Teshar · Early Spring, 9,993 BCE · Midlands Camp

  The blade had been in the coals long enough.

  Teshar could tell by the colour — not the bright orange-white of obsidian pushed too far, but the deeper, settled glow of stone that had drunk heat slowly and was holding it. He watched it for one more count, then lifted it clear on both green-wood carrying sticks.

  Heat climbed through the wood at once. He moved fast.

  He set the blade beside Mailen's outstretched arm and gripped the bone-wrapped handle through his gloves — double-layered aurochs hide, hair-side out, each finger-stall tied separately at the knuckle. The right thumb carried a patch from last autumn. They smelled of old smoke and rendered fat. They were the most useful things he owned.

  Mailen lay on a folded sleeping-hide, forearm up, palm open. The gash ran from two fingers below the wrist to the inside of the elbow — a blade wound, the edges ragged where he had pulled away mid-cut and made it worse. Three days without closing. The flesh around it had gone the pink-white of early inflammation, and last night Siramae had pressed her lips together in the particular way that meant her patience with the wound was nearly gone.

  Marlek crouched at Mailen's right shoulder — one hand on the upper arm, one knee across the bicep. No instruction given. Just his weight, placed where it was needed.

  Yarla held the lower forearm with both hands. She was fourteen, and her face wore the still, working expression she used when something cost her.

  "Hand him the cloth," Teshar said.

  Yarla reached sideways without looking away from the arm, picked up the roll of nettle-woven cloth, and placed it against Mailen's mouth. Mailen took it in his teeth without prompting. He had been hunting since he was twelve. He knew what came next.

  Teshar pressed the blade flat onto the open wound.

  The sound was immediate — fat crackling against heat, then a high continuous sizzle as the skin sealed under the obsidian's face. The smell was one he had never fully adapted to: sweet and acrid together, cooked flesh in the wrong context.

  Mailen's whole body convulsed. He drove his heels into the hide, a strangled cry tearing out around the cloth — not quite a scream. His free arm swung up.

  Marlek caught it with his weight and said nothing.

  Yarla's hands did not move.

  The shelter entrance darkened. Siramae came through first, herb bag pushed back, hands free. Kelon followed half a step behind. Neither had been inside when it started. They had heard it.

  Siramae pressed both hands flat to Mailen's chest. Kelon took his legs.

  Teshar counted three. Removed the blade in one clean motion and set it back on the flat stone.

  Mailen's body dropped. The cry cut off. He pulled a long breath through his nose — still clamping the cloth — then another, and the shaking started. Fine and continuous through the whole torso, the body's accounting for what had just been done to it.

  Teshar stripped the right glove and took a pinch of dried willow herb from the clay pot beside him. He crushed it between his fingers to release the oils — the scent came up green and faintly sweet — then pressed the bruised leaf-matter onto the sealed wound with his bare fingertips.

  The willow herb was not from their stores. Their stores were nearly gone. He had spent the previous afternoon on the south-facing slope above camp, working on his knees through the new growth, picking leaf by careful leaf from plants that had barely pushed through the first warm week. Too early for a proper harvest. He had taken what was there.

  He wrapped the wound himself — cloth strips pre-cut, pre-boiled, Siramae's work — in two overlapping passes, tight enough to hold, loose enough that the blood could move.

  "Two days. Full rest. Arm elevated when he sleeps. If that cloth shows wet before tomorrow evening, come to me."

  He glanced at Yarla. She nodded once.

  Mailen had taken the cloth from his teeth. He stared at the roof of the shelter and breathed in the careful way of a man who has found the pace that keeps him on the right side of composure. He did not look at his arm.

  Marlek released his grip. He stood, looked at the wrapped forearm, looked at Teshar, and walked out without a word. Teshar did not need one.

  He cleaned the obsidian blade, wrapped it in its hide sleeve, and left.

  **

  Siramae fell in beside him before he reached the second tent.

