As slow going as the tracking across the lava flow went, Benet finally suggested that some of their number search along the grassy banks of the hard stone river where Grace would eventually have to cross once she reached its edge. Nodding in agreement, the men split into two groups, one on either side of the grassy verge, while Kip and Abel kept to the actual trail along the top. Their way was by far the slowest, and Abel, who could do nothing but watch and encourage Kip, was greatly relieved when one group that had ranged far ahead called back that they found her tracks in the grass. The entire party gathered at the lava’s edge while Kip examined the trail.
“Yes, it’s hers,” he announced finally. Abel, who already knew it was Grace’s trail they studied, wondered how much Kip understood, and how much of that understanding was of the Goddess. Probably more than Kip would ever realize.
The men surged on through the swath of verdant grasses and late-blooming flowers that rimmed the valley’s edge, glancing up repeatedly to the foothills that mounded up just beyond. Grace’s trail went unerringly toward the high country and Abel looked past the grassy foothills to the steeper, more rugged mountains beyond them. How far would she go? Would she stop when the sharp rocks had sliced her feet into bloody ribbons or when the nights became as cold as death to her lightly clad body? He remembered Pat’s conviction that Grace was alive and tried to find comfort in it. He hoped they would not find only a corpse.
The trail was easy to follow through the low foothills, marked clearly by the path of crushed grass. Some of the men remarked confidently how easy it would be at this rate to find her, and they relaxed into companionable banter and broke into their packs for bread or cheese to eat as they walked. There was little for Kip to do, now that the trail was so clearly defined, but walk along and he fell back among the men as he would have on a familiar hunting trek. Only Abel kept to the front, walking alone and silent.
He began to feel afraid. There was no reason for it, which meant to him that it was Goddess-sent, and that only made it worse. Around him the late-blooming flowers lifted their small faces to the sky; birds darted and chittered overhead; the men behind him laughed at some shared humor. There was no sobering omen to point to, only the great billow of clouds that roiled up from the high mountains, a common enough sight in fall. Yet in the warm afternoon sun, a chill gripped Abel. He cast about with his mind, sending out fingers of emotion; it was not for himself that he feared, nor for Grace. The answer came back strong and sad. It was for Pat. Not understanding did nothing to diminish the feeling. He knew, somehow, that his wife’s lifework was broken.
The men continued on, none but Abel aware of the strong undercurrent of despair. As the foothills mounded higher, the grasses grew thin and sparse, the higher, cooler air affording less moisture for growth. Grace’s trail became less distinct, and finally men at the front of the wedge called back Kip to come forward again to identify it. The discussion aroused Abel from his own thoughts, and he realized he’d been following his intuition only, not a well-marked trail. He returned to the men knotted around some indistinct tracks in the dirt and knew they would never find Grace.
“She’s headed up this way,” Kip said kneeling at the tracks and reading their direction. He pointed to a cleft in the hills ahead, a cleft that became a gully that climbed the high mountains.
“She can’t have gone far,” someone said. “Not without boots or shoes.”
“We’ll find her by nightfall,” one man predicted confidently.
“Unless that storm breaks.”
Everyone, including Abel, looked up. The clouds had continued to billow, rising now like a churning titan darkened to an angry gray, and the westering sun had tinged the darkness with an edge of fire. The clouds boiled even as the men watched, muscling out over the foothills, throwing wide, bilious shadows across the edge of the valley. Their weight too much now even for the high mountains, they began to lumber down the steep slopes, and their dark roiling ranks came at the men like an army of gray giants.
“Holy Goddess,” Abel swore, and some of the men made the sign over their hearts that they hoped would protect them. Kip, still on one knee, rose to his feet and without taking his eyes from the storm questioned Abel.
“What do we do now?”
Abel knew the answer even as he knew the result. “We go on until we can go no more. Keep to the trail; we’ll watch the storm.”
Obviously unnerved by the storm, Kip still was not surprised by Abel’s answer. He dragged his eyes from the menacing clouds and picked out the trail. Trusting in Abel’s leadership—and the Goddess’ favor—he led the way.
