The Dragon Revenant - Katharine Kerr [91]
“If you woke up in time at all,” Rhodry said. “I heard a good bit about these wretched floods, and I don’t like the idea of traveling in them, I tell you.”
“No more do I, dear brother, but alas, we have no choice. Our one consolation is that we’ll have the roads to ourselves for a couple of weeks until things reach some kind of equilibrium.” Salamander looked utterly dismal. “Until then, we shall be riding wet, dirty, cold, and generally as miserable as one can get outside of outright illness. Alas, alack, well-a-day, and so forth and so on.”
“I suppose we could lay up in a town for a few days,” Jill said.
“There aren’t any more towns between here and the central plateau, not ones big enough to have an inn, anyway. Besides, we’ve got to keep moving. Somewhat’s wrong—I can feel it in my ill-starred soul.”
“And how do you know that we’re not riding straight into trouble?”
“There, my petite partridge, you have a very good point indeed. We’d best set up some kind of guard when we make camp tonight. Doubdess we won’t be able to sleep much in this blasted muck, anyway.”
Just before sunset the drizzle thickened to a sort of vertical fog, not quite a rain but too wet for mist, and the clouds seemed to hover a mere arm’s reach above the road. Leaving the brown, swollen river, they led their stock up a hill to the cold and windswept grassy crest.
“This won’t do,” Salamander moaned. “We could all die of a congestion of the chest and spare our enemies the trouble of catching us.”
“Well, there’s some boulders and shrubs down over there,” Jill said, pointing. “We can tether the horses in the grass and then try to find some dryish spots down in the rocks.”
“Try, indeed. I like your choice of words.”
Even though she was a road-hardened silver dagger, that night Jill was almost as uncomfortable as Salamander. Enormous pale hunks of sandstone, the boulders poked through the hillside and clustered on a small natural terrace about thirty feet down from the crest. Along with the prickly shrubs and tall weeds that grew in between them, these rocks did indeed provide shelter from the wind, but the level spaces between and around them were narrow, and the ground so wet that the damp soaked right through the blankets. Eventually they all decided that the only way to sleep was sitting up with blankets wrapped around them like cloaks. Although Jill wanted to do her share and stand a watch, Rhodry pointed out that while he and Salamander could see in the dark, she’d be blind as a mole on this starless night.
“Get what rest you can, beloved,” he said. “I’ll wake you just before dawn. We’ll get an early start. If naught else, it’ll be warmer once we’re moving.”
Once the last of the sunset faded, Jill realized that, indeed, standing a watch would be a waste of her time. In the swirling mist-rain she could barely find the horizon, much less see anything in the broken country around them. Perhaps, if she were lucky and happened to be staring right at it, she might have seen a large animal or a man moving, if it were some light color and noisy to boot. Wrapped in two blankets and her cloak, with her sword in its scabbard right beside her, she wedged herself under a slight overhang between two boulders and wondered if she’d ever fall asleep. A few feet away she could see Rhodry poking around, looking for another dry spot, but only as a gray shape moving against a blackness.
“Salamander’s on watch?” she said.
“He is, up near the crest so he can keep an eye on the horses.”
By the rustling he was making Rhodry seemed to be scraping small stones and sticks out of his chosen spot. Finally he settled down, leaning back against a rock and sitting so still that she could barely make out where he was. Tented in her blankets and out of the wind, she began to warm up at last, and she managed to ignore the slight cramps in her legs enough to drowse off. Once she half-roused to find Rhodry leaving, creeping quietly uphill for his watch; distantly she heard what might have been Salamander whispering