  They walked without talking. The camp was already moving in the thin morning — water being carried, hides aired, the firekeeper feeding the central pit from a stack he had been building since before dawn. Two of Linna's people worked at the fish rack. The air smelled of woodsmoke and thawed ground, and somewhere above the thorn ring a thrush was working through the same ascending phrase over and over, as though it had not yet decided whether to commit to it.

  "The redness is at the wound edges," Siramae said. "If it moves past the first wrap-mark by tomorrow night, we have a problem."

  "I know."

  "The willow herb will slow it."

  "Yes."

  She glanced at him. "You walked three hours for that yesterday."

  "Two and a half."

  "The slope, not the river path?"

  "The river patch was stripped in the cold snap. The hill-facing plants had shelter."

  She made a sound that was neither confirmation nor approval. "He's strong. He'll fight it off, or he won't. The body makes that choice, not us."

  "He's been eating better this month. That counts."

  "Everything counts," she said, and left it there. She shifted the empty herb bag to her other shoulder. He had noticed she had been carrying it empty for three weeks.

  They were near Arulan's tent. She stopped.

  "He's ready?" Teshar asked.

  "Since yesterday. He's waiting on you."

  "The bread?"

  "Nessa and Ethva have had it since first light. It's good." A pause. "Good, meaning it tastes like something. Not just hot and dry."

  "I tried a piece at dawn."

  "I know. You were very quiet about it."

  The line of her mouth shifted — the version that was not quite a smile, the one he had learned to read.

  He pushed open the tent flap.

  **

  Arulan's tent smelled of old hide and cold earth and the faint sweetness of a fire that had burned low in the night and not been rebuilt.

  The elder sat with his staff across his knees — that staff, those hands, that stillness, the same as it had been for five winters. His hair was fully grey. The tremor that came and went in cold weather was in his hands today, moving through them when he shifted his grip, and which he had stopped trying to conceal some months back. His eyes had not changed.

  Teshar sat across from him.

  "Mailen?" Arulan said.

  "Sealed. Two days. He'll fight it or he won't."

  Arulan absorbed that without movement. "And the council."

  "When you're ready."

  "I've been ready." He tapped the staff once against the ground. "Gadrian will resist."

  "I know."

  "He's not performing. He believes what he says. Don't argue with it as though it's an obstacle — argue with it as though it's a serious question."

  Teshar looked at him. "It is a serious question."

  Something in the elder's face eased. "Good. Then answer it seriously." He stood, staff in hand, finding his footing. "Linna has already decided. Half the room is yours before you open your mouth. Don't waste that by explaining too much."

  He moved toward the flap.

  "Arulan."

  The elder paused without turning.

  "Thank you," Teshar said.

  Arulan considered that for a moment. "Don't thank me yet," he said, and pushed through into the morning.

  **

  They came one by one and in small groups, drawing into the circle around the central fire in the order that had established itself over months.

  Arulan to the north, staff planted. Raisa was at his right shoulder with her counting stick. Varek to the left, already crossed-armed, already settled into the position he had chosen before he arrived. Siramae between Varek and Quaybec, the empty herb bag across her knee.

  Quaybec sat with his palms open on his thighs. He had arrived from the wreckage of his band with six people alive out of forty-three, and in the months since had not once asked for anything he had not already given back. The other elders gave him the particular quiet that people gave to endurance they could not account for.

  Gadrian took his place on the far side without looking at anyone. He was thirty winters — younger than Marlek and Torek and Arulan by a considerable gap — but he sat with the posture of a man who had grown up carrying something and had not set it down. The antler-and-bone staff at his knee was carved with marks Teshar had never asked him to explain. Several of the older men in his group greeted each other with a gesture — thumb to chest, then open — that Gadrian used only with them. He was not unfriendly. His loyalties ran in a different direction for certain things, and he was honest about it.

