The caravan only stayed a night; they were gone before I knew for sure that Kurnal was where I really wanted to stay, but then, that was more or less what I'd signed up for. In the morning, a pair of elders walked me around the town, introducing me to people, and trying to suss out what I was capable of. Of course, I said that I could mend items, and that turned into a first job almost immediately.

They introduced me to Miun, a potter that was obviously also not from around here. If most of the people around here seemed vaguely Arabian, she seemed vaguely east Asian, but with the kind of muddled features that suggested she might have been half of each. She'd been hired to do a number of tasks, but many of the creations broke when she fired them, either because she didn't know how to fire the clay correctly or because there was something to the clay that made it more difficult, the elders didn't know.

Miun gave me an untrusting look, and I steeled myself. I'd been thinking about this a little on the walk, but especially in a small town, I didn't want to make anyone feel superfluous or redundant. Really, in general, I didn't want people to resent me, but when there were only a few people around to offend, things could only possibly get worse; Kurnal had less than a thousand people, and any one of them would have more cachet than me, unless they were really on the town's shit list.

So when they asked me if I could fix the clay half-pipes that Miun had been asked to make, I made something of a production about it, making it look a lot more difficult and time-consuming than it was rather than snapping my fingers and making two dozen more in an instant. Everyone but Miun seemed relieved that I could do it, with an elder explaining that the pipes were needed to irrigate the fields, and that everything she'd produced had been broken of late. Miun looked at me, grumpy, but didn't object or try to explain anything. I promised to repair a few of them at a time, and we moved on to other things.

In addition to showing off that I could repair things, I also demonstrated the telekinesis that the bracers gave me, and this impressed one of the elders, who introduced me to Kalam, a fruit grower whose tall trees were mostly filled with something like pears. Kalam smiled at me openly, and we walked to the nearby trees, where he pointed up.

"We use ladders and climbers to get most of the fruit," he said, "but some of the high pieces won't fall until they're overripe. We can still press those to make cider or brandy, but even that is better with properly ripe fruit."

Again, I overstated how much trouble it was, but everyone seemed much happier that way.

On the topic of more general things that needed doing, they also introduced me to Nim, a stonecutter who had been working long hours maintaining and expanding some stone-paved roads. It was tedious labor--cutting stone to size and shape, digging a similarly sized hole, positioning the stone, and filling carefully back in around it. I was more interested in the quarry he ran; he told me that much of the stone around here was sandstone, but the high plateau I'd seen coming in was partly an old eruption of a denser, harder stone, and there were remnants of the same scattered around. Long ago, people had tried to mine the mountain, but found it a lot of struggle with few rewards. He was still willing to dig out and cut some of the other stone nodules, since their dark color was a nice contrast to the lighter sand, dirt, and sandstone around here, but it was tiring.

Between the three, I figured I could find enough labor to pay for food and basic shelter for now, which also brought me to the question of said shelter. The elders conferred, and admitted that the best chance of having any privacy was probably with a goat herder on the edge of town, whose daughter had died a couple years before. There was still a spare room there, separate from the parents', though it would need fixing up.

That goat herder was Malla, a middle-aged woman who wore the passage of time on her features like a heavy coat. I got the impression that she had married young and had only one child, making her probably in her forties at the oldest, but she could have been sixty for the gray hair and wrinkles. She agreed easily to lodge me at a price I could afford, and that was more or less enough for the two elders to declare their work done for now.

Malla showed me her daughter's cottage, but saying the place needed work was being rude; it was in good shape, the roof showing no signs of substantial rot or leaks. Once I was left alone, a quick pass through with Fabricate repaired some old nails and merged the roof together a little more cleanly, but it didn't take much more than that to keep things sound. The bedding was trash, admittedly, and I used Fabricate with abandon to turn a years-old dusty straw-stuffed mattress into something workable. If only for show, I'd probably want to find a new mattress or at least new stuffing, but that was just me hiding what I was capable of, and only as long as I wanted to hide it.

Aside from that, there was no furniture, not even an old stool or dresser. I suppose there had been, but it might have been sold or taken by the mother over time; it didn't matter, not for me. I did a last check on my feet--they were achy, but would be fine--then, for lack of another immediate task, went out to look at the goats.

They were woolly sorts, smallish, and they'd no doubt done quite a job keeping the grass and shrubs in the area short, as goats were known to do. Aside from the horses, they were only the second animal I got anything like close to, and they seemed... familiar enough, at least, in form. A young kid saw me watching and moved over towards where I was, tossing its head at me and sending a thought at me that I didn't immediately understand, even once the Bracer translated the thought.

Baby (child)?

I frowned, wondering if the young goat confused me for the woman's dead daughter, but it wouldn't have known about the place's past, not at its age. I knelt down and offered a hand through the fence, but when the goat got close, it suddenly backed off.

Baby... Nice? Oh, no.

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It looked at me sideways for a moment, trying to determine if it should run, and I didn't force anything with the bracers, just tried to see if it would accept me as I was.

Eventually, the goat reached out to me, sniffing my offered hand, but it didn't try again to mentally connect. I considered the question, gently touching my bracers, and they gave me a faint impression of a thin web of lines connecting the young goat to others in the family. I cocked my head to the side, considering. Were the goats faintly psychic? Did it pick me up and wonder if I was part of the family, just from that?

I ended up leaving without an answer, getting supper at one of only two available diners--the one that wasn't the inn I'd stayed in last night. That place had patrons, and food, but I'd not been a fan of either.

The tavern I tried tonight was a slightly rowdier place, and seemed to be the only real place for any of the single people in town to eat or drink. There was no individual seating, so I found myself on a long table between unfamiliar people, which was definitely not immediately comfortable, but across the table and one aside was a moderately attractive young woman who noticed me sitting down with a cocked head, leaning in almost immediately.

