The draft horse was not a bad mount, for what he was. Clove was big-boned and ponderous. I put him through his paces on our third day of travel. By then, he was answering the bridle and my heels, though not sharply. He didn’t seem to mind being ridden, but he was not my partner in it as Sirlofty had been. He made no effort to stay under me. His trot rattled my teeth. His canter was actually rather smooth, once I finally persuaded him to that pace, but he could not sustain it for long, and I had no fixed destination or schedule. I followed the road, hoping that one of the fortifications along the way would take in a stray recruit.

My body was more at fault than my horse’s for the discomforts of that journey.

As an engineer, I could see that I was like an overburdened suspension bridge. Too much flesh was heaped around my bones and dependent on my muscles. My body no longer worked as it had been designed to do.

Flexibility had been lost. Strength had been gained in my major muscles, but my back complained constantly. Clove’s bone-shaking trot was also a fat-wobbling quake for me. My cheeks shook, my belly jounced, and the flesh along my arms and legs jostled in syncopation to his hooves. At the end of each day’s ride, my ass hurt more than it had the day before. My expectation that I would soon toughen up and regain my ability to ride a full day without soreness was a vain hope. There was simply too much of me pressing my buttocks against the saddle, with the predictable consequences of developing sores. I tried to be grateful that they were on my flesh rather than my horse’s, but that was grim comfort. I steeled my will and went on, wondering how long my determination would last.

Three days past Franner’s Bend, I passed the site where Cayton’s Horse and Doril’s Foot had met their end. Someone had put up a wooden sign.

The crude letters read “SITE OF THE SPECK PLAGUE BATTLE.” If it was meant to be humor, it left me cold. Beyond it, row upon row of shallow depressions in the earth showed where the ground had sunk on the hastily buried bodies. Beyond them, a large ominous scorch mark on the earth was gradually giving way to encroaching grasses. I fancied that a smell of death lingered there; Clove and I hastened past it.

The first time the sun began to set with no shelter of any sort in sight, I turned Clove from the road and followed a tiny trickle of a stream up a gentle hill and into the brush. The faint trail I followed and a blackened ring of fire stones at the end showed I was not the first traveler to camp here. Hopeful, I lifted my eyes and soon found the sign that Sergeant Duril had taught me to look for so many years ago. Carved into a tree trunk was the outline of two crossed sabres. Wedged into a crotch of branches well above it was a bundle of dry firewood. Farther out on the branch dangled the bag that would hold kindling and emergency food. The courtesy among scouts and cavalla troopers was to take what one needed from such caches and replace it with whatever one could spare. The smoked fish I could smell was far more appetizing than the travel bread in my pack.