A water bottle! He had a water bottle! That was the second of his needs taken care of!
Emboldened by his luck, he climbed up to the camp. Who knew? They might have left something else behind. When you have plenty of equipment, you can think about leaving things that are broken.
They had at least piled their trash in a tidy heap, which showed good discipline—but when he took a stick and poked through the remains of the fire in the fire pit—there were still coals!
Something about coals twinged something in his memory. What was it?
Was there a way to carry coals with you to start a fire when you didn’t have a fire-starter? Yes! That was it!
While he waited for his mind to relax enough for the information to come to the surface, he built the coals back up a little. As long as he had a fire, there was no reason not to roast some cattail roots. And while he waited for them to bake, he turned over the trash pile and found treasures.
Half a knife blade. A real knife blade! It looked as if some idiot had been using it to try to pry something apart and had snapped it in half. He could make himself a wooden handle, and he’d have a short, but usable, knife. Two broken water gourds, one snapped off at the neck and one cracked across the bottom. An assortment of broken or worn pieces of leather; from the looks of things, the men had been put to work mending some of their gear and the mule harness. Some torn, stained, burned cloth. In short, between last night and now, he had been given virtually everything he had asked for.
That was when his memory finally let the information about carrying fire float to the surface.
He hunted for damp moss, and when he found it, he carefully lined one of the half gourds with it, the one that had the crack across the bottom. Then he scooped up one of the best coals with a clamshell and rolled it into the gourd, then covered it with hot ashes and more moss. He made a carrying net with bits of cordage and fitted it to the gourd, then did the same for the intact water gourd. He wrapped the leather and cloth around the knife blade and smaller bits, stowed all of that in the other broken gourd, then tucked that in the back of his blanket sling with his other sparse gear. Last of all, he really put out the fire, tidied the trash pile, ate his roasted roots, then made his way down to the river again, carefully making sure to step in the same places the Karsites had.
That night, he had the first cooked meal he had enjoyed since the drugged soup.
The fire that he made was tiny, and he made certain to build it under the shelter of the overhanging rock he camped beneath to disperse the smoke. He ringed it with his sling pebbles, and when they were hot enough, he teased them away from the flames and used a clamshell to scoop them up and drop them into the other broken gourd, which was now full of water and redbugs. While the redbugs steeped in hot water, cooking slowly, and his cattail roots roasted in the fire, he whittled down a split piece of branch into a handle for his new knife, fitted it to the blade, and bound the whole tightly with his vine cord.
“Redbugs” were actually green or greenish brown when alive; they turned red when cooked. Cooking them in the barely simmering water heated by the stones was the best way because it didn’t take very long to cook that tiny amount of meat, and the more you cooked it the tougher it got.
Mind, he’d have eaten leather, and enjoyed it, at this point.
He sighed with satisfaction as he ate his bugs and his roots, drank the slightly gritty, bug-flavored water, then banked the fire for the night. Now he had everything he needed as soon as he was forced to stop following the river. Cookpot, water carrier, fire, and a knife.
He was one step closer to home.
He slept very well that night.
10
It was a good thing that he’d found the Karsite camp when he had, because by afternoon of the very next day, the river took an abrupt turn to the west, and when he climbed the slope and a tree above it to see where it was going, it appeared to be heading straight west for as far as he could see.
He got down out of the tree and had to sit for a moment, as he found himself completely overcome with panic.
All this time, he’d been following this watercourse, and it had been a reliable source for water, food, and shelter. Now he would have to leave it. And now he would be completely at the mercy of the Karsite lands.
And, of course, he was increasing his chance of running into Karsites themselves.
He told himself to stay calm, but it didn’t help. He was scared. This wasn’t something he’d ever done before. All of his ability to survive depended on things he had learned at the mine, where he’d had a reliable source of water and learned how to catch slow-moving things he found in the ponds and pick wild, growing things he could rely on. He didn’t really know what the Karsite lands would or could offer. He was pretty sure he would be a terrible hunter. Once away from the river he had no idea how he was going to find water. He wasn’t sure he was ready to hunt for shelter away from the riverbank, which provided a lot of overhangs. Aside from the cattails, hickory nuts, cress, and redbugs, there hadn’t been much of anything he had recognized as food.
And he had no idea how to find his way if the trees got too thick to see the sun.
Nor did he have any notion of what animals out here were dangerous. Were there wolves? Bears?
He wouldn’t have worried if he’d still had Mindspeech, or, at least, not so much. He’d have been able to sense animals before they got close, and he would hear peoples’ thoughts in plenty of time to get out of sight. Now . . . he was half blind, and the thought made his mouth dry with fear.
But there was no hope for it. He had no idea where in Karse he was, except that it couldn’t have been more than a fortnight by wagon south of the Valdemar Border, because he was pretty sure he hadn’t been unconscious for much more than that. He could walk at about half the speed of a wagon, and he wasn’t confined to roads. So by that reckoning, he didn’t have much more than half a moon before he’d be home and safe. Or, at least, he’d be reasonably close to the Border.
