THE LONG WALL Trail ended nearly five kays from the outskirts of Herfidian, itself a good twenty kays east of Bremarlyn by the Eastern Highway. None of the way stations had offered anything but shelter.
While shelter was indeed welcome amid the continuing strange alternation of snow and ice rain and sunlight and crisp fall afternoons, food was my biggest problem. Water was available from the cascades and the brooks, for the temperature never dropped far enough to freeze more than skim ice over running water. The abrupt changes in temperature had spoiled most of the wild fruits and berries. I had found one blue chyst in a copse of trees near the second way station. The blues are terribly bitter, but nearly a dozen were clear and edible.
I ate one on the spot and put the others in my pack, hoping to save what dried food was left as long as possible.
Rabbits were plentiful, and curious. But I had no way to kill them at a distance, and didn’t seem to be able to stalk them. More important, I still didn’t like the thought of killing them. Even at home, I’d never been a big meat-eater. Neither had Mother, and my father had teased her about it, saying that it was the secret to her youthfulness.
From the ridge line part of the trail, I had noticed some other strange changes. In places, huge circles appeared to have been cut out of the forest, and nothing remained but a fine dust. Those places seemed to be near the Eastern Highway, some distance from the trail, and the only things that were left standing were natural hills or the heavy foundation stones of barns or buildings.
It looked like the work of an enemy, because the destruction appeared to be just in or around the inhabited places. But who was this unseen enemy?
While I wasn’t about to find out in the hills, trudging along the Long Wall Trail toward the east, I also wasn’t in a hurry to make myself visible. What I could have used was a bath or a shower. Despite the earlier snows and sleet, the air was still dusty, so much so that I often found myself sneezing as I made my way eastward.
When I finally stood by the stone marker—the one that said “Long Wall Trail, in memory of Kenth, last Duke of Ronwic”—that signified the end or the beginning of the trail, depending on which way you were going, I still had no real idea what I would do. I couldn’t live in the
woods, and I had no living relatives—except a second cousin of my father’s that I had met exactly once who lived somewhere in Inequital.
The sky was overcast, and the strange dark cloud pillars continued to dominate the western sky, in the general area of Inequital, although the capital itself was farther than I could have seen. A light mist was falling. The air was mostly warm, although the occasional strange cold gusts still accompanied the warmer mist. The dirt of the trail below me was unmarked, sheltered by a double row of overhanging firs. Behind the firs were the usual mix of Westron trees, most of the leafy ones well toward losing their summer foliage and having but scraggly winter leaves.
The marker sat about a hundred rods above the Eastern Highway. Why the trail ended near no town was a mystery to me, but I had never asked. All I knew was that I had another five kays to walk, and that I was getting hungry, and that I wanted a bath.
The last seemed most unlikely. Food was probable, one way or another, and walking was certain for now. I didn’t dare waste the energy on place-sliding, not unless I was faced with an emergency, or worse.
Before I headed toward the highway, I unstrapped my pack and set it on top of the flat stone marker, unfastened it, and removed the last blue chyst. After three days, even the blue ones didn’t taste too bad. I needed some energy, and otherwise there were only a few sticks of jerky and two small chunks of cheese left. Those I wanted to save.
Allyson had done well, but like all good things her provisions were about to end. When I finished the chyst, nibbled all the way down to the hard seed, I tossed it into the deep brush to my right.
Swwiiissshh.
A grossjay swooped after it, almost catching the seed before it struck the ground. Times had apparently been hard for the birds as well. Grossjays were not known for their fondness for chyst seeds.
I pulled the pack back on, shrugging my shoulders to try to relieve the stiffness that seemed permanent. Then I started down the trail, staying on the short grass on the side, avoiding the slippery combination of dirt and mud in the middle.
The line of firs ended halfway to the highway, and I pulled up short, staying in their shade, as I could hear the rumble of a vehicle in the distance. Instead of walking along the road, stupid in any case, I kept under the overhang of the trees, where I stumbled every so often. While most of the trees were light-leaved for winter, between the mist and the evergreens, I wasn’t as exposed as I would be closer to the road, and I could hide quickly. The idea of hiding and skulking around bothered me, but being picked up by the ConFeds would have bothered me a lot
more—especially since I didn’t know why they were after my family … and presumably me.
After about a kay, the rumbling increased in pitch, and I dropped behind a pine, waiting.
Over the hill from the west they came, clear even from a distance. First came a steamer, black, with a flag on the front bumper. The flag was the ConFed banner. Then there were two open steam freighters, carrying full loads covered with tarps. Last came an armored steamer, the kind with the composite ceramic plates and a turret gun. The armored steamer was wreathed in vapor as it rattled along.
In my whole life, I had never seen such a detachment on the Eastern Highway, not near Bremarlyn, so far from Eastron, even father from the Northern Isles—although that conflict had been over even before my father was born.
So I crouched in a hollow behind the pine and waited for them to pass out of sight. The wait wasn’t all loss, though. In looking around, I saw what might have been a stunted pearapple, behind the firs to my left, toward Herfidian. As I waited, watching, I marked the pearapple location and studied the steamer as it hum-hissed past my pine tree, less than five rods away. Double-tiered and totally enclosed, that black steamer was easily twice the size of my father’s official steamer. The black finish was wearing thin and beginning to show the reddish ceramic beneath, and the faded purple stripe along the side, across both doors, was also heavily scratched.
