We didn't make more than fifteen kilometers the first day, walking slowly and resting a lot. I'd been averaging about fifty a day all the way from Mizzoo, judging from mileage signs and my map. Tom told me my wound had been messy, dirty, and infected. He'd actually trimmed it out with his knife and cauterized it with a hot pistol barrel! And here I was two days later, hiking up the road.
He didn't talk a lot. Off and on he whistled tunes I'd never heard before, and occasionally sang a little in a language that was new to me. Sometimes he even greeted people we passed as if he knew them. I noticed, though, that he picked people who looked like they could stand having a stranger greet them. Mostly they greeted back; at least they smiled a little.
We got to Otavi around midday. The county there was called Savo, and its people spoke a whirring language I'm sure I'd never heard before. Tom bought a feed of oats and barley for the mare. Never mind that the barley would make her fart and I'd be walking behind her. He also bought a gunny sack to rub her down with at the end of the day. He and I had a lunch of sausage and hot stew at the inn, eating at the bar, on our feet.
Lying on my left side by the campfire that evening, I told him all that had happened since I'd run into Jamila and Paddy at the inn in Galway. In that time I'd killed twelve men, thirteen including the Lizard, which sort of awed me when I thought about it. Tom didn't say what he'd been doing, but he told me some interesting things about Lizards. According to him, sometimes they had natural bodies, which bled blood when they were cut, and sometimes they had artificial bodies. The artificial bodies were a kind of machine, and the Lizard airboats probably had a thing that could find them. Talk about magic!
Natural or artificial, their eyes were always red, he said. The one I'd killed had probably worn something in its eyes to make them look like a person's—contact lenses, he called them—and one had popped out when I'd whacked him with my sword.
He thought that probably they'd been able to detect the tracking tool, too. And the Lizard gun. Which explained a lot, if it was true. But if it was, why hadn't they detected the Lizard gun in the barn when they were right next to it? Or hadn't they been looking for it then?
As Tom said, we had more questions than answers, but it didn't seem to bother him. Actually, it didn't bother me either, to amount to much. I just would have liked to know.
He didn't say how he knew the stuff he'd told me. And I didn't ask, although I've got a reputation for questions. I was having a hard enough time digesting what he'd already said.
The next day we made at least twenty kilometers. I could have done more, but Tom said it was plenty. It took us into a county called Bihar, where the people were dark and lively, and talked Merkan to each other, but too fast, with an accent like Bhatti's.
I was feeling a lot stronger.
No one looked crossways at us, in Savo or Bihar, even though we were walking while leading a perfectly good saddle mare. I got the feeling that no one was watching for me there, waiting to do me in. But it was more than that—as if we weren't quite as noticeable as we should have been.
The day after that we must have walked thirty kilometers. Walking gave me no particular pain, although my butt was still kind of sore. And while thirty kilometers made me as tired as fifty would have a week earlier, I wasn't used up by it. Tom was definitely a champion healer; I doubt that even Bhatti could have had me going that strong that soon. I was still bandaged, but not so tightly, and when I changed the bandage, I explored the wound with a careful finger. It was twenty centimeters long and maybe three wide, a deep groove with a helluva scab in it. A big hard scab that itched and was interesting to touch. I could sit now, carefully of course, which was welcome. Resting on your knees gets tiresome, and some places are too wet for lying down.
The next few days, things went pretty much routinely, and we got up to more than fifty kilometers per day, sometimes hiking north, sometimes east, sometimes in between, depending on the roads. And while we didn't question people, I saw no evidence that Lizards or anyone else was causing unusual trouble. What I'd heard in Connemara about dangers north and east had been imagination, I decided. For anyone who didn't have Lizards hunting him.
Sometimes I found myself daydreaming about Jamila: We were going to run into her around the next bend, or find her eating her supper in an inn. Daydreaming's a poor practice for a warrior, ordinarily. You need to be alert. I'd been depending on Tom to notice things for me.
Once about midday we met a slim wiry guy, fairly tall, sitting in the woods by the road, eating wild onions. He was interesting-looking. Dark, but not as dark as Jamila. His hair was straight, even straighter than the people's in Bihar, and his features and the brownness of his skin were different than theirs.
As soon as I saw him, I decided he was probably one of us. Tom had no doubt at all, and we stopped to talk to him. His name was Lemmi Tsinnajinni, and he came from a place called Dinnehville, in the Kingdom of Saint Croy. I'd never heard of Saint Croy. He said it was on one of the headwaters of the Mississipp. I got the impression that he was young—about my age—and old at the same time, and I was pretty sure he was a lot more advanced than me. His masters, he mentioned, were named Wong and Ara. Tom seemed to know them, which stuck in my mind like a bur. We talked a few minutes and then, to my surprise, Tom said goodbye and we left Lemmi sitting on the log with his onions.
When we'd walked on a few dozen meters, I looked at Tom. "Why didn't we join up with him?"
A white eyebrow raised at me. "What did your masters tell you before they sent you out?"
