“No,” he exclaimed. “It can’t be, she’d never come herself, not with the city burning.”
“No? What can she do about the city but put it under siege and wait for reinforcements from Portland? She might as well come after us. Pride, you know. And I imagine the touch of using Tomas to track me down proved irresistible.”
Wordlessly, Robin took the binoculars from his saddle and focused on the specks ten miles away, but Dian did not need glass lenses to see her dog. He was there, on a long lead, no doubt, fastened to the wrist of Captain Breaker. She turned back to the ridge, and after a few minutes Robin followed.
They made it past the slide, and once they had regained firm hillside Robin called a halt and made her eat some bread and dried fruit. It tasted like sand, but she obediently chewed and swallowed while she sat with her eyes studying the opposite hilltop. Robin ate silently and put the food in the bag when they had finished, then came to stand beside her.
“So,” he said. “You know the dog better than I do. How do we shake him? Short of flying?”
“We don’t. I take up a position on that hill with the gun. You go on ahead.”
“No.”
“Oh, Robin, please. No heroics. There’s only the one rifle. I’m a better shot than you. I can pick off . . . I can kill Tomas and the Captain when they come up to the base of the slide, and probably three or four others, depending on how they’re arranged. Chances are better than even that without her they’ll turn back home. Even if they don’t, they’re still three hours behind us. I’ll catch up with you and we can set up a second ambush. Guerrilla warfare.”
“No.”
“Robin, damn it—”
“I have the right to choose, Dian,” he said evenly, and she could not insist, could not help seeing that were she to force him, it would be as if he had not left Ashtown, and she—she would be stamped irrevocably as an Angel. She squinted at the opposite ridge for a moment, and then held out her arm.
“This wand,” she told him. “Its charge stays full for over a week. Everyone believes that a wand only works for its owner, but actually all it needs is for her thumb to be on the indentation—see here? This is the power adjustment; top is full power. At that setting it kills, fast. They say there’s no pain. Surer than a rifle bullet. You just have to be sure my thumb is on the dent. Doesn’t matter if I’m alive or not. It should have two minutes of full power. One second kills.” She snapped the wand back into place, and looked up at him to see if he had understood. He had. Neither of them would return to Ashtown. Not alive.
Forty minutes later they were on the opposite knoll. Robin led the horses down the hill away from the creek to tether them while Dian trimmed the brush to make an overhanging shelter. She lay down at full length under them, grunted at the pain in her breast, and set about creating a bowl for the globe of her stomach in the hard ground. She had to settle for a doughnut of branches, and then when that threw off her position at the rifle, she devised more rocks and branches to hold her elbows up at the proper level. Robin returned with a pair of blankets, which helped, and shoved in beside her under the scrub. He set out their bottles and a leather bag of food, took up the binoculars and lay quietly next to her, looking downstream while she fiddled with the telescopic sight and the props. She felt as if she were lying on a basketball and her breast burned like the living hell, but it was the best she could do. She brushed the hair back from her forehead and took a long pull from her water bottle, then she too lay quietly. The air was hot and still, and after the months of breathing concrete and tarmac, the odors were sweet and subtle.
“You know,” she mused after a while, “I was lying under a bush with a pair of binoculars when this whole thing started.”
“This is not the end,” said Robin, without taking his eyes from the binoculars.
“You don’t think so?” she said softly, and for the seventh time reached out to rearrange her meager supply of long bullets. He did not answer, and they lay, silent and invisible companions, and waited for the end to begin.
It did not seem long, although it was nearly an hour, before Robin stirred.
“Something startled a jay.”
Dian wiggled her fingers rapidly to limber them up and bent to her gun. One minute stretched out, two, infinitely slow now, and when large and abrupt figures loomed into her scope it was a shock, as if the already familiar arrangement of boulder, brush, and tree had suddenly given birth to a dragon. She shook her head free of all thoughts, and put her finger on the trigger.
