The arrow whispered away from the bow-string's twang, flicked across the meadow, and arched down to strike the shy ram at his flank, and too far back.
Baj ran toward them as the old male backed, then stepped snorting aside — set a second arrow to the string, jolted to a stop and shot the other sheep again. Struck behind its shoulder, the animal bucked and collapsed sliding into the grass. The ewes bleated, whirled and ran down-slope, and the old ram, reluctant... certain that Baj was guilty of something, backed, turned, and followed them.
CHAPTER 18
It was evening, with banners of cloud colors streaming across the sky. before Baj found the others — wending north, tiny with distance, through evergreens below him.... They'd passed him by.
He put two fingers to his mouth and whistled, but the slow cold wind was against him, and they didn't hear, didn't look up. So, burdened by sword-belt, bow, quiver and pack — and with a considerable weight of butchered mutton on his back, bundled in the beast's own hide — Baj commenced as good a gallop as he could manage down the mountainside.
He fell once, and rolled a little with tangles and thumps from his load, sheathed rapier akimbo (wonderful word), but there was no one to see.
... After at least a WT mile of downhill hurry through thicker and thicker forest, he came out to an almost level — face streaked red by whipping branches — whistled, and saw Nancy and the others hear, and turn to watch him come.
Errol ran back to caper around Baj, sniffing the wrapped meat's blood odor. He reached up and tugged at the hide, until told, "No," and pushed away.
"Where have you been?" Nancy apparently angry. "You were to hunt before us — then wait. Where were you?"
Baj pointed up. "High. Found the sheep there."
Nancy made a tongue-click like Errol's, and turned away.
"Thank these mountains' Jesus," Patience said. "Not turkey." Her left arm was free of its sling.
"No, mountain sheep."
"Baj, I believe you may still be a prince. Can we camp? Can we eat?"
"If we find a place close and deep enough for one of your dangerous fires." Richard sighed. "Appetite will be our deaths."
"Better than starvation," Patience said. "I didn't feast with the madmen. — Do you know that many of their children die in winter? They think it incorrect to bundle them warm."
"Better the Robins," Nancy said, "than those people. If they are what Warm-time humans were, then bless Drunk Jupiter, and the Wall."
Baj started to say something in those cruel dreamers' defense, then decided not. He was too tired from sheep chasing, and it would mean an evening's battle — Nancy's method of discussion.
* * *
Grumbling, shaking his shaggy head, Richard allowed himself to be bullied for a guarded fire of windfall, in a dense stand of balsam poplar damp enough to catch no sparks. "Though I suppose, if we're seen in these hills, it will likely be by those we come to see."
Baj, with Errol helping, dragged two weather-seasoned logs to lie side by side with a bed of dry branches between them.
"Meat's going to taste of sap." Patience sat with her coat unbuttoned despite the chill.
"Do you want this fire?" Richard said, "— or don't you?"
"Yes, I do."
"Then stop complaining."
"Well," Patience said, "we're all getting tired."... But all were less tired when the meat was roasted, spitting and running fat, showers of sparks rising into a windy night. Richard carved out smoking slabs with his heavy knife, hung each on a whittled stick, and passed them to the others before hacking out half a haunch for himself.... Comparing with the village meat before, Baj found this mutton — wild, fresh, tainted by no notion of Warm-times returning, no cropped slaves, no weeping children — to be the better supper.
They ate sitting close to the fire, except for Errol, who gobbled under a shrub — and Patience, finishing a second thick chop, sitting relaxed against a hemlock trunk. "I have," she said to Baj, when he offered her a blanket, "a Warming-talent, failing a little, but still firm enough to cozy me." She smiled at him, her nose now straight — though with a little bump at the bridge. "... Are you settled this evening, Baj? Safe, resting, and full of rich meat?"
"Yes, I am."
"Perfect," Patience said, and drew the scimitar resting across her lap as she leaped and lunged long to slice him lightly just below the knee as he rolled back and away with yelp of startlement, then pain.
He came to his feet, hopping backward into the trees, his rapier drawn as she came to him, saying in a conversational way, "Edge only. Three cuts wins." And demonstrated in shadowing firelight by feinting, then striking him backhand along his left side, slicing his buckskin jerkin over a rib.