  Linna settled on Gadrian's right. Paeton took his place a step behind her left shoulder, as he always did. Their daughters — Sera and Myra, seventeen and fifteen — sat further back with the other younger adults, hands moving through morning tasks, eyes tracking the circle.

  Marlek took his place at Teshar's right and did not look at him.

  Torek was already running numbers — a particular stillness in the eyes, different from ordinary attention, that he had carried in since before he sat down.

  Hoden sat forward on his flat stone, elbows on his knees, watching Linna.

  Kelon, Naro, Raku, Ketak, Yarla — the outer ring, placed there by Arulan's nod the previous day. Not elders. Present.

  Arulan's eyes found Teshar.

  Teshar stepped forward.

  **

  He did not begin with the south. He began with the ground under their feet.

  "The attack on the trail was seven days ago. Drev is healing — his leg will carry him, but not on a hard march for another two weeks. Mailen's arm I sealed this morning. We will know in two days whether it goes clean."

  He let that settle. He looked at the herb rack near the east shelter — bare wood, bone hooks, nothing on them. Everyone in the circle knew what it looked like.

  "Our medicine stores are close to gone. Siramae has been walking further each week for less. The plants here do not grow in numbers worth depending on."

  Varek's eyes moved to the rack and back.

  "The permanent camp." A pause. "The kilns are sealed. The jars are hidden. The concealment marks are ours to read. None of that changes. But the camp is occupied. Returning to it means a fight, and a fight costs people, and some of those people will not come back. Before we decide that is the right price, I want us to know what the other ground offers."

  Nobody filled the space.

  "Linna." He turned to her. "Your scouts walked the first ridge south of here last autumn. Tell the council what they saw."

  She did not wait.

  "Flat ground south of the ridge. Two river systems feed in from the highlands — one strong year-round, one seasonal. The soil sits above good drainage, and does not hold surface water when the rains come. The winters are shorter. The game in the valley runs heavier than what we have hunted here." She paused. "My daughters walked to the Pine line and counted. They also said the ground was soft in a way they had not seen before. Not bog-soft. They could not name it."

  "Reed beds," Teshar said. "Building material within reach of the main water. And the herb species Siramae has been trying to find here — they will grow there as they should. In numbers. Not scraped from hillsides."

  Siramae's hands were still on the empty bag.

  "That is the ground I am proposing we move to," Teshar said. "Now I want to show you what it can do."

  He reached into the pack at his knee and brought out the bundle.

  **

  It was not much to look at.

  A tied cluster of dried grass, the seed-heads still attached, straw-coloured, modest. He held it out across the circle and let people look at it.

  Gadrian said, "Barley."

  "Yes. The same grass you have all walked past on the south-facing hillsides. Three seasons ago, I started watching the patches that grew nearest camp." He turned the bundle slowly. "I noticed something Siramae had always known: the plants grow denser in cleared ground. Competition thins them. So I cleared around the best patches and came back in the first autumn. The yield in those areas had doubled."

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  He set the bundle on the ground between them.

  "I took the fullest seed-heads and scattered them in a new, cleared section further along the slope. The second season, that section gave more than the first. Third season, I had enough to store."

  He looked at Gadrian. "This is not a spirit's gift. It is watching, responding, and doing it again. Siramae has done this with her healing plants for twenty years — she clears around the good ones, returns to the same patches, and keeps seed from the best harvest. I applied the same practice to the plant that fills you most."

  Siramae reached out and pressed two fingers to one of the seed-heads, feeling the grain inside. She did not look up.

  "In the south, on the right ground, we do this properly. Not a patch — a plot. Cleared, planted, tended, harvested. Enough to store through winter. Enough that when the hunting comes back thin — as it did this year, as it did two years before — the band does not go thin with it."

  **

  Gadrian spoke before the circle could settle into response.

  He did not raise his voice. The weight was in his attention — the weight of a man who had thought the thought through before opening his mouth — and the circle registered it.

