Now a certain brightening of the diffused light reflected into the cart told him they were passing houses with snow-white walls; by this, with the time and distance, they must be in Sedad Vix city. Odors floated to him—salt water, fish, the spicy products of the south, not unpleasantly blended. The docks. Was the man going to make him a body by heaving him into the sea? To his futile angers was added that of not being able to see the old rascal’s eye—now the Blue Star had recovered its virtue under the witch-wife’s ministration—but there was time for little more of thinking, for the cart drew up with a cry to the mule, the driver got down heavily, his feet sounding on stones and then on plank. He was gone briefly; Rodvard felt the covering taken from him, and with a grunt, he was hoisted to a shoulder, stiff as a log. A whirling view of pallid dockside houses, the masts of a tall ship with her sails hanging in disorderly loops; he came down with a jar that shook every bone onto what appeared to be some structure projecting from the deck, where a red face surrounded by whisker looked into his own. One eye in the face was only a globule of spoiled milk; (the cold Blue Star on Rodvard’s heart told him the good eye held both cruelty and greed). “Yah,” said Redface. “The fish is cold.” “I tell you now, live as an eel. Fetch a mirror.” Redface reached out a dirty-nailed hand and pinched Rodvard’s cheek, hard. “Mmmmb. A spada’s worth of life. To save argument, I’ll give you two.” “Ey, look at him, a proved mechanician with a badge and all. I say to you, my old woman she has done with him so he’ll work like a clock, pick, pick, never mind time nor nothing. A gold scuderius; you should give me two.” They chaffered horribly over his body, while Rodvard lay moveless as a statue (thinking of how he was one, alas not cradled in light and speed like the Wingèd Man to whom he had compared Count Cleudi when Cleudi marked the resemblance between them; not upborne by spirit like the figure of the archer-hero; but a stiff corpse, subject of a sale, a carcass, a beef). He heard the chink of money passing; the one-eyed man gave an order that Rodvard was to be taken below, and someone carried him awkwardly with many bumpings down a ladder to a tight room smelling of dirty humans. He was tossed high onto a kind of shelf and left alone for a long time (thinking all the while of what the mule-driver had said about his being witched to work like a clock, and wondering whether it were true).