The slope they were climbing had once been part of a field, judging by the bracken and small trees that had encroached into the overgrown grasses. Away to the east, partially around the slope, stood the remains of a tumbledown church. Or at least Garret assumed that’s what it was. He was used to the Appalachians where everything, save Mrs. Malvern’s castle, was built of wood. Here, the buildings had a more enduring appearance. Construction seemed to use more field stone than timber, and buildings were often coated with some sort of plaster.
Garret watched the remains of the church pivot slowly in his field of vision as they climbed up the hill past it. The roof had fallen in and the walls were giving up their battle with the weather, one stone at a time. Only a little of the plaster remained on the walls.
It might have been a sad spectacle, but Garret was too tired and hungry to care. They all were. There had been a beautiful flat spot by the edge of the road. A stream had lay nearby, and the woods had been close enough for firewood, but that hadn’t been good enough for Bartram.
After what felt like weeks of walking, they crested the slope. The top of the slope was nowhere near the highest point of the topography, but only a shallow foot to the real hills that lifted, rocky and imposing, in front of them.
A grove of trees covered the flat area in front of them. The trees were sparse but large. Their crowns were heavy with enough leaves that little was able to grow beneath them. Garret ran a hand across a trunk as Bartram led them into the grove. The bark was rough and tan, but it was the appearance of the tree itself that made Garret want to touch it. In the Appalachians, Garret was used to big trees, trees far larger than these, in fact. But in the Appalachians, most trees grew straight and tall, with a single round trunk.
Each of these trunks appeared to be composed of several smaller trunks, fused together into a bundle from which sprouted countless branches that wandered and diverged like veins.
“What kind of trees are these,” Burl asked nobody in particular. He coughed again. It was starting to sound chesty.
“Carob,” Lieutenant Bartram replied from ahead in the semi-dark. “You can eat the pods.”
“Pods?” Velvet asked uncertainly, fingering a long green seed pod above his head.
“The brown ones,” Bartram amended. “They aren’t in season yet, but the ripe ones can hang on the trees for a year, so you should be able to find a few if you look.”
Bartram dropped his rucksack and began rooting around in it. “We’ll pitch camp here for the night,” he said. “Find some firewood while I get a fire started for dinner.”
Garret gritted his teeth. Fishy suppressed a groan. Bartram had a genius mind and a silver tongue, but when it came to normal things like building a fire, he was helpless. Unfortunately, incompetence never stopped him from asserting his authority. Velvet sauntered nonchalantly towards Fishy and Garret. Fishy dug through his pack and emerged with a piece of dried beef, which he put between his teeth. He resumed digging and shortly emerged with a tinder kit.
“Want us to distract him?” Velvet asked Fishy as soon as they were close enough not to be overheard.
“Yeah,” Fishy muttered around his dried beef. “Just get him far enough away that I can get the fire really going so he doesn’t think he needs to ‘help’ me like he did last night.”
Pun’kin beat them to it. “Hey, this is really good, ya’ll!” he hollered, chomping on a carob pod. “Just watch ‘em seeds. They’re like rocks!” A British voice nearby made a snarky remark, but Garret wasn’t close enough to hear what Butterworth said.
“Try to find the dried ones,” Bartram said. “But not too dry. They should feel like leather in your hand.” Then, miracle of miracles, he got up and went to show Pun’kin what he meant.
Fishy pounced on the fire spot like it was a Christmas ham. Garret shrugged at Velvet, who rolled his eyes in response. Garret pulled two pieces of dried meat and two pieces of hardtack out of his pack and handed one of each to Velvet. They both went to find firewood.
On the way, they passed Burl who was peeing on a tree and trying to look like he was doing anything other than that. Since Fishy wasn’t there to do it, Velvet wolf-whistled at him. Burl almost died.
W
Darkness had settled. Garret and Velvet returned with the biggest armloads of wood they could carry. Even so, it wouldn’t burn for long. Garret and Velvet had been forced to climb into the hills before they’d managed to find anything that would burn for more than ten minutes. Burl trailed somewhere behind them, lugging a much smaller armload. The wavering light of a small fire flickered through the carob trunks, making all their strange cords seem to writhe like a bundle of snakes.
