What a hole of a village! I’d never in my whole life seen a village like it, never would have believed a village could be so miserable.
The houses were round, brown, windowless, and stuck up on piles like watch towers, and underneath there was all suns of crap piled up – these weird huge pots, washtubs, rusty pans, wooden rakes, shovels... The ground between the houses was clay, scorched and trampled so it shone. And everywhere you looked, nets. Dry. And what it was that they could catch was beyond me: on the right, there was a swamp, on the left there was a swamp, and the whole place stunk like a garbage dump. A real hole. They’d been rotting there for a thousand years, and if it weren’t for the duke they’d have gone on rotting for another thousand years. The North. A wilderness. The inh
