With morning there were clouds, and toward noon, thunder. I was getting out of the wild border country then, to where there was an almost continuous string of fields on my right, between the rutted road and the river. Hills of potatoes or glossy green corn stood in rows, and here and there people were out chopping weeds or picking potato bugs.
Then it got really dark. I heard the rushing sound of rain crossing forest, loud enough to be a hailstorm coming, and people took off running for the woods. Forest hung over the road from the off side, and I ducked under cover myself, swung the pack off my shoulders, and took out my oilskin poncho. I'd hardly got my pack back on when the rain came galloping down the road, the big first drops hitting so hard they splashed up dust. There wasn't any hail; it was just raining that hard. Even under the eaves of the woods, I hurried to get my poncho draped over my pack and me. In seconds, looking into the rain was like looking into a waterfall.
I kept on walking then, passing field workers hunched wet and shivering under the trees, which by now weren't keeping much water off at all. After a few minutes, though, it eased to a steady fall. A wagon came along, drawn by two horses past their prime. Its driver stopped and looked down at me from beneath the dripping hood of his own oilskin. He must have seen that I carried a sword; it would have shown, even with the poncho. But it didn't seem to worry him.
"Would ye be carin' to ride?" he asked me.
I told him I would, and climbed to the seat beside him.
"Me name's Shamus Finnigan," he said. The hand he gave me was small but thick and hard.
I shook it. "Mine's Luis Raoul DenUyl," I told him.
Finnigan's Merkan had an accent, a sort of lilt, sounding as if part of the time he spoke another language entirely. Not that that was unusual, of course, but his accent was new to me. Most all districts, during the great shuffling, were settled with folk from a single far place, and mostly they held to their old language, learning Merkan as a second tongue, at least the men, to trade and otherwise traffic with outsiders.
Where I was from though, two different peoples got planted together, plus a few Old Merkans who'd been drifting around in a daze. The Vlaamsch had been the most numerous at home, and the Espanoles next, but the Old Merkans, few though they were, had been kind of depended on. They'd known the country—what to plant and when—that sort of thing. That was more than a hundred years ago, and since then both the Vlaamsch and Espanol languages had died out there. Mostly all they left were names. I could remember my daddy's grandparents using Vlaamsch when they wanted to talk privately, but even so, there was generally enough Merkan mixed in that us kids could sort of guess what they were talking about.
After we'd shaken hands, Finnigan started up his team. Water streamed off their rumps. "Ye're no soldier oi take it," he said, and when I looked surprised, he grinned, misunderstanding. "Yer sword's not all that shows. Oi could see your breeches and brogans below yer raincloak."
Brogans? That must be what they called boots here, or maybe shoes. What surprised me, though, was that anyone would comment, or think to notice, that I wasn't a soldier. "You're right," I told him. "I'm not. Are there many around?"
"Not now. But there were, these weeks past. And trouble enough, too, before they went back to Kings Town. 'Twas the king sent 'em round, pressin' young men into service, ye see." His eyes withdrew, and he licked thin lips, shaking his head. "There's a war off east. And talk of devils..."
He shut up then, as if the devils he'd mentioned were on his mind now and he didn't want to talk about them. His devils had to be the Lizards, I supposed. Pretty soon the rain petered out to spatters. Finally Finnigan asked where I'd spent the night.
"In the woods," I told him. "I don't have enough money to spend it needlessly, and I'd have lost two hours' travel if I'd stayed in the last village. Gorky that was."
"Gorky." The wagoner nodded. Gorky was in Ohio, on the west bank of the Ohio River. "Ah well, ye didn' miss much. Gorky folk aren't friendly to strangers, oi suppose ye noticed, and their whiskey's not fit to drink. They're pagans, too; worship a false god they call Lenin."
The rain was down to occasional spatters, and Finnigan had pushed his hood back. With his face more exposed, his eyes showed green beneath carroty eyebrows, and they looked me over again. "Where might ye be from?" he asked.
"Mizzoo. County called Aarschot, near the Mississip."
"Ah! The Mississip! Oi've heard of it. The Ohio'll take a man there, they say, if he stays on it far enough. Our county here is Connemara. Where might ye be goin'?"
"On east." It was a put-off.
"Lankster?" he persisted.
I shrugged. "Never heard of Lankster. Have you ever wanted to see the ocean?"
Finnigan nodded. "When oi was young. But oi never did anything about it."
More than a few young men got the wanderlust and went to see the Ocean, or the Sweetwater Seas off north. Or back home, maybe the Great Grass Sea to the west, where people lived on horseback, herding cattle or following them, and sometimes were hostile to strangers.
"If ye go to see the Ocean," Finnigan suggested, "steer off south. Well before ye come to Lankster. Down through Jinnia, south and then east. Northeast is truly dangerous; it's full of devil worshipers up there."
The green eyes peered keenly at me as if watching to see how I'd react. I don't think I did, though somewhere along the way, talk of devils would start being more than just talk. As for avoiding northeast—that's where my mission lay, where the cloth map in my pack was leading me.
