by Becca Mills
“Why’d you bring him?”
“Not my choice.”
She raised one eyebrow and shot a glance toward Williams.
Huh. I’d been wondering why Patricia had inflicted Copper on me for this trip. Maybe she didn’t have a say.
Copper jigged under me, sensing my distraction.
“Calm down,” Mizzy said in a soothing voice. “Walk nicely.”
He quieted suddenly. I could feel his mouth soften as he lowered his head.
“Can he understand what you’re saying?”
“No. He gets the feeling that goes with the words, not their meaning. I could just hum or say nonsense sounds, but saying exactly what I mean helps me focus the emotion better.”
I opened my mouth to ask another question, but Terry spoke up. “We should focus on the forest. Predators tend to hang around the town. We must smell pretty tasty, packed inside those walls.”
The idea of smelling tasty gave me a little shudder. I looked back to the trees.
Even when the forest was still dark, it had been alive with birdsong. Now that the light was filtering down through the canopy, I could see birds everywhere. Many were tiny — no bigger than large bugs. Some were much more substantial. Most seemed to be brightly colored. They looked like jewels — flitting through the branches, clinging to the trunks, swarming around us and the horses as though we might have food to offer.
The farther we rode, the more of them I saw.
Sometimes a flock of tiny ones would focus on a particular horse in a way that seemed aggressive, but swishing tails and shaken manes deterred them. Some of the larger ones would land on the packhorses and hop around investigating the cargo. The horses’ fodder was stored in canvas bags too tough for their beaks to tear through, but they were quite adept at loosening the ties on the sacks and making off with a few kernels — even though it took several birds working together to undo a knot.
There seemed to be many flightless species, as well. Sometimes a whole bevy of them would run right under the horses’ feet, somehow managing to avoid being crushed as they darted to and fro. Occasionally a family of really big ones would pound past us at a run, using the road as a quick route through the forest. Copper didn’t like those one bit. Too bad Patricia hadn’t grazed ostriches alongside Cordus’s horses, so he could’ve gotten used to such creatures.
The flighted birds also took advantage of the road. Given the density of the trees, I guess open airspace was a hot commodity. Every few minutes, the narrow strip of sky above us would darken as a great flock passed overhead.
Birds of prey seemed to have noticed the way the road concentrated their food source. I saw several successful hunts, just in the first hour.
At one point, a truly massive bird — far bigger than a bald eagle — burst out of a tree into the midst of a passing flock, then flapped down to the road in front of us, a wriggling mass of bright blue and green feathers clutched in its talons.
It stood there atop its prey and shrieked at us.
It didn’t sound like the hawks I remembered from Wisconsin. Instead of a single piercing cry, the shriek had different tones.
Almost like words.
I shivered.
Williams stopped a good ways back from the bird and waited. Eventually it shrieked again, crouched, and sprang into the air, winging heavily up into a nearby tree with its meal. It alternated between gulping chunks of meat and staring at us as we rode by.
There’d probably be dinosaurs in this stratum as well, but I didn’t know what kind.
Yellin always reacted dismissively to my questions about S-Em animal life. Especially the dinosaurs. Every time I asked, he’d get all sniffy — like a tourist who’s just gotten back from Paris and finds his friends want to hear about the city’s cockroaches, not its history and culture.
I thought that was stupid. Humans were a new species, over here. The dinos had had more than 200 million years to create strata and colonize those created by other species. Surely they were still a significant factor.
I glanced around at the other members of the party. They were all scanning the trees. Distracting one of them with a question didn’t seem wise. Later.
As it turned out, we weren’t the only people on the road. We passed several parties going the opposite way, and around midday two travelers caught up with us from behind.
But we passed no signs of human habitation. I wondered if we would have to camp by the side of the road.
I was relieved when, in the late afternoon, we came to a large triangular stockade built at a crossroads. It was made of tall logs driven into the ground and reinforced inside with wooden crosspieces. The tops of the logs were sharpened, and raised guard platforms had been added inside the walls at the three corners. The forest all around the stockade had been cleared, leaving an ugly expanse of mud and stumps.
There was a lot of mud inside the fort as well. A roofed wooden platform at the center provided some space for bedrolls, but the horses would have to stand in the slop all night long.
Ten other travelers were sharing the stockade with us. Two were the people who’d passed us on the road earlier. The rest were a trading party. They had a lot of packhorses, and the place already smelled strongly of horse pee.
We unpacked what we needed, then fed the horses and got them settled for the night.
Ida settled on the edge of the platform and made food for us — a stew of dried meat, grain, and vegetables.
We gathered ’round, and she handed each of us some hard crackers. The others began dipping stew out of the pot with their crackers. I did the same. It was edible.
Williams had taken the spot beside me, and I itched to move away. Being exposed to him almost nonstop for four days had dulled the flashbacks, but I still got antsy if he came close enough to touch me.
I tried to edge away unobtrusively, but Mizzy was right there.
Williams’s head came up. One of the traders was approaching.
“Peace, friends,” said the trader in Baasha. “Would one of you beautiful ladies be willing to help us? We have no women to prepare our meat.”
