Tond, Book One, Chapter 6: Heading south, and they're being followed!

 As we continue the "Tond" story, Rolan and his new friends are in the mountains bordering the south of the Fyorians' lands. They are about to enter the Karjan Imperium, which has always been slightly menacing -- but not as much as what else is out there.

Tond, Book One: The Sons of Tlaen Ras-Erkéltis

Chapter 6

Into the Imperium

 

Tayas dzepalbts Bohrazhulg Hragezhnok ash Vyorannok, tk tayas rek tsakyats bizhulg rak dzn’raenksh maktsrenk. Al pyacham, tk ta’ach fot tsopfraghtl tremachkrtsng chigtl maha, kyeth ta’ach kotlanwawits Kiwarjannok.

“The South Barrier Mountains separate the Imperium from the Fyorian Lands, though these mountains are much less formidable than their counterparts in the north. However, the foreign traveler, crossing them, is still often surprised by the change in the air as he descends into the Karjans’ world.”

From a Karjannic Guide for the Traveler

  

Mountains between Rohandal and the Imperium, Fifth Month, Fyorian year 614

 “So you’ve never been outside of Rohándal,” said Hanroy as he leaned over the smoky campfire to inspect the wild pheasant roasting on the spit.

“No,” answered Rolan. “But I’ve heard a lot about other places, and I saw a little bit of some things, there in the Eye before the grosk attacked. But this is all new to me.” He recalled the last several days, passing through the red sandy landscapes of Rohándal; that arid land (with its edifices of red sandstone and beige adobe) was all that he had known. He reflected briefly that he hadn’t even said goodbye to Xóa Éyuhand, his home town. Now he shivered, huddled in his blanket, and leaned closer to the fire. The air here was cold and surprisingly damp, although the stars shown overhead like a myriad beacons in the dark blue midnight. There was no moon, so there was not enough light to illuminate the mountains, but still they were there, dark looming shadows, brooding shapes of deeper night within the night. Somewhere in the distance an animal howled; what kind of animal, he couldn’t guess.

Presently Hanroy’s wife appeared from out of the gloom and dropped an armful of twigs and bare branches on the fire. She was a slight woman, short and slim, with a round face and darkish hair that pointed to possible part-Karjan ancestry. She sat down next to Hanroy and wrapped her arms around him. “It’s too cold out there getting wood,” she said.

“You didn’t have to get any now anyway, Andri,” said Hanroy, “The fire will last till morning, I think. But thank you. Yes, it is cold. But the pheasant is almost done. Ranti did a good job in catching it. We’ll be warmer when we eat, I’m sure.”

“I’ve never had pheasant,” said Rolan. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen one, either.”

“Well they don’t live in Rohándal!” said Hanroy. “Too much sand. At any rate this will be our last hunted meal for this journey. By this time tomorrow we’ll be nearing the Imperium.”

“I don’t really like hunting,” Rolan commented, “That bird looked so helpless when Ranti caught it. But I think the meat will taste better than this salted preserved stuff we brought with us, and this, this, what’s it called, anyway?” He took out a piece of the crumbly white bread from his pocket, and bit off a tasteless dry corner.

“It’s called Áyushaa. It’s Sherványa for ‘bread for travelling.’”

“Hmmm...” Rolan thought a minute. Funny that he couldn’t remember that; Fyorian words would be nearly the same: Árushái, bread for walking.

Hanroy’s son, Ranti, appeared out of the darkness. “The tent poles are falling down,” he groaned. “We were playing a game of háru-kándis, and suddenly the tent sagged and fell in on Andreya. Scattered all the pieces.” He frowned. “And I was winning, too.”

Hanroy laughed. “Fourth time this trip. Those poles are no good. But who wanted to buy them, Ranti?”

The boy shrugged. “Wasn’t me,” he intoned unconvincingly.