Garret stepped into the clearing and dropped his armload of wood.
“Finally,” Fishy said, “did you guys stop for coffee?”
Garret flipped him the finger and squatted down on his haunches by the flames. Across the fire, someone else was already squatted. It was a little Serbian girl, no more than five years of age. Her dress, if it could still be called that, was soiled and snagged, and the hem was trodden.
Her face was smudged as well, but her large limpid eyes soaked Garret and Fishy up as if she’d been created to watch and wait. Her hair was dark and wavy, and currently a mop around her smooth face. She was a beautiful child.
“Uh, hi,” Garret said. She did not respond, but watched him. At last Garret noticed her hands, which were in her lap. Between them she held a piece of naval hardtack. One end had been nibbled. A couple dried apricots peered out of the fold between her knees. Judging by the orange stickiness around them, she’d had quite a pile of them to begin with.
A stick cracked loudly. Fishy was breaking up Garret’s wood and adding it to the fire. “She doesn’t speak English, Lover Boy,” Fishy said.
Garret looked around, as if the darkness and the strange trees could offer a good explanation for the waif across the fire. “Who is she?” Garret asked.
Fishy cracked another stick and peered at Garret. “If she doesn’t speak English, how would I know that?”
“Right, okay. Well where did she come from?”
Fishy just shook his head. He was stacking the fire in a four-sided box, overlaying the pieces in alternating pairs just as one would do at larger scale to construct a log cabin. Garret hadn’t seen a fire built that way. He’d always built a teepee fire.
“I think that’s gonna burn too fast,” Garret said. Fishy ignored him.
Velvet walked back into the fire light and dropped his load of wood opposite Garret’s pile.
“Mine’s bigger,” Garret said to Velvet, then began easing around the fire towards the little girl.
“Oh yours is bigger than his, is it?” Fishy asked. “Is that what you guys were doing out there?”
“Stow it Fishy,” Velvet said. Then he followed it with, “Who is this?”
Fishy sighed wearily. “You guys are killing me.”
Velvet got defensive, and Bostonian. “Well, what’s wrong with that question?”
Fishy opened a hand in exasperation. “Why don’t you ask her then?”
Garret stopped edging around the fire. He was trying to smile and look as non-threatening as he could, but the little girl was watching him, and growing tenser with each inch he came closer to her. Suddenly he felt foolish and backed away from her. She relaxed.
“How did you hand her the food?” Garret asked.
“Didn’t.” Fishy said. “Laid it out for her and she came and got it when she was ready.”
“How near is the closest village?” Velvet asked with concern.
“Where’s Burl?” Garret interrupted. “Wasn’t he right behind us?”
“How should I know, Velvet,” Fishy replied, as he began to stack Garret and Velvet’s firewood into one neat fuel pile.
“Burl?” Garret called, standing up.
“Did you give her anything to drink?” Velvet asked.
Fishy glare
d up at him, offended that Velvet had asked. “She drained my canteen.”
At the same time, Lieutenant Bartram, Butterworth, and Pun’kin appeared together from the western side of the grove. Butterworth was carrying more firewood. Pun’kin had removed his shirt and filled it with long brown carob pods, several of which were sticking out of his mouth like curved cigars. Lieutenant Bartram wasn’t carrying a thing.
“Well hello,” Pun’kin said cheerily. “Who’s this?”
“Jesus Christ! What’s wrong with you people?” Fishy growled.
“Hey!” Pun’kin said. “Don’t you start talkin’ like Velvet!”
Garret prowled away into the trees, drawing on his wolf vision as he did so. The darkness melted back, giving way to a low-visibility, but well-contrasted, grey and black panorama. “Burl?” Garret paused to listen.
No response.
