Текст книги "The Last Hour of Gann"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 80 страниц)

BOOK IV

PIONEERS

Meoraq was a warrior and had been all his life. He had been born under the Blade, raised in the training halls of Tilev, called to serve as Sheul’s own Sword in judgment. These were the ways he knew—to cut, to grapple, to conquer—and every man who ever spoke a word in his presence spoke it with respect and by his leave.

He was Uyane Meoraq, son of Rasozul, who was son of Ta’sed, son of Kuuri, and forty-three names more, every man of them a Sheulek in his own time, all the way back to Uyane Xaima, who had walked with Prophet Lashraq himself. He was the veteran of better than three hundred judgments and if Sheul willed it, he would either go on to three hundred more or retire to stand as champion of Xeqor. He was a warrior. He was not a cattle-drover.

The humans said they were ready to follow him. Yes, they said this, even on the night before, when they bedded themselves down free of sentries and of care, trusting him to keep all danger from their little camp. They said this when it pleased them to wake the following morning, most of them not only after dawn, but well after. Those with tents made no effort to strike them. Those nearest the fire were setting it alight. They all assured him they were ready and then they just sat there!

Meoraq worked his way through four humans, dragging them bodily onto their feet and setting them in a line, but when he reached for a fifth and noticed all four of his humans had drawn off into a cluster, he had to cry surrender. He bellowed it, in fact. And then he stormed off in search of Amber.

She was sitting on a crate at the edge of camp with her Nicci. Both had their packs on their laps. Amber stood when she saw him, although he noted she put her pack down, rather than shoulder the strap for travel.

“What are they waiting for?” he demanded. “Did you not tell them dawn? Where is that chattering cattle’s ass who calls himself your abbot?”

Amber’s green eyes rolled heavenward, just as any dumaq’s eyes might do if one were entertaining thoughts best not spoken aloud to a Sheulek. “Oh Scott!” she called in a curious, lilting way. “Meoraq would like a word with you.”

“A word? I’d like my hand upside his snout, if only he had one! Half the morning is gone! S’kot!” Meoraq grabbed Amber by the arm and dragged her with him as he strode ahead to meet the human hesitating toward him. “I wanted these people ready to march at dawn! Where is your obedience?”

Scott looked at Amber.

“He’s not happy about the delay,” she said.

“What delay?” asked Scott.

Meoraq drew back. “Is he serious?” he asked dangerously.

“Yes,” she sighed. “Look, Scott, he wanted us on the road first thing this morning. First thing. Like, the sun comes up and we get going.”

Scot heard this without apparent concern, certainly without apology. “Well if that’s what he wanted, he should have been ready.”

“What in Gann’s grey hell does he mean by that?” Meoraq demanded.

“I don’t know. What are you talking about?” she asked Scott. “He’s been ready for hours. His teepee’s packed. He’s got his good, um, belts on. Or whatever he’s wearing…Are those suspenders?”

“This is a travel harness!” Meoraq snapped, clutching at one of its buckles. “And it’s a damned expensive one! I would have to sell three of you as cattle to make the cost of this harness and I can hardly see the sin of that since you have made no effort to obey me as men must do! Get your damned humans on their feet and make them ready!”

“And what was that?” Scott asked after a wary moment.

“Your guess is as good as mine, but it’s a safe bet that it’s got something to do with all this standing around.”

“Fine.” Scott turned boldly away from Meoraq and addressed Amber alone, folding his arms as though he wore a pair of blades upon them. “Tell him that if he wanted us to start early, he should have had our food ready on time.”

“I should have what?” Meoraq hissed.

“Are you high?” Amber asked, and while it was impossible to read either her malleable face or her tone, both were clearly touched by some sort of emotion. “He’s not running a hotel here, he doesn’t owe you a continental breakfast!”

“He does if he wants us to follow him anywhere. I like this camp exactly where it is, Miss Bierce. We have the high ground here, we’re in easy reach of water, we have the herds—”

“This is not your decision, human!” Meoraq snapped. He could feel his throat warming in pulses. His color was coming in. He made an effort to take deep breaths.

“What herds?” Amber asked. “The saoqs are hours away these days and you have no guarantee that they’re coming back.”

“Deer don’t migrate, Miss Bierce.”

“These aren’t deer, you dumb dick! Stop acting like this is Earth!”

Meoraq terminated her further words with a silencing grip on her shoulder. “Enough. Speak my words, human. Do not speak for me. I am Sheulek.”

