On the Oceans of Eternity (16 page)

“I must be; caught you, didn’t I?” he said, laughing down at her face. Some of the things she said sounded a bit funny in English, but he’d learned to translate the sense of the words. “I love you too, honey. How’s Jared?”

“Fed, changed, and sleeping,” she said. “I think he may be starting to cut another tooth, poor thing.” She turned to Sue: “Sister!”

That was a direct translation of what a second wife called the first, among the Cloud Shadow People fifteen hundred miles to the east, accompanied by an enthusiastic embrace and kiss—most grown men in Spring Indigo’s tribe had more than one wife, because so many young men died early, hunting or in raids. Some things just worked out for the best, if you had luck. He seemed to have the
keuthes
where women were concerned, thank God.

Absolutely no way I was going to leave Indigo back there, with my kid.
The expedition had rescued her people in the middle of a last, lost battle with enemies out to destroy them, and one of the Islanders had been injured badly enough that they decided to winter there. The Cloud Shadow tribe had a lot of amiable characteristics, one of which was that they really did believe in gratitude. The outsiders had spent the fall and winter and early spring with them, teaching much and learning a great deal, too; two of the Islanders had settled down with them for good—keeping a third of the horse-herd, among other things. Sometimes he wondered what would come of that, and of the other things Henry Morris and Dekkomonsu would show them.

They’re good people, Indigo’s folk,
he thought; he’d considered staying himself. There were worse lives than being a hunter of the Cloud Shadow tribe. They were critically short of adult males, after their losing war, and they would have been overjoyed to make him their leader.

Yeah, I considered it for about fifteen minutes, until I finished listing all the reasons not to do it. First, no beer, ever again,
he thought.
Or hot showers, and
the
thought of never reading another book
... Wilderness travel was great, if you could take some time out now and then.
But it’s
damned
good luck Indigo and Sue hit it off so well.
A small party in the wilderness
had
to stick together. When they got back to the Island ... well, they’d see. The arrangement was unconventional, true, but his people were pretty good at minding their own damn business, most of them.

Spring Indigo broke away and shoveled dirt over the last fire, then brought him and Sue their belated breakfast, cakes of fresh acorn bread and mountain trout grilled over the fire on a framework of green sticks, with a slab of bark for a plate. He squatted on his hams and ate, considering the day to come. Chuckling a little as his son Jared woke on his rabbitskin blanket—his diaper was more of the same, stuffed with soft moss—pulled himself erect, tottered two experimental steps, fell on his belly, and made a four-legged beeline for Perks.

“Perks!” It came out sounding more like
Pewks;
the boy was still having trouble with “r.” “Perks!”

It was amazing what the great scarred mankiller thug of a dog would put up with, including yanks on his fur and tail and small chubby fingers poked in his ears. With no more than a look of pained resignation, or sometimes pinning the boy down with a paw and licking his face. He didn’t even get up and walk away unless it got unbearable. Not at all the way he acted with adult humans who took liberties.

“Come on,
kwas’yain-daz,
strong little warrior,” Spring Indigo said, scooping the toddler up. Young Jared screwed up his year-old face and reached back toward the dog. “Ai-a, this child thinks he is a puppy, that Perks is his uncle! When his time comes to be a man, he will dream wolf-dreams and travel the Other Country on four legs. His spirit animal will be the Wolf.”

“He could do worse,” Giernas said.

“Dada! Dada! Fly!”

The infant scowl changed to a smile, accompanied by babbling sounds that were almost words, in three languages, and he reached for his father mstead of the dog. Mixed in were real words, also in three languages, of which his father spoke only one; they’d made a campfire game of keeping track of how many. The latest tally had thirty-two in English learned from the rangers, four in Sue’s occasional Cantonese, and twenty-one in Cloud Shadow dialect. Giernas took the child, snorting when small fingers grabbed at his nose and beard, and whirled him around to cries of
fly! fly!
He fluttered his lips against the bare pale-amber skin of the boy’s stomach and then handed him back, wiggling and squealing. Spring Indigo efficiently transferred him to a sling across her back, and he yawned and went to sleep with a sudden limp finality, his cheek pressed against the back of her neck, utterly relaxed in the warm comfort of contact with his mother’s back.