He was looking at Ida.
“No I will not help,” she said exasperatedly. “You are fools to hunt on this road.”
The trader’s expression darkened. “If we do not hunt, we will not eat.”
“You should have packed food,” Ida said.
The trader pointedly turned away from her and toward Mizzy.
“I would poison you if I tried,” she said sweetly. “I cannot cook.”
The trader turned to me, smiling through his annoyance.
I was tempted to say yes, just to get away from Williams for an hour. My brother loved hunting, so I’d butchered plenty of ducks and pheasants in my day. Even a few turkeys.
But in my mind’s eye, I saw Gwen shaking her head and saying something annoyingly sensible, like, Don’t alienate the people you’re relying on, or, Choose your allies carefully.
I followed the others’ lead and declined.
The trader stomped off, muttering under his breath.
Within half an hour, the smell of roasted meat wafted over. I guess they’d figured out how to do women’s work once they got hungry enough.
After we’d cleaned up and laid out our bedrolls, Mizzy brought out a small stringed instrument and began to sing songs. Her voice was wonderful — low and rich and full of emotion. It only took a few minutes for the traders to drift over. They sat among us, listening raptly. It was a song of lost love. I was transfixed by the depth of sadness. I couldn’t help crying.
Mizzy played on for a good half-hour, mixing rollicking, bawdy tunes with ballads. By the time she set her instrument down, the tension between us and the traders had melted away, and the groups separated amiably.
Watch shifts were divided up. I didn’t get one. That was okay with me. I wouldn’t have known what to watch for.
Nothing attacked us that night, but the wooden platform was hard and the deep silence o
f the forest made me nervous. I slept poorly. In the middle of the night I woke from a nightmare — I’d been sitting with Cordus in his office, staring worshipfully at him, while deep inside, the real me screamed and raged, caged and helpless. It took a long while to get back to sleep.
Mizzy woke me before dawn. The packhorses had already been fed and loaded up, so all I had to do was get myself and Copper ready to go.
That turned out to be a tall order. After his night in the mud, the little horse was in an especially foul mood. Every time I turned away from his head, he tried to bite me; if I got too close to his rear, he cocked a hind leg threateningly. Eventually, I put a halter on over his bridle and tied his head closely to one of the sleeping platform’s heavy wooden pillars. That kept his teeth out of the equation, but he still eyed me balefully, pinning his ears and swishing his tail as I tacked him up and loaded my saddlebags.
By the time I was finally ready, the sun was up, and the party was standing at the stockade’s gate, ready to leave. I led Copper over to them, only to find I was too stiff to get my foot in the stirrup. I might’ve been a lot fitter than I used to be, but riding ten hours a day was going to take some getting used to.
Terry dismounted and gave me a leg up. That was embarrassing, especially when I saw my boot had muddied his sleeve. He just smiled and shrugged.
Once we were on our way, the morning passed much the way the last day had: plodding through thick, flower-covered forest. The narrow strip of sky showing through the canopy was cloudy, and mist clung to the tops of the trees. The air smelled wet and syrupy.
The farther we got from Free, the bolder the birds became. They had no qualms about landing on the horses — or on us. The packhorses almost always had little flocks riding along on their loads, chattering, plucking at the ropes, lifting off, swooping around, and landing again like a bunch of tiny, hyperactive toddlers.
At one point, a pretty bright pink and yellow bird landed on my forearm and sat there, looking up at me curiously. My impulse was to let it be, but Mizzy leaned over and shooed it away with a flick of her whip.
“Surely they aren’t dangerous,” I said.
“No, not really. But they are pests. Many of the smaller ones will try to steal away a bit of flesh. They have venom that makes the wound bleed a lot. The blood attracts more. They swarm around you trying to get their share. It’s a nuisance.”
I stared at her. “Seriously? Those little birds would actually attack us?”
“Oh, yeah. We call them ‘skin-pickers.’ They’re always hungry. They like to steal hair too — for their nests, I guess. That’s why I wear a hat outside town.”
Wow. Venomous vampire barber birds.
Their gemlike beauty took on a sinister aura.
I pulled a crumpled sunhat out of my saddlebag and stuffed my hair up under it as best I could.
Sometime before noon, one of the horses in Ida’s pack string came up lame. It turned out to be a loose shoe, and Williams called a halt so Terry could pull it and put on a boot as a stopgap.
Without needing to be told, everyone turned their mounts outwards to watch the trees. As usual, Williams stuck close to me.
“Hey,” I said quietly, “did you hear what Mizzy said earlier about the little birds attacking people?”
He nodded.
“Is it true?”
Another nod.
His nods were more of a single quick lift of the chin. I suppose a full up-and-down movement of the head struck him as wasteful, or maybe just undesirably polite.
I sat in silence for a minute, scanning the woods.
“Can’t you keep them off us with a barrier?”
“Not without hurting them.”
“Hurting them?”
He looked down at me as though I were being especially dense.
“Most of them fly right into barriers. Stuns or kills them.”
I stared up at him, trying to marshal a response.
