‘We could do better if we had more time,’ she said. Light was failing fast; only the sheen of the lake, visible between trunks and sweet-smelling shoots, relieved gloom. Chill deepened minute by minute. An owl hooted. ‘A thatch hut, for instance. Or at least a fire in front of our entrance, rocks piled behind to make a reflector. We will do better after tonight, I promise. This is kind of an emergency, and I’ll settle for not freezing.’
Meanwhile she propped an end of the pole in the fork and started collecting thinner pieces to lean against it on either side. Under her direction, the men did likewise; thereafter they wove sticks and saplings between; foraged for material – branches, moss, fronds, punk, anything – to pile on top until it lay five or six centimeters thick; added a second layer of wands to keep this covering from blowing away. ‘Check the duff underneath for stones and twigs,’ Ronica said. ‘It’ll be your mattress. Later we may sleep in luxury on juniper boughs. We do need blanketing. You three drowned rats use the parachutes; the rest of us have dry clothes. But come on, get leaves and stuff to put over you.’
They crawled into the shelter and composed themselves, close together, just as night was giving birth to stars. Animal heat made it warm, and weary bodies found the bed amply soft. However, Iern was a while about falling asleep. He had contrived to lie beside Ronica, and became overly aware of her.
2
The trek began, and soon he was astounded. He was having a perfectly glorious time.
Half of it was in bleak, sluicing rain. Afterward mosquitoes came in clouds, and their whine was an irritant almost equal to their bite. Ticks drilled into flesh; extracting them was an art that required care, lest the head stay behind and produce an ulcer. Advised by their guide, men gave a wide berth to the bears they sometimes came upon, and feared rattlesnakes much more, and learned to keep an eye out for poison ivy. There were also brush, windfalls, quagmires, streams, ponds to contest their way and often force them to detour beyond sight of the inland sea. Farther on, they encountered hills along it, and the hollows between were apt to be worse going than the slopes. (A few times they saw mounds of a different sort on the banks above the water, with shards of brick and glass visible through the overgrowth, and shunned them. Those had been villages, centuries ago, and that was too sad a knowledge.) In camp the chores were many for unskilled, uncallused hands to toil at, from the first collecting of firewood to the last stowage of supplies away from thievish animals. The march went on but the forest still reached ahead and around, endless, tenantless, pitiless.
Only when riding a storm or a woman had Iern enjoyed himself so hugely.
He had the wit not to exult aloud, as others did not complain aloud. Much of his pleasure was due to nothing save luck. He was young, in excellent physical condition, naturally dextrous, and possessed of adequate footwear. Poor, raddled Plik must lurch along in shoes that rubbed him raw. Mikli’s elegant boots held out, but he admitted that they pinched, and that his wiry frame had fewer reserves of strength than he had thought. Terai commanded plenty, and the versatile hands of a sailor or a smith, but these brooding green intricacies made him feel trapped and wore at his nerves. Wairoa seemed totally adaptable – yet who could tell, when he himself did not?
Iern, though, learned from Ronica.
He learned that rain was a bath, not a scourge, and the way to stay comfortable in it was to strip down to almost nothing, for the chill factor in wet garments was what could kill. (Her body was dazzling, her nudity or seminudity casual – not provocative, as an amicable but cranium-rocking clop across the chops taught him early on.) The juice of wild mint or plantain repelled insects, and the immune system was presently dismissing effects of those that got through. Noises changed from annoyance to fascination; the forest was a treasury of sounds, as it was of odors, tastes, textures, sights – here a muskrat burrow, hidden until Ronica pointed out the traces, there the prints of a fox, meaningless until she read to him the long story they told – never before had he been this aware.
Travel became simpler after she taught him the ways of it. For instance, you parted brush with your shins and then, in the same flow of motion, your forearms, and glided on through. She did not force the pace, anyway. ‘What’s the hurry? You guys should improve as we go. Meanwhile, if we pushed somebody to the point of collapse, that really would keep us too late in these boonies. Let’s shoot for an average of, oh, twenty klicks a day.’
