Page 7 of Backpacking through Bedlam

“And we don’t know what comes out to hunt at night,” said Sally. “I don’t think that’s a great idea.”

Right. I’d been eavesdropping long enough. I picked my pace back up, stopping at the edge of the rock to look down at the group. “I found a way up,” I said, giving no sign that I’d been listening.

The small cluster of mice standing on Thomas’s shoulder cheered. There were four of them, each wearing a different livery. Leave it to the mice to have figured out Sally was family while Thomas was still trying to pretend that he wasn’t planning to bring her home with us forever.

Thomas himself lifted his head, lowering his hand—across his eyes, as I’d predicted—and sliding his glasses back on before he offered me a wan, somewhat strained smile. Even with the tension around his eyes and the exhaustion in his posture, seeing him smile made me want to jump down from the rock, put my arms around him, and kiss him until I forgot why I’d stormed off in the first place.

The first thing that attracted me to Thomas Price was the fact that I knew I wasn’t supposed to be attracted to him. He was Covenant; he couldn’t be trusted. Oh, and my father hated him. Put together, those things made him the perfect man.

And then I got to spend time with him, got to know him, and figured out there was more to having a crush on someone—to falling in love with someone—than pissing off your parents. It didn’t hurt that he was the best-looking man I’d ever seen, and while I’ve seen a lot more men since then, I stand by that assessment. Tall, with brown hair and blue eyes, cheekbones that could cut glass, and tattoos covering most of the skin from his collarbones down, but honestly, it was his hands that did it for me. Thomas’s hands are long-fingered, quick and clever, and from the first time I saw them, I thought they’d been designed for holding me.

And he did. For years, he did. And then he left me, through no desire of his own, and I spent all the time between now and then just trying to get to a place where he could hold me again. It was all I’d ever wanted. I’d expected it to be enough. I didn’t know what I was going to do if it wasn’t.

“If you head along the rock that way,” I pointed, “and go around the corner, there’s a crack about twenty feet further on, with some good handholds above it. I tossed a glow stick in there, and saw a massive wood louse, but that was it. I don’t think there’s anything waiting for a quick snack. I can drop a rope over the side and help people up if they get to the crack.”

“That would be lovely,” he said, and moved closer, stretching his arms as far up as they would go while rising onto his tiptoes at the same time. Catching my cue, I dropped to my stomach, stretching my own arms toward his. By straining, we could brush our fingertips against each other. The mice promptly ran along his arm and onto mine, cheering as they made their way to my shoulder. Thomas stepped back again. “They were asking after you,” he said, by way of explanation. “I thought you might like some company while we all get topside.”

“Always glad to see the mice,” I said, and pushed myself back to my feet, trying to ignore the tiny cheers as the mice grabbed hold of my hair to steady themselves. Their tiny claws dug into my skin, not hard enough to draw blood, and the sensation was familiar enough to bring a smile to my face.

Thomas answered my smile with one of his own, apparently taking my expression as a sign that I wasn’t angry anymore. Well, maybe I wasn’t. We had things to work on, but staying mad wouldn’t do me any good. I waved down at him. “See you in a minute?”

“Certainly,” he said. It would take time to get everyone moving, especially with the need to keep them pressed against the rock wall and stepping without falling into a rhythm, but at this point, we were all old hats at hurrying our little caravan along. Sally was already gesturing people into position. Thomas continued to watch me even as I backed up and turned to walk back the way I’d come, but he didn’t ask me to stop, and in the end, I just kept moving.

Okay, so maybe being reunited with my true love after fifty years apart wasn’t as easy or as much like a romance novel as I’d always hoped it was going to be, but I wasn’t sorry I’d done it. I was sorry it had taken so much longer than it needed to, but even with our little frictions and sharp edges, having Thomas back in my life was the only thing I’d wanted for so long that I couldn’t imagine being sorry to have found him.

Would it have been nice to have a reunion that didn’t feature a massive band of cross-dimensional refugees? Sure. Would it have been even nicer if we’d been able to park most of them in one spot while we took the warriors and scouts with us for a quick, surgical search of available dimensions? Absolutely. Unfortunately, the amount of effort involved in keeping a door open for a large group, while immense, was less than the effort of opening a smaller door twice and then a third door for the aforementioned group. Plus not every universe touched on every other. We could go six or seven dimensions before we found a good place to drop people off, and trying to double back that far could have had serious consequences for Thomas’s health—all assuming the local equivalent of the giant moles didn’t come along and eat our people while they were waiting for us. No, efficiency and conserving our limited resources meant everyone came with us, much as it sucked. And it did suck.

The mice moved from my shoulder to my pack, where they began the Aeslin equivalent of Bible study, quietly discussing the day’s events as they codified them into what would become formal scripture. Yes, Aeslin mice can be quiet. It doesn’t come easily for them: their preferred volume is much closer to a shout than a whisper. But they’re very small creatures in a very large world, and they know how to keep their voices down if it means not getting eaten.

