The hot breath of the Forbidden Zone's desert wind threw tiny crystals of sand in Virdon's eyes and forced him to squint up to the ape, who was rustling with his and Burke's travel papers as if he could detect some hidden message between the cramped curves and whorls of Galen's script. Virdon felt sweat pooling at the nape of his neck and trickling down his spine, and suspected that not all of it was from the pounding heat that made the air around them swirl in lazy currents.
Burke was unusually silent, a fact that added to Virdon's concern. He cast a quick glance to the younger man at his side, but Burke's face was blank; only his eyes were moving, flicking from one ape to the next, scanning the whole patrol, probably noting their position, alertness, and armament.
Knowing Burke, he was already preparing for an attack, though Virdon couldn't say whether for one from the apes, or for his own. Considering the major's prior experiences with the simian overlords of their planet, both possibilities were equally likely.
Virdon felt another trickle of sweat running down his back.
"So you claim that you belong to a 'Doctor Kova'," the voice of the patrol leader took Virdon out of his worried musings. "And he allowed you to roam the far side of the mountains... to collect herbs?" The ape leaned back in the saddle and made a show of scanning the landscape, shadowing his eyes with his hand.
Virdon involuntarily followed his gaze and admitted to himself that Galen's excuse for their unsupervised traveling wasn't holding up anymore out here. In the mangrove jungles of former Northern Florida, up through the endless swamps of Georgia, and finally, in the eternally fog-covered mountain slopes of the Appalachians, water had been in abundant supply, breeding mosquitos in the dense riparian forests, and feeding orchards, wheat and cotton fields wherever the apes' human servants had managed to turn the wilderness into cultivated land.
But here, on the western flank of the mountain range, edging into the Forbidden Zone of the inner lands, water had vanished deep underground. The clouds emptied their load on the eastern side of the Iron Mountains, as the apes called them, and only appeared as hazy veils of mist in the mornings, before the sun drank them up at noon. In the past, these parts had been fertile and green; but whatever climate change had added to the apocalypse since then, had turned them into a wasteland.
Nothing grew here except some thorny, gray-leafed creepers. Virdon doubted that they had any healing properties. Much as he hated to admit it, the patrol leader had a point.
"Now, I don't think you wrote those papers yourselves, seeing as humans are too dumb to read or write," the chimp said; he rolled up the scroll and stuffed it into the cuff of his leather glove. "But maybe you thought you could use them to stray a bit farther from the path than your master intended you to go."
It was a reasonable conclusion for an ape to make, but not one Virdon could afford to submit to; it would be completely at the apes' discretion whether he and Burke would be sent back to their 'master', or sold as ownerless strays on the nearest simian marketplace. Not that it would stop them from continuing their mission, but Virdon wasn't willing to tolerate any more delays. Not now, when they had finally outrun Urko and could focus on their actual objective — finding a pocket of civilization that would enable them to send a signal back home, back through time.
"We may have gotten lost, vetes," he said, carefully keeping his voice respectful, his body relaxed and slightly hunched, making himself smaller in front of the ape. Most apes couldn't manage the completely erect stance of a human, and towering over an ape was considered a provocation, even if said ape was sitting on a horse and thus being taller than the human by default. Much as it grated on him to still be cowering before the apes, this was not the time to put pride before prudence.
