Redoubt (26 page)

He was very, very glad he had those crude spears when he heard voices on the afternoon
of the fourth day.

They were speaking Karsite, and they were coming from somewhere above him.

He had already found his shelter for the night; or, rather, he had dug it for himself.
He had found an enormous, downed tree, and he had patiently enlarged a hollow under
it and lined it with dead leaves. He had just finished peeling his dinner of cattail
roots and was about to go down to the water to see if he could augment them with redbugs,
when he heard the voices.

“Make camp here,”
ordered one.
“You and you, go down to the river and bring up enough water to hold us through the
night. You and you, dig the latrine pit. I don’t want anyone out of camp after dark.
Nobody goes outside the perimeter.”

Quickly, he gathered everything up and tucked himself back in under the log, pulling
the weeds up and toward him to conceal the opening. Just in time, too. Shortly, a
couple of men in identical brown tunics came blundering down the hill, hung all over
with what looked like waterskins, like pods hanging off a tree. He peered longingly
at them. Oh, what he would have given for a chance to snatch one!

No such luck. It was broad daylight, and there were two of them. Even if he’d had
the skills of a thief in a tale, that would have been suicidal.

They filled their skins in the river, complaining about the cold and wet, and lumbered
back up the slope, grumbling loudly the entire time about how heavy the water weighed.
Evidently their captain heard them.
“Quit your bellyaching and move, or I’ll make you march with them all day tomorrow!”

After that, no one came down to the river, and from upslope came the sounds of men
making camp. Or at least, that was what Mags assumed the sounds meant. Wood chopping,
digging, hammering, the voice barking orders, the sound of a couple of mules—mules
and not horses, as he heard one of them bray, startlingly loud in the absence of other
animal sounds. The men were sent back down for water again, which made sense now that
he knew about the mules, since the mules would need as much water as a couple of men.
They had probably used up a goodly share of the water from the first run setting up
a watering trough for the mules and taking care of cooking and washing needs. This
would be the water that would hold them through the night. Then, as the sun began
to set and the valley filled with shadows, there was the sound of at least one fire,
the smell of woodsmoke and cooking, and men talking. It was impossible to hear what
they were saying over the rushing river below him, but the cooking smells nearly drove
Mags mad. It seemed a punishment designed specifically to torment him, to be cramped
in his damp little cave, chewing on a raw cattail root, while above him were men warming
themselves at a crackling fire and eating cooked food.

He reminded himself of all the times he’d smelled the good dinners the Pieters were
eating while he and the other kiddies huddled over their watery soup and single piece
of bread. And he
had
food. He’d filled up on redbugs before he stopped, and he still had lots of hickory
nuts and cattail roots. He muffled a nut in his blanket, cracked it between two stones,
and ate it slowly, reminding himself to enjoy the rich taste. He peeled and ate another
root, then another nut. He concentrated on how good they tasted, the rich taste of
the nut, the slightly sweet crunch of the root, and how much more satisfying they
were than soup that had barely one sad shred of cabbage in every four spoonfuls. It
helped; in fact, it helped tremendously.

He didn’t dare sleep, however. Despite the officer’s order that no one was to leave
the camp after dark, he didn’t dare take the chance that someone would, anyway. So
instead of sleeping, he dozed as lightly as he could, listening for the sound of clumsy
footfalls coming down the hill over the sound of the river.

He was startled awake by the blat of an inexpertly sounded horn at dawn, and he spent
the next couple of candlemarks listening intently. Four men came blundering down the
slope this time, laden with waterskins. Halfway up, he heard someone curse. Someone
else said,
“Leave it. It’s probably bust in the fall.”

His heart leaped. Was there a chance, was there even a chance—

He maintained his silent vigil, however.
If
it was a waterskin that the man had dropped, it might very well have broken in the
fall, and he had no way of mending it. Or the captain might send someone down after
it anyway. Or it might not have been a waterskin after all.

So he peeled a root and ate it, slowly, taking tiny bites. Peeled another and ate
it. Ignored the smell of hot food as best he could, although the smell of cooking
meat was extremely hard to take. Listened as hard as he could and watched through
his curtain of weeds.

Finally he heard what he had been hoping for: the jingle of harness, the rattle of
wheels on rock, and the tramp of feet. And all of it going downstream, away from him.

Had this been the same group that had stopped his kidnappers?

