That did it. Nobody claimed their extra ten minutes, and my urge for a swim vanished mysteriously. Suddenly we were all hopping and hobbling, buckling belts, priming pistols and loosening swords in scabbard. As we moved off Clare fell in beside me and took my hand, quite naturally; then, spotting Mall, she reached out the other to her. Mall hovered, obviously a little nonplussed, till I waved her over impatiently. It didn’t take much effort. Clare pushed her in between us, and I felt Mall’s hand clasp mine and clutch at it like a handhold on a cliff. My resentment was fading fast. Her fate might be the loneliest of anybody’s – and if she really would remember me a thousand years, better it wasn’t bitterly.
The trail soon grew steep and narrow, forcing us apart; and we had to help Jyp. Since he couldn’t hang on to the branches and the outcrops he slipped a lot, and every jolt was agony to his arm. He made it worse by continually looking around sharply at everything except his footing. Wounds had been treated with what was to hand – my powder-burned hands with juice of bitter aloes, for one; but he had nothing to stem the pain, except alternately and colourfully cursing the Wolf who shot him, and his own stupidity.
‘At least he didn’t hit the bone,’ Clare encouraged him. ‘Or just chipped it, anyway. An inch over and he’d really have broken your arm –’
‘He’d ha’ blown it clean off,’ said Mall sombrely. She seemed as edgy as Jyp, continually looking back over her shoulder.
Clare winced in sympathy. ‘Oh god! Well, you’re lucky he didn’t have an automatic, at least.’
I looked at her sharply, but she just smiled. It was just as Jyp had said; she was moving in a dream, almost, accepting, not questioning. Not thinking through the implications of what she’d said. And yet still the old Clare, all right. Unconsciously or not, she’d made a pretty good point.
They were such all-round stinkers, those Wolves, I couldn’t imagine them missing a chance to spread that bit more mayhem. Why didn’t any of them have modern weapons? They could surely get them easily enough. Why not tommy-guns or M-16s instead of cutlasses? Why not, for that matter, naval guns instead of muzzle-loading cannon, fast pursuit boats instead of sailing ships? It had never occurred to me to ask. But in one of our brief halts, at noon under the spreading shade of a vast star-apple tree, Jyp was ready enough to talk – I suspect because it kept his mind off the pain, or other things.
‘Sure, they could use ’em. So could we. Once in a while some Mutt’n’Jeff does get his mitts on what you and I’d call a modern gun, and raises plenty ruckus – mostly till he jams it, or his ammo runs out. Then what? Chances are he ruins it trying to repair it. And for ammo, he could just about handcast .45 shells, I guess; hand-turn new cases, maybe, or save spent ones. Stuff’em with black powder or gun-cotton, at half the power – but making the firing caps, fulminate of mercury or some such stuff, that’s tough work. Hard as handcrafting a whole new musket, even hand-rifling it – one he’d have not rouble loading. But he manages – and then maybe his second or third homemade shell blows in the breech and takes his hand off. See?’
‘I begin to,’ I said, wondering. ‘They’ve never heard of industry out here – of mass-production –’
Jyp gestured airily. ‘Oh, heard, sure. But industry’s big; it binds folk together, ties ’em down. And you need a whole chain of industries to make your modern weapons, or ships, or anything else. Men don’t settle too long out here, or sooner or later the Core’ll suck them in once again. So who refines the gas for your fast boats? Who turns out the plugs and cams and piston-rings? Or trues the steam-cylinders, even? Not many places’ll run to more’n a shipyard or two – and the workers come and go. There’s no call for more; we don’t miss it. Out here a man can live and sail and fight any way takes his fancy, all the ways we’ve ever done –’
‘Up until the Industrial Revolution,’ said Clare thoughtfully, rolling her head around. ‘Like a barrier …’
‘The what?’ Jyp looked at her dubiously. ‘Not one of those Wobbly types, are you, lady? Skip it. Me, I’m glad they went and gave you the vote, but –’
I interrupted hastily. ‘What she means is, out here you can’t ever go the way the Core has. And a lot of people there do think it was a mistake. Not me! Though I’ll admit you seem to live better than I’d have expected without progress – in medicine, for one thing …’
Jyp forgot himself, started to shrug and winced heavily. ‘Ah, we’re short on progress all right; but we’ve got other advantages …’
Clare lifted her head from my knee, and grinned. ‘You mean disadvantages, don’t you?’
‘Lady, I mean what I say. You’ve only seen the rough side of it, so far. We’ve other things going for us. Other forces, other wisdom.’
‘Magic?’
