The journey to the base of the tor took over an hour. By that time, they had passed a couple of people walking along the road. Other people, some of them driving carts or riding horseback, came and went from the tor. As Jane saw the open gate in the earthworks clearly, she looked first at the donkey, then down at Ishihara.

“Is this little donkey going to make it home again? He must be worn out.”

“Emrys expects to sell the wood and the meat. The return load will be much lighter.”

Sentries at the gate glanced at the cart and waved them through without stopping them, though they stared in wonder at Jane in her Chinese robe. Emrys drove the cart up a steep slope to the top of the tor. Jane saw Wayne looking around with interest and did the same.

The defensive earthworks turned out to be more than a single wall. Four concentric walls ringed the base and the lower portion of the slope. Starting just inside the gate, cobblestones paved the road.

“It’s bigger than it looked from outside,” said Jane, as the donkey began pulling the cart up the steep angle. “Ishihara, how big is this place?”

Ishihara scanned the area briefly. “I cannot see the far side of the tor, but if the shape of its base as a whole is roughly a circle, I estimate that outer wall encloses approximately seven hectares.”

Up ahead, the road led through an open, nearly square gatehouse in the high wall that surrounded the summit and the village within it. Sentries held spears lazily on the top of the wall, talking among themselves. Jane thought the wall had been constructed of wood until the cart passed through it. Then she found that only a breastwork of wood faced the outside; the bulk of the wall was made of unmortared stone.

Inside the wall, they found themselves in a bustling village. Jane turned and looked up at the inside of the wall. Now she could see that the sentries stood on top of a wooden platform that ringed the top of the stone wall, with the wooden breastwork rising high enough to protect them from attackers who might have crossed the first four earthen ramparts on the lower slope. All around the village, the interior side of the wall was designed the same way.

“It looked so modest from a distance,” said Jane. “This is pretty impressive.”

“I estimate the perimeter of this wall to be over three-quarters of a kilometer,” said Ishihara. “Since the wall has neither straight sides nor represents a circle, my approximation is quite rough.”

On the far side of the main gate, a two-story hall built of timbers rose over the rest of the village. Emrys turned the cart down a narrow side street, but Jane continued to look at the hall. If MC 6, after returning to his full size, was going to seek the seat of power, he would probably find it inside that hall.

Jane saw that Wayne also had taken a second glance at the hall. He almost certainly had reached the same conclusion, but she said nothing. Maybe something else was on his mind. In any case, MC 6 was still microscopic, possibly somewhere on the ground at their feet this very moment.

Emrys drew up the cart and greeted a couple of men behind a booth. Chunks of meat layout on a wooden counter, with flies buzzing over them. The men called out heartily and waved for him to step down.

As he did so, Jane realized that the men at the booth and most of the other villagers nearby were all staring at her. Then she saw that they looked just as curiously at Wayne and Ishihara, in their more modest Chinese peasant clothes. None of the villagers spoke, however.