L. Modesitt - The Chaos Balance

“Quiet,” Nylan said as he guided the mare toward the inn…and the road that led out of Henspa.

“Most places are in the morning.”

From the porch of the inn, broom in hand, Lessa waved.

Ayrlyn and Nylan waved back.

For a time, they rode without speaking toward the northwest end of the town, seeing only a handful of people-a woman struggling with laundry in two wooden tubs, a carter with barrels of something driving his wagon past them toward the square, and two children weeding a garden.

“Is it just male dominance,” mused the healer, “that makes this place the way it is?”

Nylan wondered if he should even think about answering.

She turned in the saddle. “Well? You have that look that says you’ve thought about it, and you aren’t about to answer unless someone hammers it out of you.”

Nylan looked down sheepishly. Weryl looked up with a grin of gums and teeth.

“Out with it. I’m not like Ryba, and I won’t let you hide your thoughts until we can’t talk at all.”

“Well…” Nylan swallowed. “Look at Henspa. One woman changed the town. She’s remarkable, but I’d say that you, Ryba, Istril, Huldran, probably others from the Winterlance , might have acted the same way. The culture here suppresses women, but do they have to accept that degree of suppression?”

“That’s a good question.” Ayrlyn was silent as they rode past a cot where a woman in tattered gray trousers and a faded brown shirt hoed a garden, bearing a child in a backpack. “Then, look at how many women made for Westwind.”

Nylan rubbed his chin, reminded again that he was still being taken for a woman from a distance because he had no beard. “Henspa’s more isolated. Do you think that…” He wasn’t quite sure what he thought.

“Oppression is usually less in any culture where people can leave. Maybe there’s something we don’t know. Maybe, except in places like Henspa, near the borders, there wasn’t anywhere to go.”

“Maybe…” There was something more, Nylan knew, but he couldn’t get his scattered thoughts to focus.

They neared the northwest end of Henspa, where the dwellings thinned out, and then gave way to recently tilled fields on the downhill side of the road, and meadows interspersed with woodlots on the right side.

By a house where a thin line of smoke streamed from the chimney, a youth in brown trousers and a patched shirt stood beside a wood pile, ax in hand. His eyes took in the angels, and their hair, and he looked away, then spat on the ground.

“You see a lot of that. At least, I did before,” said Ayrlyn.

“You think we ought to wear hats, or caps, like you did trading?” Nylan asked. “It’s the hair.” Absently, he let Weryl play with the fingers on his free hand.

Ayrlyn frowned, then shook her head. “I don’t think so. It’s not the same as trading. People would say we were trying to hide something.”

Nylan glanced at Weryl. “When our hair-color sets people off-”

“That’s just here. Once we get farther away from Westwind, they’ll have heard of the angels, but I don’t think the hair will be a problem.”

Nylan wondered, but he wasn’t going to argue with Ayrlyn’s feelings. She was usually right, and she had much more experience in traveling Lornth than he did.

He fingered his chin, then swallowed. “Do you think that the bandits attacked because they thought we were both women, and maybe I was an old woman?”

“That would make sense. Unfortunately.” Ayrlyn looked at the road ahead. “There are a lot of stereotypes in this culture, more than you’d expect to find, and I don’t know why.”

“Don’t most low-tech cultures have stereotypes?”

“Not this many.” Ayrlyn shook her head. “And it doesn’t fit an open agrarian society, which is pretty much what Lornth is. So we’re missing something, and that bothers me.”

Nylan nodded. Missing anything else bothered him, too. It bothered him a lot, because that meant more problems down the road, and the last thing they needed was another set of problems, especially when he didn’t know how long they’d be traveling or where they’d end up.

White puffy clouds, intermittently spaced, scudded out of the north and across the green-blue sky, occasionally obscuring the mid-morning sun, but not enough to keep Nylan from perspiring.

The road had carried them farther westward, and it had been more than two days since they had left the hills covered with ironwoods that had flanked the eastern side of the road. At least, so far they hadn’t seen any more ironwoods. A kay to the west of the road that generally wound northward was a line of trees that Nylan suspected followed a river. He blotted his forehead as the mare carried him over a low rise that overlooked a wide valley filled largely with cultivated fields.

On the right side of the road was a low stone pedestal bearing a kaystone. The ornate Anglorat lettering, surrounded by a chiseled frieze of grain sheaves, declared Duevek .

“Sculpted kaystones, now?” asked Nylan.

“Oooo…” murmured Weryl, drooling whitish fragments of travel biscuit across the front of the carrypak. Nylan was glad that Istril had sewed the pack from shipsuit synthetics, because it washed easily and dried quickly-both qualities a necessity to keep it from reeking.

Beyond the kaystone the road widened enough so that it would carry two wagons abreast, although it remained rutted and packed clay.

“Prosperous-looking town,” Nylan said.

“They’re the dangerous ones.” Ayrlyn’s eyes flicked ahead. On the low hillside on the northeast side of the town was a complex of white-walled buildings that resembled a Neorat villa-not that Nylan had ever seen one except on a screen.

“That has to be the local lord’s place-or whatever they call them.”

“Lords or holders-they’re addressed as ‘lord’ or ‘ser,’” said Ayrlyn.

Weryl waved a hand, and Nylan broke off another corner of the hard travel biscuit.

“You’ve given him a lot of biscuits.”

“Not that much. They expand in his mouth, and he spits out about half. They keep him awake and happy. That means we get to sleep more-or haven’t you noticed?”

“I’ve noticed him sleeping more at night. That doesn’t go for his father, the lecherous cad.” She grinned as she spoke.

“I haven’t heard any complaints.”

“Who would listen?”

Nylan tried not to grin. Best not to continue that conversation.

At the base of the hill, before entering Duevek proper, they rode past a white-plastered house with a red tile roof and a matching barn or stable. In the corral beside the stable were what looked to be hogs.

“Definitely prosperous,” Nylan said.

Dark splotches in the road showed where potholes had been filled, and even the smaller cots had been recently painted or plastered.

Nylan absently provided the water bottle to Weryl as the mare carried them toward the square ahead-the first true square Nylan had seen, with buildings on all four sides around a walled section of green grass and bushes from the center of which rose a statue of an armed man on a horse brandishing a hand-and-a-half blade.

A green-framed sign of a huge golden cat hung from a green bracket outside the painted white inn. Unlike the first inn Nylan had seen-Essin’s Black Bull-this sign had both the image and the name, if in old Anglorat, painted below in crisp green letters.

As they rode into the square proper, a thin man in a dark-green tunic peered out from the doorway of what appeared to be a cabinetmaker’s shop. His eyes lighted first on Ayrlyn, and then upon Nylan. Abruptly, he stepped out and shut the door-quietly-and scurried down the brick walk to the next structure, a narrow building that featured a basket and a halfkeg over the door. In turn, that door shut, and three figures-one of them the man in the green-fanned out across the square.