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University s. And night on Wolff was starker by far. She pulled at the lapels
of her coat, smiled as she remembered Head s daughter who kept tugging her
tunic down when she was nervous. Aleytys shifted the straps on her shoulders,
sighed. Tamris was on her first solo Hunt. She ll do fine, her mother over
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again, though she wouldn t thank me for saying it. She thumped the blunt end
of the staff against the dampish earth in the bottom of the wash she found
herself standing in.  Move your feet, Lee, time to get on with it. She
started walking away from the Wall.
The banks on either side of her did not quite reach her chin. Visualizing her
gray-wound head sliding along like some odd-shaped badger sniffing after mice,
she chuckled, then began looking about her as she strolled along the wash
bottom. Stubby brush grew here and there on the tops of the banks, rows of old
dried weeds leaned against these or fell over into gray piles, making way for
new weeds pushing up around them and where there were no weeds or brush,
matted grass grew, winter-dried and limp, pale in the blaze of starlight.
Spreading as far as she could see to her left or to her right were plowed and
planted fields, a haze of early growth beginning to mask pale brown earth;
robo-cultivators like small stilly goats ambling down the rows. In a few of
the fields sprays of water from sprinklers glistened like silver mist. Over
all the fields hung a profound silence where the whisper of the wind was like
a shout, the hiss of the sprinklers penetrating. The cultivators moved in
eerie silence with the fluid grace of flesh rather than the metal stiffness
and clatter Aleytys expected. The cultivators she knew were the women of
client families attached to the Houses of the Raqsidan and they had never
labored in such silence. No, there were groans and grunts and sneezes,
laughter, gossip, shouts, all done to protest or palliate the crushing labor
demanded of them.
She walked along the winding wash, the staff thumping in the increasingly
sodden bottom. When that bottom began to ooze and hollows in it had a skim of
water in them, she moved up onto the bank, the heavy pack threatening to
overbalance her until, catching herself with the staff, she worked out a way
to walk that wouldn t strain her too much. She shrugged and wriggled the pack
to a new angle and in the end was able to settle into a steady three-point
rhythm. Now and then she glanced back at the looming Wall, feeling absurdly
conspicuous, wondering what it was that kept someone, anyone, from seeing her,
coming after her. If anyone at all bothered to look she had to stand out from
the landscape as if she yelled and waved a flag in their faces saying here I
am. But she went on, unchallenged, marching away from that great pile whose
shadow still weighed on her, would press down on her even when she crawled
beneath that outer fence that was no defense but only something to keep wild
ruminants out of the fields. A shadow that weighed heavier on her than the
backpack though that was heavy enough. I ve gone soft, she thought. Too much
sitting. Flitters. Flying. She shrugged the backpack about again, shifted the
webbing straps. Haven t settled to the work yet, she thought. She smiled
suddenly. In an odd sort of way this was like the night she ran from the vadi
Raqsidan out into a world she knew nothing about, hunting then as she was
hunting now something that more than likely did not exist.
She walked on, half-expecting to hear yells of outrage from the Wall, to feel
the shock of a stunner in the middle of her back, set to react, almost
disappointed when the night remained so very tranquil, her strengths untested.
The mush in the bottom of the wash grew deeper and slushier, the stiff round
reeds thicker; a stagnant musty smell wafted from the skim of water and a hum
of glassy insects filled the air a handsbreadth above the bottom. A few
minutes later the agri-fence was before her.
It was metal mesh for the first meter then electrified barbed wire stretched
between the metal fenceposts on white ceramic insulators. Where it jumped the
wash it left a gap that someone had attempted to fill with a half-moon of
mesh. Aleytys glanced over her shoulder at the Enclave, saw the tip of the
center dome showing above the Wall. She saluted it, grinned at herself then
began examining the gap.
The mesh patch was broken, twisted, rolled aside, part of it buried in the
mud, the rest covered with rust and scaly lichen. She looked from the soupy
mud to the rusty, snaggled wire, grimaced, then shrugged out of the pack, laid
it on the bank, drove the spiked end of the staff into the dirt to hold it out
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of the muck, settled herself beside it and pulled off her boots. She scraped
them on the wiry grass, folded them inside her coat, thrust that bundle
through the shoulder straps, rolled her trousers above her knees, squatted in
the ooze and used the staff to muscle the pack through the jagged opening. Her
feet kept sliding in the slime, but the tough roots of the reeds gave her a
precarious purchase as she struggled with the awkward burden; with a grunting
heave she managed to land it on the far side of the fence mostly out of the
muck. Breathing heavily, still squatting, the reeds combing through her toes
as she moved, she inched forward and wriggled through the gap. She
straightened, joints creaking, waded a few steps more, threw out her arms in
an explosion of triumph and freedom though the Wall s shadow still held her,
not too far ahead she could see starlight frosting the grass. She stretched
her senses out as far as she could, searching for the indigenes in ambush Hana
had led her to expect, but either it was the off-season or she was simply
riding a belated bit of luck. Kicking her feet through the limp dew-spangled
grass until most of the mud was washed away, she ambled along the bank,
yawning and stretching, until she was back beside the pack. Ruefully aware
that an hour s walking was nothing compared to what lay ahead of her, she
rubbed at her shoulders where the webbing straps had reddened the flesh, then
she eased down on the damp grass. The creaks and strains of all beginnings,
she thought. She yawned again, pulled her coat from the packstraps and dabbed
at the last of the mud. She slid her feet several times over the grass,
enjoying the feel of the cool wiry stems as they passed beneath her soles. It
felt so good she was reluctant to put her boots back on, but the pack was too
heavy and the going was too ragged to allow her the luxury of barefooting it.
She worked the boots back on, hesitated over the coat; the air held
intimations of warmth to come, so she tied it on the pack, then muscled the
pack around, worked her arms into the straps and used the staff to heave [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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