Once inside they stared about them with frank curiosity. A long table made of polished boards set on stakes pounded into the earth ran down the center and on it in orderly piles were things Fors recognized fiom his few visits to the Star House. A stone hollowed for the grinding and bruising of herbs used in medicines, its pestle lying across it, together with rows of boxes and jars—that was the healer’s property. And the dried bundles of twigs and leaves, hanging in ordered lines from the cord along the ridge pole, were his also.
But the books of parchment with protecting covers of thin wood, the ink horn and the pens laid ready, those were the tools of the law man. The records of the tribe were in his keeping, all the customs and history. Each book bore the sign of a clan carved on its cover, each was the storehouse of information about that family.
Arskane stabbed a finger at a piece of smoothed hide held taut in a wooden stretcher.
“The wide river?”
“Yes. You know of it, too?” The law man pushed aside a pile of books and brought the hide under the hanging lantern where oil-soaked tow burned to give light.
“This part—that is as I have seen it with my own two eyes.” The southerner traced a curved line of blue paint which meandered across the sheet. “My tribe crossed right here. It took us four weeks to build the rafts. And two were swept away by the current so that we never saw those on them again. We lost twenty sheep in the flood as well. But here— my brother scouted north and he found another curve so—” Arskane corrected the line with his finger. “Also—when the mountains of our land poured out fire and shook the world around them the bitter sea waters came in here and here, and no more is it now land —only water—”
The law man frowned over his map. “So. Well, we have lived for ten tens of years along the great river and know this of its waters—many times it changes its bed and wanders to suit its will. There are the marks of the Old Ones’ work at many places along it, they must have tried to hold it to its course. But that mystery we have lost—along with so much else—”
“If you have ridden from the banks of the great river you have come far,” Fors observed. “What brought your tribe into these eastern lands?”
“Whatever takes the Plainspeople east or west? We have the wish to see new places born in us. North and south have we gone—from the edges of the great forests where the snows make a net to catch the feet of our horses and only the wild creatures may live fat in winter—to the swamp lands where scaled things hide in the rivers to pull down the unwary drinker—we have seen the land. Two seasons ago our High Chief died and his lance fell into the hand of Cantrul who has always been a seeker of far lands. So now do we walk new trails and open the world for the wonder of our children. Behold—”
He unhooked the lamp from its supporting cord and pulled Fors with him to the other end of the tent. There were maps, maps and pictures, pictures vivid enough to make the mountaineer gasp with wonder. They had in them the very magic with which the Old Ones had made their world live for one another.