I could feel the ground vibrate as the rest of the road convoy neared. The dull gray freighters looked newer, but still battered. Unlike the steamer, their cabs were open, and one had the windscreen folded down. Both were heavy-laden, with what appeared to be machines under the tarps. An armed ConFed stood in the guard booth at each corner of the cargo bay of each freighter. Eight armed ConFeds—in the center of Westron, thousands of kays from the old borders. And they weren’t looking bored. I shrank down further behind the pine as the freighters neared. The guards had weapons out and kept scanning the roadside.
How anyone would catch them I couldn’t imagine. All four were travelling nearly as fast as a normal runabout.
But someone had, clearly, because one of the armored guard booths on the first freighter had projectile holes in it and a dull reddish smear on the shattered composite underneath.
I decided not to move as the freighters passed, waiting for the laboring armored steamer to come into my now-restricted view.
The gray double plates were scratched, some of the scratches almost bleeding with red as the ceramic composite beneath showed through.
The turret had a steel shield around the gun port. An armored steamer with some steel—that was something else. Steel wasn’t that easy to come by any more.
The acrid odor of old steam, old oil, and hot rubber permeated the area as the armed steamer rumbled past. It was the three-axle type, with shields over the double tires, and the gun in the top turret kept swiveling from point to point, although thankfully not in my direction.
I stayed in the hollow behind the pine until the ConFed vehicles had disappeared over another low hill, and until the sound and vibration were gone as well. The bitter smell of abused machinery remained.
I recalled the pearapple. Before I checked out the possibility of fruit, I made my way deeper into the brush, and relieved myself. Seeing the ConFed convoy had created a sudden urge for such relief.
Then I pushed through the thickets of dead summer brush to the tree. Although the birds and weather had taken a toll, I found two partly good fruits. Using the old knife Allyson had left me, I cut away the rotten parts and ate the rest right there.
After wiping the knife clean on some dried grass, and then on the hem edge of my cloak, and doing the same with sticky fingers, I made my way back to the edge of the highway and resumed hiking toward Herfidian.
As I neared the top of a low hill, perhaps the third after the place where I had encountered the convoy, something seemed wrong. My steps slowed, ears alert, eyes looking for a wisp of steam in the air. Sniff … sniff—even trying to detect a hint of the scent of oil and steam.
Only the sound of a grossjay broke the stillness as I edged forward.
I shook my head as I saw the emptiness that began just below the crest of the hill. Nothing but a few huge boulders rose out of the circular expanse of dust. It was though a giant lumberman had taken an axe and swung it at ground level in a circle, and then burned everything to dust—except the dust was a fine brownish powder, not gray or black like ashes, and there was no smell of burning. I thought I remembered the place … before … a water station with the old inn maintained more out of sentiment than anything else. My father had claimed the inn still served one of the better evening meals in the Bremarlyn area.
Where the inn and its outbuildings had stood were only buried lumps, foundation stones covered with shifting dust. The old high firs were gone, as was the steep-pitched barn that dated back to the time of wagons and beasts.
“ …
cccah
…
cuhh … CHEW …”
Once the fine dust got into my nose, I couldn’t stop sneezing until my eyes were thoroughly running
and my shoulders hurt from the violence of the sneezes. Had anyone been around, I would have been helpless.
Finally, I gathered myself together, just short of the dusty wasteland that seemed to stretch nearly a kay before me. Only the tracks of ConFed convoy through the thinner cover over the road itself marred the dust, so light that it seemed to shift with even the slightest breath of air.
How the steamers had made it through I wasn’t certain, but there was no way I was going to survive the sneezes and convulsions that each step would generate. Going around the edge would add another kay to the distance to Herfidian—assuming Herfidian was still there and not a dusty wasteland. Assuming I did not run into the ConFed Marines.
I sat down on a fallen log for a moment to think, to think and to recover from my sneezing attack.
Something had destroyed the inn, something that had left only dust, and that something seemed to strike populated areas. I had seen the circular spaces from the trail, though none were actually out in the woods. But the presence of the ConFeds meant that some outposts had survived.
Shrugging, I got up. There wasn’t that much choice. So I began to struggle along the edge of the destruction. The trees and brush closest to the actual destruction looked more as if they had been winter-killed than burned, but would extreme cold have the same effect as fire and create an ash-like dust?
By the time I regained the road, or the sheltered edge under the firs that bordered the highway, indeed had bordered all the highways, the afternoon was nearly gone. And I had no handy way-stations in which to shelter myself. So I kept putting one foot in front of the other.
Twice more the rumble of freighters pushed me out of sight—once into the ditch and once behind a thicket. These freighters were also guarded by ConFed Marines bearing nasty looks and nastier weapons.
As the day waned into twilight, and as I neared the top of each hill, I edged over carefully, afraid of what I might find.
Herfidian was in more of a valley, cut by the Oligar River, as I recalled, and the trade section was the part closest to Bremarlyn.
Had
been the closest to Bremarlyn. The same circle of destruction was evident on the western side of the river. The eastern side looked untouched by that destruction, but I could see the shanties and tents and smell the open fires from more than a kay away.
Some order prevailed. The road had been swept clear of dust, or used enough to keep it mostly clear. That, and there was some sort of gate guarding the old stone bridge that crossed the Oligar. In the early evening
light, I could see someone lighting a set of torches there. A soldier of some sort, for the outline of the weapon on his back was clear.
Soldiers and more soldiers!
If I walked down the road, the soldiers would have me, and some might know who I was. But with the river to the south and the swamps to the north …
So I retreated into the bushes and relieved myself again. After that, I found a grassy spot behind a tree, out of sight of the road. Once my pack was off, out came the last chunk of cheese and several fractured pieces of jerky. I chewed them slowly, savoring the last taste of each.