His stomach churned with the raw, greasy food he had eaten. He had to eat more slowly or lose everything. Vomit was a hard smell to hide. In a tightly covered container that would protect its contents from vermin, he found three quarters of a wheel of cheese. He thought how long such food would sustain him in his escape-but the fewer traces of his passing were noticeable, the better. While the cotholder might not notice the loss of a few tubers and grease in a pan, the disappearance of too much cheese would be a different matter. So he found a thin old knife blade in the back of a drawer and sliced off a section of cheese, enough to provide him a small meal but, he hoped, not enough to be instantly noticed. Almost as if his restraint were being rewarded, he found a dozen rolls of travel rations in another tin box and took two. He would surely find more food if he was not greedy now. He believed in that sort of justice.
He removed the bandage on his forehead, a painful task even when he had soaked his face in the cold stream water. One or two spots bled a little, but as no blood trailed down his face, he left the wound open to the clean mountain air.
He went back to the cothold to look for clothing but found none. He did take one of the older hides. He could not count on finding shelter, and though this was the fifth month, the nights could still be chilly.
Leaving the cothold, he investigated the tracks that led off in several directions. A flash of sunlight on something metallic caught his eyes and he whirled toward the river, afraid that he had been discovered. It took him much longer to locate the source of the reflection: the oarlocks of a small boat. Under the thick shrubbery along the bank, the boat was almost invisible, tethered to a branch with a rope so worn by constant rubbing against a half-submerged stone that the slightest pull would part the last strands.
He provided the pull and, stepping carefully into the boat, used his stick to push out into the current of the river. Perhaps he should have tried to find the oars, but he felt an urgency to be away from this cothold and as far down the river as possible. The little craft was just long enough so that if he cocked his knees, he could lie flat and be unseen from the shore.
That night, when he saw the glowbaskets of a sizeable small holding-not a large enough one to have a watchwher on guard-he propelled himself to the bank and tied up the boat by the tether he had mended with strips of his tattered shirt during his long day afloat.
Luck was with him. First he found a basket of avian eggs left on a hook outside a side door to the beasthold. He sucked the contents of three, and carefully deposited three more in his shirt, tucked into his waistband. Then his eye caught the shirts and pants drying on bushes by the flat river stones where women would have washed them. He found clothes to fit him well enough and corrected the positions of others to make it appear that what he had chosen might simply have fallen into the river and drifted away.
In the beasthold for a second look, though the animals moved restlessly in the presence of a stranger, he found bran and an old battered scoop. Tomorrow he would boil the bran and add the eggs for a good hot meal. Suddenly he heard voices and immediately returned to his boat, pushing it carefully out into the current and lying down, lest he be seen.
The night swallowed the voices and all he heard was the gurgle of the river in which the boat moved so silently. Above him were the stars. The old harper who had taught all the youngsters at the Glasscrafthall had told him the names of some of them. Indeed, the old man had mentioned meteorites and the Ghosts that appeared in bright arcs in Turnover skies. Shankolin had never believed that those bright sparks were the ghosts of dead dragons, but some of the younger children had.
The brightest stars never changed. He recognized the sparkle of Vega-or was it Canopus? He couldn't remember the names of the other stars in the spring sky. In trying to recall those names and when he had learned them, his mind inexorably returned to Aivas and all that… that thing…had done to him. He'd only recently heard, in a repetition of very old news, that his father had been exiled to an island in the Eastern Sea with the Lord Holders and other craftsmen who had tried to stop the Abomination.
Now that the source was silenced, they'd be able to talk men and women into returning to their senses. The Red Star brought Thread. The Dragonriders fought Thread in the skies, and people lived comfortably enough between Passes. That had been the order of life for centuries-an order that should be preserved. When he had heard that the Masterharper of Pern, a personage Shankolin had admired, had been abducted, he had been deeply disturbed. But his ears had been blocked for Turns before he gradually recovered some hearing and learned about that part of the incident. He had never clearly heard why the Masterharper had been found dead in the Abomination's chamber. But it, too, had been dead-"terminated," one of the miners said. Had Master Robinton come to his senses and turned off the Abomination? Or had the Abomination killed Master Robinton? He felt eager to discover the truth.
Once he got down Crom's river-perhaps Keogh Hold would be far enough-he could make plans and see just how badly the Abomination had interfered with Pern's traditions and way of life.
Gathers began in springtime, when the roads dried of winter snow and mud, and he could simply blend into the crowds, and perhaps find more answers. He was hearing more and more these days, even the shrill song of avians. Once he caught up on current news, he would be able to plan his next moves.
Surely not everyone on Pern would want tradition degraded or would believe the lies that the Abomination had spouted. He called to mind those whom he knew had been seriously disturbed by the so-called improvements promulgated by Aivas. By now, eleven Turns since the Abomination had terminated, some right-minded, thinking folk would realize that the Red Star had not changed course simply because three old engines had blown up in a crack on its surface! Especially when Thread continued to fall on the planet-as indeed it should,to be sure that all Pern was united against the menace of its return, century after century.
"I don't know why it had to mess up time," said the first man, morosely fingering a pattern in the spilled gravy in front of him.
"You're messing up the table," the second man said, pointing.
"He had no call to mess up our time," the first man insisted, rather more vehemently.
"Who?" Second was confused. "He? It?"
"Aivas, that's who or it."
"Whaddya mean?"
"Well, he did, didn't he? Back in '38-which should be only 2524." The holder scowled, his thick black brows coming together across the wide bridge of his thick nose. "Made us add some fourteen Turns allasudden."
"He was regulatingtime," Second corrected, surprised at his companion's vehemence. The holder had seemed a pleasant enough companion, knowledgeable about music and knowing all the words to even the latest songs the harpers were playing. With his third wineskin, his temper had deteriorated. And possibly his wits, if time or how folk numbered Turns was bothering him.
"Made me older'n' I was."
"Didn't make you smarter," Second said with a rude snort. " 'Sides, Masterharper himself said it was all right on account there were dis– ah, disk-" He paused and used a belch as an excuse while he recalled the exact phrasing. "-there'd been inaccurate timekeeping because of Thread falling only forty Turns once instead of fifty, like it usually did, and people forgetting to account for the disk-"