Destiny's Road (21 page)
and that was very near the beach. He could see an endless reach of sand without a shack or wall or footprint anywhere, nothing but sand and weed and painted shells.
Otterfolk shells. A score in view to left and right, now that he thought to look.
Tim edged the boat closer yet. That wasn't an Otterfolk graveyard, was it? Sharks had bones; chugs had bones; but there weren't any Otterfolk bones on that beach. Just shells painted in acrylic colors, all set on the beach beyond the tide line, like headstones maybe, until one shifted suddenly, and again.
The boat rocked. Damn, he was too close, his centerboard was grinding against sand! He turned hard, and back a bit as the sail tried to go slack. The centerboard wasn't grinding anymore because his four riders had dropped off and the boat was riding higher. He angled for open sea before he thought of the other boats.
They were all turning.
He had some sea room now, and he looked back for the particular shell that had moved.
It covered a hollow. Shapes too small to see crawled out from under the edge.
Otterfolk were riding waves to shore. He saw them clearly for the first time, four limber shapes with short finned limbs and long bodies. He half-recognized the markings. Those had been the riders on his boat.
He worked it out later, thus:
Fishers were too skilled, and a fisher boat was too predictable. Boring. A thief in a boat he didn't know how to use, making mistakes and learning as he went, made for an exciting ride.
Four riders piling on a thief's boat would slow it. Fisher boats chasing it, being less interesting, would carry fewer riders. Of course the thief would be caught.
Otterfolk might choose to ride two at a time to give a thief a longer run; but Tim always believed that the Destiny natives had minds but no language. Negotiation had to be basic.
Threatened, the thief sent a basic message. Tim had threatened to beach his boat on the birthground.
The Otterfolk must respond. Perhaps they fouled the fishers' centerboards or tillers, or clung to the handholds in hordes, until the boats couldn't move.
At the time, Tim couldn't guess why the fishers had abandoned their chase. But sailing near shore now seemed a very dangerous thing.
Otterfolk shed their shells: that was clear. They made nests in sand, and left the shell to shade the emerging young: that was a likely guess. Otterfolk would kill any creature found on that shore: that seemed very likely.
He stayed well out to sea until he was nearly to Baytown.
The sky was red with after-sunset, and Quicksilver burned right at the water. Baytown fisher boats were at sea ahead of him. As he came nearer they all turned toward him.
Tim aimed his boat inland, toward where a dish-shaped crater lay on the beach.
The wind was blowing out to sea. He couldn't aim directly toward shore, but he could approach in a switchback pattern. When the centerboard grounded and heeled over, he went overboard. The lightened boat bobbed up and righted. He swam for shore with boats converging behind him. He crawled out winded, and ran for the crater on rubbery legs.
He paused once, and stooped to lift the rim of a painted shell that would almost cover his chest. His vision grayed and he went to his knees. But the cavity under the shell was empty; the Otterfolk children gone. He heaved himself up and kept running, chest heaving, and half fell over the rim of the fused sand dish.
Arcs of wooden bench lined the inland half of the dish. The wood was ancient and weathered. Soft sand lined the bottom on the sea side, and the slanted rim had been painted with hieroglyphs in yellow, orange, green, scarlet, indigo.
The shell he was holding was very like those he'd found scattered over the mudflats that held towels and soggy clothes for the Baytown fishers. Would he have found paint, if he'd turned one over?
It was too big for his pack. He shoved it up between his shirt and rain tunic, against his chest.
He was burning priceless seconds. Fishers had gone overboard. They were in the water, trying to save his stolen boat by attaching lines: they meant to tow it. A few shouted at him, the words blurred, the tone unfriendly.
The five-color cartoons along the rim of Meetplace were old but still vivid. If he studied them he'd see what those simplified figures represented.
But Baytown women were wading the mudflat in his direction, and Tim thought it best to leave.
The Speckles Can
Think of us as priests of evolution.
-Caravan proverb
He climbed as far as the caravan trail before he looked back. They wouldn't follow him in the dark...?
