His grip was stiff; it hurt. His mouth worked as if he were chewing, or about to spit up something that disgusted him.
Liv waited, watched. She put her hand over his and nodded.
He said, “Once upon a time . . .”
She sighed and let go of his hand.
“. . . an old king a mad king white-bearded on a charging horse with a sword and flags and trumpets like in the very oldest oldest stories we learned in our nurseries and taught us to be brave there was an old king and a fallen kingdom and his wise adviser who was very old and wise and who talked to rocks and birds and the wind and his name was Kan-Kuk, madam, Kan-Kuk of the First Folk who saved me on a night when I lay dying under stars and on ash ash ash and we promised to aid each other for neither could stand alone—he stepped from the rocks and lifted me in his arms and his red eyes were sad and wounded—he told me: It began at Founding, the first . . .”
He shook as he spoke—the name Kan-Kuk tore itself from his throat like two sharp gunshots—and as he said the word Founding, he slipped on a rock and let go of Liv’s wrist and fell back into the water. His head went under.
Liv waded in after him.
The General thrashed briefly, pulling her off her feet, then went still. She lifted his head clear of the water and pulled his limp form up onto the rocks. Fortunately, he was near weightless—and even more fortunately, he began to breathe again on his own, much to Liv’s relief, because she had no real notion of how to help a drowning person.
He was silent again. She sighed and looked away.
She sat in the sun and waited. The General remained silent.
After a while she checked her golden watch—it was, as she suspected, still not working. Time was not reliable in the western wilderness. She snapped it shut and returned it to the bag.
When she looked up, she gasped in shock.
Three men stood under the oaks, not thirty feet from the rock pool.
At first, because they were in shadow, she couldn’t make out their faces or their clothes. They might have been Linesmen, or Folk, though they were tall for the former and short for the latter—and something in their bearing suggested that they were almost as surprised to see her as she was to see them, which suggested they were neither Linesmen nor Folk. It seemed possible but unlikely that they were hallucinations, brought on by loneliness.
They approached. They moved slowly, stiffly, almost shyly.
They’d come silent as Folk, but they were clean shaven and sun-browned, dressed in bright clothes, holding steel weapons—they were men.
She inched her hand closer to her bag, and the knife within it. Not too close or too quickly, for the men held bows, arrows notched and straining. Bows! Like storybook fairies. Not Linesmen, then.
Two were bare from the waist up. The tallest, thinnest, and oldest wore a red jacket—a cavalry jacket—with faded golden epaulettes, and a few remaining black buttons. Beneath the jacket he, too, was bare chested. He wore rough deerskin trousers. He carried a cavalry saber at his waist. He had a fine-boned old face, long white hair greased back from a high scalp.
The other two were younger. Both were short and heavy shouldered. One fair; one dark. The dark one had a large wen on the side of his nose, from which hair sprouted. An unfortunate face but not an alien face. Liv could not, she thought, be imagining them—she would not have troubled to create that wen.
They came forward slowly, staring with such open amazement that Liv could not fear them, bows notwithstanding.
Liv stood, hands open. They were already lowering their bows.
“We are not alone,” she told them.
The silver-haired man in the red jacket—where the jacket fell open, its buttons lost to time, the hair on his skinny old chest was white, too—saluted smartly.
He greeted her: “Madam.” He nodded to the General, who appeared to have fallen asleep. “Sir.”
Then he huddled and whispered with his companions.
She was so delighted to see the faces of human beings other than Creedmoor and the General that it was all she could do not to run up and put her arms around them and burst into tears.
“You seem,” she interrupted, “to be civilized men. I had not thought to meet civilized men so far west.”