Barden was starting to rethink her preference for preparation as she shifted her pack to better sit on her hips. All the gear seemed to be getting heavier and heavier. They had been on the move almost two full days now—one night of little rest once they had crossed Stark Ridge, then a day across the plains to the ruined fort. Then another incomplete night of sleep, followed by a hard march toward Hilltown, hearts still hammering from their escape from the wights.
There were no breaks; they were keeping pace with the elfin figure of Lady Wíela.
And Barden could tell, as the sun hung high overhead and beat down on them, that by late afternoon they were all well past exhausted. She knew that because the Marines had stopped chattering.
She ignored blisters, ignored that metallic taste in the back of her throat, and focused on step after step while trying to keep situational awareness. This was basic training, doing the ruck march, covering your afternoon’s twenty klicks with a full load.
The Romans did thirty, and she knew Cale would tell them that fact if anyone complained. And if anyone complained, Barden also had a lecture loaded and ready to go: An army marched. Troops marched. It was just what they did.
“We should talk water, Corporal.” Dooley paced alongside Barden in the bright sunlight.
Rashad was on point, now, and Lady Wíela had graciously allowed herself to fall back into the middle of the squad order. Dooley had started the day pacing along beside her, making sure their VIP wasn’t going to fall over again, but a few hours of that had gotten tiresome and the red-headed corpsman quickened her pace to join Barden’s team.
“My Camelbak is about empty,” Barden said. “I told Orley and Rashad to keep an eye out for water. The grass has gotten a lot greener.”
“Doesn’t mean too much, though,” Jones said. “Could just mean it gets shit on a lot.”
“Well, then it has something in common with Marines,” Barden said, then glanced over at Dooley, a bit mortified. She didn’t let slip things like that, unless she was drunk.
Dooley rolled her eyes. “Don’t worry, Corporal. I won’t tell Cale you have a sense of humor.”
It wasn’t that. Barden just had to keep a certain level of Cale-like hard-ass going in order to be taken seriously, and then some more. Most of the men assumed she’d studied folklore history and mythology to get a promotion and a team. And she’d caught several of them trying to explain some seriously basic-ass squad tactics to her. Sure, screaming “there’s a Corporal in front of my name, boot!” put them on the right path.
But no one did that shit to Cale.
“Eventually we have to run into water somewhere,” Barden said.
“We can keep walking maybe two days once we run out,” Dooley said.
As much water as had been falling on them back at the Haunted Ruins—which was what everyone was calling the place, complete with audible capital letters—they hadn’t been able to catch much of it, or find any pooled usefully anywhere.
When Lady Wíela finally agreed to stop for the night, deeming a section of a rocky meadow to be safe enough, Barden collapsed gratefully to the ground with the rest of her team.
It had been a long time since Basic, and the interrupted sleep the night before had left her feeling off her game.
Barden sipped sparingly at the water, and accepted a mint from Jones, who conversationally complained, “I’m missing my shea butter. It’s right next to the cot where I left it, and now I’m already getting ashy as fuck.”
“Hold on.” Barden dug around in her pack, and came up with a small tin of off-brand moisturizer.
“Goddamn, Corporal, you really do carry everything when you head out.”
By the next midday, canteens and Camelbaks were dry and Barden noticed that her Marines looked flushed.
Cale directed them back south of the road where the land sloped down a bit, hoping to find a river valley or something. But it turned into just more of the gently rolling plains, undulating barely enough to keep them from getting a good look around. Trees and hills, and even the hint of mountains, loomed in the distance, but that was about as good as it got.
Barden didn’t like that they had lost track of the road. They had been heading generally northeast, and they could kind of pick out their general position from the overhead photo-maps, but they were already skirting the edges of those maps, and landmarks had gotten really hard to come by since leaving the Haunted Ruins. They could go another day or maybe two as Doc said, on really limited water rations. Then they would have to spend at least a day trying to figure out how make water vapor condense usefully for them to extract survival amounts of it.
And Barden was worried that they might be getting farther from Hilltown, rather than closer.
“Corporal!” Rashad shouted. “I hear water!”
“Where?” Jones asked. “There’s no streambed around here.”
