Lan came to watch, too, a couple of times, but after a few days he decided that he really wanted that extra hour or so of sleep most of the time, and quit coming every single morning. As the word got around that Adept Alikaket didn’t mind an audience, pretty near everyone got up early at least one morning just to see what he was doing. Most folks only came once, but a few came back over and over, and in the second week of the trip, some of us started trying to learn the pattern by imitating the adept’s movements.
William joined up right away, and kept at it, the same way he had when Professor Ochiba started teaching us Aphrikan magic after day school when I was thirteen. Most of the magicians stuck with it long enough to learn the pattern, and Dr. Lefevre and his assistant, Mr. Melby, came almost every morning. Bronwyn did, too, and Mr. Zarbeliev, the circuit rider from the Middle Plains Territory. Roger only came once.
I wasn’t sure why the others were interested; maybe it was just a way of working out the kinks before we got on our horses for the day’s ride. I was interested in the magic as much as the exercise. Every day I used my world-sensing to watch as the adept’s magic waxed and waned according to his movements. That was what I wanted to learn, not Hijero-Cathayan spells.
I’d spent a large part of my life being scared of myself and my magic. I’d mostly gotten over it, but there was a tiny part of me that still worried that I’d lose control and hurt someone, the way I’d almost done at my sister Diane’s wedding nine years before. If I could command my magic the way the adept commanded his, I could let that tiny part go for good.
After what the adept had said to me on that first day, though, I didn’t mention what I was after. I was pretty sure he’d tell me that I wouldn’t be able to learn what I wanted, because Hijero-Cathayan magic was too different from mine.
Even though the way he described it made sense, I reckoned there had to be other ways to look at it. Adept Alikaket seemed to think that Aphrikan, Avrupan, and Hijero-Cathayan magic were three different things, but they didn’t feel like that to my world-sensing. Magic all felt pretty much the same to me — sometimes it was stronger or weaker; and the ways Aphrikans, Avrupans, and Cathayans each used it were very different, but underneath, it was all the same power. So even if I couldn’t learn to do exactly what he was doing, maybe I could understand it well enough to figure out an Avrupan or Aphrikan way of doing it instead.
I didn’t have as much time to think as I’d have liked. Things did get easier and more of a routine as the days went on, but I still had more than enough work to keep me busy. In addition to watching out for the mammoth and making observations and notes for Professor Torgeson, Mr. Corvales asked everyone to keep a journal, even the soldiers and support staff. He said it was important to have as many records of what happened as we could, and everyone took it very seriously. I heard Sergeant Amy joking with the captain about running out of ink before we got to St. Jacques du Fleuve, if we kept up at this rate.
The speed at which we were moving kept all of us even busier. The plan for the first part of the trip was to get through settlement territory as quickly as possible, so as to get on into new territory where there were no wagonrests and we’d have to be more careful. Settlement territory was dangerous, and grew more so the nearer you got to the far edge, but we knew a lot about handling prairie wolves and saber cats and Columbian sphinxes and swarming weasels. We only knew some of the wildlife of the Far West, and all of the things we knew about, from mirror bugs to medusa lizards to steam dragons, were even more dangerous than the critters in settlement territory.
Everyone on the expedition knew that, of course, but some of us knew it better than others. In spite of the Frontier Management Department’s rules, there were quite a few folks along who’d never been west of the Great Barrier Spell even once. Every group had some, even the exploration-and-survey people. Neither Roger nor Elizabet — Miss Dzozkic, the surveyor — had ever crossed the river.
The scientists and magicians had the least experience. Only Adept Alikaket, Professor Torgeson, William, and I had spent time in settlement territory, and Adept Alikaket’s visit to the study center hardly counted. Professor Ochiba was like Roger — they’d both lived for years in Mill City, but they’d never actually gone through the Great Barrier Spell before. One of the other magicians was from New Orleans, so he knew about the wildlife in the Southern Plains Territory, though he hadn’t personally seen or fought them. The rest of the magicians had plenty of book learning about the wildlife, but no more.
