"I'll put it out," said Hal.
He got up, extinguished the glowtube and crawled back into his bedsack in darkness. He had set his cup to one side of the bedsack and it was still half full. Sitting up, he drank it off, then laid back down himself. The feeling of the dream he had admitted having came back to him. There was nothing he could have told Jason about it that would have made sense out of his murderous response at being wakened, or his earlier unaccountable ceasing to breathe.
… He had been riding, armed and armored, on horseback with others. They had ridden out of some trees onto the edge of a vast plain, and halted their horses. Distant in the middle of the otherwise stark emptiness of the plain was a dark, solitary, medieval-looking structure - like a peel tower, narrowing as it reached upward to its crenelated top. There were no other buildings around it, only the tower itself - and it was far off. There was a terrible sense about the tower of waiting, that held them all silent.
"I'll go alone," he had said to the others.
He had gotten down from his horse, passed the reins to the man next to him and started out on foot across the endless distance of the plain, toward the tower. At some time later, he had looked back and seen those Who had been with him, still sitting their horses, small under the trees which were themselves shrunken with the distance he had put between himself and them. Then he had turned again and continued on toward the tower, to which he seemed hardly to have progressed a step since he had left the edge of the wood; and without warning something he could not see had come up out of the wasteland behind him and touched him on the shoulder.
And that had been all. The next thing he had known was that he was awake with his hands around Jason's throat. Still holding in his mind the dream-memory of the tower as he had last seen it in his dream, he fell asleep again.
He woke to the feel of his foot being moved. He opened his eyes and saw that it was Jason who had hold of it, through the bedsack. Jason squatted at arm's length from the bottom end of the bedsack, at maximum distance from him; and his gaze was anxious.
"Wasn't I breathing again?" Hal said, and grinned at him.
Jason let go of his foot and grinned back.
"You were breathing, all right. But we're due to help with breakfast. You'll have to hurry."
Hal rolled over, fumbled for and found the bath kit with which Hilary had supplied him, and pulled himself out of the warmth of the bedsack into the chill morning air. He stumbled from the tent toward the nearby stream.
Fifteen minutes later they were walking through the dawn woods toward the cook tent. The light was grayish white and mist was everywhere in wisps between the trees. Sounds came very clearly through the mist, sounds of wood being chopped, people calling back and forth, metal objects clanking against each other. The cold, damp air laved Hal's freshly depilated cheeks and touched deep into his lungs when he drew it in. From dead sleepiness, he was waking powerfully to a sense of being very alive, warm and alive within the protection of his heavy outdoor clothing. He was hollow with hunger.
When they got to the cook shack, however, he and Jason had time only for a hastily-gulped cup of coffee before going to work. But eventually the rest of the Command was fed and they got a chance at their own breakfasts.
"We'll look over the packsaddles, first," Jason said as they sat eating, perched on some boxes in the cooktent, "along with the other gear. Then we'll check out the animals and decide which to load first and which to lead unloaded for rotation. I haven't had a chance to look in the load tent, yet; but Rukh said we've already picked up about three-quarters of as much raw makings as we can carry; and we'll get the rest on our way."
"Our way to where?"
Jason stopped eating for a moment and looked at him.
"No one's said anything?" he said. "Rukh didn't say?"
"No."
"Why don't you go ask her what you're supposed to know, then come back and tell me?" Jason looked uncomfortable. "I don't know what to say and what not."
"I remember you talking in the van to Hilary about the Coretap - "
"I didn't know you were awake." Jason's face was stricken.
"I'd just woke."
"Yes. Well," said Jason, "why don't you talk to Rukh? That way we'll all know what we can talk about."
"All right," said Hal. "I will."
They finished their breakfast and went back to the donkeys and the load tent. All that day they worked over the packsaddles and other carrying gear and practiced loading and unloading. Ten of the donkeys were required to carry the community equipment of the Command, and whatever personal gear a member of the Command was temporarily unable to carry. That left sixteen others to carry what Jason continued to refer to as "the makings," and act as replacement animals for any of the other donkeys who fell lame or otherwise needed to be rested from their loads. It was ordinary practice, Hal learned, to rotate the loads on the animals, so that each one of them periodically was led unburdened; and this went beyond keeping the animals in the best possible condition. It had its roots in the idea that it was sinful not to allow the beasts, like humans, periodic rest.
The next day the Command packed up and started out; and with that began some weeks of daily travel through the mountains. They made fifteen to eighteen kilometers a day; and each night when they camped, they would be visited by people living in the vicinity, bringing in donations of food or supplies, or more of the raw materials for the potassium nitrate.
The physical demands of this life were entirely different from those the mines had made on Hal, but he adapted quickly. He was still as lean as a stripped sapling and he suspected he was still adding height; but to a great extent he had begun to develop the strength of maturity, while still having the elasticity of youth. Before they were a week on their way, he was completely acclimated to this new life. Even the local coffee was beginning to taste good to him.
Their weeks were all very much alike; high altitude days full of bright sunshine and wind, with a few small white clouds, the air very clean and light, the water icy cold from the mountain streams and their sleep sudden and sound after days that grew steadily longer as they moved south to meet the advancing summer.
Hal and Jason were up at dawn. They ate, harnessed and packed the donkeys for the day's trek. Two hours later, the Command was on the move, its human members lined out ahead with backpacks containing their immediate personal equipment and followed by Jason at the head of the donkeys carrying the general gear of the Command. At the tail end of the donkey contingent were those animals carrying the makings and the unloaded animals. Last of all came Hal as rearguard on the pack train. It was his job to make sure none of the beasts or people fell behind and got left, meanwhile keeping a wary eye on the donkeys ahead of him to make sure no load had slipped and no animal had gone lame.
It was a duty that called for vigilance rather than activity; and Hal's mind was free. It was the first time he had been able to stop to think since he had run from his home in the Rockies. On Coby the weekday life of the mines and the weekend life in Port had not given him the kind of mental privacy in which he could stand back and take stock. Now, it was amply available. In the solitude of his position at the end of the donkey line, with the long day's walk and the solidity of the mountains all around him, peace flowed into him and he had the chance to think long thoughts.
Now that he could hold it off at arm's length, he recognized that the Coby life had been an artificial one. He had spent the last three years indoors. It had been necessary as a place to hide while he grew up physically; and it had taught him to live, if not be completely comfortable, with strangers. But in a deeper sense, it had been, as planned, only a marking of time while he had grown up. Now, he was like a convict released from prison. He was back out in the universe where things could begin to happen; and he saw matters more in their proper dimensions.