"You remember what the Free Territory used to be like, right?"
"Yes, it all happened last spring, or last summer, really. I heard a lot of fighting. Then there were new people in charge. My pa was in Texas at the time; when he got back he said we had to do what they say for a while."
"You liked it better before they came, right?"
"Yes. Momma was happier. She hated it when Pa was in Texas though."
"I was gone for a couple of years myself. Now that I'm back I'm trying to find if there's any Free Territory left."
"Are we going to live there? Is there anywhere safe now?"
"I hope so, Hank. If there is, we'll find it."
* * * *
They were refilling their water skins at a trickle when Ahn-Kha came back from his scout of the old camp.
"Everything's burnt out, my David. Picked clean. Lots of holes in the ground. If there were buried weapons, I'd say they've been dug up."
"No one there?"
"Tracks. I smelled urine."
"You speak really well, for a big stoop," Hank said.
Ahn-Kha stood straight, towering over the boy. "We call ourselves the Golden Ones. I grew up trading with men in Omaha. I translated for my people when I was David's age."
"What's old for a stoop?"
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.""