A week later, Ritva Havel restrained an impulse to rub at her buttocks. When you’d been riding as hard and as long as they had, your tailbone kept trying to burst into sight and wave itself.

“Christ, I’m sore,” Ian said, and stood in the stirrups and rubbed himself vigorously.

So much for self-restraint, she thought sourly.

They were by themselves, unless you counted two remount-packhorses each and a pair of collies and a flock. The horses were well trained, though they had them on leading reins here on this crowded road near the city. The dogs were extremely well trained, enough to make her feel awkward; she could swear they gave her disgusted looks sometimes. The worst of it was the sheep. Two hundred and sixty of Rancher Woburn’s animals, driven all the way from the Camas Prairie.

Two hundred and fifteen now, as they approached the capital city. The rest had died in ways that often displayed a certain strain of idiot genius; eaten by wolves or coyotes or cougar was the simplest, ranging up from there to one that had managed to crawl into a culvert just before some rain, get stuck, and drowned. Though the runner-up had strangled itself reaching for a leaf by sticking its head into the fork of a young aspen and struggling until it choked.

The grilled ribs and chops had been some compensation. Now they had to keep them from spilling off the road; the suburbs and buildings on the west side of the Boise river had been torn down, like many such around stillinhabited cities and towns, but they had been torn down much more thoroughly , including tearing up foundations. Right now they were a dense network of tidy little truck-garden patches, irrigated by canals and wind-pumps and green with a dozen varieties of fruit and vegetables and small pastures for milch cattle. She didn’t want to think of the legal complications of letting the sheep stray, in this rule-obsessed land.

“How on Arda do sheep ever live long enough to breed?” she said rhetorically, after they had headed off a mass break towards rows of carrots whose tops showed green against the dark soil. “Why doesn’t someone kill them, for that matter? Not to eat, just because they’re so stupid and annoying?”

They were moving very slowly behind a convoy of wagons, big ones drawn by oxen and loaded with—ironically enough—bales of raw wool. The greasy lanolin-rich smell was unpleasant, but not impossibly so. The road was mostly pre-Change, with holes in the pale aged asphalt neatly patched or filled with pounded crushed rock; they kept up the old custom of traffic taking the right here, and the left was fairly densely packed, which meant they couldn’t take the flock around the great vehicles and their crawl.