She shut her mouth and waited, glaring at Scott who made a point of gazing loftily back at all his lounging people as he said, “If you want to go, go. No one’s stopping you. But you are going to have to give me some incentive before I uproot these people a second time. We have everything we need right here in my camp. I’m not leaving just because you say so.”

“So be it,” said Meoraq, once he was himself quite calm. “Sheul has put you in my path and until I know the reason, I accept that I must care for you. So I will make a hunt for you. But if you want to share in it, you will have to be at my camp.”

Amber relayed this, more or less, while Meoraq stood behind her and punctuated the words with hisses where necessary. “Now here’s a little something from me,” she said at the end of it. “In all this time, you haven’t done a goddamn thing except hold meetings and tell us everything is going to be okay. When Meoraq walks away, you don’t get to say that anymore. Instead, you get to tell them to pick up a spear and figure out how to use it before they starve to death. You think anyone is going to care how far they have to walk as long as they don’t have to do that?”

Scott said nothing. His face had turned a deep purplish-red color, like shadesweet fruits left too long on the vine and gone to poison. “I’ll think about it.”

“Think as long as you like,” Meoraq told him and turned to Amber, “Gather your things and whichever of your people—”

“You do and you’re out of here!” Scott shouted, grabbing at Amber’s shirt. “Don’t you dare say one word to anyone, Bierce! This is my camp! Mine!”

Meoraq had never lost his temper so entirely or so quickly in all his life. Shoving Amber aside, he seized Scott by his soft, pink throat and lifted him right off the ground. “No one interrupts a Sword of Sheul!” he bellowed. “Not abbots, not judges, not governors, and not you, you freakish little gutter-bastard! Give me your obedience or I’ll send you back to the clay that shat you out!”

Scott strangled and battered futilely at Meoraq’s arm.

“Obedience, I say! Show me your fucking fist! Tell him—” he roared, turning, but Amber was nowhere to be found. Meoraq blinked, breathing hard, looking left and right and finally down, where Amber sprawled across the wet ground, clapping one hand to her head and staring dazedly at the sky. Blood, red as those shadesweet fruits in their fullest, dappled her fingers and streaked her hair.

And his first thought, unwelcome as a cold draft blowing across a dark and empty room, was not that she was injured, but only that she was a woman lying at his feet upon her back. He saw that and somehow forgot his anger even as it continued to throb in his throat, just as he forgot the human gasping for air at the end of his fist.

But thankfully, that moment ended.

Meoraq turned all the way to her and let Scott go. He didn’t mean to throw him, but he wasn’t careful either, and Scott crashed into a wooden crate and slid gasping to the ground. Meoraq was on one knee in the next instant, chasing her hand away to probe through the springy, matted mass of her hair.

The damage he found was little more than a scrape, neither deep nor wide. It bled, as head wounds were apt to do, but Amber did not give any kind of cry when he nudged at it. She pulled irritably out of his reach instead, saying, “I’m fine, damn it! You pushed me in the mud, not off a cliff! Christ, these pants were clean just, uh…I guess it was a week ago, but still! Damn it, Meoraq!”

“You’re bleeding.”

“I’m what?” She noticed the red smears on her fingertips and stared at them without comprehension, then touched at her head and studied the fresh daubs of blood she took away. “I didn’t hit a rock or anything,” she said, seeming puzzled but only a little troubled. “It must have been you.”

He drew back, his spines flaring forward.

“You have rough hands,” she told him. “Your…you know, your scales.”

He stared at her for a long time before slowly looking down at the faint sign of her blood, like red frost, on the side of his hand.

“There he goes,” said Amber, climbing to her feet. She was watching Scott, who had already retreated across the whole of the camp to gather his lieutenants and hiss at them. “It doesn’t look like he’s telling people to pack up and get ready, either.”

“I do not care,” said Meoraq distantly. He clenched his hand to a fist and opened it again, watching the blood shine where it was still wet and crack where it had already dried. “If it is to be Sheul’s lesson that I learn to herd cattle, so be it. I shall tether them up in a line and whip their flanks, but they will walk, by Gann.”

He heard a dry, fleshy, smacking sound. Amber had clapped both hands to her face and was holding them there. “You can’t talk to them like that,” she said, sighing in the same breath that she spoke, which was a clever human trick.

“Of course I can. I am Sheulek.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means I am owed all obedience.”

