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When they rode alone Guil could sink into trains of almost-thought and exist in Burn’s realm of sun-on-back, humans-at-distance, food-the-day’s-necessity and sex-on-opportunity. Sometimes in the high hills you ran into a partnership like that, one where you couldn’t talk to the man except through the horse; and Guil supposed in the long run they were happy enough—never work, never come into a town, they’d barter sometimes, food and skins for clothes or a knife. Usually when you met them, the human half wanted to trade, the horse was skittish—and the rest of the time you just got a spooky feeling in the brush, the intimation of something that might have been there for a moment, might have looked you over in a slightly predatory or slightly fearful way… wild things did that sometimes, before they ran.
He was glad enough to sink into that kind of nowhere at least for the day. The leg ached when he didn’t. The stomach complained it was empty when he didn’t, and he didn’t care he was hungry, really—he hadn’t energy left to care.
But somewhere toward evening Burn found the stream that crossed the road well north of Shamesey, a smallish stream—Guil was relatively sure it was the same one—cold in this season; and Burn wanted to cool his legs and drink and—definitely—find something to eat.
So Guil sat down there and tended the wound he had gotten, the ugly rip that by now was somewhat scabbed and not wholly clean. He took off the breeches and sat on the bank, dipping up water to wash the wound and numb the pain, which was so miserable once he’d worked the pants off that Burn took himself from the vicinity, went a distance down the stream and slammed his three-toed foot down on something that wriggled.
Burn ate it then, alternately washing it in the stream. It was not particularly nice; it was not the sort of thing Burn saved for cooking, and Burn had the grace to keep his tidbit out of range of a queasy stomach to eat it.
“I don’t suppose you could catch a fish,” Guil said aloud, and thought <fish.>
Burn snorted, and wandered off along the stream, nosing into this and that, sampling the water. Burn came back to him with, <mudcrawler, mossy big shell.>
He wasn’t that desperate.
< Plate-fungus.>
No.
<Scraggy pucker-berries.>
He was disgusted. <Guil riding,> he imaged, and got up to put his pants on. Burn came back to him, took him up again, uncommonly patient still with this carrying business.
<Valley,> Burn imaged, having settled on that goal, imaging a good winter and enough to eat. <Mountain meadows. Meandering stream.>
He dreamed in that still sunlit but nippish ride, of the valley where he had been a boy, in the first spring he remembered. He wondered where it was, and whether it was what he remembered. He thought of it, in bad times.
And perhaps he did gloss it a bit, being light-headed with pain and hunger, with the meadows spangled with starflowers and the delirious yellow spikes of mollyfingers, in green lush grass; but that was the way he liked to remember it—which was probably, he’d long said to himself, why he’d never found it.
Burn took up his dream readily enough, embellished it with the restless longings of his own kind: a valley, a far, far different place from the safe, smoky dens of Shamesey hostels, where riders and horses lived in such muddy, smelly, close quarters.
A clean winter, a wide winter, with all the white valley to hunt. Tarmin. Then this place.
“Promise,” Guil said. “I promise.”
Burn twitched his ears back and forth.
“Don’t know ‘promise,’ do you? Probably it’s good you don’t.”
<“You don’t,”> echoed back to him. Burn could image sounds he didn’t know, so far as his horsey brain could remember them. Or cared to remember them. Then a visual image. <Mollyfingers and green grass.>
Mollyfingers didn’t grow in the lowlands. They wouldn’t grow where factories sent up smoke, or in places like Anveney, where men ripped copper and lead out of the earth and made beautiful, poisoned pools, bright blue and milky white.
<Cattle,> Burn thought, sulking, and then again, quite cheerfully, the sunlight in his thoughts belying the evening—<mollyfingers and clean new grass.>
Twilight was getting scarily deep scarily fast in the folds of the hills, with the sun already over the mountain rim.
Maybe the riders Cloud had smelled behind them had stopped for camp by now. Da
They’d come back to the road finally. He’d found their tracks where the dust was thick, and where a horse’s toe had scored the occasional rock. He could track at least that well: from an old rider on his one long trip he’d picked up enough of the art at least to read whether a horse or a man was ru
But he knew precisely the riders he was tracking; and he was scared, to tell the truth, not alone now of the riders they’d feared behind them, but of a night alone out where he’d never been alone before if they didn’t catch up before they ran out of daylight. He caught little strange vignettes of himself and Cloud seen from low to the earth or high on the hill or out of the brush, so he knew that small hunter eyes were watching them, nothing big, nothing that would bother a horse—yet. He had his pistol by him and he decided, considering having fallen on the hill and having had it slide free, that a tie-down would be a very good idea, but he wasn’t going to tie it in the holster now, thank you, he wanted to be able to draw it very quickly, and not shoot himself or Cloud, if an emergency happened. He was afraid his hands would shake if he had to aim. He was afraid of shooting in panic and hitting the men he was tracking. A townbred junior rider had no business alone out here, he was increasingly convinced—he’d never been alone in the dark in the Wild before, and he didn’tknow what was watching them from the brush.
The Westmans might have slowed down just a little, he said to himself. They might have helped, damn them, when he’d fallen, instead of laughing and riding on.
They’d asked him to come with them out here. Jonas had said he’d improve their chances of finding what they were looking for— so why had they let Cloud dump him? Damned fu
Neither did Cloud. Cloud sent an uncomfortable hostility, daring the Westmans or their horses to stop anything Cloud wanted.
“You embarrassed me,” Da
Or the politics of humans with each other.
Well, so maybe young humans didn’t pick up on things like human politics too well either, the way he didn’t understand why older and wiser riders would have left him. Why boys his own age would have done it, he could figure just fine: plain stupidity. But he didn’t think that was the case with the Westmans, who were borderers like Stuart, who understood what the dangers were.
So borderers played rough jokes on each other, and expected juniors to take more than they dared hand back, the way every other senior did… but they were friends of Stuart, and Stuart hadn’t laughed at him.
He tried to think it was some sign of trust that they did leave him, and figured he’d catch up, and figured he’d take care of himself. Maybe it was a sign of respect, or an expectation of him—or something.