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Ahn-Kha's ears folded flat against his head.
"About forty years older than you're going to get if you call him a 'stoop' again," Valentine said.
"You can call me Ahn-Kha, or Uncle, if that's too hard for you to pronounce."
"Uncle? My ma would smack me if I called a ... Golder Ones my uncle."
Valentine decided to change the subject. "Hank," he asked, "what kind of scrounger are you?"
"Haven't had many chances. We'd just burn when we'd go out on the Honor Guard sweeps."
Valentine picked up a stick and put three parallel scores in the ground. He added a fourth, under them and perpendicular to the other three. "That's a mark for a cache. You know what a cache is?"
"Ummm..."
"It's a hiding spot. The mark would be on a tree or a rock. See if you can find one as we walk. Chances are it would be out at the edge of the camp. We're all going to go in and have a look around."
The crossed a series of gullies and came upon the camp, folded into the base of the mountain in the broken ground there.
The camp was in ruins, inhabited only by the memories in Valentine's mind. The Quonset huts were gone, the shacks and cabins burned to the ground. The smaller branches of many of the trees in camp were black-barked where the flames had caught them. Valentine saw again the old faces of his platoon, remembering the smiles of his men over mugs of beer in the canteen and Sergeant Gator's slow, easy laugh. He was a Ghost haunting a Southern Command graveyard, and in a few more years there wouldn't be anything left to mark a place where legends lived.
Ahn-Kha picked up a handful of dirt at one of the burned cabins and let it trickle through his hands, sniffing it. "Jellied gasoline," the Grog said. "Bad way to die."
Valentine kept an eye on Hank, who was examining tree bark.
"Is there a good death?"
"Among my people's warriors, we have a saying." A good death can come through battle, at a place that is remembered. A better death can come through heroism, sacrificing yourself in the saving of others. The best death comes late, after seeing grandchildren born, for then you've also had a life.""
"There's a lot to admire in Golden One wisdom. Beats dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori."
"What is that?"
"A phrase from Latin: 'It is a sweet and proper thing, to die for one's country." That kind of death's neither sweet nor proper. Just ugly. Necessary sometimes, but not sweet and proper."
The allies stood in silence for a moment.
"It will be dark soon," Ahn-Kha offered as a change in subject.
"I don't want to sleep here. Let's make a camp farther up on the mountain. Somewhere we can hear."
"We could make it back to the wagon if we hurried."
Valentine found Hank's footsteps with hard ears. "I don't want to travel with the boy at night. I can hide my lifesign, and you don't show as human. Hank might get sensed if there are any more of those loose Hoods around."
"That was odd, to run across three masterless ones. Do you suppose that many Kurians died when they fought here last summer?"
"I hope so."
Valentine was getting tired of hoping. Ever since returning to the Ozarks, his hopes had been vanishing from his mental horizon like a series of desert mirages. Hopes that his Quickwood would make a difference in the war. Hopes that he might be able to return to the Caribbean, where Mali Carrasca was carrying his child-or daughter, according to Narcisse. Hopes that they'd find some vestige of Southern Command still in these hills. But if there was still hope to be found, it wasn't at Magazine Mountain.
* * * *
Valentine ate his flavorless bread, and tried not to think of the plentiful fruits and vegetables of the Caribbean. Ahn-Kha was occupying Hank with the story of the Golden Ones' battle against the General in Omaha.
"They would have rolled over us. But our Ghost found the railroad cars filled with the men who were operating the Reaper soldiers. He blew up some, burned the others where they were parked. The Reapers didn't go wild, like the ones with the horses; they just dropped in their tracks. Took the heart out of the rest of the General's men; they were used to having the Reapers at the front of the fight. In the confusion my brothers broke their chains and rose against them. But if it weren't for David, wounded twice-"
Valentine tossed a pebble at the Golden One. "Don't leave out the other details. Be sure to tell him how I almost had my head shot off," Valentine said, rubbing his aching leg. He pointed to the scar on his face. "An inch closer and the bullet would have taken the side of my face with it. Don't leave out the part where you found me in an interrogation cell, with my pants full of shit and a gun to my head. Ahn-Kha was the one who killed the General, Hank. I had a pair of handcuffs on at the time."
