<Mountains,> Guil thought, then, slipping into a moment of weakness, <mountains clean with snow in the winter, game running on the slopes. Mountains above the MacFarlane. Kantung Peak.>
Then, abruptly: <Aby lying dead on the rocks. Aby and Moon together, > because that ugly image leapt into his mind whenever it found the chance.
He stopped it. He thought of water. He thought of bubbles on the surface.
<Aby giving sweets,> Burn recalled pleasantly. <Aby smiling. Wind blowing red hair, blowing red leaves in the woods. Aby standing on the hillside. Warm thinking. Moon wanting sweets from Aby’s pockets.>
Guil resisted the imaging at first. But he did recall that day with pleasure. He remembered Aby laughing, playing keepaway with Moon and Burn.
<Dodging on the moonlit hillside. Moon darting this way and that for pockets.>
A lump arrived in his throat.
<Guil and Aby,> Burn imaged, <holding hands. Taste of honey, smell of dew and grass and Moon and Aby and Guil. Moon and Burn mating. Guil and Aby mating, sweet smells, good feelings every where.>
The whole moonlit moment rebuilt itself, lived vividly and faded into the present sun and chill breeze, as if it were the same day.
Wind and grass, sun on autumn colors. On the left hand the mountains loomed up, the Firgeberg, the backbone of the continent. The wind came down from the foothills with a chill that shivered through the grass, cold and clean enough to wipe away the stink and madness of Shamesey camp.
<Hunting,> Burn sent him. <Heart beating quick, quick feet moving ahead of us, chasing willy-wisps through the brush. Delicious.>
Burn had no long memory for distress. Troubles came and they went. Horses died. Horses were born. As long as it wasn’t Burn, Burn didn’t stay concerned.
<Guil cooking nice meat, fat crackling in the flames, warmth in the dark.>
One more sunrise. One more sunny afternoon on the hills. A rationed number of them.
But Burn also had no memory for money. Money ran counter to Burn’s sense of the world, and Burn forgot where bacon came from. Burn’s rider was supposed to have it, that was all.
<Guil laying down shiny coins on counter. Man taking coins, giving bacon. Anveney streets.>
<Cattle.>
<Pigs,> Guil sent.
<Bacon,> Burn thought, much more cheerfully. Burn imaged the slow rolling of hills northward.
And they argued for a while about the connections of Anveney town, banks (a concept Burn refused to deal with, as a repository for things worth bacon: naturally one would immediately get what was worth something, and not leave it anywhere) and humans (not high in Burn’s thinking right now, since humans had lately had rifles shooting at them). Burn was vastly put out by humans and would be put out so long as Guil’s leg hurt, because it made Burn’s leg hurt. Almost. Well, close enough.
When they rode alone Guil could sink into trains of almost-thought and exist in Burn’s realm of sun-on-back, humans-at-distance, food-the-day’s-necessity and sex-on-opportunity. Sometimes in the high hills you ran into a partnership like that, one where you couldn’t talk to the man except through the horse; and Guil supposed in the long run they were happy enough—never work, never come into a town, they’d barter sometimes, food and skins for clothes or a knife. Usually when you met them, the human half wanted to trade, the horse was skittish—and the rest of the time you just got a spooky feeling in the brush, the intimation of something that might have been there for a moment, might have looked you over in a slightly predatory or slightly fearful way… wild things did that sometimes, before they ran.
He was glad enough to sink into that kind of nowhere at least for the day. The leg ached when he didn’t. The stomach complained it was empty when he didn’t, and he didn’t care he was hungry, really—he hadn’t energy left to care.
But somewhere toward evening Burn found the stream that crossed the road well north of Shamesey, a smallish stream—Guil was relatively sure it was the same one—cold in this season; and Burn wanted to cool his legs and drink and—definitely—find something to eat.
So Guil sat down there and tended the wound he had gotten, the ugly rip that by now was somewhat scabbed and not wholly clean. He took off the breeches and sat on the bank, dipping up water to wash the wound and numb the pain, which was so miserable once he’d worked the pants off that Burn took himself from the vicinity, went a distance down the stream and slammed his three-toed foot down on something that wriggled.
Burn ate it then, alternately washing it in the stream. It was not particularly nice; it was not the sort of thing Burn saved for cooking, and Burn had the grace to keep his tidbit out of range of a queasy stomach to eat it.
“I don’t suppose you could catch a fish,” Guil said aloud, and thought <fish.>
Burn snorted, and wandered off along the stream, nosing into this and that, sampling the water. Burn came back to him with, <mudcrawler, mossy big shell.>
He wasn’t that desperate.
< Plate-fungus.>
No.
<Scraggy pucker-berries.>
He was disgusted. <Guil riding,> he imaged, and got up to put his pants on. Burn came back to him, took him up again, uncommonly patient still with this carrying business.
<Valley,> Burn imaged, having settled on that goal, imaging a good winter and enough to eat. <Mountain meadows. Meandering stream.>
He dreamed in that still sunlit but nippish ride, of the valley where he had been a boy, in the first spring he remembered. He wondered where it was, and whether it was what he remembered. He thought of it, in bad times.
And perhaps he did gloss it a bit, being light-headed with pain and hunger, with the meadows spangled with starflowers and the delirious yellow spikes of mollyfingers, in green lush grass; but that was the way he liked to remember it—which was probably, he’d long said to himself, why he’d never found it.
Burn took up his dream readily enough, embellished it with the restless longings of his own kind: a valley, a far, far different place from the safe, smoky dens of Shamesey hostels, where riders and horses lived in such muddy, smelly, close quarters.
A clean winter, a wide winter, with all the white valley to hunt. Tarmin. Then this place.
“Promise,” Guil said. “I promise.”
Burn twitched his ears back and forth.
“Don’t know ‘promise,’ do you? Probably it’s good you don’t.”
<“You don’t,”> echoed back to him. Burn could image sounds he didn’t know, so far as his horsey brain could remember them. Or cared to remember them. Then a visual image. <Mollyfingers and green grass.>
Mollyfingers didn’t grow in the lowlands. They wouldn’t grow where factories sent up smoke, or in places like Anveney, where men ripped copper and lead out of the earth and made beautiful, poisoned pools, bright blue and milky white.
<Cattle,> Burn thought, sulking, and then again, quite cheerfully, the sunlight in his thoughts belying the evening—<mollyfingers and clean new grass.>
Twilight was getting scarily deep scarily fast in the folds of the hills, with the sun already over the mountain rim.
Maybe the riders Cloud had smelled behind them had stopped for camp by now. Danny hoped that the Westmans had.
They’d come back to the road finally. He’d found their tracks where the dust was thick, and where a horse’s toe had scored the occasional rock. He could track at least that welclass="underline" from an old rider on his one long trip he’d picked up enough of the art at least to read whether a horse or a man was running or walking, how loaded his quarry was, and—if a human was involved—how tall that human was and maybe what the gender was.