He was pretty certain they were just patrolling, not looking for him specifically.
His kidnappers had kept him carefully concealed, after all, so unless for some reason
he’d been taken on the orders of someone high up in the chain of Karsite authority,
no one in Karse knew he was here. So these fellows might be looking for interlopers,
bandits, and troublemakers, but not specifically him.

He’d been very, very careful about the traces he had left behind. He’d tossed everything
he couldn’t eat into the river to be carried away and scattered. When he pulled up
cattails, he was generally using the fibrous leaves to make twisted cordage while
he walked, the redbug shells from the bugs he ate vanished into the river immediately,
and so did the cattail peelings. There was nothing in the places where he’d slept
to show that it hadn’t been an animal that had denned there. He didn’t leave tool
marks on anything, because he didn’t have tools. He’d walked on rock to avoid leaving
human footprints.

He didn’t think they’d find any trace of him.

And even if they did,
they
were not the ones hunting him. They had come from the opposite direction of his kidnappers.
He just had to hope his kidnappers didn’t meet up with them.

He hoped, even if they did find something, they would assume he was a native Karsite,
a hunter or a vagabond. It wasn’t as if they had any way of telling the nationality
of whoever had left some broken nutshells.

He waited a good long time before moving out of his shelter, and when he did, it was
cautiously. With a careful eye uphill, just in case someone came back, he crept down
to the river until he found the spot where the men had been filling their skins. He
looked upslope. Their path was painfully obvious, with torn up weeds, bare patches
where they had dug their feet into the soil, and everything trampled. Slowly, telling
himself not to hope, he worked his way up the slope, examining their path for a couple
of arm lengths past the trampled area, looking for whatever they had dropped.

And his heart leaped when he spotted it—a round, brown shape caught in the middle
of a scraggly bush, hidden from above by the leaves but visible from below. They’d
have had to get down here to spot it. No wonder they hadn’t wanted to go back.

Scarcely daring to believe his luck, he worked his way into the thorny tangle, suffering
his fair share of scratches on the way in before his hand closed around it. And he
shed a bit of blood on the way out, too. But when he drew it out, he could have shouted
for joy.

Not a waterskin, but a water gourd, which was probably why they hadn’t bothered to
go after it. Gourds were easily grown, easily replaced, and cheap. This one wasn’t
broken, and the stopper was still rammed securely in the neck. It was obvious what
had happened—the carrying-strap had snapped. A Sun-In-Glory had been inked with a
stamp onto the side, meaning it was Karsite army issue and not someone’s personal
property—probably part of the equipage for the mules. Another reason why they wouldn’t
care. If they had lost someone’s personal waterskin, there would have been words at
the very least, but losing a bit of the army equipment was unlikely to generate any
repercussions.

A water bottle! He had a water bottle! That was the second of his needs taken care
of!

Emboldened by his luck, he climbed up to the camp. Who knew? They might have left
something else behind. When you have plenty of equipment, you can think about leaving
things that are broken.

They had at least piled their trash in a tidy heap, which showed good discipline—but
when he took a stick and poked through the remains of the fire in the fire pit—there
were still coals!

Something about
coals
twinged something in his memory. What was it?

Was there a way to carry coals with you to start a fire when you didn’t have a fire-starter?
Yes! That was it!

While he waited for his mind to relax enough for the information to come to the surface,
he built the coals back up a little. As long as he had a fire, there was no reason
not to roast some cattail roots. And while he waited for them to bake, he turned over
the trash pile and found treasures.

Half a knife blade. A real knife blade! It looked as if some idiot had been using
it to try to pry something apart and had snapped it in half. He could make himself
a wooden handle, and he’d have a short, but usable, knife.
Two
broken water gourds, one snapped off at the neck and one cracked across the bottom.
An assortment of broken or worn pieces of leather; from the looks of things, the men
had been put to work mending some of their gear and the mule harness. Some torn, stained,
burned cloth. In short, between last night and now, he had been
given
virtually everything he had asked for.

That was when his memory finally let the information about carrying fire float to
the surface.

He hunted for damp moss, and when he found it, he carefully lined one of the half
gourds with it, the one that had the crack across the bottom. Then he scooped up one
of the best coals with a clamshell and rolled it into the gourd, then covered it with
hot ashes and more moss. He made a carrying net with bits of cordage and fitted it
to the gourd, then did the same for the intact water gourd. He wrapped the leather
and cloth around the knife blade and smaller bits, stowed all of that in the other
broken gourd, then tucked that in the back of his blanket sling with his other sparse
gear. Last of all, he
really
put out the fire, tidied the trash pile, ate his roasted roots, then made his way
down to the river again, carefully making sure to step in the same places the Karsites
had.

