Rakki had never seen animals led by halters before. The Cavers used them to carry loads. Mistameg had asked him how many “boxes” of bullets there were. Rakki had never heard the word. Jemmo, who had given him the few bullets that he had carried with him—also taken from him, along with the edged club—hadn’t said anything about boxes. Bo had made a shape in the air with his hands that Rakki hadn’t understood but nodded to anyway. But when asked how many boxes, he hadn’t known how to answer. So they had taken two hairhides—which was what he called the animals. If there were more boxes than two of them could carry back, they would make a return trip.
They followed the line of the cliffs, which took them up toward the higher ground above the swamp regions. Although this was not country that Rakki spent extended time in, he knew it well enough from many exploration and food-seeking expeditions. By the next day they would descend again into a valley that opened to the far side of the ash-mud wastes bordering more familiar territory.
As they receded farther from the lowlands the surroundings became bleaker, the slopes of scattered scrub and thorn bushes giving way to a wilderness of shattered black rock standing in angled pinnacles split by fractures that in places rent the ridge into immense blocks already starting to slide apart. Nothing grew here. The earth and rocks threw off an oppressive heat that Rakki could feel on his face. Vapors rose from the chasms and fissures, searing the throat and stinging the eyes. Even the dogs were affected, ceasing their noisy investigations around and ahead of the group, and instead following reluctantly behind, their ears flat, tails hanging down. Partway through the morning, rain began falling but it didn’t wet the ground. Rakki’s people told him that these were places where new parts of the world were made, when the earth heaved and roared, and fire fell from the sky.
There could be no stopping until they were past the barren uplands. They had brought some water in sacs made from skin and bladders, but the Neffers began squabbling over shares, and the supply was soon gone. The hairhides plodded ever more slowly, tongues lolling from slack mouths, their eyes bulging and taking on a strange crazed look, and the Neffers had to pull them by the halters and beat them with sticks to keep them moving. Bo and Scar-arm were surly at Rakki for bringing them this way, which somehow seemed to make it his doing that the water had run out. Screecher echoed their mood and subjected him to an assault of ongoing abuse interspersed with blows. Rakki’s tongue swelled, and his mouth felt as dry as ashes from a fire. He endured the thirst and the insults without protest. The time for reckoning would come very soon now.
Finally, they dragged themselves over the last crest and could look down over folds of falling ground showing patches of lichen and stubby weed before disappearing into banks of mist, beyond which the dark shadows of mountains loomed indistinctly. The animals smelled water, and their lethargy gave way to a sudden eagerness to get ahead, making the handlers fight to keep them back. Beneath the mist were mud hills and then tar bogs that connected roundabout to the swamplands that Rakki was from. That was the route that Jemmo and the others would have taken. Rakki watched Screecher yelling at Gap Teeth, whose hands were slipping on the halter of the hairhide that he was trying to restrain. Soon now, he promised himself.
They descended into a basin of shelving slopes, where water rising from the ooze among the rocks came together to find its way down into the head of a ravine opening below. Already the air was cooler. Breaking free, the hairhides forged ahead to plunge their muzzles into the rivulets, while the dogs ran past them and lapped frenziedly. Rakki found a spot where the water spilled over a lip of rock in a trickle, threw himself down, and scooped it to his mouth in cupped hands. It was warm with an acrid, sulfurous taste, but in his condition he would have drunk the tar waters that lay in oily pools among the reeds lower down. Shingral and Fish started refilling the skins.