Mitchell Smith - Moonrise

The trees in these groves bore birds like bright fruit. Baj had seen the red-crossbills and siskens north on the River, but not the little purple finches – very like the pets, though different colors, that ladies kept in their chambers at Island… He supposed Patience, meeting these feathered creatures in the air, must puzzle them.

After perhaps two glass-hours, Richard ducked into a hemlock thicket, stopped in its small ragged clearing – cool and deep-green as underwater – and shrugged off his pack.

"And we stop, why?" Patience brushed an evergreen frond away from her face.

"We're coming near to Map I-Seventy." Richard bent his odd knees, sat, then rocked back to lean against his pack. "So I thought we'd rest the day out here – then go on to cross the open at night."

"And be up into the Map-Tuscaroras by dawn." Patience nodded. "Seems sensible." She sat cross-legged, her scimitar across her knees, as the others shed their packs and settled. Settled as well as memory of the burned Robins allowed.

Baj, drowsing, found paintings of those people in his mind, roasted mouths open, as if they spoke and screamed. He tried to recall the little birds instead…

They lay at ease, or slept through the rest of the day, lulled by the hemlocks' shade and rich perfume – which reminded Baj, when he roused, of the exhalations of court ladies at Island, who'd taken to chewing sugared pine-gum to sweeten their breath. It could be scented sometimes, passing a group of them laughing in long paneled gowns, belted with daggers, and neck-laced with ropes of freshwater pearls or Map-Arizona turquoise. Ladies guarded by dangerous lovers, brothers, and fathers, and grown delicate and sometimes cruel as the pretty insect-eating flowers raised in corners of the glass gardens…

Baj woke in early evening – as all the other sleepers woke together, like children in a nursery, and rummaged for the last of smoked turkey-bird.

"A good rest," Patience said. They sat in a fire-circle, eating, though there was no fire in the glade. "I was tired. These mountains… I once Walked-in-air, and occasionally on the ground, from Boston to North Map-Mexico. And thought little of it."

"How many WT miles?" Nancy was examining Errol's hair for nits, the boy stretched out with his head in her lap like a fireside dog, drowsing.

"I suppose… more than two thousand. Though I came down to the east of here, where there is at least some civilization, if you count shepherds and cattle-herders and small farmers. And I did have an occa carrying my baggage – fool that I was not to steal one from the penthouse this last time I left. I would have had to kill sentries to do it… had no permission, no Faculty note. And the thing would have been complaining all the way. They are… sad company."

"MacAffee brought one down to Island," Baj said. "And are they… are they Persons, too?"

Nancy took her hand from Errol's hair. "What business is that of yours?"

"It is his business," Richard said to her. "Are all Persons wise? Are all of us gifted with sense? – No, no more than Sunriser-humans are, who have their own fools and witless unfortunates."

"I didn't mean to cause pain," Baj said.

"No." Patience leaned to one side, brought a handful of blueberries out of her coat pocket, mouthed a few from her palm, then held the rest out to Baj to sample and pass on. "No, it was a fair question… Are occas Persons? Yes, though so sad and stupid. They are Persons as I am, as Richard and Nancy and Errol are – as many in Boston, who do not realize it, also are to some degree, since those Talents who believe they make useful improvements will not stop their making, though of worse and worse."

"May be stopped, though." Richard tossed the last blueberries down his throat.

"Yes," Patience said. "If we manage, we will stop them – though their making has allowed many men and women to warm themselves through the worst of Lord Winter's exercise, and gifted a few to Walk-in-air." She sat silent a few moments, staring into the hemlocks' deep green. "… My Maxwell is by blood-bits the greatest of Talents, made to someday – if it pleases him – made to press our earth a little nearer the sun, to bring Warm-times back again."

Another silence. And though she'd seemed serious, Patience smiled at Baj. "- Or do you suppose that only Wish-fools would think it possible?"

"… I'm not one to judge impossibility, Lady – for here I sit, alive, and with friends. But our world is large, and we are small."

"Me excepted," Richard said.

"But Baj," Patience said, "- nothing exists, not form or motion, unless first determined, shaped in a mind."

"Rocks," Baj said. "Trees."

"Ah, but those are Second-rocks, Second-trees – and then thirds of them and fourths and infinite numbers of them. But the first, imagined – how else come to be?"

"I think… our librarian, Lord Peter Wilson, would have said yours is an argument of prior givens – those creations by thought – and poorly logical."

"Your 'Lord Peter Wilson,' Baj, was first my dear old Neckless Peter of many years ago. And you're right; that is exactly what he would have said… But then, if not in logic, how do I come to Walk-in-air, so eagles sail beside me?"

"… That, Lady, I do not know," Baj said, and noticed Nancy watching him, staring as if to see beneath his skin.

They set out by a rising moon and jeweling stars, traveling down through evergreens and out onto the widest plain Baj had seen since the River's coast, though more soft-summit mountains, the Map-Tuscaroras, could be seen rising to the north.

This was a valley – Map-Exxoned an ancient great roadway once – worn now WT-miles broad by centuries of end-of-summer flooding, come down yearly the distance from the Wall. The last of moon-light revealed streaked shallow banks of mud and gravel braided down the pass, and a wind – likely also from the Wall – came whispering cold.

"Lord Winter begins to wake," Nancy said.

"Hold here," Patience said behind her, and they all crunched to a stop on the valley's gravel, except for Errol, who skittered on into darkness… There was a pause, and Baj supposed the lady had stopped for necessity, though no one looked back to see… But after a few moments, there was a flap and flutter of cloth, and a faint moon-shadow swept slowly over them, though only her white hair could be seen against the sky.

"Safe now," she said above them, voice conversational from a ceiling of stars. "Safe to be Walking-in-air in darkness, unseen. Though once, in a glacier-lead where the Long Island lies, a horned owl came and struck me, almost took my ear. Cruel birds…" Baj could just follow – by her hair, by the stars she shaded – as she sailed away.

"That would be pleasant," Nancy said, "- to learn to do."

"For that," Richard shifted his pack more comfortable, "- for that, neither of us have the piece in the brain required."

"And I believe," Baj said, feeling rough gravel beneath his moccasins' soles, "- I believe there must be a cost."

Nancy, stepping up beside, poked him with her elbow – the first time in a while that she'd touched him. "And what cost is that?"

"… Beside her always-hunger, I don't know."

"If you knew how old she was in WT years," Richard said, trudging in the lead, "- you'd know the cost."

"Fifty years?… More?"

"Thirty-nine," Nancy said, and stepped out so Baj had to trot to catch up.

"Is that true?"

"Yes. And how old do you think I am?"

Baj remembered wise men's lessons. "Young," he said.

… They worked their way by star-light, more than the slender crescent moon's, across the Map I-Seventy – the pass certainly much wider than it had been in Warm-times – and, though easier than mountainsides, still difficult traveling over one-after-another low ridge or shelf of mud and flood-trash rafted down, with only coarse grass growing.