“You warned us that time,” she said, reaching out to him. “I know how hard for you it must have been.”
He took her hand and laid it along his cheek. Only that. But it was thus that Rigo saw them.
Sylvan excused himself, bowed, and went away to find Rowena. “A pleasant tete-a-tete.” Rigo smiled fiercely. She was too preoccupied to notice the quality of that smile. “Rigo, you must not ride.”
“Oh, and why is that?”
“Sylvan says—“
“Oh, I think it matters very little what Sylvan says.” She looked at him uncertainly. “It matters a great deal. Rigo, the Hippae are not merely animals. They … they do something to their riders. Something to their brains.”
“Clever Sylvan to have thought up such a tale.”
“Do you think he invented it? Don’t be silly. It’s obvious. It’s been obvious to me since we saw the first Hunt, Rigo.”
“Oh?”
“And since last night. For the love of God, Rigo. Didn’t it strike you as odd that no one blamed the Hippae? Here’s this girl who disappeared during a Hunt, and no one blames the Hippae she was riding on?”
“If you disappeared during a Hunt, my dear, and turned up later as a courtesan in some petty principality, should I blame your horse?” He gave her a wintry glance, then left her there, staring after him, trying desperately to figure out what had happened.
9
In the Friary of the Green Brothers, nights sat gently upon the sills. The great, night-freezing cry which haunted the southern latitudes was seldom heard here, though whole choruses of grublike peepers filled the dark hours with dulcet sound. Days were spent in labor, nights in sleep. Brothers, so it was said, had once spent their time in study, but little study was needed here. All the questions had been reduced to doctrine; all the doctrine had been simplified to catechism; all the catechism had been learned long ago. Besides, what would the penitents do with more knowledge? They had no use for it here. The Friary sat upon shortgrass prairie, though there were tall grasses not far away. Every year in mid to late summer the Brothers went out to cut down quantities of strong, thick grass stems that grew to the height of seven or eight tall men. Other Brothers remained behind them at the Friary, digging deep and narrow trenches, in parallel pairs, outlining the new halls which would be needed during the Grassian year. Though penitents grew old and penitents died, the number of Brothers kept growing. Seemingly it was becoming a more frequent happening for acolytes of Sanctity to fly apart, like fragile wheels, spun too fast.
When the great grasses had been sawn through and tied in bundles, they were dragged back to the Friary and upended side by side in the waiting trenches. The top of each bundle was pulled over and tied partway down the bundle in the opposite ditch until the whole double line had been bowed into a vaulted hall which would be roofed with thatch, its openings walled with panels of woven grass. Within this lofty space the Brothers would build whatever kind of rooms were needed: a new chapel or kitchen or another set of cells.
So space was enclosed, said the historians of the order, long ago on another world by people who lived among tall grasses. The historians did not say what such people did in the winter. During winters on Grass, the Brothers retired below to a cramped underground monastery where they suffered through a lengthy season of sequestered and jam-packed irascibility. Winters drove more than a few of them past the pale of sanity. A sick wildness lurked among the brethren —skulking, endemic, more often erupting among the younger than among the aged. The old felt themselves past hope, but the young had hope continually frustrated and as continually strained against their frustration in strange and dangerous ways.
In the summer Friary, there was room enough for frustration to find an out. The narrow halls sprawled this way and that among the low grasses, some making vaulted cloisters around enclosed gardens, some with doors opening upon wide vegetable plots, some giving upon farmyards where chickens scratched or pigs grunted contentedly in their pens. If it had not been for the towers, the Friary could have been a tumulus left by a great tunneling mole, the round-topped halls dried to very much the color of the native soil.