  "My father's people moved. His father's before him. We moved with the seasons, followed the game, read the ground and took what it offered. When it offered less, we moved on and let it recover. That is why we were still here to be hungry — because our grandfathers did not stay in one place until they had nothing left."

  He looked at the bundle on the ground.

  "Planting means staying. Staying means putting your survival into the earth. A bad season when you are moving is a bad season — you hunt further, you gather elsewhere, you come through. A bad season when you have planted and stayed is a different thing entirely. You have committed, and if the earth does not return it, you have nothing." He looked at Teshar directly. "My grandfather's grandfather knew how to feed a band. He did not plant."

  Varek came in without waiting. The flatness in his voice was not the flatness of a man without feeling — it was a man pressing hard on something he did not want visible.

  "We built something. Clay walls. A kiln. A longhouse with a tiled roof. Piece by piece across five winters, and we sealed it and walked away because we had no choice, and now you are asking me to walk further from it."

  "I am not asking you to abandon it," Teshar said.

  "What would you call it?"

  "Waiting. The camp is sealed. The marks are ours. We come back when the coalition fractures — and it will fracture."

  "You don't know that."

  "Vekarn lost forty men on one road in one afternoon." Teshar's voice stayed level. "What holds a coalition built on fear when the man who built the fear is gone? The question is whether we return to that camp in a position of strength, or whether we wear ourselves down in the cold until we cannot."

  Varek pressed his lips together and looked at the fire.

  Hoden came in then — smooth and measured, from the position he had settled into once he decided which way he wanted the council to fall.

  "No one in this circle has seen the south ground," he said. "We have one woman's scout report and Teshar's belief. Before we commit seventy-five people to a march we cannot reverse mid-season, should we not send a party south first? Two days out, two days back. We confirm what Linna's scouts saw."

  He spread his hands. Reasonable. Costing him nothing.

  Quaybec spoke.

  He spoke rarely in councils. The circle registered it the way it registered weather — without fuss, with full attention.

  "My band walked to Arulan because the ground we were on stopped feeding us. Not because we were unlucky — because we stayed past the point where any ground could carry what we asked of it." He looked at the barley bundle. "I have not heard a reason to doubt what Teshar says. I have eaten what Teshar has grown. I ate it before it was a bundle."

  Torek said: "The last five hunts. Three came back light. One came back empty."

  He had finished. The number was the argument, and he did not dress it.

  Linna let the quiet after Torek's words run for two full breaths.

  "I lost nineteen people to Vekarn's forces. Not to plague, not to winter — to blades, while my band was spread across ground we thought we knew. He took us apart in pieces." She did not look at anyone in particular. "Staying in one place can mean staying where the enemy finds you. But moving to chosen ground — ground you have assessed, ground that feeds you, far enough south that his reach is shorter — that is not the kind of staying my people died because of."

  She nodded at Teshar. "I have watched what he has grown. I have eaten from it. My daughters are going to learn the method."

  Gadrian looked at her. He did not answer.

  Marlek said, "South."

  He had been sitting with his forearms on his knees and his eyes on the fire. He lifted his head, said the word, and sat back.

  Arulan waited until the weight of it settled.

  He planted the staff tip in the ground. The sound was small and reached everywhere.

  "Gadrian." He looked at him directly. "You are right. Your grandfathers knew how to feed a band and did not plant and survived. That is a true thing." He paused. "My grandfathers did not fire clay. They did not build kilns or tile roofs or sealed grain jars. Teshar brought those things." He looked at the barley bundle. "I have been wrong about what is possible twice in my life, because I did not recognise what was standing in front of me. I am not making that error again."

  He looked around the circle.

  "We go south. We plant. We hunt. Both things, not one. The spear does not leave your hand, Gadrian. It never did."

  He rose. Council over.

  **

  "Before you go," Teshar said. "There is something I want you to try."

  Arulan sat back down.

  Siramae had already turned toward the east entrance of the thorn ring.

