Pol explained to Sophos, and incidentally to me, that if you are already rising when the horse’s shoulder bumps your backside, you have a more comfortable ride. So we tried trotting up the road, lifting our backsides just ahead of our horses’ rising shoulders and moving a little faster toward wherever we were going. Very soon I didn’t have the strength to lift myself out of the saddle, and my brains bounced in my head the rest of the day.
We walked the horses frequently to rest them and me, but I was nearly dead by nightfall, and I didn’t see much of the town where we stopped. It had an inn. We went in and I ate, and before I was full, I fell asleep on the table.
I woke up on the floor again, next to Pol’s bed, but this time Ambiades and Sophos were in the room as well, sharing the bed on the other side of me. I contemplated the undignified sort of figure I must have made as I was carried upstairs a second time and winced.
Pol was awake with the first clink of my chain, and I wondered if I could have slept the entire night without shifting. I may have. Or he’d woken often to check on me. When he saw that I was awake, he swung his feet out of the bed and nudged me aside in order to make room for them on the floor.
“Rouse yourselves,” he grunted to the two in the other bed.
Ambiades untangled himself from the sheets and crawled out of the bed. Yawning, he padded over to the chair where everyone else’s clothes were piled. I’d slept in mine. Sophos didn’t move. I sat up and looked over the edge of the bed. His eyelids could have been glued shut.
“Psst!” Ambiades hissed, but it was too late. Pol reached over me and woke Sophos as efficiently as he had woken me after lunch the day before, but at least Sophos landed on a soft bed. Once everyone was up, we all headed outdoors for the benchhouse and a bath at the pump. The sun was just rising over the hills, the sky was blue and clear, but the hollow in which the town sat was still dark. The water was cold, but I was the only one that complained. I warned Pol that if he tried to wash me again, I’d bite.
“He’s probably septic,” Ambiades warned, teasing me in a tone just a little more condescending than the one he used on Sophos.
Pol handed me a washcloth without a word and watched while I scrubbed the last of the prison dirt off my elbows and ankles and the back of my neck. The magus’s soap smelled of honeysuckle.
Inside the inn our breakfast waited: oatmeal and yogurt. There were no oranges this time. “What was the thumping this morning?” the magus asked Pol as we sat down. He was looking at me.
“That one,” the soldier answered, pointing at Sophos with his spoon, “would sleep through cannon fire. One morning he won’t wake up until someone spits him on a longspear.”
Sophos blushed.
“Sleeping lightly is a necessary virtue in a soldier,” the magus pointed out to him, “and it’s not a fault in anyone else.”
“So who wants to be a soldier?” Sophos grumbled at his oatmeal.
“Not me,” I said. Everyone else at the table looked at me in surprise, as if they had forgotten I could talk.
“Who asked you?” Ambiades sneered.
“He did, fuzz-lip.” I pointed with my spoon to Sophos while Ambiades’s hand leapt to his face.
He jerked it back down and asked, “What would scum from a gutter know about being a soldier?”
“I wouldn’t know, not being scum from a gutter. But my father is a soldier, and it’s a bloody, thankless, useless job for people who are too stupid and too ugly to do anything else.” Even if my father and I have come to appreciate each other a little more, I still don’t think much of his chosen profession, but I probably shouldn’t have mentioned it then. My capacity for tact sometimes surprises even myself.
There was a perfect silence at the table while all of us looked over at Pol to see what he would make of this insult to his intelligence as well as his manners. He remained impassive, but the magus told me that in the future I could ignore conversation that was not directed toward me and I should keep my mouth closed unless specifically addressed. I remembered that I had been brought along as a useful sort of tool and not a human being at all.
I ate my breakfast in silence. When the magus stood up and said, “We’d better get the horses ready,” I continued to stare at my empty oatmeal bowl until he cuffed me on the back of the head.
“What?” I said. “Were you specifically addressing me? I thought I was supposed to ignore those—”
“I have a riding crop packed in my saddlebags,” he said. “Would you like me to use it on you?” He was bending over me, and his voice was low. I am not sure that anyone else heard, but I understood him plainly. I threw one leg over the bench and stood up.
“Lead on,” I said.
Several extra packages were added to our baggage before we rode away from the inn. While Ambiades, Sophos, and I watched, Pol and the magus carefully arranged and rearranged the loads so that the horses would not be unevenly weighted. I wondered about Pol. He wasn’t a common foot soldier. Sophos and even Ambiades treated him with too much deference. The magus clearly liked and respected him, relying on him to enforce orders addressed to me. He’d probably be the one to use the riding crop if push came to shove.
As we left the town, it became clear why the magus hadn’t brought a cart. There was no road for it to travel on beyond this small nameless town, or nothing that a civilized person, used to the streets of a city, would call a road. The wagon track we’d been following since Evisa had been carefully maintained, its central grassy strip and its verges kept cropped by the goats of each small village we passed through. Now we crossed a larger road that ran inland along the foothills. On the far side of that road, our track continued, but its wheel ruts were deep, and the grass between them higher than the horses’ knees.
We passed a few more farms, and then the way narrowed even further to a skinny, overgrown path with high grass and scrubby oaks growing on either side, sometimes so close that pricking leaves caught at the fabric in my trousers.
The path climbed steeply in places. The horses worked hard. In single file they heaved themselves uphill with a constant clatter of small stones. I gripped the horse underneath as firmly as I could with my knees and worried about slipping off the back end of the saddle at every rise in the trail. I held on with both hands as well, but my arms were in no better shape than my legs, and by midmorning they shook with the strain.
“Hey, why don’t we stop for lunch?”
The magus looked at me in disgust, but when we reached the next open space, he directed his horse onto the grass, and mine obediently followed. I tried to convince it to move into the shade before I climbed down, but it stopped next to the magus’s horse and wouldn’t go on.
“Why doesn’t this damned horse go where I want it to?” I asked, exasperated.
“Stop jerking on the reins like that. It won’t move,” the magus told me.
“So I’ve found,” I said as I slid down. “It must like your horse more than I like you.”
Sophos heard me and laughed. “It’s a packhorse,” he explained. “It’s trained to stop next to its leader.”
“Really?” I looked at the horse beside me in surprise. “Are they that smart?”