is not so nice a place now, I am told.” They shared a brief, painful thought: their loved ones, sold in chains, to pirates or worse.
“And the other place to nose about?” Josh asked.
“A pirate camp, on the coast south of Newport. I have friends there as well who may help.”
“Pirates?’
“Now, yes. Once they fought with King Jarl’s Elite Guard.” Jarl was the Bear-King, and his Elite Guard Service – the JEGS – had won many battles against the Humans in the Race War.
Joshua remembered them well. “But if this isn’t slave trade, if this is war again…”
Beauty left the question unanswered. It lay between them a moment, then blew away like the ashes of yesterday’s fire. “We are brothers now. They cannot make us hunt each other again.”
Joshua felt Beauty’s truth. “Rose read my eyes yesterday,” he said.
“What did she see?” He didn’t always believe in Rose’s predictions, but they held special import now, if only as tokens of his beloved.
“She told me I lost something.” They looked at each other with sad hindsight. “She said there’d be a long hunt, though, and that I’d find it again.” He put the force of promise in his voice.
“What else?” Beauty insisted, buoyed by the vision.
“The rest needed translation. She said I was going to drown – but that I’d live again.”
“Better not tell that to the Pope’s men. They would drown you for blasphemy, and if you lived again they would drown you doubly for double blasphemy and insolence.”
They were about to set off when Beauty twitched his ears to the side and said, “What was that?”
“I didn’t hear anything,” said Josh.
They both listened. The wind, a cricket, the leaves. And then a subtle sound, almost not a sound at all.
They crept silently toward the noise, through tall grass and shallow puddle. It grew indistinctly louder and seemed to be coming from behind a large rock formation. It made the sound a hand makes passing through spiderwebs.
Beauty stood clear of the rocks and strung an arrow. Josh took out his blade and sidled around to the far side of the stones. Knife in hand, he crouched behind the largest piece of granite, then leapt over it blindly to the other side.
He was ankle-deep in mud. Before him was a pool, five yards across – a tar pit, covered with a quarter inch of water. At the edge of the pit, just beginning to sink, was a huge, brightly colored butterfly; its four-foot wings beating wildly to try to pull itself into flight out of the tar.
Josh smiled sympathetically. He reached out, grabbed the terrified creature by its dark furry body, and lifted it gently out of the mire. It shivered violently.
He carried it back to where Beauty was standing, bow drawn. “Just a Flutterby. Trying to drink the water off a tar pit,” Joshua explained. The animal was quivering, its delicate red-and-gold wings straight up in frightened attention. Josh carried it back to the pond and began to wash the tar off the large insect’s belly with sand and lemon juice from a nearby tree’s fallen fruits. Beauty put up his bow and walked over.
“Poor thing,” the Centaur shook his head. “They are beautiful, but not, I think, the smartest of creatures.”
Josh finished washing the Flutterby’s body clean, then placed it on some dry grass in the sun. “There you go, big girl, you’ll dry off soon enough.”
It sat there timidly. Its ebony body was glistening wet as its flower-thin wings rose and fell tentatively with each respiration. The creature’s heart continued to palpitate so quickly that the sides of its dark slender body seemed to vibrate. It looked at Joshua, and its scared, warm face smiled.
“It will be safe here,” said Beauty. “It will dry within the hour.” He looked at the sun. “We should be gone.”
Josh nodded in agreement.
They started off, but didn’t get fifty paces before Josh stopped. “Wait a minute. Be right back.” He ran over to the pond, broke open an orange, and laid several juicy slices on the ground in front of the Flutterby. Shyly, the animal lowered its eyes.
Josh ran back to where Beauty was waiting. “Let’s go,” he said, and they continued south at a trot.
Not only the contour of the western coastline, but the terrain itself had undergone considerable alteration following the quakes of Fire and Rain, and then once more after the Great Quake, which marked the beginning of the steady southward creeping of the Big Ice.
A temperate band of hills and wood extended from Monterey down to Port Fresno, but there the land became subtropical. Newport, in fact, was surrounded by rain forest, and no one civilized had ever been much south of that since no one knew when.
The marshland over which Josh and Beauty were trekking was itself highly variable in character. Areas of bogs, fens, and marshes were interspersed throughout, sometimes in great density. On the other hand, great spans of grassy plain extended sometimes for miles. It was hilly in places, rocky elsewhere. There were even scattered acres of trees.
It made tracking difficult. The wounded creature had gone over stony flats that held not a print, through foul mire that absorbed all smell. Josh and Beauty kept on the trail, but they had to slow down. At one point they missed a turning and had to backtrack a mile before they picked up the true scent.
The sun was still high when they came to the shore of the Venus River. The Venus was a long water that ran from inside Mount Venus in the east, all the way to the sea. It was fairly calm where it cut through the marshlands, but a hundred yards wide, and too deep to tell how deep.
They were both good swimmers, but Josh was hesitant and water-shy as he remembered Rose’s vision. Beauty admonished him, though, and assured him Rose had been speaking in metaphors. They stood at the muddy edge for a few minutes, watching the slow, implacable current move, like time, toward them and past them. Leaves bobbed on the surface, and rotting logs and dragonfly wings. A flower floated by. As it came even with them it paused on an eddy or undercurrent. For a moment the whole world was still for Joshua.
The moment passed. They jumped in and raced to the other side. On the other side, there was no trail.
“Most likely he let the current take him downstream,” said Joshua. “We’ll do best to walk west along the bank, pick him up where he came out.”
“So it would want us to think. But a strong Accident can swim upstream. And its home forest is east of here.”
“The brothel’s west,” suggested Josh. They thought in silence and considered alternatives. “We could split up,” Josh added. He didn’t want to. Beauty was all he had left.
Beauty placed this thought between his temples and examined it from all sides. “No,” he said finally.
Josh agreed. “We’ll walk upstream for two miles. If we don’t pick up the trail, we’ll turn back and follow the river west. He couldn’t
