The boy trundled the cart away at a run. Cugel took the pot, bread and wine to his bed and, loosing the rope, drifted high into the air.

Along the road at a run came the three farmers, followed by the boy. They halted and shouted: "Cugel! Where are you? We want a word or two with you." And one added ingenuously: "We wish to return your five terces!"

Cugel deigned no response. The boy, searching around the sky for the wheel, noticed the bed and pointed, and the farmers, red-faced with fury, shook their fists and bawled curses.

Cugel listened with impassive amusement for a few minutes, until the breeze, freshening, swept him off toward the hills and Port Perdusz.

CHAPTER IV FROM PORT PERDUSZ TO KASPARA VITATUS

1 ON THE DOCKS

A FAVORABLE wind blew Cugel and his bed over the hills in comfort and convenience. As he drifted over the last ridge, the landscape dissolved into far distances, and before him, from east to west, spread the estuary of the River Chaing, in a great sweep of liquid gunmetal.

Westward along the shore Cugel noticed a scatter of mouldering gray structures: Port Perdusz. A half-dozen vessels were tied up at the docks; at so great a distance Cugel could not distinguish one from the other.

Cugel caused the bed to descend by dangling his sword and boots over either side, so that they were seized by the forces of gravity. Driven by capricious gusts of wind, the bed dropped in directions beyond Cugel's control and eventually fell into a thicket of tulsifer reeds only a few yards inland from the river.

Reluctantly abandoning the bed, Cugel picked his way toward the river road, across soggy turf rampant with a dozen species of more or less noxious plants: russet and black burdock, blister-bush, brown-flowered hurse, sensitive vine which jumped back in distaste as Cugel approached. Blue lizards hissed angrily and Cugel, already in poor humour owing to contact with the blister-bush, reviled them in return: "Hiss away, vermin! I expect nothing better from such low-caste beasts!"

The lizards, divining the gist of Cugel's rebuke, ran at him by jerks and bounds, hissing and spitting, until Cugel picked up a dead branch, and by beating at the ground kept them at bay.

Cugel finally gained the road. He brushed off his clothes, slapped his hat against his leg, taking care to avoid contact with 'Spatterlight'. Then, shifting his sword so that it swung at its most jaunty angle, he set off toward Port Perdusz.

The time was middle afternoon. A line of tall deodars bordered the road; Cugel walked in and out of black shadow and red sunlight. He noticed an occasional hut halfway up the hillside and decaying barges along the river-bank. The road passed an ancient cemetery shaded under straggling rows of cypress, then swung toward the river to avoid a bluff on which perched a ruined palace.