"Eh, well," Horn replied at last, with a glance around him, "At least we won't be carrying heavy packs."
That elicited a laugh-a strained one, but it was at least genuine. Xylina felt a little of the tension leave her. Things were bad-but they were not yet dead.
When there was enough light so that it was possible to see effectively, Faro sent the men out to try and find whatever might have been left of their supplies and weapons. That was when they discovered some of the fantastic things the whirlwinds had done. A straw was found driven into the wood of a ruined wagon-frame like a nail. A single wild-bird egg scarcely larger than Xylina’s thumbnail was found balanced on top of one of the toppled palisade-stones. One of the swords was discovered twisted into a bizarre knot-like shape.
Xylina scoured the grass, looking for anything that seemed out of place, for often only a corner of something protruded out from under the mat of rain-flattened grasses. She found scraps of fabric, bits of wood, and a few metal arrowheads and spear points, but that was all. After a few hours, her eyes ached from peering into the grasses, and squinting against too-bright sunlight. She returned to the rest with a pocket full of metal and a few ragged bits of cloth that was not of her conjuration.
When they all gathered again at mid-morning, there was not much good news. Some few of the food supplies had been found: a bag of grain, some journey-bread, and some dried peas; also enough of the weaponry that each of them could be armed after a fashion. The wagons were wrecked and there wasn't a piece larger than a hand anywhere; the livestock were gone beyond even Ware's ability to hunt. Only one of the mules and two of the missing men were ever found dead; as for the rest-Xylina did not care even to hazard a guess.
Horn butchered the poor mule as well as he could with nothing more than his belt-knife, and strung as many ragged strips of meat as he could over conjured fires to smoke-dry. They conferred together over a strange and haphazard meal of soaked journey-bread and roast mule about what, exactly, Xylina could conjure that would be effective as weaponry. She could not produce a sword, of course-but she could manage a pointed rod of metal enough like a spear to make no difference. Finished bows and arrows were impossible, but she discovered through trial and error that she could produce a tapered and flexible stave that Faro could notch, something strong enough to serve as bowstring, and thin dowels that worked well as arrow-shafts. That, together with the arrowheads she had gleaned, gave them each two real arrows-and when Faro sharpened the dowels they, too, served as cruder arrows. Slings, of course, were easy; a length of leather-like substance and a couple of thongs, and every man was armed. There were few stones suitable, but she could conjure with no problems the kind of leaden shot that made a good slinger so effective-all she had to do was concentrate on making small bits of "lead" and the conjured metal appeared in rounded globules. She could still create their shelters and defenses each night, albeit more slowly than before, and the fuel for the fires to warm them and cook their food. Water could be a problem; they only had three waterskins among them, and unless they found water each night, they might run short fairly quickly. Food itself would quickly grow to be a problem unless they could find good hunting on the way; the food they had found and scavenged would not last that long, divided among so many.
But there was no hope of turning back. Not only would that be an admission of defeat, but it might not even be possible at this point. None of the men said anything about giving up-and Xylina had the feeling that they knew as well as she did that the road behind them was as hazardous as that ahead. She did not think they would be able to survive the country of the tentacle-beasts as poorly armed as they were now. Assuming that when they turned back, they actually found that country there! It was entirely possible that the border itself would now reveal an entirely new and deadly realm, for Ware had not expected to find this realm here, and that meant that the boundaries were changing more frequently than he had thought. More than that, Ware knew the country here, and that should help them.
At roughly noon, they set off again, this time afoot. Ware scouted ahead, seemingly indefatigable, covering the ground with a tireless stride that Xylina could not help but envy. She had gotten used to riding; she had thought she was inured to the hardships of this trek, but to her chagrin, she found herself coping with aching legs, and cramps in unexpected places, by the time they made their first halt.
Fortunately for her aching legs, their progress was slowed by the need to hunt. Of the three experienced campaigners, Tron and Jerig were the best with slings, and so they ranged to either side of the rest, hoping to bag something scared up by the passage of the larger group.
By the third halt-at a tiny stream, which gave them all a chance to slake their thirst-the hunters still had come up empty-handed. "You know," Horn said to her at one halt, "if we have to, we can always eat them hoppers. Bugs ain't bad toasted, and there sure are a lot of 'em."
Xylina gave him a sideways look, uncertain if he was trying to make a joke. His expression convinced her he was serious. He was an experienced cook, and he did know the secrets of surviving on campaign, where supplies might be captured or destroyed by the enemy. But that was one trick she had never heard of.
The "hoppers" were thumb-sized insects, shaped like the tiny leaf-hoppers of Mazonia, but much larger. They had been scaring these creatures up all along the trek, dozens of them with every step, and until this moment Xylina had not considered them as a food-source. She probably would not have considered Horn's proposition seriously, except that she knew from personal experience that there were a great many things that one would eat if one became hungry enough. There had been several times when she had made cakes of flour full of weevils, and told herself that if the weevils were eating her flour, she might as well eat them. She had certainly come to no harm from the experience.
The hoppers were convenient, and they seemed easy to catch, but they were very small. It would take a lot of them to make up a meal-and while they seemed easy to catch now, if the group hoped to make a supper of them, it might prove a lot more difficult than it looked to scoop up enough of them. And while they were catching bugs, they would not be making any progress. All things considered, unless they were starting to starve, it would probably take far more time to catch a meal of hoppers than it was worth devoting to catching them.
She wondered briefly if there were any other resources in this grassland that she had overlooked. She was, after all, a child of the city, and unused to scavenging her own food. There did not appear to be any edible grasses here; no seed-heads, at any rate, and she was relatively certain that if Ware knew some of the plants could be eaten, he would say something. Perhaps they should do some experimenting with boiling the roots of the grasses, or trying the stems of larger plants. On the other hand, she had no idea what was poisonous and what was safe.
Besides, the time to gather such things would be when they halted for the night.
Still-Horn's observation proved to her that this was not a hopeless trek into nowhere. The men were thinking- and more importantly, were standing by her. If they were going to desert her, this would have been the time, because they were no longer amidst the dangerous spiders and tentacles. There was always the possibility that one of these foreign tribes would take them in, and they would be free. But they were still here, still standing by the quest.