They were to have been fully away by now, and some other contingent was to come upon the sight, to report it objectively. But the flatboats got snared bankside in the knotted roots formed by ancient, shadowy sedge trees. Besides, the men couldn’t stop looking. They could see Bengdanis running from window to window, house to house, and climbing up the mildewy thatch of their roofs. Some threw furniture in the water and tried to leap upon it; a few were successful, though Quadling furniture, mostly woven rush, was known neither for its strength nor its buoyancy.
One clump of thatch fell lazily through the blackness, like a falling star extinguishing itself, or a burning alphabetic vowel swallowed by watery silence, or a firebird plunging into a suicidal dive in a dark nameless lake.
Drunk on metaphor, thought Liir: that means it’s time to scamper. “Guess we better go. We mess up this part of the job, guys, we’ve messed up the whole thing.”
“What was the point of this?” asked the one called Kipper.
“Campaigns are devious; that’s why they’re called campaigns and not ballroom dancing lessons,” said Liir, but his voice sounded odd. He leaned his whole weight against the barge pole and began to move out. “The beds of your lady friends are cold tonight without you, lads, and if you’re not back in time there’ll be someone else to take your place before dawn. You know it better than I. Look sharp—”
He himself looked sharp, casting an eye around to make sure nothing was coming upriver from the Bengda bridge. How could it, unless it was a river monster disturbed by the conflagration and rising in rage? No boat would ever leave from that bridge again, nor be prevented from passing under it, either; it was falling, timber by burning timber, and its population with it, as he watched.
A man and a woman on the near side, which was collapsing haltingly into the burning water, had grabbed a child between them. Her clothes were aflame and the parents or neighbors tore them off. All their mouths were open, though Liir couldn’t distinguish one human scream from all the others. Then the parents braced themselves as upright as they could against the sloping structure and began to swing the girl, arms and legs, to fling her free of the burning.
Liir was reminded of a game he’d played when he was what, seven, eight?—when Irji and Manek had swung little Nor like that, and then swung him, too. But it was into a bank of snow in the wintery heights of the Great Kells, at Kiamo Ko; it wasn’t to save his life, or hers. It was for fun.
The girl twisted as they let go, and her arms reached back, as if she could will herself to swim through the night air and return to the arms of her parents. The fire behind them caught up with their legs and ran up their backs as she hovered like a naked girl bird, gilded red-bronze in the light. Then she crashed into the water. The efforts of her parents had worked this much: she landed beyond the pools of burning oil in which everyone else had fallen.
Liir leaped from the boat, hissing over his shoulder “Back to base! That’s an order!” He didn’t turn to see if he was obeyed. In vain he looked for the girl. He didn’t see her. He didn’t see if she had swum ashore, or if she had sunk, or if she had swum back into the fiery liquid to join her parents in their immolation.
GOVERNMENT HOUSE WAS LOCKED down with tighter security than he’d ever seen it, but Liir had no trouble signaling to the night watch and getting in. Despite instructions to the contrary, Ansonby and Burny and the others weren’t out canoodling with their local girls; they’d taken refuge in the barracks. The company of their mates must seem more consoling. And Liir observed that no one was off the premises that night. The other soldiers must have been alerted not to stray. For defense of the post? For their own safety? That meant the guys assigned to the mission would have been the only ones outside of military protection. Liir saw it now. They’d have been sitting ducks, isolated from each other, naked in bed with native women when and if the news spread and a retaliation was launched.
“The hero of the hour! Where’ve you been?” asked Somes.
Liir started to say something about the girl. He hadn’t been able to find her, partly because it had been hard to train his eyes on the scene. It seared too brightly to be able to read.
“We’ve been fortifying ourselves with whiskey and patting ourselves on the back. The bridge is history! Come in for a rousing welcome.”
“History. History. In a flash,” said Liir. “Need to get something first.”
He ducked along the upper verandah that looked onto the central courtyard, keeping back in the shadows and out of sight of men lounging by the fountain below. It only took him a moment to grab his satchel, the few things he’d stored in his trunk at the foot of his bed. He put his dress boots on the windowsill: a kind of symbol, he supposed, that he’d jumped. Everyday boots would serve well enough. Then, the old, mildewing cape and the broom on his back, a corked flagon of fresh water slung over his shoulder, he made his way lightly down a back staircase and through the dry goods pantry. Then over the wall, literally and figuratively.