Nancy shouted, "Don't!"
Baj parried the next two slashes, but by very little. Patience, fighting sometimes two-handed now, gave him little room to fence. "... The time for spruce-branch fighting is over, my dear."
In the midst of surprise, sudden speed, and effort — still careful to deny his rapier's point in the ringing clash of steel — Baj, though already cut twice, found himself satisfied. As clearly as if truly seen, he saw King Sam before him in the salle, delivering that lesson of fighting over fencing-in-duels.
He kicked Patience in the belly to force her back for room, struck her swinging blade a fast hard parry to knock its line aside, and drew his left-hand dagger. Feeling her slight difficulty still in using the left hand, even to assist, he cut her lightly at the hip, withdrawing from a lunge. Then parried a cut to his head, held her steel sliding with the rapier, stepped in and struck her tender shoulder with the butt of his dagger.... As she received that pain, he drove her back against the fire — Richard rolling aside, Nancy calling again, "Don't!"
Patience, coat smoking, tried to wrench away from the flames. Baj let his rapier-edge meet her in a minor stop-thrust cut across her trousered thigh — and as, too late, she beat that blade aside, he struck lightly through her coat's sleeve with the left-hand dagger's edge . .. felt the give-and-part of cloth and skin beneath the blade. Third cut.
He stepped back to drop his weapons, stepped forward again to haul her free of the fire... and pat out flame runners along her coat-tails.
Patience was laughing, breathless. "Oh, very well done! Done very well — though, it's true, against only a small older lady, still fighting mainly wrong-handed." She wiped her blade on her coat's cloth, slid it into its sheath. "Your two fathers came to fight with you, isn't that so?"
"Perhaps." The cut beneath his knee was stinging worse than the other. Blood on his buckskins there.
"No 'perhaps' about it. Your Second-father, for workmanlike common sense; your First-father, for no mercy shown. My shoulder hurts..."
"You are both fools!" Nancy stood glaring at them,
"Of course," Patience said, shrugged off her greatcoat, and examined it, "— as are we all. Who but fools would be here, and for our reasons?... My poor coat."
"Come here." Nancy tugged Baj into firelight. "Where are you hurt?"
"Only little cuts."
"Nothing worth sewing up, I'd say." Richard smiled his toothy smile. "Good fight." Errol, sitting close to him for warmth, a little piece of mutton-fat stuck to his cheek, tongue-clicked in apparent agreement.
"And you're a fool, too," Nancy said, "— with a fool beside you. Can't we wait for Shrikes or the Guard to chop us? So stupid." She turned Baj this way and that with calloused narrow hands. "Your side..."
"Nothing much, either of them." He wiped a red drop from his dagger's blade, found none spotting the sword, and sheathed both.
"Too bad," Nancy said. "A real wound would have been a lesson." She turned to Patience. "And you — he hurt you three times."
"Hurt me lightly, dear," Patience said. "Kitchen cuts, and will clot — though I know a real wound would have been a lesson."
"Ha ha," Nancy said, a very old Warm-time ironism. Baj had read it in copybooks of course, but couldn't recall hearing it used. "A
nd you," she said to him, "— the next time we practice, I'll use Janice." And she walked off into the evergreens.
"Janice...?"
Richard, who'd been smiling, stopped, and spoke softly. "So you don't ask her, Baj... She names her sword in revenge-reminder for her mother. A Thrush, and very young. — After the Faculty had made Nancy in her belly? The next time, they made an occa. Her mind fled away and never came back, and she died."
Baj sat by the fire, his leg stinging where Patience had touched him. His side hardly hurt at all. "What a pleasure it will be — a duty and a pleasure to ruin that city."
"Difficult duty," Patience said. "And time for us to sleep." She shrugged her singed coat on, and lay down beneath her hemlock. "Though they say sleep cannot be stored — still, weariness can be."
"No truer words...." Richard lay down, settling by the fire, drawing his blanket over as Errol came to cuddle beside him.
