matters, and who would have dreamed they'd ever be a concern of his?
He slowly turned and turned – Errol, expressionless, turning precisely with him across the fire – and felt the cloth drying on his back, felt a warning tightness in his buckskin trousers… so stepped a little away from the flames.
As he did, Nancy tossed a pork rind aside, stood – hesitated to find the unison – then joined so the three of them spun together.
Richard clapped heavy hands to keep the beat, heaved to standing in his odd way, and began massively revolving with them, half-humming, 'Boom… boom… boom.' So they all turned and turned, arms outstretched, sending long fire-shadows whirling across the mountain slope.
… So primitive a dance seemed to have been dance enough when morning came. Baj – smelling, he thought, at least a little better than before – noticed an easing of difference. Perhaps only an easing of his perception of difference, so Nancy seemed less changeable; Richard less remote. Errol remained as he had, a step aside.
It seemed to Baj, as breakfast pork was finished, and private morning shits were taken in the evergreens, that he appeared to be
But good stories, perhaps to be told later. If there
… Down one wooded mountain… then up the next. By sun-overhead, Baj found he'd developed a permanent prejudice against up-and-down country. The River had flowed level, its banks had been level – even in flood – and it seemed that style of country was in his bones. Perhaps from his First-father's prairies as well. Level seemed… more sensible.
They chewed sliced ham as they climbed, drank from canteen and water-skins along the ridge, then stoppered them descending. Baj found the beauty of these steep places, a beauty greener with short summer's every day, their only compensation – at least at the pace Richard and Nancy set. But he kept up, buckskins a little stiff, a little tight.
'And we hurry,' he said to the Made-girl – they were managing along a rough fracture-ledge with nothing beautiful about it, '- we hurry to get where?'
'To meet the Guard, campaigning in Shrike country,' slightly lisping the word's beginning.
'Ah… I see,' Baj said, and was sorry he'd asked and been reminded. That tribe had been heard of even far west on the River – as ferocious, with a custom of impaling living men and women on tall, shaped spikes of ice (or sharpened wooden stakes in warmer weather) in imitation of their unpleasant totem bird. 'Wonderful…'
Nancy grinned, reached over and patted his arm. His bitten arm – which now only itched.
There were odors – once they'd gotten off the cliff ledge – odors of wildflowers, of woods herbs just springing, sweeter than any Baj remembered. The River had smelled only of meltwater, and the traces men left in its currents. The coast woods also had had something of that dankness to them… which these mountain forests did not, their meadows certainly not, since they were carpeted with coming flowers. Pink lady's-shoe, Baj had seen before, and blossoming clover. But the others – yellows, tiny foliate azures – he wasn't sure of, perhaps had never noticed, if they grew in lowlands.
The perfume of those, when he crossed a clearing behind Richard's tireless padding, was delicate at first as if it were the sunlight's own odor, then grew stronger on a breeze.
In one such meadow – deeply slanting off a mountain's crest – Baj stopped with the others as if the grand view commanded their attention. Through the clear air of late afternoon, without even a sailing hawk or raven to mark the sky's cloud-tumbled blue, rank on rank of mountains – their slopes dark with spruce and hemlock forest – marched away for endless Warm-time miles.
'All those to be climbed, I suppose.'
Richard looked back, smiling. 'Not all, Baj.'
'Only most,' Nancy said, hitched her pack higher, and made what Baj had found to be her usual slight springing bound, that settled to swift walking. She led down off the meadow, where shaded worn stone hollows still held fragile traceries of snow, and Baj and Richard followed along… Errol, traveling unusually close, skipped and hopped beside then behind them, sometimes stooping for pebbles to throw sidearm at nothing in particular.
Camped in early evening on a wide jutting shelf of stone almost halfway down a mountainside, Baj found his face and forehead hot with sun-burn – that light certainly striking harder at such heights… He'd read of sun-burn, of course, knew that sailors on the Gulf Entire – and even more so farther south – might suffer it in the short summer.
He'd had windburn and weather-burn, of course, ice-boating on the river. But this sun-redness was new… Another new thing.
Nearly the last of the wild boar's meat was supper, with spring onions and small dug roots, roasted at the fire's edge… Then, sitting back from the green-wood flames, since they stung his sun-burned face, Baj watched as Nancy – humming a three-note tune – polished the blade of her scimitar with a scrap of leather.
He got up, tugged her long-handled hatchet free of a piece of cut firewood, and walked across the clearing to a stand of wind-bent spruce… It took a while of choosing and chopping, then trimming to rough size, shape, and weight.
The light, though, was still fine enough when he came back to the fire. Fine enough, though tinted warm red as the sun sank.
'Here.' Baj tossed Nancy a trimmed spruce branch – gluey with sap, sturdy, and curved – a coarse imitation of her sword. The branch he kept was straight, and almost Umber.
He stepped away from the fire. 'Now,' he said to her, using the phrase the Master had used in the
She struck at him across and backhanded and across again almost too quickly to follow – whack whack
Even so, on her seventh or eighth blow, the curved stick glissaded up Baj's length of spruce to hit his fingers for lack of a guard. He riposted then, lunged extended, and struck her hard at the center of her chest as she came in swinging.
'You're dead,' he said.
But apparently she was not, since she leaped at him snarling, sharp teeth bared, beating his 'blade' aside, hacking with blurring speed, little splinters of spruce flying. It was an assault almost frightening. – Amusing, too, of course, the ferocity in a fairly delicate fox-girl face, its rooster comb of widow-peaked red hair.
Baj went back and back, giving before that furious rush – then suddenly dropped low to his right knee and left hand before her, so the girl lunged almost over him as he struck up hard, driving the end of his fencing stick just beneath her ribs.
'Dead a second time,' he said, spinning up and away as she struck at him.
He heard Richard say, 'My, my…'
Her sharp face still a mask of rage, Nancy turned to come at him again – came quickly a few steps… then more slowly as she found she couldn't breathe.
Baj stepped back and back as she followed… and began to stumble. He saw her try again to catch her breath, then stand still, a hand at her throat, narrow face pale under that comb of bright hair.
Baj felt a first thread of worry that he'd struck too hard – struck too hard at a girl, and one whose body was not perfectly human. He felt that thread of worry, but while he felt it, a thousand practice afternoons had their way, and he stepped in with no hesitation, lunged, and drove his stick's tip hard where he supposed her heart must be.
'Dead a third time,' he said. 'Never,