But if he went wandering off his northward path, there was no telling where he’d end up or how long it would take him. He had to get across before the snows began. He didn’t think he could survive too many winter nights with just a blanket.
He took a last, longing look at the river, which had become a sort of friend. Then he turned his back on it and headed northward.
As the sound of the waters faded away, he reminded himself to always go downhill if he could. He would have the best chance of finding more water in the low spots. Water must be his first concern now; you could go quite some time without food, but no more than three days without water.
If he hadn’t found that gourd . . .
Head north . . . try to stay downhill.
And now he discovered yet another “try to stay . . .” because the mine-kiddies had scoured the immediate area of the mine so thoroughly that it was—he suddenly saw—nothing at all like a wild forest. There was a lot of undergrowth. And he was trying not to leave traces of his passing.
His estimate of how long it was going to take to get to the Border shot alarmingly skyward.
No hope for it. I just have to take it one step at a time. Literally.
Keeping the sun at his right, he began picking his way across the forest floor.
It was hard not to feel both frustrated and discouraged. There had to be a hundred things around him that he could use to help him, if only he knew what they were. He didn’t dare touch the mushrooms he passed. He did find an oak tree and gathered a lot of nuts, but until he found more water than what he was carrying, he had no way to get the bitter taste out of them. He could hear squirrels scolding him, but he couldn’t see them to try to get a shot off with his sling. He had to stop when the sun was overhead, so he checked on his coal (it was still glowing) and climbed a tree to try to scout out his path.
He couldn’t get high enough to actually see anything without the tree swaying alarmingly, so he climbed back down and had a sparse meal of
cattail roots.
By midafternoon he hadn’t come across any sort of shelter or water, and he was beginning to feel unease. Should he count on finding water in the morning and try to make some sort of crude shelter now? Or should he try to find water and hope there was shelter nearby?
The distant growl of thunder decided him.
This time the storm was relatively slow moving. It didn’t arrive until after nightfall. He had managed to find an evergreen tree with flat, frond-like “needles,” and had stacked cut branches three layers deep on a lean-to frame lashed between two trees. He’d piled more of the branches on the ground beneath it to keep him—hopefully—up out of the water and mud. He got his little fire started in what he hoped was the most sheltered part of the lean-to, and by the time the storm arrived, he had cracked and roughly ground up two handfuls of acorns, which were now tied up in bags of that burned and stained cloth he had salvaged, waiting for the rain to wash the bitterness out of them. He’d eaten two roasted cattail roots and was wrapped in his blanket, just waiting for the storm to hit.
When it did, he was glad that fear had invested his preparations. Some people would probably have thought that he was using up too much cordage on lashing down his shelter. Some people might have told him that three layers of branches were too much.
They’d all have been dead wrong.
There were leaks, but the only bad one was providential—he put his watergourd right underneath it and let it fill before poking at the branches cautiously until it somehow went away. His fire remained, burning bravely, although it gave out no warmth at all. He was very glad for the layer of green boughs on the ground.
It was cold. Although there were no major leaks on him, a mist of fine rain came at him through the open side of the lean-to.
He told himself all the ways he was lucky. He had water to wash out the acorn meal, so he had food for tomorrow. He had basic shelter, so he wasn’t going to get soaked and freeze. His fire was safe. Nothing was going to be out hunting in this weather. Bears, wolves, or whatever—they were doing the same thing that he was, crouching down in their shelters and trying to get some sleep.
He did sleep, though he didn’t dare sleep much because he had to keep feeding his little fire bits of things to keep it alive.
Finally, at some point during the night, the storm moved out, although as far as he could tell, the sky remained overcast.
There wasn’t anything he could do about “not leaving traces” now; he planned on taking the shelter down, and had carefully used his cordage in such a fashion that he could salvage it all, but there was going to be a ravaged tree and a pile of cut branches when he was done.
On the other hand, it wasn’t as if he’d seen any signs of humans here. There hadn’t even been anything like a trail to follow.
With the storm gone, the sounds of the forest began. Slowly at first, and mostly the steady dripping of water through the trees. But after a while he heard other things. Small rustlings in the underbrush and through the leaves. Noises up in the trees above his head. The sound of something larger, farther away . . . it sounded as if it had hooves, there was a sort of subtle thump to its footfalls. It was moving off, though, so nothing to worry about, and if it was a deer, then that meant there weren’t any wolves or bears or whatevers nearby.
Insects. Lots of insects still. Some crickets. Lots of crackles and scuttles right under him, which probably would have been disturbing to someone who hadn’t spent most of his life sleeping in filthy, used, vermin-ridden straw every night. He hadn’t heard any of those insect noises by the river, but then the sound of the water had probably drowned it all out.
He nodded off, and woke, fitfully, remembering to feed his little fire and enduring the empty ache that the silence in his head produced. Again and again, he agonized over the thought that his Mindspeech had been obliterated by whatever those assassins had done to him. It almost didn’t matter that he’d still be able to be a Herald without it—because what really mattered was not having Dallen with him anymore. Or, at least, not in the same way.
But people go blind, and carry on. And deaf. It would be horrible, but—
Would it be so “horrible” to just be . . . ordinary?
