“Sure thing. We done it.”

  “People can do it, too. ’Cept it’s way harder for us.”

  From the bed, Miz Emily said, “I done it once. Made me a girl folks called Emma. Only she was me, and grown from little bits of me.”

  Emmy said, “She’s a medicine woman, Tom. Miz Emily’s a medicine woman.”

  “Soon’s she’d growed big ’nough,” Miz Emily continued, “I harvested. Took the eyes and the liver and kidneys. That was what I needed, and I buried the rest proper.”

  Tom said nothing; he was looking at Emmy.

  “You’ll be wonderin’ how I set my new eyes in once the old was out. There’s a lady in Swinton. Miz Pris, they call her. I help her, and she helps me.”

  “It’s her heart this time, Tom. Heart an’ lungs, too.” Emmy touched her chest. “I’m growin’ the new in me now. ’Fore long I’ll be big ’nough. Next year, Miz Emily tells.”

  “It don’t seem right,” Tom muttered, “puttin’ the young woman in the old one.”

  “Ever’body needs Miz Emily, Tom. There’s folks sick all the time, sick er leg broke er shot. They got to have her, an’ she’s got to have me.”

  Miz Emily’s breath wheezed before she spoke. “Pretty soon I seen I was going to need more, so I done it again. I missed Emma, too, and she’d been a great, great help to me. So I done, and here’s Emmy that’s been the same. She’s a good girl through-and-through, Long Tom Bright. Don’t you never forget it. She’s me, too, just like my Emma was. Don’t never forget that either.”

  She coughed. “Emmy… Emmy, honey, you come here. I’m going to do something I never done before, Emmy. Going to ’cause I got to. Hold out your sweet hand.”

  Emmy did, and Miz Emily laid a large key in it. A brass key, green with years. “That what you got’s the key to the big cab’net I never did let you into.” Miz Emily paused. “You open her up. Top shelf. A-ways in back.”

  She paused to breathe, the close air of her bedchamber whistling in her nostrils.

  “Top shelf,” Emmy repeated dutifully.

  “In back, Emmy honey. It’s a li’l blue bottle. The best medicine I got. Back corner.”

  She gasped for breath. “Tom. Long Tom. You hear all this?”

  “Yes’m.”

  “You fetch it down for her. I don’t want her standing on no chair.”

  Together they returned to the big front room, shutting the door quietly behind them. “That’s her medicine-woman cab’net,” Emmy whispered. “I never did open it before. She’d have me go ’way when she got somethin’ out. I never did s’pose I’d hold this key.”

  The antique key turned smoothly in the lock; the highest shelf was high indeed, but not so high that Tom had difficulty in seeing the bottles and boxes that stood on it.

  “Li’l blue bottle,” Emmy told him. “Back in the corner’s what she told. Way in back.”

  He found it and took it out. “No writin’ on this one.”

  Emmy nodded. “Didn’t want nobody that come stealin’ to know what was in there, I guess. Them medicines… A body can’t find ’em no more. Not nowhere.”

  “Out west, mebbe.” Tom spoke mostly to himself. “Ain’t so many lookin’ out there.”

  Emmy took the bottle, and they returned to Miz Emily.

  “Not so many lookin’,” she said. “That’s wise. You remember what all you said this day, Tom Bright. You, too, Emmy. Don’t forget, nor let him forget.”

  Emmy nodded silently and returned the key.

  “My medicine, Emmy? What I sent you for?”

  Emmy handed her the blue bottle. A tear coursed down Emmy’s cheek as she did, but neither of them commented on it.

  No more did Tom, although he took a half step back.

  “I’m weary with talking.” Miz Emily coughed. “Only I got to talk more. I’ll try to get it over quick.”

  Lean, blue-veined fingers drew the cork of the blue bottle. “I’m not going to tell you to do your duty, Emmy. You will, I know. Do your duty by Tom or whatever man you find. Do your duty by whatever children you get.”

  Emmy nodded vigorously. Hearing her stifled sobs, Tom laid his hand on her shoulder.

  “There’s a-many a man, Tom Bright, that never finds him a good woman. You got one here. Terrible young yet, but she’ll get over that. There’s no man that’s as wise as a wise woman.”

