Mitchell Smith - Moonrise

The arrow whispered away from the bow-string's twang, flicked across the meadow, and arched down to strike the shy ram at his flank, and too far back.

Baj ran toward them as the old male backed, then stepped snorting aside – set a second arrow to the string, jolted to a stop and shot the other sheep again. Struck behind its shoulder, the animal bucked and collapsed sliding into the grass. The ewes bleated, whirled and ran down-slope, and the old ram, reluctant… certain that Baj was guilty of something, backed, turned, and followed them.

It was evening, with banners of cloud colors streaming across the sky. before Baj found the others – wending north, tiny with distance, through evergreens below him… They'd passed him by.

He put two fingers to his mouth and whistled, but the slow cold wind was against him, and they didn't hear, didn't look up. So, burdened by sword-belt, bow, quiver and pack – and with a considerable weight of butchered mutton on his back, bundled in the beast's own hide – Baj commenced as good a gallop as he could manage down the mountainside.

He fell once, and rolled a little with tangles and thumps from his load, sheathed rapier akimbo (wonderful word), but there was no one to see.

… After at least a WT mile of downhill hurry through thicker and thicker forest, he came out to an almost level – face streaked red by whipping branches – whistled, and saw Nancy and the others hear, and turn to watch him come.

Errol ran back to caper around Baj, sniffing the wrapped meat's blood odor. He reached up and tugged at the hide, until told, "No," and pushed away.

"Where have you been?" Nancy apparently angry. "You were to hunt before us – then wait. Where were you?"

Baj pointed up. "High. Found the sheep there."

Nancy made a tongue-click like Errol's, and turned away.

"Thank these mountains' Jesus," Patience said. "Not turkey." Her left arm was free of its sling.

"No, mountain sheep."

"Baj, I believe you may still be a prince. Can we camp? Can we eat?"

"If we find a place close and deep enough for one of your dangerous fires." Richard sighed. "Appetite will be our deaths."

"Better than starvation," Patience said. "I didn't feast with the madmen. – Do you know that many of their children die in winter? They think it incorrect to bundle them warm."

"Better the Robins," Nancy said, "than those people. If they are what Warm-time humans were, then bless Drunk Jupiter, and the Wall."

Baj started to say something in those cruel dreamers' defense, then decided not. He was too tired from sheep chasing, and it would mean an evening's battle – Nancy's method of discussion.

Grumbling, shaking his shaggy head, Richard allowed himself to be bullied for a guarded fire of windfall, in a dense stand of balsam poplar damp enough to catch no sparks. "Though I suppose, if we're seen in these hills, it will likely be by those we come to see."

Baj, with Errol helping, dragged two weather-seasoned logs to lie side by side with a bed of dry branches between them.

"Meat's going to taste of sap." Patience sat with her coat unbuttoned despite the chill.

"Do you want this fire?" Richard said, "- or don't you?"

"Yes, I do."

"Then stop complaining."

"Well," Patience said, "we're all getting tired."… But all were less tired when the meat was roasted, spitting and running fat, showers of sparks rising into a windy night. Richard carved out smoking slabs with his heavy knife, hung each on a whittled stick, and passed them to the others before hacking out half a haunch for himself… Comparing with the village meat before, Baj found this mutton – wild, fresh, tainted by no notion of Warm-times returning, no cropped slaves, no weeping children – to be the better supper.

They ate sitting close to the fire, except for Errol, who gobbled under a shrub – and Patience, finishing a second thick chop, sitting relaxed against a hemlock trunk. "I have," she said to Baj, when he offered her a blanket, "a Warming-talent, failing a little, but still firm enough to cozy me." She smiled at him, her nose now straight – though with a little bump at the bridge. "… Are you settled this evening, Baj? Safe, resting, and full of rich meat?"

"Yes, I am."

"Perfect," Patience said, and drew the scimitar resting across her lap as she leaped and lunged long to slice him lightly just below the knee as he rolled back and away with yelp of startlement, then pain.

He came to his feet, hopping backward into the trees, his rapier drawn as she came to him, saying in a conversational way, "Edge only. Three cuts wins." And demonstrated in shadowing firelight by feinting, then striking him backhand along his left side, slicing his buckskin jerkin over a rib.

Nancy shouted, "Don't!"

Baj parried the next two slashes, but by very little. Patience, fighting sometimes two-handed now, gave him little room to fence. "… The time for spruce-branch fighting is over, my dear."

In the midst of surprise, sudden speed, and effort – still careful to deny his rapier's point in the ringing clash of steel – Baj, though already cut twice, found himself satisfied. As clearly as if truly seen, he saw King Sam before him in the salle, delivering that lesson of fighting over fencing-in-duels.

He kicked Patience in the belly to force her back for room, struck her swinging blade a fast hard parry to knock its line aside, and drew his left-hand dagger. Feeling her slight difficulty still in using the left hand, even to assist, he cut her lightly at the hip, withdrawing from a lunge. Then parried a cut to his head, held her steel sliding with the rapier, stepped in and struck her tender shoulder with the butt of his dagger… As she received that pain, he drove her back against the fire – Richard rolling aside, Nancy calling again, "Don't!"

Patience, coat smoking, tried to wrench away from the flames. Baj let his rapier-edge meet her in a minor stop-thrust cut across her trousered thigh – and as, too late, she beat that blade aside, he struck lightly through her coat's sleeve with the left-hand dagger's edge… felt the give-and-part of cloth and skin beneath the blade. Third cut.

He stepped back to drop his weapons, stepped forward again to haul her free of the fire… and pat out flame runners along her coat-tails.

Patience was laughing, breathless. "Oh, very well done! Done very well – though, it's true, against only a small older lady, still fighting mainly wrong-handed." She wiped her blade on her coat's cloth, slid it into its sheath. "Your two fathers came to fight with you, isn't that so?"

"Perhaps." The cut beneath his knee was stinging worse than the other. Blood on his buckskins there.

"No 'perhaps' about it. Your Second-father, for workmanlike common sense; your First-father, for no mercy shown. My shoulder hurts…"

"You are both fools!" Nancy stood glaring at them,

"Of course," Patience said, shrugged off her greatcoat, and examined it, "- as are we all. Who but fools would be here, and for our reasons?… My poor coat."

"Come here." Nancy tugged Baj into firelight. "Where are you hurt?"

"Only little cuts."

"Nothing worth sewing up, I'd say." Richard smiled his toothy smile. "Good fight." Errol, sitting close to him for warmth, a little piece of mutton-fat stuck to his cheek, tongue-clicked in apparent agreement.

"And you're a fool, too," Nancy said, "- with a fool beside you. Can't we wait for Shrikes or the Guard to chop us? So stupid." She turned Baj this way and that with calloused narrow hands. "Your side…"

"Nothing much, either of them." He wiped a red drop from his dagger's blade, found none spotting the sword, and sheathed both.