Harry Turtledove: A Different Flesh

Further tracking had to wait for daylight and with every passing minute, the sims took themselves farther away.

"Why?" Anne asked. The question was not directed at anyone.

"Why should even such heartless brutes snatch up a defenseless babe?

What are they doing to her?"

Wingfield's imagination conjured up a horde of possibilities, each worse than the one before. He knew he could never mention even the least of them to his wife.

But her first agonized question puzzled him as well. He had never heard of the sims acting as they had that night. They kil ed, but they did not capture he felt heartsick anew as he worked out the implications of what Caleb Lucas said, "I fear me they but sought special y tender flesh." He spoke softly, so Anne would not hear.

Wingfield shook his head. The motion hurt. "Why take so great a risk for such small game?" He gritted his teeth at speaking of Joanna so, but went on "They would have gained more meat by waiting until one of us stepped outside his cabin to ease himself, striking him down, and making away with him. If they had been cunning, they might have escaped notice till dawn."

"Wherefore, then?" Lucas asked. Wingfield could only spread his hands.

"What do you purpose doing now?" Al an Cooper added.

"As I told Anne," Wingfield said, rising. His head stil throbbed dreadfully and he was wobbly on his feet, but purpose gave his voice iron. "I will search out the places where the sims encamp in their wanderings, and look for traces of Joanna. If God grant I find her living, I'll undertake a rescue. If it be otherwise, "

Henry Dale stuck his head in the cabin door. His lips stretched back in a savage grin. ", Then kill them all," he finished for Wingfield. "

'Twere best you do it anyhow, at first encounter."

"No," Wingfield said, "nor anyone else on my behalf, I pray you.

Until I have oertain knowledge my daughter is dead, I needs must act as if she yet lives, and do nothing to jeopardize her fate. A wholesale slaughter of sims might well inflame them al ."

"What cares one pack of beasts what befalls another?" Dale asked scornful y.

Allan Cooper had a comment more to the point."Should you fare forth alone, Edward, I greatly doubt you'd work a wholesale slaughter in any case, more likely the sims would slay you."

That set off fresh paroxysms of weeping from Anne. Wingfield looked daggers at the guard. "I can but do my best. My hunting has taught me somewhat of woodscraft, and bul et and bolt strike harder and farther than stones." He spoke mostly for his wife's benefit; he knew too well Cooper was probably right. Still, he went on, "You'd try no less were it your Cecil."

"Oh, aye, so I would," Cooper said. "You misunderstand me, though. My thought was to come with you."

"And I," Henry Dale said. Caleb Lucas echoed him a moment later.

Tears stung Wingfield's eyes. Anne leapt from her chair and kissed each of his friends in turn. At any other time that would have shocked and angered him; now he thought it no less than their due.

Yet fear for his daughter forced expedience from him. He said; "Henry, I know your skill amongst the trees. But what of you, Al an? Stealth is paramount here, and clanking about armored a poor preparation for't."

"Fear not on my score," Cooper said. "Or ever I took the royal shilling, I had some nodding acquaintanoe with the Crown's estates and the game on them." He grinned slyly.

Wingfield asked no more questions; if Cooper had made hisliving poaching, he would never say so straight out.

"What will the council say, though, Allan?" Dale demanded.

"They will not take kindly to a guardsman baring off at wild adventure."

"Then damnation take them," Cooper replied. "Am I not a free Englishman, able to do as I will rather than harken to carping fools? Every subject's duty is to the king's; but every subject's soul is his own."

"Wel spoken! Imitate the action of the tiger!" cried Caleb Lucas, giving back one quote from Shakespeare for another.

The other three men were careful y studying him. Wingfield said, "You will correct me if I am wrong, Caleb, but is't not so your only forays into the forest have been as a lumberer?"

The young man gave a reluctant nod. He opened his mouth to speak, but Dale forestalled him: "Then you must stay behind. Edward has reason in judging this a task for none but the woodswise."

Wingfield set a hand on Lucas's shoulder. "No sense in anger or disappointment, Caleb. I know the offer came in al sincerity."

"And I," Anne echoed softly. Lucas jerked his head in acknowledgment and left.

"Let's be at it, then," Cooper said. "To our weapons, then meet here and away." Wingfield knew the guard had no hope of finding Joanna alive when he heard Cooper warn Henry Dale, "Fetch plenty of powder and bullets." Dale's brusque nod said the same.

Before noon, the three men reached the spot where the dogs had lost the sims' scent. As Wingfield had known it would, the trail led through the marshes that made up so much of the peninsula on which Jamestown lay. By unspoken consent, he and his companions paused to rest and to scrape at the mud clinging to their boots.

His crossbow at the ready, Wingfield looked back the way he had come, then to either side. For some time now, he had had a prickly feeling of being watched, though he told himself a sim would have to be mad to go so near the English settlement after the outrage of the night before.

But Cooper and Dale also seemed uneasy. The guard rubbed his chin, saying, "I like this not. I’m all ajitter, as I've not felt since the poxy Spaniards snuck a patrol round our flank in Holland."

"We'd best push on," Henry Dale said. "We'll cast about upstream and down, in hopes of picking up tracks again.

Were things otherwise, I'd urge us separaTe, one going one way and two the other, to speed the search. Now", he bared his teeth in frustration, "'twere better we stayed in a group. The bushes quivered, about fifteen paces away. Three weapons swung up as one. But instead of a sim bursting from the undergrowth, out came Caleb Lucas. "You young idiot! We might have shot you!" Cooper snarled. His finger was tight on the trigger of his pistol; as a veteran soldier, he always favored firearms.

Lucas was even filthier than the men he faced. His grin flashed in his mud-spattered face. "Send me back now if you dare, my good sirs.

These past two hours I've dogged your steps, betimes close enough to spit, and never did you tumble to it. Have I not, then, sufficient of the woodsman's art to accompany you farther?"

Wingfield removed the bolt from his bow, released the string. "I own myself beaten, Caleb, for how should we say you nay? The damsels back in town, though, will take your leaving hard."

"They'll have plenty to company them whilst I'm gone, and shall be there on my return," Lucas said cheerfully.

"And in sooth, Edward, are we not off to rescue a fair young damsel of our own?"

"Not wondrous fair, perhaps, since the little lass favors me, but I take your meaning." Wingfield considered. "We'll do as Henry proposed before your eruption, and divide at the streambank.

Caleb, you'll come with me this way Henry and Allan shal take the other. Half a mile either way, then back here to meet. A pistol-shot to signal a find; otherwise we go on as best we can.

Agreed?"

Everyone nodded. A sergeant to the core, Cooper mutted, "As well I don't have Caleb with me I want a man to do as he's told." Unabashed, Lucas came to such a rigid parody of attention that the others could not help laugh.

Caleb and Wingfield hurried along the edge of the creek, their heads down.

Herons and white-plumed egrets flapped away; frogs and turtles splashed into the turbid water. "There!" Lucas said.

His finger stabbed forth. The print of a bare foot was pressed deeply into the mud.