When the war itself ended, the treaty specified that Nassa must never be rebuilt, and Levannon had to agree; it never had been. Our traveler could not recall what year the war was, but he said the pines where Nassa used to stand had grown better than twenty feet tall. And he said that the city of New Nassa, a few miles from the simple war memorial among the pines, was a much stronger town in the military as well as the economic sense — better command of the eastern road… Joking of course, Old Jon asked him: “Was you, sir, one of them terr’ble Nassa heretics, sir?” The traveler looked at him too long and unwinking, like an ancient turtle, and then laughed barely enough for politeness, without answering.
A regiment was coming to defend Skoar, Emmia had said. They’d use the Northeast Road — no other available except the West, and that must be busy if there had already been fighting in the Seneca region. It shouldn’t matter to me, I thought, since I meant to avoid roads anyway until I was a long way from Skoar. My uneasiness subsided for lack of fuel and I drifted into a sort of sleep.
I woke in slowly lightening darkness, pulled from a warm riot with a girl who was not Caron but only a trifle bigger and older. I can’t bring back much of her now except a red flower in the back of her dark hair that tickled my nose. She was singing; I kept whispering to her she better not, we better not do anything until Father Milsom fell back out of sight on the other side of the stockade. I was awake, my thighs gripping nothing but a branch. I ached, and I’ll never see her again. They don’t come back. Dion remarks it’s just as well they don’t, for if we hoped to find our unfinished dreams we’d be forever sleeping, and who’d cook breakfast?
Skoar, in fact everything of my fourteen years — (even Caron, even Sister Carnation) — seemed to me in that time of waking to have become like a mixed sound of voices behind me, farther and farther behind me on a road where I could do nothing but go forward.
The fog became swirls of gray replacing the night; I saw the shape of willow branches near my eyes. I wriggled down the tree in the milk-soft confusion and pushed on up the mountain, hungry, not much rested but clear in the head. The policers wouldn’t like the fog, so I tried to, though it slowed me down. I arrived at my cave in half an hour, famished. I could spare no time to hunt. The fog was thinning away under the pressure of an invisible sun.
I dug up my money first — fifteen dollars altogether, it ought to help as soon as I came to any place where money mattered. At a moment when sunlight broke through the fog and edged the leaves with wet trembling gold, I had in my palm the shiny dollar Emmia had given me: it seemed not so very bright. After dropping it among my other coins I could hardly tell it from the rest. Then I recovered my sack, with the golden horn — and my luckcharm of course. Could I have known all the time that it was there, but needed some compelling reason for running away? — from Emmia? Skoar? From my boyhood self because I must have done with it?
A slim-witted wild hen came searching her breakfast of bugs barely ten yards off. My arrow lifted her head from her neck — she’d never miss it. I couldn’t stop to make a cooking fire, but drank the blood and dressed her off, and ate the heart, liver and gizzard raw, wrapping the rest in burdock leaves for lunchtime. I recall I gave the luckcharm no credit, although in many ways I was still quite religious.
The nearest stream began at a spring on the mountain’s northeast slope beyond my cave, a small loud brook with alders and brambles along the banks. I knew it ran two miles or so through the woods and then across the Northeast Road at a little ford. I could follow it almost to the road and then use the road as a guide, glimpsing it now and then to check my position as I traveled east — toward Levannon.
The brook covered the bottom of a scratchy tunnel, a narrow green hell. Thinking of policer dogs, I had to try it. I stuffed my moccasins in the sack again, to save them. My bare feet winced at the thought of snakes, and took a beating on the stones.
Of course when the dogs lost the scent the men would use some brains, following the brook with the dogs searching both banks. At a break where the brambles gave way to common weeds, I stepped out and walked away, to make it look as if I had given up and started back toward Skoar. I passed within grabbing reach of a big oak but went beyond it, to a thicket where I messed around a little and peed on the leaves to keep the dogs amused. Then I backtracked and swung into the oak with care to leave no damaged twigs. From the oak, by risking one leap far above ground, I passed to another tree, and then from branch to branch all the way back to the brook.
They’d at least lose time beating their gums over it, maybe decide I was a demon and sit down and wait for a priest to come help them louse it up. But I stayed with the stream another half-mile, and when I left it I did so by the way of the trees again, proceeding through the branches to another great oak. There I climbed high, to study the land.
Clouds swarmed eastward playing dark games before the sun. Edgy weather, a petulant wind stirring the oak leaves with sultry insistence. A spring storm might be advancing.
The road was nearer than I thought. I saw a red gash less than half a mile to the east. It could only be red clay, where the road approached and crossed a rise of ground. Though the road was empty I heard an obscure and troubling sound that was no part of the forest noises. Turning my head to puzzle at it, I found I was staring down on what must be another section of the same road, startlingly near my oak, hardly fifty feet away, a spot where branches thinned out to reveal the red clay and some gravel. Confirming it, the unstable breeze brought me a whiff of horse-dung. Not fresh — this near part of the road was empty like the other, but I didn’t like it, and clambered to a lower spot where I was better hidden. Whatever the sound might mean it was fairly distant, a dry mutter not resembling either voices or a waterfall.
I cut off an end of my gray loin-rag and tied it around my bead. I don’t mind being red-haired, but it doesn’t help you look like a piece of bark. While I was busied with that, a dot of life appeared on the distant road between me and the uneasy sky.
Even far off, a human being seldom looks like any other animal. In Penn, with the Ramblers, I’ve seen the flapeared apes they call chimps, the chimpanzees of Old Time. I could always tell one of those from a man if I wasn’t drunk or spiteful. The man I saw on the red clay road was too distant for me to be sure of anything but his humanity — that rather arrogant, rather fine human stance by which even a fool can defy the lightning with a hint of magnificence — and his alertness, his observant stillness under the intermittent sun.
10
That dot of man printed against the sky was studying the road. The noise ceased while he paused, then a tiny arm swung up and forward, and the uncertain sound resumed. Men must have used that signal from ancient days, when there’s been good reason not to shout aloud: “Come ahead!”
He was followed at first by a few like himself in brown loin-rags and red-brown shirts, walking with the long stride of men used to extended journeys with light burdens. Advance scouts. The sound strengthened as the first horsemen appeared over the rise.
Feet of a mass of men and horses — having once heard the surge of it as I did that morning you’d never mistake it for anything else, whether the men are marching in rhythm or coming broken-step like the soldiers who followed that mounted detachment. This was no parade. They were coming to defend the city. I saw presently a group of men without spears surrounding a handsome motion of white, blue and gold — our Moha flag.
The advance scouts would not take much time to reach that near section of the road. I drew back all the way behind the tree-trunk, waiting. They were good — to tell of their passage I heard only a faint crunch of gravel. Then came the plop and shuffle of hoofs. I dared peek around the trunk as the cavalry went by; they’d leave it to the scouts and never think of looking upward. Thirty-six riders — a full-strength unit, I happened to know.