“We all know who it was,” said Hanroy. “Next time see if you can win a good tent from the innkeeper rather than a háru-kándis board. Now go put the poles back up again. Tie them up if necessary. Use some rope. There’s some in my pack. Don’t come to me with your problems. You’re getting old enough to deal with them yourself. Oh, and when you rescue your sister from the collapsing tent, tell her that dinner is ready.”

“Well it’s about time!” said the boy and he vanished into the night again. His voice could still be heard, “I’m starved!”

 

They ate the pheasant (Rolan thought it tasted a little like chicken, though that was a comment he’d heard before) along with some boiled mountain vegetables that Hanroy and Andri had picked during the day; then Hanroy and his family disappeared into their tent (still rather wobbly) and left Rolan wrapped up in his blankets by the fire.

He huddled his arms closer to his body and shivered in the chill air. He would not be able to sleep anyway; there were always those nightmares, serpents and voids and grosks, lurking within the shadows of his mind. He did most of his sleeping during the day, riding on one of Hanroy’s burros, since he was still weak and couldn’t walk far.

So he sat there in the flickering light and darkness, and overhead the stars blazed bright. He glanced heavenward. The Hourglass was beginning to peak out from behind the dark shadow of the nearby mountain, its three central stars were gleaming like jewels. There was a fuzzy patch of light below them, he had seen it before and always wondered what it might be.

His mind began to ramble. He had often wondered what stars were too. Some of the ancient ahíinor lore had said that they were like other suns but much farther away; but how far away were they, and how far away was the sun? And that didn’t explain what that fuzzy light was. Other old lore had said that they were the campfires of the engkéilii, the spirits of light that had been created at the dawn of time; yet if they were campfires, at least some of them should move, not stay in the same place night after night. Well, of course they weren’t in exactly the same place night after night, they did change with the seasons, but any late summer night (like now) would find the Hourglass rising at the same time. And why did they rise and set anyway? And how could one explain shooting stars; neither suns nor campfires could suddenly appear and shoot through the sky...

Oh, there was a shooting star now, there in the north, a glittering spark moving through the heavens. Surely he had seen it out of the corner of his eye, making him think of shooting stars at that instant.

Hmmm, it was a very long shooting star; it did not go out quickly or disappear with a flash of green or red. (It was said that shooting stars fell to earth, but surely if they were far-away suns they would get as bright as the nearby sun before they hit!) This one just stayed there, moving vaguely closer, it seemed, changing neither in brightness nor color. Then abruptly its direction altered, moving back the same way as it had come, though now it was slightly brighter. That was strange. He thought of waking Hanroy to ask what he might think; but Hanroy was snoring quite loudly in the tent (or somebody in there was snoring) so he thought better of it. The star went out the next moment anyway, just after seeming to suddenly change course again and descend rapidly, or maybe it went behind the mountain to his left, he couldn’t tell. He decided to ask Hanroy about it tomorrow anyway.

He sighed, fumbled through the pack Keldar had given him before the departure, sitting there beside him on the ground next to his walking-staff. He pulled out another chunk of áyushaa and bit into it deliberately; maybe he could make the dry pasty stuff taste better by eating enough of it. (Oh well, maybe not. It felt like a sock stuffed in his mouth.) He shoved the rest back into the pack and rummaged around a bit more, pulling out the Karjannic dictionary, and thumbed through the pages, readable by the firelight. Oh, there it was:

 

star: kwehlen, pl.: gwehlen.

 

No entry for ‘shooting star’? Well, Shillayne had said that it wasn’t a very complete dictionary.

His mind began to wander again. Hmmm, that was interesting, he hadn’t noticed it before. Karjannic words were always made plural by changing the first consonant like that. He looked up a word that he knew:

 

tower: hwatsats, pl.: watsats.

 

Yes, that was correct. Karjannic changed the beginning of a word to make a plural, where Fyorian changed the end. But what exactly did the plural mean? Fyorian had several types of plurals. He glanced back up at the sky, wondering whether gwehlen meant two stars, more than two, a constellation, or something else.

A silvery light began to show dimly behind the mountain to his right, interrupting his thoughts. The crescent moon was rising.

