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Martin managed to convince Namo to think strategically about traveling to Benuun. If he were to accompany her, they would need to get some gear, because frankly, Martin simply couldn’t fathom how Namo’s standard of comfort was low enough to where she could sleep well just lying on a pair of thin blankets she kept inside her rucksack each night. Mercifully, Namo had no attachment whatsoever to the money she had earned the previous night, having lived her entire life in a barter economy. The pair pooled their meager funds and managed to scrape together enough to purchase some trail rations, a map of the area, and a canvas tent large enough to barely squeeze two people inside, which Martin reasoned was unlikely to need to happen on their trip unless unseasonably wet weather passed through on their way to Benuun—still, better safe than sorry. The map was barely any use, and the former surveyor’s apprentice doubted its accuracy at all. For starters, there was a large region of the map southeast of Benuun that was completely blank; in addition, names of landmarks he was familiar with were misspelled, swapped around, and misplaced entirely. Martin reminisced for a moment about his old surveying tools: his theodolite, his chains, his telescopes… He could have constructed his own damn maps if he still had access to those. It couldn’t be helped; the map they had would have to do.

The tramp played the role as pack mule, as the larger of the pair. The only tent they could afford was uncomfortably heavy, but since Namo contributed the bulk of the funds to purchase it, he felt it was only fair that he contribute to the effort somehow. By the time the pair headed south out of Fordham through the outskirts of the central district, the white sun was fading to a mellow gold on the western horizon. Camping on the road was an inevitability, one which Namo looked forward to: “Ya know, it was an interesting experience sleepin’ in a human tavern, but I gotta say, it was really hard to actually fall asleep.”

“Why?” Martin asked. “Was it too noisy?”

“Well, that was part of it… I dunno, I think it was just so different than what I was used to. I still enjoyed the experience, though! But I’m hopin’ we can sleep under the trees or the stars tonight, don’tcha know?”

Martin could sympathize with her, though he supposed he may not have had any trouble sleeping last night on account of the rotgut he had imbibed.

Near the edge of town, Namo carried on her usual habit of rambling about this or that: this time, an anecdote regarding a childhood near-death experience. Apparently, she had almost fallen out of a tree and off a cliff, narrowly avoiding plummeting thirty meters to her death, but was able to carefully cut herself out of a web of vines that had grown around the tree, with help from Uyutuk, one of her friends who had moved to Benuun. She stopped in the middle of her sentence near the climax of the yarn. “Do you hear that?!” the woman exclaimed, excitement saturating her voice. Martin listened carefully. He faintly heard a musical sound once Namo had drawn silent. As he tried to pinpoint the source of the music, the faun started a jog toward the its source, her splayed hooves kicking up a trail of dust in their wake. Martin, not in a hurry himself, continued at his walking pace, hands dangling in his jeans pockets as his duster flapped in the breeze.

The man heard the source of what had kindled Namo’s excitement as he approached the source of the sound: an obviously working-class gentleman in a slouch hat, a dusty white button-up shirt, and threadbare cotton overalls playing a bluesy harmonica melody while sitting on his porch. The scene was a picture out of his most hackneyed bucolic daydreams. Here they stood, near the edge of town on a dusty, manure-encrusted corduroy road, as the sun considered setting along the western horizon, watching a man play a wordless lament to bygone days and the things that could have been. Be that as it may, the experience was apparently entirely novel to the faun. She was careful not to interrupt the man, who only hesitated for a fleeting moment to acknowledge the travelers before resuming his playing. When Martin walked up beside her, she whispered into his ear: “What is this amazin’ instrument? It sounds kinda like he’s screaming, but like, in a good way, if that makes sense.”

The man suppressed a snicker at the description. “That would be a harmonica. Never heard one before?”

“Har-mon-i-ca,” she sounded out, her accent showing in the bent pitch of the vowels. “Nope, never heard it, but I love it! Do you know how hard it is to play?”

Martin, with a smug smile, decided to play a bit coy. “I don’t imagine it’s too hard. Lots of folks play it.”

“I wonder if I could learn someday.” She swayed a bit, to and fro, to the melody, which admittedly was pretty danceable.

“Never say never,” was the tramp’s terse reply.

The pair listened intently to the gentleman play his mournful song, and Martin caught a glimpse of a day not so different from this, spent by the fire with Davin by his side, a bottle of whiskey in his hand, and a heart full of song. But the glimpse was merely that: an ephemeral mirage of a yesterday long abandoned, left to wither and weather to the inexorable advance of time. Before long, the pair continued on their way down road out of town.

