17
GREAT SPRING
The Yellow Desert passed by, ever on the right, alternating between flat and dunned. On the left, the scrub-covered landscape Ves called the Salt Hills rolled by in great white mounds, streaked Yellow with sand blown across the Great Road, specked with yucca and sage.
The river forked the morning of the fifth day, the left narrow and swift, the right wide and slow and shallow. Both sides were lined with rice paddies, sprawling estates sometimes visible in the distance beyond them. A town sat at the fork, but the Flowered Calf didn’t slow. Ves took the right, careful to stay in the center of the sluggish current.
After another ten days, the weather turned cool as the river bent east to run parallel to the brown, desolate mountains to the north, edging closer, day by day.
