Califia's Daughters (26 page)

The barn had collapsed, the cabin was a crackling black skeleton; Robin's unburned possessions lay scattered across an expanse of slowly refreezing mud that four days before had been clean snow. Glass shards sparkled in the sunlight; half the greenhouse panes had melted, sagging and dripping back from the great heat of the burning cabin. Broken dishes lay in heaps, a pan lid had lodged in the branches of a huckleberry bush, the beautiful woolen blanket from Robin's bed lay torn and trampled at the base of a tree. And brooding over it all, the blackened stones of the chimney and a few stinking beams that clung precariously together.

She walked forward slowly, but there was no body among the ashes, no smell of burnt flesh to give the remains an even more nauseating undertone. Near the barn she found a manure shovel with a smear of blood on one end and picked it up, sharply gratified to see strange hairs, bright blond in color: Robin had not gone without a fight.

But if they'd surprised him in the barn, why hadn't he had his handgun with him?

Because he'd gotten out of the habit of wearing the thing,
her mind answered,
with you here to back him up.
She dropped the shovel as if it had bitten her.

She went over to the giant slab of granite that had been Robin's porch step and found it still warm from the fire. She found something else as well: after she'd been sitting there for a while, she became aware of faint movement and looked down to see Cat, her odd gray-brown fur filthy and scorched in places but relatively uninjured. Dian pulled off her glove and held out her hand, and a minute later the fur brushed against it. Cat crawled into her lap, head buried in Dian's coat, purring desperately. She even stayed there when Tomas came over and nudged her with his nose.

At Dian's feet lay one of Robin's delicate herb baskets, undamaged although its contents had spilled out onto the ground. Turning it over in her hands, she looked up and, halfway between the house and the barn, saw something that made her heart stop in her chest. She put the cat down and walked numbly around the rough circle of exposed earth to stand staring blankly at the charred remains of Robin's books. The murdered authors of a world gone past lay cremated, deliberately piled up and set aflame. She knew the intruders for what they were, and she felt the rage begin. It grew like the growl in Tomas's chest, this revulsion and fury at life's Destroyers. These were not human beings who had been here, though they walked on two feet. These beings were a throwback, the spawn of the creatures who had brought on the Bad Times, who had killed Kirsten's father and thousands more in their riots, who had poisoned water supplies and burned libraries and set bombs and murdered anyone tainted by a connection with technology and education. Great as her rage was over Robin, her revulsion at the way he had been taken was even greater. She dropped the small basket and sprinted for her horse, consumed by the need for venting her fury.

When her hand was on the pommel, however, she did not mount. A small cold voice spoke through the heat and asked her what she would do if they did not have Robin when she caught up with them. Would she be able to meet them on their own level and exterminate them regardless? Or would she be forced to back off and return here to a very cold trail? Should she even go after him at all? She stood for several minutes leaning against the saddle, willing the voice of reason away, wanting to be gone. In the end, though, cursing herself under her breath, she removed the bridle so Simon could scrape in the snow for grass and went to find a hefty branch to sort through the smoldering remains.

Ninety minutes, a sliced finger, and numerous painful little burns later, Dian was satisfied that Robin's body was indeed not here. With a degree of grim humor she gathered together some of the larger scraps of unburned wood and lit them a second time, setting Robin's largest pan, dented but whole and filled with ash-flecked snow, onto the resulting fire. While the water heated, she scrubbed her face and blackened hands with snow and set off in a wide circle, scouring the hillside for any trace of Robin, any hint that he might have gotten away. There were none. The pan sent a geyser of steam into the air, and Dian poured the boiling water into the thermal jug, threw in a few tea leaves, screwed in Isaac's wooden stopper with care, and stood up. Her eyes went to Tomas, lying on the warm granite-slab step, Cat tucked fastidiously against his flank. The dog's head was between his paws, and he was watching her intently.

First, Cat. Dian spent a few minutes further collapsing the inner wall of the greenhouse, dragging some branches over to shut it off. It would be cold, but protected. She went back to the slab and stroked the frazzled fur. “Sorry, lady, but you're going to have to fend for yourself. You can get in out of the cold in the greenhouse, and there'll still be plenty of mice near the barn.” Dian gathered up what few edible bits of scorched food she could find, then retrieved the sad heap of Robin's blanket and dropped it in front of the dog.

