Moonrise

eating!' Her face contorted with rage. 'It's our mouths – our teeth. It's the animal that was stuck in us, you fuck- your-mother thing!'

'I wasn't doing that.'

'lie, lie, and lie again like all Sunriser shits who think they're better!' She stood, tears in the yellow eyes. 'He waits,' she said to Richard, '- to see you lift your leg against a tree. He waits for me to sniff someone's bottom like a dog! To bend and lick myself.'

'I don't.'

'It's your doing! It is all your doing!' And she was gone out of the fire's light.

After a silence in which only Errol ate, Richard lowered a chewed venison rib, and said, 'She didn't mean you, as you.'

'… I know what she meant,' Baj said. He looked into the fire's coals so as not to meet the big Person's eyes. 'I know the only differences between Boston and the River Kingdom are place and custom and arms. The dangerous come-at-you's of both are blood-human… as are the Talents' cruel studies, also.'

'Trouble,' Richard said, 'is made by all, Baj, who wish and want.' He raised his rib-bone and took a tearing bite. '- And by Persons as much as any.'

'I'm back,' Nancy said from the dark. 'I am back to eat – and if the Sunriser doesn't like it, he can lass my part- fox ass!' She stepped into golden firelight – red gold on her widow's peak of hair – sat in her place, snatched a chop sizzling from its spit-stick and bit into it, shook her head to tear a chunk loose. Brutish, but for tears still streaking her face.

'It's true,' Baj said. 'It… disturbed me a little, to watch you both eat. I suppose it always has, because it shows the blood in you.' He cleared his throat. 'Bears have always frightened human people. A wise old man, our librarian, told us once that men used to worship bears… And foxes and men have played hunting games forever – the foxes winning more times than not.'

'I'm not listening.' Nancy gnawed her bone.

'Those things are true, just the same.'

'Talk talk talk,' Nancy tossed the bone away, '- talk does not equal one bad look.'

'Then forgive me,' Baj said. 'I apologize.'

'You're forgiven,' Richard said, '- and now, I suppose I can mention your smell without offense.' He smiled a toothy smile.

'You stink,' Nancy said. 'You smell like an owl.'

'I didn't know owls smelled.'

Richard handed him a fatty portion, still sputtering. 'They smell like humans,' he said.

… That night, drifting in and out of sleep in his wrapped blanket, Baj, roused by a cold wind come south into the mountains, regretted the fire's warmth and warm ashes. Richard had insisted on moving their camp more than a bow-shot across the slope, in case the fire had given the Robins notice.

Sleeping and almost sleeping, Baj considered the difference between traveling from – as running from a furious king – and traveling to, as now he ventured toward the Shrikes and Boston's Guard, for vengeance, and perhaps the cold earth's good… It seemed to him, that direction made surprisingly little difference in journeys.

CHAPTER 12

A smith, with spark-scarred hands and singed leather apron, roused Patience in early after-noon, gestured her up and off her pallet, and led her outside past a guard – a short tribesman bearing hide-shield and heavy hatchet, and looking almost strong as the smith.

A short thick iron-bound section of log was waiting, with a yard's length of rusty chain to what seemed a leg shackle.

Patience, having dressed that morning – with the help of Charlotte-doctor – in her boots, dirty blouse, trousers, and worn blue coat – stood a little stunned by sunlight and the busy murmurs of a village of wattle huts ranked steeply down to the left along a mountain stream. A considerable village, seen in daylight – more than forty small dwellings, and three larger ones. One, certainly bachelor quarters… All she could see were handsomely plastered light mud-brown beneath brighter painted scenes of hunting, and perhaps of war, the colors (berry colors, oak-leaf colors, under-bark colors) all oranges, dark reds… The village looked better than it smelled; sheep grazed between the huts, and Patience saw an open shit-pit seething with summer flies beside the nearest beaten path.

The smith, who appeared to speak no book-English, or very little, directed Patience with grunts and gestures, brought her beside the log-round, sat her on it, then tugged her right boot and stocking roughly off… set the shackle's hinged limbs just above her ankle, closed them – and tested the fit, turning the iron a little this way and that. It was painful enough that Patience noticed her bound shoulder now only ached, and not so severely.

It seemed the smith judged very well – shook the iron, checked for tightness to the bone – then, like an impatient lover, shoved Patience down along the log, and placed her leg where he wanted it across the round's iron band.

A rivet fitted to key the shackle closed, the smith produced a heavy hammer Patience hadn't seen, and – without pause for care – drew back and hit the rivet's head five clanging savage blows so swiftly she only had time to be frightened by the third.

Done, the smith took his hammer and walked away past two admiring naked little boys, and a small girl who needed to blow her nose. More children were gathering, but the adults – perhaps two hundred men and women, all kilted, feather-scarred, and bare to the waist – paid Patience no attention, but worked among the hutments, choring, tending small gardens.

She stood, found one boot awkward, and tugged it and the stocking off so she stood by the log-round barefoot. She tried a step, found the shackle griping, abrading her skin, and bent to tuck the stocking in around it for a cushion.

A second step proved that hauling the log-round would be constant labor. Even with two good arms, she would not be able to hoist the thing more than a few inches off the ground. And nothing that was not quite light could be carried while Walking-in-air. Chained, her traveling would be by dragging over earth, and no other way.

The tribe would keep her – for themselves or Boston – keep her from Maxwell forever.

Patience had wept only a few times in her life; easy weeping was simply not in her, but she would have wept in sunshine by the Robins' stream, except for being interrupted of the notion by a scatter of dung – sheep dung, she hoped – that was thrown and hit her in the face.

She turned, chain jingling, and saw a naked young boy, summer-tanned, grinning at her. The dung pieces were of no use, so Patience stooped for a small stone and slung it sidearm – sadly, right-handed – so it only whizzed past the boy's head, instead of striking with a satisfactory tock. Still, it backed him up, startled…Backed him farther when she searched and stooped for a second rock.

'Two teeth!' Patience called – meaning two to be taken in payment for one – Boston's improvement of the most ancient rule of all.

If the Robin boy didn't understand the reference, he understood the stones, and turned, bent to slap his scrawny ass to her, then trotted away and out of range to join a circling crowd of dogs and children, boys and girls all naked in summer's warmth, all grimy with dirt and their home hearths' smoke and soot.

'No fucking helpless Person ever!' Patience noticed she'd already adopted a prisoner's muttered self- conversation. She gripped her rock, an only friend, tossed it… caught it again, and bent to look for another likely one, perhaps a little heavier, to crack a man's skull. The log-round was difficult… difficult to drag. She put the rock in her coat pocket. Then – her bound shoulder complaining, though she used her right hand – she gripped to haul on the chain and spare her ankle. The round grunted like a stupid animal, and scraped reluctantly over weedy dirt, while she searched for her second good stone.

The children stood a fair way off, watching. And, Patience supposed, must see a little woman, worn, white- haired, and wounded, hobbling with her weight of log in a blue coat too big for her. '…Once,' she wished to call to them, 'Once I was young and beautiful and fierce, and flew fighting over a great battle. This – this you see, is not who I really am.'