A Different Flesh by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online

they were going down into marshier country again as they approached the York River, which paralleled the James to the north. They all kept peering ahead for a telltale smudge of smoke against the sky.
    Darkness fell before they found it. They had to stop, for fear of losing the sims’ trail. Wingfield drew first watch. He sat in the warm darkness, wishing he had some way to let Anne know what he had found. His wife would still be suffering the agony of fear and uncertainty he had felt until that afternoon, and would keep on suffering it until he brought their daughter home.
    He refused to think of failing. He had before, when he thought Joanna dead. But having come so close, he felt irrationally sure things would somehow work out. He fought that feeling too. It could make him careless, and bring all his revived dreams to nothing.
    When he surrendered sentry duty to Lucas, he thought he would be too keyed up to sleep. As it had back in his own bed, though, exhaustion took its toll; the damp ground might have been a goosedown mattress ten feet thick.
    Henry Dale spotted the sims’ fire first. The Englishmen were much closer to it than they had been to the one a couple of days before, for it was smaller and not as smoky. The hour was just past noon.
    â€œWe wait here,” Allan Cooper decreed, “so we may approach by night and lessen the danger of being discovered.”
    They soon found that danger was real. A sim on its way back to the fire walked within a double handful of paces of their hiding place. By luck, it was carrying a fawn it had killed, and did not notice them.
    â€œAh, venison,” Caleb Lucas sighed softly, gnawing on smoked meat tough enough to patch the soles of his boots.
    The wait seemed endless to Wingfield; the sun crawled across the sky. To be so close and yet unable to do anything to help his daughter ate at him. But getting himself killed with an ill-considered rush would do her no good either.
    The Englishmen made low-voiced plans. All had to be tentative. So much depended on where Joanna was around the fire, what the sims were doing to her (Wingfield would not let himself consider Henry Dale’s notion), how many sims there were, how much surprise the rescuers could achieve.
    At last the birds of day began to fall silent. The sky went gold and crimson in the west, deep blue and then purple overhead. When stars came out not far from where the sun had set, Allan Cooper nudged his fellows. “Now we move—cannily, mind.”
    The guard led them as they crept toward the fire. He was humming a Spanish tune under his breath. Wingfield did not think he knew he was doing it. But he had learned his soldiering against Spanish troops, and a return to it brought back old habits.
    This band of sims dwelt in more open country than had the other. The Englishmen could not get very close. Half their plans, the ones involving unexpectedly bursting from the woods and snatching up Joanna, evaporated on the instant. They whispered curses and watched from the nearest shrubbery.
    At first glance the scene in front of them did not seem much different from the one they had watched a couple of nights before. There were more sims here, perhaps as many as forty. Three or four males were roasting roots and bits of meat on sticks over the fire, and passing the chunks of food to sims who stood round waiting.
    Another male was cutting up an animal that, with its skin removed, Wingfield could not identify. He stiffened. That was no stone tool the sim used; it was a good steel knife. Henry Dale noticed that at about the same time he did. “Damned thieving creatures,” he muttered.
    A female set the young one it was holding down on the ground, then rose and ambled away from the fire, probably to relieve itself. The infant followed it with its eyes and shrieked in distress. The adult came back and played with it, dandling it in its arms, rolling it about, and making faces at it. After the child was