“That’s really … um. Really nice. You know — worrying about them. I didn’t know you were animal-rightsy. I mean, into animal rights. And all that.”
“Ryder.”
“Yeah?”
“We’re leaving.”
“Oh. Right.”
I reined Copper back into place.
I’d discovered a lot of weird-ass things in the last six months, but Williams as animal lover was definitely top five.
The land grew hillier as the day went on. At some points, the road had been cut into a hillside, creating a steep soil cliff to one side and a drop-off to the other. Those patches were muddy and rough with debris that had fallen from the uphill side. Visibility into the jungle was almost nil.
Kevin was clearly nervous of these stretches. He consulted his map and warned of each one as we approached.
Williams treated each hillside cut with caution, stopping for several minutes to scan the trees and listen, then putting up a barrier before leading us through — I could tell because little birds started bouncing off us.
At first I was tense with worry at each of these passages, but soon we’d navigated more than a dozen with no sign of trouble.
Around midday, the party of traders from the night before caught up to us. They all looked better rested than I felt — they’d still been asleep when we left the stockade.
They’d done some more hunting — the leader had a brace of goose-sized birds hanging by their feet across his horse’s withers. The birds’ necks were slit, and the horse’s legs were heavily splattered with blood.
Now I understood Ida’s angry reaction the night before. I could smell the blood as the man rode past. If I could smell it, predators could too.
The traders slowed down to ride with us.
Williams didn’t look happy, but he allowed it. That was surprising. They messed up our careful formation and enveloped all of us in their blood scent.
One of the traders was a young guy — seventeen or eighteen, I thought. He fell in beside me and introduced himself. His first name was “Serhan.” His last name started with a “K” sound. I couldn’t seem to get the pronunciation right. When I asked if I could call him “Mr. Serhan,” he blushed and nodded. Then he started chatting me up.
I could’ve kicked myself. I knew Seconds were comparatively formal and should’ve guessed he’d take my use of his first name as a come-on. I was uncomfortable and tried to extract myself from the conversation, but he was persistent, and I didn’t want to be rude.
He figured out quickly that my language skills were so-so and started speaking more slowly and using shorter, simpler sentences. I told myself it would be good practice and tried to hold up my end of the conversation.
The exchange turned out to be informative. Serhan told me our destination for the night was a small town named Butua. Apparently, we were traveling through a sparsely populated highland region. Towns tended to be scattered two or three days’ ride apart, with stockades between for travelers. Most were located near natural resources of one kind or another. Butua had been built beside a gold mine.
About two hundred miles north, the highlands gave way to a vast river plain that was flooded part of the year. The trading party was headed for the river.
After a while, the traders grew tired of Williams’s long pauses before the hillside cuts and rode on ahead. Serhan gave me a dazzling smile and said he’d look for me in town that evening.
I really hoped he wouldn’t.
“You made a friend,” Mizzy said, once the traders had passed out of earshot.
“I don’t need that kind of friend.”
“That kind of friend can be useful. They’re always willing to help.”
“Sure, but the help comes with strings attached.”
She laughed. “Well, at least you got to practice your Baasha. You’re going to need it.”
“Do most people here only speak Baasha?”
“No, but it’ll be your only common language with most of them. Languages in the strata tend to be dictated by where i
n the F-Em the people came from originally.”
“So people in Free speak English because they came from North Carolina?”
“Yeah. Several Native American languages are spoken, too.”
Mizzy started telling me about the tribes who’d lived around the strait before Europeans showed up in North America. Then she launched into a creation myth of the Tuscarora people she thought might preserve the cultural memory of an S-Em power using the strait.
My attention wandered.
I found myself thinking about how Cordus had tried to change me. I stuffed that thought back in its box and mentally nailed the lid shut. Too bad my brain didn’t come equipped with an iron maiden.
“Why so grim?” Mizzy said.
I jerked, and Copper jigged beneath me.
“Oh, nothing. You know. Thinking of home. Sorry.”
“Are you going to be over here for a long time?”
“Longer than I’d like to be.” Time to steer the conversation away from me. “How about you? Have you lived here long?”
She laughed. “As you said, longer than I’d like.”
“What brought you here?”
“I got in some trouble. Mr. Gates helped me.”
Mizzy wasn’t old enough to have been hunted. She must’ve gotten into some other sort of fix. I let the silence stretch a few extra seconds to see if she’d elaborate, but she didn’t.
“Do you like living in Free?”
“It’s okay. Not enough of an arts scene.”
“Has it changed much since you’ve been here?”
“Not a great deal, no. It’s been a frontier town for a long time. The tide shifts back and forth. Sometimes it seems like we’re pushing the dinosaurs out, but then they make a comeback.” She frowned. “Recently they seem more organized and aggressive. That’s not a good sign.”
As though on cue, a horse screamed up ahead. An instant of dreadful silence pressed down on the forest. Then the sound of gunfire and human and animal panic washed over us. Honest to god, it was right out of a horror movie. If you bottled pure terror, that’s what it’d sound like.
Copper’s head shot up with a snort. Without even thinking about it, I kicked him, and he leapt forward.