Right of Thirst by Frank Huyler Read Free Book Online Page A

York.”
    â€œAh,” he said, as if something had become clear to him. I felt my cheeks flush.
    â€œIt’s not a bad way to start again,” he said, thoughtfully, and not unkindly, after a moment. “It worked for me.”
    I did not reply.
    He finished off the last of the meat, eating with evident pleasure, drank the rest of the wine, and then, as he wiped his mouthfor the last time, he thanked me for dinner.
    â€œI hope you’ll join us,” he said, after I paid the bill, and we stood outside the restaurant in the warm night. “I’ve talked to a few others, but they’re much younger, and have very little experience. We need someone like you. We need someone who knows what they’re doing.”
    With that, he shook my hand, firmly.
    â€œYou have my card,” he said, looking me in the eye, bringing the evening to an end. “I hope to hear from you.”
    â€œDo you need a ride to your hotel?” I asked.
    â€œNo, thanks,” he said. “It’s not far. I’m used to walking.”
    I said good night, and watched him for a moment as he strode off purposefully toward the center of campus, head up, as if he had an appointment to keep.
    As I stood on the street, I felt as though I was on the cusp of an untraceable disappearance, that I was very close to being swept under entirely. I’d lived in that town for nearly thirty years, and right then it meant nothing to me, no more than the Atlanta of my youth. It was just another place, another stop along the way, full of strange young faces, ten thousand at a time, in four-year cycles, passing through.
    I suppose another world was what I wanted most.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    The days were blinding and bright and deep. Silent, also, except for the wind and the river in the background. When it was still, at night, the air was like a pane of ice. Sound carried a great distance—footsteps on the gravel, voices from the cook tent. There were birds—a kind of small brown gull, sweeping in for the garbage. Apart from them, and the villagers below us, the place was empty. When I first stepped out of the helicopter, I felt as though I’d landed on the surface of the moon.
    Our five tents sat clustered around one another on a field of boulders at the base of a thousand-meter cliff. Two of them—the cook tent and the dining tent—were canvas, tall enough to stand in. The other three were modern two-man domes, one blue, one yellow, and one green, where we slept. They were the single source of color on the field.
    It was the flattest place for miles, a few hundred yards of gently sloping ground, between the steep flank of the wall rising above it and the path descending sharply through the boulders to the river below.
    On the far side of the river, immense gray granite walls swept up to the tips of the ridges. There were patches of snow, icefalls, streams of running water. Deep in the valley, the day was shortened by theridges on either side, and the escarpment of snow-covered peaks I knew was there, stretching northward, could not be seen.
    Above it all, the sky presided like the most radiant of blue pools, stained with the faintest hint of black.
    A mile or so below us, beside the river, stood a village of some thirty homes, and if we walked to the edge of the field and part-way down the slope we could see it. Less than a hundred miles to the north, countless identical villages lay in ruins, and tens of thousands of people lay dead. But there, just south enough, nothing had been touched.
    The villagers grew barley and wheat on terraces and apricots in orchards and the sudden emerald and yellow fields leapt up around the houses. From a distance, the village was entirely lovely, with the gray and white snowmelt of the river, and the polished granite boulders, and the brown-walled orchard full of apricot trees, and the high-altitude sun pouring down over everything. In the early evenings, the gentle yellow of the