The Magic of Recluce - L. E. Modesitt [64]
The early morning gray-and-white puffs of cloud were darkening and thickening as Gairloch bore me onto the worn but even gray stones leading to the city gate. The walls were scarcely impressive, rising only about twenty cubits. Two squarish towers, each with crenelated parapets too small to be very useful, framed the gate. Graying and iron-bound timbers comprised the city gate itself, a gate that waited in a recess in the walls behind the towers. A stone bridge spanned the space between the towers. When closed, the gate sat in a stone groove and was backed with stone on all sides, making it difficult, if not impossible, to batter down. But any attacker would have gone for a less defended point on the low walls in any case.
Set toward the city from the walls was a stone hut, and outside the hut waited a pair of guards. As I watched, a small cart, pulled by a swaybacked horse that could have been a mate to the one I had seen at Felshar’s, rocked over the stone gate groove and onto the pavement by the guard hut.
The rear guard waved the cart, driven by a woman with straggly hair and a hooked nose, toward the other side of the roadway. “Over there. Don’t take the whole road!”
Whstt-chuck. The long reins clacked, and the cart lurched slightly away from us.
“Halt!”
The other guard stopped looking bored as he took in my dark cloak and the pony.
“Where’d you get that horse, boy?”
“Felshar’s, officer.” There was no sense in being nasty to the man. Besides, he was bigger than me, and, if paunchy, probably could use the sword that one hand rested upon.
“Any way to prove that?”
I shrugged. “I have a bill of sale with Felshar’s chop.” Then I touched the staff, which was faintly warm to my ungloved fingertips. “And, besides, would I lie about it?”
His eyes moved to the staff, widened like Cerclas’s eyes had widened, then moved to my face.
“You’re young for that…”
“I know. They’ve been telling me that since the spring.” I unfolded the thin parchment from my belt. “If you’d care to look…”
The look on his face—that, and the fury behind his eyes—warned me.
Clang…thwackt…
…whssssttt…
“…Aiiiee…thief!”
Somehow, I had managed to stuff the parchment into my belt and grab the staff from the holder quickly enough to knock aside his sword even before he positioned himself. The second tap—and it was scarcely more than that—was to his cheek, but the brand was instantaneous.
Gairloch didn’t wait for my heels in his flank, but began to trot, then gallop, through the still-open gate. The gate couldn’t be closed, not in the instants Gairloch took me past the second guard and through the gate gap in the wall.
Cloppedy, cloppedy, cloppedy… Gairloch’s hooves rang on the stones, and I dropped the reins and grabbed his mane with my right hand, trying to keep from hitting anyone with the staff, hanging on as we careened down the causeway.
“Look out!”
“Runaway horse!”
“Thief! Traitor!”
A set of peddlers scrambled off the causeway into the mud-filled trench on the right, and Gairloch angled around a slow-moving wagon pulled by a single plodding horse which barely lifted its head. I could have reached out and touched the dusty harness, so close did we pass.
The traffic on the causeway probably saved us from an arrow in the back, but by the time we cleared the causeway where the day’s incoming produce and shoppers all funneled toward Freetown, we were out of range of all but the strongest of crossbows, assuming any were ready and in place on the guard-tower parapets.
The clippedy-clop of Gairloch’s hooves changed to a muted drumming as he carried me along the packed clay of the highway. No stone roads or highways in Freetown, it seemed. We galloped past a crossroads, which carried more traffic than the road we traveled, and kept heading into Candar.
Before too long, I reined in Gairloch, keeping in the middle of the road, which was surprisingly firm considering the continuing rain and dampness of the night