Threatened, the thief sent a basic message. Tim had threatened to beach his boat on the birthground.
The Otterfolk must respond. Perhaps they fouled the fishers' centerboards or tillers, or clung to the handholds in hordes, until the boats couldn't move.
At the time, Tim couldn't guess why the fishers had abandoned their chase. But sailing near shore now seemed a very dangerous thing.
Otterfolk shed their shells: that was clear. They made nests in sand, and left the shell to shade the emerging young: that was a likely guess. Otterfolk would kill any creature found on that shore: that seemed very likely.
He stayed well out to sea until he was nearly to Baytown.
The sky was red with after-sunset, and Quicksilver burned right at the water. Baytown fisher boats were at sea ahead of him. As he came nearer they all turned toward him.
Tim aimed his boat inland, toward where a dish-shaped crater lay on the beach.
The wind was blowing out to sea. He couldn't aim directly toward shore, but he could approach in a switchback pattern. When the centerboard grounded and heeled over, he went overboard. The lightened boat bobbed up and righted. He swam for shore with boats converging behind him. He crawled out winded, and ran for the crater on rubbery legs.
He paused once, and stooped to lift the rim of a painted shell that would almost cover his chest. His vision grayed and he went to his knees. But the cavity under the shell was empty; the Otterfolk children gone. He heaved himself up and kept running, chest heaving, and halffell over the rim of the fused sand dish.
Arcs of wooden bench lined the inland half of the dish. The wood was ancient and weathered. Soft sand lined the bottom on the sea side, and the slanted rim had been painted with hieroglyphs in yellow, orange, green, scarlet, indigo.
The shell he was holding was very like those he'd found scattered over the mudflats that held towels and soggy clothes for the Baytown fishers. Would he have found paint, if he'd turned one over?
It was too big for his pack. He shoved it up between his shirt and rain tunic, against his chest.
He was burning priceless seconds. Fishers had gone overboard. They were in the water, trying to save his stolen boat by attaching lines: they meant to tow it. A few shouted at him, the words blurred, the tone unfriendly.
The five-color cartoons along the rim of Meetplace were old but still vivid. If he studied them he'd see what those simplified figures represented.
But Baytown women were wading the mudflat in his direction, and Tim thought it best to leave.
14
The Speckles Can
Think of us as priests of evolution.
He climbed as far as the caravan trail before he looked back. They wouldn't follow him in the dark...?
It was already too dark to tell.
Thirst was near killing him.
Well, he was new at this. He followed the caravan trail to the Spectre River. He watched from cover while the last of the light died, before he crept to the water and drank his fill.
Then he kept climbing.
He woke sheltered in bushes, just below the Road, on the wrong side of the Spectre River. He woke joyful. He was free! Anyone could outrun a caravan.
He watched Baytown wake. He watched the boats put to sea. Any tiny fleck of white on the water might be Otterfolk. It was all a wonder, but the thing he wanted most was to go down.
Did he do wrong to run? He was frantic to question them. All those discarded Otterfolk shells! Fishers must be in constant contact with Otterfolk.
Why did the merchants let Baytowners inspect their wares the day before they bought? They didn't do that anywhere else along the Road, except in Tail Town itself. Did the Otterfolk tell the locals what they needed?
How?
All his traveling had only bought him more questions.
He saw no way across the Spectre. The bridge lay too close to Baytown. Baytown knew that he had stolen a boat. They knew he had landed on the forbidden beach. The shadow of the mountains was withdrawing from Baytown, and sunlight would soon touch the mountains where he hid.
The flat Road itself hid nothing and grew nothing.
If he tried to hunt what lived in the brush, Baytown fishers would see brush moving on the mountain. He didn't dare even reach up into a fool cage.
But the slopes above the Road bloomed with Earthlife crops that hadn't been harvested since Cavorite passed. He crept among them like a snake, and gorged on fruits and berries. He collected beans, several kinds of nuts, and a few root vegetables. The beans he set soaking in a bottle.
He cooked after dark in a rock fire pit tall enough to hide the light.
Then he climbed in the dark until he reached bare rock.
In the morning the Spectre had become a thousand springs. Crossing was easy.
Now there were none to spy on him at all. Nobody lived on this long stretch between Baytown and the distillery. Tim stayed high, at the interface between Earthlife growth and bare rock.
Fruits and grains grew here, and the occasional fool cage with something trapped inside. Rotten bird meat would still make bait for catfish. He didn't hunt; someone might hear gunfire. He walked wide around the occasional wild pig. Once he speared an unwary rabbit with his weed cutter. He was never able to do that again.
He'd traveled this way before.
He watched the Road for signs of pursuit. Merchants must know about bicycles, and Tim couldn't outrun those. He'd be wary for a while.
But nobody followed. In ten days he was halfway home.
He'd been seeing birds as big as men. He hadn't seen one fly, but they ran like the wind. Ostriches. The land was flat up to an abrupt “frost line,” where bare rock suddenly rose nearly straight for five or six hundred meters.
He was halfway between the Neck and Spiral Town, he judged, high on the spine of the Crab. A klick's stretch of chaparral, of tiny Earthlife oranges and berry bushes and Destiny thorns, barred him from the Road. Far ahead he could see a vertical white thread of waterfall.
The long stretch of lonely coast was ending. The Homes and Wilsons were friends of the caravans, and so was every community beyond. How would they treat a yutz found wandering loose? Tim would have crept past the distillery and dairy; but it seemed to him that he was becoming clumsy.
Nothing serious. He'd left the Otterfolk shell behind, three mornings in a row. The shell was proof of some terrible truth that he hadn't yet fully understood. It served as a platter too: it kept food out of the dirt. He needed it.
This morning he'd lost time doubling back to get the shell, again, and he'd found his fire pit sitting like a signature. He threw the rocks into the bushes, as usual, but this was getting scary. He didn't want to end like Jael Harness.
There was no sure way to recognize speckles deficiency.
He could keep track of the days, eleven now, and so what? He could move more carefully, look around himself more often, avoid some mistakes that way. More likely he'd just forget the question, and gradually all the patterns in his mind would go too.
He was a couple of caravan-days downRoad from the distillery. For now he'd keep to the heights. He'd reach the falls tonight and go down in the morning-hide the gun first-approach the distillery by the Road, unless they found him first.
Every child knew that planets glowed by reflected sunlight. Quicksilver was brilliant before it passed behind the sun. These last few days, with its shadowed side turned toward Destiny, Quicksilver had been nearly invisible; but now it was crossing the sun.