That night, he had the first cooked meal he had enjoyed since the drugged soup.

The fire that he made was tiny, and he made certain to build it under the shelter
of the overhanging rock he camped beneath to disperse the smoke. He ringed it with
his sling pebbles, and when they were hot enough, he teased them away from the flames
and used a clamshell to scoop them up and drop them into the other broken gourd, which
was now full of water and redbugs. While the redbugs steeped in hot water, cooking
slowly, and his cattail roots roasted in the fire, he whittled down a split piece
of branch into a handle for his new knife, fitted it to the blade, and bound the whole
tightly with his vine cord.

“Redbugs” were actually green or greenish brown when alive; they turned red when cooked.
Cooking them in the barely simmering water heated by the stones was the best way because
it didn’t take very long to cook that tiny amount of meat, and the more you cooked
it the tougher it got.

Mind, he’d have eaten leather, and enjoyed it, at this point.

He sighed with satisfaction as he ate his bugs and his roots, drank the slightly gritty,
bug-flavored water, then banked the fire for the night. Now he had everything he needed
as soon as he was forced to stop following the river. Cookpot, water carrier, fire,
and a knife.

He was one step closer to home.

He slept very well that night.

10

I
t was a good thing that he’d found the Karsite camp when he had, because by afternoon
of the very next day, the river took an abrupt turn to the west, and when he climbed
the slope and a tree above it to see where it was going, it appeared to be heading
straight west for as far as he could see.

He got down out of the tree and had to sit for a moment, as he found himself completely
overcome with panic.

All this time, he’d been following this watercourse, and it had been a reliable source
for water, food, and shelter. Now he would have to leave it. And now he would be completely
at the mercy of the Karsite lands.

And, of course, he was increasing his chance of running into Karsites themselves.

He told himself to stay calm, but it didn’t help. He was scared. This wasn’t something
he’d ever done before. All of his ability to survive depended on things he had learned
at the mine, where he’d had a reliable source of water and learned how to catch slow-moving
things he found in the ponds and pick wild, growing things he could rely on. He didn’t
really know what the Karsite lands would or could offer. He was pretty sure he would
be a terrible hunter. Once away from the river he had no idea how he was going to
find water. He wasn’t sure he was ready to hunt for shelter away from the riverbank,
which provided a lot of overhangs. Aside from the cattails, hickory nuts, cress, and
redbugs, there hadn’t been much of anything he had recognized as food.

And he had no idea how to find his way if the trees got too thick to see the sun.

Nor did he have any notion of what animals out here were dangerous. Were there wolves?
Bears?

He wouldn’t have worried if he’d still had Mindspeech, or, at least, not so much.
He’d have been able to sense animals before they got close, and he would
hear
peoples’ thoughts in plenty of time to get out of sight. Now . . . he was half blind,
and the thought made his mouth dry with fear.

But there was no hope for it. He had no idea where in Karse he was, except that it
couldn’t have been more than a fortnight by wagon south of the Valdemar Border, because
he was pretty sure he hadn’t been unconscious for much more than that. He could walk
at about half the speed of a wagon, and he wasn’t confined to roads. So by that reckoning,
he didn’t have much more than half a moon before he’d be home and safe. Or, at least,
he’d be reasonably close to the Border.

But if he went wandering off his northward path, there was no telling where he’d end
up or how long it would take him. He
had
to get across before the snows began. He didn’t think he could survive too many winter
nights with just a blanket.

He took a last, longing look at the river, which had become a sort of friend. Then
he turned his back on it and headed northward.

As the sound of the waters faded away, he reminded himself to always go downhill if
he could. He would have the best chance of finding more water in the low spots. Water
must be his first concern now; you could go quite some time without food, but no more
than three days without water.

If he hadn’t found that gourd . . .

Head north . . . try to stay downhill.

And now he discovered yet another “try to stay . . .” because the mine-kiddies had
scoured the immediate area of the mine so thoroughly that it was—he suddenly saw—nothing
at all like a wild forest. There was a
lot
of undergrowth. And he was trying not to leave traces of his passing.

His estimate of how long it was going to take to get to the Border shot alarmingly
skyward.

No hope for it. I just have to take it one step at a time. Literally.

Keeping the sun at his right, he began picking his way across the forest floor.

