‘Good.’ Snorri nodded, clearing the side ditch with one stride. ‘I’d thought you lost back there.’
‘Lost?’ I feigned hurt. ‘Every prince should know his realm like the back of … of …’ A glimpsed memory of Lisa DeVeer’s back came to me, the pattern of freckles, the knobs of her spine casting shadows in lamplight as she bent to some sweet task. ‘Of something familiar.’
The road wound up to a plateau where innumerable springs chuckled from the eastern hills along stony beds and the land returned to cultivation. Olive groves, tobacco, cornfields. Here and there a lone farmhouse or collection of stone huts, slate-roofed and huddled together for protection.
Our first encounter was an elderly man driving a still more venerable donkey ahead of him with flicks of his switch. Two huge panniers of what looked to be sticks almost engulfed the beast.
‘Horse?’ Snorri muttered the suggestion as we approached.
‘Please.’
‘It’s got four legs. That’s better than two.’
‘We’ll find something more sturdy. And not some plough-horse either. Something fitting.’
‘And fast,’ said Snorri The donkey ignored us, and the old fellow paid scarcely more attention, as if he encountered giant Vikings and ragged princes every day. ‘Ayuh.’ And he was past.
Snorri pursed his blistered lips and walked on, until a hundred yards further down the road something stopped him in his tracks. ‘That,’ he said, looking down, ‘is the biggest pile of dung I’ve seen in my life.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen bigger.’ In fact I’d fallen in bigger, but as this appeared to have dropped from the behind of a single beast I had to agree that it was pretty damned impressive. You could have heaped a score of dinner plates with it if one were so inclined. ‘It’s big, but I have seen the like before. In fact it’s quite possible that we’ll soon have something in common.’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s quite possible, my friend, that we’ll both have had our lives saved by a big pile of shit.’ I turned toward the retreating old man. ‘Hey!’ Hollered down the road at his back. ‘Where’s the circus?’
The ancient didn’t pause but simply extended a bony arm toward an olive-studded ridge to the south.
‘Circus?’ Snorri asked, still transfixed by the dung pile.
‘You’re about to see an elephant, my friend!’
‘And this effelant will cure my poisoned hand?’ He held the offending article up for inspection, wincing as he did so.
‘Best place to get wounds seen to outside a battle-hospital! These people juggle axes and burning brands. They swing from trapezes and walk on ropes. There’s not a circus in the Broken Empire that doesn’t have half a dozen people who can stitch wounds and with luck a herbman for other ailments.’
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