"To the village?" She looked up, and thought hard. "I can't remember it much," she said.
"But you had family there. Your mother—"
She shook her head. "We didn't have any mother. We belonged to Gan Buli. He hit us a lot. My sister..." She didn't finish.
Maybe Luck had been with Melle after all.
But never with Irad.
"All right, then you'll come with me," I said, in as matter-of-fact a tone as I could manage. "But listen. We'll be going on the roads, into villages, some of the time at least. Among people. I think it might be better if you were my little brother. Can you pretend to be a boy?"
"Of course," she said, interested in the idea. She thought about it. "I need a name. I can be Miv."
I almost said, "No!" but stopped myself. She should have the name she chose herself. Like Melle, it was a common name.
"All right, Miv," I said, with a little effort. "And I'm Avvi."
"Avvi," she repeated, and then murmured, "Avvi Beaky," with a tiny smile.
"And who we are is this: we aren't slaves, because there aren't any slaves in Urdile, where we live. I'm a student at the University in Mesun. I study with a great man there, who's waiting for us. I'm taking you there to be a student too. We come from just east of the Marshes."
She nodded. It all seemed perfectly convincing to her. But she was eight years old.
"What I hope is, we can mostly keep off the big roads and just go through the countryside. I have some money. We can buy food in villages and from farmers. But we have to look out for slave takers. Everywhere. If we don't meet any of them, we'll be all right."
"What is the great man in Mesun's name?" she asked. A good question. I wasn't prepared for it. Finally I said the only name of a great man in Mesun I knew: "Orrec Caspro."
She nodded.
There seemed to be one more thing on her mind. She finally said it. "I can't pee like a boy," she said.
"That's all right. Don't worry. I'll stand guard."
She nodded. We were ready to go. A short way downstream from the bend of the river it widened and shoaled out, and I said, "Let's cross here. Can you swim—Miv?"
"No."
"If it gets too deep I can carry you." We took off our shoes and tied them to my pack. I fastened a length of light rope around Melle's waist and my own, with a few feet of slack between us. We waded out into the river hand in hand. I thought of my vision of crossing a river, and wondered if soon I'd be carrying the child on my shoulders (which were still sore from carrying her yesterday). But this didn't at all look like the river I remembered. By picking a zigzag way on the high point of the shoals I was never more than waist deep, and could hold Melle up well enough, except in one place where the current ran fast and deep alongside an islet of gravel. There I told her to hold tight to the rope around my waist and keep her head up the best she could, and I waded in, swam the few yards to the gravel bar, and wallowed ashore. Melle went under only at the last moment, when she thought she could touch bottom and couldn't. She came up choking and sputtering. After that we had only shallow waters to wade, and soon came to the far shore.
As we sat getting our breath, drying out, and putting on our shoes, I said, "We've crossed the first of the two great rivers we have to cross. This is the land of Bendile."
"The hero Hamneda had to swim across a river when he was wounded, didn't he?"
I can't say how much that touched me. It wasn't that she'd learned the story of Hamneda from me. It was that she thought of him, that he was familiar to her mind and heart as he was to mine. We had a common language, this child and I, a language I hadn't spoken with anyone else since I left my own childhood in Etra. I put my arm around her little thin shoulders, and she wriggled against me comfortably.
"Let's go find a village and buy some food," I said. "Hold on, though. Let me get some money out so I don't wave all of it in people's faces."