West of January by Dave Duncan Page B

it.
    “Here!” Rilana said and held out a canteen. “It’s only half-full, but it’ll have to do. There’s a gully over that way.”
    She shook her head and was suddenly serious. “Good luck, Knobil!”
    I grabbed the water bottle, spotted a quick kiss on her forehead, and ran.
    So my cowardice did save me in the end. Anubyl had first looked for me in the open and then guessed—or been told—that I had hidden in the herd. Later, while he was looking for me under the woollies, I was fleeing away over the grasslands. Obviously Rilana had kept her word and hadn’t told him I had gone. My luck held again. I was able to stay down in gullies for a long way. One small herder does not show up for very far on a landscape so huge. He did not come after me on his horse, or if he did, he did not find me. Probably he preferred to stay close to the camp while the angel was there.
    By chance, or because my luck still held, I was heading south. Anubyl had said that there were water holes that way. Even after the angel left, he would probably want to scout to the north, if he believed what the angel had told him. South was my safest road.
    I settled into a long-distance lope, a loner at last.
    —3—
    T HE LOPE FELL TO A WALK , the walk at last to a stagger.
    The sun burned without mercy above my left shoulder. Desiccated ridges and hollows rolled on without end. Boulders and sand, scabby grass between patches of gravel and shattered dry clay—an empty land beneath a vacant sky.
    “You can’t go on forever, you know,” said a whisper in my ear.
    “Who are you?”
    “I am Loneliness. I am your companion now.”
    “Go away.”
    “Not until you die. I shall be with you always, until then. It won’t be long.”
    “I have a knife and a bow string and a water bottle.”
    Loneliness laughed at my side. “An empty water bottle and no sling. Even Indarth had a sling.”
    “What need I fear? Thirst? I shall find a pond. Food? I can eat miniroos. Poisonthorn? I am not a child!”
    “Eagles. Rocs. Roo packs. People.”
    “They are rare,” I insisted. “Anubyl survived. I shall find a pond with trees and make a bow.”
    There was no shade, but I sat on some thicker grass to fashion a sling from my pagne. It had been tattered before, and I was now left with little to cover my nakedness. That hardly seemed to matter very much.
    “Or even traders!” I said loudly. “I may meet some traders.”
    Loneliness laughed again. “You have nothing to trade. Traders would not be interested in you.”
    He was wrong, of course. He did not know—because he was me, and I did not know. Traders would have been very glad to see me, but I met no traders, not then. Those canny, nervy folk would have long since fled the grasslands.
    I was surprised at the effort needed to force myself back onto my feet. Loneliness fell into step beside me once more. His voice was the sound of the wind on the hills. It was the crunch of grass below my feet, and sometimes it was my voice.
    “What if you see another herd?” he asked. “People? You will want to go to them, won’t you? You have never been away from people before.”
    “And the man will kill me. No, I must be alone. Until I can go back and kill Anubyl.”
    “He is a man. You are a boy.”
    “I am a man now.”
    “Are you?” Loneliness inquired. “Your body hair is coming in gold, like the stuff on your head. Your eyes are blue like a newborn’s. They never turned brown, as eyes should. There is something wrong with you. You will never be a proper man, freak.”
    The grass was withered to its roots, littered everywhere with dry dung. The hollows held the corpses of ponds, and the only trees I saw had long since been cut down or shriveled to useless brittle tinder.
    My heart burned with contempt for the angel. So my mother’s death was not his business? What use were the angels, then? Nasty little man, I thought—old, fat, and useless.
    “You can’t go on much longer,” Loneliness