The Summer Palace by Lawrence Watt-Evans Read Free Book Online Page A

rainbow.
    This, Gnaw Gnaw explained, was all for their
summer
clothing; they did not wear so many feathers so openly when they made their way down to Winterhome. In winter they wore leather, or clothes purchased in Barokan, and kept their feathered garments packed carefully away. They didn’t want the lowlanders to realize just how plentiful the feathers really were, for fear of lowering prices.
    In addition to weaving and dyeing, women and children also gathered the greens and mushrooms that added a little variety to theUplander diet, and even did some gardening. When a few handy specimens of native species were pointed out, Sword tried to learn to recognize which were safe and which were poisonous, but was not very confident of his abilities.
Ara
meat in its various forms, and these women’s gleanings, made up virtually the entire Uplander diet.
    â€œWe ate
ara
eggs at the Summer Palace,” Sword remarked.
    â€œDid you?” Dancer was startled. “I’m sure the Wizard Lord paid a great deal for them.
Ara
eggs are rare and precious here. The birds normally breed in their winter home, far to the south, and we never see those eggs, only the chicks.”
    â€œSometimes, though,” Gnaw Gnaw told him, “a hen will lay here in our lands, out of season.”
    â€œWe take those when we find them,” Fist said. “They never hatch.”
    â€œBut they make excellent eating,” Stepmother said, licking her lips.
    Sword nodded. “They do,” he agreed.
    The men stared at him; apparently the fact that he had eaten
ara
eggs raised his status in their eyes. Most of the clan, Fist explained, never got to taste them; when they were found, the Patriarch would dole them out to a favored few clansmen as rewards.
    If he had known that they were such a delicacy, Sword thought, he might have paid more attention when he ate them. As it was, he had not really registered them as anything special, merely as very large and tasty eggs. He had thought their excellence had been due to the talent of the Wizard Lord’s cooks, but perhaps the eggs themselves had been responsible.
    The tour and the lectures continued. The clan’s water came from two sources. Wells were not practical here, no one had ever sunk a shaft deep enough to find water, but there were streams and rivers, and the Uplanders also used rainwater cisterns. Sword had not realized there were any rivers on the plateau; he did not entirely understand how they might form when the land was so flat, and he had assumed that if they existed, he would have seen waterfalls spilling over the cliffs, rather than the little trickles he was familiar with.
    The clanspeople found this particular ignorance very amusing indeed.
    â€œIt does rain here, after all,” Dancer said. “The water has to go
somewhere.
”
    â€œThe rivers all flow to the east and south,” Fist explained. “The plateau is flat, yes, but it isn’t
level.
It’s all very slightly tilted to the east. The western cliff-edge is the highest part of the world. When the rain falls, it all runs to the east, and gradually collects into bigger and bigger streams—water is scarce up in the west, but by the time you get a hundred miles from the cliffs, the biggest rivers are a hundred feet wide and as deep as I am tall.”
    â€œYou really did a remarkable job of missing them, if you didn’t see any on your way here,” Dancer said.
    â€œWell, he was walking east,” Fist said. “He was probably midway between two streams.”
    Everyone nodded agreement with this suggestion, which left Sword feeling unreasonably stupid, as if he
should
have seen them. He changed the subject, asking about the other water source Gnaw Gnaw had mentioned.
    The cisterns, Sword was told, were the strange squarish structures he had glimpsed in the distance on occasion. Each consisted of a large wooden frame, twice the height of a man, lined with what