She drew a circle in the sandy dirt near her foot, making it as perfect as she could, using a thorny twig to draw it with. That was a world, or a self, or God, that circle, you could call it anything. Nothing else in the wilderness could think of a circle like that —she thought of the delicate gold ring around the compass glass. Because she was human, she had the mind and eyes and skillful hand to imagine the idea of a circle and to draw the idea. But any drop of water falling from a leaf into a pool or rain puddle could make a circle, a more perfect one, fleeting outward from the center, and if there were no boundary to the water the circle would fleet outward forever, fainter and fainter, forever larger. She could not do that, which any drop of water could do. Inside her circle what was there? Grains of sand, dust, a few tiny pebbles, a half-buried thorn, Andre’s tired face, the sound of Southwind’s voice, Sasha’s eyes which were like Lev’s eyes, the ache of her own shoulders where the pack straps pulled, and her fear. The circle could not keep out the fear. And the hand erased the circle, smoothing out the sand, leaving it as it had always been and would always be after they had gone on.
“At first I felt that I was leaving Timmo behind,” Southwind said, as she studied the worst blister on her left foot. “When we left the house. He and I built it … you know. I felt as if I was walking away and finally leaving him forever, leaving him behind. But now it doesn’t seem that way. It was out here he died, in the wilderness. Not here, I know; way back up north there. But I don’t feel that he’s so terribly far away as I did all autumn living in our house, it’s almost as if I’d come out to join him. Not dying, I don’t mean that. It’s just that there I only thought about his death, and here, while we’re walking, all the time, I think about him alive. As if he was with me now.”
They had camped in a fold of the land just under the red hills, beside a lively, rocky stream. They had built their fires, cooked, and eaten; many were already stretched out in their blankets to sleep. It was not dark yet, but so cold that if you weren’t moving about you must either huddle to the fire or wrap up and sleep. The first five nights of the journey they had not built fires, for fear of pursuers, and those had been miserable nights; Luz had never known such a pure delight as she had felt at their first campfire, back in a great tree-ring on the south slope of the badlands, and every night that pleasure came again, the utter luxury of hot food, of warmth. The three families she and Southwind camped and cooked with were settling down for the night; the youngest child—the youngest of the whole migration, a boy of eleven—was curled up like a pouchbat in his blanket already, fast asleep. Luz tended the fire, while Southwind tended her blisters. Up and down the riverbank were seven other fires, the farthest no more than a candle flame in the blue-gray dusk, a spot of hazy, trembling gold. The noise of the stream covered any sound of voices round the other fires.
“I’ll get some more brushwood,” Luz said. She was not avoiding an answer to what Southwind had said. No answer was needed. Southwind was gentle and complete; she gave and spoke, expecting no return; in all the world there could be no companion less demanding, or more encouraging.
They had done a good day’s walk, twenty-seven kilometers by Martin’s estimate; they had got out of that drab nightmare labyrinth of scrub; they had had a hot dinner, the fire was hot, and it was not raining. Even the ache in Luz’s shoulders was pleasant (because the pack was not pulling on them) when she stood up. It was these times at the day’s end, by the fire, that counterweighed the long dreary hungry afternoons of walking and walking and walking and trying to ease the cut of the pack straps on her shoulders, and the hours in the mud and rain when there seemed to be no reason at all to go on, and the worst hours, in the black dark of the night, when she woke always from the same terrible dream: that there was a circle of some things, not people, standing around their camp, just out of sight, not visible in the darkness, but watching.
“This one’s better,” Southwind said when Luz came back with an armload of wood from the thickets up the slope, “but the one on my heel isn’t. You know, all today I’ve been feeling that we aren’t being followed.”
“I don’t think we ever were,” Luz said, building up the fire. “I never did think they’d really care, even if they knew. They don’t want to think about the wilderness, in the City. They want to pretend it isn’t there.”
“I hope so. I hated feeling that we were running. Being explorers is a much braver feeling.”
Luz got the fire settled to burning low but warm, and squatted by it simply soaking the heat up for some while.
“I miss Vera,” she said. Her throat was dry with the dust of walking, and she did not use her voice often these days; it sounded dry and harsh to her, like her father’s voice.
“She’ll come with the second group,” Southwind said with comfortable certainty, winding a cloth strip around her pretty, battered foot, and tying it off firmly at the ankle. “Ah, that feels better. I’m going to wrap my feet tomorrow like Holdfast does. It’ll be warmer, too.”
“If it just won’t rain.”
“It won’t rain tonight.” The Shantih people were much weather-wiser than Luz. They had not lived so much within doors as she, they knew what the wind meant, even here, where the winds were different.
“It might tomorrow,” Southwind added, beginning to wriggle into her blanket-bag, her voice already sounding small and warm.
“Tomorrow we’ll be up in the hills,” Luz said. She looked up, to the east, but the near slope of the stream valley and the blue-gray dusk hid that rocky skyline. The clouds had thinned; a star shone out for a while high in the east, small and misty, then vanished as the unseen clouds rejoined. Luz watched for it to reappear, but it did not. She felt foolishly disappointed. The sky was dark now, the ground was dark. No light anywhere, except the eight gold flecks, their campfires, a tiny constellation in the night. And far off there, days behind them in the west, thousands and thousands of steps behind them, behind the scrubland and the badland and the hills and the valleys and the streams, beside the great river running to the sea, a few more lights: the City and the Town, a tiny huddle of yellow-lit windows. The river dark, running in darkness. And no light on the sea.
She reset a log to smolder more slowly, and banked the ashes against it. She found her sleeping bag and wriggled down into it, next to Southwind. She wanted to talk, now. Southwind had seldom spoken much of Timmo. She wanted to hear her talk about him, and about Lev; she wanted for the first time to speak about Lev herself. There was too much silence here. Things would get lost in the silence. One should speak. And Southwind would understand. She too had lost her luck, and known death, and gone on.
Luz said her name softly, but the warm blanket-bundle next to her did not stir. Southwind was asleep.
Luz settled down cautiously, getting herself comfortable. The river beach, though stony, was a better bed than last night’s in the thorny scrubland. But her body was so tired that it felt heavy, unwieldy, hard; her chest was hard and tight. She closed her eyes. At once she saw the hall of Casa Falco, long and serene, the silver light reflected from the Bay filling the windows; and her father standing there, erect, alert, self-contained, as he always stood. But he was standing there doing nothing, which was not like him. Michael and Teresa were off in the doorway, whispering together. She felt a curious resentment toward them. Her father stood with his back to them, as if he did not know they were there, or as if he knew it, but was afraid of them. He raised his arms in a strange way. She saw his face for a moment. He was crying. She could not breathe, she tried to draw a long breath but could not; it caught; because she was crying—deep shaking sobs from which she could scarcely gasp a breath before the next came. Racked with sobs, lying shaken and tormented on the ground in the enormous night, she wept for the dead, for the lost. Not fear now, but grief, the grief past enduring, that endures.