As they left the hostel, Var looked down the path once more, mystified. Who was the noble, dazzling, silent man who had made their escape possible? Would he ever know?
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
They marched northward through winter and emerged at last in spring far beyond the crazy domains. Here they found complete strangers: men and women who carried some guns and bows but not true weapons, and who did not fight in the circle, and who lived in structures resembling primitive, dilapidated hostels. They burned wood to warm these 'houses' because there was no electricity, and Illuminated them with smoky oil lanterns. They spoke an unpleasantly modulated dialect, and were not especially friendly. It was as though every family were an island, cultivating its own fields, hunting its own preserve, neither attacking nor assisting strangers.
Still the Master followed, falling behind as much as a month, then catching up almost to within sight, forcing them to move out quickly. Now the silent man Var had fought accompanied the Nameless One. The scattered news reports and rumors described him well enough for Var to identify, though he said nothing to Soil about this. If she knew that a warrior of that quality had chosen to accompany the Master...
Had those two fought, and the Master had made the stranger part of the empire? Or had they joined forces for convenience, in the dangerous hinterlands?
Summer, and the country remained rugged and the pursuit continued. Soil was taller and stronger now, growing rapidly, and was quite capable. She learned from him how to make vine traps in the forest and capture small animals, and to skin them and gut them. How to strike fire and cook the meat. She learned to make a deadfall, and to sleep comfortably in a tree. Her hair grew out, black and fine, so that she resembled her natural mother more than ever.
Soli taught him, in return, the rudiments of the weaponless combat she had learned from Sosa, and the strategies demonstrated by her father Sol. For they both knew that eventually the Master would catch up, and that Var, despite his reservations, would have to fight. The Nameless One would force the combat.
'But it's better to run as long as we can,' she said, seeming to have changed her attitude over the months. 'The Weaponless defeated Sol in the circle, long ago when I was small, and Sol was the finest warrior of the age.'
Var wondered whether Sol could have been as good as the sticker now traveling with the Master, but he kept that thought to himself.
'It was the Weaponless who struck my father on the throat so hard he could not speak again,' she said, as though just remembering. 'Yet you say they were friends.'
'Sol does not speak?' Var's whole body tingled with an appalling suspicion.
'He can't. The underworld surgeon offered to operate, but Sol wouldn't tolerate the knife. Not that way. It was as though he felt he had to carry that wound. That's what Sosa said, but she told me not to talk about it.'
Var thought again of the fair stranger, the master sticker, now almost certain that he knew the man's identity. 'What would your father do, if he thought you were dead?'
'I don't know,' she said. 'I don't like to think about it, so I don't. I miss him, and I'm really sorry' But she cut off that thought. 'Bob probably wouldn't tell him. I think Bob pretended I was being sent on an exploratory mission and didn't return. Bob almost never tells the truth.'
'But if Sol found out'
'I guess he would kill Bob, and' Her mouth opened. 'Var, I never thought of that! He would break out of the underworld and'
'I met him,' Var said abruptly. 'When you were ill. We did not know each other. Now he travels with the Master.'
'Sol is the Nameless One's companion? I should have realized! But that's wonderful, Var! They are together again. They must really be friends.'
Var told her the rest of the story: how he had fought Sol, and tried to send him back to oppose the Master. About the strange generosity of the other man. 'I did not know,' he finished. 'I kept him from you.'
She kissed his cheek-a disconcertingly feminine gesture.
'You did not know. And you fought for me!'