Rashad trotted forward, up a long, shallow rise. He reached the top, then beckoned to the rest of the squad and headed down the other side. Barden hustled, trying to catch up with him, and she could hear the rest of the squad coming up behind. A glance back revealed even Lady Wíela was double-timing as much as her dignity would allow.
“Oh yes, there’s water here!”
Barden ran smack into the back of her team, who’d stopped and bunched together like a bunch of dumb boots. But the automatic reprimand died on her lips, and she felt the rest of the squad pile up behind her, as they all stared down the gentle slope at the scene.
A glade spread out before them, with slender and supple trees that swayed gently in the softest of breezes. Magenta and yellow flowers dotted the grass around the glade, peeking from between vibrant green blades, looking as if they could advertise lawn products. The very air seemed to have a pastel hue to it, so soft and pleasant it made the sunshine earlier seem harsh and scorching, though it had been much like any pleasant summer day. Glittering sparkles that reminded Barden of iridescent insects flashed in the light and weaved through the air.
The water that Rashad had heard came from a burbling spring framed by a small, natural cairn. The water tumbled gracefully down into the glade, first forming a narrow stream, then spreading into a wide, shallow pool, surrounded by the thickest patches of white lilies and lilacs.
And nymphs.
There were at least a half dozen naked nymphs that frolicked in the pool, cooing and singing to the beautiful air.
“Holy shit, they’re naked as porn stars,” Orley said. “Only better.”
They were beauty itself, sublime and transcendent, somehow both beyond mere sex and yet embodying it.
Rashad stood still, transfixed, and the squad started to stumble around him, their thirst forgotten in the wonder of the glade. Barden hooked her arm in under Rashad’s shoulder and dragged him along toward the pool. She inhaled lilac perfume, so gentle and inviting.
Diaz shed his gear at the edge of the pool and waded in, maybe twenty meters from the nymphs who, having caught sight of them all, giggled and beckoned them on.
“This isn’t right.” Heath stood, rooted in place, just a few meters from the edge of the pool. His whole body strained against something, concentration writ across his face. His M27 was up on his shoulder and he had it pointed somewhat in the direction of the nymphs as sweat started to drip down his chin. Barden reached up as she and Rashad approached, and made sure the weapon’s selector switch had been flipped to SAFE.
Dooley now pushed past Diaz, wading up to her waist in the pool. The susurrus of nymph voices and dancing lights in the air weaved all around them, drawing them all closer. It even finally broke Heath, who dropped his weapon to dangle on the sling. He took a jerking step forward.
“It’s. Fucking. Beautiful.”
The metallic taste of thirst had faded. All Barden could think about was—
—the bleating of a herd of sheep eviscerated Barden’s newly found serenity. Just as Dooley reached out for one of the closest nymphs, who studied her with a sudden, deep interest, a shaggy shepherd waved a long crook through the air at the pool.
“Fria ga surika ka fria!” the shepherd shouted.
He swung his long crook in another arc, smacking one of the nymphs on her bare bottom. Shrieking, she sprang out of the water and traipsed off along the stream, then vanished into the pastel air.
“What’s he saying?” Barden shouted. “I can’t understand him!”
“Should I engage?” Diaz asked.
“He’s saying: get back, damn you!” Lady Wíela shook herself. “Those are nymphs!”
The man was hairy, nearly as wide as he was tall, but clearly packing very little fat on his stout frame. Beard and hair were unkempt, and Barden felt sure if he smiled there would be gaps in his teeth wide enough to march through. He wore a dark woolen vest that seemed to blend with the hair on his chest, shoulders, and arms, and his leather pants were well-worn and shiny. A huge brass cowbell dangled from a strap around his neck.
“He says get the fuck out of the water!” Lady Wíela shouted.
Barden looked around as the fog behind her eyes faded. “Why can’t we understand him?”
“It’s the Midlands dialect,” Lady Wíela said, annoyed. “Even with your translation spells, he’s barely intelligible. I can hardly understand the man myself.”
The shepherd jabbed his crook through the air again, scattering the rest of the nymphs, who all evaporated into the sparkly air. The shepherd swung irritably at a few of the sparks, too, and they hustled away from him.
