Mikkal barked laughter. “He knows the formula, anyhow! Invoke the upper-class privacy fetish, plus a hint that if we don’t know why he’s running, we can’t be blamed if the tentacles find him amongst us.”
“Impie agents aren’t city police or gentry housecarls,” the king said. “They got special tricks. And … a few
days back, a clutch of seethe-heads affrayed a marine patrol on the Wildfoss, remember? Several escaped. If you’re on the flit, Mariner, why should we risk trouble to help you across Ironland?”
“I didn’t say I was, sir,” Ivar responded. “I told Mikkal, here, I can be useful to you. But supposin’ I am in sabota with Terrans, is that bad? I heard tinerans cheer Emperor Hugh’s men as they left for battle.”
“Tinerans’ll cheer anybody who’s on hand with spending money,” Mikkal said. “However, I’ll ‘fess most of us don’t like the notion of the stars beswarmed by townsitters. It makes us feel like the universe is closing in.” He turned to Samlo. “King, why not give this felly-oh a toss?”
“Will you be his keeper?” the seated man asked. Aside to Ivar: “We don’t abandon people in the desert, no matter what. Your keeper has got to see you through.”
“Sure-ah,” Mikkal said. “He has a look of new songs and jokes in him.”
“Your keeper won’t have much to spare,” Samlo warned. “If you use up supplies and give no return—well, maybe after we’re back in the green and you dismissed, he’ll track you down.”
“He won’t want to, sir … King,” Ivar promised.
“Better make sure of that,” Samlo said. “Mikkal, the shooting gallery’s still assembled. Go see how many lightsweeps he can hit with that rifle of his. Find some broken-down equipment for him to repair; the gods know we have enough. Run him, and if he’s breathing hard after half a dozen clicks, trade him back, because he’d never get across the Dreary alive.” He rose, while telling Ivar: “If you pass, you’ll have to leave that slugthrower with me. Only hunting parties carry firearms in a Train, and just one to a party. We’d lose too many people otherwise. Now I have to go see the animal acts get properly bedded down. You be off too.”
VI
In a long irregular line, herd strung out behind, the caravan departed. A few persons rode in the saddle, a few more in or on the vehicles; most walked. The long Aenean stride readily matched wagons bumping and groaning over roadless wrinkled hills. However, the going was stiff, and nobody talked without need. Perched on rooftops, musicians gave them plangent marches out of primitive instruments, drums, horns, gongs, bagpipes, many-stringed guitars. A number of these players were handicapped, Ivar saw: crippled, blind, deformed. He would have been shocked by so much curable or preventable woe had they not seemed as exhilarated as he was.
Near sundown, Waybreak was out on the undulant plain of Ironland. Coarse red soil reached between clumps of gray-green starkwood or sword trava, dried too hard for there to be a great deal of dust. Samlo cried halt by an eroded lava flow from which thrust a fluted volcanic plug. “The Devil’s Tallywhacker,” Mikkal told his protege. “Traditional first-night stopping place out of Arroyo, said to be protection against hostile gods. I think the practice goes back to the Troubles, when wild gangs went around, starveling humans or stranded remnants of invader forces, and you might need a defensible site. Of course, nowadays we just laager the wagons in case a zoosny wind should blow up or something like that. But it’s as well to maintain cautionary customs. The rebellion proved the Troubles can come again, and no doubt will … as if that’d ever needed proof.”
“Uh, excuse me,” Ivar said, “but you sound, uh, surprisin’ly sophisticated—” His voice trailed off.
Mikkal chuckled. “For an illiterate semi-savage? Well, matter o’ fact, I’m not. Not illiterate, anyhow. A part of us have to read and write if we’re to handle the outside world, let alone operate swittles like the Treasure Map. Besides, I like reading, when I can beg or steal a book.”
“I can’t understand why you—I mean, you’re cut off from things like library banks, not to mention medical and genetic services, everything you could have—”