On four occasions she decreed a layover, two nights on the same spot while they rested and did various jobs such as laundry; they might be soapless, she said, but that was no excuse for being rancid. The first time, she treated Plik’s feet, making pads of moss and cloth for the sores while remarking what a variety of alternative materials existed – birdskin, bast. … ‘You’re not going anywhere till we’ve got you properly shod, fellow. Yasu Krist! Didn’t your pappy ever tell you a hole in the sock means a hole in the foot?’
‘Yesterday you mentioned you could make a boat out of – birchbark, was it?’ he said. ‘Why don’t you and save us this walking?’
‘It’d take a while, and we’d be weatherbound a lot, or paddling against winds that’d wear us out worse than any swamp. Also, we’d have to come ashore for most of our necessities. No, for us Shanks’s mare is faster.’
Ronica rose from her crouch above Plik’s ankles. ‘I’ll get some rawhide for moccasins.’ She sighed. ‘I hate killing a deer when we’ll have to leave most of the carcass behind. But I’ve got to, and Brother Crow or Sister Worm will benefit, so the waste isn’t too bad.’
First she stood in the smoke of the fire she had kindled, using a drill she had made, twigs, tinder, and careful breath. (The drill was wood and parachute cord. She had remarked that sinew could have substituted for the latter, or gut, or various vegetable fibers. Lacking a steel knife, she could have chipped a serviceable blade out of stone.) Iern wondered why she fumigated herself. ‘Animals fear human scent,’ she explained. ‘After all, we’ve been predators for a million years or more, the paleoanthropologists tell me.’ (Her vocabulary was another surprise to him.) They haven’t the instincts to understand smoke-smell, unless an actual forest or prairie is burning.’
At his request, she demonstrated how she would track her prey –by faint marks in soil and grass, pellets of dung, leaves nibbled in characteristic patterns – and stalk it – in slow, high-arching steps, freezing dead still whenever its constantly shifting attention drifted near her. ‘At home in Laska, it’s fun getting close enough to touch them.’ Clearly, she would fail if anybody else went along. She vanished in among pines.
Mikli having declined to release his pistol, she would make the kill with her knife. Her sole additional piece of equipment was her rabbit stick, which she carried everywhere ‘on principle.’ It was a straight piece of dense wood, about a meter long and as thick as she could comfortably grasp, usually tucked beneath an arm. With it she knocked down anything from a dry branch for fuel to small game spied on the way.
‘Once in Laska,’ she had related, ‘I met a grizzly, and plain to see, he was in a bad mood. I brandished my stick. It’d be no use in a fight against him, of course, but it made him stop before he charged. “Why, you nasty little tramp, you,” he thought – which gave me time to reach a tree, bigger’n he could uproot and higher’n he could grab. Eventually he got bored and wandered off.’
She returned in the evening, blood-splashed, a skin slung on her back full of meat and selected parts, whatever she expected they could use. As twilight fell and her group settled around the campfire, she needed a while to become cheerful; she sat cross-legged, staring into the flames. Iern asked why. ‘Today I felt a life run out between my fingers.’ she said low. Again he must wonder what she really was.
Less personal killing didn’t bother her. She whittled out bits of wood which, set in a figure-four shape and baited, upholding a boulder, frequently provided a squirrel or the like for breakfast. She caught fish on wooden spears or bone hooks, or in stone weirs if the p
arty happened to overnight by a stream. Sometimes her hurled stick felled a bird; jay turned out to be delicious. One misty dawn she stripped, camouflaged her head in grass, and swam slowly, silently, off into the lake, until she could slip beneath a flock of ducks and seize two by the legs.
By then, her fellows were generally not spitting meat over a bed of coals. She had taught them how to cook with water in hollow stumps or pits, using heated rocks, or bake in ovens of stone and turf. It conserved vitamins better, she said. For the same reason she tried to make the men eat all organs of an animal; and she boasted of her maggot stew, but in that case she encountered a marked lack of interest.
She didn’t press the point, if only because there was no dearth of vegetable food either: berries of numerous kinds, clovers, grass seeds, select parts of cattails, sedges, thistles, dandelions, nettles. Some things required special treatment, such as boiling; some must be avoided, such as purple grass seeds that might carry ergot; some were not available at this time of year, such as the pollen cones of pines, or would require too much processing, such as acorns. However, Ronica proved her claim that the wilderness was a cornucopia for those who knew how to seek and take – ‘always with care and love.’ she said in one of her earnest moments.
