack turned from the road a quarter of a mile on and led towards the ridge. It bore evidence of recent traffic, and large traffic at that—the hard-baked ground scarred by wheel ruts, the overhanging trees sporting fresh-broken branches. On cresting the ridge we could see an encampment ahead: three large circles of wagons, a scattering of tents. Not a circus set up to entertain but one on the move and enjoying a rest stop. A dry-stone wall enclosed the field where the travellers had camped. Such walls were common in the region, being as much a place to put the ubiquitous chunks of rock that the soil yielded as they were a means of containing livestock or marking boundaries. A sour-looking grey-haired dwarf sat guarding the three-barred gate at the field’s entrance.
“We already got a strongman.” He eyed Snorri with a short-sighted squint and spat an impressive amount of phlegm into the dust. The dwarf was the kind that resemble common men in the size of their head and hands, but whose torsos have been concertinaed into too small a space, their legs left thin and bandy. He sat on the wall cleaning his fingernails with a knife, and his expression announced him more than happy to stick strangers with it.
“Come now! You’ll offend Sally!” I remonstrated. “If you’ve already got a bearded lady I can scarce believe she’s as comely as this young wench.”
That got the dwarf’s attention. “Well, hello, Sally! Gretcho Marlinki at your service!”
I could feel Snorri looming behind me in the way that suggested my head might get twisted off in short order. The little fellow jumped from the wall, leered up at Snorri, and unhitched the gate.
“In you go. Blue tent inside the circle on the left. Ask for Taproot.”