Tomas. Tomas first, a stout lead connecting her to—damnation, not the Captain! An Angel, but not Breaker. Donna, usually in charge of the duty roster? What the hell was she doing out here, a city girl? Dian ran the scope across the growing crowd of Angels and strangers milling about excited on their horses, gesturing and miming their exclamations at the landslide, until suddenly a ripple spread through them like a boulder dropped into a pond and Captain Breaker was there. The Captain, looking—sweet Mother of God, look at her face. Rage, controlled but visible, the lust for murder mixed with pleasure and anticipation. And complete confidence. Dian shivered at the thought of what those hands would do to her, and to Robin, and waited for an opening.
None came. The women moved up the hillside, Tomas disappeared and reemerged, never near the Captain, never both of them clear, and it had to be both. Agony, frustration, near premature tightening of her forefinger before Robin spoke.
“They’ll have to follow our way up the ridge, and they’ll be strung out then. It’s further away, though. Will that make a difference?”
Dian released a breath, let go of the gun, eased her rigid neck.
“No problem,” she said. “No problem.”
She squirmed backward out of the bushes, got to her feet, went off to urinate in the brush, drank some water, thought of nothing at all. After fifteen minutes she went back to her hiding place, rested the smooth gun comfortably into her shoulder and her cheek, and began the last wait. Her mind remained mercifully blank, with no past, no future, only necessity and the open hillside across from her, and the gnats whining in her ears.
Forty-five minutes after leaving the slide, the pursuers appeared on the hillside. Tomas was surging up the hill in the lead, bounding eagerly at the freshness of Dian’s scent, his muscles yanking at the arm and shoulder of the human he was yoked to as she stumbled up the rough slope trying to keep up with him. A few riders were still on their horses, most were on foot. No sign yet of the Captain. Tomas was halfway up the open patch of hillside, eighteen or twenty women straggling behind him. Dian and Robin both lay taut, waiting for Breaker to appear. Tomas was twenty yards from the first trees now. No Captain. Fifteen yards. A drop of perspiration ran down Dian’s face, and she dropped her head to her sleeve to clear her eyes. Robin stiffened and Dian snapped back up to see her Captain’s unmistakable gray stallion with a pair of legs behind his belly. Too canny, the Captain. It would have to be Tomas first, then, and hope for the best. No thinking now, and Dian shifted to the dog, her dog, the dog she had bred and helped to whelp, the dog she had held from the hour of his birth, who had taken his first meat from her hand and received her training and become her partner, who had saved her life more than once, who loved her so much he would betray her and the man she was responsible for, the dog who was eight yards from safety and straining happily against the leash, smelling her nearness, and she centered his chest in her crosshairs, gently squeezing the ridge under her finger, aiming at where the fullness of his chest would be in the instant it took the bullet to travel the distance, and the trigger went back, back, and the gun jolted against her shoulder.
Dian slammed another round into the chamber, but Tomas was down and tumbling, thrown aside by the force of the impact, brought up short by the taut lead attached to the wrist of the Angel, a woman with much faster reactions than Dian would have credited her with because she followed his pull by throwing herself to the ground and lying still, but there was no time for her now, not
with the Captain loose, and the scope’s vision stuttered across the confusing litter of moving people until it found the gray horse, half-rearing and being pulled down from the off side, the woman’s legs mingling with the horse’s. Right, then, have to take the horse out first, and when he had come full around to face downhill, she put two rapid bullets into his chest and neck and he collapsed, kicking, but the Captain was still not exposed, she went with him, huddled behind him and invisible but for a hand here and a glimpse of hair there. The hillside had erupted into movement, women diving for cover and hauling their horses up and down the hill, a scurry of body parts in the powerful scope. Dian aimed at any woman who came near enough to the Captain to be of any help, so it was not until Robin made a noise that she realized that something other than her rifle bullets was happening below. She had hit three women, but there were at least six absolutely still bodies, including Donna where she lay with her arm outstretched toward the body of Tomas. Dian lifted her eye from the limited field through the scope and saw a guard on a horse tumble limply to the rocks, another one stand up from behind a boulder, put a hand to her chest or throat, and collapse as if poleaxed. All Angels, she could see, none of the Queen’s guards. The men of Ashtown still held the city and had finally managed to boost the transmitter’s signal enough to reach here. Too late to save Tomas. Too late.
