Outland Exile by W. Clark Boutwell

Author:W. Clark Boutwell [Boutwell, W. Clark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781491775646
Publisher: iUniverse
Published: 2017-10-28T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 36

ARRIVAL

Malila sat up and moaned. Her head, feeling twice its normal size, throbbed in retaliation. She sensed something had died, died a slow, pestilential death, in her mouth. Remembering a dinner of pickles, bear ham, and alcohol, she barely had time to dress before staggering out and vomiting into the tall grass.

Jesse found her as the last heaves subsided, leaning over her to block the too-bright sun with his shadow, and tsked. He pressed a red bandana into her limp hand. The back of the old man’s hand showed a new livid bruise. She almost asked him about it.

“We have to move today, lass. Rest while we pack. When you feel up to it, we will get you something to make you feel better … when it will stay put for a while.”

“You poisoned me! I’m going to die here!”

“I’m sorry, so sorry, lass. I don’t know what I was thinkin’ … bear ham, pickles, and ’shine. I am truly sorry.”

Malila had an appropriately scathing response on her lips, but the thought of the food, again, wrung her out, making her retch bile-green slime into the grass.

In time, Malila recovered enough to stand and wash out her mouth from a bucket left near the door of the dugout.

Moses, grinning, approached her with a large tin of clear liquid.

“Jesse said for you to drink this. Make you feel better if’n you can keep it down.” It tasted vaguely salty but bitter.

Moses showed her to the corral. Jesse had finished saddling three horses and had leads on two others loaded with their gear. The old man, looking gray, finished wrestling a pack into place. Malila smiled at his discomfort, matching her own.

“Okay, miss. This here is Arab. He’s about as gentle an animal as I have,” said Moses. “Do you want a leg up?”

Malila nearly fell over backward looking up to the saddle. Unity horses were never this massive. She took the leg.

Once mounted, acrophobia replaced nausea for a season. Jesse mounted with Moses’s help as well.

They left the rendezvous station deserted, the doors barricaded against animals and the coming snow, for what Moses said would be a three-day ride to the colony.

By early afternoon, Malila was better and worse. Her nausea gone, she could devote her misery to a more fundamental pain. Moses shortened her stirrups, a name she suspected he had just invented to annoy her. As the sun sank, they moved south, a little higher out of the river valley. The high country already wore the brown gray of a winter landscape, although, here and there, near the river Malila still saw the greens, crimsons, and yellows of autumn. Occasional spires of blue smoke rose up until kited away by the wind.

The riding trip, like the foot trek before, rapidly assumed a sameness. Moses nudged her before dawn as he went to collect the horses. Jesse stirred up the fire from the night before. The three broke their fast with a bitter black effusion of what appeared to be charcoal.

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