Orion Shall Rise (37 page)

‘Yes, yes,’ said Mikli.

Terai glanced at Iern. ‘Good for you that we’re not in Yuan,’ he said.

‘Why?’ asked the Clansman.

‘You didn’t know? Well, what information Wairoa and I gathered is sketchy, but does give strong reason to think the Yuanese supplied most of the equipment for Talence Jovain Aurillac’s private army. It was smuggled in through Espayn, which suggests his dire words about that country are a smoke screen, hm?’

Iern stood dumbfounded.

‘I told you, take the politics and stick it!’ Ronica snapped from above. ‘Uh-huh, I understand the problem. We Norries don’t want you Maurai to go home with whatever additional data you’ve picked up about Ori – about our project. Like the confirmation that we are the fissionables gatherers, or whatever clues there may be in my identity and Iern’s presence. You don’t want us to go homefull of secrets you haven’t learned, plus a warning about what your high command has heard from you. Well, we’ve got to hang together on the trail. Else we may not live to backstab each other in Dulua. Give me your pledge – cooperation, yes, comradeship – or by God, I’ll strike off alone and leave you here to die!’

Iern suppressed a protest; Plik wet his lips; Mikli seemed thoughtful; Terai glowered; Wairoa waited impassive. After a moment, they mumbled agreement.

‘Good.’ Ronica sprang down, smiling. She touched Iern’s hand. ‘I wouldn’t really have abandoned you two guys,’ she whispered. ‘You’re innocent. But I figured we needed some dramatics along about then.’ She raised her voice. ‘Okay, let’s make that shelter. Follow me.’

Plik nudged Iern. ‘Innocent?’ he murmured hoarsely. ‘Perhaps, in a sense. But not harmless. You’re a mightier threat to the world – the old world we’ve known – than any of these, my friend.’

‘Do you truly mean that?’ the Clansman asked. ‘How?’

‘Upheaval. The forces are gathering for it, and you are at their center. Merciful Christ, but I want a drink!’

Ronica soon found what she sought: a long bough that had fallen and weathered into a pole; a pine with a branch low above the ground, and no dead trees nearby which might topple in a storm, on a site sufficiently elevated that rainwater runoff would not course through; surrounding deadwood and other forest debris, ferns,
shrubs, lesser trees which included some broadleafs.

‘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 party 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.