Because ordinary people didn’t have Companions, never had that incredible surety of never being alone again. Ordinary people carried on, fell in love, muddled through, had their lives, even did incredible, heroic things . . .
So maybe you shouldn’t feel so bad about just being ordinary now.
On that unsettling thought, he slept again, and when he woke, just in time to blow his fire back to life before it died, it was dawn.
* * *
These were either extremely tall hills, or else very short mountains. The land wasn’t particularly prosperous either, from the look of it, which probably accounted for why he hadn’t seen any signs of people. The forest was thick down here in the valleys but quickly thinned out on the slopes, and you could see the stony bones of the land poking out through the thin soil near the top. Not good farming land, although he wondered what he would find if he ran into another stream and sifted through the gravel. These hills might well hold metals or sparklies.
Again, another reason why he probably wasn’t seeing signs of people. Mines concentrated a lot of people on a small piece of property, and they needed to be on roads. Miners didn’t do much besides their jobs, which were backbreaking and difficult and didn’t leave them a lot of energy to waste.
So you wouldn’t likely find miners out roaming the forest for fun.
Assuming their masters would even allow them to get off the property in the first place. No telling how mines were run in Karse. Miners might be better off than in Valdemar, but given what he knew about Karse, probably not. In his limited experience, there weren’t a lot of happy mining collectives, where everyone shared and shared alike and no one was worked into exhaustion for the sake of a few rocks, even in Valdemar.
The rain had indeed leached all of the bitter out of his acorn meal, and he munched that for a change from the cattail roots. Meanwhile, he kept his eyes on the ground, watching for greens, even as he kept the sun at his right shoulder.
And he was, at last, rewarded; in a patch of sun, dandelions grew thickly. He stopped then and there, sharpened a fallen branch for a digging stick, and took the time to get as many of the roots as he could. It was too bad that at this time of year the leaves were too bitter to eat, but now he had lunch, and maybe dinner too.
And then, just as he was about to stop because the sun was almost overhead, a glint of something shiny and red among the leaves ahead made him dart forward—
And nearly trip over the tangle of thin, prickly blackberry vines.
The vines were thin, the foliage sparser than the ones he was used to. Possibly it was the thin soil. But there were berries hiding under those leaves, berries that nothing had wanted to fight the thorns for, and he ignored scratches to get on hands and knees, eating two for every one he harvested. He tucked the berries into a pouch of much cleaner cloth—the cloth that had held his acorn meal until he ate it all and had hung out in the rain all night. It was worth every scratch; the tart-sweetness of the berries nearly brought tears to his eyes, and he chewed the seeds carefully to get all the benefit out of them. He lost track of time as he foraged, getting food and drink in one, saving his precious water. It was only when he realized that the sun was well and truly over his left shoulder that he came to his senses and knew he’d been at this for well over a candlemark. Probably two.
And now he was faced with a dilemma: find a place to make a shelter here and keep foraging until the berries were gone, or move on and try to find water?
The berries were food and drink together. He wouldn’t have to search for water if he stayed here.
But they would also attract other creatures. And he wouldn’t see the things that came for the berries at night until it was too late. Bears wouldn’t care about a few little blackberry thorns.
&nbs
p; He had no more cattail, but he did have dandelion root, acorn meal, and enough berries for another meal. He thought about hiding in a flimsy little shelter while a bear snuffled about outside. It was fall; bears wanted to eat to bulk up to sleep through the winter, and he wouldn’t be able to do much against a bear.
Move on.
With a sigh of regret, he gathered and stored a last handful, then took his scratched self out of the patch.
* * *
The woods of this valley were quiet; the trees were tall, but there was nothing but trunk down here near the ground. The undergrowth wasn’t as thick, except in places where the sun got past the leaf canopy, or places where saplings had managed to become trees. It was a lot easier making his way through here, but he had to be very careful to keep track of the sun. One more providential find of wood sorrel added to his provender, and at long last, the faint sound of trickling water rewarded his pauses to listen. It took him off his self-appointed path, going to the east, but he tracked it to its source in the side of the hill. It was either a very tiny spring or a seep, but there was enough there to refill his bottle and fill his cooking gourd, and he made a bit of a basin to collect more by damming the outflow with rocks in case the dripping ran dry in the night. Then, finally, he had a bit of luck as he hunted up and down that spot of steep hillside; he located a good place to spend the night. Not a cave, but a solid rock overhang, a place to build his fire out of danger of another storm and maybe get some shelter for himself. And, more to the point, it was a solid bit of stone and earth at his back, with nothing nearby to attract animals.
By sunset he had a porridge of acorn meal and dandelion root cooking, was slowly munching his trefoil-shaped leaves and stems of sour sorrel, with his slightly squashed berries laid out to finish his meal. He listened carefully to the birds he could hear singing all around him, knowing they would be his first warning of anything coming that he couldn’t see. But as the little valley he was in darkened with shadow, they remained tranquil.
Redoubt: Book Four of the Collegium Chronicles (A Valdemar Novel) Page 22