'I don't think you will be able to ride Havok,' she said. 'We are about to head into difficult terrain.'
'Until such time comes, I will ride,' the Teblor replied. 'You are free to lead your own horse. Indeed, you are free to carry it over all terrain you deem difficult.'
Irritated, she headed towards her own horse. 'Fine, for now I will ride behind you, Karsa Orlong. At the very least I will not have to worry about being whipped by branches, since you'll be knocking down all those trees in your path.'
Boatfinder waited until both were ready, then he set out, along the north edge of the boggy glade, until he reached its end and promptly turned to vanish into the forest.
Karsa halted Havok and glared at the thick, snarled undergrowth and the crowded black spruce.
Samar Dev laughed, earning her a savage look from the Teblor.
Then he slipped down from his stallion's back.
They found Boatfinder waiting for them, an apologetic look on his grey-painted face. 'Game trails, Deliverer. In these forests there are deer, bear, wolf and elk – even the bhederin do not delve deep beyond the glades. Moose and caribou are further north. These game trails, as you see, are low. Even Anibar stoop in swift passage. In the unfound time ahead of which scant can be said, we find more flat-rock and the way is easier.'
Both interminable and monotonous, the low forest was a journey tangled and snarled, rife with frustration, as if it lived with the sole purpose of denying passage. The bedrock was close to the surface, a battered purple and black rock, shot through in places with long veins of quartzite, yet its surface was bent, tilted and folded, forming high-walled basins, sinkholes and ravines filled with exfoliated slabs sheathed in slick, emerald-green moss. Tree-falls crowded these depressions, the black spruce's bark rough as sharkskin and the needleless, web-thick branches harsh as claws and unyielding.
Spears of sunlight reached down here and there, throwing motes of intense colour into an otherwise gloomy, cavernous world.
Towards dusk, Boatfinder led them to a treacherous scree, up which he scrambled. Karsa and Samar Dev, leading their horses, found the climb perilous, every foothold less certain than the last – moss giving way like rotted skin to expose sharp-edged angular rock and deep-holes, any one of which could have snapped a horse-leg.
Sodden with grimy sweat, scratched and scraped, Samar Dev finally reached the summit, turning to guide her horse the last few steps.
Before them wound more or less flat bedrock, grey with the skin of lichen. From modest depressions here and there rose white and jack pines, the occasional straggly oak, fringed in juniper and swaths of blueberry and wintergreen bushes. Sparrow-sized dragon-flies darted through spinning clouds of smaller insects in the fading sunlight.
Boatfinder gestured northward. 'This path leads to a lake. We camp there.'
They set off.
No higher ground was visible in any direction, and as the elongated basolith twisted and turned, flanked every now and then by slightly lower platforms and snags, Samar Dev quickly realized how easy it would be to get lost in this wild land. The path bifurcated ahead and, approaching the junction, Boatfinder strode along the east edge, looking down for a time, then chose the ridge on the right.
Matching his route, Samar Dev glanced over the edge and saw what he had been searching for, a sinuous line of smallish boulders lying on a shelf of stone slightly below them, the pattern creating something like a snake, the head consisting of a wedge-shaped, flattened rock, while at the other end the last stone of the tail was no bigger than her thumbnail. Lichen covered the stones, bunching round each one to suggest that the trail-marker was very old. There was nothing obvious in the petroform that would make the choice of routes clear, although the snake's head was aligned in the direction they were walking.
'Boatfinder,' she called out, 'how is it that you read this serpent of boulders?'
He glanced back at her. 'A snake is away from the heart. A turtle is the heart's path.'
'All right, then why aren't they on this higher ground, so you don't have to look for them?'
'When the black grain is carried south, we are burdened – neither turtle nor snake must lose shape or pattern. We run these stone roads.
Burdened.'
'Where do you take the harvest?'
'To our gather camps on the plains. Each band. We gather the harvest.
Into one. And divide it, so that each band has sufficient grain. Lakes and rivers and their shores cannot be trusted. Some harvest yields true. Other harvest yields weak. As water rises and as water falls. It is not the same. The flat-rock seeks to be level, across all the world, but it cannot, and so water rises and water falls. We do not kneel before inequity, else we ourselves discard fairness and knife finds knife.'