The army and support staff were kind of in the middle when it came to having dealt with wildlife before. The army unit came from one of the forts in the South Plains Territory, so they knew all about terror birds and saber cats and Columbian sphinxes and the other critters that roamed the whole of the Great Plains. They hadn’t had any run-ins with spectral bears or giant beavers or other Northern wildlife, but they knew plenty about being cautious. None of the support people had been West before, though they’d all lived along the Mammoth River and had some idea what they were getting into.
Fortunately, we didn’t have much trouble for the first two weeks. We had to detour around a nest of razorquarls on the second day, and at the end of the week Sergeant Amy ran off a black bear that went for the supplies in one of the wagons, but that was all.
By then we were deep inside the area that had been devastated by the mirror bugs four years before, and there wasn’t as much wildlife to worry about. The mirror bugs had eaten everything bare and even chewed up the roots of the trees and killed them. That meant that almost all of the animals had left or starved to death, and while the prairie plants had grown back, the larger critters, especially the predators, hadn’t moved back in yet. The animals that needed tree cover or magical plants wouldn’t be back for a long time.
As we got closer to the far edge of settlement territory, wagonrests were scarcer and we had to plan our route more carefully. The newer settlements were still building their own palisades and barns and houses; they hadn’t gotten to building shelter for travelers yet. The settlers didn’t have room to put up thirty-one people, either, so when we couldn’t make it to a wagonrest, we had to stop early to set up a protected camp ourselves.
We had good weather for the first week and a bit more, but after that the spring storms set in, and it seemed like every couple of days we ended up riding through rain. Mostly it was just steady drizzle, which was pretty miserable but didn’t slow us down, but there were a couple of heavy rains when the wagons got stuck, and about once a week there were thunderstorms that made the mammoth nervous.
A few days before we reached St. Jacques, there was a particularly bad storm in the late afternoon. By the next morning, the mammoth still hadn’t calmed down enough to load, and Mr. Corvales was muttering about losing time.
I wasn’t exactly surprised; the mammoth had always gotten restless in spring and fall, when his wild cousins were migrating. Usually he started fussing around the start of April and kept it up all month, but I figured that walking all the way from Mill City had kept him from feeling so edgy this time. Professor Torgeson and William and Professor Ochiba and I worked on him for half an hour, but every time we got him tamed down, he’d raise his trunk after a minute and start shifting and dancing around again.
Just when I thought Mr. Corvales was going to come tell us to let the critter go, or stay behind until we got it under control, I saw Wash go up to him and say something. Mr. Corvales stiffened and looked north.
We’d been crossing an empty section of prairie covering a series of long, low hills, and we’d camped at the top of the highest rise we could find, so we could see pretty far. The hills and the prairie stopped at a dark, bare stand of dead trees along the northern horizon, one of the patches of forest that the grubs and mirror bugs had killed.
A haze hung just above the forest, barely visible in the pale post-dawn light. I squinted, then stiffened. “The forest is on fire,” I said before I could stop myself.
Everyone
’s heads whipped around to look north. “No wonder he’s nervous,” William said after a minute, nodding at the mammoth.
“He has reason,” Professor Ochiba said. “And now that we understand that, we should have better luck with him.”
“I certainly hope so,” Professor Torgeson muttered. She was the only one of the four of us who didn’t use Aphrikan magic, so she’d been trying to get the mammoth loaded up while the rest of us held him calm.
Word of the fire spread quickly, and it didn’t take long before the whole expedition was as edgy as the mammoth. Fortunately, we did manage better for knowing why the mammoth was uneasy. Aphrikan magic works by nudging things in a direction they might go anyway, but that’s closer to what the magician wants to happen. The mammoth wouldn’t stay calm while there was a forest fire burning only two and a half miles away, but we got it to stand still long enough to load up so that we could get moving.
