“It’s mostly a servitors’ study,” he grimaced, “though not entirely. And please don’t repeat what I’ve said. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.” Though the look in his eye told her he had mentioned it just to see what she would say, and do.
MORGOT, JOSHUA, AND STAVIA started out early the following morning in the donkey cart, the four little animals pulling strongly as they trotted eastward toward the hills. Joshua drove. Morgot lay in the bottom of the cart on a folded quilt, her head propped on their sack of provisions, her eyes shut. She had been getting up at least half the time with baby Marcus, changing him and bringing him to Myra to be fed. Now she lay in the gently jostling wagon bed, rocked to sleep as in a cradle, catching up on many interrupted nights. Stavia read until her eyes got tired, then slumped on the wagon seat, staring out at the changing scenery. The nearer hills were softly green, some bright with early grain, others dotted with low, dark shrubs, like crouching bears. Behind them the wooded mountains folded, ridge and valley, and over all the sky spread in eastward banners of streaming cloud. The previous day’s chill wind had given way to warmth. Wildflowers bloomed along the road, splashing flares of gold and white and orange. Stavia sat up and began to notice their surroundings.
“How far are we going?”
“Two days’ travel. About halfway to Susantown.”
“What’s there? At halfway?”
“A hotel for travelers. It’s halfway between Mollyburg and Abbyville, too. Kind of a crossroads.”
“We’re meeting someone?”
“Morgot is meeting someone,” he said softly. “Something to do with a trade agreement. Grain supplies, I think.”
“She’s been really worried about the allotments. I guess the harvest wasn’t good last year.”
“Well, actually, it was about the same as usual.”
“Then why was our ration cut?”
“Because there are more of us. There were about two hundred babies born in Marthatown last year, and the year before that.”
“People must have died to balance it out!”
“Not many. No contagious diseases this year. No raids or battles.”
“What’s Morgot going to do?”
“I think there’s some move afoot to trade Marthatown’s dried fish for inland grain.”
The road began to coil up into the hills. Morgot drove while Joshua and Stavia walked beside the cart to save the animals. Not far down the slope from the road a reforestation crew was working in a cleared area, dropping feathery tree seedlings into shovel slits, pressing them closed. Morgot called out to them and walked down, inspecting the soft tufts of new growth among the stumpy roots of old trees. At the edge of the clearing something moved and fled with a flash of white.
“A deer?” Morgot asked, incredulously.
“We’ve seen several,” the crew leader told her.
“I thought the project released them far north of here.”
“They did, Morgot. But it’s been ten years.”
“That long!”
“They could even be wild ones. Survivors from before the convulsion.”
Stavia was still gazing at the place in the forest the thing had vanished. A brown flow of incredible grace and speed. Deer. She had seen pictures, of course, but they had not been seen in the wild for generations. After the convulsion, a few deer had been found in a park or zoo somewhere north, and a breeding program had been started with annual releases into the wild. But, to think of actually seeing one! They were certainly different-looking from sheep or donkeys, or even from those pictured reindeer in Beneda’s book.
They went on, over the first range of hills. A strangeness at the edge of the landscape caught Stavia’s eye. Below them, to the south, was a place where the green of field and tree ended and a carpet of black and gray extended to the south and east, losing itself in distances. “Look at that! What is that?”
“A bleak devastation,” remarked Morgot from the back of the wagon, sitting up to get a look at it. “You haven’t seen one before, have you? There are only a few them up here in and around Women’s Country, but if you went far enough south of the sheep camps past Emmaburg, there wouldn’t be room to drive a wagon between them. Down there, south and east of the mountains, there’s nothing but bleak desolations, as far as you can travel. The whole continent is gone. Here, use my glasses.”
Stavia twiddled with the precious glasses, bringing the cancerous gray up close. “But there’s nothing growing there!” The land looked ashen. Even the rocks were twisted and melted.
“Nothing at all,” Morgot agreed. “Remember Cassandra’s lines in Iphigenia at Ilium, T have seen the land laid waste and burned with brands, and desolation born from fiery wombs’? Well, that’s one of the places she was talking about.”
“Is it dangerous?”
Morgot flapped her hand in front of her mouth in a cooling gesture. “Hot. Not with fire, with radiation. You walk across that place, a few days later all your hair will fall out and you’ll start dying. Still, a bleak desolation isn’t as dangerous as some of them, because you can see it. Some of them, you can’t see. The rock looks all right, and the plants, but it will kill you just as surely as this one. The one south of Marthatown is like that. We call them masked desolations when they’re like that.”
“How do you know it’s there?”
“We’ve still got some preconvulsion radiation detectors. Whenever we send an exploration team, we send a detector with them. Or a good map.”
“A desolation,” repeated Stavia, staring at the bare, black place until it was hidden behind a hill, lost in the tree-specked ranges. “How did they make it?”
“With their evil weapons. You know that.”
“Yes. I guess I did know that.”
That night they camped in a grove of eucalyptus trees, the air redolent with the medicinal tang of the leaves. The donkeys were tethered in a meadow, the wagon half hidden among junipers.
“We won’t let the fire linger,” Morgot said. “There really have been some Gypsy-bandit attacks up this