Dooley had just stopped, waist deep in the water, arms outstretched, until the spell she was under faded into personal horror as she started to look around and shake her head. She was hardly alone, though. Lady Wíela, whom Barden assumed should have known about this sort of thing, had been right behind her, until she’d stopped to translate, and half the squad were behind the two of them.
“The flowers . . .” Brust sobbed, on his knees, hands on his head.
Some of the hundred or so sheep in the flock had splashed across the little stream and now were on the near side, munching at the numinous flowers scattered through the glade. Other sheep were head down, drinking from the stream and pool contentedly and bleating happily.
“The damn flowers will grow back tomorrow,” Lady Wíela translated for the shepherd wading through his flock to approach the squad. “You all should be careful, messing around with magical springs and the spirits of the waters.”
Cale, who’d been bringing up the rear, looked a bit dazed. He’d escaped the indignity of running into the pool, but he was pulling his gear back on, somehow giving off a rueful air with his slow and deliberate movements. “Magical springs?”
“You need to make a lot of noise before you come in the glade, to startle them off.” The Lady continued to translate as the shepherd spoke. He lifted the bell around his neck and gave it a couple swings, the harsh clanging drowning out the bleating of the sheep for a moment. “Otherwise, you end up addled.”
Dooley splashed back up out of the pool, soaked from the chest down.
“Hey, Doc,” Barden started, and got the sort of glare that could kill goats from a hundred meters. “The water okay to drink after all that?”
Dooley woodenly nodded. “Just add the tablets.”
“Okay, fill your canteens.” Barden shook herself off and glanced around at the rest of the Marines, who seemed to be slowly coming back to themselves. It was time to give them something to do and focus on. “Let’s go!”
Rashad filled his own canteens and Camelbak, then helped others to do the same. Jones tried to deadlift Brust off his knees, but was struggling.
The shepherd still eyed them all suspiciously as Barden walked over to him and held out her hand.
“We’re Americans.” She didn’t bother saying which ones, if, as Cale had told her he suspected, with other forces out looking for them, there was no reason to advertise.
“He says he’s never heard of them,” Lady Wíela said. “But, these are dark times and he hears tell all manner of foreign folk traveling about. And evil armies descend upon the land like locusts. He says someone just stole his grandmother’s favorite robe from her clothesline last night. He’s using a lot of profanity to indicate that they are animals.”
The old man shook his head sadly, as if he’d never seen such horrors in all his life.
Barden smiled at the shepherd a little and looked around. “It’s lucky that we happened across this place. We’ve been days without seeing any fresh water. We weren’t sure if we would find any more between here and Hilltown.”
The shepherd cocked his head, bushy beard and all, as Lady Wíela spoke to him.
“No bad luck then, you’re on the right track,” Lady Wíela said. “Cross three or four more regular streams, all running next to each other, between here and Hilltown. Can’t miss, he says.”
Jones gave up on trying to get Brust to his feet and just pushed him down on his face in the remains of some glittering lilac blossoms. “Rivers don’t work like that. They don’t run parallel. Find me a map on Earth where there are three rivers running parallel, Corporal, and I’ll give you everything in my savings account when we get home.”
She turned to the shepherd, fixing him with a skeptical eye. Behind her, Brust groaned and struggled to stand.
The shepherd spread his arms and glanced to the sky. Lady Wíela said, as he babbled on, “Do you know a fellow by the name of Araulo?”
“No,” Barden said.
The shepherd narrowed his eyes after being told the answer, then nodded.
“He says if you’re heading to Hilltown, he can show you the best ways of it.” Lady Wíela wrung her cloak out. “He’s taking his sheep to market.”
“We’d really appreciate that,” Cale said, coming forward to shake his hand.
As Barden went to fill up on water herself, she heard Jones mutter: “It’s not even the right season for taking sheep to market.”
“So, you’re a farmer now, Jones?” Orley asked.
“No, just educated,” Jones snapped back.
Barden put a stop to the disagreement by ordering Jones to double-check that everyone had put their water purification tablets in their canteens or Camelbaks.
