Tuli was thirsty, there was char-dust packed in her nose, clogging her throat, more than anything she wanted a glass of water, but she looked at Rane’s taut face, streaked like hers with black dust, and kept her peace. Rane leaned against one of the building walls and waited until the squealing of the cart wheels had died to a faint scratching, then she went to the mouth of the alley and looked into the street.
There was no snow falling. The streets were cleared here as they’d been in Sel-ma-Carth. Dawnlight was reddening the roofs high over them. Rane beckoned and began moving along the street at a fast walk; Tuli had to trot to keep up with her. With Ildas scampering before them, they wound swiftly deeper into Oras, through narrow alleys that smelled of rotten fish and urine and cheap wine, over all that the indescribable but pervasive stench of poverty. The gloom was thick in these winding ways in between houses that leaned together and seemed too rotten and worn to stand on their own. Rane never hesitated as she turned from one noisome street into another, stepping over ragged bodies of sleeping men and a few women, or loping around the piles where they’d huddled together against the cold in the meager shelter of a doorway. In some places they were thick on the ground as paving stones, gaunt, groaning men, sleep coming as sparely to them as the scraps they ate. Hunger and destitution in the city seemed more devastating than in the country, perhaps because there the hungry and the failures were more scattered and hidden from view and because it was easier to get food of a sort and shelter of a sort in the groves and outlying herders’ huts.
They came to a rickety structure several stories high. It was backed onto the great curtain wall and stretched out its upper stories close to the building on either side as if fearing a moment’s weakness when it could stagger to one side or the other and need help to keep standing-or so it seemed to Tuli as Rane loped across the street and plunged into a narrow alley along one side of the building.
The ex-meie stopped before a door with corroded hinges and a covering of muck dried on it so thick it seemed the door hadn’t been opened in years. She reached into a hole in the wall beside the door, groped about a minute, then jerked hard on some invisible cord. She pulled her hand out, stepped back and waited, the tension draining from her lanky form, the weariness suddenly increasing as if she’d suddenly gone slack.
A moment later the door swung open, slowly, carefully, but with no suggestion of furtiveness. Doesn’t want to disturb the camouflage, Tuli thought. The smallish man who stood in the doorway scowled at her, then turned to Rane. “You bleeding-heart meien, always shoving children on me; well, get in before the traxim fly and spot you.”
IV. The Jump
Poet-Warrior/Kingfisher
1
Julia lay groggy with pain and drugs, trying to convince herself she should ask Grenier to give her enough to kill her in the next shot. Trouble was, she couldn’t yet bring herself to give up so very finally. I am the distilled essence of what this country used to mean, she thought, making phrases to take her mind off the pain. Unquenchably optimistic in the face of disaster, absurdly expecting something to come up and change everything if only I work hard enough and wait long enough. Logic says die and save the drugs, the care, the strength spent on me for those they can help. But I’m not logical about this. This dying. Say it, Julia. Dying. Not logical. Half of what I think is fantasy. She stirred restlessly and the young girl who sat reading in the bar of light coming through the tent’s door put her book aside and come over to her.
“Time for another shot, Jule?”
Julia smiled at her. “No. Maybe a glass of water though?”
As the girl helped her sit up and drink from the glass, she heard an outburst from the meeting place loud enough to reach them through the trees and the heavy canvas of the tent. She sputtered, turned her head away. The girl set the glass aside and eased her back down on the pallet. “Lyn,” she said. “Go find out what that’s about. Please?”
Lyn looked dubiously at her.
Julia gathered herself, lifted a hand, touched the girl’s arm. “What a hoo-haw. Lyn, if I have to lie here and listen to all that without knowing what’s happening out there my curiosity will drive me up the wall.”
Lyn got slowly to her feet. “You be all right?”
