Angry Lead Skies

44

Wilderness is relative. Before sunrise we were in wild country compared to where I live. But we were in a carefully tamed and only mildly unkempt park compared to the places where I fought my share of the war.

Of course, this was the worst nightmare wilderness Singe had ever seen. She couldn't take ten steps without stopping to sniff the morning air for the warning stench of approaching monsters. I kept after her to move faster. "The quicker we get there the quicker we get it over with and the quicker we get back to town. You don't want to spend the night out here, do you?" But instinct is hard to overcome. I prove that every time I get too close to Belinda Contague. "Besides, the grolls can handle anything we're likely to meet."

Dojango had been yakking all morning, inconsequentialities. Typical of him, actually. So much so that nobody paid him the least attention. Though Doris did drag him out of the cart and have him pull it as one way of slowing his jaw down.

"Wait a minute," I said. "What was that?"

Because Dojango's mouth runs with no real connection to his brain he just chomped air for a minute. What might he have said that could interest me? He hadn't been listening. Then he went into mild shock because somebody was interested in something that he'd said. "Uh, I don't remember, actually."

"About the thing you saw in the sky."

"Oh. That happened while you were all asleep, actually."

When the time had come we'd all just planted ourselves at streetside, grolls on the flanks, and started snoring. We hadn I been bothered.

Size does matter.

Dojango continued, "I decided I'd stand watch on account of all of the rest of you were out like the dead."

He was fibbing. He hadn't been able to sleep because he'd spent all that time snoozing in the cart. It's easy to tell when Dojango is revising history. He forgets to use his favorite word.

"And?"

"And a ball of light came in out of the east, from beyond the river. It went somewhere south of us. It stopped for a while. I could see the glow. Then it came north, slowly, drifting back and forth over Grand Avenue. I had a feeling it was looking for something, actually."

"And it came to a stop up above us?"

"Yeah. After a while it shined a really bright light down on us. And that's all I remember." He shuddered, though. So there was something more.

"What else?"

He didn't want to talk about it but Dojango Rose is incapable of resisting an invitation to speak. "Just a really bad dream where the light lifted me up and took me inside the glow, into a weird, lead-gray place. They did really awful things to me, these weird, shiny little women. This one wouldn't leave my thing alone."

"I see." He'd healed wondrous fast if he'd been tortured. "Something to keep in mind." I did some thinking. Some consideration of the circumstances. I came up with some ideas.

The first time we approached a sizable woodlot which boasted enough tangled undergrowth to suggest that it wasn't used much I had Doris and Marsha carry the cart and its cargo deep inside and camouflage it with branches.

Dojango cried like a baby.

"I guarantee you I don't have a whole lot of sympathy, buddy. Why don't you use your sore feet to make the rest of you mad enough to smack some of those elves around when we catch up with them?"

That bought me a respite. Dojango Rose is a lover, not a fighter. He probably heard his mother calling but couldn't run away as long as his brothers stuck it out.

We passed gated estates. The grolls attracted considerable attention. Most of the guards were friendlier than they might have been had I tried to engage them in conversation on my own. Doris and Marsha make a convincing argument just standing around, leaning on their clubs.

Some of those guards had seen Saucerhead and Playmate go by. But not a one had seen Kayne Prose. Or any other willowy blonde. Tharpe and Playmate had been bickering, according to several witnesses. They were, also, not making very good time. We were still only a few hours behind them despite our pause to enjoy a stone mattress.

"We keep on with this and we're going to find ourselves out in the real country pretty soon," I observed. We were past the truck gardens and wheatfields and starting up the slope into wine country. Ahead the hills started growing up. Fast.

We popped over a ridgeline, me cursing the day Kayne met Kip's pop and, even more bloodily, the day I let myself get into debt to Playmate. "Whoa! There it is. That's perfect."

"There what is?" Dojango asked. I'd stopped. He'd sat down. He had one boot off already.

"That bowl of land down there. Filled with trees. It has a pond in there. You can see the water. Runs down off all these hills. Looks like a great hiding place. Bet you that's where—"

Some sort of flash happened under the trees. A dark brown smoke ring rolled up through the foliage. There was a rumble like a very large troll clearing his throat.

"That was different," Dojango said. He levered his other boot off.

"My guess is, our friends just found the elven sorcerers."

Nobody rushed off to help. Dojango massaged his blisters and distinctly looked like he'd rather head some other direction. Any other direction.

Singe had the sensibilities of a soldier. "If we can see what is happening down there, then whoever is down there can see what is happening up here."

"Absolutely." I responded by dropping into the shade of a split rail fence. The Rose boys didn't need the whole speech, either. The big ones made themselves as scarce as possible on an open road that ran downhill through a vineyard where the plants were seldom more than hip high. To me. Dojango rolled into a ditch.

A look around showed me a countryside not made for sneaking. The wooded bowl was entirely surrounded by vineyards. I could cover some ground on hands and knees amongst the vines but there wasn't a whole lot of cover for guys twenty feet tall.

And there were people out working the vineyards. Some not that far from us, eyeing us askance because of our odd behavior. Before long most of the workers began to amble downhill to see what was going on.

"There's our cue, people. Look like you've got grape skins between your toes."

Dojango began to whine in earnest. Once out of his boots his feet had swollen. He couldn't get them back on.

It was real. We'd have to leave him behind. Which was just as well, actually. Dojango has a talent for screwing things up by getting underfoot when times begin to get exciting.

I told him, "We'll pick you up on the way back."

He didn't act like his feelings were hurt.