It was already too dark to tell.
Thirst was near killing him.
Well, he was new at this. He followed the caravan trail to the Spectre River. He watched from cover while the last of the light died, before he crept to the water and drank his fill.
Then he kept climbing.
He woke sheltered in bushes, just below the Road, on the wrong side of the Spectre River. He woke joyful. He was free! Anyone could outrun a caravan.
He watched Baytown wake. He watched the boats put to sea. Any tiny fleck of white on the water might be Otterfolk. It was all a wonder, but the thing he wanted most was to go down.
Did he do wrong to run? He was frantic to question them. All those discarded Otterfolk shells! Fishers must be in constant contact with Otterfolk.
Why did the merchants let Baytowners inspect their wares the day before they bought? They didn't do that anywhere else along the Road, except in Tail Town itself. Did the Otterfolk tell the locals what they needed?
How?
All his traveling had only bought him more questions.
He saw no way across the Spectre. The bridge lay too close to Baytown. Baytown knew that he had stolen a boat. They knew he had landed on the forbidden beach. The shadow of the mountains was withdrawing from Baytown, and sunlight would soon touch the mountains where he hid.
The flat Road itself hid nothing and grew nothing.
If he tried to hunt what lived in the brush, Baytown fishers would see brush moving on the mountain. He didn't dare even reach up into a fool cage.
But the slopes above the Road bloomed with Earthlife crops that hadn't been harvested since Cavorite passed. He crept among them like a snake, and gorged on fruits and berries. He collected beans, several kinds of nuts, and a few root vegetables. The beans he set soaking in a bottle.
He cooked after dark in a rock fire pit tall enough to hide the light.
Then he climbed in the dark until he reached bare rock.
In the morning the Spectre had become a thousand springs. Crossing was easy.
Now there were none to spy on him at all. Nobody lived on this long stretch between Baytown and the distillery. Tim stayed high, at the interface between Earthlife growth and bare rock.
Fruits and grains grew here, and the occasional fool cage with something trapped inside. Rotten bird meat would still make bait for catfish. He didn't hunt; someone might hear gunfire. He walked wide around the occasional wild pig. Once he speared an unwary rabbit with his weed cutter. He was never able to do that again.
He'd traveled this way before.
He watched the Road for signs of pursuit. Merchants must know about bicycles, and Tim couldn't outrun those. He'd be wary for a while.
But nobody followed. In ten days he was halfway home.
He'd been seeing birds as big as men. He hadn't seen one fly, but they ran like the wind. Ostriches. The land was flat up to an abrupt "frost line," where bare rock suddenly rose nearly straight for five or six hundred meters.
He was halfway between the Neck and Spiral Town, he judged, high on the spine of the Crab. A klick's stretch of chaparral, of tiny Earthlife oranges and berry bushes and Destiny thorns, barred him from the Road. Far ahead he could see a vertical white thread of waterfall.
The long stretch of lonely coast was ending. The Homes and Wilsons were friends of the caravans, and so was every community beyond. How would they treat a yutz found wandering loose? Tim would have crept past the distillery and dairy; but it seemed to him that he was becoming clumsy.
Nothing serious. He'd left the Otterfolk shell behind, three mornings in a row. The shell was proof of some terrible truth that he hadn't yet fully understood. It served as a platter too: it kept food out of the dirt. He needed it.
This morning he'd lost time doubling back to get the shell, again, and he'd found his fire pit sitting like a signature. He threw the rocks into the bushes, as usual, but this was getting scary. He didn't want to end like Jael Harness.
There was no sure way to recognize speckles deficiency.
He could keep track of the days, eleven now, and so what? He could move more carefully, look around himself more often, avoid some mistakes that way. More likely he'd just forget the question, and gradually all the patterns in his mind would go too.
He was a couple of caravan-days down Road from the distillery. For now he'd keep to the heights. He'd reach the falls tonight and go down in the morning-hide the gun first-approach the distillery by the Road, unless they found him first.
