They rested a little, then began cautiously to crawl up the far slope. There was plenty of cover, though the plants and thorny bushes of the underbrush tore at their faces and hands. Kennard’s leather riding-breeches did not suffer so badly as Larry’s cloth ones, but their hands and faces were torn and bleeding, and the red sun was beginning to thin away the dawn clouds, before they reached the summit of the slope and lay on the rocks exhausted, too weary to move another step. Behind them, in the valley they had left, there seemed no sign of men or banshees.
“They may have called off the hunt,” Kennard muttered, “Banshees are torpid in the sunlight—they’re nightbirds. We just might have got clean away.”
Huddling his cloak round him, he knelt and looked down into the far valley. It was a huge bowl of land, filled to the brim with layered forest. Near the top, where they were, there was underbrush and low scrubby conifers, and snow lay in thin patches in hollows of the ground where the sun had not warmed. Lower down were tall trees and thick brushwood, while the valley was thick with uncleared forest. Not a house, not a farm, not a cleared space of land, not even a moving figure. Only the wheeling of a hawk above them, and the silent trees below them, moved in response to their dragging steps. They had escaped Cyrillon’s castle. But in the growing red light, their eyes met, and the same thought was in them both.
They had escaped bandits and banshees. But they were hundreds of miles from safe, known country—alone, on foot, almost weaponless, in the great trackless unexplored forests of the wildest part of Darkover.
They were alive.
And that was just about all that they could say.
THE SUN CLIMBED higher and higher. In the high hollow where they lay, a little cold sun penetrated their retreat, and finally Kennard stirred. He took off his cloak and spread it in the sun to dry, then stripped to the skin and gestured to Larry to do likewise. When Larry, shivering, hesitated, Kennard said harshly, “Wet clothes will freeze you faster than cold skin. And take off your boots and dry your stockings.”
Larry obeyed, shivering, crouching in the lee of a sunwarmed rock. While their clothes dried in the bitter wind of the heights, they took stock.
In addition to his medical kit—which contained only a few of the most ordinary remedies, and measured only four or five inches square—Larry had his knife with the broken blade, corkscrew, and tiny magnetized blade. Kennard looked at it with raised eyebrows and a rueful grin, and shrugged. He also had another piece of the coarse bread, a notebook, handkerchief and a coin or two.
Kennard, who had come provided for a long journey, was better armed with his razor-sharp dagger, a tinderbox and flints, and in the leather pouch at his waist he had some bread and dried meat. “Not much,” he said. “I had more cached near where I left my horse; I’d hoped we could dare take that road. And there is food in the forests, though I’m not so sure here as I am in the woodlands nearer home. No, we won’t starve, but there’s worse than that.”
At Larry’s questioning look, he said reluctantly, “We’re lost, Larry. I lost my bearings when we were getting away from the banshees last night. All I know is that we’re west of Cyrillon’s hold—and no lowlander or Comyn has ever come so far into these mountains. Never. At least, if they have they haven’t lived to tell about it. We can’t go back eastward toward home—we’d have to cross Cyrillon’s country—or make a wide circle northward and get into the Dry Towns.” His face, though he tried to keep it impassive, trembled. “That’s all desert land—sand, no water, no food, and we might as well go back and ask Cyrillon for a night’s lodging. Southward there’s the range of the Hellers—and not even professional guides or mountaineers will go into them without climbing equipment, and mountain gear. I’ve done a little rockclimbing, but I’m about as fit to climb through the Hellers as you are to navigate a Terran spaceship.”