Within two minutes, silence had descended opposite, the silence of dead Angels and bewildered Queen’s guards clutching the reins of their mounts among the trees as if the horses could save them from this terrifying plague. Another minute, and a voice through the utter, shocked silence, the words unintelligible but the personality and intent unmistakable: the Captain, mustering the remnant of her troops. Figures began to assemble along the top of the hill, then at a signal they all moved down at once, horses protecting bent-over women, moving in front of and around the gray stallion’s body. Dian kept her sights on the Captain, although short of slaughtering every horse on the hill, which she did not have the ammunition to do, she could not prevent Breaker from gaining the protection of the trees. However, just before she disappeared into them, the hated face peered incautiously over the withers of her four-legged barricade and seemed to look straight into Dian’s eyes. There was madness there, and wild laughter and rage, and Dian had the pleasure of seeing her duck at the last shot.
The battle was over. Looking a last time at the tawny figure among the black-clad ones, Dian could not say it was won.
The dust settled. Crows began to call. Within a very few minutes the first vulture had begun to circle overhead. Robin finally put down his binoculars, dropped his head onto his arms, and took a shaky breath.
“Will she come after us?” he asked finally.
“No. She’ll be halfway to Ashtown by now, to see what she can save. She’s crazy, but she’s not stupid. We’re safe.”
“I’ll go down there after dark to get Tomas’s body.”
“No. We leave now. There will be one of the Queen’s guards sitting very still and waiting for us to come down, and probably two working their way in this direction.”
“How do you know?”
“It’s what I would do. No, we’re safe from Breaker now, unless she finds Ashtown totally lost to her and Bess unwilling to support her. Then she’d come after us, but not before. Let’s go.”
“Dian, I am so utterly sorry.”
“Shut up, Robin. Just shut up. Bring the water, and let’s get out of here.”
. . . WE DECLINE TO SAY MORE OF WHAT BECAME OF THEM, BECAUSE, IF WE WISHED TO DO SO,
IT WOULD BE A NEVER-ENDING STORY.
THIRTY-ONE
AUGUST, AGAIN. HEAT LAY ON THE VALLEY, CHILDREN shouted and shrieked from the millpond. In the fields, the orchards, the barns, women and men labored. The harvest was under way, and although it was not a bounty such as last year’s, it would be adequate, with care, to hold them through the winter. God was good.
Judith was working her way down the row of bush beans with her hoe. In a few minutes she would be at the fence and could start up the next row, and so it had gone all morning. She liked hard physical labor. The mind had no place in it, just grit and stamina, very satisfying and incongruously restful.
She reached the end, walked over to the shade under the young mulberry tree where she’d left her water bottle, drank, walked back, and began the next row. She and Isaac had chosen to do the entire field themselves, although he was up at the house at the moment. They often worked together, pulled into each other by the vacuum of Dian’s absence. He was a good partner. He didn’t insist on making conversation. That was restful too. Back up the row, the uneven rhythm of chop, scuffle, pull, chop, pull, scuffle, chop, leaving drifts of wilting weeds in her wake where she had freed the beans of their competition, mindless and necessary work.
What would Dian have thought, told of her sister’s uncharacteristic affection for brute labor? She wondered, as never a day passed without wondering, if she would ever know what had happened to her sister. She’d left a note in the snow for Miriam to find, a maddening little note saying only, Dian was here, and then nothing. The world was just too big, and the expansion of this Valley into the land beyond the waterfall was only another symptom of its uncontrollability.
She increased her pace and was soon soaked in sweat. Her mind’s jabber retreated.
Up the row, turn the corner, back down to the fence, stop to swallow some lukewarm water, up the next row, turn the corner, back down. Soon it would be time for lunch, her breasts told her, though she would like to keep on with this until darkness came and she could fall exhausted into bed, or until the earth came up around her legs and swallowed her up. Chop, scuffle, chop, pull, scuffle.
