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soon enough.”
It sat there timidly. Its ebony body was glistening wet as its flower-thin wings rose and fell tentatively with each respiration. The creature’s heart continued to palpitate so quickly that the sides of its dark slender body seemed to vibrate. It looked at Joshua, and its scared, warm face smiled.
“It will be safe here,” said Beauty. “It will dry within the hour.” He looked at the sun. “We should be gone.”
Josh nodded in agreement.
They started off, but didn’t get fifty paces before Josh stopped. “Wait a minute. Be right back.” He ran over to the pond, broke open an orange, and laid several juicy slices on the ground in front of the Flutterby. Shyly, the animal lowered its eyes.
Josh ran back to where Beauty was waiting. “Let’s go,” he said, and they continued south at a trot.
Not only the contour of the western coastline, but the terrain itself had undergone considerable alteration following the quakes of Fire and Rain, and then once more after the Great Quake, which marked the beginning of the steady southward creeping of the Big Ice.
A temperate band of hills and wood extended from Monterey down to Port Fresno, but there the land became subtropical. Newport, in fact, was surrounded by rain forest, and no one civilized had ever been much south of that since no one knew when.
The marshland over which Josh and Beauty were trekking was itself highly variable in character. Areas of bogs, fens, and marshes were interspersed throughout, sometimes in great density. On the other hand, great spans of grassy plain extended sometimes for miles. It was hilly in places, rocky elsewhere. There were even scattered acres of trees.
It made tracking difficult. The wounded creature had gone over stony flats that held not a print, through foul mire that absorbed all smell. Josh and Beauty kept on the trail, but they had to slow down. At one point they missed a turning and had to backtrack a mile before they picked up the true scent.
The sun was still high when they came to the shore of the Venus River. The Venus was a long water that ran from inside Mount Venus in the east, all the way to the sea. It was fairly calm where it cut through the marshlands, but a hundred yards wide, and too deep to tell how deep.
They were both good swimmers, but Josh was hesitant and water-shy as he remembered Rose’s vision. Beauty admonished him, though, and assured him Rose had been speaking in metaphors. They stood at the muddy edge for a few minutes, watching the slow, implacable current move, like time, toward them and past them. Leaves bobbed on the surface, and rotting logs and dragonfly wings. A flower floated by. As it came even with them it paused on an eddy or undercurrent. For a moment the whole world was still for Joshua.
The moment passed. They jumped in and raced to the other side. On the other side, there was no trail.
“Most likely he let the current take him downstream,” said Joshua. “We’ll do best to walk west along the bank, pick him up where he came out.”
“So it would want us to think. But a strong Accident can swim upstream. And its home forest is east of here.”
“The brothel’s west,” suggested Josh. They thought in silence and considered alternatives. “We could split up,” Josh added. He didn’t want to. Beauty was all he had left.
Beauty placed this thought between his temples and examined it from all sides. “No,” he said finally.
Josh agreed. “We’ll walk upstream for two miles. If we don’t pick up the trail, we’ll turn back and follow the river west. He couldn’t have swum upstream more than two miles.”
In a measured voice, Beauty replied, “Yes.” It was the Human way - to try to cover all the possibilities. Such an approach had its merits, Beauty conceded to himself, when Horse sense failed.
It was a standing joke between them, Beauty’s economy of words. Quiet Josh was positively garrulous next to his equine companion, and frequently teased the Centaur about his dour, parsimonious speech. Beauty, in his turn, would accuse Josh of logorrhea, of being a Scribe just to scribble, of meaningless chatter. And so it went.
Josh looked at his friend now, after the two monosyllabic retorts and said, “Tell you what, stamp your foot once for Yes, twice for No. Okay?” It was his great joy in life to tease his golden friend.
Beauty looked down his nose distantly at Josh, raised his right front hoof, and tapped the young man backward into the river. Joshua splashed, spluttered, and pulled himself out.
“Like that?” beamed the Centaur angelically.
With a gleeful whoop, Joshua jumped on top of Beauty’s back, leaned his full weight to one side, his hands in the Horse-man’s mane, and wrestled the Centaur to the ground. They rolled around the mud, horse-playing for a full minute before Josh looked up to realize they were surrounded by a party of hostile creatures.
He stood up slowly, hands away from his knives. Beauty jumped up in a single motion and stood perfectly still, waiting.
There was a big fellow, hair covering most of his face. He aimed a crossbow directly at Joshua’s middle. Beside him stood a gaunt, toothless woman holding a zip gun – these primitive firearms exploded as often as not, but one never knew. Next to her was a muscular man with no arms and the head of a large black bird. At his side a gorilla smiled, opening and closing its fists.
And the leader, a nearly naked woman with a saber in her hand and a black cloth hood over her head; her brilliant green eyes stared out through the two holes cut in the cloth. On her right shoulder was branded an upright trident.
Nobody moved. It was an animal thing. Each was sniffing the air, reading the wind. Josh felt a droplet of sweat congeal under his arm and creep down his side, precipitating out of the hot afternoon sun with tension in the air. Finally the woman in the hood spoke, in a low monotone.
“Are you a believer?” she said.
Josh tightened. The question identified the interlopers as BASS – Born Again ‘Seidon Soldiers – and though they looked pretty scruffy, they were known to be tough infighters. Furthermore, they considered themselves highly moral, and Joshua knew this meant they were labile and dangerous.
“Our journey is moral,” Josh said to the hooded woman.
“We are tied to no King,” explained Beauty.
“Nor the Pope,” added Josh. BASS were under the command of the Doge of Venice, and though the Doge was aligned with the Pope, there were factional hostilities. The BASS worshiped Poseidon or Neptune, God of the Sea. Their religion prophesied that someday the sea would reclaim the land, and then Neptune would rule the whole watery world.
“Are you believers?” repeated the hood-woman.
“Our mission is Venge-right,” said Josh. “Vampires have killed our people.”
“Perhaps they had a right,” said the hooded woman. The Bird-man made a raucous noise in his throat, like the sound of a ratchet being turned, then was silent again.
Josh noted Beauty’s hind legs flex, ready to spring. “They had no right,” said Beauty. The hairs on his mane stiffened.
“Nonbelievers lie for their own ends,” said the hooded woman. Her eyes were on Beauty and her hand on her saber.
“Our journey is moral,” repeated Joshua. He felt the situation deteriorating quickly; something had to be done. His fight was not with these people. He wanted only to show them that neither was their fight with him. So he decided to gamble. “Our power comes from the water,” he intoned.
He saw them tense. Beauty looked at him questioningly. Josh knew these people had a complex, mystical, baptismal relationship with the sea, and he suspected they would react strongly to his statement. He was right, the air was electric.
“Water