Mitchell Smith - Moonrise

Baj supposed he ate not much differently, being so hungry, so pleased.

… He woke chilled under his blanket into a damp dawn – stretched, yawned, and rolled out ready for cold pork and mountain climbing. Both hams, already roasted, had been propped over the banked fire through the night, for deeper smoking. Charred dark, they would last for long traveling… The rest of the meat would be gone in two or three days, with only tiny wild spring onions found to cut its thick sweet-saltiness. The head had been buried in the ashes, slow cooking, and as the others roused, Richard – yawning, still sleepy – dug into the fire's gray bed to the last still-red coals, lifted the boar's head free, its curled tusks cracked by heat, then split the heavy skull with a stroke of his ax, and served brains out steaming on widths of bark… Baj let those go by, and took a chop. Brains – and testicles, and the palms of the hands – had been the ceremonial delicacies of cannibal Middle Kingdom, and only two or three generations before.

The three of them – Errol gobbling off to the side, behind a spruce – sat wreathed in the fire's last wisps of smoke, and ate seriously, for strength as much as satisfaction.

… By sun-overhead – the old WT noon – they were up and over the round peak of the next mountain north, and though Richard still led with Nancy, Baj kept close behind them even in the steepest places – where they occasionally went on all fours.

Then they were onto long ridges, misty with low cloud and stretching away north and east, so no end of them could be seen. Only wind-bent spruce grew along these crests, seemed to grow from gray stone weathered bald and broken. Eagles – dark eagles, not the bright-headed fishing ones that tree-nested along Kingdom River – swung just above or just beneath them as they traveled. Errol threw stones to strike the birds, but they paid him no mind… drifted with the wind along the heights, hardly flapping their wings.

From these high ridges, Baj saw for the first time that the earth was truly round. Slowly turning in one place he found the horizon very slightly curved – difficult to make out amid distant misty mountains, but certain just the same. So, the copybooks' casual claim was proved again as Gulf and Ocean sailors proved it, watching departing ships seem to slowly sink into the sea, so that finally only their raven's nests and banners could be seen… then not even those.

… As the day grew old, the wind grew young, and blew hard enough to be leaned into – a danger, with damp rock to climb along, and vacant air often close on either side. His first time so high, those long, long falls through sunstruck fog to stone slopes so far below – and, in places, to distant forest browns and greens still farther down – kept Baj's attention on his boots, so he marked every step to make sure of it, and fell behind.

"Keep up!" Nancy, looking back, waved him on.

"I am fucking keeping up. But I'm not going to fall, either!"

She stared at him for a moment – that yellow-eyed stare – then went on along the ridge after Richard, and soon out of sight among sloping, broad, bare shelves of granite.

"Jesus-damned things…" It seemed unfair the two – Errol also – had animals' endurance and fine footing. Baj thought of taking his boots off, but then his wool stockings would be worn to holes within a quarter-mile over this country.

The girl, so kind and careful when he'd been hurt, now was an annoyance, always with something to say about what he might do better. Keep up. And if he hurried and fell off these heights – what then? Fox's tears for his memory?

Baj went a little faster, but carefully.

"Don't tell him."

"Don't tell him what?" Richard stood idly swinging his ax, surveying the green peaks to the east as they waited for Baj-who-was-a-prince. "- We'll be in Map-Kentucky by dark, tomorrow."

"Just don't tell him."

Richard turned to stare at her. "And what makes you suppose, Little One, that I would – or that the boy would care?"

"I know what men think, humans or Persons."

"You know what some think."

"All, Richard."

They heard Baj's boots on the ridge's rock.

"Mmm. And did you notice the eagle that was not an eagle?"

"No, I didn't."

"It flew miles east of us, just the same."

Baj tramped up to them. "I'm here," he said to Nancy. "- Satisfied?"

As Richard had seen her – so Patience had seen him and his companions as she sailed past, then on for hours more over country steep enough to take them days of travel. She'd seen the tiny three of them (the Weasel-boy certainly roaming near) filing along the top of the ridge. A dangerous way to go, outlined for anyone to see from miles away, and likely not what Captain Richard would have done if the crest cliffs had allowed him passage a little lower.

Still dangerous going, through Thrush country soon becoming Robin country. The Robins took heads.

Dangerous for her, too, to walk so tired through the air. And so high. The Patience Nearly-Lodge Riley who, at seventeen, had thought her way so easily over the ice from Boston, and down from the Wall – Walking-in-air all the lowlands south, crossing the Gulf Entire, and then into the Sierra Occidental – had ended fresh as a summer flower.

The flower was withered weaker now, as flowers failed with Lord Winter's first breath.

If there were such Great Spirits of climate and the rest – and people who were not fools believed it – if there were, then why was the gift of youth-forever, forever withheld? Why were interesting men and women – and interesting Persons, Boston made – why all left doomed to rot, and know it?…Violent passing, of course, quite another thing. Poor MacAffee; he'd fenced his four taught strokes, his five taught guards… really helpless as a child against invention. Still, a pleasure to have felt fine steel, so keen, strike and catch and draw a man's life out with it. The look on his face… on all their faces before…

Wind, harder wind came buffeting through the mountain pass. Difficult… difficult to Walk-in-air against, it took such concentration. Patience welcomed forest in her mind, and sank a little lower toward it, her coat ruffling, flapping about her. A short-summer wind, at least, and not cruelly cold.

She welcomed forest more warmly, welcomed what ground, what stone lay beneath the trees, so she sailed lower, beneath the worst of the gusts… low enough to kick at the tallest spruce-tops with her boots as she went past.

Perhaps her weariness allowed Maxwell to come dreaming in. A dream of baby odors of pee, stains of his wet-nurses' breast milk, and a cloth tit of southern cane sugar – so she felt him resting warm against her breast, crooning, nudging to suckle. Patience caught the hem of his dream like a sliding border of silk, and wished herself into it, her left breast's nipple into his wet, soft, baby mouth – urgent, then painfully sweet as he worked his hungry mouth to take dream milk from her. Her breast ached, both breasts ached with the pleasure of it. Soon. Soon, my baby. My darling boy…

She seemed to bend to him, sharing a vision – Maxwell no longer suckling strongly, restless, disinterested – as they viewed, from some drifting vantage, a great wind-humming space she recognized as Island's Bronze Gate… the river surging past, its currents swirling in the stone harbor. There were colors, banners, welcoming music as two people – a man and woman – stepped down a ship's gangway hand-in-hand. Both older… so it took a moment to recognize them…

The dream spun back to its beginning, Maxwell tugging gently, nudging, as he lightly suckled like a lover, so the sweetness of it ran like honey to her groin.