Freedom's Landing (15 page)

With a start Kris wondered if he was quoting an old Bill Cosby routine.

“I want you to circle around,” and he gestured, “as far as you can go in a day's march, and map. Zainal here says he knows how to map. He's picking up English real good. Officer material for sure.” This last Mitford said in a lower voice and with a grin meant for Kris alone. “Seeing as how
you know him, and seem to be able to charade things to Slav and Coo, you'd be the human in the team. Unless you got any real objections to the duty.”

“Is there going to be trouble for the…ah…aliens, sarge?”

“Ain't there always?” Mitford said in a cynical tone. “I can trust you, Bjornsen,” he added in a dark low tone. “You've proved you can hack it, too.”

“Thanks, sarge,” and Kris felt a good deal taller for that unexpected praise.

“And with the Catteni along he'll see you don't come to harm.”

“Thanks, sarge,” she said, this time wryly. Build 'em up to knock 'em down, but she grinned to show she had no ill feelings. It was enough that the Sergeant wasn't as misogynistic as some career soldiers she'd heard about.

“I want you to draw additional rations from Greene for all of you. Seems like the Deski can't stomach the red meat and they need somethin' in their diet, though what it is I haven't been able to figure out.” He sighed. “That's another reason I'm sending one along with you. And you're to eat!” He shot one thick index finger at her so suddenly that she rocked back. “We've got enough to supply patrols away from camp. That stuff may be less tasty than field rations even, but it's got all the nutrional crap you need to march on. Get another issue of blankets and an extra coverall. Got it?”

“Got it, sarge,” she said, her hand halfway to her brow to salute when she realized that might not be appropriate even if it was an instinctive reaction to his manner.

“Good,” and he grinned in the firelight, having caught that abortive gesture. “Zainal, get the rations and supplies and move out at your leisure.”

“Leisure” in army parlance meant right smart. So in next to no time they were making their way in dawn's early light up the ravine, and into undiscovered country.

Zainal led at a spanking pace that didn't seem to alter whatever the terrain they had to traverse. But, like Mitford,
he did call a halt when full daylight lit the skies.

The first thing Zainal did was tie a knot in a thin strip of blanket, of which he had quite a few tucked inside a thigh pocket. A tally rope? Well, they had no writing materials and Zainal, strong as he was, couldn't exactly carry a sheet of rock with him to chalk up the miles. Or should she say “klicks” since she was on a military operation?

“What are you counting, Zainal?” she asked.

“Steps, so I know distance,” he said in Barevi.

“Oh…” And that steady pace now made sense. “What's the Catteni word for miles, or kilometers? How do you measure distance?”

“My…step…” he said tentatively in English.

“‘Stride' is the better term,” she said.

“Stride is one Catteni
pleg.
”

“
Pleg
for the leg,” she said, using her own brand of
aide-mémoire.
“Make a stride for me, please?”

“Hmmm,” and he complied.

Stretching her own long legs to their limit, she could just about make the same length. “Hmmm. Over a meter then. Hmmm. Well, I could almost spell you on a level surface so you could have a break.”

“Hmmm,” he said again, blinking rapidly as he sifted the meaning of her words.

So she “charaded” what she'd said and then he understood with a grin.

“One
pleg
is almost dead-on a meter. One
pleg
, one meter,” she said.

Slav and the Deski were watching, too, their expressions keen enough to show they were interested in the demonstrations. So she pointed to the Rugarian, gestured for him to take a stride. His was the same length as hers but the Deski's was much longer since he had spiderlike, long leg bones. Although Kris tried to get Slav to tell her what a
pleg
was in his language, and attempted to extract the same information from the Deski, she had no success. Both kept saying stolidly, “
Pleg, pleg.”

A plague on it
, she thought but smiled and patted each in turn before she sat down again to get the good of the rest period. She wasn't sure if they didn't care to have a language lesson or if they had some obscure reason for sticking so perversely to the Barevi words. Both Rugarian and Deski had rather flat, inflectionless voices, but then what she knew of Catteni was flat and inflectionless, too. The lingua Barevi had had more rhythm and tone to it than the languages in which Zainal had spoken to both Slav and Coo.

