Glory nodded without speaking.
* * *
The first sign they had of the village was the trees—orderly plantings of fruit trees, their branches full and heavy with bird-pecked autumn fruit. The ground at their roots was littered with windfalls that soured the ground, and the horses slowed, nosing among the bounty. Even Kurfan gave one of the apples an experimental bite. Glory dismounted and stood, stretching, looking around.
Beyond the orchards were a series of patchwork gardens, the earth straggly with the green leaves of plantings untended for many seasons and intermixed with the tall stalks of opportunistic weeds. The poles set in the middle of some of the gardens leaned crazily in the buckled earth. Some of the whirligigs of folded paper that had been tied there as scare-crows still dangled from them, drab and draggled by the rains.
Surrounding the garden plots were a series of low stone walls, no more than two feet high, and as Glory's eyes adjusted, she could see that in many places the walls were buckled and charred. Here and there half a brick wall stood, or some tumbled timbers, and Glory realized that some of the "walls" were the foundations of buildings, and that there had once been a large and prosperous village here, now gone.
She wanted to ask where the village was, but that would be trivial and stupid. Her eyes could tell her where the village was. It was here, all that was left of it. It was just that part of her hoped that by asking the question she'd get a different answer than what she knew to be the truth.
She didn't understand at first why so many of the gardens had been dug up and replaced with neat tamped mounds over which weeds and grass ran anarchic riot, but it was only a moment before she saw the place where a pit had been dug and not refilled. These were graves, all of them, mass graves, dug to house too many dead. The Allimir of Mechanayas had been laid to rest in their own gardens.
She left her horse to browse among the apples, and walked through the orchard toward the village beyond. She did not look back to see if Belegir followed. She did not walk over the mounded gardens, or near the last still-open grave. She had no desire to see what it contained, nor to know why its dead remained unburied.
The sun was warm on her back, illuminating the landscape with a shadowless noontide glare. Much of the village had burned, it was true, but as much more looked as if it had been simply blasted out of existence. One building was nothing more than a spray of bricks scattered on the ground, as if some giant had just come along and shoved it over. From what she could see and imagine, Mechanayas looked as if it had started life as one of those doll-sized ideal English villages that Anne-Marie liked to collect. Everything was built to Allimir scale, giving the remains of the tidy little houses around her the air of having been built for hobbits. Dead hobbits.
A sudden movement startled her, and she squealed and jerked in surprise, but it turned out to be only a lean and suspicious chicken startled into flight by her presence. The Allimir had gone to their gardens, but it seemed their livestock had been left behind, to fend for itself as best it could. Those wary and clever chickens that had survived seasons of freedom and predators still haunted their ancestral homes.
Here and there some things remained, untouched by what had slain Mechanayas. A gate in a stone wall, carved and painted blue. A tile stove, half-sunk into the earth and surrounded by poppies, with no sign of the house that should have contained it. A building's interior wall, the exposed beams shaped and polished, the small-paned window of colored glass, unbroken in its painted carven frame, casting pools of green and blue, gold and red, upon the weeds that grew up through the stones of the floor.
She kept seeing movement out of the corner of her eye, but every time she turned it was gone. Trick of the light? More chickens? Survivors? She stopped and listened, but heard nothing other than scraps of birdsong and the whistle of wind over the stone. After a pause, she walked on.
The Allimir village had been built along medieval lines, with what must once have been shops and houses set around a town commons with a well and a watering trough beside it. Unconsciously she'd expected the destruction to get worse the closer she got to the center of the village, but instead there were more partially intact houses—as if whatever had come for the villagers had worked its way inward—and the central green itself was untouched, though the grass had gone weed-choked and yellow. There was a tree growing beside the well—an enormous tree, of village smithy proportions. It looked enough like an oak to be one, and its bark, as far as she could reach, was smoothed and polished by generations of caressing hands.
Again Glory had the creepy sense of being watched and measured, but saw nothing. She certainly had nothing to fear from the Allimir, if Belegir and the others were any indication, and if there were anything in all the Land of Erchanen capable of even using harsh language in an adversarial situation, Belegir would certainly already have enlisted it in the fight to save his people.