It was open, gaping, the pin removed and dropped onto the ground beneath it. Even with just one pin removed, the panels could be pulled apart, though it took some strength to do so. We turned immediately to the gaufers, looking them over for blood or wounds, but they were as placid as a rain pool on a rock, gazing liquidly beneath fringed lashes, jaws moving in the immemorial rhythm of the cud. So, our songfathers tell us, animals of the long ago twice chewed their food, even back so far as Old-earthian times.
“Something pulled it loose,” said Leelson, clamping his mouth into a grim line. “One of your beautiful people?”
“They couldn’t,” I said. “It’s made so they can’t. We must not have put it in tightly last night.”
“I did that side,” Trompe objected. “And believe me, it was as tight as it is possible to get it!”
We were still standing there, lost in that kind of slightly fearful confusion that readily leads to contentiousness, when Lutha came to the door of the wagon and asked in a plaintive voice, “Where’s Leely?”
I blurted, “Isn’t he curled up under the blankets? I thought … ”
She turned back to rummage inside the wagon, crying almost at once, “He’s not here. Trompe, Leelson, he’s not here.”
“He’s only a child,” muttered Trompe. “He couldn’t have opened—”
“He’s strong as the proverbial nox,” grated Leelson. “If you haven’t seen that, you haven’t noticed much. He’s stronger than many men I know.”
“Oh, God, God.” Lutha’s voice rose in a shriek. “Where is he. Where’s my baby?”
The two men exchanged glances once more, pulled two more pins out, thrust open the loosed panels, and went in opposite directions, one up and one down the canyon, quartering the ground, looking behind stones and among low growths, calling, “Leely. Leely-boy. Leely.”
Lutha was out after them in the moment, barefoot as she was, her hair streaming behind her, covering the same ground and lamenting so loudly that the rock walls echoed with it.
“Hush!” bellowed Trompe. “Listen!”
Abrupt silence. Then I heard it. Softly, a little voice, not at all fearful or pained. “Dananana.” And again: “Dananana.” It came from upstream, in the direction of our travel.
Lutha darted in that direction, soon catching up with Trompe. Leelson trudged slowly back to the wagon and continued disassembling the panels as though nothing had happened. He had about him an air of frustration that had been growing hour by hour since Lutha had arrived at Cochim-Mahn. Everything she did irritated him, but he could not, for some reason, just let her be, so everything he did regarding her irritated him as well. By the time Trompe and Lutha came back, she carrying the boy, Leelson was muttering to himself angrily with the gaufers half-harnessed.
“What are you doing!” Lutha screamed. “My, God, Leelson, don’t you care about him at all!”
She lifted the boy in a dramatically hieratic gesture, as though offering him for sacrifice or dedication, drawing attention to his arms. There were several little red spots on the flesh above his wrists, no more than insect bites. Leely seemed undisturbed by them. He wasn’t scratching or whimpering, and even as I looked the redness faded. It was like watching a candle burn down, slow but perceptible. So healing was with him.
“He doesn’t seem to be hurt,” said Leelson in an expressionless voice. “Look at him, Lutha!”
Her eyes were still full of righteous fury, but she did look at the boy, her chin quivering as she kissed and hugged him and looked beneath his shirt to see if he was hurt, murmuring small endearments the while, all of which Leely ignored in favor of churning his arms and legs and caroling “Dananana.”
“He’s not hurt,” said Leelson again. “He woke early, let himself out, and got bitten by … what, Saluez? You know your native vermin better than we.”
“Jiggerbugs,” I said, giving the creature an equivalent aglais name. “Maybe. Or there’s a kind of spidery thing we call D’lussm. Both of them bite.”
Which they did. A bite from either would leave spots similar to those on the boy, though usually it took a day or two of frantic itching and even localized pain before the swelling disappeared.