AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Don't you ever tell the truth?”
“Do you?” Amschat grinned his goldmine grin, but his eyes were not smiling. “Why do I find you on my fleeces? Amschat is no kidnapper. There will be people at home who will worry, yesno?”
“I expect Granny will come looking for me,” said Esk, “but I don't think she will worry much. Just be angry, I expect. Anyway, I'm going to Ankh-Morpork. You can put me off the ship -”
“- boat -”
“- if you like. I don't mind about the pike.”
“I can't do that,” said Amschat.
“Was that a lie?”
“No! There is wild country around us, robbers and - things.”
Esk nodded brightly. “That's settled, then,” she said. “I don't mind sleeping in the fleeces. And I can pay my way. I can do -” She hesitated; her unfinished sentence hung like a little curl of crystal in the air while discretion made a successful bid for control of her tongue. “- helpful things,” she finished lamely.
She was aware that Amschat was looking slightly sideways at his senior wife, who was sewing by the stove. By Zoon tradition she wore nothing but black. Granny would have thoroughly approved.
“What sort of helpful things?” he asked. “Washing and sweeping, yesno?”
“If you like,” said Esk, “or distillation using the bifold or triple alembic, the making of varnishes, glazes, creams, zuumchats and punes, the rendering of waxes, the manufacture of candles, the proper selection of seeds, roots and cuttings, and most preparations from the Eighty Marvellous Herbs; I can spin, card, rett, Hallow and weave on the hand, frame, harp and Noble looms and I can knit if people start the wool on for me, I can read soil and rock, do carpentry up to the three-way mortise and tenon, predict weather by means of beastsign and skyreck, make increase in bees, brew five types of mead, make dyes and mordants and pigments, including a fast blue, I can do most types of whitesmithing, mend boots, cure and fashion most leathers, and if you have any goats I can look after them. I like goats.”
Amschat looked at her thoughtfully. She felt she was expected to continue.
“Granny never likes to see people sitting around doing nothing,” she offered. “She always says a girl who is good with her hands will never want for a living,” she added, by way of further explanation.
“Or a husband, I expect,” nodded Amschat, weakly.
“Actually, Granny had a lot to say about that -”
“I bet she did,” said Amschat. He looked at the senior wife, who nodded almost imperceptibly.
“Very well,” he said. “If you can make yourself useful you can stay. And can you play a musical instrument?”
Esk returned his steady gaze, not batting an eyelid. “Probably.”
And so Esk, with the minimum of difficulty and only a little regret, left the Ramtops and their weather and joined the Zoons on their great trading journey down the Ankh.
There were at least thirty barges with at least one sprawling Zoon family on each, and no two vessels appeared to be carrying the same cargo; most of them were strung together, and the Zoons simply hauled on the cable and stepped on to the next deck if they fancied a bit of socialising.
Esk set up home in the fleeces. It was warm, smelled slightly of Granny's cottage and, much more important, meant that she was undisturbed.
She was getting a bit worried about magic.
It was definitely getting out of control. She wasn't doing magic, it was just happening around her. And she sensed that people probably wouldn't be too happy if they knew.
It meant that if she washed up she had to clatter and splash at length to conceal the fact that the dishes were cleaning themselves. If she did some darning she had to do it on some private part of the deck to conceal the fact that the edges of the hole ravelled themselves together as if . . . as if by magic. Then she woke up on the second day of her voyage to find that several of the fleeces around the spot where she had hidden the staff had combed, carded and spun themselves into neat skeins during the night.
She put all thoughts of lighting fires out of her head.
There were compensations, though. Every sluggish turn of the great brown river brought new scenes. There were dark stretches hemmed in with deep forest, through which the barges traveled in the dead centre of the river with the men armed and the women below - except for Esk, who sat listening with interest to the snortings and sneezings that followed them through the bushes on the banks. There were stretches of farmland. There were several towns much larger than Ohulan. There were even some mountains, although they were old and flat and not young and frisky like her mountains. Not that she was homesick, exactly, but sometimes she felt like a boat herself, drifting on the edge of an infinite rope but always attached to an anchor.
The barges stopped at some of the towns. By tradition only the men went ashore, and only Amschat, wearing his ceremonial Lying hat, spoke to non-Zoons. Esk usually went with him. He tried hinting that she should obey the unwritten rules of Zoon life and stay afloat, but a hint was to Esk what a mosquito bite was to the average rhino because she was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don't apply to you.
Anyway, it seemed to Amschat that when Esk was with him he always got a very good price. There was something about a small child squinting determinedly at them from behind his legs that made even market-hardened merchants hastily conclude their business.
In fact, it began to worry him. When a market broker in the walled town of Zemphis offered him a bag of ultramarines in exchange for a hundred fleeces a voice from the level of his pockets said: “They're not ultramarines.”