Garret glanced back to make sure no one could see him, then kicked off his boots and his ill-fitted Serbian clothes. Naked as the day he was born, he dropped to all fours and initiated the change. He didn’t push it quickly, he just let it go as it was meant to. Grey fur shot down his back and across his chest. His head realigned with his spine, his ears crawled up to the top of his head and became furry and triangular. His face elongated, filling with sharp teeth. His hips shifted and his pelvis changed shape. His legs shortened, the joints moved, and the muscles compacted down into powerful wolf legs. His fingers disappeared, backfilling his paws, and he felt his balance improve as his coccyx extended into a richly plumed tail. The last couple joints popped into place, but it didn’t hurt, it felt kind of good, like cracking his knuckles.
Garret scanned the trees and minimal undergrowth. His black-and-white wolf sight was better than his human eyes at night, but compared to what his senses of hearing and smell were telling him, he hardly needed his eyes.
His pointed ears caught every sound for acres around, from the owl swooping away from the branch to the north, to the beetle crawling through the grass to his right. He inhaled into his cavernous wolf lungs. His nose told him strongly of the rank stench of humans—his own scent and Velvet’s—going and returning. Burl’s scent was there too, laced with the acrid reek of the drops of urine he’d splashed on his pants, but it was only the trail he’d laid down on the way out. He hadn’t come back this way.
Making no more sound than a mouse, Garret slinked into the trees.
Ten minutes later, Garret padded his quiet way out onto a rock outcropping on the side of the mountain. Out in front of him, Burl lay on the edge of the rocks, overlooking the carob grove below. Garret wrestled with his human annoyance, and his wolfish protectiveness, trying to get them both to lay down and be quiet so he didn’t hurt Burl’s feelings when he spoke to him.
But Garret was steamed. It had taken him several minutes to climb to the outcropping, so he’d gotten to spend the entire climb fearing that Burl had fallen over. But there Burl was, just lying on the edge, stargazing, or whatever he was doing. Garret could smell from here that Burl was unharmed.
Garret pushed the wolf aside and stood, his body reshaping as easily as clay in an artist’s hands. He walked up beside Burl and squatted down, trying to decide what kind of big-brotherly tongue lashing he needed to give.
“Shhhh,” Burl said, before Garret could open his mouth.
Burl pointed down and to the east in the carob grove, a few dozen yards from where the campfire flickered in the trees and Pun’kin’s big mouth rang loud and clear.
Garret squinted, then called up his wolf vision, as much as he could get without changing his body in a way Burl would notice. Garret didn’t get much clarity, but it was enough for him to pick out the outline of a person. Someone else was in the woods, not far from the camp. The person was still as a stone, and watching Garret’s friends. The hair on the back of his neck stood up. He hadn’t caught the slightest hint of the person’s scent while he was searching for Burl, so not only had the person stayed upwind, but he had come into the grove from another direction, probably the east.
Garret was drawing enough from the wolf to feel the barest edge of its instincts, but he didn’t need them. His dull human instincts were enough to tell him that this was neither right nor innocent. The person was standing mostly behind a trunk, but not in a fearful or doubtful posture. The person was watching. Observing. And Garret’s friends were completely unaware of it. If there was one person that Garret’s wolf senses had missed, there could be more. He rose to his haunches.
“Burl,” he whispered in a voice he knew the smaller boy would not disobey. “Stay here until I come back for you.”
“Okay,” Burl whispered. Garret turned to go.
“Garret?”
Garret turned back. “What Burl?” he hissed.
“Um, why are you naked?”
W
An hour later, they were all sitting around the fire. Well, standing and sitting. Mostly standing. And arguing.
“I’m in charge here,” Lieutenant Bartram said icily. “There will be no further debate. She could be part of Mlada Bosna for all we know.”
“What is she going to do, sir?” Fishy asked, his posture defensive. “She can’t hurt us.”
Butterworth was standing beside Lieutenant Bartram, arms crossed over his little British pectorals. “Mate, if she brings the Serbian army down on us, we’re all dead!”
“Stow it Barney,” Fishy retorted. “You don’t have any say here. And for the last time, I’m not your ‘mate’!”
