Mitchell Smith - Moonrise

Fortunate Baj, a victor, lay with his wounds to the wind, and would have been happy with them frozen solid and senseless… Still, he slept a little while, then woke in darkness, feeling very clearly, in his right hand and wrist, the stumbling throb of George Brock's heart as the rapier's point found and pierced it… with good cause. Perhaps.

And as if that thought had called her, Nancy came out of the dark, and knelt to him. "Are you awake?"

"Yes."

"We have vodka – do you want some?"

"No, sweetheart; I'm doing well enough."

She arranged the bedding, then unlaced her muk-boots, pulled them off with the foot wraps, undressed, and squirmed under the blankets beside him. She reached to hug him close, so he felt smooth bare belly, the tender proddings of her twin rows of little nipples, the weight of a soft strong thigh.

"I forgive you," she said, lay with him under the combing wind… and soon, so lightly, began to lick his wounds.

Travel was difficult the first day. Though his injuries were not much, a severe headache had come with them, which sunlight made worse, so Baj marched squinting, Nancy wincing with him when he misstepped on mounded tussocks. The guard-troopers, slouching by on their big mounts, glanced down in passing, but said nothing to him concerning the duel.

At evening, and grateful for the day's end, Baj found fading light easier on his eyes, and the headache less severe, so he managed seal stew without upset. He also, encouraged, beat Richard at chess – an almost accident, since both of them had forgotten a knight hidden in plain sight. Which prompted a discussion of accident and oversight as determinants of history.

A discussion acting perfectly as a medicine draft to send Baj to sleep where he sat. The last he recalled was Richard saying, "Well… that's rude."

The usual trumpet – then rye-porridge – at dawn's first light, found Baj's headache almost gone, the sewn injuries less uncomfortable, the sore shoulder much better. And the sun, that morning, troubled him only a little.

These improvements lasted half the day, until the goat-eyed cavalry colonel trotted past, cursing an unlucky officer who – riding beside him – said only, "Sorry, sir." The colonel glanced down, saw Baj trudging along – and pleased, perhaps, by the shame that had been visited on the infantry, a tender-ass Sun-riser having slaughtered one of their own – called out, "Get this young swordsman a ride!"

For which kindness, ungrateful Baj cursed the colonel through a freezing after-noon, since while horses had a gentle gait, moose did not. The headache returned, as copybooks had it, "with a vengeance."

Still, no trooper, riding beside him or riding past, mentioned the fight. Only Dolphus-Shrike – fur bundled, javelins over his shoulder, his yellow hair knotted at his neck – come jogging along fast as the trotting mount, smiled up at Baj, and said, "I see I'll have to watch my mouth before such a champion, such a Jack Monroe."

"Not today," Baj said, standing a little in the stirrups to ease jolting, and the Shrike laughed.

So, a difficult after-noon, and a day that brought the Companies to the Wall's wide lap of moraine – ten to twenty WT miles of huge rounded drumlin hills, outwash rubble, and milk-water cirques appearing in the tundra… then great shallow lakes, ice-skimmed and stretching out of sight with flocks of ducks and geese rising in roars of wing-claps from them, then swirling away over other shallow waters that had to be splashed through or widely skirted, and fast foaming streams to be forded with difficulty and some danger… occasionally crossed twice as they wound and wended in the way. It was slow marching.

At necessary halts, some troopers, whirling humming slings, galloped along beneath the sailing clouds of birds – their moose pounding through puddles in spray – and sent stones hissing up to bring down several.

At one such delay, Nancy ran up alongside Baj's mount with his bow and quiver in her hands.

"Oh, for Christ's sake…" That ancient exclamation still risky in some places.

"Get one!" said the merciless girl, and reached them up.

The moose had no change of gait beside ambling rolling trot or a dead run, and dead run would be required for duck chasing. There also seemed a question whether the reins had any function – they'd certainly had none for Baj so far.

He gritted his teeth, which hurt the hurt cheek, strung and braced the bow in the saddle – something he'd done before, hunting, though not with a bruised and aching shoulder – then drew an arrow from the quiver – one of his last from the River. He took the rein-ends in his teeth, nocked the arrow to the bowstring… and drummed his heels into the moose's massive flanks.

What reins and duckings did not do, kicks apparently did – and Baj found himself tearing along from a brutally wrenching start, going at a racehorse's speed but with side-swaying and surging up and down like a festival crank-ride.

The velocity, and tossing this way and that as the animal galloped – hammering sedge, smashing through milky runs of melt-water – had all the discomforts of nightmare. Baj's sore head and sore shoulder seemed to snarl at him as he flew across the tundra, out of the saddle as often as in it.

It was so bad, so painful it became funny, and Baj released himself so he seemed to drift laughing beside that unfortunate rider, reins in his teeth, clutching his bow as he went flying, jouncing, reeling across the country on a great, black, bulge-eyed beast.

"Hattie," the trooper had named her as he'd handed her over, dubious, but giving Baj a leg up.

Baj called "Hattie! …" muffled by bitten leather as he leaned back, hauling on reins apparently set in stone.

Then he gave up, spit the leather out, and went along – as copybooks often had it – "for the ride."

He even managed to draw with an unhappy shoulder and shoot at seven ducks whirring over (though not going much faster than he was) – missed the flock by a distance, and of course that arrow lost in melt-water.

Hattie gave no sign at all of slowing, but Baj, growing used to windy great speed, jolting pain, and eccentric motion, managed to nock a second arrow – shot it at almost random, and out of a great whistling dark ceiling of geese, killed one.

The day after, they were under the loom of the Wall. The companies, at sunset, camped two miles from its base in a wilderness of foaming rapids not yet frozen, and fractured fallen mountains of blue ice and white ice. Boulders – seeming, in number, a heaped limitless drift of river-bank pebbles – lay with many big as manor houses, and all ground smooth-sided as planed planks.

The milky river rapids, the threads of short-summer's melt – though many ran several bowshots wide – thundered in waterfall down from massive ice-faces, parapets, ramparts here rising two miles high, to crash in fountaining spray, then surf along great dunes of the glacier's till… That sound, continuous as it had been for centuries – though greater or lesser with freeze and thaw – shook the ground, drum-rolled to echo from the Wall, then rumbled away to the east and west as if the Wall asked and answered questions fundamental, along three thousand miles from ocean to ocean.

Kingdom River, the Mississippi, could have run along the base of that frozen monument, and been no more than moat to a fortress inconceivable.

Somewhat subdued since his ride the previous day – Hattie having been retrieved by her concerned trooper, carefully examined, kissed on the nose, then taken away to the Line to feed – Baj had seen the Wall before, from a headwater branch of the River, though at a much greater distance… But this was the near thing itself, a miles-high, horizon-wide palace, its vaults ice-white, ice-gray, ice-blue, with glittering sheets of melt in sunset light, their roaring waters carving down great crevasses, shaping ice canyons in the air, persuading immense formations – twice, as he stood watching – to slowly lean… lean out and away from the mass, and topple dreamily down.