She sighed again. “Listen. This is…This is a social situation, okay?”

“What does that mean?”

“It means…You have to make friends with these people.”

“Eh?”

“Friends.” She cast about with her eyes, then shrugged her arms out in futility. “Friends, you know? You need them to like you.”

She said it, as she said most things, with sincerity even though he knew it for a lie. Friendship could be pleasant, but it could also be a dangerous distraction. A boy born under the sign of the Blade did not play with the other boys of his caste, but competed against them, brawled with them, beat and were beaten by them. The masters at Tilev allowed no leisure hours in company, only study, meals and sleep, where every stolen whisper risked a slap across the snout. The brunts at least had some leeway to chat amongst themselves, but were set against each other so often and so brutally as part of their training that even then attachments were few. After his ascension, his duties as a Sheulek kept him moving from city to city, and what company he might share with a man like Nkosa was kept brief. A Sword of Sheul must always be honed and ready to strike, and personal feelings could only complicate things.

“Do you like any of these people?” he asked, gesturing toward the camp where a few humans were reluctantly gathering up their gear.

She dropped her eyes as if it were a reprimand before glancing shamefacedly at her people. “I should.”

“Why?”

“Because…Christ, I don’t know.” She covered her face again, baring her teeth as if she wanted to bite something. “Okay, so I’m a horrible hypocrite and the last person who should be trying to explain this to anyone, but that doesn’t make it any less true. People need people.” She grimaced even as she said it, not in a smiling way. “What would you do if Scott convinced them you were some kind of…of raging, man-eating, bloodthirsty lizardman?”

“Kill him,” Meoraq said with a snort.

She stared at him for a moment before asking, in some exasperation, “Wouldn’t that just prove him right?”

“I might as well, since he’s already convinced them in your scenario. At least he wouldn’t be around to gloat afterwards.” He watched Scott as he moved among his people, touching them, bobbing his head, speaking lengthy and serious words, and motioning quite often back at Meoraq with the whole of his Gann-damned hand. He found himself toying idly with the thought of killing the man, then more than idly, and then he let it go and looked at Amber instead. She was also watching Scott. The blood in her hair had dried, forming a short series of stiff, brown spines, which stuck straight up as if she were in a state of great surprise, comically at odds with the solemn expression on her face. He looked back at Scott and said, “I did not intend to strike you.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m fine.”

He grunted, then pointed brusquely out at Scott (with the whole of his own hand, ha). “How long is this likely to take?”

“I don’t know. Longer than it has to, I’m pretty sure.”

“Are you prepared to travel?”

“Me?” She looked around at the crates where she had left her pack and her Nicci. “Yeah, I’m good to go.”

“Then let’s see if we can hurry them along.” He shrugged his own pack higher on his back in a meaningful way and started walking. A great outcry rose up from those humans who noticed, and it had not fully settled before Amber was hurrying to collect not only her pack and her pet human, but one of the heavy, sealed sacks her people usually used to sit upon. Its weight gave her obvious difficulty, but she heaved it up and managed a loping run back to his side. Soon all the humans were finally scraping themselves together, shouting out for him to stop, to wait, to give them a damned minute, just as if he had not given them all morning.

Meoraq listened, at once annoyed and grimly pleased with the commotion he had caused, and unthinkingly gave Amber a two-knuckle tap to the shoulder in a far more intimate welcome than he ever should have given one of her kind, much less a woman of any kind. Luckily, she took it for a command, looking back over that shoulder in a puzzled way at the humans who were struggling to follow in his wake.

“Yeah, they’re coming,” she said. And looked up at him with half a smile, half a frown. “But I don’t think you made any friends.”

“In the Book of First Hours, it is written, ‘If every hand of every man reached out to you in friendship, so it would yet remain they reached from Gann. A true son of Sheul is never tempted, but seeks always to clasp the one hand that reaches down from heaven.”

“I got…practically none of that.”

“It means I am Sheulek,” he replied, patting her companionably but safely on the unfeeling swell of her pack. “And I don’t need friends.”

* * *

Which was just as well, since he made none that day.

Meoraq knew it was no easy thing he asked of them. He had waded through the hip-deep bog of reeking water that the lowlands became in the rainy season, crossed the middle plains under the sweltering wet heat of summertime, and climbed the highland steppes when the icestorms raged so violently that his clothes were frozen to his body. He had walked both by day and by dark of night, upon whole roads and fallen roads and no roads at all, and he had done all these things with no company apart from the ravening beasts of the wild and the equally ravening men who had gone to Gann. He had suffered and survived the consequences of his ignorance, recklessness and, yes, outright stupidity, and knowing the humans were strangers to this land and its hardships, he was resolved to forgive much.