After the sheep ate and drank their fill, the shepherd shouted at them to move on. A bedraggled sheepdog meandered out of the hill to snap at the sheep, and soon the squad was sidestepping sheep droppings as they hiked up out of the now muddied, sheep-trampled glade.
They followed the herd and its shepherd up and out into the land beyond. To Jones’s disgust, the sheep eventually forded four shallow rivers, splashing across merrily as the laconic dog urged them on.
At one of numerous stops, where the shepherd pulled out a pipe and sat there smoking what to Barden seemed like a suspiciously calming substance with a sweet smell, he would chatter at them.
Sometimes Lady Wíela would translate. Most of the time she just ignored the shepherd.
She’d been even grumpier than usual since the glade. Barden assumed it was because the great Lady, who seemed to have come from some sort of royalty, thought that getting trapped by the nymphs, in similar fashion to the squad, had been a slight to her station.
After a night around the shepherd’s fire and some sleep, they approached the foothills and spotted the smoke fires and tips of chimneys of a small town nestled in the clefts ahead.
“That Hilltown?” Jones asked the shepherd.
“It’s near hills,” someone added.
The hairy man babbled on for a moment at them and waved at the land around them, leaving no one the wiser as to the answer.
“It’s an outlying village,” Lady Wíela snapped, and stalked on by. “Hilltown is not much farther ahead. Clearly. You can see the smoke from its fires just over there. If you cared to look.”
Wíela’s disagreeable nature only intensified from there.
Barden tried to drop back, but Cale motioned her to leave her team and remain next to him and Lady Wíela. He wanted Barden to know everything he did. Or maybe he just wanted someone else to share in Lady Wíela’s annoyance.
“I had hoped, with the help of your people, to change a great injustice,” she said, apparently edging toward giving them the information she’d been holding close to her chest up until now. “But if my people were attacking your base, then the die has been cast. It’s too late for you to help me. I should leave.”
The squad wasn’t strung out cleanly anymore; they were all tired, and they had started to take on the now-unmistakable odor of sheep shit. Tagging along with the shepherd, or drover, or whatever he was, had not been without its drawbacks.
Cale kept trying to argue with the Lady, and that was fine with Barden. He had command. This was his shit duty, not hers. “While we’re on our feet, at least, nothing is out of our reach.”
Ooh-rah! Barden thought, half with a smile, and half seriously. Sometimes it was both at once, wasn’t it?
“You are all dead men walking with a huge target on you. I need to see my kingdom returned to rights, and it’s not going to happen battling through the countryside with a bunch of losers and . . . nerds.”
She had learned that word from someone, and in her tone, gave it twice the insult it ever implied.
For a while they focused on getting up a steep dirt road into the little village in the gap ahead. The shepherd sent the bleating mess of livestock scurrying toward a pen at the edge of town, and Cale’s own herd shuffled off through the village.
“Yeah, not a town. Definitely a village,” Orley said. There couldn’t have been more than fifty buildings clutching to what little dirt remained on the cut in the land.
Evening was creeping along, and they were all tired and hungry. Barden could smell meat sizzling away, the scent heavy on the wind. Her mouth watered.
“You know, we’re tougher and better than you think,” Cale said to Wíela as they passed through the gate among a crowd of Marines, starting his argument up again. “We got you out of that wreck, after all, didn’t we? That’s what we can do when motivated.”
“So, that was your best,” Lady Wíela said flatly. She appeared to mull that over as they walked through the village, while a few people in cloaks looked at them with curiosity. A few faces peeked out from behind shutters that slammed shut when Marines looked back up at them.
Lady Wíela shimmered, and her face twisted in front of Barden’s eyes. Before anyone could react, she drifted aside through the gap between Antoine and Shane. And just like that, she was gone, blended instantly with the tiny village’s crowd.
“Fuck,” Cale muttered.
At least half of them had seen Wíela slip away, but no one could agree which way she went.
The Marines paused halfway through the village, trying to find her, but it quickly became obvious she was gone. After ten fruitless minutes, a clearly annoyed Cale called the search off.
“Too much attention,” he growled, pointing at the villagers staring at them. “Let’s get to Hilltown and regroup.”
“Regroup,” Barden knew, being Cale code for “figure out what the hell to do next.”