By the time we finished, we could all see the flames and smoke to the north. Mr. Gensier thought that the fire had started during the storm the previous afternoon, by lightning striking somewhere among the dead, dry trees. Wash and Greasy Pierre said that the fire probably wouldn’t come our way; the wind was wrong and there’d been enough rain that even last year’s dead grass wasn’t likely to burn easily. Still, we moved along at a brisk clip, and everyone kept a nervous eye on the northern horizon all day.
That night we had more rain, much to everyone’s relief. Nobody even minded when the wind shifted and we spent the whole next day smelling damp ashes. When we got to St. Jacques du Fleuve, we found out that the fire had burned most of that section of forest and badly damaged one of the settlements at the edge of the trees.
“Damned fools figured on salvaging the timber the bugs killed,” the Settlement Office agent in St. Jacques grumbled at Mr. Corvales when he asked for news.
“It does seem a shame to waste it,” Mr. Corvales said mildly. He’d brought three of us along to the Settlement Office to collect the expedition’s mail and send off our letters.
The agent shrugged. “Fine, if you take it down and clear a firebreak. Anyone with half a brain and normal eyesight could tell that there’d be a fire sooner or later, with all that wood standing around drying out, and it’s only good sense to be ready for it. But that bunch kept putting it off, and now look at ’em. I’m not terrible fond of idiots.”
“That’s plain,” Mr. Corvales said. He handed over a huge stack of letters to send back to Mill City and points east, and waited while the Settlement Office agent checked them over. It took him a while, as pretty near everyone on the expedition was sending more than one letter. St. Jacques was our last chance to write home, unless we got lucky and ran into a trapper out in the Far West who was willing to carry mail back for us.
“Which settlement was it?” I asked.
“Neues Freiburg,” the agent said, and I breathed a quiet sigh of relief that it wasn’t one that I’d visited, so I didn’t know any of the people who’d been hurt or lost their houses. Then I felt guilty for not being as sorry about them hurting, just because I didn’t know them personally.
We picked up the expedition’s mail and left. Mr. Corvales handed me the letters for the scientists and magicians, and I took them back to camp to pass out. Everyone had mail, most of us more than one letter. I had four: a fat one from Mama, thin ones from Robbie and Nan, and one from Professor Jeffries. William had two. I could tell from the handwriting of the address that the first one was from Mama. I didn’t recognize the other, but when William saw it, he stiffened and his hand shook when he took it from me, so I was fairly sure it was from his father.
We stayed three days at St. Jacques, refilling our supplies and getting everything in tiptop working order. St. Jacques was crammed with people, most of them trappers stopping in to trade the furs they’d collected in the winter. They all looked a little wild when they first arrived, and a fair few of them didn’t bother to get themselves shaved and spiffed up, though there were plenty of places to do it.
There were two saloons, and they were open and full up all night and all day. Captain Velasquez made a point of telling the army folks that he’d court-martial anyone who pulled a gun, no matter what the provocation, but he didn’t try to keep his men out of the drinking houses. I overheard him telling Mr. Corvales that it would do more harm to have the men grumpy and resentful because they hadn’t been allowed to have a last bit of fun than it would to have them hungover on the first day out of St. Jacques.
I spent most of the time answering my letters, helping Mrs. Wilson and Sergeant Amy find the last few supplies they needed, and walking the mammoth around the outside of the camp to keep him calmed down.
On our last night in St. Jacques, Sergeant Amy came back to our tent hauling a giant canvas sack and wearing a grin that was just as big. “Take a look at these, will you, Eff, and tell me whether or not I’ve just been taken for a ride.”
She turned the sack end-up and shook it out. Two jackets fell out, slightly smelly and crudely stitched. Mrs. Wilson wrinkled her nose. “If you didn’t get paid to haul those things away, I’d say so.”
“They’re made of medusa lizard skin,” I said. “They’re real, if that’s what you wanted to know. But …” I couldn’t help making the same kind of face as Mrs. Wilson. From the look and smell, the skins hadn’t been properly cleaned or tanned, and I could see places where the seams were already coming apart. “I don’t think they’ll last long. And even if they do, I don’t know that I’d want to wear one, protection or not.”
