Harry Turtledove - A Different Flesh

"Why, I wonder?" Wingfield said. He glanced toward the column of smoke from the sims' fire, pointed. "They could easily see that from here."

"What does it matter?" That was Henry Dale. "Let's hunt down the beasts and have done with this pointless chatter."

"Pointless it is not," Wingfield said, "if it will help us in the hunting. Were you coming to a camp of your friends, Henry, why would you then avoid it?"

"Who knows why a sim does as it does, or cares? If it amuses you to enter the mind of an animal, go on, but ask me not to partake of your fatuity."

"Hold, Henry," Cooper said. "Edward's query is deserving of an answer.

In war, now, I'd steer clear of a camp, did it contain the enemy."

"Are sim bands nations writ in small?" Dale scoffed.

"I tell you honestly, I do not know for a fact," Cooper replied.

"Nor, Henry, do you." Dale scowled. Cooper stared him down.

The country rose as they traveled away from the James.

The sims they were fol owing stuck to wooded and brushy areas, even when that meant deviating from the chosen course. After seeing the fourth or fifth such zigzag, Cooper grunted, "Nation or no, that pair didn't relish being spotted. Soldiers travel so, behind the foe's lines."

"Even if you have reason," Caleb Lucas said a while later, ruefully rubbing at the thorn scratches on his arms, "why did the wretched creatures have to traverse every patch of brambles they could find?"

"Not for the sake of hearing your whining, surely." Had Cooper given Henry Dale that rebuke, he would have growled it. With the irrepressible young Lucas, he could not keep a twinkle from his eyes.

AII the Englishmen were scratched and bleeding. Wingfield stopped to extract a briar that had pierced his breeches.

The bushes around him were especially thick and thorny, their Ieaves a glistening, venomous dark green. Only against that background would the white bit of cloth have caught his notice.

He reached out and plucked it from its bramble without realizing for a moment what it meant. Then he let out a whoop that horrified his comrades. They stared at him as at a madman while he held up the tiny piece of linen.

"From Joanna's shift!" he said when he had calmed enough to speak clearly again. "It must be, the sims know thing of fabric, nor even pelts to cover their loins."

Save their own pelts, that is," Lucas grinned. Then the excitement took him too. "Proof we're on the right track."

And proof, or at least hope, my little girl yet lives," he said, as much to himself as to the rest. "Had they sought no more than meat, they'd not have left the shift round her so long, would they?" He looked to the others for reassurance.

"It were unlikely, Edward," Cooper said gently. Caleb Lucas nodded.

Henry Dale said nothing. Wiping his florid face with his sleeve, he pushed ahead.

Late that afternoon, near the edge of a creek, the Englishmen came upon the scaly tail of a muskrat, al that was left of the beast save for a blood-soaked patch of grass Allan Cooper found close by. "Here the sims stopped to feed," the guard judged. Further casting about revealed a sharpened stone that confirmed his guess.

"This making of tools on the spot has its advantages," Caleb Lucas said.

"One need never be without."

"Oh, aye, indeed, if one has but three different tools to make," Henry Dale said sourly.

Wingfield did his best to ignore the continual bickering. He went over the ground inch by inch, searching for signs of Joanna. He final y found a spattering of loose, yellowbrown muck on some chickweed not far from the edge of the stream. His heart leaped.

The others came rushing over at his exclamation. Dale and Lucas stared uncomprehending at the dropping, but Allan Cooper recognized it at once.

"The very same as my little Cecil makes, Edward," he said, slapping Wingfield on the back. "This far, your baby was alive."

"Aye," Wingfield got out, giddy with relief. His greatest fear had been that the sims would simply dash her against a treetrunk and throw her tiny broken body into the woods for scavengers to eat.

"They have her yet, I must grant it," Dale said. "Do they take her back to their fellows for tortures viler than those they might perform in haste?"

"Shut up, damn you!" Wingfield shouted, and would have gone for Dale had Cooper and Caleb Lucas not quickly stepped between them.

"Have you not cal ed them beasts all this while, Henry?" Lucas said.

"Beasts kill, aye, but they do not torture. That is reserved for men."

"Leave be, al of you," Cooper ordered in a paradeground voice.

"Yes, you too, Caleb. Such squabbling avails us nothing, the more so when a life's at stake."

The guard's plainspoken good sense was obvious to everyone, though Wingfield could not help adding, "See you remember we know it is a rescue now, Henry. I charge you, do nothing to put Joanna at risk."

Dale nodded gruffly.

The Englishmen hurried on; hope put fresh heart in them and sped their weary feet. Soon they were going down into marshier country again as they approached the York River, which paral eled the James to the north.

They al kept peering ahead for a telltale smudge of smoke against the sky.

Darkness fell before they found it. They had to stop, for fear of losing the sims' trail. Wingfield drew first watch. He sat in the warm darkness, wishing he had some way to let Anne know what he had found.

His wife would still be suffering the agony of fear and uncertainty he had felt until that afternoon, and would keep on suffering it until he brought their daughter home.

He refused to think of failing. He had before, when he thought Joanna dead. But having come so close, he felt irrationally sure things would somehow work out. He fought that feeling too. It could make him careless, and bring all his revived dreams to nothing.

When he surrendered sentry duty to Lucas, he thought he would be too keyed up to sleep. As it had back in his own bed, though, exhaustion took its tol ; the damp ground might have been a goosedown mattress ten feet thick.

if Henry Dale spotted the sims' fire first. The Englishmen were much closer to it than they had been to the one a couple of days before, for it was smaller and not as smoky. The hour was just past noon.

"We wait here," Allan Cooper decreed, "so we may approach by night and lessen the danger of being tdiscovered." They soon found that danger was real.

A sim on its way back to the fire walked within a double handful of paces of their hiding place. By luck, it was carrying a fawn it had kil ed, and did not notice them.

"Ah, venison," Caleb Lucas sighed softly, gnawing on smoked meat tough enough to patch the soles of his boots.

The wait seemed endless to Wingfield; the sun crawled across the sky. To be so close and yet unable to do anything to help his daughter ate at him. But getting himself kil ed with an ill-considered rush would do her no good either.

The Englishmen made low-voiced plans. All had to be tentative.

So much depended on where Joanna was around the fire, what the sims were doing to her (Wingfield would not let himself consider Henry Dale's notion), how many sims there were, how much surprise the rescuers could achieve.

At last the birds of day began to fall silent. The sky went gold and crimson in the west, deep blue and then purple overhead. When stars came out not far from where the sun had set, Al an Cooper nudged his fellows. "Now we move cannily, mind."

The guard led them as they crept toward the fire. He was humming a Spanish tune under his breath. Wingfield did not think he knew he was doing it. But he had learned his soldiering against Spanish troops, and a return to it brought back old habits.

This band of sims dwelt in more open country than had the other.