The moccasins she made for Plik and Mikli were a hasty job, she admitted, but they should serve for the rest of the trip, and they did.
As a rule she was gone throughout most of the day, foraging, while the men hiked. In the later afternoon she reappeared, bearing provender, and guided them to a campground. They had acquired regular duties, whatever they did best or least badly. Plik and Mikli scavenged firewood and cooking stones; Terai dug a hole if that was wanted, or did other heavy labor; Iern and Wairoa, Ronica’s aptest pupils, helped her in more skilled tasks, mainly constructing and equipping a shelter.
As they learned and toughened, the travelers began to have leisure: a lunch break, an hour or two around the fire at night before going to sleep – or inside in rainy weather, warmed and dancingly illuminated by another fire safely beyond the entrance, reflecting off a rock wall at its back and roofed if necessary. By tacit consent, talk steered clear of the divisions between them. Ronica might reminisce about the vast variousness of Laska, Iern about Uropa, Terai about the South Seas and the Asian countries he also knew; Mikli might throw in a cynical, funny story; Plik might sing; on a memorable evening, Wairoa told of what he had found in Africa.
The moon dwindled and waxed anew.
3
They were not far from the edge of cultivation. Another four or five days should see them in Dulua.
The night was unseasonably mild, and faring had been easy. Iern could not sleep, he could merely drowse. When he sensed that Ronica was leaving the shelter, he came altogether awake. Lately she and he had been exchanging long glances. He awaited her back soon, from a simple errand of nature, but she did not come. Finally, impulsively, he got up too, picked his way among slumbering forms, and stepped outside.
The moon was full, as it had last been when he fell like Lucifer, how long and long ago. Low above the great lake, it cast a glade which ripples broke into countless tiny golden wires upon obsidian, each with its own life. Elsewhere, stars gleamed. Light made hoar the grass that sloped back toward the trees; it filled them with silver and shadow, while the cone of the thatch hut became a finger pointing at the galaxy. Silence dwelt under heaven. A breeze ghosted moist, subtly pine-tinged.
Iern had left his wrapping of parachute silk behind. Like the others, he hung his clothes up to air before he retired. Coolness caressed his skin, dew his feet. Somehow he knew where to seek, a rivulet that glimmered and faintly chimed on its way across a hillside into the lake. Ronica sat there, on turf that summer had turned thick and sallow. Her knees drawn up and arms laid around them, she gazed out over the water. Moon-glow frosted the hair spilling down her breasts.
She lifted her face toward him. ‘Hi,’ she said tonelessly.
‘May I join you?’ he requested.
‘Sure.’ She hesitated. ‘I may be in want of company. Or maybe not. Let’s see.’ She patted the ground beside her.
He lowered himself. Through the centimeters between them, he thought he could feel the radiant heat of her blood … drumtide of her heart –? … She turned her eyes back outward.
A time passed. Now and then her mouth or brow twitched slightly, as if in pain. Finally he could not but murmur: ‘What’s troubling you, Ronica?’
She made no reply. He waited before he said, ‘All right, I’ll keep quiet.’
‘Thanks for that, Iern,’ she answered. ‘You’re good people.’
Still she looked eastward, to where moon and constellations were ascending. The sky wheeled majestic around the Pole Star. He remembered Orion.… No, not yet. Orion was for winter, when the year must die and a new year come to birth.
Suddenly she leaned over, caught his hand, and cried from deep within: ‘Oh, God, Iern, what am I going to do? We’re almost there.’
She is surprise upon surprise, he thought. Hope flared, but he kept himself moveless, save for returning the pressure of her fingers, and his own voice muted. ‘What do you mean, Ronica? What’s wrong?’
Her free hand made a fist and beat the earth. ‘We – trailmates – Terai’s such a decent man, and Wairoa – oh, I don’t know, he’s a mystery, except that he may be the bravest human being I’ve ever met –
‘Not too much worry about you or Plik,’ she blurted. ‘I think we can do pretty well by you in the Northwest Union, and not badly by him. But those Maurai, they’re enemy, it can’t be helped, they are, and we cannot let them carry back the news they’ve gotten. We cannot. It would end any last uncertainty in Wellantoa, you see, and give clues, and our venture is so desperate at best. Mikli talked to me about – his pistol or my knife while they sleep – but no, no, no, wasn’t that deer bad enough? I said I’d kill him if he tried. They’ve been our trailmates – What am I going to do?’
