Farseed by Pamela Sargent

Author:Pamela Sargent
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2007-06-21T04:00:00+00:00

They were close enough to the river for Nuy to fetch water for them easily, and near enough to the sea that she could go down to the shore in the morning to see what fish the early tide had washed onto the sand. Dry gourds shed by the boltrees, brush, and dried horse droppings provided fuel for their fire, although they made a fire only when they needed one to cook some of their food. They did not need a fire to warm themselves, and she had never seen any bears, big cats, or wolves near the area that bordered the sea; the cats and wolves preferred to hunt inland where there was more prey. Nuy also did not want to risk any chance of alerting her father to their presence. He would probably not look for her here, but there was always the chance that he or others of her people might come back to forage nearby.

Bonnie and Tonio taught her how to make flat pieces of bread from the powdery substance called flour, and how to cook beans in the pot, but they ate as sparingly as they could from the few supplies they had left. The dried fruit and meat would keep, and the fish Nuy collected could sustain them for a while, although Bonnie worried that they could not live that way for very long.

“It’s because we’re not native to this world,” Bonnie explained, “because we came here from somewhere else. This fish can fill our stomachs so that we don’t feel hungry, but I don’t know how much actual nourishment it’ll provide. If we ate nothing but the fish and whatever plants might be edible, we could feel as though we’ve eaten enough even while we’re slowly starving ourselves.”

Nuy shook her head, not sure that she understood. The fish had always satisfied her own hunger, sometimes for many days when there was nothing else to eat, but her people had not survived only on fish even when they had been living near the sea. Deer could be hunted farther inland, one could make do with rabbits and rits, and there were the birds and eggs that could occasionally be found near streams and pools. Even though the great storm had swept most of those birds away from the coops where her people had kept them, a few of the freed birds had managed to survive along the river.

“So we’ll have to conserve our food,” Bonnie continued, “make it last as long as possible, but with any luck, maybe we won’t have to wait too long. Within a month—in about thirty days, our people will expect us to be back. Thirty days after that, they’ll begin to worry about us, and not long after that, they’ll have to be wondering what’s happened. And then they’ll send someone out to look for us.”

“And by then,” Tonio added from where he lay, “maybe I’ll be able to travel, if I can stay on that horse. And you’ll come with us.

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