“As long as they’re the real thing, I can deal with the rest,” Sergeant Amy said confidently. “A couple of the men used to quick-tan gildenslink hides for fun, back at the fort. I’m sure they can fix these right up.”
“Not if they try to use magic to do it,” I said. “The skin is resistant, just like the lizards. That’s the whole point of making it into jackets.”
“That’s probably where the fellow who made these went wrong,” the sergeant said with unimpaired cheerfulness. “I’ll warn them, never fear.”
“I don’t really care what went wrong or what you do with them, as long as you get them out of this tent,” Mrs. Wilson said firmly.
“All right, all right, I’m going.” Gingerly, Sergeant Amy gathered up the jackets and stuffed them back in the bag.
“And that one’s your bedroll tonight!” Mrs. Wilson called after her as she left the tent.
“By the time I get back, I doubt I’ll notice!” Sergeant Amy shot back just before the tent flap fell shut.
Leaving St. Jacques du Fleuve was harder work than I’d expected. Captain Velasquez had warned everyone that he wasn’t making any allowances; whatever shape anyone was in, he wanted us on the road by sunup, just as usual. A couple of the soldiers decided that the best way to be on time was to stay up all night drinking; they were still plenty cheerful when we rode out, especially compared to the folks who’d quit early enough to have morning hangovers, but they weren’t much actual use.
It wasn’t just the soldiers who’d been taking advantage of their last night in town, either. The exploration-and-survey group wasn’t in any better shape than the army folks, and several of the people in the science team looked to be under the weather. So it was no surprise that we didn’t make very good time that first day.
Once everyone recovered from too much celebrating in St. Jacques, the days fell into a pattern. We started off every morning as soon as it was light enough to ride. Those first few hours were long and cold, especially when it was cloudy. We stopped at mid-morning to rest the horses for an hour, and then went on until about two in the afternoon, which was generally the end of the day’s ride. Wash or Mr. Zarbeliev and some of the soldiers would go off to hunt while the rest of us made observations and did tests and set up camp. There was plenty of game, and the hunters nearly always came back with more than enough meat for dinner.
Every three or four days, we spent a full day in one spot, so the animals
could get a good rest and all the scientists and survey people could work at the jobs they’d come along for. Nobody complained about how slowly we were moving. The horses were nearly as important as our rifles, and they were a lot harder to keep in good condition.
The maps we’d brought along from the McNeil Expedition were less help than you might think. West of St. Jacques, the land flattened out, and there were so few trees that it was hard to tell where the mirror bug plague had stopped. That really frustrated Professor Torgeson. She had a bunch of theories about the mirror bugs, and she’d been hoping to map out the far edge of the damage they’d done, but without all the trees they’d killed, it was nigh on to impossible to tell where they’d been.
One good thing about the lack of trees and hills was that you could see trouble coming a long, long way off. We had a couple of hours’ warning when a thunderstorm was coming in from the west, and several times we shifted course to avoid attracting the attention of a flock of terror birds or pack of prairie wolves. Mostly, though, all we could do was loosen up our rifles and ride close in to protect the wagons.
The Western Plains were a lot more crowded than I’d ever expected. By the time we were three days out of St. Jacques, we were sending curly-horned antelope bounding away from our path nearly every time we topped a rise, and there were so many mammoths and herds of bison and antelope and silverhooves grazing, the whole plain looked like it had freckles.
The mammoths made everyone uneasy. They wandered around in groups of ten or fifteen, which was too many for us to handle if they took a notion to ignore our protection spells and all charge at once. Mr. Corvales and Captain Velasquez had five men with elephant guns spaced out around the wagons, but nobody was quite sure that even an elephant gun would take down a mammoth in one shot. Also, they took a while to reload. If a whole group of mammoths attacked, they would flatten the wagons for sure.