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He walked down to that land until it became browns and greens around him. His Road in places became a muddy track lined with fences some stones of which were white, like the Road—so the men had stolen them to make their own stoneworks, and he hoped they had not removed all the Road ahead.
Men were working in the fields. They stopped, mopped their brows and stared at him from a distance, but they came no closer.
In time he came to a Village that lay some distance from the Road. But his Road did not lead him toward it, so he decided that this was not the Place he was looking for. The houses were squat, and the color of their stonework matched the thatch of their roofs. He saw people very distantly, and a track did lead that way, but he had come to grief once from leaving the Road, so he did not let curiosity or hunger lead him aside.
He walked until dusk, and found green Apples on a tree and had two, leaving the Road just to cross a fence. He supposed that no one would mind. He slept by the roadside, under the shelter of that rough stone wall, as much shelter of stone as he had yet found on the Road, and in the morning had another apple, and one to take with him. They made his stomach hurt, but it was a different kind of hurt than having nothing at all to eat, and they eased his thirst.
He found berry bushes, and had a handful of berries. He found a brook, and drank.
He passed other villages, which never sat near the Road, as the fences never blocked it. He met a man on the Road, once, the only man he had seen on the Road at all. “Good day,” he said, and that man dropped his load of sticks and climbed over the rubble wall and ran away rather than pass him, so he thought that he had been in his proper Place, but the man had not been in his, and the man had run for fear of consequences. He was sorry. He would have liked to ask questions. But at least the man had flung nothing at him, nor brandished a knife, and he walked as quickly as he could to be away from the village toward which the man had run.
But no one chased him and no one else appeared on the Road.
He passed another night beneath a berry hedge, and smelled wood fires on the wind, until the stars were turned in their courses. Remembering the man ru
He walked in the morning, hungry and finding nothing at all to eat.
His clothes, he had noticed, hung loosely on him, and despite his washing, showed increasing mud stains. He shaved every day. He had the razor and the little mirror, and when he found water to drink, as he did low aboutthe cheeks and more shadowed about the eyes, and he knew he looked more desperate and more untidy than he had begun.
On the third day since the Bridge, he came to a high place from which he saw the fields divided up in a great circle about a hill and a sprawl of walls and higher walls.
Fortress, he thought, and in his experience of strangers by now, he stood in some dread and doubt what he ought to do next.
But his Road, now a straggle of white stones, went inexorably toward it and, that being what Mauryl had said, as the Road was going, he gathered his courage and kept walking.
The narrow grass-grown track among the fields gave way to a broader path by afternoon, as he came down into the valley: a rough, earthen, common road, it became, ru
On either hand were fields of sorts he had seen before: he knew Barley and Oats, which one could eat raw, though not pleasantly; he knew Orchards and Apples. He saw Sheep wandering white on the hillsides.
He saw the walls in the distance ahead of him, wider and greater than he had imagined, vanishing behind low hills and rising again as he walked.
He saw other men in the fields, and he was anxious when he had to pass them working near the Road. But they were an occurrence more and more common, as if here the Road was permitted to them, or as if they had no fear of strangers.
In time he met a man who slogged along the road under a load of baskets slung on a stick. The man was coming toward him, and for very little persuasion he would have fled the meeting himself, over the fences and across the fields; but as the man came slowly, head bowed, he thought how the Road was his Place, and Mauryl had said go on it. So come what might, he kept walking and waiting for the approaching man to do or say something.
The man, white-bearded as Mauryl, just trudged past, with a glance or two toward him that said the man at least wondered at him, or suspected bad behavior in him, but over all the man with the baskets seemed no threat to him and did nothing.
Further along, he saw a man working and digging in the ditch beside the Road. That man stopped his work and looked at him in some evident surprise, as if he had expected him to do something remarkable.
He made a little bow, as Mauryl had told him was polite, and the man held his Hat in his hand and gazed curiously at him as he passed.
Nearer the walls, much nearer, he saw a double gate in the wall and slowly, the most dazzling, the strangest Word he had yet seen before him, he thought of Town, and then of People and Streets, of Walls and Defense, and gates and bars such as Ynefel had had. He saw a cart come out of those gates, a cart pulled by an Ox and accompanied by two men. It was piled high with straw and great clay jars. Its wheels wobbled and groaned with a squeal of wood on wood as, inevitably, they met and passed. He stepped off the track to give them room, anxious, because one man had a stick which he had no hesitation to use on the ox, for no fault that Tristen could see. He did not like that man and gave that man a straight, steady stare, wary and ready to move away if that man should strike at him.
But that man shied away from him instead, and the men went their way away from the town, as he went his, for his Road took him toward the gates—gates which still stood open, it seemed, to anyone who cared to come in or out, though Ynefel’s doors and windows had been locked and barred for fear of Shadows.
Here there must not be such a danger, he said to himself; and though men seemed to look askance at him, no one harmed him or threatened him, perhaps being better-behaved men, of a sort Mauryl would approve.
He walked, fearful but unchallenged, up to the stone gateway beneath the arch.
But there he saw that men with Spears—a dreadful Word—sat there talking with each other. Guards, he thought: Soldiers. Weapons and Armor, defenses and locks and protections. He was afraid of the guards, though they paid him no attention at all, seeming too busy in their conversation.
And he was not exactly deceiving them when he saw no reason to put himself in the notice of men busy at other matters, especially while he was obeying Mauryl’s instruction. There being a cart with tall stacks of baskets stopped at the side of the gate, it was not exactly dishonest of him to duck behind it and walk past into the town without bothering anyone.
And there—were Streets, exactly as he anticipated them, but, oh, so different. He was confused for a moment, seeing no order in his choices, and settled on walking straight ahead, since it was the direction he had been going. Men stared at him, some very few, but most jostled him in their own urgent haste to be somewhere. He stared after one and the other, wondering whether he should be going there, too—but he saw nothing to attract him. Walking uphill, he entered on a place with narrowing daylight, where buildings increasingly overhung, where men spread out racks and jars on the side of the street and made those trying to pass dodge around the obstacles they posed.