Westward, then, for a half-dozen or so days. Whereupon they would come to a long-dead river-bed wending northwestward, the valley sides cut and gnawed by the seasonal run-off from countless centuries past, gnarled now with sage brush and cacti and grey-oaks. Dark hills on the horizon where the sun set, a sacred place, the oldest maps noted, of some tribe so long extinct their name meant nothing.
Out onto the battered road, then, the city falling away behind them.
After a time, Karsa glanced back and bared his teeth at her. 'Listen.
That is better, yes?'
'I hear only the wind.'
'Better than ten thousand tireless contrivances.'
He turned back, leaving Samar to mull on his words. Inventions cast moral shadows, she well knew, better than most, in fact. But… could simple convenience prove so perniciously evil? The action of doing things, laborious things, repetitive things, such actions invited ritual, and with ritual came meaning that expanded beyond the accomplishment of the deed itself. From such ritual self-identity emerged, and with it self-worth. Even so, to make life easier must possess some inherent value, mustn't it?
Easier. Nothing earned, the language of recompense fading away until as lost as that ancient tribe's cherished tongue. Worth diminished, value transformed into arbitrariness, oh gods below, and I was so bold as to speak of freedom! She kicked her horse forward until she came alongside the Toblakai. 'But is that all? Karsa Orlong! I ask you, is that all?'
'Among my people,' he said after a moment, 'the day is filled, as is the night.'
'With what? Weaving baskets, trapping fish, sharpening swords, training horses, cooking, eating, sewing, fucking-'
'Telling stories, mocking fools who do and say foolish things, yes, all that. You must have visited there, then?'
'I have not.'
A faint smile, then gone. 'There are things to do. And, always, witch, ways of cheating them. But no-one truly in their lives is naive.'
'Truly in their lives?'
'Exulting in the moment, witch, does not require wild dancing.'
'And so, without those rituals…'
'The young warriors go looking for war.'
'As you must have done.'
Another two hundred paces passed before he said, 'Three of us, we came to deliver death and blood. Yoked like oxen, we were, to glory. To great deeds and the heavy shackles of vows. We went hunting children, Samar Dev.'