She cast herself against him. He held her close. She did not weep, but she shuddered.
Until she raised her countenance, and smiled beneath the moon, however shakily, and said, ‘Okay, no decision yet. I will not allow murder, but – Anyway, meanwhile. I need, no, I want – Never mind. Don’t think I, I haven’t noticed the looks you’ve been giving me. And you’re an almighty attractive man, and I’ve grown almighty horny. M-m-m-m?’
She was a storm, a delirium, a lioness. In between times, they were both astonished to find what merriment and peace were theirs to share.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
They were near the end of the wilderness when Ronica noticed things that brought her to a halt. It was early in the day; but she had already bagged a fat woodchuck and hoped she would soon get enough else that she could rejoin Iern. Let the others trudge onward, she thought; she and he could take their time and, later, catch up.
‘Oh-oh,’ she breathed, plus a brimstone curse. The traces she had come upon required scrutiny. Those broken branches, slashes through brush, heavy tramplings over ground were from last year. Since, the forest had been healing. Maybe nothing less than a Survivor’s eye would have seen the scars. I damn near wish I hadn’t.
She curbed her emotions. Iern was a splendid lover, but that could wait. In fact – she grinned abashedly – her supply of Afterward capsules, which she had slipped into a pocket before leaving Kemper on a just-in-case basis, was getting low. What most of her wanted was simply his company, and even that wish had less to do with his glamour as a Stormrider and (Plik’s phrase) exiled prince than it did with his own self.
Better postpone the fun and games. Something big has happened hereabouts, and we could blunder blind into a hell-kettle of consequences. She went on all fours. Nose close to soil, she used a twig to tease away leaves and needles that had fallen over the tracks she wanted to read. They were well-nigh obliterated; the fact that any indication of them whatsoever remained gave her ideas which made her uneasy.
Sunlight filtere
d through greenness, or struck between openings to bake aromas out of earth and duff and speckle them with gold. Insects buzzed; crows made rusty noises from afar; a wild dog barked. She paid only the peripheral heed of caution. Lay cheek to ground and study those hints of shadow that make visible the remnants of a print.…
By now the men were competent to pick a resting place in her absence. They had pitched camp on a bluff above the lake. Though the trees were more than a hundred meters back from it, the sun had gone behind them when Ronica arrived. Their crowns stood black against a yellowing western sky. Beyond the shade they cast, the water seemed doubly bright. Bats and swifts darted through silence. The turf underfoot kept warmth that the air was losing, and springiness and a hay scent of the summer that was waning.
Iern sped to meet her. ‘Hai, where’ve you been?’ he shouted. ‘I imagined the most awful things –’ He embraced and kissed her. His whiskers were thin and soft, and always would be till he found a razor and got rid of them, but the rest of him was man, plenty of man. She responded as vigorously as weariness allowed. Their relationship was no secret.
At length he stepped back and said, glancing at the marmot in her rawhide carrier: ‘Plain to see, you were busy. That isn’t much you’ve brought.’
‘It’ll have to do,’ she replied. ‘If my dead reckoning isn’t way off, we should reach Dulua tomorrow, where they’ll feed us. If we decide against that route, I’ll scrounge us a proper meal.’
The rest, similarly puzzled, had congregated around, hulking Terai, pinto Wairoa, gaunt Plik, Mikli the carrion cat. It was the latter who asked sharply, ‘What do you mean? What have you found?’
‘Spoor,’ she reported. ‘A good-sized bunch of men were busy in these woods last year. They brought in a heavy load of equipment and supplies, mostly on horseback. I found a site where they spent a while, operating out of it on foot, before moving on. The alignments of tent-peg holes, latrines, and what-have-you told me they were soldiers.’ She paused. ‘Not local soldiers. Their clumsiness proves that. I’ve never been in these parts before, but I do better – hell, you guys have learned to; and I understand most Krasnayans have some woodcraft, considering how many of them are loggers or trappers. Any guides they furnished must’ve been run squanchfooted, trying to herd those cheechakos.’
Orion Shall Rise Page 29