  Tom nodded. “I’ve heard.”

  “She’s not. Not yet. You got to be the steady one for now.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Build you a cabin when you’ve got that land. Make it li’l but solid. Won’t be nobody but you to protect it, so it’s got to be li’l. When there’s more, you can make it bigger.”

  “Like you said, ma’am. That’s the best, I know.”

  Nodding, as it seemed, wholly to herself. Miz Emily raised the blue bottle to her lips.

  Emmy shrieked.

  Miz Emily might not have heard her; Tom watched her swallow and fall back among her pillows.

  Like a rabbit frozen by the serpent’s eye, Tom saw the blue bottle roll slowly to the edge of the bed. The thump as it struck the floor freed him to kneel beside Emmy and—hesitantly, awkwardly—lay his rifle aside and put his arms around her.

  So they remained as second after second ticked past, until someone began knocking on the door through which Tom had entered the house.

  Emmy rose, wiping her eyes with the heels of both hands. “I’ll see,” she gasped. “Y-you stay right here.”

  He did, but listened through the half-open door of the bedchamber.

  “You heard me cry out, Miz Ledbetter.” The voice was Emmy’s.

  Tom could not hear the reply.

  “She’s tooken bad. Real bad. Asked me to fetch her medicine for her, which I done.”

  A woman’s voice murmured, though Tom could not make out the words.

  “You wait till she’s better, Miz Ledbetter. She wouldn’t want nobody to see her like she is now. Didn’t want me to, even. Only you’re gettin’ soaked.”

  Nodding, Tom went to the bed and picked up Miz Emily’s right arm. It was not yet stiff, but there was no pulse. He straightened her legs and crossed her arms on her chest.

  When Emmy returned, he said, “She’s gone. Reckon you knew ’fore me.”

  “My heart knowed.” Emmy sighed. “I jus’ kept sayin’ no, no, no inside myself. Only my heart knowed soon’s the bottle passed.”

  “Wasn’t till that bottle fell that I did, Emmy.” Tom looked for the blue bottle then, but he had kicked it under the bed.

  “You didn’t know her like me.”

  “I reckon not.”

  “I know the folks ’round here, too.” Emmy sighed again. “They goin’ to say I kilt her, Tom. They been prophesyin’ it.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Don’t matter now.” Emmy shrugged. “It’s what’s said that does the work. Kill me for it, if they can.”

  “Have to kill me first,” Tom told her.

  “You sure, Tom?”

  He nodded solemnly, and she embraced him, her smooth chestnut hair well below his chin.

  When they parted at last he said, “We got to bury her, Emmy. Wouldn’t be decent not to.”

  “Think you can wrap her up an’ tie her tight, Tom?”

  “Now?”

  Emmy nodded. “Won’t nobody see us carry her out back, ’cause of the rain. You want to eat ’fore we do it?”

  He shook his head.

  “Nor me, Tom. I’ll feel better when she’s been put under proper an’ prayed over. Stew’ll keep. It ain’t but simmerin’. Where’s the key?”

  They found it among the bedclothes.

  “Put it in her hand, Tom. She’d like it. Put it in there an’ we’ll tie her up.”

  Rolling the shriveled body in its blankets required no more than a minute. When it was done, Emmy carried in rags he tore to strips.

  “Her bandages they was,” Emmy murmured. “They’re bandagin’ her this day.”

  “She died for you,” Tom told her.

  “I died for me,” Emmy corrected him.

  He carried the long bundle like an infant in his arms when they left the house. Emmy, leading the way, bore the too-large spade with which she had dug Miz Emily’s small garden that spring.

  So it was that they passed through the clearing and into the trees, and at last entered another clearing, a place where no one lived. There, in the rain, Tom built a deep house for the dead woman, and laid her in it while Emmy wept, and heaped the sodden clay upon it.

  Together they knelt and prayed aloud, their strong, young voices muted by the rain.

  · · · ·

  Back in the house that had been Miz Emily’s, they hung their clothes before the fire and ate venison stew with home-baked bread. “Like seein’ me like this?” Emmy asked.

  He nodded, and she said, “Knew you would.”