"I take first watch, apparently," Baj said, and went down through the evergreens to pee.... Finished, he laced his buckskins, and was wending back up through foliage to the fire, when he saw Nancy standing in a little space, looking out to the north through a break in the trees.
He stepped beside her, looked out... out past a mountain's low shoulder, and saw in the distance the faintest fine horizontal line, a spider-web thread, shining white under the moon.
"The Wall. And still must be a hundred WT miles away."
Nancy turned, narrow face moon-shadowed and forbidding. "More. — And why are you always... present?" she said. "Isn't it possible for me to be alone?"
"Of course. I don't —"
"So fucking stupid," she lisped the s. "Your 'three cuts' nonsense with that crazy woman."
"Nancy, she — it was a lesson."
"You're always glancing little looks at me, too."
"That's not true."
"It is true, and I'm tired of it."
"I don't —"
"Yes, you do, liar. Always little looks... staring at someone who's so strange — who's so much an animal." She put out a hand and shoved him. "From now on, stay away from me!" She shoved him again, harder, teeth showing in moonlight — Baj took her wrists, and it became a wrestle. Then a fight.
She wrenched a hand free, hit him hard in the face, then came at him biting — a snarling quick snap of white teeth — and Baj, not wanting to hit her, grappled her close, lifted her off her feet, and fell rolling amid evergreen branches as she kicked and struck at him, wiry strong.
Frightened she'd draw her knife or try for her sword, he hugged to pin her arms, saying, "Sorry... I'm sorry," though for what he wasn't certain. She tried to knee him, and he thought of calling to Patience for help, but that seemed so embarrassing....
Then, though she'd fought so fiercely, suddenly she lay still beneath him, so he thought he'd hurt her.
"Nancy, I didn't mean to..."
A cold look from moon-shadowed yellow eyes. "Get off me, Sunriser. — And keep away."
"I can't," Baj said, surprised that was what he couldn't do.... And having said it, for no real reason he bent and kissed her. Felt her mouth, the slender bones of her long jaw as she turned her head aside, but he didn't care... felt against his lips a canine's needle point, and didn't care. He kissed her as he'd kissed no girl in his life; there was nothing left of him but kissing.... She lay still, but it made no difference to him. He hugged and gripped her as if he might squeeze all pleasure, all sweetness, all good news from her. He wrestled her softly and sliding, licked her throat, found her little ear in the thick soft crest of her hair. "Love," he whispered to her. "And has been love...."
Then, after what seemed a wait of years, a slim arm — as if reluctant — rose to circle and hold him.
"Forgive me," Baj whispered, "— for not saying so sooner."
"You are a fool," Nancy said. "A fool..." She lay back under moon-shadow, unbuttoned her wool shirt, and drew the cloth aside to show six little tender-nippled breasts in two rows of three down her chest. "Look," she said. "Look."
And he kissed them up and down.
When their clothes were off, strewn in evergreens — all but the moccasins, which were too much trouble — he found other differences. Shorter sturdier thighs than a full-human girl's might be — but smooth and white as Map-Alabama marble. Muscular buttocks, a slender drift of russet fur down the small of her back, and thick brush of the same between her legs, so he had to search for a moment to find a soft pout that parted into oiled warmth and slippery entrance — first for a finger as he bent over her, she clutching his cock with a calloused little hand... then for that, when she said, "There," and put him to her.
Then the different smell of their fucking, her slightly harsher odor than a Sunriser girl's . .. and the different angle of it — so she soon eased him out, turned beneath him for comfort as she went to all fours, hollowed her back to present herself, and moaned as he found her again.
Baj drove into her and into her to the rhythmic soft sound of wet, and on through a time that was no time, until Nancy twisted and thrashed beneath him as he came... then bit his bracing arm, convulsed, and called out to her mother.
.. . The wind's cold, the forest's discomfort they hadn't felt at all, then slowly returned to them. They found clothes and cloaks to draw over for covers, to tuck under to pad the hemlocks' windfall. Then they lay content, hugging, damp with sweat.
After a while, kissing her, Baj found tears. "What?" he said. "What...?"
"Oh, Baj... Baj, my dear, I come to you not new." She took a breath. "Not new. I have—"
"— Not been with me. But now you are. And I love you."