"I'm new this far east," I told him. "Maybe it's time for me to stop a day or two. See what I can learn. In times like these, a man likes to know the road ahead a bit, and the people."
Finnigan nodded. "God willin'," he said, and crossed himself. I did the same, with feeling, and we made small talk for a while. One of the things he told me was that on east from here it wasn't a good idea to sleep out in the forest. What I didn't tell him was that, for me, inns could be more dangerous than the woods, though I stayed in one now and then for the comfort and to scrub up.
The valley had been getting wider, and the farm fields bigger. The hamlets where the farmers lived were closer together. We passed occasional wagons, and now and then a horseman, or someone traveling afoot. No one was in the fields now, nor would be till after noonmeal, when things had dried out some. The rain quit entirely and the sun came out. We took off our ponchos and let it dry our clothes where water had leaked through or trickled down, or crawled up the legs of our breeches. Things didn't look much different now than back home in Mizzoo, or most other places I'd seen.
After a bit we rounded a corner of woods and I could see a village ahead, almost a town. It must have had a couple-hundred houses. The ridges that walled the valley closed in there, their trees well spaced from a long time of grazing and firewood cutting that had thinned the forest almost to parkland—the way it usually was near so many people. Above the village, the valley really got narrow, with steep sides, and on a hilltop I could see a big fort made of stone, maybe even with cannons on its walls. This had to be a county seat.
"There she is," Finnigan said pointing. "Galway Town. Father Hannery, our priest, knows as much of the world as any man. Many a traveler stops with him for bed and supper, in return for tellin' what they've seen and the news they've heard."
He clucked to the horses and they moved a little livelier, as if oats and a rubdown were practically in sight. Close up, Galway looked and felt different than Aarschot. For one thing, most of the roofs here were thatched; I'd seen other places like that, here and there along the way. And between the vegetable gardens growing around them was something I'd never seen before: waist-high fences of stacked stones, some of them overgrown—looking tied together—with vines.
There were more children than I was used to, too, playing in puddles or around and behind the stone fences, or hoeing or weeding in the gardens. Some were clearly not all right, as if the people here didn't cull their infants as strongly as the Pope commanded. I saw a cleft palate, a stunted arm with a hand that was little more than a wrist with nubs on it, and a clubfoot that would curse its wearer with a limp all her life. Hardly made in the image of God, and any children they got would carry the curse too. It made me wonder about the priest here, or whether these people might be heretics. Or maybe it was just the distance from the Holy See; Galway had to be more than a thousand miles from Norlins Town at the mouth of the Mississip.
The main street was cobbled, though, with river stones, which was more than I could say for most villages I'd passed through. The church was near the upper end—a church of stone blocks, with a taller than usual bell tower. Just below it, two roads branched off, well traveled, going off up two side valleys, one in each direction. A sign in Merkan pointed east to the inn.
Father Hannery was out of town, and just now there was no assistant priest. His wife made it clear that she wasn't free to take in strangers not of the cloth. Certainly not young, sword-carrying strangers, unless they were in sore distress. Finnigan frowned at the door when it closed, and shook his head, muttering something in his own language that didn't sound like flattery.
I could have shown Miz Hannery my medallion of course, but Finnigan would have seen and heard. And anyway she might not know of my Order, or might have heard bad things about it. Father Hannery would have known it of course, and taken me in whether he approved or not. For it's well known among the clergy that we stand high with the Pope.
"Me wife and oi've got only a small cottage," said Finnigan, "and four young in it, or oi'd offer ye a bed. But oi've a barn, if ye're willin' to sleep in the hay and take a bowl of stew with us. Otherwise there's an inn at the upper end of town—you saw the sign—no doubt with travelers that could tell ye more than oi about things in the east."
I didn't have to think twice. "That's a generous offer," I told him, "and I'll take you up on it, with thanks." So I went home with Finnigan, helped him unload the barrels from his wagon into a shed, then rubbed down and curried the two horses while he went in the house to tell his wife about the noonmeal guest he'd brought home with him.
The meal was nourishing enough, and since leaving Aarschot, I'd gotten used to underspiced food. It was like most of Merka didn't know about garlic and peppers.
Finnigan's wife was as red-haired as he was, and the children too. Four was a good-sized brood, and none had been drastically cursed, though the oldest was cross-eyed enough that at home the priest would probably have done away with him at his second winter solstice.
Moira Finnigan didn't speak much Merkan, which wasn't unusual for a woman. But if you didn't mind freckles, she was pretty for someone probably in her thirties. And her teeth still seemed good; apparently their priest did his duty in teaching hygiene, at any rate.
I ate more than a single bowl. The Finnigans urged a second on me, and a third, with a goodly stoup of beer and then another one. Finnigan was a pretty good brewer. Back in Mizzoo I'd have handled it all without blinking, but my stomach had shrunk since I'd left, and afterwards, talking, I got drowsy. When we'd talked ourselves out, I thanked both of them, went back to the barn feeling full as a tick, and fell asleep in the hay.