Claude waded out and dragged the nun onto the bank. Felice rested on hands and knees in the shallows, spewing and coughing. He lifted Amerie’s sodden body in a jackknife bend to empty the lungs of water, then filled them with his own warm air.
Breathe, child, he begged her. Live, daughter.
There was a sound of gagging, a first halting expansion of the chest beneath the soaked and torn starship captain’s uniform. One last kiss of shared breath, and she returned.
Amerie’s eyes opened and she stared wildly at Claude, then at the smiling Felice. A choked sob rose in her throat and she buried her head in the old man’s breast. He had Felice pull the warm Orcadian sweater from his pack and wrapped the nun in it; but when he tried to pick Amerie up and carry her across the bridge she was much too heavy for him. So it was the little athlete who had to assist the nun, while the paleontologist toted his own and Felice’s gear.
Amerie’s pack with its medical supplies was lost, swept far downstream! They had to set her broken arm with the meager first-aid equipment from the individual Survival Units, following steps outlined in a laconic plaque entitled Common Medical Emergencies. The injury was a simple fracture of the left humerus, easily reduced even by amateur medics; but by the time Amerie was treated and sedated, the afternoon was well advanced. Richard convinced Claude and Felice that it would be useless to try to press on farther, regardless of possible pursuit. They went a short distance from the river into a concealing grove of massive oaks. There Richard erected two decamole cabins while Felice went out and shot a big fat roebuck and Claude grubbed nourishing cattail tubers from a boggy spot.
With their stomachs full, cots set on maximum soft, and critter-proof screendoors latched, they fell asleep even before night fell. They never heard the owls and nightingales and tree-frogs singing, nor the fading howls of bear-dogs raging on a cold and futile trail far to the south. They did not see the mist start to rise from the rapids as the stars brightened. And they never saw the glowing grotesqueries of the Firvulag, who came and danced on the opposite bank of the river until the stars paled with the coming of dawn.
The following morning Amerie was feverish and weak. By common consent they dosed her with their limited store of medication, made her comfortable in one hut, and withdrew to the other so that she could sleep and mend. They all stood in need of recuperation, and there seemed little danger that any pursuit party could cross the crag-bordered torrent without their being aware of it. Felice was confident that they had eluded the trackers altogether. “They might even find equipment from Amerie’s pack downstream and decide that we’ve drowned in the river.”
So they slept, lunched on cold venison and algiprote, and then sat in the shade of an ancient oak, sipping small cups of precious instant coffee and trying to decide what to do next.
“I’ve been working on a new plan,” said Felice. “I’ve considered different possibilities and decided that the best place to get another torc would be near Finiah, where there are plenty of Tanu. They might even have a storehouse or a factory for the things. What we have to do is hide out until Amerie is healed, cross the Vosges, then hole up outside the city. We can rustle supplies from caravans or outlying settlements.”
Richard choked on his coffee.
Felice went on serenely, “And then, after we’ve analyzed their defenses and learned more about the actual technology of the torcs, we can work out plans for the strike.”
Richard set his little cup down on a tree root with great care. “Kid, you’ve conned us and bullied us into going along with your plans so far, and I’m not saying you didn’t do a damned good job getting us away from Epone and her stooges. But there is no way you’re gonna force me into a four-man invasion of a whole city full of exotic mind mashers!”
“You’d prefer to hide in the woods until they hunt you down?” she sneered. “They won’t stop searching, you know. And the Tanu will be coming out themselves instead of just sending human Slavics. If we follow my plan, if I get a golden torc, I’ll be a match for any of them!”
“That’s what you say. How do we know you’ll be able to get it up? And what’s in it for us? Do we get to be your loyal spear carriers while you’re playing Madam Commander? No friggerty golden torcs are going to do the rest of us poor normals any good. Sure as shit some of us’d get chopped by these freaks before your private guerrilla war was over, win or lose. You want to know what my plans are, bull-dolly?”
She sipped her drink, eyes hooded.
I’ll tell you!” Richard blustered. “I’m gonna rest up here for another day or two and repair my footgear, and then I’m heading north to the big rivers and the ocean, just like Yosh did. A little luck and I might even meet up with him. When I get to the Atlantic I’m sailing southward along the coast. While you’re doing your bandit-princess routine, I’ll be getting pissed on good wine and bouncing broads in my pirate shack in Bordeaux.”
“And the rest of us?” Claude kept his tone neutral.
“Come with me! Why not? I’ll be marching easy, not breaking my butt climbing to hell and gone over the Vosges. Listen, Claude, you and Amerie stick with me and I’ll help you find some nice peaceful place the Tanu never heard of. You’re kinda old to get mixed up in this crazy kid’s battles. And what life would it be for a nun, for God’s sake? This one kills people for fun.”
Felice said, “You’re wrong, Richard,” and drank coffee.
The old paleontologist turned from one to the other, then shook his head. “I’ve got to think about this. And there’s something else I’ve been meaning to do. If you don’t mind, I’ll just go a little farther into this grove of oak trees and spend some time alone.” He got to his feet, felt briefly in the big pocket of his bush jacket, and walked off.
“Take as long as you like, Claude,” Felice called. “I’ll see to Amerie. And keep a lookout, too.”
“Don’t get lost,” Richard added. Felice muttered an expletive under her breath.
Claude wandered along, automatically noting landmarks as he had done for so many years on freshly tamed planets. An oak with two massively drooping branches like ogre arms. A reddish pinnacle standing out amidst the gray granite. A dry meadow with a maple, one branch turned anomalously golden too early in the season. A little pool dotted with pink water-lilies, with a pair of ordinary mallard ducks swimming lackadaisically about. A spring issuing from the rocks, adorned with lacy ferns and shaded by a magnificent beech.
“How’s this, Gen?” the old man inquired.
He knelt down and held out his palms to the trickle, drank, then laved his forehead and the sunburnt back of his neck. Asperges me, Domine, hyssopo, et mundabor. Lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor.
“Yes, I think this will do very well.”
He took a thin flat stone from the basin of the spring and went to the foot of the beech tree. After carefully removing a pad of moss, he dug a hole, set the carved wooden box into it, and replaced the soil and plants, patting them firm. He marked her resting place with no stone nor cross; those who cared about her knew where her dust lay. When he was finished he went back to the spring for a handful of water to refresh the disturbed moss, then sat down with his back against the tree trunk and closed his eyes.
When he awoke it was late afternoon. Something crouched at the spring and watched him with a wary light-green gaze.
Claude held his breath. It was one of the most beautiful little animals he had ever seen, its graceful and sinuous body not much longer than his hand, with a slender tail adding another twenty centimeters to its length. Its underparts were pale orange and the upper fur tan with subtle black shading rather like a kit fox. The feline face was full of intelligence, mild and unthreatening, for all that it resembled that of a miniaturized cougar.