  Nessa appeared first, carrying a clay pot with both hands hugged against her belly for warmth, the lid pressed down. She was one of Quaybec's people — grey-haired, compact — and she had spent three mornings learning the grinding method with a patience Teshar had found quietly humbling. Ethva came behind her, younger, carrying a flat stone loaded with small round pieces of bread, dark on the underside where they had sat against the heated cooking-stone, steam still lifting from the thicker ones.

  The smell arrived before the objects did.

  Warm, faintly nutty, substantial in a way the camp's mornings rarely managed. The porridge had been enriched with bone-marrow fat and wild thyme — the fat carried the heat, the thyme cut through with something green and sharp — and the combination reached the circle and made several people shift position without appearing to notice. The bread smelled simpler: toasted grain and dry warmth, not quite sweet, not quite bitter, entirely unlike anything else in the midlands camp.

  In the outer ring, Yarla turned her head.

  "What Nessa and Ethva are carrying," Teshar said, "is what the barley becomes. A flat stone, a fire, water, and work. Porridge from the ground meal, enriched with marrow fat and whatever herb grows near the water. Bread from the same meal, pressed flat on a heated stone."

  He looked at the circle.

  "Hoden. Marlek. Eat."

  Hoden moved first. He took a round of bread, broke it with his thumbs, and examined the interior — pale meal, denser at the centre. Smelled it. Took a bite.

  The circle watched him chew.

  He finished the piece. Took a second, smaller piece and ate that too. He licked the meal from his thumb and looked at Teshar.

  "Well done. You've outdone yourself. This is good."

  Marlek took the clay pot from Nessa and drank from it directly, both hands around the rim, the way he drank broth. He held the porridge in his mouth a moment. Swallowed. Reached for more without comment. He finished a full portion, wiped his hands on his thigh, and looked into the pot to see if there was another.

  The circle went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with uncertainty.

  One of the younger men in Gadrian's group said, "Are you serious. Is it actually—"

  "It's good," Hoden said, without looking at him. "Have some."

  They came forward — not all at once, with the brief hesitation of people asked to trust something new, but steadily, one after another, until the circle had folded into something closer to a meal than a council.

  Linna broke her piece and passed the larger half to Paeton without looking at him. She tasted hers, and her expression did not change except around the eyes, where something settled and stayed.

  Sera made the sound Myra was too composed to make: a short, genuine exclamation of pleasure, quickly swallowed but audible, which made Naro grin from the outer ring.

  Quaybec ate quietly and steadily. When he finished, he looked at Nessa and gave her a nod that was, in the economy of Quaybec's face, a considerable thing.

  Gadrian approached last. He took a piece of bread and turned it over in his hands — the dark-fired underside, the pale interior. Pressed it between his fingers to feel the density. Took a small bite. Chewed slowly, looking at nothing in particular. Took a second bite, finished the piece, and stood with his hands at his sides.

  He did not ask for more. He went back to his place and sat down.

  Varek had moved to the far edge of the circle and was eating standing, three steps back from everyone else. He took both bread and porridge, ate everything, and did not acknowledge it.

  When the eating had settled into the comfortable noise of people who are full rather than people who are deciding, Teshar said:

  "Three mornings' work. Early, before the camp was moving. Nessa, Ethva, and I ground and baked from four jars — all I could make with what we had. With a proper plot in the south behind us and a first harvest in, this is what every morning can look like. Not the thin morning. Not the how-much-is-left morning. This morning."

  Siramae said, "With this, the sick eat. The old eat. Children eat when the hunt comes back empty. We do not stand at the entrance waiting for the men to return from the chase to know whether anyone eats today."

  "It won't replace the hunt," Hoden said, settled now at the inner ring. "But I can see how it sits alongside it. When the hunting is thin, this fills what's missing."

  "I approve," Torek said.

