The following day he went his way, leaving behind the warriors he had conquered. 'Only for fun!' he explained.
'Good, good.'
They watched him disappear down the trail, singing tunelessly and flipping his club end-over-end in the air.
CHAPTER TEN
'My year is up,' Sos said.
'I would have you stay,' Sol replied slowly. 'You have given good service.'
'You have five-hundred men and an elite corp of advisors. You don't need me.'
Sol looked up and Sos was shocked to see tears in his eyes. 'I do need you,' he said. 'I have no other friend.'
Sos did not know what to say.
Sola joined them, hugely pregnant. Soon she would travel to a crazy hospital for delivery. 'Perhaps you have a son,' Sos said.
'When you find what you need, come back,' Sol told him, accepting the inevitable.
'I will.' That was all they could say to each other.
He left the camp that afternoon, travelling east. Day by day the landscape became more familiar as he approached the region of his childhood. He skirted the marked badlands near the coast, wondering what mighty cities had stood where the silent death radiated now, and whether there would ever be such massive assemblages of people again. The books claimed that nothing green had grown in the centers of these encampments, that concrete and asphalt covered the ground between buildings and made the landscape as flat as the surface of a lake, that machines like those the crazies used today had been everywhere, doing everything. Yet all had vanished in the Blast. Why? There were many unanswered questions.
A month of hiking brought him to the school he had attended before beginning his travels as a warrior. Only a year and a half had elapsed, but already it had become a entirely different facet of his existence, one now unfamiliar to him and strange to see again. Still, he knew his way around.
He entered the arched front doorway and walked down the familiar, foreign hall to the door at the end marked 'Principal.' A girl he did not remember sat at the desk. He decided she was a recent graduate, pretty, but very young. 'I'd like to see Mr. Jones,' he said, pronouncing the obscure name carefully.
'And who is calling?' She stared at Stupid, perched a ever upon his shoulder.
'Sos,' he said, then realized that the name would mea nothing here. 'A former student. He knows me.'
She spoke softly into an intercom and listened for th reply. 'Doctor Jones will see you now,' she said, an smiled at him as though he were not a ragged-bearded dirt-encrusted pagan with a mottled bird on his shoulder.
He returned the gesture, appreciating her attention though he knew it was professional, and went on through the inner door.
The principal rose immediately and came around the desk to greet him. 'Yes of course I remember you! Clas of '107, and you stayed to practice with the-the sword wasn't it? What do you call yourself now?'
'Sos.' He knew Jones knew it already, and was simply offering him the chance to explain the change. He didn take it immediately, and the principal, experienced in such matters, came to his rescue again.
'Sos. Beautiful thing, that three-letter convention. Wish I knew how it originated. Well, sit down, Sos, and tell me everything. Where did you acquire your pet? That's genuine mock-sparrow, if I haven't lost my eye for bad lands fauna.' A very gentle fatherly inflection came mt his voice. 'You have been poking into dangerous regions warrior. Are you back to stay?'
'I don't know. I don't think so. I-I don't know wher my loyalties lie, now.' How rapidly he resumed the mood of adolescence, in this man's presence.
'Can't make up your mind whether you're sane or crazies eh?' Jones said, and laughed in his harmless way. 'I know it's a hard decision. Sometimes I still wish I could chuck it all and take up one of those glamorous weapons and- you didn't kill anybody, I
