‘That is probably well.’
‘It heads north?’
‘Yes.’
Traveller thought about that as he took another sip of the appallingly foul drink. With a horse under him he would begin to make good time, but that might well take him right on to that demon, and he did not relish a fight with a creature that could slay thirty bandits and leave nary a footprint.
One child, who had been kneeling beside him, piling handfuls of dirt on to Traveller’s boot-top, now clambered up on to his thigh, reached into the gourd and plucked out a sliver of meat, and waved it in front of Traveller’s mouth.
‘Eat,’ said the son. ‘The meat is from a turtle that tunnels, very tender. The miska milk softens it and removes the poison. One generally does not drink the miska, as it can send the mind travelling so far that it never returns. Too much and lt will eat holes In your stomach and you will die In great pain.’
‘Ah, You could have mentiones that earlier.’ Traveller took the meat from the child, Me was about to plop it Into his mouth when he paused. ‘Anything else I should know before 1 begin chewing?’
‘No. You will dream tonight of tunnelling through earth. Harmless enough. All loud has memory, so the miska proves-we cook everything in it, else we taste the bitterness of death.’
Traveller sighed. ‘This miska, it is mare’s milk?’
Laughter erupted.
‘No, no!’ cried the father. ‘A plant. A root bulb. Mare milk belongs to foals and colts, of course. Humans have their own milk, after all, and it is not drunk by adults, only babes. Yours, stranger, is a strange world!’ And he laughed some more.
Traveller ate the sliver of meat.
Most tender-indeed, delicious. That night, sleeping beneath furs in a tipi, he dreamt of tunnelling through hard-packed, stony earth, pleased by its surrounding warmth, the safety of darkness.
He was woken shortly before dawn by a young woman, soft of limb and damp with desire, who wrapped herself tight about him. He was startled when she prised open his mouth with her own and deposited a full mouthful of spit, strongly spiced with something, and would not pull away until he swallowed it down. By the time she and the drug she had given him were done, there was not a seed left in his body.
In the morning, Traveller and the father went down to the abandoned Skathandi horses. With help from the mute dogs they were able to capture one of the animals, a solid piebald gelding of sixteen or so hands with mischief in its eyes.