The Spirit Stone - Katharine Kerr [64]
For instance, there was Devaberiel’s attitude to his son. Although he left the actual work to Morwen, such as feeding Evan and cleaning him up afterward, Devaberiel doted on the boy. He told him little stories, sang him little songs, and began teaching him the Westfolk language with every evidence of enjoying the process enormously. Gwairyc had never seen a man treat his son that way before. In fact, he’d never paid much attention to children at all. In his mind they fell under the rubric of women’s work and thus no business of his, either to like or dislike them.
‘Dev seems cursed glad to have an heir,’ Gwairyc remarked to Jennantar one evening.
‘Heir?’ Jennantar said. ‘Not truly. Not as you Deverry folk think of heirs, anyway.’
‘Well, a man needs someone to leave his property to.’
Jennantar laughed, but pleasantly. ‘You’ll understand more once we get out on the grass,’ he said. ‘None of us have property, exactly, not as you’d think of it.’
Gwairyc found he had no comment to make on such a bizarre idea, so he merely smiled.
Gwairyc got his biggest surprise, however, when they reached the trading grounds. He’d been expecting a town of sorts with a seasonal market, just as he’d seen so many times on their journey west, that is, a rural place, and certainly isolated, but a town nonetheless. Instead, they rode free of the forest one sunny day to see a green sea stretching out ahead of them—a sea of grass, rippling with wind-blown waves, and dotted at some distance with a cluster of white tents like ships.
‘Ah, there they are!’ Nevyn rose in his stirrups and pointed at the tents. ‘There’s quite a crowd waiting for our merchant.’
‘That’s it?’ Gwairyc said. ‘That’s the Westfolk town?’
‘They don’t have any towns.’ Nevyn sat back down into his saddle. ‘They don’t farm, either, you see. They wander with the seasons out here with their herds of horses and flocks of sheep. They trade wool, lambs, deerskins and the like to border farmers for some of the things they can’t make themselves, but their real wealth is the horses. Look at Wffyn, come hundreds of miles to acquire a few.’
Gwairyc shook his head in amazement. ‘Wandering around—that’s the strangest life I’ve ever heard of,’ he said at length. ‘What about their king? Does he go with them?’
‘He does, but truly, he’s not much of a king by our standards.’ Nevyn thought for a moment. ‘To tell you the truth, I’ve never even heard his name. I do remember being told they have one, though.’
‘Ye gods, what a cursed lot of savages!’ Gwairyc shook his head again. ‘No wonder I’ve never heard of them before.’
Devaberiel and his friends rode straight for the tents, but Wffyn halted his caravan at what looked to be a regular camp site for traders. Beside a stream where willows and tangles of hazel wands offered shade and some shelter from the wind, someone had built three stone firepits, about twenty feet apart and each large enough to roast an entire sheep, assuming of course that the cook had enough fuel to do so. Gwairyc had noticed Wffyn’s men cutting up extra deadfall wood during their forest camps, and now he understood why they’d carried it with them. Naught but grass out there, he thought, and he shivered with a toss of his head.
Some of the muleteers began unloading the mules while others rummaged through the packs and brought out tether ropes and pegs. Wffyn wandered around, shouting orders, then stood talking to Nevyn. Gwairyc was waiting for Nevyn to tell him where totake their horses and mule when he noticed Morwen, standing at the edge of the confusion and staring out to the west. She was holding Evan’s hand, and the child was