The Carpet People

leave.’ He wandered off to one of the carts and pulled a blanket over his head.
    ‘What did he mean?’ said Snibril.
    ‘A nap,’ said Bane. ‘It’s like a short sleep.’
    ‘I mean about writing down too much. Who wrote down too much? What does that mean?’
    For the first time since Snibril had met him, Bane looked uncomfortable.
    ‘That’s up to him to tell you,’ he said. ‘Everyone has . . . things they remember.’
    Snibril watched him patting Roland absently on the muzzle. Who was Bane, if it came to that? He seemed to generate a feeling that made it hard to ask. He looked like a wild man, but there was something about him ... It seemed to Snibril that if a pot that was about to boil over had arms and legs, that would be Bane. Every move he made was deliberate and careful, as if he’d rehearsed it beforehand. Snibril wasn’t sure if Bane was a friend. He hoped so. He’d be a terrible enemy.
    He lay back with the belt in his lap and thought of wights. Eventually he slept. At least, it seemed like sleep, but he thought that he could still hear the camp around him and see the outline of Burnt End across the clearing. But he wondered afterwards. It seemed like a dream. He saw, in a little blurred picture hanging in the smoke-scented air, the Carpet. He was flying through the hairs, well above the dust. It was night-time and very dark although, oddly enough, he could see quite clearly. He drifted over grazing herds, a group of hooded figures – wights! – pushing a cart, a sleeping village . . . and then, as if he had been drawn to this spot, to a tiny figure walking among the hairs. As hedrifted down towards it, it became a person, all in white. Everything about it was white. It turned and looked up at him, the first creature he had seen who seemed to know he was there . . . and he sank towards those pale, watchful eyes . . .
    He woke suddenly, and the picture faded, while he sat up clutching the seven squares tightly in both hands.
    A little later they broke camp, with Pismire driving the leading cart.
    Glurk lay inside, white and shaken but strong enough to curse colourfully every time they went over a bump. Sometimes Fray rumbled far off in the south.
    Bane and Snibril, now wearing the belt around his waist, rode on ahead.
    The Carpet was changing colour. That in itself was not strange. Around the Woodwall the hairs were dark green and grey, but west in Tregon Marus they were a light, dusty blue. Here the green was fading to yellow, and the hairs themselves were thicker and gnarled. Some bore fruit, large prickly balls that grew right out of the trunk of the hair.
    Bane cut into one with his knife, and showed Snibril the thick sweet syrup.
    Later they passed far under some kind ofconstruction high in the hairs. Striped creatures peered down from their lofty fortress and hummed angrily as the carts passed beneath.
    ‘They’re hymetors,’ called out Pismire, while the noise thrummed above their heads. ‘Don’t take any notice of them! They’re peaceful enough if you leave them alone, but if they think you’re after their honey they’ll sting you!’
    ‘Are they intelligent?’ said Snibril
    ‘Together they are. Individually, they’re stupid. Hah! The opposite of us, really. Incidentally, their stings are deadly.’
    After that no one as much as looked at a syrup ball, and Bane spent a lot of time glancing upwards with one hand on his sword.
    After a while they reached a place where two tracks crossed. A cairn of grit marked the crossroads. On the cairn, their packs at their feet, sat a man and a woman. They were ragged creatures; their clothes made Bane’s clean tatters look like an Emperor’s robe.
    They were eating cheese. Both started to back away when Bane and Snibril approached, and then relaxed.
    The man wanted to talk. Words seemed to have piled up inside him.
    ‘Camus Cadmes is my name,’ he said. ‘I was a hair-cutter for the sawmill in Marus there. Isuppose I’m still a hair-cutter now, too, if anyone wants to employ me. Hmm? Oh. I was out marking hairs for cutting and Lydia here had brought out my dinner and then there was this sort of heavy feeling and then—’
    And then he’d got to a point where words weren’t enough, and had to be replaced by arm-waving and a look of extreme terror.
    ‘When we got back I don’t think there was a yard of wall left standing. The houses just fell in on themselves. We did what we could but . . . well, anyone who could just left.