Over as little as the first two days that the pair spent on the road toward Benuun, Martin noticed that they were steadily increasing in elevation. In addition, with the help of Namo’s keen eye for botanical diversity, he noticed that the assemblage of plants they encountered began to change with the increase in elevation. Martin found himself the unwilling student of the happy-go-lucky faun woman. To her, every type of shrub, forb, tree, and herb had a role to play, a story to tell, a gift to offer. There were many plants she didn’t know the English name of, and more still she didn’t know any name for whatsoever. Nevertheless, Martin found himself impressed by the extent which she was able to infer plant characteristics by looking for features she recognized from other plants. At one point during their second day of travel, Namo gasped, then halted in her tracks beside the road for what seemed like the thousandth time. “Oh, fer cute! Hey Maa’ko, get a loada this guy!” She tried to pull Martin aside to look at a bush.

“Looks like a bush.” He made a motion to continue walking.

“Come on, I promise this is the last one I’ll make you look at.” She tugged on the sleeve of his duster like a child.

“You said that three hours ago.”

“Yeah but, this one’s really neat! Just trust me and get down here!” She demanded, yanking on his sleeve more insistently.

Martin reluctantly complied with her order, just as he had the previous five times Namo had found a plant that was slightly different from the last one she had shown him. He approached Namo, who had crouched along the side of the road, and joined her crouching stance. Namo clipped a branch and held it out for the human to accept. “Now whaddya notice about the way the leaves are arranged on this stem?”

“They’re arranged in some sort of a way,” Martin said, sarcasm dripping from his voice like a muddy water on a hosed-down dog.

Namo responded to Martin’s noncommittal response with an open-handed swat to his chest and it was all the man could do to not sprawl backward from the recoil of her strike. Fuck’s sake, she’s got an arm! “Don’t get smart with me, mister. Look with those fancy blue eyes of yours and tell me what you see!” She had taken on the persona of stern schoolmistress all too easily, Martin noticed with slight concern. He gave a closer look at the stem she held out for him. The leaves formed rough triangles with petioles extending from a vertex on each leaf blade. Each leaf attached opposite one another in pairs on the branch, and each pair was vertically offset from the stem, such that one pair pointed slightly upward, alternating with the next pair angled slightly downward, up to the base of the stem. However, Martin looked closer, and saw nestled at the base of each petiole a tiny purple flower.

He relayed this information to Namo. “Opposite, simple leaves, with flowers arranged… sorry, I can’t remember the word again. Sub-something.”

“Subaxial. But you’re right!” Namo beamed at him. “You’ve learned so much even in one day!”

“How do you know all these terms anyway? Like, these are jargon words that I’m not even familiar with.”

“Well, it’s a long story,” the faun said, seeming almost reluctant to divulge the information, “but the humans who stayed in my village a few years and taught me and my siblings Amonuunkep? One of them was a botanist, don’tcha know? She was, um… she was one of the ones who inspired me to go travelin’ the continent and learn more about our… plants...” the way Namo trailed off gave Martin the impression that she lost her train of thought. However, after the moment of silence stretched out into several moments, the man looked up from inspecting the t his crouching position up at his traveling companion only to find her staring off into the distance, picking at one of her fingernails nervously.

“Uh, Namo? You with me?” The man inquired.

Namo shook her head with a start. “I’m sorry, what were we looking at again?”

“You were talking about how you were friends with a human botanist who taught you English.”

“R-right.” The hesitation was clear in her voice, before she noticed the stem Martin was holding. “But anyways, let’s not get distracted, alright? What else can ya tell me ‘bout that flower?”

Martin squinted. It was so tiny he could hardly see whether there was a structure of interest she was trying to get him to point out. “It… looks like it has six petals?”

“Yes, that’s right! That, plus the opposite leaves, means that it’s probably related to i'snaamutuun. The roots of i’snaamutuun are used to treat fever, but I’m not sure if this plant is good for that though.” She produced a small pair of shears from her pack - of obviously human make - and clipped a few springs of the bush. When she finished, she hopped up to her full height from her crouch. “I’m so proud of you, Maa’ko!”

Martin had to admit, it was pretty rewarding to have been able to identify at least a couple botanical terms, though he doubted he would ever find much use for the skill. I have enough useless skills already, he mused.

As the pair ventured south, the incline increased in grade, and during a particularly arduous stretch, the pair spent hours navigating loose switchbacks designed to accommodate caravan travel. The cliffs above them, hewn from rusty red rock straddled by narrow bands of gray-white, appeared as ancient brick buildings with concrete moldings whose exterior had begun succumbing to erosion. Pits in the cliff faces sometimes took extreme forms in narrow spires and, far in the distance to the west, a narrow archway that threatened to collapse at some moment in the next few million years. The forest had thinned in this particular section of the forest due to the steepness of the terrain; instead, scrubby bushes with small yellow berries and an assortment of grasses in various states of dormancy constituted the dominant plant community. Namo took the lead, her short but fluffy fur-fringed tail wagging with the shift of her hips as she hiked up the hill in front of Martin. It rubbed against her rucksack but didn’t seem like it was chafing, or maybe Namo was just indefatigable in that way. She gazed at the cliff wall, and although they had only traveled together for a few days, Martin pieced together the telltale signs of her barely-subdued wonderment at the formation they were scaling. “The red rocks are probably limestone—they’re red because they have iron in them, which gives it that rusty color. The gray layers are sandstone.”

