Moonrise

found other differences. Shorter sturdier thighs than a full-human girl's might be – but smooth and white as Map- Alabama marble. Muscular buttocks, a slender drift of russet fur down the small of her back, and thick brush of the same between her legs, so he had to search for a moment to find a soft pout that parted into oiled warmth and slippery entrance – first for a finger as he bent over her, she clutching his cock with a calloused little hand… then for that, when she said, 'There,' and put him to her.

Then the different smell of their fucking, her slightly harsher odor than a Sunriser girl's… and the different angle of it – so she soon eased him out, turned beneath him for comfort as she went to all fours, hollowed her back to present herself, and moaned as he found her again.

Baj drove into her and into her to the rhythmic soft sound of wet, and on through a time that was no time, until Nancy twisted and thrashed beneath him as he came… then bit his bracing arm, convulsed, and called out to her mother.

… The wind's cold, the forest's discomfort they hadn't felt at all, then slowly returned to them. They found clothes and cloaks to draw over for covers, to tuck under to pad the hemlocks' windfall. Then they lay content, hugging, damp with sweat.

After a while, kissing her, Baj found tears. 'What?' he said. 'What…?'

'Oh, Baj… Baj, my dear, I come to you not new.' She took a breath. 'Not new. I have-'

'- Not been with me. But now you are. And I love you.'

'Well, you are a fool,' Nancy said, and sat up, searching for a bandanna. She found Baj's with his shirt, blew her nose, then lay down again to more kisses.

'… Richard?' Patience spoke softly from beneath her hemlock.

A deep, rumbled 'Umm' by the fire.

'Do you know the phrase, 'Babes in the woods'?'

'I do now.'

'What will happen to those children?'

'The same, dear, that will happen to us.'

* * *

Three days later of cold mutton and hard traveling – Patience, the third day, sailing slowly only a bow-shot above them – they'd come down from the mountains to foothills, and then onto an endlessly-wide tundra plain, its mosses and sedge grasses, brown and green, streaked with dotted drifts of tiny white flowers and the little colored blossoms that Baj knew, of bilberry and crow-berry. Small brown-winged butterflies flew among those.

Along the plain's distant northern horizon lay the glittering line of the Wall. Baj had seen it close, once, from a fast ship rigged for wet, and rowed far up the river to North Map-Illinois. The glacier's frozen ramparts had risen two miles high over distant hills of moraine and milk-white lakes fed by great waterfalls of summer melt… Nameless furred tribesmen (tribeswomen, too) had paced the ship through stunted scrub along bitter river-banks, shouting, presenting naked buttocks in insult, and hurling futile javelins. 'Ah…' Pedro had said, standing at the rail beside him, '- the free, the natural life.'

'… How far would you say, Baj?' Richard standing beside him, smiling down.

'Thirty… forty WT miles. I have seen it, from the River.'

Patience laughed. 'Over tundra is deceitful viewing. Try almost twice that.'

And as she said it, the changeable frigid winds brought from the west – once… then again – the faintest reedy fluting of pipes, the faintest rumble and boom of kettle-drums… music sounding, then silenced, then sounding again with contrary breezes.

Richard cocked his great head, 'The Guard, marching. We are to be met.'

'… But that music,' Baj said, '- doesn't it warn that they're coming?'

'They don't care whether it warns or not,' Nancy said, and spit to the side.

'Still many miles away,' Richard said, listening. 'Patrolling to meet us along the plain's border – or perhaps only to strike the Fishhawks… what's left of them.'

'But marched down from the Shrike campaign, from that fighting.' Nancy looking to the western tundra, empty of all but cold wind and distant music 'Come as Patience said they would.'

'To meet us as friends?'

'As friends, Baj,' Nancy said, '- or not.'

'Wolf-General decides,' Richard said, shrugged under his big pack, and strode off to the west.

'See…?' Nancy looked up, pointed.

High above – higher than she usually now Walked-in-air – Patience wheeled west in a flutter of blue coat-tails… Baj thought he saw her glance down at them, indicate the way with her sheathed scimitar.

… Hiking with Nancy side-by-side, Baj found some reluctance in going with her toward that faint wind-broken music. Holding his hand as they managed awkward tussocks, Nancy seemed changed in the last days, as if a different girl with fox's blood – perhaps a sister – had come to him, golden eyes tart-sweet as honey-lemon candy… And matters seemed to be shifting in Baj, so now-and-never-before ran within him like a summer spring.

… Hints of that music had come to them all through the day's difficult traveling – over bog, where clouds of the season's last mosquitoes rose… then on smooth mossy stretches and ankle-sprain tussocks. But only the wind's hum and whistle sounded through a bitter night under racing moonlit clouds. There was no cover, no shelter on the tundra plain, no makings for a fire. After diminished scraps of cold mutton, there was only the shelter of sleep… Errol huddled against Richard under his blanket, and Baj and Nancy warmed each other, wrapped in wool and discovery.

Fairly at ease in her worn blue coat only, Patience took first watch, and sat in moonlight on a tussock with her scimitar across her lap, her white hair blowing in the icy wind now steady from the Wall. She listened for her baby's breathing in her mind – heard nothing, but still thought, 'Coming to you, my darling,' just in case… And he might have listened, for she thought she felt – was almost certain she felt the baby's so-dear, dimpled, pudgy hand seize and enclose her left arm, gripping hard for comfort, so her fingertips tingled.

… The morning was still and frosted, the dawn sky just brightening to jeweled blue when Nancy, on last watch, woke them to a definite distant melody, pipes in a cheery wheedling tune.

''Yanking-tootle,'' Richard said, rising massive from his blanket, yawning Errol spilled aside, '- a copybook song for morning marching. Now we get up…up! Eat, and drink water-pee, and poop. The scouts will find us before mid-day.'

After meager bites – the last of the mutton – and hasty gulps of icy water, the party divided. Patience and Nancy, with no shrubs, no tree cover but knee-high dwarf willow, went off to one side while Richard and Baj turned their backs – Baj reaching to turn Errol as well. Then the males went out to the other side of tundra to toilet.

Pissing, Errol looked up, made his clicking noises – and Baj, following his gaze, saw a great herd drifting far to the north. Three… four Warm-time miles away. Drifting north, apparently grazing on the sedge grasses and lichen as they went.

'Caribou.'

'Yes,' Ricard stood watching them. 'Small herd.'

'Small herd?'

'Baj, I've seen them take two days and nights up here, to pass. With wolves and grizzled bears following.'

Rattling tongue-clicks from Errol. The boy's empty blue eyes filled with attention… longing.

'He loves chasing, and the end of chasing.' Finished, Richard shook his odd member, tucked it away. 'Speaking of which, better if we go to meet the Guard, than have them come for us like hunters.'

'Yes.' Baj laced his buckskins. There was a little flutter in his chest at this end to traveling only with friends. Accustomed traveling… Now, Nancy would not be as safe, would not be only with friends. He imagined for a moment (childish imagining) that regiments of the Army-United – come a thousand miles north and east – stood in formation at their backs, with the certain new king, old One-eye Howell Voss, sitting his charger at the van and joking with his officers, complaining about the mess-cooks' breakfast.

An imagining that left no comfort behind.

Baj settled his pack and quiver – paused to kneel and brace his bow – then loosened sword and dagger in their sheaths, and held out his hand as Nancy came to him. 'Stay close to me.'