"Isaac?" Nico suggested, brushing debris from his scraped palms as he rubbed the newest sore spots.
"Yes," Emilio guessed softly. "Who else could it be?"
He had expected a mixture of Jimmy and Sofia in their child’s face. Perhaps that was the greatest surprise: Isaac was not a child. He must be close to forty, Emilio realized. Older than Jimmy was when he died…. The father’s coiling hair had been passed on, but Isaac’s was a darker red, now shot with gray, and matted into brittle, filthy dreadlocks. There was something of Sofia’s delicacy in the long, birdlike bones, and a familiarity to the mouth, but it was difficult to find the mother in this grimy wraith with evasive blue eyes.
"Isaac has rules," Tiyat informed them quickly, when the man stood still a few paces up the incline. "Don’t interrupt him."
Isaac did not even glance at the newcomers, but appeared rather to be studying something just to Emilio’s left. "Isaac," Emilio began hesitantly, "we are going to see your mother—"
"I won’t go back," said Isaac in a loud, toneless voice. "Do you know any songs?"
Baffled, Emilio hardly knew what to reply, but Nico simply answered, "I know a lot of songs."
"Sing one."
Even Nico seemed a little taken aback, but rose to the occasion, offering Puccini’s "O mio bambino caro" with floating top notes in a soft falsetto, repeating the song when Isaac told him to. For a time, there was no sound in the world but the two of them together: twin untutored tenors, artlessly beautiful in close harmony. Nico, beaming, would have sung "Questa o quella" next, but Isaac said, "That’s all," and turned to go.
No prosody at all, Emilio noted, recalling symptoms he’d studied long ago in a developmental linguistics course. The VaN’Jarri had mentioned Isaac’s oddities but, until now, he had not realized that there was something more than isolation that would account for the things they’d described.
"Isaac," he called before the man had stalked away, knees rising high as a waterbird’s as he walked through the splintery rocks. "Do you have a message for your mother?"
Isaac stopped, but did not face him. "I won’t go back," he repeated. "She can come here." There was a pause. "That’s all," he said, and disappeared around an outcropping.
"She’s already on her way," Kajpin muttered.
"That lander is too noisy and stinks too much," Tiyat remarked, going back to the topic abandoned when Isaac showed up. "We’ll be through the worst of this bad ground by tomorrow at third sunset," she promised.
ONCE BEYOND THE INFLUENCE OF THE GARNU RANGE, THE LAND GENTLED, rising and falling by little more than a Runao’s height. The sapphire hills darkened to indigo with distance, the near country afire with magenta blossoms flaring in sunlight, and Emilio began to be glad after all that they had remained on foot. Repetitive movement had always calmed him, narrowing the focus to the burning of his muscles, the impact of the ground against his feet. He did not try to anticipate Sofia’s arguments or his own. It will be well, he thought, hour after hour, putting one foot in front of the other like a pilgrim walking to Jerusalem. Over and over: It will be well. He did not believe this; Ha’anala’s words simply matched the rhythm of his pace.
They foraged frequently as they walked; camped in the open, heedless of detection. "If we’re arrested, they’ll take us to the army anyway," Kajpin pointed out with untroubled practicality. "What difference does it make?"
By day, Emilio could almost match that fatalism, but the nights were bad, spent wandering in charred, empty dream-cities, or pacing in the noisy darkness waiting for dawn. At last, the others would rouse, and they’d break their fast with leftovers from the previous night’s meal. Once or twice, Nico brought down some small game, but much of the meat went to waste. Emilio ate very little—his usual response to tension. Pacing restlessly until their journey resumed, he would lose himself in the silent chant: It will be well.
Eight days’ travel south of the mountains, they saw the glint and flash of equipment in the sunlight, flaring now and then on the horizon. By late afternoon, they could pick out a dark mass at the base of a dust plume when the rolling land lifted the army into sight.
"We’ll be there tomorrow," Tiyat said, but she looked west and added, "unless the rain comes sooner."
That night they all slept badly, and woke to haze and sultry air. Leaving the others to their breakfast, Emilio walked up a low rise, gazing out toward the army bivouac. The first sun had barely begun to climb, but even now the heat was making the ground dance and shimmer, and he was already sweating. Screw it, he thought, and called back to his companions, "We’ll wait here."
"Good idea," said Kajpin, joining him. "Let them come to us!"
They spent the morning sitting on the little hill, Nico and the Runa eating and chatting like picnickers waiting for a parade. But as the army grew closer and they saw the numbers, they fell as silent as Sandoz, ears straining for the first sounds. It was hard to tell if they truly heard or only imagined the thudding of feet, the clank of metal, the caroling of commands and commentary from the ranks; storm clouds now hid the western horizon with columns of black rain, and the breeze carried away all but the nearest noises.
"This is going to be a fierce one," Tiyat predicted uneasily, standing with her tail braced against a stiffening wind. The lightning in the west was nearly continuous, illuminating the underside of the thunderheads.
Kajpin stood as well. "Rain falls on everyone," she said without concern, but then added the more ominous phrase, "lightning strikes some." Tramping down the hillock to a small dip in the ground, she sat again, lowering her profile, calmly contemplating the soldiers’ ranks before remarking cheerfully, "Glad I’m not wearing armor."
"How long do you think before the storm comes?" Nico asked.
Emilio looked west and shrugged. "An hour. Maybe less."
"Do you want me to go to them and ask for Signora Sofia?"
"No, Nico. Thank you. Wait here, please," Sandoz said. He joined Tiyat and Kajpin, and repeated, "Wait here." Then, without looking back, he walked without hurry down the road until he’d halved the distance and stood alone: a small flat-backed figure, silver and black hair lifted and blown by the breeze.
By this time the vanguard had also come to a halt, and before long these ranks parted to make way for a curtained sedan chair borne from the bivouac by four Runa.
Emilio tried to prepare himself for the sight of her, the sound of her voice, but gave up and simply watched as the bearers set the chair down gently. With dispatch, they unfurled a temporary shelter like a veranda around the litter, its waterproof fabric the color of marigolds, bright in the sunlight east of the approaching storm. There was a short delay while an ingeniously designed folding chair was brought forward from an equipment wagon, snapped into shape and placed in front of the conveyance. Finally a staircase, hinged at the base of the litter’s entrance, was tipped outward, and he saw a tiny hand as it separated the curtains and took a proffered arm as support in her descent.
He had expected her to be altered but still lovely; he was not disappointed. The raking scars and the empty socket were a shock, but the harsh suns of Rakhat had rendered her face so finely creased that it seemed made of gauze; the seams of scar tissue were now merely three lines among many, and her remaining eye was lively and observant, and seemed to sweep her surroundings in continual compensation for her halved field of vision. Even the arc of her spine seemed graceful to him: a curve of curiosity, as though she had bent to examine some object on the ground that had caught her attention on her way to the camp chair. She sat, and looked up, her head tilted almost coyly, waiting for him. Delicate as a wren, with her small spare hands in her lap, she had in repose a skeletal purity: elegant and fleshless and still. "Thou art beautiful," he thought, "comely as Jerusalem, terrible as an army with banners…."