Talk among the men was infrequent now and only in hushed, uneasy voices. They followed Kip more slowly, one eye on the tracker and one on the intimidating storm. When the first lance of lightning struck the mountainside far ahead of them, they all stopped in silence and waited for the rolling crack of thunder that followed.
Small drops of rain began to fall.
Even those men with very little Goddess-sense began to feel anxiety. None of them had ever seen a storm quite like this. They edged up the hillside warily, half poised to run, as if the Goddess Herself might rip a mighty hole in the clouds and step out. They hunched against the rain and set their teeth against the increasing flashes of lightning, the rolls of thunder. Only the sight of Abel’s straight back ahead of them kept them moving forward. Even Kip, at Abel’s side, winced uneasily at the violent discharges of the storm.
The rain soaked through their clothes. They all shivered now, as much with cold as with fear. The ground seemed to shake beneath their feet as the footfalls of the lightning vibrated through the mountain. They climbed slowly higher and the black core of the storm lumbered down to meet them.
Abel noticed Kip casting about in uncertainty. “What’s wrong?” he asked, yelling above the howl of the storm.
Kip shook his soggy head. “I’m losing the trail,” he yelled back. “The rain is beating down the grass and pocking the earth; I can’t read it anymore.”
Abel stood by as Kip walked a small pattern above him, back and forth from the last clear track. The rest of the men grouped up behind, cold, frightened and disgruntled. They watched Kip halfheartedly and squinted up at the sky. They might have murmured unhappily to each other but Abel’s silence and the storm kept them quiet.
Abel stood moodily in the rain, hardly noticing the rivulets of water that ran down his face and coursed off his fingertips. He was cold clear down to his soul and felt in those darkest depths for an answer. Were they to go on? Were they to give up? He almost wished he could sleep, as if the Goddess might send him a dream to answer his questions. But She spoke so rarely to men. He might sleep forever and still not know.
Some of the men began to grumble among themselves. Watching Kip’s obviously fruitless efforts and Abel’s silent struggle gave them no comfort. They crossed wet arms over cold, soaked chests and stamped aching feet on the ground. They were afraid of the storm but afraid, too, to turn their backs on the Goddess’ temper. One fear kept them from giving in to the other. They milled about uneasily and shifted their eyes from the dark clouds to the faraway tower of the Ruins.
Suddenly the air flashed with a blinding white light, shocking their eyes in a moment of blazing, starlit intensity. At the same time, Kip screamed and fell to the ground. As the explosion of light struck their senses, the great crash and roar of sound ripped through the air and men fell panicked and screaming to the ground. The crescendo of light and noise shook them senseless, and when it ceased abruptly, the empty air quivered around their crying.
Abel sat where he had fallen—or been thrown—to the ground. The lightning had struck so suddenly and so completely that only when it was gone could his mind experience the shock of it and belatedly, the fear. And by then it was over. He sat dazed on the ground, staring sightlessly at the hillside in front of him.
One of the moaning, strangled voices behind him stopped suddenly, then cried out again in awe. “Look!”
The voice quavered and broke; Abel had no idea who it was. “Look at the stone. It burns!”
The men who could wrench their stunned minds from the shock of the lightning looked. An outcrop of stone ahead of them spewed thick smoke into the heavy, rain-soaked air, and a long, blackened gash split the rock. Although there was no flame, the stone seemed to burn magically and not even the rain could dissipate the smoke that boiled from the crevice.
Some of the men babbled in fear or keened as if it were they who had been struck. Abel rubbed his eyes with a shaking hand, then refocused them on the smoking stone.
Next to it, Kip lay without moving.
Abel rose unsteadily to his feet and went to Kip. The younger man was as still as death. He lay sprawled backward away from the stone, one arm flung across his eyes. The cloth was ripped from his arm and the flesh of it and that of his face above and below it was torn in jagged slices and pocked with shards of stone. The ragged flesh welled blood and Abel almost thought Kip’s face was gone. He knelt beside the tracker and carefully moved the arm off his face.
