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And what had been her reward? Death, by an arrow meant for him.
He trudged along in the thin shadow of the gully, trying to keep heading
south while staying out of the direct sun.
Looking back, he could see dark smoke circling into the sky, a sign that
the Whites had fired the old mine buildings. That would give him more time. He
shook his head. More time for what?
The Whites wouldn t chase him any farther. Not without a road, or any
possible water for a score of lancers and their mounts. And especially because
they probably doubted that he could survive the Stone Hills.
Justen s eyes flicked from stone to stone along the dry depression.
Everything looked shriveled, even the cacti, and the only sounds were those of
his raspy breathing and his feet crunching on the hard and sandy soil.
The first hill was gentle enough, but the sunlight on the far side struck
him like a firebolt. He squinted out at the dryness and the gray stone before
him. Somewhere to the south lay Naclos, somewhere beyond the hills-as if he
could ever get there with only a half-full water bottle and no real skills for
enduring in a stone desert.
One thing was clear, very clear. He couldn t travel during the heat of the
day. He needed a cool spot where he could rest. His eyes darted down the
hillside, looking for something sheltered, and hopefully uninhabited by
anything that would regard him as dinner.
From what little he knew, none of the bigger mountain cats lived in the
hotter regions, and the killer lizards needed more water than the Stone Hills
provided. But snakes and spike rats could be dangerous enough.
He took the slope one easy step at a time, squinting against the light,
until he reached another low point between what seemed endless hills. Instead
of climbing yet another rise, he followed the depression to the east, toward
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the westernmost spur of the Westhorns-well beyond his vision. But the Stone
Hills widened the farther south they flowed.
He trudged for nearly a kay until he found a large, boulder with two
grayish lumps tucked under the eastern side. Each wrinkled lump was the size
of a small bucket and bore hard brown spines. Justen nodded and looked at the
overhang provided by the boulder. Then he took out the blade he had lugged
across Sarronnyn and poked around, trying to scrape away the loose sand and to
see what else might be in the cool shade. A reddish insect scuttled out, and
Justen stamped on it and scuffed it away into the full sunlight. He scraped
some more, down to a mixture of hard red clay and sandstone. Nothing else
appeared. He unrolled the blanket and used some rocks to hold one edge of it
in place on the rim of the boulder, forming a rough awning.
After that, he studied one of the gray cacti. Finally, he used the long
blade to cut a slice from one side. A sticky substance clung to the blade.
Sitting down under the boulder and behind his blanket awning, he took a
deep breath and studied the slice of cactus, first with his eyes and then with
his order-senses.
The sticky, saplike substance held water, and his senses indicated that he
could probably lick or eat the gooey stuff. He touched his tongue to the grey
pulp.
 Oooo&  The pulp was more tart than an unripe pearapple, and more bitter
than fresh-harvested brown seaweed. Justen took a tiny nibble and sat down to
wait and see how his empty stomach reacted.
If he were to get across the Stone Hills, he was going to need more water
and more food, and there was no one out here to bring it to him.
He half-dozed, half-dreamed, until he could feel the air begin to turn
cooler. Then he slipped out from his awning, to realize that the sun had
almost set, with an orange glow coming from the west. The air was still warmer
than in Nylan in mid-summer, if far cooler than it had been at midday.
He looked at the cactus, then sliced off a larger chunk this time, forcing
himself to take a mouthful. It tasted like sawdust mixed with rotten seaweed,
but he gagged perhaps half of the bite down. He decided not to eat more for
the moment and began to roll up the blanket.
A faint chittering began to echo along the depression, indicating that at
least some insects existed. With a small swallow from the almost depleted
water bottle, Justen began to walk southward again, trying to avoid climbing
when possible, and looking for anything that might resemble food or water.
He saw several of the gray cacti, but decided against trying any more until
his stomach decided whether they were as edible as his senses insisted they
were.
A brown-gray rodent skittered from a crevice in a rock, then dropped back
out of sight as Justen s boots crunched in the sand. The slightest hint of air
brushed across his still sun-blistered face, and he took a deeper breath.
Maybe&
LXIII
& and maybe not.
Justen tried to move, knowing that the heat of yet another day had nearly
passed, but his eyes would not open. His fingers explored the puffiness, and
he gently worked the gunk away. Three days of eating various types of cactus
hadn t killed him, but his face was bloated, and he felt dizzy most of the
time.
He d hoped to follow the dry streambed until he could sense water under the
sand, but the water was either not there or too deep to sense. As one eye and
then the other opened under swollen eyelids in the light of late afternoon, he
tried to moisten his lips, but both tongue and lips were. dry. There just
wasn t enough water, and he d had to tighten his belt so much that his
trousers would have flapped loosely around his waist and legs had there been
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any real wind.
His back was sore, and he didn t want to think about the blisters on his
feet, or on his face. Instead, he rolled forward onto his knees and managed to
rise. He rattled the water bottle-still empty-then replaced the blade and
scabbard on his belt. The blade was useful for cutting the cactus sections to
begin with because with it, he could avoid the long thorns, but both his knife
and blade had acquired sticky edges that no amount of wiping seemed able to
remove.
He rolled the blanket as tightly as he could and strapped it into place,
then started downstream, or at least downhill. The curves in the sand
indicated that at one time there had been water in the dry streambed. Besides,
downstream was roughly southward, roughly toward Naclos, although Justen could
see no end to the stony slopes and valleys.
His eyes opened more as he walked, and he watched for the type of cactus
that was greener rather than gray, the one that had more water and was, of
course, rarer. But neither green cactus nor obvious stream or pothole appeared
in the ever-dimming nightfall.
He kept trudging, trying every so often to find some sense of water, some
hint that the Stone Hills were not so dry as he had heard they were. By now,
he could identify the rustle of the spike rats, and the hiss-click of the red
insects with the nasty-looking tails. Even a spike rat would be tasty, but the
rodents never got close enough for either his blade or a stone.
The dry sand was everywhere-in his boots, in his festering blisters, in his
ears-and where it didn t itch, it burned. He stopped to slice a corner off of
a gray cactus, the only one he could find, with barely any moisture in the
pulp. He chewed as he walked on under the stars.
He finally slumped against a boulder in the middle of the river that
probably hadn t held water since before the founding of Recluce and let his [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]