World Without End Page 0,287

then said to Mair: "Give them one each."

Mair looked terrified, but she walked across the grass with an unhesitating step and offered the food to the men.

They both snatched it and began to wolf it down. Caris thanked her stars that she had guessed right.

She quickly put the ham in her saddlebag and the knife in her belt, then climbed on to Blackie. Mair followed suit, stowing the bread and mounting Stamp. Caris felt safer on horseback.

The taller of the two men came towards them, moving quickly. Caris was tempted to kick her pony and take off, but she did not quite have time; and then the man's hand was holding her bridle. He spoke through a mouthful of food. "Thank you," he said with the heavy local accent.

Caris said: "Thank God, not me. He sent me to help you. He is watching over you. He sees everything."

"You have more meat in your bag."

"God will tell me who to give it to."

There was a pause, while the man thought that over, then he said: "Give me your blessing."

Caris was reluctant to extend her right arm in the traditional gesture of blessing - it would take her hand too far away from the knife at her belt. It was only a short-bladed food knife of the kind carried by every man and woman, but it was enough to slash the back of the hand that held her bridle and cause the man to let go.

Then she was inspired. "Very well," she said. "Kneel down."

The man hesitated.

"You must kneel to receive my blessing," she said in a slightly raised voice.

Slowly, the man knelt, still holding his food in his hand.

Caris turned her gaze on his companion. After a moment, the second man did the same.

Caris blessed them both, then kicked Blackie and quickly trotted away. After a moment she looked back. Mair was close behind her. The two starving men stood staring at them.

Caris mulled over the incident anxiously as they rode through the afternoon. The sun shone cheerfully, as on a fine day in hell. In some places, smoke was rising fitfully from a patch of woodland or a smouldering barn. But the countryside was not totally deserted, she realized gradually. She saw a pregnant woman harvesting beans in a field that had escaped the English torches; the scared faces of two children looking out from the blackened stones of a manor house; and several small groups of men, usually flitting through the fringes of woodland, moving with the alert purposefulness of scavengers. The men worried her. They looked hungry, and hungry men were dangerous. She wondered whether she should stop fretting about speed and worry instead about safety.

Finding their way to the religious houses where they planned to stop was also going to be more difficult than Caris had thought. She had not anticipated that the English army would leave such devastation in its wake. She had assumed there would be peasants around to direct her. It could be hard enough in normal times to get such information from people who had never travelled farther than the nearest market town. Now her interlocutors would also be elusive, terrified or predatory.

She knew by the sun that she was heading east, and she thought, judging by the deep cartwheel ruts in the baked mud, that she was on the main road. Tonight's destination was a village named, after the nunnery at its centre, Hopital-des-Soeurs. As the shadow in front of her grew longer, she looked about with increasing urgency for someone whom she could ask for directions.

Children fled from their approach in fear. Caris was not yet desperate enough to risk getting close to the hungry-looking men. She hoped to come across a woman. There were no young women anywhere, and Caris had a bleak suspicion about the fate they might have met at the hands of the marauding English. Occasionally she saw, in the far distance, a few lonely figures harvesting a field that had escaped burning; but she was reluctant to go too far from the road.

At last they found a wrinkled old woman sitting under an apple tree next to a substantial stone house. She was eating small apples wrenched from the tree long before they were ripe. She looked terrified. Caris dismounted, to seem less intimidating. The old woman tried to hide her poor meal in the folds of her dress, but she seemed not to have the strength to run away.

Caris addressed her politely. "Good