"They said an armed man traveling alone draws less notice than a group of armed men. But then, why are you and I traveling together now that I'm able-bodied again?"
He grinned. "Because I decided we should."
"Suppose I decide we shouldn't?"
His strange violet eyes looked shrewdly at me. "You can go by yourself any time. Whenever your muse tells you to; any one of your muses. Do you want to?"
"No."
"Why not?"
I found myself grinning. "Because I've decided not to."
He tipped his head back and laughed as if that really tickled him. "Good reason," he said.
Actually I'd had no notion of going on alone. I'd just reacted.
Where we were then, the hills were bigger—to my eyes they were mountains—and there was less cleared land, and fewer people. Fairly wild. We stopped a little early that evening. The sun wouldn't set for half an hour, but the creek that crossed the road there was so pretty, we couldn't resist, so we followed it back into the woods. We didn't cook; seldom did. I cut some bracken in a little glade and made two beds of it, one by each of two fallen trees. Tom gathered dry wood and some leafy twigs, for later when we'd want a smudge. After that we ate. By the time we'd finished, the sun was down. Daylight was starting to fade, and the mosquitoes were coming out in numbers.
I was getting ready to start the fire, when I thought I heard voices—a murmur of them in the distance. I glanced at Tom; he was listening too, intent. Without saying anything, we got up and moved quietly the seventy or eighty meters to the edge of the forest.
By the time we got there, we were crouched low, keeping the border of saplings between ourselves and the opening. There were about twenty people back in the pasture across the road. They'd brought a wagon and left the team hitched to it. And gotten a fire going, a big stack of wood that was just starring to burn; they must have hauled the wood in the wagon. A lot of it looked like old fence rails cut in two.
The people formed a loose half circle on our side of the fire, a crescent of pairs, threes, and fours, their backs to us. I couldn't decide whether they were chanting or arguing or what. It wasn't in unison or parts, like a chant, but it had an emphatic feel to it. And it was louder than regular conversation but didn't really sound like argument. I wondered if they'd been drinking.
I crouched, watching, feeling no impulse to go over and ask what was happening. Whatever it was, it wasn't a picnic. For one thing, to roast a pig or calf, they'd have had a fire going hours earlier, so they could cook over a good bed of coals. And even as far off as they were, close to a hundred meters, there was something about the sound of their voices that was ugly. Bad-ugly.
The fire grew and the people moved back a bit from it, their loose semicircle thinning more. When it really got roaring, a guy with a big-crowned field hat took a few steps toward it and turned facing outward in our direction. Everyone else stopped talking, and he began to preach, or orate.
It was more than just a few words. He rambled on while daylight slowly dimmed. Across the road and a bit to our left was a worm fence, with clumps of young thornapple here and there along it. It occurred to me that from the other side of it I'd be able to hear what he was saying. So I backed away into the woods to stay out of sight, then trotted to where the fence would shield me from the people by the fire. Tom followed, and there was no doubt at all that he knew what I had in mind. I glanced back to see how he was taking it. After all, it had nothing to do with our mission, and it could be dangerous.
He was grinning!
On the other side of the fence, instead of hay meadow, the field grew a mixed crop of barley and oats, nearly crotch-deep and growing almost to the fence. Crouching low, we scuttled across the road and along the fence. Closer to the people and the fire, we dropped to hands and knees and stayed back in the grain, crawling. Dusk was turning into twilight, but it didn't seem like a time for carelessness.
We crept out of the grain into an angle of the fence, where a clump of thornapple broke up the horizontals—a good place to peer between the fence rails. We were close enough that I could have followed what the leader was saying now, except it wasn't Merkan. Maybe I could have anyway, if my daddy's grandparents had taught us kids Vlaamsch, because it sounded a lot like it to me.
Not that his voice was like Grampa Max's. My great grandfather DenUyl, any time I'd heard him, had sounded easygoing, even when he was telling someone off. Like one time when I was about eight, I was running through the house and bumped into his smoking table, sending his tobacco fanning onto the floor. Then, in confusion, I'd managed to step on his pipe and break the stem. Dad, of course, had taken me out back of the woodshed and walloped me good.
No, this guy was delivering like the Methodist reverend in Colwyn Town. He was preaching, I was sure.
But he was about done. When we'd been settled by the fence for four or five minutes, he finally ended off, gave an order, and the semicircle opened up, almost forming an aisle. Three guys went to the wagon. While two let down the tailgate, another climbed on and seemed to pull something out from under the spring seat. He dragged it back to the tailgate, where they lifted it off the wagon and propped it up between them.
It was a young girl with her hands and feet tied. The guy on the wagon jumped down and cut the cords off her ankles, and they helped her walk to the preacher. She walked like she was drugged or drunk or something. As they got closer to the fire and we could see her better, she looked to be about thirteen or fourteen years old, and pretty. The third man followed along behind and a fourth had fallen in behind him.