Velvet and Pun’kin sat on the ground opposite them, a pile of carob between them, munching and watching the argument bounce back and forth.
Garret was standing to the side, flanked by Burl. Garret wasn’t liking either side of the argument. The person who had been watching from behind the tree was in fact a young woman. A beautiful young woman. With her long dark hair and Greek-statue proportions, she reminded Garret a bit too much of his Ma. Or maybe it was something he saw in her face. Either way he didn’t trust her.
There had been no one else around. Garret had scouted most of the surrounding mile in his wolf form, and by circling the entire grove, he had made certain that no scents or sounds had eluded him. Of course he couldn’t tell Lieutenant Rat that there was no further need for searching, so Bartram had made his own blundering search, wasting a half hour of everyone’s lives, and making so much noise that everyone within a mile knew where they were.
“What’s she going to do sir,” Fishy asked again. “Claw us all to death in our sleep with her fingernails? She’s not armed!”
“You can’t be sure of that, sailor,” Bartram said coldly.
Fishy stepped partially to the side, not enough to expose her to the Lieutenant, but enough so that everyone could see her. She was dressed in a man’s clothes, or more likely a boy’s clothes, judging by how tightly they fit her. If she was packing a pistol, it was a really small one.
She fidgeted and flashed a fearful smile at the angry men surrounding her. If she’d actually been happy, the smile would have been breathtaking. As beautiful as she was, however, she was a young woman alone. Or rather, a young woman who was undoubtedly wishing she was alone. Including Garret, there were seven guys, and they were all bigger than her. Well, except maybe Burl. Furthermore, Garret had frightened her out of her wits when he’d caught her behind the tree. He also hadn’t given her any choice about accompanying him back to the fire. As he saw the depth of her fear, he began to feel badly about the whole situation.
“Sir,” Garret said to Lieutenant Bartram. “Can you tell her we’re not going to hurt her?”
Bartram was yelling at Fishy, who was yelling at Bartram. The girl was almost cowering behind Fishy now. She was caught like a rabbit in a cage, and for all she knew, they were fighting over who was going to have her first.
“Sir!” Garret roared. “Tell her we’re not going to hurt her!”
Everyone stared at him. A bit of the wolf must have crept into his
voice.
They all looked from Garret to the girl. After a moment of calming down, even Lieutenant Bartram looked chagrined. He said a couple sentences to her in a reassuring voice. She didn’t look like she believed a word of it.
Bartram dropped his head in shame, and tried again. Longer this time, an explanation of some sort, probably. A small amount of acceptance moved into her face, but that was all.
“Sir.” The soft voice came from just off Garret’s elbow. He’d forgotten Burl was standing there. In the firelight, the scarred half of his face looked almost ghoulish. Garret hated the look of it. Not because it was ugly, but because it was a terrible lie about the gentle, fragile person underneath.
“Sir,” Burl said with a wet cough. “I think she’s hungry.”
Ten minutes later, they’d all settled into a nice, if not extravagant meal of hard tack, dried beef, dried apricots, which Bartram had boiled, and carob pods. Garret bit down on another pod and tore off a chunk, being careful not to chip a tooth on the pebble-like seeds they contained. He studied the remainder as he chewed. Most of the pods were about six inches long and curved. The driest ones crackled and broke in one’s mouth like twigs. The best ones were, as Bartram had said, like chewy leather.
Garret didn’t care about the consistency as much as the taste. He would have expected hard brown seed pods to taste like bark. Instead, they were mildly sweet and had a chocolate flavor. They were delicious.
“Looks like the locust pods from back home,” Garret said as he dug into the pile for another soft one.
“More or less,” said Lieutenant Bartram. “If you’ll notice, the leaves look like locust, too.”
Indeed they did. Small roundish leaves arranged in two flanking rows on either side of the stems.
Bartram chuckled. “When the Bible said St. John ate locusts and wild honey, it wasn’t talking about insects, like people think. It was talking about these.” He held up a pod.
Ironclad Page 59