I had always thought of my family as living on the edge of the wild lands. Clearly, that was no longer so. Civilization had crept up and flowed around to encompass us. The land was becoming settled. I didn’t like it. I had taken pride in growing up on the far reaches of the civilized world, tough and schooled in survival in a land that offered no refuge to the weak. All that was changing now.
I reached the outskirts of Franner’s Bend as the sun was venturing toward the horizon. The Bend had changed even more than the countryside. When I’d visited it as a boy, the old fort had crouched in the bend of the river amid a hodgepodge of huts and a rudimentary market. Now ranks of baked-brick houses clustered on either side of the road as I approached the fort. The mud swallows that yearly invaded our barns and plastered their homes into the eaves were more competent builders. The roofs were roughly thatched with broom from the surrounding prairie.
Handcarts and foot traffic meandered along the road and down the alleys. Busy people still stopped and stared at me. One small boy shouted into the open door of a house, “Come see the fat man on a horse!” and a gaggle of children rushed to the threshold to watch me pass. The boy trotted along behind me for some way, gawking at me in amazement. I tried to ignore him. I’d have skirted this warren if I could, but the King’s Road went right through the mongrel settlement.
The road passed a roughly paved square centered on a well and bustling with commerce. The buildings that fronted it were painted ochre and white and yellow-brown, with roofs of baked tile. In an open-fronted building, workers were lifting long swathes of fabric from dyeing vats. Men were unloading sacks of grain from a heavy wagon and carrying them into the warehouse like a trail of ants. I dismounted to allow Sirlofty to water at the animal trough by the well. Almost immediately, I drew attention. Two women who had been filling their water jugs homes giggled and stared at me, whispering like girls. One gangly old man from the grain warehouse was even ruder.
“How many?” he shouted at me as he approached. I suspected he shouted because he himself was deaf.
“How many what?” I asked him as Sirlofty lifted his muzzle from the water.
“How many stone, my man? How many stone do you weigh?”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” I replied stiffly. I tugged at Sirlofty’s bridle, intending to lead him away. But the old man seized my sleeve.
“Come to my warehouse. I’ve a grain scale there. Come on. This way. This way.”
I tugged my arm free of him. “Leave me alone.”
He laughed loudly, pleased at my reaction. Workers gawked at us. “Look at him!” he invited them loudly. “Don’t you think he ought to come to my grain scales for a weigh?” One woman grinned and nodded widely. Another looked away, embarrassed for me, while two young men laughed heartlessly. I could feel the heat rising in my cheeks. As I set my foot in Sirlofty’s stirrup, it felt higher than it had that morning, and every aching muscle in my body screamed at the prospect of remounting.
One of the young men guffawed. “Look! His horse doesn’t even want to stand for being mounted by him.”
And it was true. The ever-mannered and deeply trained Sirlofty shifted away from me. He was clearly favoring one leg now.
“Ye’re goina lame him!” the other young man warned me in a sneering, city accent I recognized from Old Thares. “Pity the poor beast. You should carry him for a ways, gutbag.”
His warning was a true one. The only reason that Sirlofty would behave in such a way was if he were in pain. I stubbornly mounted him anyway. I rode away from the well and the square, ignoring the catcalls that followed me. As soon as I was out of sight, I dismounted and led my horse. He was not limping yet, but he was moving gingerly. My horse, my fine cavalla steed, could no longer bear my weight for a full day’s ride. If I rode him again tomorrow, he’d be lame before the day was out. And then what would I do? What was I going to do now? I was scarcely a day’s ride from my father’s estate and already into problems. The hopelessness of my situation suddenly crashed in on me. I was pretending that all would be well, that I could provide for myself away from my father’s largesse. Yet in reality, I’d never done that.
What were my options? Enlist in the military? I no longer had a horse that could bear me, one of the requirements to join the cavalla as an enlisted man. No foot regiment would consider me. I’d always thought that, if need be, I could live as the Plainsmen once had, taking what they needed from the land. In the last day, I’d discovered what the Plainsmen already knew: the open wild lands were vanishing. I doubted a cotton farmer would appreciate me camping in his field, and I knew that wild game retreated from areas where people kept cattle and sheep. It suddenly seemed that there was no place left in the world for me. I recalled Yaril’s wailed words from the night before: “What are we going to do?” The answer seemed more elusive now than it had then.