In forming this resolution, Meoraq had perhaps failed to recognize that he was not the most forgiving of men.

No matter how many times he ordered them to stay together and be quiet, they soon drifted apart, shouting back and forth whenever they had something they wanted to say. When his words were not enough to bring them under control, Meoraq dealt out a few cuffs. Mindful of human fragility, they had been the most glancing of blows, hardly more than two-knuckle taps, and yet they yelped (and occasionally bled) and whined about it so much that he soon cried surrender and let them do what they wanted.

Before the first hour was ended, they had stretched themselves out so thinly, half of them were no longer in sight. The ones with the least to carry left the rest so entirely behind that when they came to an obstacle—which was often in this roadless wilderness—they had time to set up their camp so they could whine at each other in comfort while they waited for the others to catch up.

The whining! Great Sheul grant him patience against their constant whining! It was muddy. It was cold. They were hungry. They were tired. The only thing worse than having to hear it was knowing that tomorrow, he’d also have to hear them whine about how sore they were.

And they were going to be sore, judging from the difficulty they were having carrying their supplies. Meoraq had no sympathy. If they’d had the resources to construct crates, they should have made carts as well, but no, they built these enormous, ungainly casings and then heaved them up by their edges, since they didn’t even have grips or pole-holds or anything. Most of the day—not even half but most—was therefore spent either waiting for the crates, arguing over whose turn it was to carry them, or struggling to move them out of the mud, through the thorns, or up over some tumbled stone ridge.

And what could he do about it? Not a Gann-damned thing. The humans couldn’t mark half of what Meoraq told them and wouldn’t listen to the other half. He worked with them until his patience was gone—scouting ahead for the least arduous route while they rested, sharing out his water, even striking fires for them during their many lengthy rests—and told himself it would all be worth it when he stood in Xi’Matezh.

If he ever got there.

“Meoraq!” Scott called from the bottom of a steep rise which was giving considerable trouble to the exhausted men trying to carry a crate up it. “Come here!”

Meoraq, who had been waiting at the top of that rise for some time now, lowered his spines and did not move.

Scott was not deterred. He pointed imperiously at the crate and said, “Come get under this end.”

“Fuck your fist,” Meoraq replied, making sure to speak clearly and evenly.

“Right here,” said Scott, patting the crate-top. “Come on, you haven’t helped out once all day. Meoraq? I’m saying that right, aren’t I? Why is he just staring at me?”

And he whistled, like a cattleman after calves, with his soft little mouthparts puckered up like an anus. He was farting out of his face. Meoraq was rarely one for that sort of crude humor, but he laughed.

Scott threw up his hand and slapped it down on the crate-top, turning to his men. “I never know what the hell he’s thinking. Where’s Bierce?”

“Look, man.” This was Eric, who was not as objectionable as Scott, but as one of his servants, was still never going to be one of Meoraq’s favorite humans. “I keep telling you, it doesn’t matter how many people get under it.”

“He’s stronger than we are,” Scott said indifferently, trying once again to lure Meoraq down from the top of the rise. “He could probably carry this end by himself if he ever gets it through his thick head that’s what he’s supposed to do.”

Supposed to, no less.

“The ground is way too loose,” Eric argued. “We’d have to build some kind of support—”

Meoraq clapped a hand to the end of his snout and rubbed. Building anything to lift that crate to the top of this rise would take at least to the end of the day, if they knew what they were doing as they built it, which was doubtful, and if they bothered themselves to do anything about it today, which was even less likely.

“—and we don’t have a hammer or rope or even duct tape!” Eric finished. “We’re going to have to find another way up.”

Scott considered this, then turned back to Meoraq. “Do you have any rope?”

“Yes,” said Meoraq, thinking himself wonderfully patient. “However, there are no trees up here to act as anchor.”

“What?”

“Trees, idiot.” Meoraq mimed the tying of a knot, then opened his arms in a broad gesture of futility. “Rope does you no good without something to tie it to.”

Scott patted the crate even louder. “We’re going to tie it to this,” he explained, and rolled his eyes at his generals. “Not the sharpest pencil on the planet, is he?”