Nobody was saying anything now. When they got her to the preacher, they stopped. That's when I noticed he'd taken off his field hat, and for a minute I thought he was a Lizard. Then I realized he had a kind of skullcap on, with a crest on it, made to look like a Lizard's. I saw dark eyebrows beneath it, and hair hung out at the sides. He reached out and tore the dress off her—it didn't seem to amount to much and she had nothing on beneath it—and for a minute I thought there was going to be a rape.
Instead, while the two guys held her upright, the third pulled her head back by the hair. The preacher held a knife up toward the sky and started to chant. That was the first Merkan I'd heard out of him: Something about offering this perfect virgin to Satan, and Satan should accept the offering and bless them all. Then quick as anything he cut her throat, and just as quickly they flipped her around, face down, and the fourth guy appeared to be catching the blood in a bowl. They held her like that for half a minute, while the preacher stood aside. Then the two who'd been helping her walk grabbed the body by the knees and under the arms and threw it on the fire. The half-burnt-down fire collapsed when she landed on it, and sparks flew up six or eight meters.
My eyes must have bugged out like peeled eggs. I realized I'd been holding my breath, and my body was tight as a fiddlestring. I glanced at Tom; he looked as calm and alert as a warty toad watching a bluebottle.
The people at the sacrifice weren't saying any more than we were. They just watched the body burn. I understood now why they'd made the fire so long, two meters or so. After a minute, a couple of them threw more wood on top of the body, and a minute later someone handed the preacher a bowl, with the blood I suppose. He took a drink, then took it around to each of the others and they drank too. Several of them had to gather up their nerve to do it, but no one rushed them, and they did drink, or faked it. When the bowl had gone the rounds, the preacher threw the remaining blood on the fire.
Bit by bit the fire burnt down while we watched between the fence rails. Two guys with staffs poked at it now and then, or pushed burnt-off ends into the hot center. Someone went to the wagon and brought back a couple of jugs, and they started passing them around. There were some pretty big swigs taken, but not much talking. It seemed to me that if enough of them drank enough, we could go over the fence and carve them up. But the preacher said something and the jugs were put aside. He started a chant then, where he'd chant something and they'd chant a response together. I couldn't follow it. Basically it wasn't Merkan, though quite a few of the words were, and their unison was poor.
I dozed, probably for not longer than five minutes or so, before I ever realized I was sleepy. When I woke up, someone was on the wagon seat, turning the wagon around. We watched them leave, some riding in the box of the slow-moving wagon, the rest trailing behind. I wondered what in Hell they thought they'd accomplished.
That's what I asked Tom back in the woods, after I'd gotten our little smudge fire burning: "What do they think they accomplished with that?"
I looked at his eyes while I asked it. They gleamed in the firelight, unreadable. All he answered was, "You'd have to ask them, Luis."
"I'd like to. One at a time, privately. And that preacher-type with the Lizard thing on his head. What did he think he was doing?"
Tom's eyes were steady on mine, but he said nothing, just shook his head slightly. I hadn't really been asking for an answer and didn't expect one. Tom was darned smart—or darned wise, another matter entirely—but I doubted he could tell me what had been going through the preacher's head.
I stared into the fire, remembering what he'd worn on his head. "They know what Lizards look like," I said. "Someone must have trafficked with them."
Tom didn't say anything back, but I could feel his eyes. And I remembered what he'd said about the Lizards sometimes using artificial bodies—that their natural bodies bled real blood. So I'd never seen an actual Lizard, a real one. I thought about that for a while: The one I'd "killed," if killed was the word, hadn't seemed like any clockwork. What I'd cut through, and what I'd looked at beheaded, had been kind of like meat. Gray meat. It just hadn't squirted blood, was all, though it had oozed pale gray pretty freely. How could something so unnatural be?
"Or maybe what he saw was an artificial Lizard," I went on. It was half question.
"They look about the same," Tom answered, "artificial or real."
"Why would one of them show itself to him? And why did they do what they did over there?" I thumbed back toward the field. "What good did that do anyone?"
"It's a long story, Luis. To keep it simple—let's just say there's evil loose on Earth. A special kind, with reasons and intentions of its own that wouldn't make much sense to someone outside it."
I'd never given much thought to evil. To people who did bad things, yes. They were part of my job. But evil? What was evil, really? I decided that what I'd just seen in the pasture would qualify.
"How do you know these things?" I asked.
Tom smiled. "You'll know too, when the time comes."
We quit talking then and lay down against our logs on opposite sides of the fire. A few years earlier I'd have been irritated at an answer like his, or else all wrapped up in the mystery of it. But when you study under Bhatti, you get used to answers like Tom's. Or delayed answers, or no answers at all.
"Tom?"
"Unh?"
"Are you a master?"
"Nope."
"What are you then?"
"Good question. Sleep on it, and tomorrow you can tell me how it seems to you."
That was the last thing either of us said that night. But I couldn't help thinking about the angels who Bhatti and Soong mentioned occasionally, who had trained them. They also called them "monitors." Angels had founded the order and trained its masters, and Tom had seemed to know the masters who had trained Lemmi Tsinnajinni. I wondered if Tom was an angel, and decided—decided there was no way I could tell yet. Maybe later.