Varlik waited tethered in his small, open-sided shelter while one day passed and then another. Ramolu didn't appear again, but guards saw that their prisoner was fed and his canteen refilled as needed, all without visible animosity.
Not that it was a pleasant interlude. His sleep stirred ugly with nightmares. He'd waken gasping and desperate, or desolate, the dream content slipping away even as he opened his eyes, leaving him with no more than the sense that it had been about the regiment, or the Birds, Voker or Mauen or Konni. And sweatier than even the hot Kettle night accounted for.
His most restful sleep was in naps by day, and he slept about a dozen hours out of the twenty. To occupy his waking time, he undertook to learn Orlanthan from his guards—there were two at almost all times—and they were casually agreeable to cooperating. In part they taught him nouns by pointing and naming. Fingers walked and ran and jumped. He learned to count, name trees and body parts, insects and food items. And he recorded all of it, interjecting Standard equivalents. Nor was there any sign that they were playing word jokes on him, and at any rate it passed the time.
Varlik realized that this decent treatment, this absence of abuse, was remarkable, given what he knew of the Birds' history. He did not appreciate, of course, how bad it might have been. He had no criteria for comparison, nor did his imagination stretch far in that direction.
Meanwhile, there was no further bombing.
He wondered how the Birds planned to return him north; by their long trails through the forest, no doubt. It had to be at least a thousand miles to Beregesh, and he didn't know how well he'd hold up, hiking day after day. He'd done well enough on the trail raids, but that had been only four days, and the humidity there hadn't been nearly as bad as here. The mineral tablets would help, as long as they lasted, but he only had about a week's worth. He stopped taking any while he waited; he'd save them for the trek. He was almost out of water-treatment capsules.
On the morning of the fourth day an elderly Bird appeared wearing a cross-slung rifle. He was unusually short, still sinewy beneath age-loosened skin; he leered almost toothlessly down at Varlik, who sat cross-legged on the ground.
"Me boss you fella," he said. "Me name Curly. Take you fella you people, give you back. Me talk good Standard, give orders, you and black fellas go along you."
Varlik doubted that the man was anybody's boss; he wore no armband or headband of rank. His function was probably to relay orders. Then the guard corporal spoke Orlanthan to the old man. "You stand up," the old man ordered Varlik. "Some fella sweat bird him cover you eyes."
Varlik stood up reluctantly. Did he have to walk a thousand miles blindfolded? What reason would they have for that? They tied his wrists in front of him, which at least would let him wipe away sweat. A hand grasped his arm, letting him know it was time to march, and blindly, hesitantly, he began walking. It wasn't as bad as he thought it might be. Once he relaxed and trusted his guide, it went almost without a stumble.
Curly! A Standard nickname. The man must be an actual escapee, an ex-slave from either Beregesh or Kelikut, probably born into slavery, Varlik decided. He seemed different from the other Birds here, at least those Varlik had seen much of, as if the jungle nation had evolved its own culture, different from that of the labor camps and no doubt from the original tribal cultures, too.
Varlik knew at once when they were joined by the T'swa. Not that they spoke. But they moved, walked, and already his ears were functioning more perceptively. And the wounded men slowed the pace markedly. At this rate, he told himself, it would take them two or three deks to walk to Beregesh. But the slower pace would be easier on the long, hot trail.
It would be ironic if they were killed by army gunfire when they got up there. And even more so if they were killed by T'swa hunter/killer teams, though that was less likely; T'swa raiders were much likelier to see who they were shooting at than the soldiers were.
The trail changed. The new one seemed to be the hovertruck trail the scouts had reported, that led beneath the trees from a small river to the storage caves. It seemed fairly smooth, and wide enough that some of their guards were several feet to each side. Here and there it went through shallow water, once halfway to his knees, the bottom soft and mucky but not treacherous.
After a while he smelled something besides jungle, recognized it as a river in high summer—everlasting high summer here. Shortly they slowed, stopped, and he could hear thumps—the sound of activity on small boats. Then someone led him out onto a mudbank, and uncertainly, with a bumped shin, he got into a narrow, unsteady boat, to be led along it crouching, then seated on the bottom by someone wading alongside. His legs were somewhat bent, his feet against someone ahead of him—a T'swi, he supposed.
From the sounds and delay, they were loading several boats, and perhaps some wounded T'swa were having to be manhandled in. Finally his boat was pushed free of the shore, and he heard the bump and scrape of paddles on gunwales, helping the current move them. They were headed downstream. And from what he remembered of maps he'd seen, downstream here meant south, not north. He wondered what that might mean; it worried him.