What?
It took her a moment to realize that Isaac was shouting at her. She straightened her back painfully, and then the bell’s clamor rang out and she looked, startled, up the hill and saw women running toward the houses, and beyond them men—David and Salvador, Peter with Jon on his hip—sprinting up for the high meadow with a woman behind—Consuela?—urging them on. Hanna went pounding by up the road with two dripping children in her arms and three more at her heels, shouting unintelligible words while Carmen bellowed for Laine!—who would be sleeping after her night watch, Judith thought, but not Sonja because she’d gone out with a scavenging group—but Laine had heard the bell and burst out of her house at the run, half-dressed and a rifle in one hand as she pelted barefoot down the dusty road toward the bridge—all this in an instant, and Judith let the hoe drop and was moving fast in the direction of the mulberry before her head had finished turning to see what was coming at them. As Judith scrambled over the fence without seeing it, Laine passed her, shoving her shirttails one-handed into her waistband, shouting an order to Judith to get to the caves, accelerating into the turn of the road with her rifle at the ready. Then between one step and the next, all urgency left her, as her shoulders came up and she decelerated to a flat-footed halt in the space of five strides. Judith glanced toward the tree and trotted into the center of the road to see what Laine was looking at, with her rifle barrel pointing so casually off to the side. The road’s bend and the height of the corn kept Judith from seeing, but she could hear hooves, a lot of them, crossing the mill bridge, hoofbeats her mind insisted were coming at an easy, nonthreatening walk. Judith came up beside the armed woman standing openly in the middle of the road, watching the approach of:
Jeri, grinning fit to split her face, escorting what looked at first glance like:
A hundred ebony-haired, green-uniformed, armed and mounted Meijing guards, at whose head was:
A tall Chinese woman balancing an absurdly pale white-blond toddler on her left thigh with great aplomb, and riding beside her:
A man, stocky and dark-skinned, a tiny infant tucked to his chest, and gamboling amid his horse’s hooves:
Two ungainly, huge-footed, long-tailed puppies, one brindled, the other jet black. Beside them, on the outside where she had just come into view�
��or where Judith’s eyes had finally acknowledged her:
Dian. No Culum, no Tomas, but with another tiny baby strapped to her chest.
The leading Meijing soldier put her right hand into the air and the entire black-haired cavalcade drifted to a stop, except for Dian, who rode forward, dismounted, and walked the remaining distance until she stood in front of her sister.
“Hello, Jude.”
“My God,” Judith finally forced out of her throat. “My God, we thought you were dead.”
“I know. I couldn’t get a message to you until five weeks ago, and then nobody would bring it here because of the hill tribes, and that’s why half of these technicians are here, to set up a communications system—oh, sweet Jesus, Jude, I never thought I’d get home again,” and then the sisters were in each other’s arms, crying and laughing and hugging until the mite on Dian’s chest bleated in protest, and Judith stood away with a question in her eyes. Dian edged the sling away from the flat face, revealing a shock of thick black hair on the small head.
“Your nephew, Jude. My son.” She half turned and held out her hand to the man, who dismounted and walked up to them. “My sister, Judith,” she said to him. “Jude, this is my friend Robin. And the one he’s carrying is your niece. My daughter.”
“What? Dian, what is this?” Judith was torn between laughter and disbelief as she touched first one black head, then the other.
“Twins. I never believed in doing things halfway. Oh, and that’s Willa, on Mai’s lap.” She pointed at the pale toddler. “She’s mine too, in a roundabout sort of way. She was named for Will. Jude, I’m sorry.” She reached out to touch her sister’s arm, but her motion was arrested by the sight of a very dirty naked little boy baby who was trying to crawl onto the road from the shade of the mulberry tree, to be thwarted by the lowest rail of the fence. Realizing his failure, he pulled himself upright and bellowed. Judith shook her head, went over to retrieve the child and his shed diaper, and brought him back on her hip.
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