A Succession of Bad Days by Graydon Saunders Read Free Book Online Page A

by the tent is still there, everybodyvisited after lunch. It might have been a much more urgent question, otherwise.
    The two most-uphill tent pegs aren’t, the guy ropes are fine but the pegs aren’t there, at least not so as you could see them. Maybe breathing-fingers will be a way to find them.
    The one thing, the first thing, turns out to be standing in a line and walking, east to west, and writing down what we feel. Well, Wake writingdown what we feel.
    It’s squat, reach, try to figure out what words to use for things like relative depth or mass or the horrible cold squelch, like the ghost of something rotten, I run into a few times. Then it’s a couple metres forward, and do it again.
    It takes a surprisingly long time to get across the whole new meadow that way. There are a few ripples in it, too, dips I wouldn’t call a dell,but the stone underneath isn’t perfectly smooth and the meadow isn’t, either.
    Then we come back, closer to the trees.
    The whole line of the ridge, the thing that was there before we changed it, slopes down to the west, getting lower toward the West Wetcreek. The meadow is over something glittery; under that is something dark, and denser. It wasn’t lying in anything like the same way, before, exceptthe slope, and even that’s higher, you can see the hump in the ridge-line where it got higher. The dark stuff dives down northward more steeply than the hill slope; presumably that’s what gives room for the trees.
    Trying to think of this makes my head hurt. From the faces, I’m not the only one. The important thing seems to be that the dark stuff is practically at the surface on the east side;it doesn’t just tip north, it’s northwest, and the place it came from, or its heap of chances, I don’t imagine there’s a sudden hole in some other world somewhere, or we’d get vast sudden pits appearing here at least occasionally.
    Though if the dirt just switches, who would notice? It’s not like someone
lives
on most dirt.
    Probably shouldn’t think about that much.
    Wake motions us off the meadow,off to the east and a little north and down off the curve.
    “Reach down,” Wake says, gesturing.
    I do, we do: the…original, unaltered, something, standing on the stunted forb within reach of the meadow grass makes the whole thing suddenly real, I’m awake, this is really happening, and down there I can feel the angle of the heavy dark stuff, dropping away down but not vertically, it splays, out tothe east and tipped a little westward so if the face of it was a wall it leans back and in. It sloshes down there, all the free-draining rock has to be piling water up against the wall-face of the terrain we added.
    It sloshes not very far down. Feels like it’s barely half my height.
    “Tomorrow is digging out a spring,” says Wake.

Chapter 8
    It’s like being hungover, the ache doesn’t seem to be a muscle thing.
    Steam handed every one of us a pair of ten-litre cans after the post-breakfast sluicing; no yokes, just advice to avoid thinking of them as heavy.
    We don’t go to the sandpit, we go back up toward the tent and the new meadow.
    If it was a hangover, I would’ve had to have drunk something except water and altered beets.If it was a hangover, I’d be feeling better for the amount of water I got into me at breakfast. Also the salt. I don’t, so that’s not what it is.
    Not thinking of the cans as heavy gets tough, quickly; both of them slosh. Not the same slosh, one of them might be bottles, the lid looks loose. The other one’s the same can of water thing as yesterday.
    I’ve got a decent enough hat. I can’t say I’veactually got glare in my eyes, even crossing the bridge back to the east side of the West Wetcreek — Dove and Chloris and Zora between them have me and Kynefrid about cured of referring to it as a river or just ‘Westcreek’ — and over a lot of sunlit water, but it feels like glare, anyway.
    Chloris suggests stopping to rest our hands at the