As I led Clove from the old forest to the new, my eyes fell on a neatly stacked pile of cut poles beside the trail. There were about twenty of them, no bigger around than my wrist, and only about eight feet long. They had rough gray-green bark still on them. I had no doubt that Kilikurra had cut them and left them there for me. I was surprised that he had felt comfortable cutting trees in the forest when the Specks seemed to so oppose our tree cutting for our road. My second emotion was disappointment. He had misunderstood me completely. I had intended to harvest some hefty logs for stout corner posts that I could set deep in the earth. By the time I dug holes for these posts, my fence would be only five feet tall, and so spindly that the wood would likely rot through in just a couple of years.
I half expected Kilikurra to step out of the dappling shadows and claim the credit for his good deed. When he did not, I decided that I could not be sure he wasn’t there, and that my best course was to appear grateful. I put a hitch line on the bundled poles, and then bowed gratefully to the forest.
Clove didn’t like the strange contraption scraping and jolting along behind him, but eventually we managed to get down to the cemetery. I left the poles there, having decided I could use them as stakes to set out the straight lines for my barricade. I was freeing Clove from his unwanted load when I heard the heavy thunder of running feet. I straightened and turned to find Ebrooks coming at me at a dead run. Kesey, panting heavily, was some distance behind him. I looked behind me, saw no cause for the alarm on their faces, and turned back to them, shouting, “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“You’re…alive!” Ebrooks gasped out the word. He reached me, seized me in a sweaty hug, and then leaned on me, panting. Kesey had given it up. He stood, bent over, his hands on his knees, his mostly bald pate bobbing as he tried to catch his breath. After a time for breathing, Ebrooks panted, “When you didn’t come back by nightfall, we waited for you. But when night shut down and fear was flowing out of the forest thick as tar, we went back to town and told the colonel you were dead. God’s breath, Nevare, how did you survive? Are you sane still? No one knows how you can stand to live this close to the forest. And now you’ve gone and spent a night in there. Are you crazy, man?”
“Clove and I got turned around in there. We had to wait for dawn to find the way home. That’s all. It wasn’t pleasant, but I’m not hurt at all.” The lies were nearly effortless. “Why did you tell the colonel I was dead?”
Kesey had staggered up to us by then. “Well. That seems to happen a lot to fellows that have this job.”
“And the colonel was really upset to get the news. He said, ‘That’s all I need, with this review coming up! Another dead cemetery sentry.’ And he tried to tell us we’d have to take on guarding the graves. But we said, ‘No, sir, thanky kindly.’”
“I didn’t think you could just say, ‘No, thank you’ to an order.”
Kesey and Ebrooks exchanged a look. Ebrooks spoke. “It’s been a long time since the colonel issued a real order. I expect he’s afraid of what he’d have to do if he did and no one obeyed it. Easier not to test his authority than find out it’s gone.”
Kesey shook his head sadly. “It’s a shame, really. That man used to be able to blow fire when he wanted things done. But since we come here, well. He ain’t the officer he used to be, that’s all.”
“And we ain’t the regiment we used to be, either,” Ebrooks pointed out sourly. “It’s one and the same. We’ve lost so many men to desertion and suicide or just plain bad ends that the colonel worries all the time about his numbers. They keep sending us scads of prisoners to work the road. Well, pretty soon they’re going to have more prisoners than their guards can manage, even with soldiers to back them up. And if the prisoners don’t turn on us and burn the place down, then the Specks will get us. Gettys is a bad post. I wish they’d send their high mucky-mucks to inspect us and have done. They’ll turn us out of Gettys, probably send us somewhere worse. Though it’s hard to imagine anywhere worse than this.”
“Well. I suppose I’d best get cleaned up and go let the colonel know that I’m not quite as dead as he’d heard.”
“That would be good,” Ebrooks agreed. I think he was happy that I’d offered to do it myself, rather than suggesting that he should have to correct his own mistake. They went back to their groundskeeping while I went to my cabin. I was ravenously hungry, and I emptied most of my small larder. By the time I’d washed, shaved, and changed my clothing, it was late afternoon. I saddled Clove and headed for town.