Half an hour before sunset, Tim could just glance at the westering sun and glimpse a black dot on the solar disk before he snatched his gaze away.
Children did that. Adults yelled at them for it. A child who tried such a thing with Earth's hotter, brighter sun would blind himself. Tim could blind himself if he blinked the sun too near noon. If he let the sun get too far down the sky, the dot would blur out.
But he'd caught it.
So he sat on a boulder and waited for his vision to come back, and wondered why he was wasting time. Loria waited ahead, a caravan was crawling up his tail, the falls he'd seen was still ahead, and Tim Bednacourt sat on a rock waiting for dark.
Because he needed rocks to build his fire pit, and water to cook.
He hadn't seen loose rocks earlier in the day. Here was a convenient spring near a convenient landslide, a raw cleft in the rock spilling stones just small enough to lift easily. This boulder would do for a backstop, and when he brushed the coals away it would stay warm for hours: he'd sleep with his back against it.
He'd stopped to gather berries and blink at the sun. He'd washed himself thoroughly, and his clothes too, to make himself presentable. Dawdling here rather than hoping to find more rocks ahead.
His vision was coming back. Tim looked down and saw char marks.
He slid off the boulder and into the brush to think it through.
Marks of a fire.
Of course he hadn't looked for char marks on the rocks he used. He made his fires in the dark!
Vulcanism and landslides made these stonefalls. But he'd found stones conveniently clustered these past ten days, spaced a scant daywalk apart for a man carrying a pack and stopping to hunt and gather and cook.
He'd been pulling his fire pits apart after use, and so had someone else, it seemed. Someone who built much bigger fire pits. Not just a wanderer. Several men together.
Now what?
Don't hunt. He'd gathered fruit and some barley. Did he dare cook the barley? Nobody had seen his fires... had they?
He'd been more than careful. The mountain was bare above where he built his fires; no human lived there. Someone close might have whiffed smoke, but nobody had seen it rising in the dark. He built his stone circles tall. Nobody could have seen fire within Tim Hann's fire pits, not unless he were floating in the sky.
At dusk he built his stone circle and his tiny fire. There was the risk that he had been seen, that he was being followed or tracked. Best he remain predictable until he could see another way.
He lay not against the fire-warmed boulder, but in the bush, where he could watch it. A tiny moon silvered the crest and left all else black.
The bandits he'd fought had been up the Road by many days, past the little distillery and past the Shire too. So the scorched rock he'd found might mark a wanderer or two, he told himself, but not one of that band of bandits.
But any wanderer must attack caravans for their speckles.
Tim Bednacourt carried no speckles. Could he buy a bandit off? With what?
Or evade them? The only way to evade bandits was to know where bandits were.
Here were two faces of one problem. How could Jemmy Bloocher avoid being found? He'd taught himself to do that. How could Tim Bednacourt find bandits who didn't want to be found? They'd be living as he lived, but more of them. Taking refuge at the frost line? Changing identities?
Tim waited for sleep, with his eyes on six hundred meters of split rock above him. He tried to picture bandits... not bandits attacking a caravan three times a year, but living between caravan passings, settled in little groups, gathering and hunting, stealing speckles from locals or fighting each other for a dwindling supply.
His mind must have gone on working while he slept. He woke in darkness. He felt quite lucid.
He donned his pack. He moved to the stream and drank until his belly was taut as a drum.
Then he began to climb.
The Crest Mountains were glossy-smooth wherever fusion flame had touched rock. But the cooling rock had split. Here a vertical split ran nearly to the peaks. The spring flowed from the split.
He'd been looking up at the rock face for so long that it was branded in his memory. Good thing, too. He couldn't see! But he could follow the split by touch.
No telling how high he was when he began to be afraid.
Climbing in the dark was crazy. The notion had come to him in his sleep, fully formed. He was climbing in the dark because he would be conspicuous in daylight, against gray rock with no plant growing anywhere.
The little moon continued west. A trace of light touched the mountain face now. The cleft narrowed, but Tim was able to pick out handholds and footholds. Then those ran out. All his muscles were shaking with fatigue. They'd throw him off the cliff if he kept this up.
Down a bit and over, a rock face was trying to split off, leaving a ledge.
Not as wide as he'd hoped. He lay with his back pushed hard against the rock, and was asleep before the trembling stopped.
Dawnlight and terror. He'd forgotten where he was. The slope stretched a vast way down. He was exposed and conspicuous on a rock cliff, hunted by men with guns.
Far away, the shadow of the Crest Mountains crept steadily from the sea onto shore.
In early summer he'd been on shore looking up at where he was now. What had he seen? Backlit by a rising sun that hadn't cleared the peaks, this whole face of the mountains would be black. He would be invisible. Nobody would look this high anyway.
Tim Bednacourt began to climb again, Cracking had put ledges over his head to block him, but cracking gave him handholds and footholds. He rested on the trunk of an incredible scrub-oak tree that had sunk roots into the last of the main split. When the sun lit the southwestern face of the range, he was on the narrow side of the Crab Peninsula.
Nothing grew at the crest, and little grew lower down. Flame had scoured this side of the range too. Nobody had since bothered to weed out Destiny life. This was the steeper side, a straight drop to angry waves, and not many plants had the tenacity to cling to the rock; but some did. Tim could make out Destiny colors, black and bronze and yellow-green, but Earthlife greens too.
He couldn't see a way down.
There was nothing to eat up here.
He found a flat spot to sleep out the noon hours. He made several klicks that day, picking a way along the crest, his eyes on the alien beauty of the wild shore. At evening he didn't bother with fire. He chewed a handful of barley, and waited for full dark.
Then he slipped between two peaks and looked down.
A bright orange light glared below him, just at the Road. Left and above, a mere orange spark glowed too.
He blocked the fires with his hand and let his eyes adjust.
From world's end to world's end, the Road was a gray-black line through black rubble. The shore was more vivid: there was white phosphorescence in the waves.
A faint yellow smudge far to his right: fires along a beach. The autumn caravan must be past Tail Town by now. If the caravan had sent out a yutz-hunter, Tim would have seen his fire too, and closer. It wasn't there.
The caravans hadn't sent hunters.
That bright fire must be huge, to be so steady. The distillery? It would be just below him, their dinner fire.
As for the orange spark, he must be looking down into somebody's fire pit.
He'd found what he sought. Two cookfires burned on the mountain this night: the Homes and Wilsons gathered at their dinner, and a handful of wanderers above, dangerously close to the first. The Homes and Wilsons would have to be warned. And surely they'd feed a wanderer some speckles?