saw the nest more clearly.
For a moment, so high, it did seem an eagle's nest… and with an eagle's white head showing. Then the white head moved, and the nest stirred – and the head was a woman's, her long white hair streaming on the wind, and the nest the gathered folds of a dark-blue coat that she now spread like wings in the gusts.
The woman looked down at him, seemed to be smiling from her height – then, as if the gale had picked her up, as if Lady Weather had lifted her, she rose from the branches – buffeted, swaying in the air – then sailed out and out across the treetops, her greatcoat billowing… and away into darkening evening.
Bajazet stood staring as she went. He had seen Boston's Ambassador, MacAffee, Walk-in-air, though only once, when that pleasant fat man had been drank at Festival… This woman had been another New Englander, one of their very few with the talent-piece in their brains to push the ground away beneath and behind them, so they seemed to fly as birds flew.
Wonderful, just the same, though the white-haired woman almost certainly scouted for the king – known to be likely Boston's creature. She would circle back west, find Gareth Cooper and his troopers, then tell the distance and point the way, smiling.
He should have braced the bow and put an arrow into her – tried the shot, anyway, if she'd stayed for it. How many should haves, would haves, could haves, can a person afford, running for his life?… Not many.
She'd seemed to smile at him, looking down from that height… It was odd how cruel smiles could be, grimmer than any frown.
Bajazet gave Warm-times' traditional finger to the air she'd traveled, called out 'Kiss
… Two mornings later, he woke, stood, and fainted after a dark dream of a weeping infant – its body swollen huge – lying naked but for a blanket diaper in a cave of glittering ice. A little mother, blue-coated, was attempting to comfort it with caring murmurs, little strokes and partings at its massive belly.
The dream, the child's cries, rang in Bajazet's head like a cracked bell, and he crawled down to the splashing steep little creek, drank ice-water, and ate a bunch of new grass just sprouting on the shallow bank.
Then he got to his feet, went back to gather his weapons and goods, and ate a little spring beetle off a tree. There was no taste to it, only slight crunching.
He was surprised to find he could walk, though starving, could keep climbing the wooded gradual slopes the creek-branch ran through. – Though he walked poorly, bumping into trees he must have seen, then forgotten. He said, 'Excuse me,' to one tree he struck fairly hard with his shoulder, trying to move it aside. An apology that made him laugh, though probably it had been just as well to be polite. He was not in a situation to make more enemies.
'Absolutely not,' Bajazet said aloud, against his own rule, and was perfectly clear in his mind. Hungry, but perfectly clear in his mind. The encounter with the tree seemed to have helped. And in that clarity, he walked a little better, not staggering, and made sure to travel up-hill, and not down.
At noon, seeing squirrels play through an oak above him, he strung his bow – with some difficulty, since the recurve drew eighty Warm-time pounds. Truth of the matter (a nice old copybook phrase) truth of the matter, it had always been too heavy for him… He set a broadhead to the string – should have used a blunt-tip, but had none – blinked to clear his vision, drew short and trembling, and hoped for luck.
No luck. A missed squirrel, and a lost arrow, the broadhead stuck deep in a thick branch half a hundred feet up. He could not afford lost arrows.
Bajazet pretended he'd killed the squirrel, even mimed skinning it as he walked along… mimed roasting it over a small fire, his fingers fluttering for the flames. Then he bit, chewed as if there were hot meat in his mouth, and swallowed.
'And so much for imagination,' he said, forgetting sensible silence entirely… As he passed trees, looking for other beetles on their bark, leaves flashed their lighter green with a chill breeze come through. – Then the air vibrated to a man's agonized shriek. Loud… loud, and just though the woods.
Bajazet froze in shock, fumbled his bow off his shoulder, knelt to brace it, then slid an arrow from his quiver, and trembling, set it to the string.
The man shrieked again – drew in a loud whooping breath for another scream. All in a voice that might have been an animal's, but was not. It was a sound Bajazet had never heard before.
He began to back away… back away. His legs appeared to do that without his asking. Just beyond, the man still shrieked; the trees seemed to shiver with it.
Bajazet half turned to run – then found he feared ignorance even more, the not knowing what might follow and come upon him. Perhaps come upon him in the night… So it seemed he was too frightened even to run. And at least now there would be light to shoot by.
There were no more screams.
He took a shaky breath, then began to walk forward slowly through the trees, walked as if in nightmare, bow half drawn. The daylight seemed to have grown brighter, so every detail appeared perfectly clear.
He crouched, moving under hanging branches – and still seeing so clearly… seeing each leaf, each plant-stalk. In shadow beside an elm's rough trunk, he knelt and stared out across a wide clearing, brown-black with winter- killed grass.
Only a bow-shot away, three things were eating – one tugging a loop of blue-white intestine from something in the grass. Yanking, tearing it free. There was a man on the ground – a tribesman, Bajazet could see tattoos down his arms amid the blood. A tribesman still alive, though certainly dying. His hands, his arms were raised out of the grass as if to push the things away. Bleeding hands.
Then one of the eaters bent to the man's head, and bit into it like an apple. Baj heard the sound.
He knew them, knew what they were, though these three – gone feral – wore no harness, no saddles, and their bare mottled skin was scarred by weather and woods-living. They were Boston's riding-creatures, massive, human-headed, four to five times the size of a man, and womb-twisted into huge, squat, four-footed mounts. Bajazet had seen them many times along the boon-docks, ridden by New England's merchants and officials, the creatures' legs grown heavily bent for a springing gait, their arms and hands turned to long fores ending in flat, calloused, broad-fingered pads.
One of them – the one that had tugged free a portion of the man's gut – chewed that and swallowed. It raised its great round head (a head almost perfectly human, gray hair grown shaggy, tangled), sniffed the air, then turned to look across the clearing.
There was no question but it saw Bajazet kneeling in shadow… It stared at him a long moment with wide, idiot eyes a light shade of gray or blue, then smiled and stuck out a flat bloodstained tongue. Stuck its tongue out at him like a naughty child. Bajazet ran, still clutching bow and arrow. A poor, staggering run, but the very best he could do. He ran back through the trees, then up into the hill's undergrowth, listening… expecting to hear great swift four-footed paces coming behind him.
But there was only silence, except for the breezy sounds of an end-of-winter afternoon. Silence when he stumbled to a stop at last by a red-berry bush, bending exhausted, a cramp in his left side.
He caught his breath, then shouldered his bow, quivered the arrow, and hurried on across the brow of the hill – still going east, though making a wide half-circle around the feeding beasts.
As he went, tripping now and then when he glanced, fearful, behind him, it seemed to Bajazet almost a wished-for thing to find a file of cavalry and their furious king, caught up and waiting to kill him, so his death would at least be in human company.
CHAPTER 3
Late in after-noon, walking, then trotting unsteadily, then walking again to struggle through underbrush, Bajazet supposed his flight – to someone resting in a warm room after dinner, with a copybook on his lap – might seem a suitable subject for epic poetry. Poetry of a sort. Treachery, murders for a crown, a young prince fleeing through forest… meeting monsters. Might very well be a poem, if dirt and desperation, if eating insects were left out of it.