“Is he dead?” Benet’s voice came quietly over Abel’s shoulder.
“I don’t think so.” Abel saw a bubble of bloody foam quiver beneath Kip’s nostrils. Although the skin around his eyes had been shielded by his arm and was unbroken, smatters of blood zigzagged across it. The man’s face looked like raw meat. Abel thought that if by some miracle Kip lived, it would be another miracle if he were not blind.
The steady rain began to wash some of the blood away and then Kip moaned and moved slightly. He opened his eyes and the shock was still in them. His pupils were huge. His breath seemed to catch in his throat.
Abel was about to lift Kip from the ground when another blade of lightning knifed into the hillside less than a ridge away. The air shook with the immediate clap of thunder, and Abel knew there was no going on. He gathered up the bloody, moaning tracker and turned his gaze down the mountainside.
“Down there to the west,” he said, and motioned with his head, “there’s that large rocky outcrop. We’ll camp there until the storm passes.”
“It could be all night,” someone said.
“At least,” Abel agreed. He glanced skyward and blinked at the rain.
“And then?” It was Benet.
“Then,” Abel said solemnly, “we go home.”
CHAPTER 4
Those few days held as much confusion and bewilderment for Grace as they did for the others. Whipped at first by her own fear and unwillingness to believe, Grace ran from the valley. She ignored her own unprepared vulnerability and dashed across the lava escarpment, her cut bare feet leaving the trail of blood that the men would follow. Rationality had not returned when she stumbled up the first of the foothills, and she climbed doggedly into the high country and refused to look back. When blind dusk forced her to stop, she sank fearful and exhausted to the base of a quaking tree and fairly passed out into sleep. She awoke once that night, cold and hungry, and burrowed a nest in the fallen leaves of the quaking tree, ate her meager food, and fell again into sleep.
When she awoke the next morning, she sat up with panic prodding her. Scanning the valley below, she could see the dwarfed flash of the white, concrete Ruins in the early sun, but she pulled her eyes away quickly lest Orin could feel her gaze. She still refused to believe that she was, or could be, the Sibling, but with an irrational twist of logic, she was deathly afraid Orin could track her by his very sensitivity, and she caught her breath at the thought of her people swarming after her in crazed, misplaced adoration. The idea of her being the Goddess’ chosen and all the attendant consequences combined to chill Grace with a shudder of panic and when that panic threatened to paralyze her, her mind shut the thoughts away in a dark, sealed chamber. The only thing Grace understood with certainty was that she must get as far away from the valley as she could, and quickly. She forced her sore, battered body to its feet and looked for a direction to go.
This high country was all foreign to her. The men came here to hunt sometimes, but Grace had never been beyond the valley’s floor. The sparsely grassed hills and the quaking trees seemed very different up close from the view she’d had from the Ruins. Any other time she might have enjoyed exploring the new country but now her only thought was escape, and in the strange land she had no clear sense of where that might be. She noticed a line of trees that shaded a small stream, the stream meandering within the deepest cleft between the hills, and she struck off toward it. Caring nothing for its northwesterly direction—only that it led away from the valley—she chose its implied bounty compared to the barren hills. She drank from the stream and washed the dirty tear tracks from her face, then bathed her cut feet in its coolness. With an eye out for berries or plants she knew were edible, she began to walk.
All that day she traveled the stream’s course, following it through the high hills to the northwest. When, in late afternoon, the stream veered northeast toward its upstream birth in the higher cold country, Grace stayed to her original direction and walked the barren hills alone. Although she had passed the one night well enough in the high hills, she knew her thin sack dress and a nest of quaking leaves would not protect her for many nights at this higher elevation. She had to find a new home, down away from the high country, where the temperatures were milder.
She walked the clefts and ridges all that day and spent that night cold and sleepless, for there were no quaking trees with their insulating leaves into which she could burrow. Her second morning alone seemed bleak and purposeless, and she wandered slowly, aimlessly, hardly even having the will to eat when she found some ripening ground berries in her path. Her fear and her flight had robbed her of her normal enthusiasm but she would not allow herself to question and she would not allow herself to stop. She pushed on in her mindless wanderings.
