and Sallo are Sidoyu names," the bald man said. "I'm off to bed, Bia. I'll set off before dawn. Pack us up a dinner, eh? Come along south with me if you like, Gavir."
The woman sent me upstairs after him to the common sleeping room of the inn. I lay down in my old blanket on a cot and fell asleep like a rock dropping into black water.
The bald man shook me awake in the dark. "Coming?" he said, and I struggled up and got my gear and followed him. I had no idea where he was going or why or how, only that he was going south, and his invitation was my guidance.
A tiny oil lamp burned in the room downstairs. The innkeeper, who stood behind the counter as if she had stood there all night long, handed him a large packet wrapped in something like oiled silk, took his quarter-bronze, and said, "Go with Mé, Ammeda."
"With Mé," he said. I followed him out into the dark and down to the waterside. He went to a boat, which looked immense to me, tied up to a pier. He untied the rope and dropped down into the boat as casually as stepping down a stair. I clambered in more cautiously, but in a hurry, as it was already drifting from the pier. I crouched in the back end of the boat, and he came and went past me doing mysterious things in the dark. The gold spark of the inn doorway was already far behind us over the black water and fainter than the reflections of the stars. He had raised a sail on the short mast in the middle of the boat, not much of a sail, but it took the slight wind and we moved steadily on. I began to get used to the strange sensation of walking while floating, and by the time there was some light in the sky I could move around well enough, if I hung on to things.
The boat was narrow and quite long, decked, with a low rope rail all round; the whole middle of it was a long, low house.
"Do you live on the boat?" I asked Ammeda, who had sat down in the stern by the tiller and was gazing off over the water at the growing light in the east.
He nodded and said something like "Ao." After a while he remarked, "You fish."
"I have some gear."
"Saw that. Give it a try."
I was glad to be of use. I got out my hooks and lines and the light pole that Chamry had taught me how to make in fitted sections. Ammeda offered no bait, and I had nothing but my acorns. I stuck the wormiest one on the barb of a hook, feeling foolish, and sat with my legs over the side trailing the line. To my surprise, I got a bite within a minute, and pulled up a handsome reddish fish.
Ammeda gutted, split, and boned the fish with a wicked, delicate knife, sprinkled something from his pouch on it, and offered me half. I'd never eaten raw fish, but ate it without hesitation. It was delicate and sweet, and the spice he'd put on it was ground horseradish. The hot taste took me back to the forest, a year ago, digging horseradish roots with Chamry Bern.
My other acorns wouldn't stay on the hook. Ammeda had kept the fish guts on a leaf of what looked like paper. He gave them to me as bait. I caught two more of the reddish fish, and we ate them the same way.
"They eat their kind," he said. "Like men."
"Looks like they'll eat anything," I said. "Like me."
Always when I'm hungry, I crave the grain porridge of Arcamand, thick and nutty, seasoned with oil and dried olives, and I did then; but I was feeling very much better with a pound or two of fish in my belly. The sun had come up and was warming my back deliciously. Small waves slipped by the sides of the boat. Ahead of us and all around us was bright water, dotted here and there with low islands of reeds. I lay back on the deck and fell asleep.
We sailed all that day down the long lake. The next day, as its shores drew together, we entered a maze of channels between high reeds and rushes, lanes of blue-silver water widening and narrowing between walls of pale green and dun, endlessly repeated, endlessly the same. I