“Half a day.”
“Then there better be a fortress there, because otherwise I'm done. They should have some sort of medical facilities and stockpiles in such a place.”
“But can you walk on it?”
“I'll have to, won't I?”
For the next half an hour, the government pilots lobbed fire spoors into the turmoil of the forest until the inferno raged through such a howling madness that nothing could have survived its countless hot tongues. They were forced to strip off their coats and sweaters, even back in their cool, water-floored cavelet. Often, the air became so superheated that it was difficult to draw a satisfactory breath — though Davis was pleased that the air currents worked in such a way as to draw the smoke upwards, away from the trees, and pulled new air in, underneath. Otherwise, they would have been dead of smoke inhalation inside of minutes. The Alliance rep was taking no chance with his elusive prey.
Finally, when the soldiers ceased shelling the charred and smoking woodlands, when the fire began to abate, Davis decided it was time to move out. Though it was still quite hot, they put their coats on once more, for wearing the bulky garments was easier than carrying them. Outside, in the ashes and thin black skeletons of yil trees, the pall of smoke was so dense overhead that the sky was invisible, shielding them from the view of the police; even after they had left the burned sections and made their way into unmolested trees and brush, it offered them excellent cover against discovery.
Davis hardly felt the chunk of shrapnel in his thigh as they began their last long lap of the trek.
Then it began to itch.
Then burn.
In an hour, it felt as if it were cored with napalm and that the flesh was being burned to ashes from within by steady, small flames, as if the shell of his leg were hollow, without bones or meat to fill it. With each step, it buckled and bent under severe pain.
It bled more than it should. Most of that trouser leg was soaked through.
The flesh in the area immediately around the wound was swollen and a yellow-blue in color.
He felt feverish.
He favored it for the first three hours of the walk, and they stopped to rest periodically. Their progress was hampered, but the Alliance seemed to be certain that they had perished in the forest fire and that misassumption gained them all the time they needed.
Sometimes, sitting on a log or rock, resting the damaged limb, he got furious with his body, as if its ruined leg were its own doing. After coming through so much, he could not contend with the idea that his own inability to go on the last couple of miles would spell the end for them. But he soon realized that a hatred of himself and a disgust with his own weaknesses only depressed him and made it more difficult to go on. On the other hand, if he turned his fury into hatred of the Alliance, a personal, intimate hatred of the little rep and of each and every soldier that had been after them, the anger gave him strength, roused him to the accomplishment of things he had not known possible. When the rage was most brilliant in his mind, he could even put weight on the wounded leg without feeling much pain, if only for a few steps;
And so they progressed, Leah adding her support when he stumbled, Davis's face flushed with fury at the men who had put them in these circumstances, had driven them to this insane flight, banished them from the company of “normal” people. In the writing of so many historical novels, he had become intimately acquainted with nearly every era of mankind's past. It always amazed him that taboos changed so radically from historical moment to historical moment and from one culture to another — even when those cultures might exist in countries whose lands were side by side, or even when they existed within the larger society of a single nation. It was one of the things he tried so hard to make his readers grasp. The structuring of taboos which have nothing to do with the health of a nation but merely interfere with another man's rights is a silly and useless practice. Why tell a man what he may wear or with whom he may make love and under what conditions? In a hundred years, you will be laughed at for your narrow-mindedness. He thought of all this as they walked, and he forced himself to explore the ideas in more detail than ever, in an attempt to relieve his mind of too much consideration of his pain.
Eventually, he came to understand something important about the men who constituted the Alliance, the men who held power over the masses. They had never discovered the concept of “us.” Indeed, they had even rejected the concept of “me” in order to regress to one more barbaric level — the concept of “it.” Each man in the Alliance was part of “it': the government, the great machine of the laws and the prisons and the councils. Each man was a cog inside the overall mechanism, without individuality outside of his operating perspective. This view of the world, this “it” concept was the most dangerous unconscious philosophy ever adopted by a large segment of humanity, for it allowed its adherents — the bureaucrats and soldiers and politicians — to commit the most atrocious acts of physical, emotional, and mental slaughter and abuse against their people that the human mind could conceive. A member of the Alliance government who murdered a “traitor” or other enemy of the state never actually thought of “me” as the responsible party. “It” was to blame, if anyone. The soldier who killed in the war, the general who gave him his orders to destroy, and the president whose policies initiated the combat to begin with — none of them were responsible (in their own minds) as individuals, for they had only been acting in the name of the government, as a small — or even a large — size hardly mattered; the excuse could always apply — cog in the mechanics of “it.” And, in the last level, “it,” the government, was protected as well, since the machine could always rely on the cliche that “the government gets its power from the people' — a ruse to get the people to vote for the same megalomaniacs the next time they went to the polls.
He was jolted out of one of these tangled reveries as they passed out of the forest and climbed up a brush- covered foothill at the base of one of the largest mountains he had ever seen, a gargantuan peak of rock whose form vaguely resembled a wisdom tooth. They had been walking and resting, walking and resting in an almost hypnotic cycle for nine hours, ever since they had left the burned woods. To stop and not sit to raise his leg broke the chain of events, if only a trifle, and called forth his attention.
“Tooth,” she said, holding onto his arm, keeping him erect with her own tense little body. “If I understood my grandfather correctly, the entrance to the fortress is not far.”
He nodded, sorry she had broken the trance into which he had settled so comfortably, for the pain was a great deal worse while he was fully aware of his surroundings.
“Come on,” she said, pulling his arm.
His leg was very warm and an odd tingling sensation pierced it from foot to hip. When he looked down at it, he wished that he had not, for the sight was unsettling. The wound had been torn wider, and the shrapnel had worked its way partially back out. In the process, the severed blood vessel had been permitted more freedom to spurt, and it was jetting regular pulses of warm blood down over his trousers. With an effort, he looked around and saw, behind, that he had been leaving a fairly rich red trail for the last half a dozen steps. In the moonlight, though, the red looked black.
“Hurry!” Leah said.
“Bleeding… too fast,” he said.
“A tourniquet,” she suggested, trying to make him sit down on the snow.
“No time. Only a… medkit. Bleeding too fast. Wound's… too big. I'm sort of sleepy.”
“Don't sleep,” she said. “Fight it!”
Blackness rose out of his guts and surged through his entire body, velvety and smooth and pleasant to behold. He felt his blood pressure dropping as a leaden dizziness clutched him and spun him heavily about.
He screamed silently…
Silently…
Tooth Mountain stood so close — yet so far.
He shambled a few steps forward before he fell and struck the ground hard. The cold snow felt wonderful on the spurting wound, and he suddenly felt sure he would be fine, just fine, with just a little snow in the wound where the blood was… He laid there, feeling good, drowsy, appreciating the cold snow as he slipped quietly, peacefully into death…
XI
