Moonrise

and dirty. His face had the drawn look that Baj remembered from when he was a boy, and saw young officers of the Army-United come down the river from the fighting in Map-Illinois… Their faces had been as this man's was. It seemed that burning Robins had a cost.

'Amazing how well I see you all,' the young man said. And to Baj. 'You, a little more clearly… But all four of you… manifestations are invited to eat gift food set out for you. We are… perhaps more than usually tender, today, to those drifting out of proper time.' He stared at them, shook his head. '- So, what of our food might nourish you, you are welcome to eat while fact and falseness touch for this little time.' Still smiling, he gestured them to follow him past others, families sitting to their food… then indicated the empty benches of a table that must just have been weighted with platters of sizzling mutton – sliced thick, of roast onions, broken potato, steamed cabbage and carrots, a stack of rye flatbread, and a clay pitcher of what seemed barley beer.

'Yours,' the young man said, 'for what use it is to you. – Any questions?'

'None.' Richard shook his head. 'But thanks for your generosity to insubstantial guests, only passing through.'

The young man nodded, but looked past Richard, not at him. There was a dull brown stain down the front of his white shirt. He had very clear gray eyes… an older man's eyes, with an older man's understanding in them. 'My father should be thanked for that,' he said, '- as we thank him for so much.' He smiled again, then wended away through the crowded tables.

Not one other – of the hundreds seating themselves around them, serving out food, joking with their loved ones – not one appeared to see them.

'Does this mean they won't hurt us,' Nancy murmured, '- take our eyes?' But neither Baj nor Richard could answer her.

CHAPTER 17

Though the town's armed men might still smell of Robins burning, gentler odors came drifting from the cookstoves and kettles as Baj and the others were left as perfectly to themselves as if they still camped high in the Smoking Mountains – though here, with wooden spoons and their belt knives, they dealt with mugs of barley beer and fired-clay plates heavy with roasted mutton and steaming vegetables. They ate, dipped flatbread in gravy, and poured out foaming beer.

'It seems,' Baj said between bites, 'that terror does not affect appetite.'

'Increases mine.' Richard folded a slice of meat in flatbread, and ate it.

'You three,' Nancy said, apparently including Errol, who had slid under the table with fistfulls of mutton, '- you three are fools.' Though she was chewing as she spoke. She tried a carrot, made a face, and looked around, staring at the women. 'Light cloth clothes,' she said, '- and worn in this never-truly-warm, so close to the Wall. And showing so much, as to say, 'See my bare legs? Come and fuck me.' '

'It's likely,' Baj said, refilling his mug, 'this is their Last-of-summer festival.' Errol slid from under the table, a wad of mutton-fat in his hand, to join boys coursing through the crowd, but Baj reached down and held him. 'Stay with us.'

'I think,' Richard spoke softly, though there was no other table close, '- I think the Robins shouldn't have settled so near these people.'

Baj, mashing his potatoes in mutton gravy, turned to look around them. 'Yes, and became too much of a contradiction to these believers.'

'Believers enough,' Nancy said, '- to perch men and women with sticks up their rear ends as the Shrikes do, then burn them.' An eye-tooth grated on a mutton bone.

Hunger over fear for all of them, Baj supposed, at least for the moment. '… And intend those murders to frighten other tribes-people, keep them from settling near I-Seventy, spoiling this dream of Warm-times with reminders of now.'

'Madness.' Richard set his carrots aside with a large horn-nailed finger. '- And the reason the Guard is kept away. Boston doesn't want its soldier Persons building their own magical town. For fear, I suppose, of what they might pretend.' He smiled at a girl-child – the only child who'd come to stare at them, but the smile proved too toothy, and the child fled. 'Oh, dear, and the only one who'd look at us…'

'Maybe pretend it was Sunrise-humans the Boston people made,' Nancy said, spearing an onion on her knife, '- and that Persons were the first on Lady Weather's earth.'

'Acting the wish,' Baj said, 'is the magic they try here, as if belief must someday make it so.' He ate a spoonful of potato. 'I think they give us this food as savages leave meals for the ghosts of their dead. We're not perfectly real to them, don't belong in their true time.' He ate another spoonful of potato. '- We may be acceptable, unless we ask questions, or stay too close… or too long.'

There was uproar from a long table a pebble's toss away. Two bearded soldiers, in stained and muddy gray, sat with their wives and many children, all merry… red-faced and laughing at something the taller soldier had said.

'… But will these Believers let us go?' Nancy ate another onion from the point of her knife, white teeth nibbling. 'You two philosophicals might consider that, and remember stolen children, and the ruined things that marched their rolling box. – Every Jesus. That woman is showing her bare ass! You see her butts beneath those so-short pants?'

'Could be summer dressing, this far north, to try to hold the warmth a little longer. More wishful magic…' Baj looked around him, leaning on the town's creation to imagine centuries away. 'These people make as perfect an as if as possible, so reality must follow… How Lord Peter would have loved to see this.'

Nancy bit into a large piece of mutton, sliced her mouthful free with a close pass of her knife. 'And are they too stupid,' she said, chewing, 'to notice it hasn't worked? That Lord Winter still steps down from the Wall?'

'Oh, then,' Richard said, 'they believe they haven't pretended well enough.'

'And so…' Baj took another chunk of meat, cut it again, and gave a portion to Errol – who settled with it under the table. The mutton was aged rank, sharp as ripe cheese. '- And so, likely each year these people must try harder, make what they hope are better copies of Warm-time things, and live exactly as they suppose those ancient people lived.'

'Fools,' Nancy said.

'- Until,' Richard said, and belched, 'it becomes necessary to kill any nearby Robins – who do not copy WT ways, and so spoil everything.'

'They're not going to let us leave.' Nancy gripped her knife's handle so her narrow knuckles whitened. 'And you're talking and talking.'

'We're all frightened, dear.' Richard glanced at the people eating around them. 'But when males are frightened, they must pretend not to be. Still, I do think they'll let us leave.'

'Yes,' Baj said. 'May insist on it. There were no Persons in Warm-times.'

Now, only Errol was eating. It seemed that with first hunger over, fear took its place.

'Yes?' Nancy still gripped her knife. 'And so they'll let us go? Then answer this, Richard. Do their sweat-slaves act the Warm-times with them?'

'Those destroyed men,' Baj said, 'I think they've made into only engines.'

'Every Jesus…' Nancy showed sharp teeth. 'We should have come north the way we went south last year, and never traveled east to this Pass.'

'Then we'd never have seen this -'

'And never seen burned Robins, either, Who-was-a-prince!'

'… There's something else you might see,' Richard said, 'if you look, without making a show of it, over to the west. Then higher.'

Baj did, casually as he could, and saw only a speck, darker than the sky's sunny blue, tracing its slow way above the horizon.

Nancy glanced once, and quickly. 'Is she coming here?'

'No,' Richard said, '- she won't. That would get us killed.'