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warm their evil buttocks, and she obeyed them, thinking all the while of the curses she'd spent her life
raining upon their heads.
When they slept, she cut their throats, one by one, moving silently from one unconscious form to the next,
while their sentinel looked afar from the tallest rock, guarding against nonexistent enemies. When he
descended to take his turn at rest, she met him with a spear in the gut.
The look in his eyes had repaid her for much suffering.
Their bodies were a nuisance, after she stripped them of weapons, tools, loincloths, and ornaments. At
last she rolled them over the edge of a handy ravine, and she supposed their bones must lie there still. She
had never gone to see.
Now she bent forward, staring down at the toiling figure. Though her teeth were gone, her bones painful,
her hands bent with the aching sickness, her eyes were still keen. As the shape moved closer, she
recognized that he was, indeed, a man, and he carried a double burden.
Even as she watched, he paused in a cut between two ridges of stone. Junipers shaded his chosen resting
place, and he placed one of his bundles against the trunk of the tallest. The bundle moved, and she knew
it to be a child.
Holasheeta settled herself to observe what he might do there. A lone man, carrying a small one what
could his errand be? Had he, too, suffered the loss of his clan and did he flee from the Long-Heads as
she had done?
Or was he some enemy she had not yet met, intent upon wickedness? Whichever he might be, she
intended to learn his direction and his purpose, if that were possible. She had not lived so long in her
solitary aerie by ignoring the few unusual things that happened below her perch.
She knew herself to be invisible, her dark skin melting into the red-brown and gold shadings of the rocks
among which she sat. He might look directly at her without seeing her. for the distance was great. It was
only his motion that had caught her attention as he toiled across the slope below.
Once she concentrated her gaze upon the shadowy spot beneath the juniper, Holasheeta could follow his
actions as easily as if he had been beside her. First he drank from a gourd and cupped his hand so that
the child could drink, too. Then he dug into his pouch, and she knew that it must contain food.
He lay flat on a skin beside the young one, once they had finished their food, and the two of them
obviously slept, midday though it was. That told her what a hard journey this one had known. She also
guessed that he still had a long and difficult one ahead, else he would have pushed onward to his goal.
She dozed, too, shaded by the boulder beside her, as the sun slanted westward. When its golden warmth
touched her knee, she woke again, to find the man behaving very oddly indeed. He lifted the child to his
shoulder, patted his back, took him down, and rocked him in his arms.
The man poured water into his hand and washed the small body from head to heels. That was what one
did when an infant had a high fever, Holasheeta knew at once.
Was the child ill? All her oldest instincts returned, bringing her upright.
She had tended her own young, back in that other life. She had known the correct plants, the right
methods of dosing with them, the ways to bring down fevers or to draw the corruption from wounds.
Down there was a sick child. Those children whom she had put from her mind so long ago called to her
heart again, and the memory urged her toward the secret path she had discovered among the tumbled
boulders.
She could reach the man and the child before night fell. But he must not move on while she came down to
him. She looked about, found a round pebble, and squinted toward the pair below her.
They were so nearly beneath her ridge that it would not take a long cast to carry the pebble to their feet.
Gauging from the angle of the slope, she figured the drop would take skill, but she had been killing small
game with rocks for most of her life.
Holasheeta stepped away from the boulder, into the full glare of the westering sun. She drew back her
arm and flung the pebble with great accuracy.
It landed almost beside the man holding the child. The puff of dust was invisible from her height, but she
saw him start and look down. She drew off her loincloth and waved the dark leather over her head in an
arc, and when he looked up again, he caught the motion.
She took another pebble and flung it down, hoping he would understand that she meant for him to wait.
Evidently he did, for he sat again beneath the juniper, the young one in his arms, the man's feet drawn up
to support the small body.
And Holasheeta, feeling young again, a mother again, a healer again, hobbled, as quickly as her crooked
leg could manage, to find her path down the ridge. She would speak again with human beings, although
they could not be the real People she had known.
Yet they were alive, intelligent, and, she hoped with great fervor, no enemies of hers.
CHAPTER NINETEEN [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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