Hal himself passed quickly into a state of concentration that effectively blanked out everything but his immediate task; and as the evening wore on, the intermediary of his conscious mind cut out entirely. He moved through a maze of perception, navigating through the dark without questioning the impulses that sent him one way or another; almost unconscious of the constant stream of warnings and information about the ground under his feet that he uttered as he went, for the benefit of Rukh behind him, so that there was a steady feed of verbal signals being passed rearward from person to person in the line.
With the waxing of the night hours, the thin new moon rose behind the clouds and the night winds freshened. Breaks in the cloud cover began to come more often; and, even when they did not break, the clouds were thinner, permitting more light to reach the ground. To these changes, Hal paid no conscious attention. He was not even aware of his own ground speed picking up and the progress of the line behind him improving as the illumination of the earth before him improved. He was long past ordinary fatigue, into adrenaline overdrive. He had forgotten his body entirely; and nearly forgotten his senses, as direct instruments of that body and mind. He lived in a universe of varying shades of gray and black; and he swam through that universe, forgetting everything else. Time, the goal toward which he progressed, the reason for progressing, all these were lost to him. Even the thought of those things he turned aside from, as physical obstacles, was forgotten. He turned right and left as he went without understanding why he turned; knowing only that this was his purpose - to move in this careful and intricate fashion, indefinitely.
A jerk on the line connecting him with Rukh eventually stopped him. He rotated blindly to face her.
"We'll stop now," her voice came strongly to him. "It's light enough to see by."
He was aware that the available illumination had increased. He had been able to tell this from the lightening of the shades of gray he saw, the absence of blackness. But for a moment, looking across little more than a meter of distance, caught up still in the concentration of his long navigation, he could not see her. His mind registered her only as one more abstract in varying shades of gray, reflected illumination. Similarly, what she said made no sense to him. His mind registered and identified the words, but could not relate them to the universe in which he was still continuing to feel the way for all of them.
Then sight and understanding flooded back in on him at once. He saw the forest floor, the trees and the bushes about them in the stoic, lean light of pre-dawn; and it finally registered on him that the night, and his task, were over.
He was conscious of falling; but he did not feel the ground when he struck it.
He came slowly back to awareness. Someone was shaking him. With a great effort he opened his eyes and saw it was Rukh.
"Sit up," she said.
He struggled into a sitting position, discovering that, somehow, a tarp had materialized under him and blankets over him. When he was up he felt something - it was a filled packsack, he saw, on looking - pushed into place behind him, so that he had something to support his back. Rukh put a bowl of undefined hot food - stew, apparently - in his hands.
"Get this inside you," she told him.
He looked about at trees lit by a late morning light.
"What time is it?" he asked, and was startled to hear his voice come out as a croak.
"One hour until noon. Eat."
She rose and left him. Still numb in body and brain, he began to eat the stew, using the spoon she had left in the bowl. He could not remember ever tasting anything so delicious; and with each hot bite, life woke more fully in him. The bowl was suddenly empty. He put it aside, got up, folded the blankets and tarp - they were his own, he discovered, as the packsack was his - and stowed them in the pack. But the bowl and spoon were not his. He took them down to the stream by which they had set up camp and washed both items. Around him the rest of the Command was striking their tents or rolling bedsacks, preparatory to getting on their way. He brought the bowl and spoon to Tallan.
"Not the kitchen's," Tallan said, irritably, over her shoulder as she hurried just-packed equipment onto the backs of the kitchen donkeys. "Those're Rukh's."
He took them to Rukh.
"Thank you," he said, handing them back.
"You're welcome. How are you?"
"I'm awake," he said.
"How do you feel?"
"A little stiff - all right, though."
"I'm sending the wounded off with a separate party," Rukh told him, "with as much of the equipment as we can spare, so as to lighten our load as far as we can. They'll leave us by ones and twos along the line of march today; and hopefully the Militia won't notice their trails in their hot pursuit of ours. Morelly's going leaves us one team leader short. I've talked it over with James and decided it's time we started to use that training of yours on an official basis. I want to appoint you a group leader."
He nodded.
"There's more to it than that," she said. "The other leaders are all senior to you and normally the Command'd have to lose James and myself and all the others before you'd find yourself responsible for the Command. But I'd like to tell the rest of the group leaders something of your special training - with your permission - so that I can also tell them that if you had the experience, James and I would consider you as first in line to be his replacement, as Lieutenant, if anything happened to him. Will you agree to that?"
It took his still-fatigued and sleep-numbed brain a few moments to consider the implications of what she had just asked.
"Since it's an open secret that the Militia want me more than ordinarily," he said at last, "there's no reason not to tell them I had special training, and what kinds of training it was. But I'd appreciate it if you didn't tell them the names of my tutors, or anything more than they actually need to know."
"Of course."
There was, for a moment, almost a gentle note in her voice; but it was gone before he could do any more than register it; and in fact if it had not been for his memory's ability to replay anything he had just heard, he would have been unsure that he had heard it at all. Standing this close to her, he could feel the outflow of a dark and vibrant living power from her, like a solid pressure.
"You're a sub-officer from now on, then," she said, "and I'll expect you to come looking for James and myself, whenever we halt, so that we can make use of what you can offer to our planning. For right now, you might note that the Militia are roughly eight kilometers behind us and they're making a kilometer an hour over our best pace. Also, what's chasing us now is the first and second units you saw, combined."
She proceeded to brief him on other details:
Jason and two of the others had been sent off as soon as they had stopped, to climb the side of the mountain they were currently skirting and get enough altitude to check behind them with field viewers for their pursuers.
They had been early enough to witness the smoke plumes rising above the trees from the cooking of a morning meal, barely within viewer range; and make the estimate of the marching time that the Militia would require to catch up with the Command, if it simply stayed where it was. However, the smoke also indicated a force at least double the size of one of the units Hal had seen and described; and later observation, as the Militia broke camp and began to move, had confirmed this fact.