  Arulan was holding a piece of bread in both hands. He had been holding it for some time. He took a bite. Chewed. Set the remainder on his knee.

  "Five winters," he said.

  He did not complete the sentence.

  Gadrian spoke with the difficulty of a man examining a position he has held for a long time, without pretending the examination is comfortable.

  "I want to know where this came from. Not the plants — I know barley. I mean the practice. The grinding. The fire-baking. How does a man who has been in this world for five winters know how to do this when none of our people does?"

  The question had been in the room since morning. Teshar had been waiting for it.

  "I watched Siramae," he said. "For years. She knew which plants came back reliably to the same ground, which ones grew denser when competition was cleared, which seeds to keep from the best harvest, which roots held through winter and which didn't. She built knowledge out of observation, season by season." He looked at her. "I did the same thing with a different plant. She showed me the method without knowing she was showing it."

  Siramae was looking at him with an expression he did not often see on her face. Not satisfaction exactly — the thing that sits beside it, when someone says something true about you in a room where it matters.

  She looked away.

  "The grinding and the fire-baking were three winters of bad results before they were anything useful," Teshar continued. "Too coarse, too raw, too burnt, too wet. Nessa and Ethva improved the method more in three mornings than I had in three seasons."

  He nodded at both women. Ethva kept her eyes on the pot. Nessa tilted her head.

  "And if the first planting fails?" Gadrian asked.

  "Then we eat what we hunt. The same as now. The planting adds — it does not replace. The spear stays in your hand."

  "How long to the first harvest?"

  "One season, if we arrive before the planting window closes. First yield will be thin. Second season, more. Third, enough to store through winter and seed the next planting."

  "And if we arrive after the window?"

  "We wait a season. Hunt and gather as we do now, plant in the first warm week of the following spring. We lose a year, not the plan."

  Gadrian said nothing else. His hands rested on the carved staff — not gripping it.

  Linna said, "My daughters want to learn the grinding."

  "Then they should."

  "Good," she said, and looked back at the fire.

  Arulan planted the staff.

  "Then we go south. We prepare. We leave within the month."

  He stood. Council over.

  **

  The circle broke apart slowly, the way warm things do.

  Varek left without speaking to Teshar. He went to the far side of camp and set himself to relashing a pack-frame that did not need relashing, working with an intensity the task did not require. He would not sabotage the decision — Teshar had known him long enough to be certain of that. His dissent would surface at every difficulty on the road south. That was its own problem, but it was an honest one.

  Gadrian crossed to where Nessa was cleaning the cooking-stone. He asked her something, low. She answered. He listened with his head tilted — the posture of a man receiving information he had decided to receive — and when she showed him the motion of the flat grinding-stone, he looked at it as he had looked at the bread: not with approval, not with resistance, but with the careful attention of someone who does not let things past without knowing what they are.

  Hoden found Teshar near the remains of the fire pit.

  "Scout the south trail before the march. I know the passes better than most of the band. I should go first."

  "Yes," Teshar said.

  Hoden registered the agreement without warmth, which was the version Teshar had intended. He left.

  Siramae was still at the fire pit when Teshar came back past it, picking up the cloth strips Yarla had left from the wrapping. She was folding them with the efficiency of someone who has run out of most things and means to waste nothing.

  "Will you help me teach Linna's daughters?" he said.

  "To grind?"

  "To gather. To know which plants matter. And to grind."

  She set the last fold down. "You could have asked years ago."

  "You would have said no."

  "Probably." She turned the empty herb bag over in her hands. "I teach. You don't correct me in front of them."

  "I've never corrected you in front of anyone."

  "You've wanted to."

  "Occasionally."

  The line of her mouth shifted.

  "All right. But the herb knowledge comes before the grain. They need to know what heals before they learn what fills."

  "Agreed."

  She picked up the cloth bundle. Started to leave. Stopped.

  "Mailen. Go check him before you do anything else."

  "I was going."

  "Go faster." She walked away.

