"She will delay us," the Elder insisted. "And we must travel swiftly a great distance. We must cross the valley below us, and if there is trouble we cannot wait for a woman to keep pace."
O'Hara smoothed Nedra's hair. "Nonetheless, she is going."
"Then she is your burden."
"Yes, my burden. I understand."
The Elder lashed out the order of the march, and the youngest clansmen fanned out in front as scouts, a hundred yards apart, with those who followed moving now in groups of two at intervals of five minutes, dispersal against a fire-power far more deadly than the guns O'Hara knew. The Elder stationed O'Hara and Nedra as the second of these groups, so that their pace would be determined by the scouts out front. In this order, and proceeding at a dog-trot, the party swiftly descended the flank of the mountain toward the small valley intervening before the next range.
They were soon down upon the valley's floor, moving steadily through head-high grass broken now and then by densely wooded groves of aspen, and by noon they were crossing the ice of a narrow stream, heading toward a thicket. The Elder, pressing up from behind, now urged O'Hara to increase his speed—the scouts, he warned, having crossed the stream, were running for the lower slopes of the mountain across the valley.
"They are almost beyond danger," he explained, "and you cannot blame them. This is the point of risk, when they are not scouting carefully."
But Nedra needed no urging. They were climbing now, the grade curving sharply upward, exhausting, the icy wind of December cutting into the tissue of their lungs as if they were breathing acid. They reached the first shaggy line of snow-clad conifers and were pausing there, trying to determine where the route now led, when far ahead of them up the slope, a great burst of sound came roaring and a thin column of ocherish fuming matter shot up toward the sky, flattened at the top, changed coloration rapidly toward mottled red, then seemed to sag, drifting down toward the earth again.
Nedra seized O'Hara's hand.
Then down below them, just beyond the stream they'd crossed, another blast of sound came simultaneously with that tortured, soaring column of dark yellow matter, pustulant, and like a pustule bursting at the top, fuming into a blackish red, the color of dried blood. Obscene, O'Hara thought—it was obscene. A fire of filth.