'We'll go to the path,' Marek whispered. 'Then down to the river.'
Their progress was slow. Frequently, Marek paused, crouching down to listen for two or three minutes before moving on. Almost an hour passed before they came within sight of the dirt path that ran from the town to the river. It was a pale streak against the darker grass and foliage that surrounded it.
Here Marek paused. The silence around them was complete. He heard only the faint sound of the wind. Chris felt impatient to get started. After a full minute of waiting, he started to get up.
Marek pushed him down.
He held his finger to his lips.
Chris listened. It was more than wind, he realized. There was also the sound of men whispering. He strained to hear. There was a quiet cough, somewhere ahead. Then another cough, closer, on their side of the road.
Marek pointed, left and right. Chris saw a faint silver glint - armor in starlight - among the bushes opposite the path.
And he heard rustling closer by.
It was an ambush, soldiers waiting on both sides of the path.
Marek pointed back the way they had come. Quietly, they moved away from the path.
'Where now?' Chris whispered.
'We'll stay away from the path. Go east to the river. That way.' Marek pointed, and they set out.
Chris felt on edge now, straining to hear the slightest sound. Their own footsteps were so loud, they masked any other sound. He understood now why Marek had stopped so often. It was the only way to be sure.
They went back two hundred yards from the path, then headed down to the river, moving between the fields of cleared land. Even though it was nearly black, Chris felt exposed. The fields were walled in low stone, so they had a slight cover. But he was still uneasy, and he gave a sigh of relief when they moved back into uncleared shrub land, darker in the night.
This silent, black world was entirely alien to him, yet he quickly adjusted to it. Danger lay in the tiniest movements, in sounds that were almost inaudible. Chris moved in a crouch, tense, testing each footstep before applying full weight, his head constantly turning left and right, left and right.
He felt like an animal, and he thought of the way Marek had bared his teeth before the attack in the room, like some kind of ape. He looked over at Kate and saw that she, too, was crouched and tense as she moved forward.
For some reason, he found himself thinking of the seminar room on the second floor of the Peabody, back at Yale, with the cream-colored walls and the polished dark-wood trim, and of the arguments among the graduate students sitting around the long table: whether processual archaeology was primarily historical or primarily archaeological, whether formalist criteria outweighed objectivist criteria, whether derivationist doctrine concealed normative commitment.
It was no wonder they argued. The issues were pure abstractions, consisting of nothing but thin air - and hot air. Their empty debates could never be resolved; the questions could never be answered. Yet there had been so much intensity, so much passion in those debates. Where had it come from? Who cared? He couldn't quite remember now why it had been so important.
The academic world seemed to be receding into the distance, vague and gray in memory, as he made his way down the dark hillside toward the river. Yet however frightened he was on this night, however tense and at risk of his life, it was entirely real in some way that was reassuring, even exhilarating, and-
He heard a twig snap, and he froze.
Marek and Kate froze, too.
They heard soft rustling in the brush to the left, and a low snort. They stayed motionless. Marek gripped his sword.
And the small dark shape of a wild pig snuffled past them.
'Should have killed it,' Marek whispered. 'I'm hungry.'
They started to continue forward, but then Chris realized that they were not the ones who had frightened the pig. Because now they heard, unmistakably, the sound of many running feet. Rustling, crashing in the underbrush. Coming toward them.
Marek frowned.
He could see enough in the darkness to catch glimpses of metal armor now and again. There must be seven or eight soldiers, moving hastily east, then dropping down, hiding in the brush again, becoming silent.
What the hell was going on?
These soldiers had been back at the dirt path, waiting for them. Now the soldiers had moved east, and were waiting for them again.
How?
He looked at Kate, crouched beside him, but she just looked frightened.
Chris, also crouching, tapped Marek on the shoulder. Chris shook his head, then pointed deliberately to his own ear.
Marek nodded, listened. At first he heard nothing but the wind. Puzzled, he looked back at Chris, who made a distinct tapping motion against the side of his head, by his ear.
He was saying, Turn on your earpiece.
Marek tapped his ear.
After a brief crackle as the sound came on, he heard nothing. He shrugged at Chris, who held up his flat palms: Wait. Marek waited. Only after a few moments of quiet listening did he become aware of the soft, regular sound of a person breathing.
He looked at Kate and held his finger to his lips. She nodded. He looked at Chris. He nodded, too. They both understood. Make no noise at all.
Again, Marek listened intently. He still heard the sound of quiet breathing in his earpiece.
But it wasn't coming from any of them.
Someone else.
Chris whispered, 'Andrй. This is too dangerous. Let's not cross the river tonight.'
'Right,' Marek whispered. 'We'll go back to Castelgard and hide out for the night outside the walls.'
'Okay. Good.'
'Let's go.'
In the darkness, they nodded to each other, then they deliberately tapped their ears, turning their earpieces off.
And they crouched down to wait.
In a few moments, they heard the soldiers start to move, once again running through the underbrush. This time, they were going up the hill - back toward Castelgard.
They waited another five or six minutes. And then they headed down the hill, away from Castelgard.
It was Chris who had put it all together. Climbing down the hillside in the night, he had brushed a mosquito away from his ear, and the movement had inadvertently turned his earpiece on; not long afterward, he had heard someone sneeze.
And none of them had sneezed.
A few moments later, they had come upon the pig, and by then he was hearing someone panting with exertion. While Kate and Marek, in the darkness beside him, were not moving at all.
That was when he realized for certain that someone else had an earpiece - and thinking it over now, he had a pretty good idea where it had come from. Gomez. Somebody must have taken it from Gomez's severed head. The only problem with that idea was-
Marek nudged him. Pointed ahead.
Kate gave the thumbs-up sign and grinned.
Broad and flat, the river rippled and gurgled in the night. The Dordogne was wide at this point; they could barely see the far shore, a line of dark trees and dense undergrowth. They saw no sign of movement. Looking upstream, Chris could just make out the dark outline of the mill bridge. He knew the mill would be closed up at night; millers could work only during daylight hours, because even a candle risked causing an explosion in the dusty air.
Marek touched Chris on the arm, then pointed toward the opposite bank. Chris shrugged; he saw