As they hiked on, they reached another plateau, where a second break was called: another knot in the tally string. When Zainal told her how many
pleg
each knot represented, she realized they were traveling at slightly better than four miles an hour…that is, if Zainal was stopping every hour. So, in the next onward push, she counted the minutes while he counted his paces. She thought she might have lost a few minutes because she got sidetracked watching the Deski check the vegetation on the plateau—what there was of it because there were no fields or hedges or much of anything. But just when she felt they had been marching for an hour, Zainal called a halt.

“Gee, man, you got a clock in your head?” she asked as he made a third knot.

He raised a querying eyebrow at her. It made his face seem more humanish, less Cattenish.

“Lordee, how do Catteni tell time?” she muttered to herself, trying to remember if he'd had some sort of digital device on his wrist, like good spacefarers should, when she'd first encountered him.

“Time.” He picked up on that word and tapped his skull. “Time kept here. Good time.”

“Now don't tell me your home world has long days and nights like Botany?”

The two spent the rest period explaining and understanding that concept.

“Full turn of planet is not as long as here,” he said in the best English sentence he had so far made.

“Boy, you sure learn fast.”

“Is ‘boy' a good thing to say of me?” Again that quizzical expression.

“Well, yes,” Kris replied, grinning, delighted with his sense of humor: something she hadn't thought Catteni possessed. “But you are a man, I am a woman. Boy is a young man. I'm using it in the context of a slang expression, so it doesn't mean the same thing as the word should.”

He grinned in such a polite way that she wasn't sure if he understood her explanation at all before he gestured them to take up their journey again.

The day grew warm on the plateau, which had no shade at all on its sandy and gritty surface, only the wiry plants with their odd-shaped leaves that didn't look like anything on any Earth deserts—and Kris had been in the Las Vegas and Salt Lake City scrubland areas. Coo kept tasting plants, and even different-colored patches of soil as they went: usually spitting the samples out so that Kris wasn't sure what verdict was being rendered. She was becoming so thirsty that her tongue felt swollen, so on what was the midday rest stop she didn't have the desire to banter with Zainal. The others took out “lunch,” chawing off good hunks from their bars, but she didn't think she had enough saliva in her mouth to chew, much less swallow.

“You bite, you chew, be better,” Zainal said kindly and rolled his mouthful about to show that he wasn't swallowing either.

She tried a small piece and discovered that something in the bar helped generate some moisture. She didn't eat as much as the other three but felt better for what she did put in her stomach.

They traveled on, then; the plateau was gradually sloping down to a lusher sort of terrain. And a stream. She had to restrain herself not to prostrate herself
in
the stream but carefully reeducate her mouth and throat to wetness.

“God, what I'd give for a canteen.”

“What is this ‘god' so many call on?” Zainal asked. “Another ‘boy'?”

Coming as the question did in Zainal's rich guttural voice, it sent Kris into a fit of the giggles. She'd often been told that she had an infectious laugh—and had proved it from time to time by setting a whole classroom off—but it pleased her no end that the effect extended to another species. The Catteni's chuckle sounded very human. Slav cocked his head at her and frowned while Coo merely looked at her in consternation, as if the Deski thought Kris was having a fit or convulsion.

“I won't answer that question now, Zainal,” she said when she had reduced giggle to grin. “‘God' was never a boy! I will explain another time when we have several years at our disposal.”

Zainal frowned, not having understood all she said. Which was about par for the course, she thought. And just as well.

Having drunk sufficient water to revive her, Kris now pulled out the rest of her lunchtime bar and finished it. She was ready to go then, but Zainal did not urge them away from this pleasant spot: as much because there were new varieties of plants along the stream bank which Coo was sampling with great eagerness. He came back with something which he showed to Kris, the first time he had done that.

“Looks like a kind of watercress to me,” she said, testing one of the stems and a leaf. “Can you eat it?” she asked, gesturing to her mouth with the sample.

