Blade was quiet for a moment, chewing on her lower lip. All around them, water dripped slowly from the leaves, making the long fall to splash into puddles below, and the air was thick with the perfumes of strange flowers. “Look,” she said, finally. “We didn’t fly all that far before we were brought down. Twenty, maybe thirty leagues at most. We can go back in the direction of our previous campsite. That was defensible; remember, there was a cliff nearby? And remember the river that ran alongside it?”
Nervously, Tad flexed his talons into the loam. New scents rose to his nostrils, of earth and old leaves, dampness and the sharp aroma of a torn fungus. “You have a point.” He thought about her suggestion, mentally trying to figure out how long it would take two injured people to walk the distance that two uninjured people had flown. It isn‘t so much the distance, as what we have to cross to get there. “It might take us as much as four days,” he pointed out. “We don’t have any real way of getting good directions other than the north-needle, and we’re going to be crawling through leagues of this—” He waved his claw at the tangled undergrowth. “We’re going to be carrying packs, we’ll have to guard our backtrail and watch ahead for ambushes, and we’re both injured. All of that will delay us; in fact, we probably ought to assume that we’re going to be creeping through the forest, not hiking through it.”
If we’re going to do this, I want to creep. I want to go from bit of cover to bit of cover; I want to walk so that we leave no sign and little scent. I want to leave traps behind.
“But when we get there—we’ll be at a cliff face, Tad. That means caves, probably at least one waterfall; even if we don’t find the river at first, we can work our way along the cliff until we do find the river. We’ll at least have someting we can put our backs against!” She looked unbelievably tense, and Tad didn’t blame her. Of the two of them, she was the most vulnerable, physically, and the least able to defend herself, knife skill or not.
Not that either of us will be particularly good at it. In terrain like this, I’m at a distinct disadvantage. If anything gets in front of me, I can probably shred it, but at my sides and rear I’m badly vulnerable at close quarters.
If they left this camp, their choice of how to proceed was simple; pack out what they could, or try to live off the land with very little to aid them. Take the chance that they could improvise, or—
Or find out that we can’t. We’re hurt; we are going to need every edge we can get. That means tools, weapons, food, protection.
“The one advantage that we have is that whatever these creatures are, they don’t know us, so they can’t predict us,” she persisted. “If we move now, we may confuse them. They may linger to look over what we left. We aren’t going to lose them unless they lose interest in us, but we may leave them far enough behind that it will take them a while to catch up.”
If only they had some idea of what kind of creature they were up against! The very fact that they would be trying to slip quietly through the forest rather than running might confuse their foes.
Or it might tempt them into an attack. They might read that as an admission of weakness. There was just no way of knowing.
He nodded, grinding his beak a bit. “Meanwhile, if we stay, they can study us at their leisure,” he admitted. “And that makes us easy targets.”
Go or stay? Remain where they were or try to find some place easier to defend?
Either way, they were targets. The only question was whether they made themselves moving targets or entrenched targets.
Aubri and Father always agreed on that; it’s better to be a moving target than a stationary one. “All right, I agree,” he conceded. “Let’s make up two packs and get out of here. You might as well load me down; it isn’t going to make a great deal of difference since I can’t fly anyway.”
She nodded, and wordlessly turned to rummage through the supplies cached in the tent. In a few moments, she handed him a pack to fill.
He joined her in picking through all the supplies they had salvaged. It was obvious what they were going to leave behind; just about everything they had saved. They would have to abandon everything that wasn’t absolutely essential.
Their discards went everywhere, now that there was no point in sheltering them. If their foes did come to rummage through what they left behind, the confusion of belongings might gain them a little more time.
Clothing, personal items, those joined the rejected items; it was easier to decide what to leave than what to take. The piles of discards grew larger, with very few items making it into the packs. The medicine kit had to come along; so did the weapons, even though the pouches of lead shot were heavy. So far, there hadn’t been anything around that Blade could use in the sling instead of lead shot. This was the wrong time of the year for fallen nuts; the soil here wasn’t particularly rocky, and they couldn’t count on a cairn of pebbles turning up at a convenient moment.
The only distance-weapon she could use one-handed was the sling, so the shot had to come, too.
The food had to come with them, and some of the tools, and just enough bedding and canvas to keep them warm and dry at night. All of that cloth was bulky and heavy, but if they got soaked, they could easily die of cold-shock, even with a fire to keep them warm and dry them out. Then again—if they got soaked in another long rainstorm and they were caught without shelter, there would be no way to build a fire to warm them. No, the canvas half-shelter and a blanket apiece had to come along.
They were leaving a great deal for their opponents to look over, and Tad hoped that it would keep them very, very busy. And if only I knew something, anything about “them,” I’d be able to think of a way to keep them even busier.’
Part of their training included this sort of selection process, and they had learned just what was truly essential to survive. It didn’t take long before they had two packs put together, one large, and one small. Blade would carry two spears and use them as walking sticks; that way she would have both aid and weapon in one. It had taken some ingenuity to rig her pack so that it would stay on with a minimum of pain—there couldn’t have been a worse injury than a broken collarbone when it came to carrying a pack. Much of the weight was going to fall on her hips, now, and would probably cause bruises and abrasions. Both Tad and Blade had come to accept that pain was going to be an omnipresent part of their immediate future, and their concern regarding it was more a case of figuring out ways to lessen its immediate impact, since eliminating it was impossible, “endure now, heal later” was the philosophy that would serve them best.
The morning fog was just beginning to lift when they took a bearing with the north-needle and headed into the west. Blade led in more open areas. She was small—they both had the feeling that if an attack came, it would come from the rear. He was better suited to bearing the brunt of an attack from the front than she, and in open areas he could turn around quickly to help Blade. In close quarters, he led, with Blade guarding his tail. They were still vulnerable from the sides, but it was better than a completely unguarded rear. They had discussed booby-trapping the camp, but decided against it. If their foes were kept nicely busy with what remained, that was good, but if one of their number was hurt or killed by a booby-trap, it might make them angry and send them hot on the trail, after revenge. Also, discovery of one trap might make whatever it was give up on a search of the camp entirely and go straight into tracking them, which would lose them valuable distance.