He nodded, “Yes.”
Jael the herd put her hand over her eyes. “Truth my light! but our life is deep!”
The mendicants left the portal. The slide closed, making the door solid.
“Wait here,” said the herd-girl. “I will go knock. Wait here until you are called.”
She knocked, and the panel slid back. He heard her speaking to the sister and the latter answering. Then she spoke again, and, after a moment of hesitation, the door was opened. She entered; it closed after her. He sat down on a stone bench beside the portal and watched the lacework of branches, great and small, over the blue. A cripple with a basket of fruit sat beside him and began to talk of jongleurs he had heard, and then of the times, which he said were hard. With his lameness, something in him brought Foulque to Garin’s mind. “Oh, ay!” said the cripple, “kings and dukes make work, but dull work that you die by and not live by! The court will buy my grapes, but—” He shrugged, then whistled and stretched in the sun.
“How stands Duke Richard in your eye?”
The cripple offered him a bunch of grapes. “Know you aught that could not be better, or that could not be worse?”
“Well answered!” said Garin. “I have interest in knowing how high at times can leap the better.”
“Higher than the court fool thinks,” said the cripple. He sat a little longer, then took his crutch and his basket of fruit and hobbled away toward the town.
Garin waited, musing. An hour passed, two hours, then the panel in the door slid back. A voice spoke, “Jongleur, you are to enter.”