There was a shuffling sound near him, to his left. He turned and stared; a shadow loomed there in the darkness. It hadn’t been there before. Some kind of animal; too close to their camp. Two pale pinpricks of light — eyes — were staring back at him. He jumped up to frighten the thing (wondering if this was wise, especially if it were bigger than him) and it didn’t move. The eyes seemed to follow him, though. The shuffling noise came again, along with a hiss of breath, and now there was a pungent, sweaty odor in the air. He cried out and pulled his four-pointed star amulet out of his pocket; he used it to send the glowball leaping out of his pack and into the air, gleaming and flashing. The eyes were lidded, and the creature turned and bolted into the bushes. But Rolan stood there, staring after it; certainly it couldn’t be what he had seen! A blobby body with four birdlike legs and a pointed head… a long crossed bird’s beak… elongated floppy ears like a long-eared dog… and arms like withered branches sticking out of the sides of shapeless body. There had been something metallic about it too, various parts of it had gleamed in the glowball’s light, particularly the pointed thing on its head...

Hanroy scrambled out of the tent a second later. “What’s happening? I heard you yell...”

“Gruntag, I think,” said Rolan. “Something weird, anyway...”

“Gruntag? Here? Are you sure it wasn’t a bear?”

“No bear looks like that, I don’t think. It looked like odd parts, all put together... Look, there’s its trail.”

Hanroy went over to inspect. “Hmmm. Bird’s tracks. Four of them. And dragging a bare tail. It goes over there into the bushes. I can’t see it after that. Certainly not a bear. That’s good, anyway. Bears can be dangerous. Nobody really knows about gruntags.”

“It wasn’t friendly.”

“...And what’s a gruntag doing here, so far from Borrogg? Oh, Rolan, look, there’s a shooting star.”

A small light had appeared in the sky near them, and was rapidly diminishing into the north.

Rolan stared at Hanroy with his mouth open. “Hanroy, There was another shooting star, a very long one, just before I saw the gruntag...”

“Flyfire. It had to have been a flyfire,” said Hanroy. “Somehow one of those gruntags must have found one and knew how to use it.” Rolan knew that a flyfire was one of the Ancients’ most powerful ren-yam mechanas; a crystal that makes a fire like the Eye, except it can fly. Honroy was continuing, “I’ve been told flyfires are very dangerous to use too. At any rate, the gruntag won’t be back. The flyfire mechana can only be used once. Or twice at the very most.”

 

Neither of them slept for the remainder of the night; Rolan was too nervous (even if Hanroy’s analysis was correct, why would a gruntag, after finding a flyfire mechana, decide to come here to these mountains?) and Hanroy, once aroused from a deep sleep, could not easily drift back into the world of dreams. So they stayed up by the fire, talking and drinking an herb tea that Andri had bought just before they had left the town (Hanroy said it was very good, though Rolan thought it tasted musty) and Rolan tried a couple of times to make his áyushaa bread taste better. Hopeless. No more spooky creatures appeared, though, and Rolan began to wonder if perhaps he had dreamed it himself.

The moon was high in the sky when a rosy light began to appear in the east and almost at once, as if in response to the light, a chorus of birdsong erupted around them. The mountains took on greenish and bluish hues, and now they could be seen as the towering monoliths of tree-studded rock that they were. There was the sudden burst of glorious light as the sun itself appeared out of a fogbank in the distance, and now the mountains were grey and green and brown, magnificent enormous half-alive fingers of rock thrust into the sky, trying to reach the very stars (which were growing dim).

One of the two burros hee-hawed, and Hanroy went over to it, patted it on the nose and gave it a piece of áyushaa bread. It hee-hawed again and turned away, then nibbled at some grass at its feet.

Rolan laughed. “I think I might prefer grass to that stuff too.”

“You’d be surprised,” replied Hanroy. “Áyushaa can be delicious when you’re on a journey and can’t find anything else to eat.”