The Deski nodded and popped a stalk into his mouth and chewed with every indication of pleasure. Kris nibbled carefully and, feeling her lips and gums go slightly numb, buried her face in the water and gargled vigorously. She felt Zainal's hands on her shoulders supporting her. She rinsed and gargled, being careful not to swallow, and rinsed and rinsed until the sensation was washed away.

“Thanks, Zainal,” she said and then saw how concerned all three of her companions were. “Oh, I'm fine. I didn't swallow any of it. All yours, Coo, all yours.”

The Deski nodded vigorously and made a show of clutching the rest of the sample plant to his chest.

“No more try,” Zainal told her sternly.

“You bet!”

His concern altered to a glare of frustration. “More ‘boy' words?”

“Well,” and Kris rocked one hand back and forth to indicate neither one nor another. Oh, lord, but she'd never appreciated how complex English was. Or did she mean “idiomatic American”?

They went on then, until Kris wondered how much longer she could ignore the swelling of her feet which the wraparound boots were not compensating for. And she thought she'd been fit! Ha! She had dropped behind the two aliens…two of her companions, she amended quickly…and found herself watching the rippling of the hairs on the Rugarian's legs. His feet did look funny in the wrap-around Catteni footware and he didn't seem to have “muscles” where humans did: but depressions came and went with each stride sort of laterally instead of up and down the way calf muscles did. And in front of him, Coo seemed only to have leg bones, no muscular movement at all, only the tendons—or what passed for tendons on a Deski—on either side of the one leg bone, lifting and lowering it, like the shaft of a crane. She tried to imagine the anatomy of her companions, sans their skins, and failed utterly. Biology had not been one of her stronger subjects. Oh, the gaps in her education.
Well, there's nothing like on-the-job training
, she thought, or whatever it was they were now doing.

Some place and time later, she was able to stop moving her legs and sat down on a rock. There was a small fire enclosed in a circle of rocks and around a cairn of rocks.
Odd formation
, she thought bemusedly. Then, as the buzz of fatigue allowed it, Kris could hear the babbling of a brook nearby. Water! She half rose and then was pushed back onto the rock and a big leaf presented her.

“Drink!

She grasped the leaf, feeling the thickness of it, and found a “lip” from which to drink. The water was ever so cold and tasted ambrosial. Real Adam's Ale!

“More?” asked Zainal, looming over her.

She struggled to rise. “I can get my own water…Ohhh, no,” and her voice came out just this side of a wail. Zainal's big hand pushed her back onto the stone just as she realized how weak she was.

She sipped this time and was able to take in more of her surroundings. Someone was chipping rocks?

She looked around and saw Slav and Coo hammering a hole out of the slab of rock not far from the fire. They were on a slab of rock, an outcropping that edged yet another of the fields, a meter above ground level. Large-leaved plants formed a bit of a canopy over the portion of the cliff, affording them some shade. Beyond this small campsite she saw the spray from a little cataract that spilled off the rock and into a pool, then on down across the field. A crop field, she noticed.

Looking back, she realized with a start of amazement, the men were making a rock caldron. On the far side of the campfire were the limp carcasses of rocksquatters and some other smallish beasties she hadn't seen before: six-legged which, she thought idly, would make skinning them tedious. Then Zainal knelt to perform that task. Rather deliberately, she thought, he gathered up the entrails and threw them off, onto the field below.

“Zainal,” said Slav, and pointed to the now sizable hole they had chipped into the rock.

“Water,” Zainal said, and Slav and Coo, reaching up to pluck more big leaves from the trees shading them, made several trips each.

When the hole had been filled to within a handspan of the top, Zainal threw in the dissected joints of the animals and Coo added some roots, similar to the ones already in use at the cave. Then Zainal, deftly using a forked stick, started transferring hot rocks into the improvised stew pot.

Kris was delighted and clapped her hands that someone was making use of her suggestion. She reached about her and gathered up more stones, which she piled in the center of the fire. They'd probably need a lot to get the stew cooked enough.