drown, before rescuing it with his spoon.
Sariel raised a mug of water, regarding it suspiciously. For someone who’d supposedly crossed an ocean of it, he didn’t seem much inclined to drink the stuff. He tapped the mug. ‘Nothing stronger?’
‘Once a year, to celebrate the day when a whole year’s worth of radio messages have been entered in every journal, tome, history, codex and atlas racked on our shelves. Then we start again. Come back in eight months and I’ll be glad to serve you some rice wine. We’re holier than monks down here.’
Sariel reluctantly swigged from the mug while demolishing the meal’s remains, chasing crumbs with his knife. As mangy as the down-on-his-luck bard was, Carter felt a surge of sympathy for the sly old devil . Is this what people warn about when they talk of young minds being far-called? Wandering without finish across lands that never ended. Bereft of friends and family. Letting empty spaces and the almost infinite wilderness fill your mind with madness, until the day came when you turned up at a town and all you could talk was nonsense about riding fish and your good friends the stag and the hare? No job, no prospects, no kin. Was Carter looking at himself in sixty years times if he abandoned his stultifying apprenticeship? No, surely not. I’d be stronger than Sariel. It isn’t a crime to want to see more of the world than the dust on top of the guild’s atlases.
‘What did you find out there, Sariel? Did you really cross the ocean? See anything of the war on the far shore… travel through the Burn?’
‘Oh, surely,’ said Sariel, wiping crumbs out of his wiry white beard. ‘All the countries and kingdoms of the Burn at each other’s throats, killing and murdering for longer than most empires have stood. Lands as black as night, the very ground murdered by continual combat, unable to push out more than a single stalk of corn from their field, and that a sickly weak-whore weed of a plant. Brigands for princes and killers for police and cannibals for judges. It was in the Burn that I met Oak-legged Andal, his legs so powerful he could vault into the sky with a single bound. He tied sails to his arms and loved to glide so high, where the world’s pull is less than the tug of a feather. Together we fought an evil warlord, the Sultan Gram. Ah, the sultan! Never have you met such an impertinent, fool-born bombast. Gram had enslaved a host of nations, setting them to building a massive firework as tall as a mountain, a rocket to carry him and his court far from the Burn’s ruins. But Oak-legged Andal and I foiled the sultan’s scheme and paid him back for the millions of peasants the devil had worked to death constructing his grotesque folly. We sabotaged the rocket’s mechanism and when he mounted the vessel, it kept on going straight up.’
‘And what happened then?’
‘The firework melted, of course. Turned to a slag by the sun, and he fell back, landing in one of the neighbouring states. There, refugees who had survived the sultan’s predations fell upon him, tied him to a spit and cut slices of him off to feed their dogs, just as the sultan’s soldiers had done to their families.’
Carter felt a pang of disappointment. This old beggar probably hadn’t travelled further than the Marshes of Hellin.
‘There are no happy melodies sung in the Burn, only lamentations. Nobody in the lands is willing to honour the traditions of salt and roof to deserving strangers such as I.’
‘If you’re finished, Sariel, I’ll guide you to a cabin down the valley. If you’re found here by the others, I reckon it’ll be the tradition of salt and boot up the back-side that’s offered to you by my guild master.’
The mad old bard pushed his empty plate aside. ‘You lead, Lord Carnehan, and I shall follow. What did I say my name was again?’
‘Sariel.’
‘Yes, that’s it. So much to remember, so much that’s forgotten.’
‘If you’re still here tomorrow,