“He can ride in the horse-basket later.”

Giernas nodded.
Hmm. We ought to make the next settlement by sundown.
He splashed his face and hands with water from the stream and dried them on grass, took up his rifle, and walked to the head of the column.
With the elk meat for a gift.

Most of the bands hereabout were hospitable and friendly, but an excuse for a barbeque never hurt, in his experience. They could lie up there for a couple of days, fix their gear and trade for some more acorn-flour, and then another week ought to bring them down into the lowlands and nearly to the coast. If he’d calculated rightly, there ought to be an Islander ship down on the coast of Peru trading for cotton and saltpeter about now; if the radio hadn’t gone on the fritz, they could have called—but it would check in at San Francisco Bay anyway. Once a year in spring, starting last year and continuing for four more, if there was no word. His eyes went to the packhorses. One of them carried that equipment; there might be usable parts, irreplaceable pre-Event stuff, so they had to lug it along. Others bore carefully prepared hide sacks, ready to be filled by panning the foothill streams near what the pre-Event maps called Sutter’s Mill. He didn’t intend to be greedy; just four ... or five or six ... or maybe a dozen ... horseloads of two hundred pounds each. Enough to pay for the expedition, the way he’d promised the chief, and enough to give everyone who returned a good solid grubstake; that had been attractive before, and doubly so now that he wasn’t a bachelor anymore.

The doing, though, the doing, that was the thing....

The things we’ve seen and learned. My journal, Jaditwara’s sketches, Sue’s botanical stuff, the plants and animal specimens—
He’d stood in one place on a knoll and rough-counted ten million buffalo going by, once. A single passenger-pigeon flock of a million and a half, crossing the Ohio ...

The fourth member of the expedition was sitting cross-legged and leaning against a tree, sketching with charcoal on a flat piece of white pinewood. Their local guide, Tidtaway, stood a little way away from her, posing.

At least we actually know he’s called Tidtaway now.
Since he’d been visiting them for months in their winter camp and traveling with them for weeks. The name probably translated as something like “Quick Tongue.”

Half the time they couldn’t be sure if what a local said when he tapped his chest was really a name, or meant something like “That’s me,” or “I am your guide,” or “Hi, and who are you?” or “Wow! Funny-looking foreigners sitting on weird deerlike creatures!”

Or a phrase might be the name of his tribe or clan or whatever they had ... just as the “names” of local features might mean “that’s a lake” or “why are you pointing at the mountain?” It was
frustrating,
not being able to stay in one spot long enough to get past gestures, grunts, and a few elementary words. But there were so
many
languages here, sometimes changing from one little band to the next, particularly up in the mountains; they’d barely got to an elementary-conversation level with Tidtaway. The ranger thought that the guide’s tongue might be ancestral to the Penutian family of languages, but he couldn’t be sure; the sources on the Island had been frustratingly general, and he himself was no scholar. He wished it had been practical to bring one of the pre-Event tape recorders along, so that students back on the Island could hear the actual sounds.

The Indian was a short dark man, muscular and strong, with an engaging smile showing a gap in his white teeth. Giernas suspected it was something of a salesman’s smile; certainly Tidtaway had been trying to bargain with the strangers from the moment they arrived, and hadn’t stopped since they decided to winter near his band last fall.

Jaditwara of the Teluko lineage of the
Fiernan Bohulugi
finished the drawing and shook back her long yellow mane, slipping on a beaded headband she’d gotten in trade for another drawing six months before, and picking up her rifle. Giernas chuckled silently to himself; among other things, the guide had tried to buy Jaditwara with three strings of oyster-shell beads, a volcanic-glass pendant, and a bundle of wolverine pelts. Now he exclaimed in wonder at the drawing, wrapped it carefully between two pieces of bark secured with thongs, and added it to his bedroll—a large woven mat that also served as a poncho or cloak at need, rolled into a tube with a bearskin lashed around it. The lashings also held one of the grooved throwing-sticks with a hook at the end the Aztecs had called—would have called—an atlatl, and four feathered darts with wickedly sharp obsidian points that must have come from far away in trade. For the rest he wore sandals, a breechclout with panels falling fore and aft, and a belt that carried a steel trade knife and a stone-headed hatchet; his hair fell to the shoulders, confined by a headband sewn with plaques of bone.

