Days of Blood and Fire - Katharine Kerr [33]
“The house be round, Meer, and there does stand this dirt wall, a mound like, all round it. I can see some cows, too, and it looks like they be white. It’s kind of hard to tell from here.” Jahdo shaded his hand with his eyes. “Oh! I do think that’s the city.”
In the strong morning light he could pick out, far across the valley, three gray hills surrounded by what seemed to be stone walls, being as they were too smooth and circular to be cliffs. Spread across the hills were the tiny shapes of whitewashed houses, all of them round, and some larger stone buildings. Over it all hung a faint haze—the smoke of cooking fires, most likely—out of which, at the top of the highest hill, rose a cluster of round stone towers with flat roofs, just like the ones mentioned in the old tales, as dark and grim and ugly as chunks of iron. When Jahdo described this view, Meer sighed, but he said nothing.
“It be not far.” Jahdo swallowed heavily. “We should get there before noon.”
“To find out our fate at last. I can only pray that some kind and decent master buys you, lad. What happens to me is of no moment, for I am a broken man with no house or clan, but you have a life ahead of you.”
“Not much of one.”
Meer stayed silent. Over the past three days, as the squad rode for Cengarn, Jahdo had run out of tears for his lost family, his lost freedom. He felt numb, as if he’d been so ill with a fever for so long that life had receded to some far distance.
“Come on, lads!” Rhodry called out. “Almost home.”
In a clatter and jingle of tack and hooves the squad jogged off downhill. When they came onto the flat, Jahdo got his first omen of what their welcome might be like. Just by the road they saw a young girl, her blond hair hanging in one long pigtail down her back. She was wearing a dirty brown dress, cinched in at her waist with a length of old rope, and carrying a wooden crook, apparently to help her herd the cows. At the sound of the horses’ hooves and the jingle of tack, she turned toward the road and watched as the men rode by. When Rhodry made her a gallant bow from his saddle, she laughed and waved, until she got a look at Meer. At that she turned and ran screaming for the farmstead.
“Stop!” Rhodry called out. “We won’t let him hurt you.”
When the other men laughed, Jahdo remembered how he hated them. Although the girl stopped screaming, she kept running, darting inside the earthwork wall. They could hear a gate slam, and dogs began barking hysterically—an entire pack, from the sound of it.
“Better trot, men,” Rhodry said, grinning. “Let’s get out of here before they set the dogs on us.”
Since they passed the farmstead with no more trouble than the din of angry hounds, Rhodry called the squad to a walk. Apparently he was in no hurry to reach the city, for all that he’d called it home earlier, not on such a lovely day, perhaps, with songbirds warbling and the sun glinting on the stream. As they rode closer, Jahdo found himself thinking of the city as a storm cloud, floating nearer and nearer, rising high and dark on the horizon at first, then looming to fill the view. He couldn’t decide whether he wished that they’d reach the city and get it over with or that Time would slow and they’d never quite arrive.
At length, though, they came to the West Gate, where a sheer rise of cliff, hacked smooth with tools and reinforced at the base with stone blocks, guarded a winding path up to the town. By tipping his head back Jahdo could just see the tops of the towers, rising over a dark gray wall at the brow of