“That’s all I have of Judaism, Adam. A few prayers for special occasions, poorly remembered. I’ve met a number of Jews in my career and to some degree refreshed my understanding of the religion’s rites and doctrines. But I can’t claim to be either knowledgeable or observant.”
“Then why do you light the candles and say the prayers?”
“It honors my parents, and their parents before them, and so on.”
“Is that enough to make a man a Jew?”
“In my case it is. I’m sure the Dominion would say so.”
“But you disguise yourself very successfully,” I said, meaning to compliment him.
“Thank you,” he said, somewhat acidly, adding, “We’ll all three have to disguise ourselves very soon. Ultimately I mean to get us aboard a train bound for the east. But we can’t travel among respectable people—the news of Julian’s disappearance will have been disseminated among that class. We’ll have to present ourselves as landless. You in particular, Julian, will have to suppress your manners and vocabulary, and you, Adam,” and here he cocked his eye at me with an earnestness I found disquieting, “you’ll have to forgo some of the gentility of the leasing class, if we’re not to be discovered.”
I told him I had met many examples of indentured or transient laborers through my father’s activities in the Church of Signs. I knew how to say “don’t” for “doesn’t,” and how to spit, should the necessity arise, and how to swear, though I didn’t like to.
“Even so,” Sam instructed me, “the men and women who follow your father’s faith have already distinguished themselves from the lowest types by their urge to attend a church. In a few days we’ll be surrounded by thieves, fugitives, adulterers, and worse, and not one of them interested in repentance. I can make you look low-born easily enough, but it will take some study before you can act and speak the part. Until then my urgent advice is to keep your mouths shut whenever possible—both of you.”
As if to set a tutelary example, he lapsed into a brooding silence.
In any case we were too exhausted for further talk; and despite the crude circumstances, the keening of the wind, the thinness of the old Army blanket Sam had given me, and the daunting prospects before us, I was asleep before very long.
* * *
In the morning Sam ordered Julian and me to scout the east-west road from a prudent distance and alert him if we saw any military traffic there.
Our horses would have made us conspicuous, so we left them behind and hiked to the verge of the main road, where we concealed ourselves behind hummocks of snow. We had put on as many layers of clothing as we could get our hands on, and taken all the cold-weather precautions we had learned from Sam and gleaned from the military romances of Mr. Charles Curtis Easton. None of it was especially effective, however, so we spent much of the afternoon stomping our feet and breathing into our hands. The snowfall had ended and the wind had passed, but the temperature hovered near the freezing point, causing a sort of wraithy mist to rise from the landscape, and making everything chill and drear.
Late in the afternoon we heard a group of cavalry moving through the fog. Quickly we hid ourselves. Peeping through an embrasure in the mounded snow, I counted five men of the Athabaska Reserve coming down the road. They were the usual back-country soldiers, with the exception of the man who rode at the head of the troop. That man was a long-haired veteran of stern demeanor. His uniform was in impeccable order, but he rode at a curious angle; which was explained when I saw that he had been strapped to the saddle by an arrangement of belts, on account of the fact that he was missing his right leg. He was, in other words, a different kind of Reservist, one whose inventory of bodily parts had been whittled by the war but whose military skill and professional instincts remained fully intact.
When he came abreast of our position he reined up and turned his head this way and that, seeming almost to scent the air. Julian kept utterly still, while I resisted an impulse to flee with all the speed in my legs. During this interval I was scarcely able to breathe, though my heart raced like a mouse in a tithe-box, and the silence was broken only by the wheezing of the horses and the creak of leather saddles.
Then one of the Reservists cleared his throat, and another pronounced some witticism, which caused a third to laugh; and the one-legged man sighed as if in resignation, and spurred his horse, and the cavalrymen rode on.
* * *
We hurried back to deliver our intelligence to Sam.
Sam, as a result of his past service in the Army of the Californias , was comfortable in the company of military men, and he had made the acquaintance of several Reservists during their visits to Williams Ford and his travels to Connaught. When Julian described the man who led the small company we had seen, Sam shook his head in dismay. “That must be One-Leg Willy Bass,” he said. “An excellent tracker. But your report’s incomplete, Julian. Finish it, please.”
I didn’t know what he meant. Julian had described the cavalry detachment in minute detail, I thought, very nearly to brand of polish Mr. Willy Bass used on his pommel, and I couldn’t imagine what he had left out. Julian, too, seemed nonplused, until the critical datum came to mind. Then he smiled.
“West,” he said.
“In full, please, Julian?”
“The detachment was traveling from the east to the west.”
“Good. Now draw a conclusion from that.”
“Well… since they must have ridden out of Williams Ford in the first place, I guess they were returning home.”
“Yes. I know One-Leg Willy well enough that I doubt he’s finished with us. Most of his virtue as a tracker is in his obstinacy—the rest is guile. But if he’s ranged to the east of us and turned back, he must not have our scent exactly. I calculate this would be a good time for us to make for the railroad.”
I ventured to ask more exactly where we were headed. Sam said, “A coaling station called Bad Jump. It has a poor reputation, and the businesses that operate there aren’t the kind that keep honest ledgers. But that suits our purposes entirely.”
* * *
Bad Jump may have been our likeliest destination, but it was nowhere close, and we had to ride all that day and through the night nearly without rest. That was hard on us, and even harder on the horses. But the animals weren’t our main concern, Sam said; in Bad Jump we would have to sell them, in any case, or rid ourselves of them some other way. By this time I had become almost affectionate toward Rapture, who hadn’t attempted to kick me even once, and I was reluctant to abandon him. I couldn’t argue with Sam’s logic, however, for horses are cumbersome baggage on a train, and the quality of the animals (Sam’s and Julian’s, at least) would instantly incriminate them as Estate horses.
We rode for three days and “camped rough” three nights. The end of December was raw and cold, and I couldn’t sleep for shivering, even in the ingenious shelters Sam contrived for us along the route. Because of the clear skies our fires would have been easy to detect, and Sam was quick to quench them. He had considerable respect for the tracking skill of One-Leg Willy Bass, and often scanned the horizon behind us; and his nervousness spurred us to a greater exertion, in so far as we were capable of it.
Early on one of those cold mornings, long before dawn, I crawled out from our makeshift tent under a sky in which the Aurora Borealis burned and trembled with unusual vividness and clarity. Meaning only to attend to a call of nature, I found myself staring upward. The air was as clear as freshwater ice, and the shifting lights in the zenith looked to my weary eyes like the green-shaded alleys, gilded walls, and glacial parapets of some vast Celestial City.