  She smiled when her bowl was empty. “Don’t have to wash no dishes. Been a long time since I’ve et an’ didn’t have to do up afterward. You got anything to take west ’cept your rifle an’ what you got in your li’l pack?”

  He shook his head.

  “Have a look around. You see anything we might need, you take it.” She went to the third cabinet, the one Tom knew he would never forget. Its door swung back, and she said, “I’ll take from here. Much as I can carry, anyhow. I don’t have much else.”

  “How’d you do that? Git it open?”

  “You think I locked it again?” She smiled. “You git dressed, hear? I’ll git dressed, too. I see what you’re thinkin’, Tom, plain as pikestaff. I’m thinkin’ the same, only they’ll say I kilt her once they learn, an’ we ain’t got time.”

  · · · ·

  Neither of them was slow, and they got a start of a day and more; but when the little food Tom had carried away—for there had been but little in the larder—was gone, he had to hunt.

  Even so, almost a week passed before they heard the distant crack of a rifle and the deathly whisper of the bullet that showered them with twigs and leaves.

  Tom ordered Emmy back (a distance that she took as one-and-a-half paces) and waited until he had a clear view of the head and shoulders of their nearest pursuer. His rifle spoke. That man’s hands flew to his face, and he fell.

  The shrill, cracked voice of an old woman sounded behind him while he was reloading: “You there, Pen Perry? Answer me! Slim Ledbetter? Speak up!”

  There was a silence before someone called, “I’m here, Miz Em’ly.”

  “That man Tom shot—”

  The old voice shook, and Tom himself turned back to look at Emmy.

  “Through the head, is it?”

  “Yes’m.”

  Another man said, “Ain’t cold yet, Miz Em’ly.”

  “That don’t matter. I can’t help him. You bury him proper, hear? Get him under and go back where you belong.”

  There were no more shots. They had walked almost until dark when Tom said, “I been wonderin’, Emmy. It ain’t—only I hope you’ll tell.”

  “How I talked like her?” Emmy giggled. “I been listenin’ to her all my life. Be a shame to me if I couldn’t sound the same.”

  He shook his head. “I seen that right off. ’Bout that blue bottle. You knew what ’twas.”

  “Not till I handed it over I didn’t.” The giggle was gone. “When I handed it over, I seen her eyes an’ knew.”

  “Them medicines you got. The shiny li’l knives. I was wonderin’ if you know how to use ’em.”

  “’Course I do!”

  Soon after, her hand found his. “She was me, Tom. An’ I’m her. You got to remember it.”

  Mountains Like Mice

  I

  “Hold still, my lord,” the sly looking man said softly to the young scholar he was dying purple. “This won’t take but a moment. Not too hot is it, my lord?”

  “No,” Dirk said, “it’s not too hot.” Stripped to his breech clout in the center of the courtyard, he was watching with awe as the warmth of the sun dried the liquid Otho the Captive dipped up with his rag and stick. Black when it came dripping out of Otho’s pot, it turned the smoothly tanned skin of Dirk’s barrel chest and long legs the color of wild grapes.

  They were alone in the court. The west wall, the only one not lined with mud-brick buildings, threw a shadow like the edge of a blade across the flagstones. Over the top of the wall, distant and misted and shadow-side to, Dirk could see the distant lift of the mountains. For the thousandth time a phrase he had heard once from old Teophilus ran through his head: “The mountains are mice.”

  It was a comforting thought, but he felt sure Master Theophilus had not meant it to comfort. He had been thinking of stealth and disease and perhaps of other things as well.

  “The soles of your feet, please,” said Otho.

  Obediently Dirk held them up in turn for the fat man to splash his dye on.

  “I well remember, my lord,” Otho said chattily, “how unnecessary I thought this when it was done to me. I supposed it would be the first place to wear clean. But I found out, my lord, that when the feet are calloused—as mine were then and yours are now, my lord—they are one of the very last places. The magistrate found it between my toes and in the crevices of the thick skin when I was drug before him. I believe I’ve told you, my lord, that I was nearly clean when I was taken?”

  From the wall, a raven which had been perched with its back arrogantly toward them as it stared out over the desert suddenly launched itself thrashing into the air. Outlined for a moment like a heraldic figure, black against the blaze of the afternoon sky, it brought to the young man a sudden personal realization of the frighteningly complex linkage between cause and effect, stimulus and response, which guides every living creature.

