'You look very fine, Peter,' Patience said. 'You look as a warrior should. – But why are you standing my guard?'
'Three sheep,' Aiken said, in fair book-English. '- Given to John Little to take his place.'
'… Ah. Is it possible that honor still lies with the Robins?'
'It still lies with me,' Aiken said, sounding to Patience very young. 'My word was given – and my word stands.' He set his javelin into the near corner. 'I took your sword from the trophy lodge.'.
'And your word stands… at what cost?'
Aiken shrugged. 'Fuck 'em.'- So perfect a use of the ancient WT phrase that Patience couldn't help smiling, and saw beneath the helmet's beak, the young man grinning with her.
'If you live, Pete Aiken,' she said, '- if you live, you will be a chief.'
Aiken reached up, loosened a strap, and lifted his plumed helmet off. Without it, hair tousled, he seemed only a boy. 'Then I'll have to run faster than Chad Budnarik; he wanted your head for the garden.'
'Peter,' Patience said – and knew as she spoke that she was no longer what she'd been. 'Peter, if it's your death, don't do it.'
'You're not my mother,' he said. 'And honor is men's business.' He stooped to examine the ankle-shackle and chain. 'This would ruin my hatchet to try to break.'
There were shouts outside, and they both stayed still, waiting as the noise went past.
'What's happening?'
'We were drummed… Some people, passing by, killed Ed Marble's wife. He's a war-chief just north, and they're a friendly village to us.'
'So, your men are going out.'
'Yes, they are.' He shook the chain. 'Hatchet wouldn't break it.'
Patience picked up her greatcoat from the pallet, draped it over her shoulders, and buttoned it – one-handed – at her throat. Then, silent, she settled herself into the quietness of anything-might-happen.
Aiken picked up his helmet and put it on. Then he bent to the log-round, gathered it in both arms – and heaved it up with a grunt. '… Come on!' He shouldered the sheepskin aside and marched out the entrance, with Patience, barefoot, hopping awkwardly close beside him.
An odd-looking pair – and were looked at, stared at, by several leather-kilted women filling clay jars of water at the steep streamside below. Others, women, children, and old people, were standing far down the settlement, watching a file of armed men trotting away to the north on the far side of the creek, spear-heads bright in first light, their long hide shields at their shoulders. Others, gone before, were only dawn shadows in among distant birches, going away, the drumming going with them.
Pete Aiken, heavy-burdened, yanking Patience stumbling along, strode upslope onto a beaten path above a row of huts – outpits stinking from one to the next as they went. Three children and a small brown dog came to follow them – but at a distance that grew more distant when Patience, hobbling, picked up a rock and bared her teeth at them.
Puffing out effort-breaths, hugging the log-round tight, Aiken staggered on as Patience managed to stay with him, the shackle scoring her ankle each quick awkward step, as if the little brown dog had come to bite her.
They passed a wide garden to their right, and Patience, struggling to keep up, bruising her toes to kick tangling chain ahead with every step, saw cauliflowers growing in it… then saw they weren't, but rows of skulls – all full- human, none shaped oddly as Persons' skulls might be. There were some heads still fleshed, but all stuck rotting in the ground for birds and summer insects to polish to decoration. Brown-feather quills bristled from eye-holes where broken shreds of white still spoiled… Thrushes.
Aiken stopped at last, and set the log-round down with a
grunt of relief beside the only hut built above the path – a small open-sided shed, with a neat true-garden laid out just past it Patience smelled charcoal and hot iron, saw instruments and steel tools pegged to the shed's back wall. Blacksmith's – and no blacksmith.
'Willard's gone fighting. That's what he likes to do…' Aiken ducked in, searching among tools, tongs, and hammers.
It occurred to Patience, standing tethered and sore ankled long-shadowed now by morning, that the blacksmith's hut presented a future certain – however distant – a future in which Boston's hostage women, its fierce Person Guard, would have proved insufficient. The village forges, their tools and shaped metal, the fine steel beaten out on their anvils – but above all the
Pete Aiken came out into the sunshine with a heavy hammer and cold chisel… Patience found the chisel particularly impressive. To make a hammer was nothing much. To forge and temper a chisel, was.
'I don't… I don't see how to take the shackle off, and not hit you.' Aiken knelt in sunlight to examine the problem. 'But I can do the chain.'
A young woman in a yellow wool skirt, her scarred breasts bare, had come up to the high path, was standing watching them. Patience stared at her, and the woman turned and went away… but with purpose.
'Trouble,' Patience said.
'My sister – and always trouble. I'm going to… I need the anvil.' He gripped the shackle's chain and dragged the log-round into the shed, Patience floundering with it, then went outside again for the hammer and chisel.
Time… time. Patience felt her heart beating the moments away. Moments for Aiken's sister to come to save a foolish brother from himself, bring other women and some older men, armed, to help her.
'Here.' Aiken took her ankle, yanked it so she suddenly sat down on dirt and ashes, then laid her leg across the anvil's iron, and pushed her worn trouser-cuff up out of the way.
Now very brisk and certain, he set the chisel-blade at a chain-link near the shackle, swung the hammer high – then whipped it down while Patience, no longer impatient, sat frozen.
She felt the blow up into her hip – heard the ringing clang an instant later. Pete Aiken bent to stare at the cut, then with no hesitation raised the hammer and struck again, then again… Patience, eyes closed, resigned to losing her foot.
'Done.' Though he hit it a fourth time, not so hard.
Patience looked and saw the link gleaming where it parted. There were voices down the path.
Aiken shook the chain, worked the link free, then stood, picked up his helmet, and put it on. 'Honor satisfied,' he said, slid her scabbarded sword from his belt, and handed it to her. 'I'll stand to hold them while you run.'
A woman – two women – were calling in their clicking pidgin, using no understandable book-English at all.
Patience got to her feet with the severed chain-length jingling, stretched up and kissed Pete Aiken's mouth beneath the helmet's beak. 'Brave man,' she said, and left him silent – apparently not used to kisses from aging Persons with broken noses. Outside, several tribeswomen, two with hatchets in their hands, were standing back along the path. There were children behind them – and coming trotting the same way, four older men with spears kicked their way through a flock of chicken-birds.
Patience – doubt and fear bundled together and set aside – called out, 'Good-bye.' Meaning good-bye to honorable Pete Aiken, good-bye to her jailor-log, good-bye to the village of Robins-by-the-Creek… Certainly able now (thank every Jesus) to set aside a shoulder only tender, an ankle only bruised – as she set aside the shouts coming chasing, uproar and argument with Aiken in their way – Patience welcomed restful concentration.
She trotted up the path in sunshine (chain-links musical at her ankle), and said a convinced good-bye to the earth beneath her feet. She emptied her mind of all but thrusting the world down and away, thrusting it behind – and her bare feet going lighter and lighter, till paddling in the air, she sailed gently swaying up… and up, with only a futile hatchet whirring its farewell.
Though Nancy and Richard seemed disturbed at such swift discovery and vengeance chase, even Errol nervous as they packed their packs and ran – Baj felt oddly at ease; he'd been pursued before, and by closer-coming and more formidable hunters.
'I apologize,' Nancy said, a little out of breath. She'd bounded up beside while they ran full out past birches and north along the mountain's shrubby slope. Surprisingly fast Richard lumbering slightly ahead, as always.
'Apologize to those behind us.' Baj was thankful he was running in new moccasins, not old boots. 'Apologize to
