“Where then?”
“Oh, oh, I do not know. Over there. At Eagle Rock, perhaps. But certainly not at the Smithy.”
His anxiety undid him; Noche came close.
“Shall I say three to you, my youngling?”
The boy fell silent and shivering. All the rest of that journey Noche kept him serviceable by the mere motion of his arms.
The place called the Smithy lies in the pit of a blind cañon, all of rusty red volcanic stone. Half-cooled it seems, smudged black with smoke, encrusted with flakes of dark lichen like soot. Some Junipers grow there, wind depressed, all asquat above the rocks like dwarfed, warty things crept out of the ruins to take the sun. In the middle of the pit half a score of pines staggered together as if awry with labor at the cold forges. Here the Far-Folk repaired to wait the smith and gloat upon his work. Here, when the earth melted in its own shadow under a sky of dusky blueness, whitening to an unrisen moon, the Outliers found them. The Far-Folk had eaten, and sat about on the broken stones gloating. Even in repose, and from the top of the hill where the Outliers looked down at them, they had the attitudes of exultation. The King’s Desire lay uncorded in their midst, the little low fire struck a thousand bright reflections from it. Red eyes of gems winked from behind a screen of golden fret. At the head of the circle sat the chief of the Far-Folk, and the Cup of the Four Quarters was between his knees.
This Oca was a lithe man, well bronzed, of a singular, wild, fearless bearing; he had a beard of thick, wavy locks that he blew back from his lips as he talked, accommodated to the carriage of his head like sculptor work. Around his mouth there was the evidence of something half-formed, undependable, the likeness of half fabled wood-creatures. In his eyes, which were bright and roving, and on his brow, there was the witness of extraordinary intelligence. He had a laugh, short and bubbling, that came always at the end of his words and belied their seriousness; it was as if some sardonic half-god sat in him and laughed at his assumption of being a man. He laughed now as the Outliers looked down on him, lifting the Cup of the Four Quarters, blowing back his long lip locks to drink.
The Outliers had come, I say, to the top of the cañon at dark, for they had not been very sure of the way, and had scorned to squeeze further help from their captive. They hung there straining through the dusk to take the lay of the land and for the moment forgot the lad. He must have had some good stuff in him, for all that afternoon he had been white with high resolve, when they thought him merely frightened. The Outliers’ party halted where the coiled and undulating strata flowed down the sides of the cañon like water lines in old bas-reliefs. Under the wiry trees they made out sparkles of red and green and figures moving. Just then the boy managed, by slipping on a pebble, to bring his throat a foot from Noche’s hand and to let out a cry formless and anguished, breaking off in mid-utterance like a trumpet torn asunder. To it succeeded the sound of a limp body dropping among disjointed stones, the rush of the Outliers going down, and the scuttling of the Far-Folk in the blind gully like scared sheep in a runway.
It was very quickly over. The cry had done its work and the advantage of the ground was all to the Far-Folk; dark people as they were, the dark befriended them. When the Outliers loosed their slings the first sound took them into cover. There was heard the crack of the sling stones followed by sharp groans, but by the time our men got down to the twisty trees there was not a spark of the Treasure nor one of the Treasure lifters. They stumbled on some of the Far-Folk women who had lingered to wake the sleeping children, and took them, with a good part of their baggage. By the time the moon came up there was nothing to be seen of either party but one slim body of a lad, with his back broken, growing cold in a deep cairn of stones.
Persilope moved on with the slingsmen to keep the trail of the Far-Folk warm, and Mancha, who preferred the work that promised earliest news of Zirriloë, came back with the captives to River Ward.