At that moment there was the sound of movement in the tent, and then a spate of curses from one of the two children and suddenly the whole tent collapsed into a jumbled chaos of fabric and sticks. There were moving lumps under it, though, and one of the lumps suddenly crawled out from beneath. It was Andri, who glared at Hanroy. “Tonight we’re finding an inn,” she said, and helped the other two lumps to escape from underneath.

 

They rolled up the hopeless tent, stuffed it into its sack, put everything else of use back in their packs; Hanroy burried the bones from the pheasant, poured some water on the fire and after it was out, he scattered the coals and burried them too. They draped their packs over the burros and, with Hanroy leading, proceeded onwards, after Rolan took one last look at the strange prints left by the night visitor. The prints were real, definitely; he had not dreamed it.

The road (if it could really be called a road, it was really just a grassy lane of varying thickness, full of rocks and muddly places) began to slope noticeably downward, and the mountains themselves appeared to become first taller, and then diminish as well. Rolan felt quite well at first and so he walked with the others; and the downward slope made him feel like he wanted to run. This was a pleasant part of the journey, and they told jokes and laughed and watched the scenery unfold. But later Rolan began to feel dizzy again, and his lungs ached; the air was becoming oppressively hot and damp. He took his usual seat on the larger of the two burros and slowly faded into a vague shadowy dream in which the ground was crawling with serpents, and strange fishlike creatures flew overhead, blotting out a weak and sickly sun with their fin/wings. The gruntag from the night before leapt up from out of the rocks underfoot, and then it was the grosk, and it bore down on him in a cold metallic fury. He jerked awake, found that he was sweating, and its took him several minutes to calm himself.

Hanroy had stopped them, and now the surroundings were utterly different. The gray and brown of the mountains was behind them; the view was nothing but green. Rolan forgot his nightmare. They were looking across a wide expanse of delicate green that sloped away downwards into an endless rolling plain of darker and lighter greens and white wispy clouds. It stretched away like a vast carpet, disappearing near the horizon into mists. Here and there in the soft expanse were clearings, and from the center of some of the clearings, stone towers stabbed at the sky like narrow grey and white spikes. Through the center of the wide view threaded a meandering ribbon of blue and gray, a river, and there were innumerable small crafts upon its glistening surface. In the far distance to their left was a flat sheet of dark blue, stretching into the distance to merge with the blue and purple and misty horizon. Five snow-capped mountains thrust upwards as if from its center, white and gray and resplendent in the glow and shimmer of the afternoon. Near those mountains, black dots hung in the air, tiny and remote; yet Rolan knew that they were probably Floaters, and would be at least the size of small houses if he could get near them. Strange smells wafted by on the slight wind; unidentifiable smells; Rolan described them later as “spicy, flowery, wild green kinds of smells”, and equally strange, unidentifiable sounds reached their ears, much too faint to really be heard, but touching their ears with a sense of presence.

“The Imperium,” said Hanroy. “The River Cheihar, mightiest of the rivers of Tond. The Great Lake Tsenwakh. The Five Mountains of Ond. The Hwatsats towers. This is the view from Mount Shulg. The most glorious view in all of Tond, some say. And the Imperium itself is as beautiful and perilous as any place. The Karjans say Teshdzart tk chohejpfennok chokajkachnok; It is your choice whether our lands are paradise or hell.”

He sat down on a boulder near the side of the road. “We’ll rest here a few minutes. Enjoy the view. Once we’re down there, you can’t see very far.”

Ranti and Andreya took the opportunity of the rest to get out the háru-kándis game-board and set up the pieces. This took a long time, and Andreya couldn’t find her high-warrior piece; by the time she had found it and they were ready to start playing, Hanroy told them to put it away again because it was time to start down. “We’ll have to hurry to make Dzokra-Krtsng by sundown,” he said. Ranti frowned at him and Andreya grudgingly picked up the pieces.

Hanroy made a comment to Rolan, “Beware of the air when we start down. You’re not completely well. The air in the Imperium is different from the air in Rohándal. We can feel a little of it already. It may make you well. Or it may make you a lot sicker. Now, is everybody ready?” And they proceeded onward.

