Such thoughts buoyed my spirits. I was in fact glad to be alone again at last. It seemed to me now that all the year I was with Barna, his great, jovial voice had filled my head, controlling my thoughts, ruling my judgment. The power of his being was in itself like a spell, leaving me only corners of my own being, where I hid in shadow. Now, as I walked away from him, my mind could range freely back over all my time in the Heart of the Forest, and with Brigin's band, and before that, with Cuga, the old mad hermit who had saved the mad boy from death by starvation. ... But that thought brought me sharply back to the present moment. I hadn't eaten since last night. My stomach was beginning to call for dinner, and a pocket full of walnuts wasn't going to take me far. I decided I wouldn't eat any until I reached the end of the forest. There I'd have a wood-rat banquet and decide what to do next.
It was still only mid-afternoon when the road came out through a thin stand of alders to meet another, larger road that ran north and south. There were cart ruts on it left from the last rains, many sheep tracks, and some horseshoe tracks, though it lay empty as far as I could see. Across it was open country, scrubby and nondescript, with a few stands of trees.
I sat down behind a screen of bushes and solemnly cracked and ate ten of my walnuts. That left me twenty-two, and nine acorns, which I kept only as a last resort. I got up, faced left, and walked boldly down the road.
My mind was busy with what I might tell any carter or drover or horseman who overtook me. I decided the one thing I had that might show me as something more than a runaway slave boy was the little book I carried in my pouch. I was a scholar's slave, sent from Asion to carry this book to a scholar in Etra, who was ill and wished to read it before he died, and had begged his friend in Asion to send it to him, with a boy who could read it to him, for his eyes were failing. ... I worked on the story diligently for miles. I was so lost in it I didn't even see the farm cart that turned from a side track into the road a little way behind me until the jingle of harness and the clop-clop of big hoofs woke me up. The horse's enormous, mild-eyed face was practically looking over my shoulder.
"Howp," said the driver, a squat man with a wide face, looking me over with no expression at all on his face.
I mumbled some kind of greeting.
"Hop up," the man said more distinctly. "Good ways yet to the crossroads."
I scrambled up onto the seat. He studied me some more. His eyes were remarkably small, like seeds in his big loaf of a face.
"You'll be going to Shecha," he said, as an inarguable fact.
I agreed with him. It seemed the best thing to do.
"Don't see you folk much on the road no more," the driver said. And at that I realised that he had taken me for—that he had recognised me as—one of the Marsh people. I didn't need my complicated story. I wasn't a runaway, but a native.
It was just as well. This fellow might not have known what a book was.
All the slow miles to the crossroads, through the late afternoon and the immense gold-and-purple sunset, he told me a tale about a farmer and his uncle and some hogs and a piece of land beside Rat Water and an injustice that had been done. I never understood any of it, but I could nod and grunt at the right moments, which was what he wanted. "Always like talking with you folk," he said when he dropped me off at the crossroads. "Keep your counsel, you do. There's Shecha road."
I thanked him and set off into the dusk. The side road led off southwest. If Shecha was a place of the Marsh people, I might as well go there.
After a while I stopped and cracked all the rest of the walnuts between two stones, and ate them one by one as I went on, for my hunger had grown painful.
Evening was darkening when I saw a glimmer of lights ahead. As