Newspapers occasionally reached this village, and those that did went from hand to hand until all had read them, when they were placed on deposit at the wineshop at the head of the main village thoroughfare. I consulted them there, a file of stained and tattered scraps, and learned what I could of the events of the past year. I found that my brother Stirron’s wedding had taken place on schedule, with appropriate regal pomp; his lean troubled face looked up out of a blurry, grease-splotched bit of old paper, and beside him was his radiant bride, but I could not make out her features. There was tension between Glin and Krell over fishing rights in a disputed coastal area, and men had died in border skirmishes. I pitied General Condorit, whose patrol sector was at the opposite end of the boundary, almost, from the Krell-Glin line, and who therefore must have missed the fun of somehow involving Salla in the shooting. A sea monster, golden-scaled and sinuous, more than ten times the length of a man’s body, had been sighted in the Gulf of Sumar by a party of Mannerangi fishermen, who had sworn a mighty oath in the Stone Chapel as to the authenticity of their vision. The prime septarch of Threish, a bloody old brigand if the tales they tell of him are true, had abdicated, and was dwelling in a godhouse in the western mountains not far from Stroin Gap, serving as a drainer for pilgrims bound to Manneran. Such was the news. I found no mention of myself. Perhaps Stirron had lost interest in having me seized and returned to Salla.

It might therefore be safe for me to try to leave Glin.

Eager as I was to get out of that frosty province, where my own kin rebuffed me and only strangers showed me love, two things held me back. For one, I meant to stay with Stumwil until I could help him with his spring planting, in return for his kindness to me. For another, I would not set forth undrained on so dangerous a journey, lest in some mishap my spirit go to the gods still full of poisons. This village of Klaek had no drainer of its own, but depended for its solace on itinerant drainers who passed now and then through the countryside. In the winter these wanderers rarely came by, and so perforce I had gone undrained since the late summer, when a member of that profession had visited the logging camp. I felt the need.

There came a late-winter snow, a storm of wonders that coated every branch with a fiery skin of ice, and immediately thereafter there came a thaw. The world melted. Klaek was surrounded by oceans of mud. A drainer driving a battered and ancient groundcar came to us through this slippery sea and set up shop in an old shack, doing fine business among the villagers. I went to him on the fifth day of his visit, when the lines were shorter, and unburdened myself for two hours, sparing him nothing, neither the truth about my identity nor my subversive new philosophy of kingship nor the usual grimy little repressed lusts and prides. It was more of a dose, evidently, than a country drainer expected to receive, and he seemed to puff and swell as I poured out my words; at the end he was shaking as much as I, and could barely speak. I wondered where it was that drainers went to unload all the sins and sorrows they absorbed from their clients. They are forbidden to talk to ordinary men of anything they have learned in the confessional; did they therefore have drainer-drainers, servants of the servants, to whom they might deliver that which they could not mention to anyone else? I did not see how a drainer could carry such a bundle of sadnesses for long unaided, as he got from any dozen of his customers in a day’s listening.

With my soul cleansed, I had only to wait for planting-time, and it was not long in coming. The growing season in Glin is short; they get their seeds into the ground before winter’s grip has fully slipped, so that they can catch every ray of spring sunlight. Stumwil waited until he felt certain that the thaw would not be followed by one last tumult of snow, and then, with the land still a sucking quagmire, he and his family went out into the fields to plant breadseed and spiceflower and blueglobe.

The custom was to go naked to the planting. On the first morning I looked out of Stumwil’s cottage and beheld the neighbors on all sides walking bare toward the furrows, children and parents and grandparents stripped to the skin with sacks of seed slung over their shoulders—a procession of knobby knees, sagging bellies, dried-out breasts, wrinkled buttocks, illuminated here and there by the smooth firm bodies of the young. Thinking I was in some waking dream, I looked around and saw Stumwil and his wife and their daughter already disrobed, and beckoning to me to do the same. They took their sacks and left the cottage. The two young sons scampered after them, leaving me with the bondsister of Stumwil’s daughter, who had overslept and had just appeared. She shucked her garments too; a supple saucy body she had, with small high dark-nippled breasts and slender well-muscled thighs. As I dropped my clothes I asked her, “Why is it done to be naked outdoors in such a cold time?”

“The mud gives cause for slipping,” she explained, “and it is easier to wash raw skin than garments.”

There was truth enough in that, for the planting was a comic show, with peasants skidding in the tricky muck every tenth step they took. Down they went, landing on hip or haunch and coming up smeared with brown; it was a matter of skill to grasp the neck of one’s seed-sack as one toppled, so that no precious seeds would be scattered. I fell like the rest, learning the knack of it quickly, and indeed there was pleasure in slipping, for the mud had a voluptuous oozy feel to it. So we marched on, staggering and lurching, slapping flesh to mud again and again, laughing, singing, pressing our seeds into the cold soft soil, and not one of us but was covered from scalp to tail with muck within minutes. I shivered miserably at the outset, but soon I was warmed by laughter and tripping, and when the day’s work was done, we stood around shamelessly naked in front of Stumwil’s cottage and doused one another with buckets of water to clean ourselves. By then it seemed reasonable to me that they should prefer to expose their skins rather than their clothing to such a day’s labor, but in fact the girl’s explanation was incorrect; I learned from Stumwil later that week that the nakedness was a religious matter, a sign of humility before the gods of the crops, and nothing else.

Eight days it took to finish the planting. On the ninth, wishing Stumwil and his people a hearty harvest, I took my leave of the village of Klaek, and began my journey to the coast.

19

A neighbor of Stumwil’s took me eastward the first day in his cart. I walked most of the second, begged a ride on the third and fourth, and walked again on the fifth and sixth. The air was cool but the crackle of spring was in it, as buds unfolded and birds returned. I bypassed the city of Glain, which might have been dangerous for me, and without any events that I can clearly recall I made my way swiftly to Biumar, Glin’s main seaport and second most populous city.

It was a handsomer place than Glain, though hardly beautiful: a greasy gray sprawl of an oversized town, backed up against a gray and menacing ocean. On my first day there I learned that all passenger service between Glin and the southern provinces had been suspended three moontimes before, owing to the dangerous activities of pirates operating out of Krell, for Glin and Krell were now engaged in an undeclared war. The only way I could reach Manneran, it seemed, was overland via Salla, and I hardly wished to do that. I was resourceful, though. I found myself a room in a tavern near the docks and spent a few days picking up maritime gossip. Passenger service might be suspended, but commercial seafaring, I discovered, was not, since the prosperity of Glin depended upon it; convoys of merchant vessels, heavily armed, went forth on regular schedules. A limping seaman who stayed in the same tavern told me, when blue wine of Salla had oiled him sufficiently, that a merchant convoy of this sort would leave in a week’s time, and that he had a berth aboard one of the ships. I considered drugging him on the eve of sailing and borrowing his identity, as is done in pirate tales for children, but a less dramatic method suggested itself to me: I bought his shipping-papers. The sum I offered him was more than he would have earned by shipping out to Manneran and back, so he was happy to take my money and let me go in his place. We spent a long drunken night conferring about his duties on the ship, for I knew nothing of seamanship. At the coming of dawn I still knew nothing, but I saw ways I could bluff a minimal sort of competence.