"You're the new guy, aren'tcha?" When I nodded, she nodded back. "I'm Ella, and this is Jurro and Fizz," she gestured to the one across from me and the one next to me and across from her. "The fellow on your other side is Murra, and you'll soon find out why people don't want to sit by him."

Murra slammed down his mug and turned to glare at her. "Shut it, Ella," he warned, lifting a hand to point a finger. "You're always talking about it like people avoid me. Everyone has gas sometimes, and the mutton here--"

Jurro snorted. "Everyone has gas, but yours is the worst, Murra. It stinks like Malla's goats wrapped in dead fish."

A server interrupted, dropping plates before spotting me and leaning over the two across from me. "Whaddya want?"

I paused, not sure what was even on offer, and said, "Water, and whatever's cheap."

The server gave me a look, and retreated. The others around me turned to look at me, and I wondered if what I said was dumb, somehow.

"When you have the money," said Jurro, "you'll definitely want the ales, or at least a good brandy. The water is fine for travelers, but not much to live off of."

Ella snoted, and gestured at her neighbor with a thumb. "Jurro drinks ale like a fish," she says, lifting her own frothy mug of something and taking only a sip. "Don't let him tell you what's for drinking, unless you have a whole stack of golds to go through. Mayor's nephew, that one, and he gets some cushy jobs that pay him well enough--"

"Oh, come off it, Ella," snapped Jurro. "You'd drink more if you had the coin, as we all would."

Ella grimaced into her mug. "Not all of us need as much booze as you do to get drunk, and if a pretty young thing like me was sauced every day, well," she snorted, "I wouldn't still be single at my age, I think."

Next to me, Fizz snorted. "If you got as sauced as Jurro does even once a week, by now someone would have killed you for your singing voice alone."

Ella stood and made a gesture like she was going to punch Fizz, but sat down, clearly not having meant it. "I have a lovely singing voice," she said, in the kind of frazzled voice you get from yelling over people while drinking. "It's the lyrics I don't remember." She nudged the person on her other side, who I hadn't been introduced to. "Hey, Harla, how's the--"

Harla slammed down her own mug of ale and, without waiting for Ella to finish, started belting out a song, in a remarkably clear voice:

Well I sent my line a-fishing, and the fishes sent for me

Along the muddy waters on the banks of He-la-ti

The fish it gave a struggle and the struggle gave it me

I found myself a-swimmin' in the muddy He-la-ti

A dozen voices repeated the last line, and Harla took a break only long enough to swallow another mouthful of ale.

I thought myself a rancher but the ranch it wrangled me

I knew that there'd be trouble once the first bicau were free

Though I tried to tell 'em where to go, they turned around with glee

And then around the virgin veld, the bicau herded me

Most of the room, this time, repeated the chorus, and Harla grinned at someone in the pause.

I thought I'd be a farmer but the farm it planted me

I spent my years a-plantin' twenty rows of kipear trees

I'd hoped to see a harvest after all the years of need,

But it weren't long at all 'afore the farm it planted me

She sat down even before the rest repeated the line, tearing into some kind of meat like she was suddenly starving. Ella, for her part, was cackling, and she'd tried a time or two to sing along, but she didn't have the voice for it, nor the memory, I think.

"Is that what you wanted her to sing?" I asked, once the noise had died down a bit--and there was a bunch of laughing and shouting after the brief musical interlude.

"Ah, yeah," Ella almost had to shout to be heard over the din, or at least she thought so. "It might as well have been written for me, seein' as I can't do anything right." She picked up her mug, made a face at it, then took a much larger mouthful of it, coming away with a bitter look on her face. She coughed a time or two, and Jurro chuckled in her general direction, already looking like he might've been drunk, but Ella pushed him away. "Can't cook, can't hunt or ranch, can't sew or spin thread. When I was a girl they gave me a hoe and a spade and told me to dig a garden and I ended up hanging from the barn in my knickers bleedin' from my shins." She snorted. "Though part of that was the desert fox, not that anyone believes me about that."

"I'm pretty sure you were just up there screwin' off," Fizz said tiredly, "Since there weren't tracks anyway."

"There were tracks," said Ella quietly, but not quietly enough to not be heard, but that seemed to have taken the will to talk out of her.

Just as well, since I wasn't really the sort for all the small-talk. I supposed I'd get used to it, but I was a bit overwhelmed. It was about that time that I was delivered a bowl of soup and a mug of water, and paid for both. The soup... well, it wasn't nothing, and that's about all you could say about it. It clearly had some vegetables and other juices, but it was barely food. Given the cash I had, I might be able to afford a bit more, but... it was worth saving in case I needed something.

Other talk picked up in the meantime, and Murra passed gas, which was only about half as foul an odor as Ella'd promised, though it was loud and disgusting. I ignored it, ate, and when nothing else seemed really to be of interest, departed back to my little cottage. I looked up at the clear sky above as I walked, eyes looking over the unfamiliar stars and wondering just which the locals would have grouped into constellations, before finally ending up back at the goat farm.

Because the area around was well lit from the stars and a bit of moon, I could see a shape along the side of the road, and two eyes--a fox or wild dog, I thought, from the size and shape of it. I didn't stop, keeping an eye on it as it kept an eye on me, but eventually it turned and dashed away into some scrub bushes a little ways off.

That encounter got me thinking about the nomads, and I resolved to mention them to someone in the morning, but it didn't seem like it was worth talking about now--especially if the others in the caravan hadn't said anything.

For now, the straw mattress was itchy, but... passable.