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"What happened to the third column?"
"Don't rightly know, sir," Moytana said. "Some of the scouts thought they heard explosions a mile or two to the east. The column turned toward them, then reversed itself, then turned back again east before it swung around south to where they were when we were first watching them. That's all they saw before it got dark."
The work of Ahn-Kha, perhaps, with ambushes or miscellaneous sounds of destruction getting the Moondaggers marching in a circle, chasing the noises of their own troop movements.
Valentine wondered what would have happened back at Utrecht if they'd united with the Green Mountain Boys. The Moondaggers had come to oversee a surrender, not wage a war. If only Jolla hadn't felt overwhelmed by the responsibility of command.
He'd leave the might-have-beens to the historians and armchair strategists. He had to check on his commanding officer.
* * * *
For two days the column crept southeast as Bloom recovered from her taste of Bear blood.
The doctors complained that it made her even more restive than usual.
The Moondaggers hovered in the distance, keeping in between the brigade and Lexington.
Valentine wondered what sort of orders and threats were passing between various Kurians, high Church officials, and the Moondagger headquarters in Michigan. Bloom was soon up to half days in her jeep after one more Bear-blood transfusion.
Valentine, now that she was on his mental horizon, suddenly saw Tikka everywhere: giving orders to her fellow Bulletproof, cadging for strips of leather to effect repairs on tack and harness, giving advice to the cooks on the best way to quick-smoke legworm meat.
Perhaps it was just his libido, but she always seemed to be reach-ing, squatting, climbing, or bending over, the muscles of her backside tight in jeans and legworm-leather chaps.
She caught him coming out of the wash tent after dinner and revealed a glass flask tucked in her summer cotton shirt snuggled up next to a creamy breast.
Valentine had seen hundreds of liquor advertisements while pag-ing through the tattered ruins of old magazines, but for all the tales of subliminal depictions of fornication in ice cubes, he'd rarely so wanted to reach for a cork in his life.
"I came here to collect on a promise," she said, taking the kerchief out of her hair and letting the carmel-colored curls tumble into into a waterfall splashing against her shoulders.
"Or are you going to Cin-Cin me out of my reward?"
What the hell. He should do something to celebrate his brief command of the brigade.
Tikka seemed like five and a half feet of uncomplicated lust. He'd just have to make sure to use a condom for something other than keeping rain out of his gun barrel.
uDo you want to be seen walking into my tent, or will you sneak in under cover of darkness?"
"Let's go to mine. It's more secluded. I'm picketed to make sure the dumb things don't blunder into the stream."
"I'll change so I can blend in."
He buttoned his shirt and threw his uniform coat over his arm and went to his tent. While he put on his leathers, she refilled her pistol belt from the company supply.
"What in the world did you do to your rig?" she asked. "All your hooks and catches are gone."
"My maiden aunt Dolly was always complaining about the chips to her furniture. Kept snagging doilies at headquarters too."
She licked her lips. "I think I can tell when you're joking now."
"Good."
They walked through the knee-high grasses to the legworm camp, a little below the Southern Command encampment and closer to the stream. They wound through grazing legworms. On the hill opposite the stream, two riders sat on a mount back-to-back, keeping watch.
She beckoned him into her tent. Some tack odds and ends sat in a chest that opened out into shelves, and various ponchos and bandannas hung on a grate-like folding clothes tree. Her bed was a net-and-frame double with a rather battered-looking down mattress. It looked too rickety to support both of them.
"You should have taken better care of your leathers," she said, disrobing with a matter-of-factness that made Valentine remember a girl he'd once known in Little Rock. "You know, it's supposed to be the mark of a real well-suited pair of riders if they can do it without any punctures or lacerations. Kind of a good omen for their future together."
She had muscular buttocks and legs, good shoulders and a sleek, feline back. Her breasts, high and small and capped by determined, thumblike nipples, gave the tiniest of bobs as she danced out of her leathers. Their full firmness made her waist look even narrower by comparison.
