fast the river goes as how fast a man can go on the river.'
Owen frowned. 'Meaning?'
'Well now, supposing the river goes five miles in an hour. A man going from dawn to dusk could go pretty far.'
'Sixty miles. Knowing that, I can estimate how quickly du Malphias could deliver troops to Temperance.'
'But if his people all got in canoes and paddled fast, they'd go farther, and your figuring would be wrong.'
'Yes, but…'
Nathaniel shipped his paddle and turned halfway back toward Owen. 'The Altashee don't worry none about miles. For them it's all 'walks.' Right fine system.'
Owen frowned. 'Let me be clear. I need to know distances so I can put things on a map.'
Kamiskwa cleared his throat. 'Captain Strake, how long does it take a man to walk one of your miles?'
Owen looked back at the Altashee. 'Flat road, easy pace, a third of an hour.'
'And in the rain, no road, through the forest, heavily laden?'
Owen laughed, remembering more than one similar march in the Low Countries. 'One in a day.'
'Distance does not matter. Speed of arrival does.' Kamiskwa smiled indulgently. 'We have many walks. Your flat road would just be a walk; though we have no flat roads. A hunting walk would be slower. Garrahai -warwalk-much faster. Then there are wet and dry walks, and light and heavy walks. We have words for all of them.'
Owen was about to complain that this system was highly impractical, but he stopped. For a people that migrated seasonally, in a land where no roads existed, the system actually did work. And while it seemed impractical to his mind, it suited the land. He might have to calculate distance backward for mapping purposes, but absent a surveying crew, his measurements were going to be inexact. While his sextant would allow him to track latitude, but without a pair of timepieces, determining longitude couldn't be done.
He frowned. 'If you measure in walks, how do you measure travel on the river?'
'This river is a two-three: twice as fast as a walk paddling up, three times floating down.' Kamiskwa dipped his paddle again. 'The system has worked for all time.'
Owen nodded. 'And the charts sent back from those who came before me? Their distances?'
Nathaniel shrugged. 'Made up mostly, I 'spect. Ain't never run into any of the Branches outside Bounty. Only true distance they know is between alehouses and stills.'
The Altashee chuckled. 'They measure in dizzy-walks.'
Owen fell silent and listened to the sound of paddles in the water. A dragonfly zipped over, paced them for a bit, then lighted on a gunwale. Its iridescent wings sparkled in the sunlight. The insect's mahogany body hue reminded him of Catharine's eyes for a moment, then his thoughts abruptly shifted to Bethany Frost. He thought she would be entranced by the insect.
Catharine would want me to save her from it.
The dragonfly took off, zigzagging toward the shore. Owen followed its flight, then looked up and gasped. 'My God, what is that?' He reached for his musket.
Nathaniel turned and signaled for him to leave the gun alone. He lowered his voice. 'It's a tanner. This range your ball would bounce off.'
Owen stared. The creature appeared to be an elk, but one of prodigious proportions. It stood taller than he was at its shoulder, and he was certain he could have lain straight out on its vast rack of antlers with plenty of room for his head and feet. It grazed, still chewing, as it lifted its head to regard them.
'A tanner?' The brown coat with white throat blaze provided no clue about its name. 'Why do you call it that?'
'One of the first explorers through here, Blackston, I'm thinking his name was, called it the 'Titan Elk.' Cumbersome name.'
'Ti- tan becomes tanner, I see.' Owen shot Nathaniel a sidelong glance. 'And I could hit it from here.'
'Hitting ain't killing.' Nathaniel nodded toward the elk. Tanner'd take more than one ball. Wounded, it would run a fair piece. We'd be all day finding it. If it tried to find us, well, we'd run a fair piece our own selves.'
The guide sighed. 'Now, iffen we was out trapping or hunting, beast like that would be worth the shot. Meat'd feed a village for a week. That hide would cover Reverend Bumble. Worth a pound or three down to Temperance.'
Owen dug into his coat pocket. 'Perhaps it's on the Prince's list.'
The other two men chuckled. 'You'll be finding a lot on his list. Half of it don't exist.'
'But the Prince…'
'He's a smart man, belike, but some of that learning has come from books that ain't worth the time to open.'
Kamiskwa cleared his throat. 'My people related stories to early explorers, who paid them with a variety of baubles. The more fantastic the story, the better the pay.'
Owen nodded. 'How will I know what is real and what is not?'
'Only know what I see, only believe what I touch.' Nathaniel smiled.
'I get the feeling, Mr. Woods, that this will be a very long trip.'
The other men chuckled and bent to their paddles. Owen continued to watch the elk until it vanished around a river bend. That the creature dwarfed any similar Auropean beast impressed Owen. Its magnificence made him smile. But there was something else there, too. The tanner, and maybe even the way the Twilight People accounted for distance, seemed so primitive.
Others would take primitive to mean backward, but Owen intended a wholly different sense. Mystria seemed a land that slumbered, still young and vital. Norisle and Tharyngia had been worked long and hard. He couldn't have gone a fraction of the distance he'd traveled in either without coming across someone or at least a signpost that indicated people lived nearby.
The earliest Mystrian settlers and explorers had called the natives the Twilight People because they tended to keep to the shadows. They'd been seldom seen except at twilight, and even then only in silhouette. They were part of the land and their reticence to be seen had been explained away as their fear of the white men and their magick.
Owen suspected it was something else entirely. The Shedashee were part of the land. They lived with it, reaping its bounty, not tearing its flesh and breaking it to their will. They'd watched that behavior in the settlers and wanted nothing to do with them, thinking them evil or insane.
And greedy, to them, is insane.
That first afternoon, with nothing but the sounds of wind, water, birds, bugs, and fish leaping, made Owen realize how far he was from Norisle. Not just in miles or walks, but in the very nature of the land. Mystria wasn't a place to be broken easily, though war could do that.
And it was his mission to lay the groundwork for that war. He would do his duty for the Crown. He had no choice. War was inevitable, especially with du Malphias somewhere out there. But, if there was a way to mitigate things, a way to save Mystria, he would seek that out, too.
If he did anything less, his failure would haunt him for the rest of his life.
Chapter Seventeen
May 6, 1763
Grand Falls
Bounty, Mystria
T hey continued up the river another four days through country that slowly rose toward the mountains in the west. They encountered rapids around which they had to portage. They brought the canoe to shore, unloaded it, carried it up around the rapids, then reloaded their gear and proceeded on upriver.
Travel was not arduous. They started out at dawn, would rest for a couple of hours during the heat of the day, then push on until dusk. Kamiskwa proved adept at hand-catching fish-what Nathaniel called 'tickling'-and Nathaniel shot a tom turkey on the second day out. They roasted some of it, smoked the rest in a makeshift smokehouse, and didn't even think about hunting until they'd finished the bird.