The road began by going straight down the slope into that green expanse, but soon the hill became steep and the road began to turn back and forth on itself in complicated switchbacks. At the same time it became noticeably wider; soon they could all ride and walk side by side. There were human and animal footprints in the dirt, footprints covering and obliterating one another; but still they met no one. The lichen-covered rocks and scraggly bushes of the mountains gave way to grasses and tall leafy plants with red and orange flowers; soon there were tall trees, decorated with moss and vines. Their branches reached up to meet overhead and block out the sun. Rolan was entering a dark green realm of omnipresent vegetation and fragrances and sounds of unseen animals and birds high overhead. The air was still and hot and wet (Rolan could see minute drops of moisture suspended like grains of sand in water). Hanroy was right, that air did have a life of its own; it pushed around them and squeezed against them and made them sweat, and it fought against Rolan as he tried to suck it in through his nostrils to get his next breath. But it was also laden with thick intoxicating smells, sweet and minty and spicy and floral, working to clear his lungs. He coughed; there was no phlegm in his throat for the first time since he had been stung by the grosk. But he was also getting light-headed, and, if he could judge from their staggering steps, so were the others.

“What kind of a place is this?” asked Ranti suddenly. “It’s so hot and quiet. Do the Karjans really live here?”

Hanroy answered. “The Karjans do live here, though not here in the trees. We’ll meet some soon, certainly. You’ll see how they live. Wait a minute...” He motioned for the others to stop. Rolan’s burro hee-hawed and stopped as well. “Just as I said it,” said Hanroy, “Sooner than I thought! Up ahead, Karjan border guards. Everyone, keep quiet, and do as I do. Generally we should not fear them. Just act friendly. I am told also that they often get bored out here by themselves, so we may be able to get by — once they have decided we aren’t dangerous and we’ve given them enough money — if we sing them a song or tell them a story. I brought some Fyorian silver-pieces. But be careful — the laws in the Imperium are not the laws in Rohándal.”

They proceeded. There, on the left side of the road, half hidden in the shadows of three massive gray tree-trunks swirling with vines, were two huts, about as tall as a man and twice that in width, covered with leaves so that they almost appeared to have grown out of the earth. As Rolan drew nearer he could hear strange half-musical clicking sounds coming from one of them; suddenly the sounds stopped and a man jumped from each hut and stood directly in front of them with hands on sword-handles.

“They’re so tall...” was Rolan’s first impression. And then he began to see other details. Those faces. Certainly they were human, but they were not like Fyorian faces. The hair, as black as night, and tied up in strange disorderly tufts. The skin, so unnaturally pale, the eyes so wide set; one man had eyes the color of the sea, the other’s were apparently reddish, not blood-shot, but his irises were distinctly magenta, crystalline. (Like the eyes of the Karjan statue!) Their noses were flat, their lips thin. Their clothes were loose-fitting and made of several layers; glimpses of something white and metalic shown through netlike layers of cloth and silk. Both wore complicated arrays of metallic necklaces hung with strange amulets and jewels; the man with the red eyes also had a bracelet on each wrist, carved with foliage and the strange squiggly marks of Karjannic writing. Both wore belts made of segments of interlocking metal, fastened with a bronze buckle like a small shield in size, bearing an inscription in, again, the Karjan Imperial writing. And fastened to the side of each belt was a long scabbard, elaborately carved with leaf patterns; from each scabbard protruded the handle of a sword. They had their many-ringed hands on those handles, and they did not move.

Hanroy went forward to meet them. “Krichpfangsh authka,” he intoned, and bowed low, almost to the ground, at the same time thumping his chest with his right fist. He stood, extended his arm, and opened his hand, palm upwards.

“Krichpfangmosh lawa,” said both Karjans, and they repeated Hanroy’s gesture. Then the man with the red eyes stepped forward. “Fyorian?” he asked. “Ahíinor?”

