“Damn. What do the eggs taste like?”
“Better cook one first and find out. Hi, Rian!”
“Boardman.” The merchant girl nodded regally. “Tim.”
He smiled at her. “Evening.”
“How goes dinner?”
“Just another damn intelligence test,” Tim said. “I never saw ostrich eggs before.”
Rian smiled and moved on.
One ostrich egg was bigger than a ten-egg omelet. The taste was different, and Tim used more seasoning after his first attempt. Speckles, of course. A little lemon rind? Yes.
Veggies and eggs never stuck to the woks.
Other chefs were at work around other fires. Quicksilver winked out below the setting sun.
As in Twerdahl Town, people passed carrying food, gave him slices of fruit and big flat grilled mushrooms and ostrich meat, and carried away sliced-up veggie omelets. Ostrich was delicious. Heavier woks, heavier omelets: Tim was working harder than he was used to. He thought of himself as strong, big-shouldered, but this was wearing him out.
Shireen ibn-Rushd accepted a wedge of omelet. She tasted it. “Tim, isn't it? Yes. You have a nice hand with eggs.” She put something in his hand, smiled, and wandered off.
Dried cherries.
He noticed tents being pitched and beds laid within. The tents were many-lobed, and flaps were generally left open. Some of the merchants were already asleep before sunset.
As in Twerdahl Town, cooking ended at sunset. He'd wondered. But now cookware had to be carted to the river, washed, part-filled with water, and set back on the fires to boil clean.
Damon led him away to the ibn-Rushd tent. He would not have found it on his own, in the dark. It was a cross, four lobes meeting at a communal circle of cushions, Shireen snoring in one of the lobes. In the center, a low table. Damon and Senka wanted to talk, but they must have seen he was ready to collapse.
He rolled himself in blankets in one of the lobes and persuaded himself he was asleep.
But their voices ran through his dozing mind, telling merchant secrets, and the memories came back in later years.
9
Between
Of fin-contoured legs run down each side. Teeth rim the broad mouth, each splitting into a myriad points. A ~0l~d prong on the skullcap shell forms a beak or, more aptly, a ram: the cap b~tt5 against the main shell for greater strength. They're air breathing. They can come right up the beach at you.
In the morning Bord'n reached through an open flap and shook Tim awake to make breakfast.
Dawn was a red glare above the mountains. Tim was stiff and tired. He did what the other yutzes were doing.
Blow up the ashes and add wood. Wipe out the woks and add dough that has been rising through the night. Cover them. Set the woks on the coals. Now a Destiny seaweed forest is rising from the waves, and it's back to the roofs while the chugs feed.
Chugs move up the beach. Sharks follow as far as the seaweed. No shots are fired. When the sharks return to the sea, the chugs have reached the wagons and the bread is done.
The bread never sticks to the woks.
While merchants get the wagons ready and hook up the chugs, the chefs and yutzes put away the cookware. They pass out bread along a wagon train already in motion.
He met Rian walking back to ibn-Rushd wagon. Almond eyes, dark oval face, intricately shaped hair. Lovely and strange. She studied him, then said, “You look worn out.”
“Where do we go next?”
“The Shire. Little town.” She turned and was walking with him toward the front of the caravan.
“Does the Shire have a graveyard?” “I'd think so.”
“Just drop me off there,” Tim said. “Here, have some bread.”
“Thank you. Tim, you can sleep once the bread's handed out.” But the tents were already stowed. “Where?”
“On the roof.”
He smiled. Two more wagons, four loaves to hand out, then sleep.
Just past noon, it rained. Six people crowded the wagon's dark, steamy interior amid cookware brought for sale and strange stuff collected in trade. The chugs plodded on while rain played flurries of drumbeats on the roof.
The rain left little time for hunting up dinner. Nobody found any eggs that day. Come evening, Tim and the other yutzes wokked vegetables with yesterday's red ostrich meat and served it over barley.
Wrestling the heavy wok was no easier the second night. When he tottered off to ibn-Rushd tent, yutzes and merchants were playing musical instruments and having a wonderful time. He wondered how they did it.
He felt his way through the tent by touch and hearing: toward Shireen's snoring, then turn left. Curled on blankets, eyes closed, he listened to the merchants' music. It came to him that he was learning more about cookery than about the path of Cavorite... and then it came to him that he was being watched. He opened his eyes.
Rian.
Just Rian. She asked, “Did you wonder why I didn't come to you last night?”
“No.” She seemed to expect something more, so he said, “I thought you must be with somebody in another wagon.”
She laughed. “Be with?”
He said nothing. Did merchants say that another way? Maybe a Twerdahl wouldn't know either.
Rian said, “It could have been you. I offered. Nobody turns me down more than once.”
Flash of annoyance. Gently, superciliously, he said, “I'm a married man.”
He couldn't read her face in the dark. He only saw her turn and move into another room of the tent. Tim let his head fall on his arm, and slept.
Moving up and down the wagon train looked easy. Anyone could do it. But the wagons never stopped moving. Tim was tired all the time. The stored vegetables were running out. The only fruit left was apples. Chickens and ostriches were scarce in these parts.
The caravan's yutzes took the lack as opportunity. They fished or hunted, or went off into the chaparral to search for anything edible. It was more fun than the continual repair work on the wagons.
Where Earthlife grew, likely you could eat some part of it. Bord'n showed him roots to dig up, fruits to pick, spices. Sage and mustard, apples and pears and oranges, potatoes and yams. Watercress.
The Road ran a klick above the shore, more or less, never dipping very near. Sharks couldn't possibly get that high, and it wasn't convenient for tending the chugs. Cavorite's crew hadn't learned about chugs when they made the Road, hadn't planned for caravans either.
Afternoon of the fifth day they reached land that looked halfcultivated, and twelve houses clustered halfway between the shore and the Road.
You couldn't call it a town. Farther, they called themselves. They were friendly to the point of effusive. The merchants supplied food and the Farther folk cooked it. Their style of cuisine was more like Twerdahl Town than Spiral Town. The merchants supplied the speckles.
Several men and women of the caravan didn't use their tents that night, but none of them were yutzes.
On the sixth morning, Tim Bednacourt was no longer tired.
Late afternoon. No ostriches, no chickens, no eggs. Bord'n had killed four rabbits; others had caught fish. Hal showed Tim how to prepare and grill a Destiny shieldfish on a grill carried from ibn-Rushd wagon.
The fish massed thirty kilograms. Its canoe-shaped shell was probably the dorsal surface. The fins on its flanks and underside were shaped to move water, but they bent in the middle and at the base: little legs with elbow and shoulder joints, tipped with twenty centimeters of horn blade. With those and its long pointed beak and the shell for a shield, the creature might fight one enemy while another wasted its efforts on the shell- “Tim! Snap out of it! Let's get this on the grill.”