Shortly after midday, she crested a ridge and had her first view of a new valley lying dark and green below. The sight provoked excitement and fear. Having spent time now in the high hills, she knew a sheltered valley was what she needed, but the apparent fruitfulness of the valley would no doubt draw bands of people and Grace thought she could never live among people again. The idyllic looking valley beckoned to her even as it frightened her. She spent several long, frustrated moments on the ridge weighing her choices before finally knowing she had no choice. She could not survive a winter in the high country. She must go down.
The hills dropped off toward the valley in an alarming grade, much steeper than the one she had climbed up two days before. Following rockslides and dry watercourses, she was able to clamber down with only a minimum of scrapes and cuts, which she accepted stoically over the thought of a more dangerous mishap like a broken bone. When at last, near sunset, she scrambled down the last wash and pushed through a screen of brittle thorn bushes, she stepped onto the cool, damp ground of the valley with a muted sense of gratitude. Perhaps the Goddess had not abandoned her after all. She had come safely to a new land and that land stretched before her. For the first time in days she felt some of her wonder return.
The long shadows of evening had covered the valley in a haze of deep purple and the shade of the forest canopy shifted to black amid the depths of the trees. Grace knew instinctively that this was not the time to push forward. She had no idea what strange beings and beasts might make their home in the forest and dusk was the worst time for sight. This was a blind time, a time of shadows and ghosts, when reality faded and fantasy took shape. She would find a place to sleep near the valley’s edge and go on in the full light of morning.
Ranging halfheartedly along a stream that ran the valley’s edge, she had almost resigned herself to another nest of leaves upon the hard ground when she found a dark animal den scooped from the side of the hill. She peered into the shallow, black hold, searching for signs of occupancy, but there was no challenging roar and no evidence of any animal’s recent passage. She crawled into the low cavity and curled her tired body within its walls, then dropped immediately into an
exhausted sleep.
Grace awoke on her third morning alone with little of the shock and pain of her first. Her body ached from the days of hard travel and her feet were still scabbed and raw, but she was toughening as well. She crept from the animal den and stretched, feeling the muscles of her body as she had not remembered doing ever before. There was a feral awareness within her, as if the Goddess’ light flooded each cell of her body and infused it with a calm excitement. She felt ready to meet this new environment to which the Goddess had brought her, ready to begin living her exiled, solitary life. For the first time in days she felt a tautness within her, an expectancy, a wonder, and she gazed off across the foreign valley with excitement.
Now as her third day began, she left the closeness of the animal den and stared out across the treed basin before her. This wide, shallow valley was much larger than the colony’s, much more crowded with growth. She felt a pleasant conviction that she would find everything she needed amid this rich basin. Looking skyward for the sun so as to keep to her original if arbitrary course, she noticed some small, billowing clouds churned up into thunderheads. It might be wiser to stay near the animal den and its crude shelter, but the valley beckoned and she was anxious to move on. Deciding she could find whatever shelter she needed under the canopy of the forest, she turned away from the hills and started out.
Walking through the forests and meadows of the valley was luxuriantly easier than walking had been in the hard packed, rock-strewn high country. With there being less need to select a soft landfall for each step, Grace was able to devote more of her attention to the area around her, and she marveled at the many unfamiliar varieties of trees and autumn-flowering plants. Erin would have loved this place with so many new plants to study and add to her collection of healing remedies. But Erin was not here. Grace concentrated instead on noticing the different trees, the unfamiliar ones with great, thick boles and far-shadowing branches. She had never seen trees so huge and reasoned that they were either of a variety that did not grow in the valley near the Ruins or were very much older than any trees there. Perhaps, she thought, these trees were older than the Bad Times, already growing when the great Shift took place, and somehow protected here from the cataclysmic upheaval. She touched one thick-barked trunk and stared up at it in wonder. She had never known any living thing that had existed before the Shift. In her mind the tree shone with Goddess-light, and she was awed by its being. It seemed a great and wonderful thing.
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