  Above all others this was the concept his instructors had droned at him daily until he had almost learned to ignore it. Now, on the verge of the Great Retreat, he was beginning at last to understand the idea he had so often parroted.

  The raven croaked twice over their heads and then, with a desperate flapping of wings, settled on Otho’s shoulder. In astonishment Dirk searched the Captive’s plump face for a hint of the understanding he would have seen, he knew, on that of Theophilus or any other Master at such a moment. There was only wonder and a kind of sheepishness.

  “He’s a pet, my lord,” Otho explained hurriedly. “I took him from the nest two weeks ago, and I’ve kept him in my rooms almost ever since. This is only the second time he’s been out.” He stroked the bird under its ruffled bill with a pudgy finger. “What ought I to call him, do you think?”

  “Corvus Corvax,” Dirk suggested drily. “I wish I knew what unsettled him like that.”

  “Oh, you will, my lord. When you come back to us you’ll be a Master yourself, and no one would believe some of the things I’ve seen my Master, Theophilus, do. Control all sorts of animals; summon the hawks from the sky, if you can credit it.”

  And so, Dirk thought, you steal fledglings to tame in immitation of him. Never mind, I’m closer to the fledgling stealing level myself. Aloud he said, “Nothing magical happens on the Retreat, Otho. If you almost completed it yourself you ought to know that.”

  “Ah, but I didn’t finish. That makes the difference.”

  · · · ·

  The gate in the west wall, which was the rear entrance to the academy, opened unexpectedly, contrary to the very explicit regulation that no freeman should observe a scholar who had undergone this degradation until he was actually in Retreat and subject to capture.

  For a few seconds Dirk and Otho saw an impressively tall man with a full beard and long, bound hair who sat a shaggy wild horse without saddle or bridle. His glance swept the courtyard like a scythe. Then the horse wheeled, revealing the slender barreled automatic rifle slung reversed over its master’s shoulders, and they were gone.

  Otho exclaimed, “It’s Master Aleksandr, come in! My lord, I must get something cooked for him—you are finished already, and you know where to wait. Heavens bless you, my lord!”

  The fat man was running toward the kitchen already with his tame bird fluttering after him. At least, Dirk reflected, he knew now what had disturbed it.

  The waiting place was a small room at the base of the round tower at the northwest corner of the academy. It possessed a tiny door, a sort of sally-port, which opened directly to the outside. In order to reach it Dirk was forced to walk through several of the other academy buildings. As he expected, the halls were deserted. Every door he did not need to use was tightly shut.

  The few possessions he would be allowed to take with him were already in the room, packed in his shoulder-strapped specimen bag: a plainly made knife with a blade not much larger than the width of his hand, but of excellent steel; a leather water flask; bandages and a bottle of disinfectant; a small magnifying glass; a clasped handbook of meditations with tables of useful information, formulas and recipes at the end. The whole collection, bag included, weighed less than two kilograms.

  There was no light in the room save what entered from a narrow firing slit in the wall; but he seated himself crosslegged on the floor anyway, intending to read. Instead, he found himself turning the book endlessly over and over in his hands while he thought of the mountains.

  He planned to go to the mountains as soon as his Retreat began, and he wondered if gray old Master Theophilus, who could read volumes in a breath of wind, knew it and would try to prevent him. The mountains were dangerous for anyone, but for a Retreatant they were, paradoxically, almost perfectly “safe.” And he could not endure the thought of ending his life like Otho, fetching water and sweeping floors for another man; turning glutton and petty thief because he had no longer any self respect to uphold.

  He crossed the room to the firing slit and stared out across the level desert, estimating that another four hours remained before dark.

  Seeing the uneven line of the mountains at the horizon he admitted to himself for the first time that he would not be going only to escape a lifetime of Captivity. The mountains themselves drew him. Looming mightiness across the desert—the promise of a world alien to all he had known from geological formations to climate, peopled with the odds and ends, the hangers-on and survivors, who had somehow endured there when the old order fell to hits. The original owners of the ground, he thought to himself. Still nosing about in the dark corners and plotting ways to stick the tom leaves back on to the calendar.