It was hard not to feel both frustrated and discouraged. There had to be a hundred
things around him that he could use to help him, if only he knew what they were. He
didn’t dare touch the mushrooms he passed. He
did
find an oak tree and gathered a lot of nuts, but until he found more water than what
he was carrying, he had no way to get the bitter taste out of them. He could hear
squirrels scolding him, but he couldn’t see them to try to get a shot off with his
sling. He had to stop when the sun was overhead, so he checked on his coal (it was
still glowing) and climbed a tree to try to scout out his path.

He couldn’t get high enough to actually see anything without the tree swaying alarmingly,
so he climbed back down and had a sparse meal of cattail roots.

By midafternoon he hadn’t come across any sort of shelter or water, and he was beginning
to feel unease. Should he count on finding water in the morning and try to make some
sort of crude shelter now? Or should he try to find water and hope there was shelter
nearby?

The distant growl of thunder decided him.

This time the storm was relatively slow moving. It didn’t arrive until after nightfall.
He had managed to find an evergreen tree with flat, frond-like “needles,” and had
stacked cut branches three layers deep on a lean-to frame lashed between two trees.
He’d piled more of the branches on the ground beneath it to keep him—hopefully—up
out of the water and mud. He got his little fire started in what he hoped was the
most sheltered part of the lean-to, and by the time the storm arrived, he had cracked
and roughly ground up two handfuls of acorns, which were now tied up in bags of that
burned and stained cloth he had salvaged, waiting for the rain to wash the bitterness
out of them. He’d eaten two roasted cattail roots and was wrapped in his blanket,
just waiting for the storm to hit.

When it did, he was glad that fear had invested his preparations. Some people would
probably have thought that he was using up too much cordage on lashing down his shelter.
Some people might have told him that three layers of branches were too much.

They’d all have been dead wrong.

There were leaks, but the only bad one was providential—he put his watergourd right
underneath it and let it fill before poking at the branches cautiously until it somehow
went away. His fire remained, burning bravely, although it gave out no warmth at all.
He was very glad for the layer of green boughs on the ground.

It was cold. Although there were no major leaks on him, a mist of fine rain came at
him through the open side of the lean-to.

He told himself all the ways he was lucky. He had water to wash out the acorn meal,
so he had food for tomorrow. He had basic shelter, so he wasn’t going to get soaked
and freeze. His fire was safe.
Nothing
was going to be out hunting in this weather. Bears, wolves, or whatever—they were
doing the same thing that he was, crouching down in their shelters and trying to get
some sleep.

He did sleep, though he didn’t dare sleep much because he had to keep feeding his
little fire bits of things to keep it alive.

Finally, at some point during the night, the storm moved out, although as far as he
could tell, the sky remained overcast.

There wasn’t anything he could do about “not leaving traces” now; he planned on taking
the shelter down, and had carefully used his cordage in such a fashion that he could
salvage it all, but there was going to be a ravaged tree and a pile of cut branches
when he was done.

On the other hand, it wasn’t as if he’d seen any signs of humans here. There hadn’t
even been anything like a trail to follow.

With the storm gone, the sounds of the forest began. Slowly at first, and mostly the
steady dripping of water through the trees. But after a while he heard other things.
Small rustlings in the underbrush and through the leaves. Noises up in the trees above
his head. The sound of something larger, farther away . . . it sounded as if it had
hooves, there was a sort of subtle
thump
to its footfalls. It was moving off, though, so nothing to worry about, and if it
was
a deer, then that meant there weren’t any wolves or bears or whatevers nearby.

Insects. Lots of insects still. Some crickets. Lots of crackles and scuttles right
under him, which probably would have been disturbing to someone who hadn’t spent most
of his life sleeping in filthy, used, vermin-ridden straw every night. He hadn’t heard
any of those insect noises by the river, but then the sound of the water had probably
drowned it all out.

He nodded off, and woke, fitfully, remembering to feed his little fire and enduring
the empty ache that the silence in his head produced. Again and again, he agonized
over the thought that his Mindspeech had been obliterated by whatever those assassins
had done to him. It almost didn’t matter that he’d still be able to be a Herald without
it—because what really mattered was not having Dallen with him anymore. Or, at least,
not in the same way.

But people go blind, and carry on. And deaf.
It would be horrible, but—

Would it be so “horrible” to just be . . . ordinary?

Because ordinary people didn’t have Companions, never had that incredible surety of
never being alone again. Ordinary people carried on, fell in love, muddled through,
had their lives, even did incredible, heroic things . . .

So maybe you shouldn’t feel so bad about just being ordinary now.