“Let’s go,” Giernas said.

Tidtaway picked up a quiver of arrows and a short recurve bow; that had been a major part of his pay, that and showing him how to make and repair and use it. He trotted up to take point with the Islander leader, making a respectful circuit around Perks, who didn’t like him. Eddie fell back to walk rearguard; Jaditwara led the horses, all traveling single file. After the first mile or so Spring Indigo judged Jared asleep enough and transferred him to a fur-lined wicker basket on one of the pack saddles. It was shaped like a recliner version of a child’s car safety seat, complete with leather crossbelts; versions of it had held the boy for better than two thousand miles of travel. She shrugged into a haversack arrangement that put another openmouthed basket on her back and ranged alongside the pathway with a digging-stick, stopping now and then to collect a handful of clover or bulbs, or early flowers gone to seed, and toss them over her shoulder. When she saw something unfamiliar she’d call Sue over, and the handy little
Field Guide to Western Plants
would come out. Once or twice what they saw wasn’t listed at all, and a specimen would be carefully transferred to the drying press. The only problem were the colts, who had a tendency to wander and dash about. When Jared woke up, he’d point and say dis?
dis?,
his current all-purpose word for “information, please.”

The pace was easy enough, easier on the humans than pack animals still a little out of condition from winter idleness; all the rangers were in hard good shape, and he’d found that Spring Indigo could walk any of them tired. If it weren’t for the needs of a nursing infant they could have made the West Coast before snowfall last.

But we did have Jared along, and weren’t in a hurry,
he thought.

They’d taken the crossing of the Plains in slow stages and made frequent long stops at campsites with good water and game, particularly when they got up into the high basin desert country of Nevada. It had been late September by the time they reached Tahoe, far too late to risk the Donner Pass route. Yet still plenty of time to build good tight log cabins, cut meadow hay for the horses, and lay up supplies. They’d discovered that there were few things that ate as well as a fat autumn grizzly weighing in around half a ton—if you were carefully unsporting about shooting from a place they couldn’t get at—and the brain-tanned pelts made superb coats and blankets.

He smiled reminiscently; they’d also made skis, which had been fun and had impressed the hell out of the surrounding tribes, visited far and wide to trade or for feasts and ceremonies and study, hunted, chopped holes in the ice of streams and lakes to fish, spent hours cutting wood and hauling it on improvised sleds, sometimes had daylong games of snowball ambush. Periods when they were snowbound with weeklong blizzards outside were spent resting, catching up on their notes and journals and specimen collections, playing with Jared and whittling toys for him, mending gear, entertaining visiting tribesfolk, singing, storytelling, playing chess, making love ... not a bad winter, all in all. They’d all been glad for spring and snowmelt, though.

Today the path lay westward and downward, through pine forest and meadow, with an increasing share of black oak as they dropped, and then an occasional blue oak as well. The mountains still stood snow-fanged at their backs, but now and then the way ahead gave a clear view, and he could see down and west toward the green-gold foothills and the long blue line of forest along the rivers of the Sacramento Valley. The stream whose course they were more or less following gurgled and leaped to his right, and sometimes the foot trail was close enough that drifts of spray came through the thick growth of ferns and drifted across their faces. Near a stand of sequoia they stopped for lunch—grilled elk liver and kidneys, wild onions, and more of the acorn-meal bannocks.

“God, but this is pretty country,” Giernas said, looking up into the swaying tops two hundred and fifty feet above and breathing in the cool scented air of their shadow. The thick straight ruddy-brown trunks of the grove were thirty feet around and more; he knew, because Sue had gotten out her measuring rope and sampled half a dozen. Above a pair of condors wheeled, winged majesty, their unmoving pinions spreading the width of a Coast Guard ultralight as they rode the foothill thermals.