"Well, you are a fool," Nancy said, and sat up, searching for a bandanna. She found Baj's with his shirt, blew her nose, then lay down again to more kisses.
"... Richard?" Patience spoke softly from beneath her hemlock.
A deep, rumbled "Umm" by the fire.
"Do you know the phrase, 'Babes in the woods'?"
"I do now."
"What will happen to those children?"
"The same, dear, that will happen to us."
* * *
Three days later of cold mutton and hard traveling — Patience, the third day, sailing slowly only a bow-shot above them — they'd come down from the mountains to foothills, and then onto an endlessly-wide tundra plain, its mosses and sedge grasses, brown and green, streaked with dotted drifts of tiny white flowers and the little colored blossoms that Baj knew, of bilberry and crow-berry. Small brown-winged butterflies flew among those.
Along the plain's distant northern horizon lay the glittering line of the Wall. Baj had seen it close, once, from a fast ship rigged for wet, and rowed far up the river to North Map-Illinois. The glacier's frozen ramparts had risen two miles high over distant hills of moraine and milk-white lakes fed by great waterfalls of summer melt.... Nameless furred tribesmen (tribeswomen, too) had paced the ship through stunted scrub along bitter river-banks, shouting, presenting naked buttocks in insult, and hurling futile javelins. "Ah..." Pedro had said, standing at the rail beside him, "— the free, the natural life."
"... How far would you say, Baj?" Richard standing beside him, smiling down.
"Thirty... forty WT miles. I have seen it, from the River."
Patience laughed. "Over tundra is deceitful viewing. Try almost twice that."
And as she said it, the changeable frigid winds brought from the west — once... then again — the faintest reedy fluting of pipes, the faintest rumble and boom of kettle-drums... music sounding, then silenced, then sounding again with contrary breezes.
Richard cocked his great head, "The Guard, marching. We are to be met."
". .. But that music," Baj said, "— doesn't it warn that they're coming?"
"They don't care whether it warns or not," Nancy said, and spit to the side.
"Still many miles away," Richard said, listening. "Patrolling to meet us along the plain's border — or perhaps only to strike the Fishhawks... what's left of them."
"But marched down from the Shrike campaign, from that fighting." Nancy looking to the western tundra, empty of all but cold wind and distant music "Come as Patience said they would."
"To meet us as friends?"
"As friends, Baj," Nancy said, "— or not."
"Wolf-General decides," Richard said, shrugged under his big pack, and strode off to the west.
"See...?" Nancy looked up, pointed.
High above — higher than she usually now Walked-in-air — Patience wheeled west in a flutter of blue coat-tails.. Baj thought he saw her glance down at them, indicate the way with her sheathed scimitar.
... Hiking with Nancy side-by-side, Baj found some reluctance in going with her toward that faint wind-broken music. Holding his hand as they managed awkward tussocks, Nancy seemed changed in the last days, as if a different girl with fox's blood — perhaps a sister — had come to him, golden eyes tart-sweet as honey-lemon candy.... And matters seemed to be shifting in Baj, so now-and-never-before ran within him like a summer spring.
.. . Hints of that music had come to them all through the day's difficult traveling — over bog, where clouds of the season's last mosquitoes rose... then on smooth mossy stretches and ankle-sprain tussocks. But only the wind's hum and whistle sounded through a bitter night under racing moonlit clouds. There was no cover, no shelter on the tundra plain, no makings for a fire. After diminished scraps of cold mutton, there was only the shelter of sleep.... Errol huddled against Richard under his blanket, and Baj and Nancy warmed each other, wrapped in wool and discovery.
Fairly at ease in her worn blue coat only, Patience took first watch, and sat in moonlight on a tussock with her scimitar across her lap, her white hair blowing in the icy wind now steady from the Wall. She listened for her baby's breathing in her mind — heard nothing, but still thought, "Coming to you, my darling," just in case.... And he might have listened, for she thought she felt — was almost certain she felt the baby's so-dear, dimpled, pudgy hand seize and enclose her left arm, gripping hard for comfort, so her fingertips tingled.
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