Meoraq started to speak, then abruptly flexed his spines forward and shrugged off his pack. He opened it up, dug out the coil of strong braid he kept at the bottom, and tossed it down to them. He watched while Scott instructed his servants in how to bind up the crate (it both amused and disgusted him to see that Eric followed the man’s directions only until Scott moved on, then quickly untied it and did it right), then moved aside so that they could ascend to the crown of the rise and see for themselves there was nothing to tie it to. Undaunted, Scott ordered his men in a line, like boys playing Heave-To with the crate acting as the opposing team.

Meoraq glanced at the tumble of rock at the bottom of the rise and moved a little further back. He waited.

“Everybody pull together!” Scott called, coming over to stand next to Meoraq. “One! Two! Pull!”

They obeyed. Grunting, straining, with Scott calling officious encouragement at them, the humans dragged the crate out of the mud and onto the slope, where they managed to drag it about halfway up before the first man’s feet slid a little too close to the edge. The ground gave, not much, but enough to throw a start into the heaving humans. Men tumbled over each other with cries of alarm and the one man who did not let go of the rope let himself be yanked painfully down the slope to land head-first against the crate, once more resting in the mud at the bottom.

Meoraq leaned out and watched until he saw enough movement to satisfy him that there were no real injuries, then turned and looked at Scott. “I want my rope back. And I want it cleaned before it’s coiled.”

Scott glared at him with color in his face and complete incomprehension in his eyes. He turned to his men. “We’re going to try that again,” he announced.

Meoraq bent his neck for a few deep breaths, rubbing at his brow-ridges.

“But first we’re going to get some branches or something to use as poles. Some people can stand at the bottom and push with the poles—”

“I cry,” Meoraq said.

Scott looked at him. “What?”

Meoraq dropped his hand and shrugged his tight spines. “I cry,” he said again, simply and without anger. “I have stood for truth in three hundred trials and surely struck down two hundred more of Gann’s corrupted in my time, and I have faced and defeated every wild beast left to this land from a denning she-ghet to a rutting bull corroki, but Uyane Meoraq, son of Rasozul and Sword of Sheul, cries surrender to you and your fucking crate. We stop here for the night.”

“What the hell is he saying?” Scott asked, puckering up his flat, ugly face in an expression of annoyance. “Where’s Bierce?”

“You had best find her,” Meoraq ordered, pointing right into Scott’s face with the whole of his hand. “Because I have a few thoughts and if I cannot express them in words, I mean to do it with the beating of your miserable, misshapen life.”

Scott moved unhurriedly back, saying, “I don’t know what the hell he’s saying. Go ahead and let’s make camp. We’re done for the day. Someone find Bierce before I forget how useful this thing can occasionally be.”

Meoraq grunted and went to gather up his emptied flasks, reminding himself at every step that this was a pilgrimage, there were supposed to be ordeals, and they were called ordeals because they were not endured easily.

Even without a sandglass or bells rung at every hour, Meoraq had always had a good sense of time. A man who spent so much of his life with nothing to look at except the sun (or the light of the sun, according to Master Tsazr), learned to read it almost unawares. Meoraq knew that they had left the fast-flowing stream behind perhaps two hours ago, and although he also knew it would not take nearly so long to reach it again, he was not prepared to find himself standing at its edge as quickly as he did.

Two hours…and here was the stream.

Meoraq did not fill his flasks. He shouldered them instead and, in a fouler mood than ten days’ rain outside of Tothax had been able to inspire in him, kept walking. He marked the sun as he went. By his judgment, he reached his destination and returned in just a little more than an hour, stopping only once to fill his flasks at last.

He came back into the humans’ camp, ignoring those brave few who dared to express their disappointment that he had no meat with him. He set his water down beside his pack—calmly, a Sheulek was the master of his impulses—but kept the one object he had taken from his walk tight in his fist and went in search of Amber.

He found her sprawled on her back on a heap of the wrapped cushions, which, judging from her flushed face and rough breath, she had only just finished hauling up to the top of the rise where Scott had put this camp—the first show of common sense the man had demonstrated. Her clothes lay over her in damp, rumpled folds that emphasized, rather than hid, the wasted hills and valleys of her exhausted body. Her eyes were shut; the flesh around them, dark and hollow-looking, like sockets in an empty skull. There was still a stain of blood in her hair.

Anger he had struggled all day long to contain faded somewhat. He opened his mouth, grappled with and was defeated by the sinful nonsense of her name, and turned instead to Nicci, who sat on the cushions close by, wrapped in one of their metal blankets, watching him.

