Quetti flushed angrily. “My people are going to die, Knobil!”
“Mine are dying already.”
He stared at me blankly, and then all the color ran out of his face. Feeling better, I reached for ropes and brake, and the chariot creaked off down the slope, sails filling. The noise made conversation impossible, and Quetti just sat and stared at me with a very puzzled, very worried expression.
When I needed to rest, though, he took the tiller without a word, and thereafter we had little time for talk. Sailing double shifts, rarely stopping even to visit with the locals, we made double time. Scarlet hill and scarlet sails, a bloody chariot bore death swiftly to the grasslands.
Angel chariots travel alone—to cover more country and to ease the burden on the locals’ hospitality. The shortest route from Heaven to Dawn lay along the borderlands south of the Tuesday Forest, and Quetti had sent some of his troop that way, but to detour northward over Monday’s moors was faster. Northward we went, through country new to me. Blustery cold winds chivied us along. Herds of long-legged wildlife fled away before us over cushioned tundra, darkly green and brightly salted with flowers.
We made good time, yet Vernier is very big. One thing I had not brought from Heaven was a razor. Quetti disapproved of an angel with whiskers, but if mine surprised the ranchers we met, then they were too polite to question. By the time we came to March and began to swing southward, I had a beard I could run my fingers through—perhaps not yet down to herdman standards, but a splendid silver and gold jungle nevertheless.
For the first time I had a chance to practice angel navigation. With chart, compass, theodolite, barometer, and a rough idea of a date, an angel can locate himself well enough to come within sight of any mountain he chooses. Nothing smaller than a mountain makes a reliable landmark. Violet had not needed navigation to find an ocean, so I had been ignorant of it, which was one reason Quetti and I had taken so long to reach Heaven. Now we knew, but our road was easy. We headed west until we were north of the sun, then west-southwest. Soon we were crackling and slapping our way through the immature growth of the early jungle.
Sleep by sleep, the sun rose higher and the heat grew more insufferable. Juvenile woodland faded imperceptibly into endless vistas of waving grasses, and our wheels were green with sap. Quetti became growly and ill-tempered, especially when I made up little songs about the smell of boiled wetlander. He was drowning in sweat, and I, in nostalgia—the scent of grass alone brought tears to my eyes. Cotton trees appeared around the ponds in the hollows, and the green-gold hills rolled away forever under an indigo sky. I was coming home. My heart sang like a choir of flute bats.
When we saw the Urals to the west, faint pale smudges on the horizon, Quetti sighed and said they were beautiful. True wetlanders are all nutty about ice. I merely snorted and turned our course more westward. These ranges had been another hazard for the herdfolk, with the flocks emerging larger and less numerous than they went in. Massacre in the passes was a regular affair in every cycle, but Heaven ignored that violence as an internal herdfolk affair.
These were not the grasslands I had seen with Violet, a hellscape of starving woollies and terrified people crammed like cactuses into a tiny corner of their normal range. Kettle had estimated that two-thirds of the herdfolk had perished in the disaster, and a single generation could hardly have restored their numbers. Quetti and I could go three or four sleeps without seeing a single herd. Woollies leave a grazed track streaked with dung that even a blind snortoise could follow, and yet we saw very few even of those. The landscape was much vaster than I had remembered, and much emptier, and my sense of foreboding grew more deadly.
I was aware of my weakness. If I brooded too long on danger, my resolve would fail. Suddenly I made my decision. I had halted on a hilltop to check our position. When I laid down my almanac, I knew that we were well into the best grazing. A fine little lake sparkled below us, large enough to attract a herdmaster, yet small enough for my sinister intent. The cotton-tree grove was confined to one end of it, leaving the rest without cover: an ideal ambush.
I began pulling off my boots.
Quetti was sitting on one of the bedrolls in the bow. He shoved his hat brim higher and looked at me quizzically.
“This is it,” I said. I opened a chest and took out my pagne. He watched for a moment and then said, “You’re still determined to go through with this madness? Ritual suicide?”
“I’m a herdman. This is my destiny.”
“Shouldn’t you at least wait until we find a suitable herd?”
I frowned, grunting with the effort as I removed my pants. “Ambush the sucker from the chariot, maybe? Seems to me you ought to have oath problems with that idea, angel!”
“Oh, Knobil!” His voice went so quiet I could barely hear it over the wind. “Do you really think I’d care about that?”
I dropped my bag of food over the side. I eyed the bedding longingly and decided it would be cheating to take it. Loners sleep on bare ground. I clawed myself up to the mast until I was upright.
Quetti also rose and he picked his way closer, saying “Knobil?” again, more threateningly.
“Yes, Quetti?”
“You’re trying to prove yourself again! I won’t argue that you’re not capable of being a herdmaster, because I’m sure that you are. But why go about it this way? No herdman is going to ride up to a water hole like this with his eyes closed, just so you can skewer him! You know how grass holds tracks! He’ll see them, and then what’ll you be?”
“A winner!” I said. “You don’t know how those big lunks think, lad. He’ll also see your wheel marks and assume that angels made the tracks. If he doesn’t, then I just have to show myself—”
“And he’ll be off like a scared roo!”
“The hell he will be! He won’t know I’m a cripple, will he? He’ll try to kill me, to stop me trailing him back to his herd. Don’t you see? And I have a secret weapon—this bow of mine has twice the range of any bow made in the grasslands. I doubt that any herdman could even draw it. They’re big, but no one’s ever taught them the knack. My arrows are better, too. So, my shoulders against his legs? That’s a fair match—”
“You’re crazy!”
“Then I’ll make a good herdman.”
“You’ll starve to death first!”
Quetti did have a point there. I glanced around at the bar ridges, barren of anything but grass, rippling in the scorching heat—not a sign of animal life, not a cloud. Yet to use the chariot to find a herd and then lay my ambush in its path would certainly be cheating. I could not kill a man without giving him some sort of chance. But how long would I have to wait?
“Someone will drop in,” I said. “There may be roos—”
“They’ll eat you before you eat them!”
I shrugged and held out a hand. “Bye, friend. Thanks for the ride… Keep an eye on that front axle.”
Quetti narrowed his eyes, ignoring my hand. “Let’s try it this way, then. Angels trade sometimes—I’ll buy a few woollies and a couple of girls for you.”
That arrangement would not suit my purpose at all, but how could I explain this to Quetti? He had the sense not to ask too many questions, but he must have known that I was up to worse things than killing one herdman. This farewell was much harder than I had hoped. “And what will those girls see, old buddy? A crippled dwarf, a yellow-haired freak! It’s not me I have to prove myself to—it’s them! The only way I can impress herdwomen is to ride up on their owner’s horse with…with his head under my arm.”
I still remember the spasm of nausea I felt as I said that.