It was tiresome and eventually painful, sitting on the boat's uncushioned bottom with nothing to lean back against and his hands bound in front of him. He wondered how long it would be like this, and whether he'd become comfortable with it after a while. There were almost no distractions, only the smooth rhythmic sounds of paddling, and now and then a few words of musical Bird, unintelligible to him. Once there was a low tense call from another boat, a break in the paddling, a short burst of rifle shots. Then there came a few rapid syllables, more shooting, a brief spate of rapid Bird again, with laughter, the tension gone. Some animal, Varlik thought, something dangerous, perhaps a river creature, and they'd killed it. The blindfold and bonds exasperated him more than ever now: He'd like to have seen and recorded the event on video.
The river was narrow, he knew, because on the recon photos much of it was completely overhung with trees, showing only as discontinuous interruptions in the jungle roof. Of course, the giants along the banks would lean out over the water and reach with branches farther still, to take better advantage of the sunlight, but still the river could hardly be much wider than seventy or eighty feet. And the occasional cries of birds and tree animals were sometimes close at hand, even overhead.
Once he got thirsty and spoke the Orlanthan word for water. He couldn't understand the reply, but after a bit someone handed him a canteen cup and he drank, probably river water, he decided.
Thunder rumbled distantly, then nearer, then boomed not far away, and rain began to pelt, then pour. Quickly he was sitting in water, but he had no complaint because, warm though the rain was, it cooled. When it stopped, however, after perhaps half an hour, the air was steamier than ever.
His physical discomfort, which had become acute in the second hour, deadened, along with his mental functioning. Once they stopped to eat, but he was not untied nor his blindfold removed. A Bird held the food in what seemed to be a large leaf, and at Curly's instruction, Varlik ate by putting his face to the food.
It was late in the day when they stopped and the bow was pulled up on a shore. Someone took Varlik's blindfold off, and he blinked in the daylight, looking around. The sun was low, and the river had widened or, more likely, was a different stream, some hundred yards across.
He counted seventeen T'swa distributed in six canoes. Two other canoes seemed to have carried an escort of guards. On the shore by the boats, guards and paddlers sat or squatted or walked around. Varlik decided that the guards were those who carried their rifles in their hands, the paddlers those who wore theirs cross-slung.
The canoes had been carefully hewed and hollowed from single logs, their sides no thicker than a board. Clearly the Birds had been supplied primarily with military necessities; beyond those, they apparently made do with primitive resources.
Just ahead was a river greater yet, a quarter mile wide or more, into which this river flowed. The shore they were on was the angle between rivers. Varlik looked around and found the old ex-slave, who now sat by a tree. "Curly," Varlik called, "what happens next?"
"You people they come sky, take away you. When little dark come. Me people got far talker, they tell you people what place."
"Can we get out and walk around?"
The old man looked at him a long moment. "You anyway got to be in riilmo. You people come down on water, take you out riilmo. No place here"—he patted the shore beside him with one hand—"no place here they come down. Not nuf room."
Riilmo must be Orlanthan for canoe, Varlik decided. A Beregesh slave would never have been exposed to the Standard for it. And the old man was right—there wasn't room on the shore for a floater.
"Can we get out and walk around now? Until 'little dark' comes?"
Curly's old eyes glittered but he only shrugged. Then a sergeant asked him something in Orlanthan, and the old man answered. The sergeant spoke again, again the ex-slave shrugged, then the sergeant called an order. Several Birds came down to the boats and began helping the prisoners to their feet, and over the gunwales into the shallow water.
For the next hour or so they lay around on the shore, the T'swa saying little. It was as if there was nothing to say, for they didn't seem depressed. Perhaps, Varlik decided, they were adjusting to their new condition as survivors being set free. Only one of them was anyone Varlik recognized, though in his own uniqueness he'd be known by all of them. It didn't seem appropriate yet to question them—ask how it had felt to see their lifelong friends killed around them, or what it was like to be without a regiment. There'd be time enough for interviews at Aromanis.
Then, in the fleeting equatorial twilight, a floater appeared. Three floaters actually: a large evac floater accompanied by two gunships that stood off a hundred yards or so. The prisoners were loaded into the canoes again, and stolid paddlers took them to midriver. Gently the evac floater settled almost to the water, nearly touching Varlik's canoe, and two paddlers grasped the edges of the wide door to steady their dugout. Cautiously Varlik half-stood and climbed in, helped by med techs and followed by the two T'swa.
Then the floater raised slightly and moved to the next canoe.
Inside was dark, and somehow unreal. A quiet medic asked if he was hurt or ill, and Varlik answered no, he was fine. The T'swa were helped to cotlike stretchers while Varlik walked forward to clear the door. When all seventeen T'swa had been loaded, a handful of Birds—exchange captives—were transferred to the canoes. Finally the doors were closed, and the floater rose smoothly and swung away. Through a window, Varlik watched the dugouts disappear in the thickening dusk, and with a dreamlike objectivity noted that he felt no jubilation.
Then the cabin lights came on and the medics began to examine the wounded.