He gestured uncomfortably at Amber. “Is she sleeping?”

Nicci spared the prone human beside her a glance. “Looks like it.”

Meoraq grunted and beckoned to her. “Leave her. You mark me well enough. I require my words carried to your abbot. Come.”

Nicci reached out to nudge at Amber. “Wake up.”

Amber’s eyes opened, but the impossible green of them was dulled into something greyish. Dead. She looked at Nicci, who was wrapping herself up again, then at Meoraq, who was battling the urge to slap Nicci right out of her shiny metal blanket.

“Hey,” Amber muttered. She visibly gathered her strength, then rolled onto her side before pushing herself into a seated position. Her arm trembled as she raised it to rub at her face. “I can’t believe I actually crashed like that.”

Crashed. Not a word he’d ever heard for rest, but one almost painfully apt. She had not been sleeping, not lying that way under the open sky with rain pooling over her eyes. She had crashed, like the ship she claimed had carried her here.

He wished briefly and with singular bitterness that he really had gone hunting after all. She looked terrible and what did he have to offer her but—

She saw the object in his hand and her brows pinched together. “What’s that?”

He looked at it himself, just as if he had not been the one to pick it up and carry it here. His anger returned, an ugly shadow of the good, clarifying fire it had been, but just as undeniable.

“I need you,” he said and curtly added, “To speak.”

“Yeah, okay.”

And she took his arm.

Reached right up and took it.

Meoraq held very still as she used him to climb to her feet, unsure where he should be looking. He was excruciatingly aware of everything around him: the wind whispering through the grass, the piercing warble of laughing humans, the smell of wet leaves and earth, Nicci’s silent staring eyes, and above everything, the warm press of all five thin fingers that gripped him.

No woman in all his life had ever…ever touched him like that. In other ways, yes. He tended to be permissive with his women, particularly if they, like the woman in Xheoth, came to his room more than once. Those he took in conquest after trial, like the flat-headed girl in Tothax, were permitted to struggle, but they rarely did and even they did not touch him like that—flesh to flesh, uninvited and unrepentant for it.

Then she let go and moved away, taking the short, limping steps of an old woman. “Oh Scott!” she called in that musical way.

At some short distance, surrounded by his generals, Scott turned around. “Miss Bierce,” he said without welcome.

Amber smiled. “Everly.”

Meoraq stepped between them.

“Do you know what this is?” he demanded, thrusting the object he had collected on his solitary walk—a plain stone, charred along one side—out before him.

Scott looked at it. So did Amber, although she had to come around the side of him to see.

“What did he say?” Scott asked in a tight, impatient way.

“He…wants to know what that is.”

Scott looked at her. She rolled her shoulders and shook her head. He frowned.

Meoraq waited.

“It’s a rock,” said Scott.

“And do you know where I got it?” Meoraq inquired.

Amber asked.

Scott’s brows puckered. “How the hell should I…? This better be what he’s really saying, Bierce, because if you’re just trying to make me look stupid—”

“You don’t need my help to look stupid.”

Meoraq gave the rock a terse shake. “Answer!”

Amber rolled her shoulders again, adding, “I hope to God you don’t want us to walk back and look because I’m done in, lizardman.”

“I took it from your fire-pit!” Meoraq bellowed, so suddenly that both of them—and quite a few of those around them—jumped. “We have been walking all day and for what? We are still in easy distance of your first camp’s fires! I could walk further on two broken legs!”

“What’s he saying?” Scott asked.

Amber ignored him, beginning to scowl up at Meoraq in her fearless, senseless way. “Hey, I think we’re doing pretty goddamn good here!”

“We have not gone half a span, human! Not even half of half! Do you know what a day’s shamefully idle distance is for me?”

“Do I care?”

“Five!”

She looked at him, then down at herself, and up at him again. “Look at me!” she said angrily. “Do I look like I can go any further than I did today? Do any of us?”

“I could,” said a human.

“Shut the fuck up, Crandall!”

“Well, I could. Hey, realistically, we did, what? Two miles?”

“It had to be more than that,” said Scott, looking alarmed.

“Uphill, loose terrain, bad weather, and of course, lugging the heavy stuff. It took us forever to get going and every time we took a break, we’d end up sitting around like two hours. I wasn’t going to say anything,” he added, rolling his shoulders. “I mean, I realize you guys aren’t soldiers.”