“Tomas, find Robin. Go to Robin.”

Dian was surprised at the speed of his response—he seemed almost to have been waiting for just that command. Certainly he did not bother to sniff at the blanket but rose and trotted off in the direction of the footprints, and her heart lifted a bit at this appearance of Culum's lightning intelligence and wisdom in his son. She picked up the blanket, shook it out carefully, and folded it away into her saddlebag. On another whim she included the small basket of herbs. Sentimentality, perhaps, but it was a light enough thing to carry; the blanket, anyway, might come in useful. She bridled the horse, mounted, and followed Tomas down the hill.

Dian had not even stopped to consider the potential consequences of going after Robin. She owed him a life, and to do otherwise was unthinkable. Nor did she reconsider her actions now, merely putting out of her mind—or, at any rate, putting in the back of her mind—the niggling voice that asked,
But you're pregnant now, and walking into danger: do you owe him two lives?
She rode along immersed in what her eyes were seeing, all her attention on the path of trampled snow that stretched before her. There were eleven horses, she decided, five of them being led. Two would be those that belonged to the woman who had killed, and been killed by, Culum; two would probably be the gang's own packhorses. She would assume that the fifth horse they led bore Robin, captive but alive and no doubt as well as they could keep him: Destroyers might burn books, but a healthy man would be a commodity too valuable to risk. That meant six strangers, which matched the footprints at the cabin. They were apparently unconcerned with anyone wanting to follow them, for they were making no attempt to conceal their tracks. Good. Even better was the news that the lead rider left occasional spots of blood in the snow.

Not so good was their goal. Assuming they had taken Robin in order to sell him—and it was unlikely that a roving band of half a dozen women would wish to be burdened with such a valuable and vulnerable, to say nothing of potentially dangerous, individual for very long—the most obvious choices were either Redburg, nearly a week to the south in this weather, or Ashtown, five, maybe six days' reasonable ride from Robin's cabin. Ashtown, whose walls had held Isaac in as a child. Ashtown, the thought of which had caused a seasoned Traveler in Jamilla's cozy parlor to shiver and a Meijing guard to go grim. Ashtown, which lay straight in the direction of the line of hoofprints she was following. Five days away, and by the signs, Robin a day and a half ahead of her. The weather would hold, her skin told her that, and she could ride by moonlight. Her thigh ached already from the demands of the last few days; it would just have to ache.

And if, as her rational mind told her was all too possible, she failed to catch up with them in time? Two choices then, discounting the third possibility of simply turning her back on the whole problem and abandoning him: she could retreat all the way back to Meijing, borrow enough money to buy him out, and ride back with that perilous amount of silver calling out to three hundred miles of countryside, to the clear possibility of finding him long since suicided and buried; or she could go in after him. Enter Ashtown, with its fearsome reputation, and steal him back from that walled and guarded city.

Neither choice bore thinking about. She would just have to overtake them, she told herself, and put her heels mercilessly into Simon's sides. She stopped at full dark, cleaned the two hares she had encouraged Tomas to take during the afternoon, and risked a small fire to cook them. She dozed, wrapped in Robin's filthy, smoke-thick blanket, then mounted up again with moonrise. At the dark before dawn she stopped again, slept for an hour, and dragged herself from her sleeping bag. After sharing the last of the cooked meat with Tomas and giving Simon a large double handful of the spilled grain she had scraped from Robin's wrecked barn, she pressed on. At midday Simon threw a shoe, and she began to walk occasionally to spell him. The endless day passed, a never ending, never changing cycle of dark tree and white ground, skirted rocks and crossed streams, and always the trail, the mashed-up stretch of hoofprints in the snow, wider now across a meadow, single file in the woods, never seeming any fresher, always mocking, drawing her hypnotically on.

The day trudged toward darkness in increasing pain and exhaustion, relieved only when she found a wooden button, half-buried in the snow, that had been torn from Robin's coat and tossed—deliberately? by Robin?—to one side. Later, by moonlight, she found where the party had spent its third night, and the trail leaped half a day nearer. Both discoveries refreshed her more than the snatched two hours of sleep between impassible dark and moon's light, and she drove on, all three of them limping now, Dian walking as much as she rode.