“No better, not worse than I always am; what’s to worry about, dear Lyn. Find out what’s going on, then hurry back and tell me. I really do need to know.” She sighed as the girl pushed out of the tent, listened to her light footsteps hurry away and fade into the shouts and uproar coming from the meeting. They’ve made up their minds what to do about the attack tomorrow, she thought. Reason enough to swallow the bitter pill. I’m declining into clichй at the end of my life. The noise that had startled her muted until nothing more came to her ears than the usual camp sounds. She lay back with her eyes closed, listening to the wind brushing through the trees, soothed by the sound, calmed enough to go back to the depressing considerations she’d been immersed in before the noise began. She had to make up her mind before the next shot, bring herself to do what she had to do. Whatever they decided, they could not take her with them, yet chances were they’d try. She couldn’t bear to think of it any longer and deliberately turned away. Fantasy. I’ve never written a fantasy. I wonder if I could? Magic. I don’t believe in it. I wish I could, but my optimism doesn’t stretch that far. Magic healer, yes. I could bring him out of air and nothing, a shaman who would make this wrongness in me right. Then, since you’ve gone this far into never-never land, why not conjure a shaman who could magic the ills out of your poor damned doomed country? God,. I wish I could believe in that enough to write it. She listened for a minute but could hear nothing except the usual noises. Come on, Lyn. Get back here and tell me what they’ve decided. Magic wand, she thought, wave it over the country and set things right. Set things right, that’s a frightening thought. She shivered. That’s what started this, one bunch of peabrains trying to make reality fit their idiot schemes. Anyway, who’s wise enough to say what’s right for anybody but himself. Herself. Not me. Only, let the killings stop, let people work out their own lives. Stop the slaughter of minds. Almost worse than bodies, what you’re doing to the minds of good people. Magic wand. Magic want. She giggled. Magic chant. Give me a magic chant, a curse that would strike only those with rigid minds, those who think there’s only one right way to do and be, give me a curse tailored to those types, give me that curse and I’d loose it over the world, I’d loose it laughing, no matter what misery it brought. Hunh! probably just as well I’m only dreaming. She sighed and tried to relax, tried to sink into the soughing of wind through the needles, the scattered bird cries, the distant chatter of a squirrel, all the wild sounds of the mountains. The smell of the pines crept into the tent, sharp, clean, the essence of greenness, of remembered mountains. Mountains. I ought to write an essay on mountains. She smiled into the dim brown-green twilight in the tent with its dusting of fine red dirt, dirt that smelled like the trees that grew out of it, dirt that smudged her fingers and the base of the glass. She rubbed her fingertips on the blanket. Her hands were bundles of sticks now, bones and skin with no flesh left. I used to have pretty hands. Forget that, no point in it. Mountains. I was born cradled between mountains. I have always had a hunger for blue mountains, a hunger like that, I suppose, that has called so many sorts of men to the sea and inspired bad poetry. Odd, isn’t it, how some verse you know is only doggerel can reach down into blood and gut and stir them mightily. But the sea’s a capricious and undiscriminating mistress; she calls everyone and welcomes them with equal eagerness and treachery. We who succumb to mountains have to share our love only with the few and the odd; our lover is harsh and demanding yet forgiving in her way; she punishes stupidity but welcomes back those willing to learn, she kills a few but most survive to return to her. I have come to die in my mountains, one last embrace, one last green breath of free air in this nation that has forgotten the meaning of freedom… eh, Julia, you grow maudlin, this part of the essay would need extensive editing… dumb, lying here, coaxing sentimental tears out of yourself. Enjoy your good cry, fool, and get back to the hard things… still… blue mountains… pine smell and bark dust… better to die here if one has to die… Lyn, where are you? Oh god, it hurts… can’t stand… have to… can’t think… fantasy… bring me… my magic healer… let me escape… let me live… She folded her wasted arms over her swollen belly, closed her hands about wrists like withered sticks and fought to endure the growing pain as the drug wore off. There was too much riding on the next shot, too much. She wasn’t ready to face it, not yet.