Every child knew that planets glowed by reflected sunlight. Quicksilver was brilliant before it passed behind the sun. These last few days, with its shadowed side turned toward Destiny, Quicksilver had been nearly invisible; but now it was crossing the sun.
Half an hour before sunset, Tim could just glance at the westering sun and glimpse a black dot on the solar disk before he snatched his gaze away.
Children did that. Adults yelled at them for it. A child who tried such a thing with Earth's hotter, brighter sun would blind himself. Tim could blind himself if he blinked the sun too near noon. If he let the sun get too far down the sky, the dot would blur out.
But he'd caught it.
So he sat on a boulder and waited for his vision to come back, and wondered why he was wasting time. Loria waited ahead, a caravan was crawling up his tail, the falls he'd seen was still ahead, and Tim Bednacourt sat on a rock waiting for dark.
Because he needed rocks to build his fire pit, and water to cook.
He hadn't seen loose rocks earlier in the day. Here was a convenient spring near a convenient landslide, a raw cleft in the rock spilling stones just small enough to lift easily. This boulder would do for a backstop, and when he brushed the coals away it would stay warm for hours: he'd sleep with his back against it.
He'd stopped to gather berries and blink at the sun. He'd washed himself thoroughly, and his clothes too, to make himself presentable. Dawdling here rather than hoping to find more rocks ahead.
His vision was coming back. Tim looked down and saw char marks.
He slid off the boulder and into the brush to think it through.
Marks of a fire.
Of course he hadn't looked for char marks on the rocks he used. He made his fires in the dark!
Vulcanism and landslides made these stonefalls. But he'd found stones conveniently clustered these past ten days, spaced a scant daywalk apart for a man carrying a pack and stopping to hunt and gather and cook.
He'd been pulling his fire pits apart after use, and so had someone else, it seemed. Someone who built much bigger fire pits. Not just a wanderer. Several men together.
Now what?
Don't hunt. He'd gathered fruit and some barley. Did he dare cook the barley? Nobody had seen his fires....ad they?
He'd been more than careful. The mountain was bare above where he built his fires; no human lived there. Someone close might have whiffed smoke, but nobody had seen it rising in the dark. He built his stone circles tall. Nobody could have seen fire within Tim Hann's fire pits, not unless he were floating in the sky.
At dusk he built his stone circle and his tiny fire. There was the risk that he had been seen, that he was being followed or tracked. Best he remain predictable until he could see another way.
He lay not against the fire-warmed boulder, but in the bush, where he could watch it. A tiny moon silvered the crest and left all else black.
The bandits he'd fought had been up the Road by many days, past the little distillery and past the Shire too. So the scorched rock he'd found might mark a wanderer or two, he told himself, but not one of that band of bandits.
But any wanderer must attack caravans for their speckles.
Tim Bednacourt carried no speckles. Could he buy a bandit off? With what?
Or evade them? The only way to evade bandits was to know where bandits were.
Here were two faces of one problem. How could Jemmy Bloocher
avoid being found? He'd taught himself to do that. How could Tim Bednacourt find bandits who didn't want to be found? They'd be living as he lived, but more of them. Taking refuge at the frost line? Changing identities?
Tim waited for sleep, with his eyes on six hundred meters of split rock above him. He tried to picture bandits... not bandits attacking a caravan three times a year, but living between caravan passings, settled in little groups, gathering and hunting, stealing speckles from locals or fighting each other for a dwindling supply.
His mind must have gone on working while he slept. He woke in darkness. He felt quite lucid.
He donned his pack. He moved to the stream and drank until his belly was taut as a drum.
Then he began to climb.
The Crest Mountains were glossy-smooth wherever fusion flame had touched rock. But the cooling rock had split. Here a vertical split ran nearly to the peaks. The spring flowed from the split.
He'd been looking up at the rock face for so long that it was branded in his memory. Good thing, too. He couldn't see! But he could follow the split by touch.
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