Mr. Echo's Arc

Chapter 25 of 25

They reached the far oaks by mid-morning and stopped in the shade to breathe. Mr. Echo's chest was still hollow. The map beat waited in the buried jar behind them. The six scouts crouched in a loose ring. Kate set the brass box down. Clover Longear flicked her ears at every sound. Then the scarred scout stood up and said the thing Mr. Echo had been afraid of. "He carries nothing now," the scarred scout said. "No map. No hum. He left it in a hole. If the pale woman finds that hole, we are lost. If she does not, he still has to find it again on the way back. Why do we follow a man who cannot hold his own road?" Two scouts looked at the ground. One looked at Clover Longear. The other two looked at the scarred scout and waited. Mr. Echo heard the wrong echo start above them, small, a door easing shut in an empty house. Doubt made its own silence. If he answered wrong, the six would split here on open ground, and the pale woman would pick them off in pairs. He did not argue. He knelt and pressed his palm flat to the dirt. "Listen," he said. "Not to me. To the ground." He tapped four beats and a rest against the earth with two fingers. The scouts leaned in. Nothing came back. He tapped again. Faint, from a long way east, the buried jar answered — four beats and a rest, muffled through soil and root. Clover Longear pressed her ear to the ground and closed her eyes. "It is there," she said. "Where he put it. Clean." She lifted her head and looked at the scarred scout. "He did not lose it. He hid it. I heard the whole map beaten into his chest. I know the shape. He carries the shape still. The jar carries the sound." She tapped her own chest once. "Two copies. Safer than one." The scarred scout's ears flattened. He tapped the ground himself and heard the answer come back. He sat down slowly. "Then he holds the road," he said. "I withdraw." One of the scouts who had looked away nodded. The other three touched their noses to the dirt, the warren sign for agreement. The circle closed again around Mr. Echo instead of breaking away from him. Mr. Echo stood. His hands were shaking, which he had not noticed until now. Kate picked up the box. Clover Longear moved to his left shoulder, witness again, and the six scouts formed up behind them without being told. But he had spent something to keep them. The buried jar was now a known point — six scouts knew where it lay, and any one of them, taken by the pale woman, could give it up. The next problem was already walking with them west.