Jefri was standing by the wagon; he was tall enough to see the map. He looked at the spot Amdi had indicated and said, “Oh-oh.”
“What?” asked Ravna. She should get up there with Amdi.
As she climbed up top, Jefri enlightened her. “There’s a snout-drawn ‘X’, just a few kilometers ahead. I bet we’re almost to Chitiratifor’s welcoming committee.”
“Yup,” said Amdi.
She settled down with Amdi and looked where Jef was pointing. The ‘X’ was in a widening of the valley one to three days’ drive ahead, depending on their own precise location. “They have a fort this near the Domain?”
“I don’t think there’s a fort there,” said Jefri. “That looks like a wide place in the valley, not a choke point. And the ‘X’ mark is in the middle of the open area. I’ll bet Chitiratifor—or Remasritlfeer—intended to meet some larger party there.”
“Ha, yes,” said Amdi. “They may even think Chitiratifor is doing fine, on schedule … except he won’t be checking in with them tonight.”
Ravna shrugged. “So we can’t go forward. And we can’t stay here. We haven’t seen anything of Chitiratifor. Surely it can’t be that dangerous to go back?”
“Okay,” said Jefri, but he was shaking his head. “You realize that once the bad guys realize we’re free, that’s just the route they all will be searching.”
Amdi was still snuffling at the map, oblivious to their dilemma. “This valley doesn’t stay steep and cliffy forever,” he said. “See, right before the ‘X’, there’s all sorts of paths up the eastern wall. We could wriggle out sideways. Who’d ever think?”
Chapter 23
Johanna Olsndot roamed the strange raft, and watched her fellow-travelers. She had no sailing skills herself, but she had been aboard seacraft of the Domain. A common design was the multiboat, a meshwork of pack-sized boats; individual packs could retain their identity. Multiboats might have a central structure for larger cargo items and be big enough so a number of packs might comfortably meet.
Even the largest Northern multiboats were smaller than the rafts in this flotilla of ten. Johanna wondered how the mess managed to sail together. Every raft had masts and sails, but nothing like packs to manage them. On her raft, the mob wandered here and there, collecting in little groups that might tug on a tiller, while others climbed in the rigging (and sometimes fell off into the sea!). The squeaks and chirrups from above might have been directions, though very few of those below paid any attention.
One by one, these rafts must surely founder, perhaps the last ending up on some faraway shore, like the shipwrecks that used to wash up on the rocks below Starship Hill.
On the second day, she sought out one of those temporary almost-packs that gathered near the booms and was tentatively pulling the sheets this way or that. Not all of these Tines were sparse-haired Tropicals. Some had deep fur pelts, scruffy and ragged and surely uncomfortable in the heat, but very Northern-looking.
“Hei, Johanna. Hei, hei.” A clot of five was all looking at her and the Samnorsk words were very clear. When Johanna sat down by them, the almost-pack surrounded her, the heads bobbing with friendly regard.
“We sailing north, I think,” it said. That might be nonsense blather, since actually they were sailing west, and the coast of the continent was just few thousand meters to the north. But if they sailed west far enough to round the Southwest Horn of the continent, then it would be north to the Domain. She took a closer look at the five heads. The nearest had a white star splash on the back of its head. It was hard to remember all the fragments she’d known over the years, but this one … she reached out her hand. “Cheepers?”
“Hei, some maybe, some,” it said. Wow. Cheepers would count as a failure by broodkenner standards, but he had survived his flight from Harmony’s Fragmentarium, and made it all the way to the Choir. Over the years, others had too, but there were still only hundreds spread through all the millions of the Choir. When Vendacious chased Johanna into the Choir, when the killing swarm knocked her down, the image and the strangeness of her must have spread at near-soundspeed across the city. Here and there, the sight had reached some few who remembered, and mercy percolated back. Just in time.
The almost-pack stayed with her a moment longer, then was joined by others and reassorted. Some of them wandered off to another mast while others merged with the larger mob that was tricking seabirds to come down for lunch.
By now all the Tines on her raft seemed to recognize her. She had no more aborted, hostile encounters. And yet, the mob did have moods. Five nights out to sea, there was a deadly riot. Johanna hunkered down, listened to mouth-screams of mortal pain. The next day, she saw dark stains smeared across timbers near the edge of the raft.
Perforce, Johanna spent hours each day studying her mob. This wasn’t like the Fragmentarium; random sex and mindsound was perversity to coherent packs, and the broodkenners did their best to suppress it. Here, perversity was the name of the game. But these singletons rarely did really stupid things like pissing in the raft’s rain cistern. In fact, they had some sailor skills, and they were quite coordinated in their diving for fish. That last was good for Jo, though raw fish could not sustain her indefinitely.
Most coherent packs didn’t like to swim, couldn’t stand the way the water interfered with their mindsounds. The members of the mob were not so squeamish. In the water, they zoomed around like they were born of the sea. Parts of her crew were in the water almost all the time—except when something black-and-white and larger than any Tines swept through the area. The Children called those animals whales; they spooked the Tropicals as thoroughly as they did Northern packs.
The whales must have been loud and relatively stupid, because the Tines seemed to know when it was safe to go back in the water. By the fourth day, Johanna was swimming with the Tines. Over the next tenday, she visited all the other rafts. The mobs on each were similar to those on her own. In the end, she became familiar with all the “crews.”
On every raft, she eventually communicated the same question: “Where are we going?” The answers were mostly variations on “we go north,” “we go with you,” and “this big river is fun!”
She eventually returned to the first raft, partly because Cheepers was there, but partly because she had decided that this raft had been intended as the primary vessel of the fleet. It was the largest, certainly. It also had an open area near the masts: the space was bounded by drawered cabinets—
The first couple of tendays were all cloudy and rainy, with open sea on one side, and coastal jungle on the other. They were going generally west and at a fair average speed. She did some arithmetic—not for the first time she thanked goodness that Ravna had forced them to learn that manual skill—and concluded that soon they would round the Southwest Horn. Truly, this fleet might be headed for the Domain.
Johanna had a lot of time to think, perhaps more time than ever before in her life. Most of that time was useless circling; some of it might save her life.
Nevil had turned out to be evil beyond anyone’s imagination. She saw so much in a different light now that she understood that. Since well before he had betrayed Ravna, he had been spreading lies. She thought of all the times he had persuaded Pilgrim and herself to steer clear of the Tropics. For
