‘I already know what you are going to say. That you have used up what magic you had, and we must stay another night here. Did you kill her?’
‘No. I let her go. She is no threat to us. And you are right that we must stay here, not one night, but three. I have decided that before I travel, I will rebuild some of my reserves. I will not be the Great Man I was when we rejoin the People, but I will not be this skeleton either. I will eat for three days. And then we will quick-walk to the people.’
‘By then, almost everyone will have returned to the Wintering Place! The best trading will be done, and all that will be left there are the things that are not quite perfect or have no newness to them!’
‘There will be other trading days in years to come. You will have to miss this one.’
Olikea filled her cheeks and then puffed the air out explosively. She had caught two more of the creatures, and she flung them down on those already heaped on the stream bank so hard that I heard the crack of their small shells as they hit. She was not pleased, and I was dimly surprised by how easily Soldier’s Boy dismissed her feelings on the matter.
She looked at him at last and surprise almost overcame her sullen glance. ‘What happened to your forehead?’
‘Never mind that,’ he said brusquely. ‘We need food. Busy yourself with that.’ With his foot, he stirred the sleeping Likari. ‘Up, boy. Gather food. Lots of it. I need to fill myself.’
Likari sat up, blinking, and knuckled his eyes. ‘What sort of food, Great One?’
‘Any food that you can get in quantity. Go now.’
The boy scuttled off. Olikea spoke from behind me. ‘Do not blame him if he cannot find much that is good. The time for the best harvesting is past. That is why we go to the Wintering Place.’
‘I know that.’ Soldier’s Boy turned and walked to the stream’s edge, upstream of Olikea. With a grunt and a sigh, he hunkered down and then sat on the ground. He reached over, pulled up a handful of water-grass, rinsed the muddy roots off in the flowing stream and then peeled the slimy outer skin off them. He bit off the thick white roots and as he chewed them, uprooted another handful of the stuff. The flavour was vaguely like onions.
By the time Likari returned with an armload of shrivelled plums, Soldier’s Boy had cleared a substantial patch of water-grass. He ate as methodically as a grazing cow. Olikea was busy with her own task; she had steamed the leggy creatures in layers of leaves and was now stripping them of legs and carapaces. The curl of meat from each one was scarcely the size of my little finger, but they smelled wonderful.
They ate together, with Soldier’s Boy taking the lion’s share of the food. The plums had dried in the sun’s heat; their flesh was thick and chewy and sweet, and contrasted pleasantly with the little crustaceans. When the food was gone, Soldier’s Boy commanded them both to find more, and then lay down to sleep. When they woke him, they had roasted a pile of yellow roots that had little flavour other than starch, and a porcupine was cooking on the fire. Likari had killed the creature with a club. Divested of its fur and quills, it showed a thick layer of fat. ‘You can see the kind of weather that soon will come!’ Olikea warned him.
‘Let me worry about such things,’ Soldier’s Boy dismissed her.
Night was deepening when that meal was gone. They slept in a huddle, Olikea against his belly and Likari cuddled against his back. Soldier’s Boy used a tiny bit of magic to hummock the moss into a nest around them while Likari had gathered armloads of fallen leaves to cover them. Over the leaves, he spread the winter blanket from my cemetery hut, even though both Olikea and Likari complained that it smelled odd. He had discovered that they had disposed of the clothing he had worn when they found him. Olikea had cut the shining brass buttons from his uniform and kept them, but the rest of it was gone, dropped somewhere in the forest when they were moving him. So all that he carried forward from my life was a winter blanket and a handful of buttons. It seemed fitting.
As they settled together in their bed with Olikea’s warm back to his chest and her firm buttocks resting on his thighs, Soldier’s Boy felt an insistent stirring of lust for the woman, but set it firmly aside. Later, after he had regained some of his flesh, he could enjoy her. For now, he must not expend any effort save to gather and eat food. As for Olikea, she showed no such interest in him at all, and Likari seemed blissfully unaware of any tension between the adults.
For the next two days, that was the pattern. As long as there was enough light to see, Olikea and Likari gathered food and Soldier’s Boy consumed it. They moved twice, following the stream, as Soldier’s Boy systematically harvested and ate every edible item that it could provide for him.
There was a freeze on the third night. There had been twinges of frost before, enough to hasten the turning of the leaves, but that night, the cold reached beneath the forest eaves. Despite the mossy nest and deep blanket of leaves, they all shivered through the night. Soldier’s Boy awoke aching, and Olikea and Likari were both grumpy. In response to Olikea’s complaints, Soldier’s Boy told her, ‘We will travel tonight. I have regained enough reserves that we will go swiftly. For now, go about your gathering. I will return shortly.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘I go to the road’s end. I will not stay there long; have food ready for me when I return.’
‘This is a foolish risk you take. There will be workers there; they may attack you.’
‘They will not see me,’ Soldier’s Boy said firmly. And with that as his farewell, he set out.
As Soldier’s Boy had recovered his reserves and strength, so had I. He was still not as immense as he had been, but he had regained flesh and energy. He moved purposefully through the forest. The fallen leaves carpeted the moss. They rustled as he strode through them. As he approached the road’s end. Soldier’s Boy slowed and went more cautiously. For a large man, he moved very quietly, and he paused often to listen.
He heard only birdcalls and once, the thump and rustle of a disturbed rabbit. Emboldened, he ventured closer to what had been the road. Stillness reigned.
By this hour of the day, workers should have arrived, but there were no signs of them. He moved cautiously along the edge of the road. The greenery I had sent out across it had browned, but the vines and crawling brambles had survived and looked undisturbed. Where I had sent plants to block the culverts, swamps had formed on either side of the road. Insects buzzed and hummed near them.
He came to the shed where the men had been keeping watch that night. It was deserted. He walked through it and found the dice still out on the rough table just as the men had abandoned them. No one had been back here since that night.
‘Perhaps it was not a total waste of magic,’ he conceded reluctantly. ‘It looks as if the intruders are discouraged. I do not think they will come back before spring.’
He had turned back into the forest before I realized that he had deliberately spoken to me.
‘I thought I was doing what the magic wanted me to do.’ I could not decide if I wanted to apologize to him or not. It seemed strange to apologize to myself, and even more so to have to apologize for an action I’d been pushed into taking. I wasn’t even certain that he was aware of what I’d tried to say to him. I thought of the times when I’d thought I’d felt Soldier’s Boy stir inside me, the moments when my thoughts had seemed more Speckish than Gernian. Always, I’d felt that he deliberately concealed himself from me. Now I wondered if he had tried to share his views, only