It’s always a treat when the Aeslin choose to communicate at something less than a shriek. According to my oldest granddaughter, Verity, I’m one of the few people they’ll do that for. I’d say it’s because they adore me, but really, it’s because a lot of the places I went while I was looking for Thomas weren’t very safe, and mice who didn’t learn to keep quiet sometimes didn’t make it back to the colony.

I regret every single one of them. The Aeslin trust us. That’s why they worship us. And for them, dying in the service of their gods is something to aspire to. They don’t usually martyr themselves, but every time I came home with an opening in my little traveling colony, there had been no shortage of volunteers to take the place of the mice I’d lost. And over time, the mice who’d managed to survive a trip or two started teaching the others the trick to it.

Half the Aeslin call me the Noisy Priestess. My clergy split when Thomas vanished, making me the only member of the family with two separate sets of rituals and catechisms. The other half of the mice call me the Pilgrim Priestess. I don’t know whether the two branches will reunite when we get home, or whether they’re going to stay as they are and found a third branch of my faith. I hope they’ll reunite.

I’d like everyone to be reunited if they can be.

Thomas’s clergy call him the God of Empty Rooms and Cold Regrets. They used to call him the God of Inconvenient Timing, but he didn’t get a separate branch of the faith when they changed his name. I’m not sure whether I should feel flattered or he should feel cheated. As far as I can tell, neither is he.

We started this journey with a member from each branch of my faith, a member of his clergy, and a novice who had yet to declare for any specific set of sacred rituals. The first three have stayed the same—Aeslin rarely change faiths once they don their livery. The fourth, however, now calls herself the first Priest of the Conscripted Priestess, and has been since before we left Ithaca. Sally really made an impression when she gave the then-novice a piece of her waffle sandwich. The mice always recognize family when they see it.

Sally was going to have a lot more mice praising her name as soon as we got home, the lucky girl. At least she seemed to like them well enough, even if they were a little overwhelming when they all got going on one of their shared rituals. Wait until we got her back to Portland.

The thought of Sally meeting the rest of the colony was enough to make me smile. I was still smiling as I reached the edge of the rock and peered into the crack I’d used to boost myself up. My glow stick hadn’t moved, making me think I was right about there being nothing down there but giant wood lice. Sure, they could be predatory in this dimension, but it seemed unlikely, and they hadn’t attacked me before.

Climbing the side of the rock was as easy this time as it had been before, and nothing appeared to take a swipe at me. I shrugged off my pack when I reached the top, unzipping it to extract a length of rope and a railroad spike. Some people think toting railroad spikes around is a waste of carrying capacity, and to be fair, the things are pretty damn heavy. But I’ve encountered enough creatures with iron sensitivity to make me think that all those old stories about wicked fairies stealing kids probably have a root in reality. Not everyone who’s managed dimensional travel uses it for good, or even for morally neutral acts. So railroad spikes are useful if you need to fend off certain types of unpleasant neighbor, plus they don’t bend or break, and they make great mountain climbing anchors.

I tied the rope around the spike, then bent and hammered it into a crack in the top of the rock, dropping the bulk of the rope down along the side. Sure, I’d offer a hand up for anyone who needed it, but a nice climbing rope is nothing to sneeze at.

Straightening, I stepped back to wait.

Moving a hundred people is never fast. Doing it when half of them are children, elderly, or in poor physical shape is . . . well, it’s just shy of glacial. I had plenty of time to study my surroundings while I waited.

Seen from my vantage point atop the rock, the land around us was almost uniformly flat but not level; there were small bumps and ridges, and some surprisingly deep grooves. I squinted at them, trying to understand their shape, before I realized what I was seeing fit well with the presence of the unusually jagged rock. This was a floodplain. Something about the local weather encouraged a form of flash floods, cutting channels in the soil and either eroding it enough to free rocks like this one or—given the depth of some of those channels—just plain washing them in from some other region.

It also explained the lack of trees. All the vegetation I could see was what I would have classified as a “grass” if I’d seen it on Earth, including something that looked a lot like bamboo, and something else with tall, fronded flowers that looked like horsetails and stood about twenty feet in the air. Mounds of earth similar to the one our mole had made dotted the landscape, pushed up through otherwise unbroken ground. There were no signs of civilization, or of anything I would recognize as a nomadic settlement.

That didn’t necessarily mean anything. Even after all the time I’ve spent on the move, I have a human’s innate prejudices, and that includes recognizing bipeds as intelligent before I recognize anything else. I could be looking at the central metropolis of the mole empire and simply be unable to recognize it for the majestic thing it truly was. It’s a funny little twist of the brain that makes it hard for humans to look at things that don’t stand on two legs and talk with one mouth and see them as people. I’ve been working on it for years. I figure I’ll be working on it until the day I die.