  **

  Mailen was asleep.

  The arm was elevated on a rolled hide, the wrap undisturbed, the cloth dry at the edges. His colour was reasonable. He breathed with the slow depth of a man genuinely unconscious rather than fighting for it.

  Yarla sat against the opposite wall, a length of nettle-cord between her fingers, working it. She did not look up when Teshar entered.

  "No change," she said.

  "Good."

  He crouched and checked the wrap edges, looked at the skin above and below, pressed two fingers to the forearm a hand-width above the wound to check the warmth differential. Consistent. Not spreading.

  He gave Yarla a small nod. She went back to the cord.

  Outside, the camp was fully in motion — packs being assessed, children counted, the argument about what to carry and what to leave already running in the matter-of-fact voice of people who had done this before and knew the cost of both errors.

  He walked to the south face of the thorn ring.

  The gap faced the plain. Through it, past the scrub and the Pine line and the rocky fall of the hillside, the ground opened and flattened and went on. The sky above was a clear spring pale — no weight in it yet, the kind that promised more than it was currently delivering but was not lying about the direction.

  He stood there for a while.

  Four jars. One three-quarters full, one half, two with room to spare. Seed enough for a first plot if the ground was right and the timing held, and nothing went wrong in transit. Three mornings of bread and porridge, and eleven of the fifteen people who had eaten without expectation had come back for more.

  Seventy-five people. All their winters. All their losses. All the things they had built and buried and would have to build again.

  **

  He was in the hammock when it caught up with him.

  Raku had strung it that afternoon between two of the poles at the camp's southern edge — reed-fibre and thin Pine, low to the ground, nothing that would survive a hard journey but adequate for an evening. Teshar had not asked for it. Raku had simply done it, in the way that Raku sometimes did things now, quiet and without announcement, as though watching for what was needed before the asking.

  The sky above the thorn ring was deepening. Not dark yet — the spring evenings were long — but losing the last of the day's pale gold, the colour going out of it slowly like heat from a fire left untended. Somewhere nearby, a pair of early swifts cut arcs over the thorn line and vanished again. Woodsmoke drifted through from the central pit. The camp was settling.

  He lay in the hammock with one arm across his chest and thought about Marlek.

  Specifically, about Marlek taking the clay pot from Nessa, drinking from it like broth, and then, without a word, without ceremony, without looking at anyone, reaching back for more.

  That was the whole of it. After five winters. After the kiln and the tiles and the grain stores and the sealing of the permanent camp and everything they had walked away from. After six years, he caught the number and held it for a moment, quietly, the way you hold something that has become too familiar to notice — after all of it, the moment that had closed the question was Marlek wiping his hands on his thigh and looking into a clay pot.

  The laugh arrived before he could do anything about it.

  Short and unplanned and real, the kind that belongs to nobody in particular — not to Teshar of the Maejak standing in an early spring camp in nine thousand and some years before the world he had come from would have a name for any of this, and not quite to Jason Valentine either, though it had something of Jason in it: the specific, helpless sound of a man who has finally understood the joke.

  "What's funny?"

  Siramae. A few paces away, seated on the flat stone she had claimed near the shelter wall, working through the evening tasks she always worked through — restringing a small drying rack with new cord, hands moving with the unthinking ease of a person who has done the same thing ten thousand times and is not thinking about it now. She was not looking at him. She was asking the question in the direction of her work.

  "Nothing," he said.

  She tied off a knot and reached for the next length of cord.

  "That was not a nothing laugh."

  He did not answer. The swifts crossed overhead again, fast and certain. Below the thorn ring, the Cilician plain stretched south in the last of the light — flat ground, good drainage, two rivers feeding in from the highlands, reed beds along the water, game running heavy in the valley. The right ground. His ground, if the window held and the march went clean and nothing went wrong that could not be recovered from.

  Siramae tied off a second knot.

  He looked at the sky and smiled.