The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,152
meal out of Republican partisans, even if it had only been bread and goat cheese. But the memories of his hobo days, of riding the rails in search of work or traveling to organize for the union, stood him in good stead now.
Sara, a denizen of the streets, first of Warsaw, then of New York, looked askance at the berries he gathered from the hedges and stared at him in disbelief when he offered her a handful of rosehips. “You sure they’re not poison?”
At the far end of the pasture he cut a milk cow out of a small herd—“This was easier when I had a horse”—and improvised a pail from a tin can found in a ditch and washed out in one of the ponds that dotted the countryside. “For somebody who looks like a big dumb farmboy you know a lot.”
“For a Yankees fan,” he replied with a grin, “you’re not too bad yourself.”
She stuck out her tongue at him and handed the improvised cup on to her father. It was good to be in the open air again. Purely aside from the swarms of SS goons, lunatics, and self-proclaimed wizards that had thronged it, there was something Tom had definitely not liked about that house. The rough country of sandy pine hills and isolated farmsteads through which they traveled, swinging wide to avoid the roads whenever they could, slowed them down but kept them out of sight of whatever authorities might be around; it also impressed on Saltwood the impossibility of intercepting Rhion before the Professor walked into von Rath’s trap.
“Poor little bastard,” he remarked, keeping a weather eye down the farm track beside whose weed-grown ditch they had paused to rest. The sun was touching the tips of the pine-cloaked hills to the west, gilding the throw-pillow clouds heaped around it and covering all the eastward lands in a pall of cold blue shadow. “I wish there was something we could do for him. I wouldn’t leave a dog to the SS, but he’s the one who ducked out on us.”
And if it wasn’t for him and his stubbornness about returning to those damn stones we wouldn’t even BE in this mess.
As if she read his mind Sara sighed and shook her head. She’d grown quieter during the day’s long hike, exhaustion and hunger slowing her down more than she’d counted on, though up until an hour or so ago, she’d still frothed every time Saltwood had insisted they take a rest. “I felt terrible, you know, watching him standing there on that stupid stone with his hands upraised, waiting. Like watching—I don’t know. Some poor goyische kid on Christmas Eve waiting for Santa Claus.” Sitting on a felled and rotting fence post, she pitched a pebble across the narrow road into the thickets of brown sedge and fireweed. She glanced up at Tom. “You ever have Santa not show up, cowboy?”
He shook his head, remembering paper chains and popcorn strings, and the line of shabby stockings pinned to the wall near the belly-stove—Tom-John-Kathy-Helen-Shanna-Ma’n’Pa. He still rattled off the family names as they all had, as a single word, and smiled a little at the memory. He’d spent a year searching for Ma and the girls, and still wondered what had become of them, and if there was something else he should have done.
“Nope. Sometimes he didn’t bring a whole lot, but he always showed.” He glanced at the sky. “It’ll be dark in an hour,” he said quietly. “We’ve got to stick closer to the roads if we’re not going to get lost.”
“They’ll know we’re gone now.” She pulled the scuffed jacket closer around her and rubbed her hands. The evening was cold already and, from the feel of the air, by morning there would be hard frost, “They’ll be hunting.”
“They’ll be sore as wet cats,” Tom said, “but as bad as they want Sligo and that patented whizzbang of his, most of their men will be up at Witches Hill. There’s just too much territory for them to cover to find us.” He held a hand down and helped Sara and her father, who had sat silent, numbed with exhaustion, to their feet. If they didn’t get a vehicle soon, the old man wouldn’t be able to go on, and Saltwood didn’t like to think about what might happen in that event. Sara might realize the impossibility of risking England’s defeat to go back for Rhion, but she’d never leave her father. And in