On the way back to my rented room, I stopped at a tavern, got drunk, and paid a yellow-haired whore three times her usual rate to bed her. If I had thought to make myself feel better, I failed. I spent money I could ill afford to discover that intercourse had become a challenge. When the jut of a man’s belly exceeds the length of his member, coupling with a woman requires imaginative positioning and a cooperative partner. The whore was barely that, and only did what she must to earn her coins.

“You see,” she said righteously as I stepped away from the edge of the bed where I had knelt, “why I had to charge you more. That wasn’t easy for me. You fair disjointed my hips!” She lay as I had left her on the edge of the bed, skirts dragged up to her waist and her legs spraddled wide to accommodate me. I recall thinking that it was the least alluring posture that I could have imagined a woman assuming.

“I’m finished,” I told her abruptly.

“That’s obvious,” she drawled sarcastically.

I dressed and left.

My knees were sore as I walked back to my rented room. Pleasure was a word that didn’t apply to what I’d done. The physical release I had experienced was inextricably mixed with the humiliation she had dealt me. Rather than taking comfort in the woman, I had completely proven to myself how much my life had changed in a few short months.

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE KING’S ROAD

T he good god never intended for people to live here.”

The woman’s words were to stay long in my mind. Her house was one of six inhabited structures in a ramshackle settlement near the second rise of the foothills before the mountains. There was little there save misery. Stumps dotted the sloping fields behind the town. The constant wind, heavy with wet chill, warned of winter. Dead Town was a “road town,” a temporary settlement thrown together to house the penal workers and their families as the King’s Road was pushed ever eastward.

Once I had believed in King Troven’s dream of a wide road that led across the plains, over the mountains, and to the sea beyond, a road that would restore Gernia’s power as a seagoing and trading nation. The farther east I went, the harder it was to sustain that vision.

Calling the structure she lived in a “house” was charity on my part. It was built of large stones and roughly skinned logs. The badly warped logs were smaller in diameter than anything I would have used for a structure. The gaps between the corkscrewed logs were chinked with wadded reeds and moss, with plastered mud over it. I judged the coming rains of winter would soon melt that chinking away. She had three small children, but if she had a husband, he was not to be seen.

My food had run out and I’d stopped to see what I could buy. The inhabitants of two other houses had already turned me away. They had little enough for themselves and no use for my coins. The irony was that I’d discovered, too late, that I was not as poor as I’d thought. When I repacked my panniers as I left Franner’s Bend, I discovered a little yellow purse tucked in among my shirts. When Yaril had slipped it in, I didn’t know. It contained fifteen hectors, a very substantial sum coming from a young woman. I resolved to use it well, and to pay it back to her when we were reunited. The extra money could not restore my battered self-respect, but it did shore up my sagging confidence. I invested some of my windfall in a battered draft saddle with a tree that fit Clove’s back and a seat that didn’t insult my own. After several fruitless efforts, I admitted that Sirlofty’s bridle and bit would never adjust to Clove. I traded them away for a bridle that fit my plug horse, some straps to adapt my cavalla panniers, and a couple of heavy blankets in case I had to sleep outside. In the market, I stocked my panniers with hard bread, smoked meat, raisins, tea, and charily, a Plains food of meat and fruit ground together into a sort of sausage bound with sweetened suet. I bought tools for rough travel: a small hatchet, sulfur matches dipped in wax, and some strips of leather to make a sling. I wanted a firearm, but that was beyond the reach of my coins. The sword I bought was not well balanced and the blade was pitted from poor care. It was better than nothing. When I rode away from Franner’s Bend, I felt I was as well supplied for the road as a man of my means could be.

In return, the road offered me next to nothing. Water was not a problem while my trail followed the river. Heat, flies, and boredom were my chief irritations by day, cold and mosquitoes by night. Clove ambled along.

For my first day’s travel from Franner’s Bend, the road was good. I passed several small villages huddled on the riverbank. They seemed prosperous, feeding off both the river and the road trade. They were older than the explosive growth of town around Franner’s Bend, but in some ways they still exuded the rough, raw aspect of a frontier settlement. All the buildings were constructed from river offerings: stone rounded by the passage of water, mortar speckled with the tiny pebbles one always found in the river sand, and an occasional embellishment of wood. There was little real timber on the plains or plateaus, but rafts of immense spond logs from the wilderness passed by on the river. Spond timber was far too dear for these townspeople to afford; the wooden parts of their houses came from river driftwood largesse or salvage from broken log rafts.