Moonrise

was now hammered harder in mind and body by mountain traveling, travel's fair meetings and foul. Tempered too late, of course, to aid his brother… He said that good-bye, then turned in his blanket, and slept, dreaming of living in the Copy-town. He knew, within his dream, what the houses were like inside. He was served a breakfast of pork- strips and eggs by a pretty woman in a flowered apron, who spoke odd book-English and called him by another name… Then, still in his dream, he walked down a narrow hall on woven carpet dyed one creamy color, and stepped into a nursery where a baby lay in a huge iron crib. Immense – bigger than Richard – naked, pale, and smelling of pee and perfumed cream, the child turned its great head as Baj came in. It stared at him with eyes a drifting milky blue. – Then Patience stood up at the crib's other side, and said, 'Get out.'

'… Enjoy your visit?'

Baj, waking after a hunting-dream following the other, roused to dawn's first light and heard Patience ask her question again, and Nancy say, 'No.'

Lying propped on an elbow under a wind-bent hemlock, with her worn blue greatcoat buttoned to her throat, Patience yawned, glanced at Baj as he threw his blanket aside and sat up. '- And here's a busier visitor. One who should learn to knock before he enters others' dreams.' She'd taken her nose-spints off, leaving only a fading bruise across the bridge.

'Your pardon,' Baj said, startled by the mention – and the cause, though he'd heard of double dreaming, usually by sweethearts.

'Oh… not your fault.'

Richard came lumbering through brush, doing up his trouser lacing. 'All awake, I see.' Errol ambled behind him, doing up in imitation.

'Ah,' Patience said, '- he has finished his toilet, and finds us awake! As, at moon-down, I settled here to find you all snoring. I could have cut your throats, one by one, and each throat deserving it.'

Richard's deep, considering hum as he knotted his laces.

'Before you burst into song, dear one,' Patience said, 'you might remember that Moonriser ears and noses may have been sentry enough in the south. But we're north, now. It's time and past time we stand night guard, or some other air-walker, for Boston's reason, may sail down silent to kill us.'

Richard stopped humming and said, 'True. Time to guard against Walkers-in-air. We'll set night watch and watch.'

Patience nodded. '… And none of you enjoyed your visit to almost Warm-times? Warm-times in a blown-glass bottle – where, from the smell of you, you ate a great meal of meat.'

'I did enjoy the idea of it,' Baj said.

'Ah. The 'idea.''

'Yes… Such an effort to make imagination real.'

'As they did to the Robins,' Nancy said. She stood, and walked away into the brush.

Patience sat up, eased her left arm from its sling, and gently exercised it. 'You wished to stay?'

'No.'

'And why not, if you admired their efforts?'

'Because it's only wishing,' Baj said. 'And they cripple and murder to try to make it otherwise.'

Patience got to her feet, swung her arm in careful slow great circles. 'Not nearly the first, not nearly the last to do that. Wishing is the winding-key of history, for – as copybooks say – good or ill… I am absolutely starving.'

'Baj,' Richard said, 'travel ahead a little, hunt for us.'

'Straight north by the sun?' Baj picked up his bow, knelt to set and string it. He had only seven arrows left – the rest splintered, or lost despite searches.

'North, by the sun. We'll catch up.'

'I'll climb with you, Richard.' Patience stretched. 'Walking either way, in air or on the ground, stiffens me a little, either in mind or muscle – the penalties of age.'

Baj fastened the throat of his cloak – it was not a warm morning – shouldered his pack and quiver, and trotted away uphill, brushing through crowding damp hemlocks as he climbed. Not a warm morning. The air, that had been so friendly all the weeks coming north, traveling with the short-summer – now, closer to the Wall, had turned a warning chill, as if Lord Winter spoke through it… whispering, as snow in gathering blizzards whispered, 'I will arrive. Shelter, or die.'

Baj heard no soft scuttling behind him, Errol not coming after as he often did – perhaps for the first bleeding fruits of the hunt. Perhaps for weasel reasons of his own.

… The Tuscaroras were not the mountains of the south. Though a little lower, these were cold-country mountains, cloaked with thick evergreens as if for warmth. Which made easier climbing in a way, with frequent handholds in dangerous places along cliff-rims, on rubble-slides. Easier in that way, more difficult in another, where almost every clearing, every slope required ducking through hemlocks' green fronds, so Baj hunted damp as if under rain.

On these tree-thatched heights, open only to the sky above, it was a relief to recall the wide fields the copy- locomotive had rolled through on its way to their celebration – though chugging by slaves' sweat only, and past the cries of children bereft… Wonderful Warm-time word, bereft.

Birds were Baj's only company through the morning. Very small gray-brown birds, and very fat, that chirped among the evergreens… liking especially, it seemed, to perch high on tender twigs that bowed and swung in the mountain wind.

There were occasional whistles of distant conies or marmots denned in rockfalls. 'A fat marmot,' Baj said aloud, '- would not be despised.' He imagined Mountain-Jesus listening from where he hung impaled, perhaps by Shrikes, on his immortal evergreen. Listening, and commanding a marmot to show itself to be killed, cooked, and eaten.

Baj climbed, went carefully along a crumbling rim – from this, at least, there was a longer view than green branches and little birds. A view east… past the humped shoulders of other mountains, to only a suggestion of green levels and lowlands, so distant an horizon it seemed it might edge the very Ocean Atlantic… Ranchers, Patience had said, ran sheep and spotted cattle down that eastern territory. Farmers grew barley and rye. Civilized country in its way, though certainly bowing to Boston more often than not – and nothing like Middle Kingdom, its Great Rule from Map-California to Map-Missouri, and south to the Mexican Sierras. Still, the east apparently not all wilderness.

… Standing on broken stone a little later, with only air and a sailing raven to his right, Baj glanced up as if a finger beneath his chin had tilted his head, and saw an animal looking down at him from a towering stone chimney much more than a bow-shot away. A sheep.

Not a sheep gone wild. He was certain of a close brown coat, as well as curls of heavy horns as it turned away in no hurry, climbed a wall perpendicular, and was gone. Mountain sheep – which Baj had heard described, but never seen – that must have drifted, over the centuries, two thousand Warm-time miles from the Map-Rockies. And found this rare palace of granite amid soft green.

There was no chasing up that cliff. Baj shrugged to settle his pack, and minding his footing – grateful he was wearing moccasins rather than hard-sole boots – began to climb to the left around that chimney's immense base… up and over what rock shelves he came to, keeping the granite height to his right as he slowly half-circled it, sweating in a cold breeze.

Even half-circling that monument, was WT's 'slow-going,' and took him deep into windy after-noon, when the ram and his ewes were probably already gone to other grazing. But Baj kept to it, since it seemed nothing else in the mountains was stepping closer to his bow.

Foolish… foolish… foolish. A chant other hunters had certainly muttered to themselves, chasing odd animals from first times to these times. The reason, he supposed, that men – women insisting? – had finally settled to growing southern wheat and northern barley.

Baj stopped to breathe, leaning against the great chimney's sun-warmed stone, and swung his pack off his back, untied his tarred-wood canteen – unplugged it, and took three swallows… A shadow came flitting over, its dark mark sliding across the rock. He thought it might be Patience… then saw a hawk, a red-shoulder, swinging away into deeper blue.

Baj supposed he was happy. Certainly felt happy. It seemed that this traveling through mountains was bound to continue forever – or at least a good while longer – and, in justice, shouldn't end with him being killed. With Nancy being killed. Shouldn't end with any of them dying.