and stuck in my throat.
We walked on around a corner. Not a sharp corner, but a great big bend like the fall of a waterfall, if you can imagine that fall turned on its side. The light got brighter and brighter up ahead until we was all the way around the corner and it was a fierce blaze everywhere.
Well, I had seen some wonders since I left Mythen Rood, but this was the strangest thing I seen in my whole life so far. It was a cave, but it was a made cave. A thousand squared-off stones was laid on top of each other to make the walls, and there was as many up in the ceilings that was curved all in a perfect arch. A hundred or more lanterns lit it up, and though it was one single space yet it was bigger than all the rooms in Rampart Hold and the Waiting House throwed together.
I seen then what the wicker wall was for. It was not to defend this place, like a proper fence would do, but to hide the lights and make it seem, if you looked in, like there was nothing here to be seen. The cave was disguised, just like the trails was.
There was people in the cave, and they turned to look at us as we come. Men, women and children was there, all with drawings on their faces like the ones I see on Sky and her hunt. Here was a little boy with a bird’s wing across his cheek. His mother standing behind him had what I think was meant to be the blade of a knife, though it could of been speargrass. On my other hand, a big skinny man leaned over to stare into my face. His face was marked with a leaf, and his breath stunk worse than an open latrine pit.
“Hey, dog,” he said to me. “Here, dog. Come to.” He said it in a sweet voice, but the laugh he give right after was mean.
The people was doing all kinds of things, some of them fetching and carrying, some talking, some sitting and eating. Several of them was sewing cloth, and several more was cooking on fires. The smoke from the fires was some of what I had been smelling. The rest of it was the people. It was the smell of everything people do, all shoved together in one place with no doors or windows to it.
They lived here. All the whole lot of them, in this one great big room.
Sky weaved her way in between them, saying hey here and yea there, but not stopping to talk to nobody. Mole clapped hands with some of the men, or took slaps to his back that was meant as salutes. Cup was mostly ignored, it seemed to me, and shrunk in against Sky’s side so as to be noticed even less.
We walked a long way, and yet we was still in the same place. There was almost as many people here, it seemed to me, as there was in Mythen Rood. They sit or stood together in little groups, like as it might be families, since there was children all running or hiding in among the legs of the older ones or doing share-work like they was full growed theirselves.
I kept thinking that we had got to come to the back wall of the cave soon, but we never did. We did come to the end of the lights though, and of the fires, and of the people. And now I seen two new things.
On the right side of the cave, close to the wall, there was a big wagon. I guess I got to call it that, for it stood on wheels, but it had got windows and doors like a house. I couldn’t tell what it was made of, for it was painted all over in bright colours, but I thought for sure it had got to be metal and not wood. It was tech of the old times, like Elaine that stood by the river ford and tried to guard it but couldn’t any more. It didn’t have no gun though – just a whole lot of wheels and a whole lot of windows, and a door at either end of it standing open.
And before I got done wondering at that, I seen what was up ahead of us. It was not so strange as the wagon-house was, but it struck on my mind