The following dawn it took her ten minutes to creep from her sleeping bag and knead the worst of the fire from her cramping thigh. Three hours later they passed the fourth campsite, where Tomas caught a raccoon attracted by the scraps. It was old and tough, but it was food, so she stopped briefly to clean it, giving most of the innards to Tomas and stuffing the rest in her pack to eat raw. The snow was deeper now, but the trail was broken already, so tantalizingly fresh she could almost smell her quarry. She would have to kill five armed, well-fed, rested women, but she would do it, and Robin would not be taken in by Ashtown.

At dusk, Simon went lame. She turned him loose in a meadow over which a Remnant house brooded. She hoisted her possessions into a tree and stumbled off, carrying only her rifle, binoculars, food, and sleeping bag. The trail was fresh now. She would make it. She would.

When it was too dark to see the trail, she fell into her sleeping bag next to Tomas, woke reluctantly three hours later, shared out the rest of the cold, raw raccoon, and dropped her trousers to urinate. When she glanced down at the moon-bright snow, her ears suddenly filled with a rushing noise and dizziness threatened to knock her over. She had to strike a light to be certain.

She was bleeding. Not a lot, not yet, but shockingly red and alarmingly steady. She let the handful of dry needles burn out, and after a while her eyes readjusted to the low light.

Bleeding. If she went on, she might well lose this baby.

If she stopped here, she would almost certainly lose Robin.

Dian leaned against the trunk of the tree, staring unseeing at the path of churned snow winding away before her. In the shifting moonlight she could all but see Robin, straight-spined with despair, riding away from her. Eventually, with the movement of an old woman, she reached down for her rifle, and took one step, then another. The being lodged within her was little more than an ounce of organized tissue, whereas Robin . . .

Robin was real. Robin was family. He had taken her in despite the threat to his life and his freedom; he had saved her life and given Culum burial; he needed her now, not seven months from now. The hypnotic trail pulled her along and she pushed forward, Tomas close by her side as he led her, stumbling and falling, in Robin's wake.

She could smell them. At dawn, she thought she saw them through the trees on the very brow of the opposite hilltop. An hour later, she came upon their final campfire, not yet cold; twenty minutes after that she saw clear signs of where Robin had thrown himself from his horse and tumbled down a steep hill, which cost his captors at least half an hour and cost him, going by the dots on the snow, a bloody nose in retribution. The blood was still red, the horse droppings barely cool, and Dian pushed herself into a shambling run.

She could smell them, see them, could almost hear them across the crisp air. She could do everything, except catch them.

         

From her vantage point up a tree two miles away, Dian's old binoculars showed her the party approaching the city, eleven horses with seven riders merging into the market crowd outside the gates. She lost sight of the bright blond head on the black horse at their lead, then saw her reappear from behind a pavilion. Dian watched until Robin had disappeared through the Ashtown gates, swallowed by the city. It looked very final.

She sat back against the tree, eyes closed, for a long time, until a faint whine from Tomas below roused her to descend reluctantly from her perch. Utterly, bone-achingly weary, she dropped with a jar from the tree, pulled some fir branches into a rough shelter, and with Tomas beside her, she slept.

When she woke, as tired as if she had never closed her eyes, she turned her back on Robin and walked through the beginnings of a dull snow, curiously thick flakes that fell against her cheeks like cold spiders, making her way back to the meadow where she had left Simon, the meadow overlooked by the Remnant of some rich person's vacation house. One side of the building lay smashed beneath a fallen tree, and the oak floor of the remainder was buckled into waves where the rain had entered, but the other wing seemed secure enough and would at least keep her dry.

She let Simon into an entrance vestibule with an ornate fitted stone floor, shut him into these impromptu stables by dragging the remains of a dining table across the hallway, then took a brief walk through the rest of the house, watching for signs of bear or cougar. She found none, only abandonment and decay. A small closet off one of the musty bedrooms held a store of sheets and mouse-chewed blankets, and she scooped up an armload of the stained and frayed fabric to soften the warped floor. The whole time, from when she jumped down from her vantage tree until she pulled the patched sleeping bag around her head, she continued to feel the slow, sticky ooze of blood from her womb.