On that unsettling thought, he slept again, and when he woke, just in time to blow
his fire back to life before it died, it was dawn.

* * *

These were either extremely tall hills, or else very short mountains. The land wasn’t
particularly prosperous either, from the look of it, which probably accounted for
why he hadn’t seen any signs of people. The forest was thick down here in the valleys
but quickly thinned out on the slopes, and you could see the stony bones of the land
poking out through the thin soil near the top. Not good farming land, although he
wondered what he would find if he ran into another stream and sifted through the gravel.
These hills might well hold metals or sparklies.

Again, another reason why he probably wasn’t seeing signs of people. Mines concentrated
a lot of people on a small piece of property, and they needed to be on roads. Miners
didn’t do much besides their jobs, which were backbreaking and difficult and didn’t
leave them a lot of energy to waste.

So you wouldn’t likely find miners out roaming the forest for fun.

Assuming their masters would even allow them to get off the property in the first
place. No telling how mines were run in Karse. Miners
might
be better off than in Valdemar, but given what he knew about Karse, probably not.
In his limited experience, there weren’t a lot of happy mining collectives, where
everyone shared and shared alike and no one was worked into exhaustion for the sake
of a few rocks, even in Valdemar.

The rain had indeed leached all of the bitter out of his acorn meal, and he munched
that for a change from the cattail roots. Meanwhile, he kept his eyes on the ground,
watching for greens, even as he kept the sun at his right shoulder.

And he was, at last, rewarded; in a patch of sun, dandelions grew thickly. He stopped
then and there, sharpened a fallen branch for a digging stick, and took the time to
get as many of the roots as he could. It was too bad that at this time of year the
leaves were too bitter to eat, but now he had lunch, and maybe dinner too.

And then, just as he was about to stop because the sun was almost overhead, a glint
of something shiny and red among the leaves ahead made him dart forward—

And nearly trip over the tangle of thin, prickly blackberry vines.

The vines were thin, the foliage sparser than the ones he was used to. Possibly it
was the thin soil. But there were berries hiding under those leaves, berries that
nothing had wanted to fight the thorns for, and he ignored scratches to get on hands
and knees, eating two for every one he harvested. He tucked the berries into a pouch
of much cleaner cloth—the cloth that had held his acorn meal until he ate it all and
had hung out in the rain all night. It was worth every scratch; the tart-sweetness
of the berries nearly brought tears to his eyes, and he chewed the seeds carefully
to get all the benefit out of them. He lost track of time as he foraged, getting food
and drink in one, saving his precious water. It was only when he realized that the
sun was well and truly over his left shoulder that he came to his senses and knew
he’d been at this for well over a candlemark. Probably two.

And now he was faced with a dilemma: find a place to make a shelter here and keep
foraging until the berries were gone, or move on and try to find water?

The berries were food and drink together. He wouldn’t have to search for water if
he stayed here.

But they would also attract other creatures. And he wouldn’t see the things that came
for the berries at night until it was too late. Bears wouldn’t care about a few little
blackberry thorns.

He had no more cattail, but he did have dandelion root, acorn meal, and enough berries
for another meal. He thought about hiding in a flimsy little shelter while a bear
snuffled about outside. It was fall; bears wanted to eat to bulk up to sleep through
the winter, and he wouldn’t be able to do much against a bear.

Move on.

With a sigh of regret, he gathered and stored a last handful, then took his scratched
self out of the patch.

* * *

The woods of this valley were quiet; the trees were tall, but there was nothing but
trunk down here near the ground. The undergrowth wasn’t as thick, except in places
where the sun got past the leaf canopy, or places where saplings had managed to become
trees. It was a lot easier making his way through here, but he had to be very careful
to keep track of the sun. One more providential find of wood sorrel added to his provender,
and at long last, the faint sound of trickling water rewarded his pauses to listen.
It took him off his self-appointed path, going to the east, but he tracked it to its
source in the side of the hill. It was either a very tiny spring or a seep, but there
was enough there to refill his bottle and fill his cooking gourd, and he made a bit
of a basin to collect more by damming the outflow with rocks in case the dripping
ran dry in the night. Then, finally, he had a bit of luck as he hunted up and down
that spot of steep hillside; he located a good place to spend the night. Not a cave,
but a solid rock overhang, a place to build his fire out of danger of another storm
and maybe get some shelter for himself. And, more to the point, it was a solid bit
of stone and earth at his back, with nothing nearby to attract animals.