Moonrise

'Mmm. And did you notice the eagle that was not an eagle?'

'No, I didn't.'

'It flew miles east of us, just the same.'

Baj tramped up to them. 'I'm here,' he said to Nancy. '- Satisfied?'

CHAPTER 8

As Richard had seen her – so Patience had seen him and his companions as she sailed past, then on for hours more over country steep enough to take them days of travel. She'd seen the tiny three of them (the Weasel-boy certainly roaming near) filing along the top of the ridge. A dangerous way to go, outlined for anyone to see from miles away, and likely not what Captain Richard would have done if the crest cliffs had allowed him passage a little lower.

Still dangerous going, through Thrush country soon becoming Robin country. The Robins took heads.

Dangerous for her, too, to walk so tired through the air. And so high. The Patience Nearly-Lodge Riley who, at seventeen, had thought her way so easily over the ice from Boston, and down from the Wall – Walking-in-air all the lowlands south, crossing the Gulf Entire, and then into the Sierra Occidental – had ended fresh as a summer flower.

The flower was withered weaker now, as flowers failed with Lord Winter's first breath.

If there were such Great Spirits of climate and the rest – and people who were not fools believed it – if there were, then why was the gift of youth-forever, forever withheld? Why were interesting men and women – and interesting Persons, Boston made – why all left doomed to rot, and know it?…Violent passing, of course, quite another thing. Poor MacAffee; he'd fenced his four taught strokes, his five taught guards… really helpless as a child against invention. Still, a pleasure to have felt fine steel, so keen, strike and catch and draw a man's life out with it. The look on his face… on all their faces before…

Wind, harder wind came buffeting through the mountain pass. Difficult… difficult to Walk-in-air against, it took such concentration. Patience welcomed forest in her mind, and sank a little lower toward it, her coat ruffling, flapping about her. A short-summer wind, at least, and not cruelly cold.

She welcomed forest more warmly, welcomed what ground, what stone lay beneath the trees, so she sailed lower, beneath the worst of the gusts… low enough to kick at the tallest spruce-tops with her boots as she went past.

Perhaps her weariness allowed Maxwell to come dreaming in. A dream of baby odors of pee, stains of his wet- nurses' breast milk, and a cloth tit of southern cane sugar – so she felt him resting warm against her breast, crooning, nudging to suckle. Patience caught the hem of his dream like a sliding border of silk, and wished herself into it, her left breast's nipple into his wet, soft, baby mouth – urgent, then painfully sweet as he worked his hungry mouth to take dream milk from her. Her breast ached, both breasts ached with the pleasure of it. Soon. Soon, my baby. My darling boy…

She seemed to bend to him, sharing a vision – Maxwell no longer suckling strongly, restless, disinterested – as they viewed, from some drifting vantage, a great wind-humming space she recognized as Island's Bronze Gate… the river surging past, its currents swirling in the stone harbor. There were colors, banners, welcoming music as two people – a man and woman – stepped down a ship's gangway hand-in-hand. Both older… so it took a moment to recognize them…

The dream spun back to its beginning, Maxwell tugging gently, nudging, as he lightly suckled like a lover, so the sweetness of it ran like honey to her groin.

No such unlooked-for pleasure, without price. Blind with longing, so deep in her son's dream, Patience struck a tree-top; a limber spruce-branch whipped across her face – and shocked from concentration, she fell through the air, awkward and clutching, until a greater branch snagged her, and wrenched her left arm from its shoulder socket.

From there, she fell and struck the ground.

… Patience tried to set tearing agony aside, and lay still for a moment. Then moved her head, moved her fingers and toes, carefully waggled her left hand to find if any nerves had been torn in the dislocation.

All moved. And she could breathe, and see, though suffering several hurts – none severe as the left shoulder's.

Patience took deep breaths, thought mindful warmth to keep herself from further shock… then carefully stood up out of a confusion of broken branches, her greatcoat, and sheathed scimitar akimbo. Her hat… her hat was nowhere to be seen beneath tall spruces. A Boston hat, broad-brimmed, blue-dyed, and made of beaver felt. An irreplaceable hat…

She wandered, stumbling a little, looking for a strong low branch forking into a narrow V. Surprising how difficult that was to find, where there were nothing but trees… She searched, hissing- in deep breaths against the pain, found two almost good enough – and then a third that was.

The left hand would move; its arm – hanging so oddly, almost behind her back – would not move, so Patience had to reach across with her right to grip its wrist. She lifted the left arm with only a single short yelp of agony, hauled it high, and jammed and wedged the wrist into the branch's rough fork. She began to faint… but wouldn't let that happen.

Another very deep breath.

Then she bent her knees, and jumped up and away, lunging hard to the right. She screamed, felt a grating almost-click, and landed with a grunt, things tearing in her shoulder, the world swaying almost away from her.

… A pause while she stood sick, vomiting a little down her front. The pain was so great that it drove her out of herself, took all of Patience Nearly-Lodge Riley, and left only a stranger standing.

… It was this stranger who rearranged the awkward arm, no matter how the woman screamed and wept. The stranger set the left wrist back into the branch's fork, forced it firmly… then paused to consider the angle necessary, the turn and twist necessary, the force necessary to leave the left arm's shoulder-joint no place to go but together.

That decided, the stranger allowed Patience back in – crouched stunned for a moment by her agony – then leaped again.

Grinding, and a surprisingly loud clack as what fit, fit.

Calling 'Ohhh… ohhhh,' Patience turned slow circles away from pain, then sat hunched on thick spruce needles, rocking back and forth to comfort herself as she would a child. A ferret seemed to cling to her left shoulder, chewing its way to the bone. Chewing at the bone, tearing tendons with its teeth. As if that. As if that…

With hours passed, it became only a deep drumbeat of pain, rhythmed with her heartbeat. Patience had sliced a wide strip of her greatcoat's hem free with her scimitar's edge, knotted the cloth into a sling one-handed… and carefully tucked her left arm angled in to rest.

Then, there was only the long night left to get through, until less pain might allow the concentration for Walking-in-air. If that proved not possible, then ground-walking the mountains' forest and stone would have to be the way north and east, and pain beside the point.

* * *

It was surprising, how familiarity dealt with fear. Just as he'd become weary of being frightened as the king had pursued him, so Baj became weary, after another day, of fearing falling.

Soon enough, he clambered along the mountain ridges fairly fast, and kept up – or almost up – with the Persons. Not that all these heights were airy, uncertain footing along granite cliffs. These mountains were so soft – anciently worn, according to Richard – that often their ridge peaks were rounded, rich with evergreens and even drifts of berry bushes here and there, though only tiny buds showed on those, and spring leaves hardly bigger, but a dark and bitter green.

Nancy no longer had to call, 'Keep up!' and seemed to Baj to be relaxing from whatever annoyance she'd appeared to nurse the days past. She traveled on in her swift pacing way – more lightly than lumbering Richard –