share.
The funeral pyre blazed throughout the evening, then around midnight,
as he maintained his vigil while she slept fitfully nearby, it slowly
collapsed with a shower of sparks into a mound of glowing embers. By
morning, all that remained was a grey-shrouded hump in the middle of a
blackened square of earth. But it still gave off a fierce heat, and
quickly ignited the odd branch and bits of debris that Roz threw onto
it as she tidied up around her seated companion.
Cadillac did not utter a word throughout the whole of that second
day.
And Roz did not attempt to engage him in conversation. She was content
to be; to savour to the full the expansive beauty of the surrounding
landscape, the fathomless depths of the blue sky world above her
head.
A sky flecked with ever-changing patterns of cloud that stretched away
towards a horizon that was so distant it surpassed understanding.
Up here in the hills, the world about her was much vaster than the one
she had experienced from the flight deck of Red River. Coming from a
life-time spent in the confines of the Federation, she had - like most
Trackers - no proper sense of scale, no grasp of the truly awesome
dimensions of the universe. If someone had told her that from where
she now stood the farthest point she could see towards the east lay
over a hundred miles away it would have meant nothing. And to have
talked about the size of the earth or the distance between it and the
moon would have meant even less.
On the first day, while Cadillac sat grieving in front of the blazing
pyre, she had taken the edge off her hunger by dipping into the
emergency ration pack that all Skyhawks carried. Now, on the second
day, as the sun reached its zenith, Cadillac rose, made a cooking fire
and silently prepared a meal for two.
Not everything had been been destroyed by the soldiers or thrown onto
the funeral pyre. Cadillac had salvaged and set aside pots and pans,
tools and implements, sleeping furs, some walking skins, even some
dried food - everything they needed to survive the immediate future and
were able to carry on trucking poles between them.
Without being asked, Roz had brought water from the stream that burst
from the moss-covered rocks deep within the forested slopes to the
north of the settlement.
The same stream that cascaded over the glistening tongue of rock
overhanging the bluff then fell in a long filmy ribbon onto the rocks
below. The same rocks on which Steve Brickman had stood to refresh