WITH THE WITCH’S BROOM, he had the means to travel swiftly, but his heart was so heavy that he couldn’t imagine lifting off the ground—or if he did, only to reach a height suitable for throwing himself from his perch.
He walked, and took no pains to conceal his tracks or silence his footfall. North, as far as he could tell. He corrected his trajectory by checking it against the movement of the sun, and if one day he wobbled too much to the west, the next he would likely wobble easterly.
It was early spring when he left Qhoyre—spring by the calendar, not by the growing season, for in the marshlands, rot and flower and fruit and seed and rot happened simultaneously all year. Long ago the climate had become a second skin from which he couldn’t extract himself until, weeks on, his path began to climb, and now and then his foot landed on a hillock of dry grass.
He’d expected some crocodile to snap off a limb while he slept, a marsh cat to take a swipe at him, but the only creatures that seemed aware of his presence were the mosquitoes, and he yielded himself to them without complaint. He imagined them bleeding him dead, a thousand bites a day for a thousand days, until from the inside out he would have dried up entirely. Then—another way of flying!—a strong gust might come along and begin to worry a fleck of skin, and his whole being might toss itself like a scatter of midges in the air and disappear.
Weeks of walking, resting, walking. He didn’t look for food, but the amoral landscape threw succor in his path. Thrashes of greenberry bush, ground nuts, the occasional swamp apple, porcupine root. He grew leaner than ever, though his diet seemed sufficient, for he suffered neither from dreams nor dysentery.
His sense of the geography of Oz was limited, but its most salient feature was the scimitar-shaped spine of high mountains that curved up from south central Oz to the northwest. He needed to get through the Quadling Kells—either by the Yellow Brick Road or not. Once he was northside of the mountains, he’d turn west and keep them on his left. Sooner or later he’d come to the gorge known as Kumbricia’s Pass, the best route to the vast grasslands of the Vinkus. But he’d move on, until the Great Kells raised their ice-sheathed peaks on the west. He’d have to hit the Vinkus River, and he’d follow it north to where it emerged in a dazzling waterfall from a hung valley in the central Kells. Up the side of that waterfall, tracing the banks of the rightmost branch of the higher Vinkus, and still higher up the middle ridge of Knobblehead Pike, and he’d be back.
Not home. There was no place like home. Just back. Back at Kiamo Ko.
As he walked, he thought of nothing, when he could manage that. The world in its variety had no appeal, and seemed mocking and vain. Clearing the Quadling Kells with relative ease, he’d come out into an easy summer on the northern slopes, wherein fruit trees sported flocked yardage of blossom, and bees sawed the sunny afternoon with their industry. It was not music, but noise. He stole some maple sap from a hermit’s storehouse in the woods, not to savor, just to feed the gut.
In time there was evidence of human habitation again—a homestead here or there, a shrine on the road—to Lurline or to the Unnamed God, he couldn’t tell and didn’t care, and didn’t stop to pay homage. He avoided people when he could, and when he could not, he was stone-tongued enough to be alarming. The kinder of the farm folk might offer a scupper of milk or a blanket in the hay loft, but they wouldn’t welcome him in to their table. Nor would he have accepted.
Once he came upon an old woman driving a four-horned cow before her with a switch. She was accompanied by a kid, a boy by the looks of it, who seemed frightened of his granny, and shot Liir a desperate, pleading look. The woman turned her switch on the child and hissed, “There’s nothing to look at in him, Tip, so mind your eyes or the road’ll trip you up, and you’re not riding the cow so stop thinking about it. We didn’t come all this way for a prize specimen so you could mope and roll your eyes.”
“How far is all this way?” asked Liir—not that he cared, but he thought if the woman would talk to him,
she’d have less breath for smacking the boy.
“Gillikin, and we aim to get there before the snow flies, but I have my doubts,” snapped the woman. “As if it’s any of your concern.”
“That’s a long way to come for a cow,” said Liir.