Hanroy answered with some more halting Karjannic words. The Karjans looked at Rolan and Andri and Ranti and Andreya in turn. Then suddenly both began laughing, and released their sword-handles.

Hanroy turned back to Rolan. “I told them that we were arguing about the best way to Kaii. I said one way. Andri said another. You said another. Ranti and Andreya each said another. So we decided to go to the Emb Lands instead. So here we are.”

He turned back to the man with the red eyes, said another few faltering words. The Karjan laughed again, then went back into the hut, came out a second later holding a curious contraption made of bamboo rods tied onto a wooden frame. Rolan wondered what it was for, but the Karjan sat on the ground, put it in his lap and began to thump the bamboo rods with metal sticks, two in each hand, making the musical clicking tones that they had heard a minute earlier. Karjan music. Andreya noticed its deep rhythmic feel, and began to do a little Fyorian dance. The Karjan smiled and continued his repeating, circular melody — no, not exactly repeating, Rolan noticed; it changed a few notes every time around so that after a few repeats it was quite different than it had started. There was something odd about those notes, too; at first he thought that they were out of tune, and he decided that an instrument made of bamboo rods would be hard to tune; but then he realized that it had a range of at least two and a half octaves, and both octaves were out of tune in exactly the same way so that they matched each other.

The song came to an end, right on the seemingly strongest beat. Andreya tried to stop her dance at the same time but didn’t know exactly when that time was, and it caught her with one foot in the air and she tumbled over sideways, laughing. Hanroy and Andri and Ranti laughed and applauded while Rolan tried to get a closer look at the instrument; but the Karjan stood up and quickly replaced it in his hut.

“You... like... my song?” he asked in faltering Fyorian (about as roughly as Hanroy spoke Karjannic, Rolan guessed.) “That... good. I write it... yester... no, last week. I... not name it yet.”

“I thought it was good!” blurted out Andreya, picking herself up.

“You dance good... too,” said the Karjan. “I like.. end... best.”

And they all laughed, including the other Karjan (the one with the blue eyes), who had remained aloof the whole time. But then he approached them, and his look was suddenly serious.

“So you go to Emb Lands,” he said. His Fyorian grammar was more fluent than the other’s, but his accent was less so. “And you have to pass through our Imperium. Then you need to pay us.”

Hanroy reached in a pocket of his cloak and pulled out four silver pieces, handed two to each man, then bowed again.

The man with the red eyes smiled, the other made no expression but continued. “You go straight on this road. You travel all day, and by sundown you come to a town. In Karjan language we call it Dzokra Krtsng.” (Here was Rolan’s first chance to hear a Karjan pronounce a Karjannic name. It sounded quite splendid, with a deep resonance and powerfully rolling R’s.) “I can’t say meaning in Fyorian language, too difficult. But there you find three inns. Any are good for family. And there you ask directions to go farther south. Great River Cheihar difficult to cross. You need ferry.”

“Thank you. Lachpfangsh authka,” said Hanroy, bowing in the same manner as twice before.

“Lachpfangmosh lawa,” both Karjans replied, and bowed again in the same way. Then they went to the sides of the road to let them pass. Rolan had an idea and suddenly fumbled through his pack (tied to the burro’s side) and pulled out the Karjannic dictionary, looked up a word.

“Lachpfangsh tsrakah.” He tried to say “Thank you for your song” to the red-eyed Karjan. The man laughed again, but Rolan was not sure if he had understood.

They proceeded down the road between the Karjans and then into the endless vegetation and either sides, and Rolan was amazed at how quickly the two guards and their huts became invisible in the greenery. “You should have said ‘Lachpfangshmyo’, I think,” Honroy mentioned.

