The Dragon Revenant - Katharine Kerr [122]
“What do you mean?” she whispered.
“You know what I mean. We’ll discuss it later. I’m sorry, my petite partridge, but we’ve got to be on the road. You may curse me as you ride.”
Curse him she did, too, because those bruises turned out to be not some magical illusion but the very real result of her etheric double slamming into her physical body. Staying on horseback was painful in the extreme. After a few miles of riding she had no energy for anything but shifting her weight in the saddle in a vain attempt to ease her aching muscles and sore joints or to prevent the worst of the jolts when her horse made a particularly hard step or stumbled a little. Although both Salamander and Rhodry tried to talk with her, she snarled at them impartially until they gave it up as a bad job. She was barely aware of their surroundings, except to notice in a general way that they were passing through cultivated farmlands, a good sign that the city lay nearby.
After what seemed like weeks of agony, they reached Pastedion about an hour after noon. To her normal eyes the town was lovely, built mostly of pale tan stone and studded with lavish gardens. As they herded their horses down the cobbled streets, they heard a symphony of bells ringing softly in the warm and flower-scented air: the rolling boom of temple bells, and a soprano jingle from the tasseled harnesses of the little gray donkeys that many of the passersby were leading along.
“We should get one of those,” Salamander announced.
“What in the names of all the gods do we need a wretched donkey for?” Jill snarled. “That’s all I want—another blasted four-hoofed worry following me round.”
“My dear turtledove! How nasty you’ve become! If you wouldn’t go flying all over the landscape against your teacher’s wishes, you wouldn’t get bruised like that.”
“If my teacher wouldn’t babble so much, he might live to see the summer come.”
As they walked on, they began to attract a crowd of loiterers, children, and women with market baskets. Every now and then someone would call out, in the friendliest possible way, and tell them that they were weeks too late for the big horse market. In the middle of town they found a large public square, cobbled and sporting two fountains. On one side was the archon’s residence, or so Salamander said, and on the other was the temple of Dalae-oh-contremo. Behind a stucco wall, painted with pictures of what seemed to be gods sailing boats through the night sky, rose the curving roofs of a cluster of longhouses and the tops of a row of ancestor statues. In the center of this wall was a wooden door with a pair of crossed oars over the lintel. Salamander pounded on it with all the strength he could muster.
“I hope they let us in,” Rhodry muttered. “We look like the scum of the earth, truly.”
If the temple turned them down, there would be no sanctuary elsewhere. Jill was suddenly aware of just how filthy and road-stained they were, with Rhodry and Gwin as unshaven and sullen as highwaymen, though Salamander never seemed to grow either beard nor bad temper. Laden with filthy gear their horses were shaggy and muddy, standing all spraddle-legged and head-down from exhaustion. When the door opened she went tense at the sight of a young priest, tall and slender in a spotless dark blue robe, his thick curly hair bound round with a fillet of solid gold.
“Well, well, the tide washes many a strange thing up on shore, does it?” he said in Bardekian, and he was smiling at Salamander as if at long-lost kin. “Here’s a pleasant surprise! Come in, come in! His holiness will be so glad to see you.” Then he hesitated, peering over Salamander’s head at the others. “But I don’t know if we’ve got room for all these horses.”
“Later we’ll take them to a public stables or something,” Salamander said, also in Bardekian. “But let us in right now, Brother Meranno, because if you don’t give us your sanctuary, we’ll all be murdered on the street.”
At that Merrano raised a shout, and other young men in blue robes