The Shadow Isle - Katharine Kerr [161]
With the toll paid, the men began to lead the mules across, five at a time—safely, despite Kov’s fears. Kov followed, clutching his staff in one hand and his mule’s halter rope in the other.
On the far side, two white cows grazed, watched over by a naked boy child carrying a long stick. He watched the caravan cross while he scratched his dirty stomach, but he never called out in greeting or alarm. Some hundreds of yards beyond him and his cows stood a huddle of thatched huts, maybe twenty in all, arranged around a stone pillar. Villagers came hurrying out as the last few mules crossed the bridge, and they all struck Kov as being as strange as the toll taker.
None of the villagers came close to the Cerr Cawnen men in height, but they were ordinary-sized men and women, taller than Kov’s own Mountain Folk by a fair bit. They looked oddly similar to one another, with their short brown hair, dark eyes, and bushy eyebrows, though their faces showed differences—a sharp nose here, a pronounced lack of chin there, and the like. They all, men and women both, wore the strange tabardlike garment. The little children, however, ran around naked. Inbreeding, Kov thought, I’ll wager it’s common among these isolated villages.
“Will we be stopping here to trade?” Kov asked Aethel.
“We will, but not for long. They lack much in the way of goods to bargain with. Dried fish, though—it be handy to have on a long journey.”
Kov noticed that some of the villagers carried big baskets of just that commodity. They walked up slowly, gravely, without a smile or a greeting among them. Even the naked children looked solemn; they stood a little way behind their elders and stared at these foreigners while they sucked a dirty finger or scratched themselves. A slightly older girl stood behind one small boy and hunted lice in his hair while he watched the muleteers. Now and then she brought her fingers to her mouth as if she were eating the small game she’d caught.
While Richt led the majority of the mules and muleteers a couple of hundred yards on, mostly to get them out of the way, Aethel and a few of his men unloaded one pair of panniers and laid simple goods out on a blanket—knife blades, needles, net floats, and a few bits of copper jewelry, roughly worked by apprentices in the jewelers’ guild back in Lin Serr.
“I wondered why he wanted those.” Mic strolled over to inspect the trade goods. “They’re cheap work.”
“Good enough to trade for dried fish, I gather,” Kov said.
“Just.” Mic grinned at him. “Barely.”
While the haggling went on, Kov decided to have a look at the village. Since it lacked any sort of wall, he assumed that no one would mind him wandering around. Certainly no one stopped him as he walked among them. Some of the huts sat only a few feet from the riverbank, which made him wonder all over again if those reputed monsters were real. A few doors stood open, and when he glanced inside, he realized that these people led poor lives indeed. A stone hearth, a few blankets, some baskets, a spear or primitive bow leaning against a wall—these appeared to be the sum total of their goods.
What truly interested him, however, was not the huts but the stone pillar. It stood some fifteen feet high, a roughly shaped log of granite weathered into a uniform gray, a totally unprepossessing thing except for one detail. Deeply-carved runes, as big as a man’s head, graced each side. Kov stared, fascinated, then raised his staff to compare. Sure enough, two of the runes on the pillar matched the pair on his staff that Dallandra had been unable to decipher. He walked all the way round the stone, studying the runes, six in all.