 

They went straight for another several hours. The road continued in the same direction, and they could see it stretching before them like a gray ribbon through the ever-present (and getting oppressive) vegetation on either side. The air got progressively thicker and damper, until it began to affect their vision; everything seemed to shimmer and grow fuzzy. Their foreheads were sweaty and drips of perspiration ran down, stinging their eyes and making it even harder to see. Rolan tried to alleviate his discomfort by listening to the sounds overhead, listening to all of the sounds as though they were all one vast piece of music; the atmosphere was full of the songs and chatterings of birds and animals; singing birds, chirping birds, laughing birds, birds that made crying and chuckling sounds. There was a song like a mourning bird of Rohándal but higher and faster, there was a rough croak of a crow, but lower, and there was the chipi-chipi-chirrripi-chipi of some unknown species. And there were other sounds too, strange high trills that lasted until they faded into the distance, and deep calls echoing in the unseen vastness of the forest around them. Rolan could not guess what they were.

After a while the sounds became monotonous and he began to pay attention to the plants instead; huge green canopies high overhead, delicate hanging vines and bearded mosses, red-veined leaves that opened to the shifting sunlight and sparkled with moisture. But those diamond-drops reminded him of his wet discomfort, and once again he felt himself sweating and sticking to his clothes.

Then abruptly the air was cooler and there was a breeze, even a cool breeze, and in a few more steps there was a blast of bright sunlight and the trees were behind them. They had stepped out into a clearing; a farmland, Rolan saw as his eyes adjusted to the brightness. Stretching around them were rectangular plots of land, each with one or two different types of vegetables growing, and divided from the others by small wooden fences. Trickling creeks ran through and between the fields, and some plots were completely submerged under standing water.

People were working in the fields; tall pale-skinned dark-haired Karjans, wearing wide hats for protection from the sun, busy picking leaves from some of the plants, and in other places turning the soil with heavy plows pulled by oxen and another large-horned type of animal Rolan couldn’t name. As Rolan and the others passed, each of the farmers stopped and waved, some smiling and saying a friendly “Krichpfangsh lawa!”, obviously welcoming this distraction from their toil. Rolan smiled and waved back, sometimes answering in Fyorian and sometimes repeating the Karjannic greeting. He also saw the farmed plants as they passed, but most were strange fruit-bearing shrubs and vines that he couldn’t name; although he recognized rice plants protruding from the standing water in some of the flooded fields.

The road was still going straight toward the buildings of the town. Such odd buildings, was Rolan’s first impression. Made of wood, boards and straight beams, with open walls in some places (he could view in and see that the floors were covered with mats of various types and colors). There was none of the Fyorian adobe, and all of the buildings had perfectly flat square or rectangular sides; larger buildings were simply made larger by adding more rooms, more square or rectangular sections. Some of the wood was painted or carved in patterns that seemed to follow the grains of the wood itself and was probably not meant to represent anything. And then he saw, and wondered why he hadn’t noticed it at the very first (probably since he was riding and looking down from a little higher than he would have been if he were walking) — all of the buildings were on wooden stilts, raised a little over a foot off of the ground. It must rain a lot in the Imperium, he realized; maybe that was why the air was so damp.

They made for the largest building on the left, which Hanroy guesssed was the inn. He was right, and the innkeeper was a Fyorian, round and jolly like Shillayne’s father (Rolan realized with a twinge that he really missed Shillayne). He showed them to their rooms (Rolan got a large one all to himself, square and built of right angles in the Karjan manner and with a large bed in the corner, on legs, to keep it off of the mat on the floor, which was green and smelled like freshly cut grass). After they had put down their belongings, the innkeeper showed them that out in the back were two large holes dug in the ground and coated with some kind of hard stone and filled with water. Rolan recognized the purpose of this (although he had never seen a bath quite like this) and immediately dove into one, laughing and splashing about.

“Actually you’re supposed to wait until we’re gone, and take your clothes off before you dive in,” said the innkeeper. “These two are for men, and there are two more over there, behind that fence, for the women. And why are there two for each? I think you’ve found out, Mr. Ras-Erkéltis; that one is soapy.”

 

To read more of this book (or to find out how they got into this situation): Tond, Book One: The Sons of Tlaen Ras-Erkéltis: Scribner, Steven E.: 9781520157573: Amazon.com: Books