Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [123]
The man returned a short, grudging nod. He was middle-aged, careworn, dressed in work clothes due for mending that hadn’t been washed for weeks, an almost welcome whiff of something human in this odorless place. His face was so gray with fatigue as to look blighted while alive. Dag thought, unwillingly, of Sorrel Bluefield again.
“You folks shouldn’t be on this sick ground,” Dag began.
“It’s our ground,” the man returned, his stare distant.
“It’s been poisoned by the blight bogle. It’ll go on poisoning you if you linger on it.”
The man snorted. “I don’t need some Lakewalker corpse-eater to tell me that.”
Dag tried a brief, acknowledging nod. “You can bury your dead here if you like, though I wouldn’t advise it, but you should not camp here at night, leastways.”
“There’s shelter still standing.” The townsman raised his chin and scowled, and added in a tone of warning, “We’ll be guarding this ground tonight. In case you all were thinking of sneaking back.”
What did the fellow imagine? That Dag’s patrol had come around to try to steal the bodies of their dead? Infuriated protests rose in his mind: We would not do such a foul thing. We have plenty of corpses of our own just now, thank you all the same. Farmer bones are of no use to us, ground-ripped bones are no use to us, and as for ground-ripped farmer bones…! Teeth tight, he let nothing escape but a flat, “You do that.”
Perhaps uneasily realizing he’d given offense, the townsman did not apologize, but at least slid sideways: “And how else will we find each other, if any more come back? The bogle cursed us and marched us off all over the place…”
Had he been one of the bewildered mind-slaves? It seemed so. “Did no one know to run for help, when the bogle first came up? To spread a warning?”
“What help?” The man huffed again. “You Lakewalkers on your high horses rode us down. I was there.” His voice fell. “We were all mad with the bogle spells, yes, but…”
“They had to defend—” Dag began, and stopped. The cluster of nervous townsmen had not put down their tool-weapons, nor dispersed back to their forlorn task. He glanced aside at Fawn, watching in concern from atop Grace, and rubbed his aching forehead. He said instead, abruptly, “How about if I get down from this high horse? Will you step away and talk with me?”
A pause, a stare. A nod.
Dag steeled himself to dismount. Varleen, watching closely, slid down and went to Copperhead’s bridle, and Saun dropped from his own mount, unshipped the hickory staff that he’d carted along slotted under his saddle flap, and stepped to Dag’s stirrup. Dag’s leg did not quite turn under him as he landed on it, and he exchanged an almost-smile with Saun as the youth carefully unhanded his arm, both, he thought, thrown back in memory to their night attack on the bandit camp, ages ago. He gripped the staff and turned to the townsman, who was blinking as if he was just now taking in the details of his interrogator’s ragged condition.
Dag pointed to a lone dead tree, blown or fallen down in the field, and the townsman nodded again. As Dag swung the staff and limped toward it, he found Fawn at his left side. Her hand slipped around his arm, not yet in support, but ready if his leg folded again. He wondered if he should chase her back to Grace, spare her what promised to be some grim details. He dismissed his doubts—too late anyway—as they arrived at the thick trunk. She speaks farmer. With that thought, Dag guided Fawn around to sit between them. Both men could see over her head better than she could see around Dag, and…if this fellow’s most recent view of a Lakewalker patroller had been looking up the wrong end of a spear, he could likely use a spacer. We both could.
Dag breathed a little easier as the mob of townsmen went back to