Namo tried to piece the information together. “Why does the red rock make the rock towers and the arches and stuff but the gray rock doesn’t?”

Not a bad question for someone who likely knew very little about geology. “The red rock gets blown away by the wind as tiny dust particles much faster than the white rock, which is a bit tougher, in a way.” He tried to explain the concept of wind erosion as simply as he could. “In addition, the red rock dissolves just a tiny bit when it rains. Even that tiny bit is more than the white rock, which resists water erosion better.”

“But then why do the arches and towers form instead of just blowin’ or washin’ away like, um, like the rest of the cliffs?”

Martin considered the question for a moment. “I don’t actually know that one for sure, but I think it has something to do with water slowly wearing away the center faster than the top and sides.”

“So like how water carries away sand and stuff as it flows downstream?”

“Yes, exactly like that… I think. Except the sandstone is actually tougher against the water than the limestone is.”

Namo took a second to ponder what Martin had shared. “Alright then smarty-pants. How do you know all this stuff about rocks?”

“I was training as a mineral surveyor and cartographer—sorry, a map maker—“ the man corrected himself to use a term he figured Namo was more likely to know. “—for a few years. It would have been my job to know about what minerals were located where and how they change over time.”

“Why’d you stop? You seem really good at it!”

Martin didn’t answer.

“Um, Martin? Didja hear me?” Namo looked back at Martin, who avoided eye contact.

“I did.” Martin said flatly.

“Oh, um, I…I can tell you don’t wanna talk about it. Sorry,” Namo replied, a bit of remorse dulling her usual cheerful tone.

As the wind was calm for most of the hike up the cliff, the slight echo of the scraping of their feet against the gravelly trail accompanied the occasional territorial call of distant lizard-birds. The serenity of the moment was unmatched when they had completed scaling the steep hillside. “Hold on, hold on! I wanna take a look,” Namo said, halting her travel companion. “Like, at where we came from, I mean.” She turned around and walked to the side of the trail, where the scraggly microphyllous bushes grew sparsely enough to provide an unobstructed view. Martin walked up beside her and was glad she had had the presence of mind to think to stop and take in the sights. Their vantage point from atop the cliff was, Martin estimated, about two or three hundred meters higher than where they had started for the day, an estimate corroborated by the burn of lactic acid buildup in his calves and thighs.

Namo sat along the edge of the cliff and peered downward, tracing the route they had taken with her stare. Martin sat next to her, his legs dangling along the rocky precipice. Far to their right, to the east, Martin saw the winding Pinuntuu River, which Fordham straddled, though the town itself lied beyond the northern horizon at this point in their travel. Below them, he could see the patchy woodland they traveled through prior to scaling the switchbacks, which itself opened up into a mostly clearcut grassland farther down the road, the only visible footprint of the fruitful forestry industry of Fordham.

Though the heat of the early fall sun beat down on them, a gentle breeze soothed the harsh white-hot sun, accompanied by the inevitable smell of airborne dust. Martin took a swig of water from his copper canteen. “So, do your friends, you know, are they as chatty as you are?” Martin asked, apprehensive about getting the loquacious faun going as soon as the words left his mouth.

“Which friends? Oh, you mean Uyutuk and Uno’opan?” She gave a mischievous chuckle. “No, but I can sure get ‘em goin’, don’tcha know! Uno’opan especially. You get her talkin’ ‘bout musical instruments and she will just. Not. Stop! I like to sing and dance but she’s an amazing harpist. Ya know, I think she woulda found the ‘mahonica’ thingie really neat!”

“You mean the harmonica?”

“Yes! That thingie! Ohhh, I’ll have to tell ‘er all about it! If only I could mimic the sound myself.” She made an honest attempt at playing a harmonica, including emitting a nasal screech not unlike nails on a chalkboard. Despite her solid effort, the cacophony made Martin bare his teeth in dismay.

“Yeah, maybe just stick to using words.”

By their fourth night on the road, Martin found himself growing irritable. He continued to feel frustrated by how close he had come to grasping a lead regarding the murder of his friend and colleague, but knew that he had been watched in the process, and now, for all he knew, she could have been made aware of his plot. The three names he learned replayed in his mind whenever he closed his eyes: Grace Couzens, Lin Zhao, Judith Montgomery. To make matters worse, while the man was no stranger to roughing it, he longed for a nice evening in a tavern with a glass of liquor in his hand. The days spent without passing so much as a trading post, and being unable to mug any of the few travelers they passed on the way for some emergency booze, meant that his patience for Namo’s incessant rambling had dwindled. It was as if she were physically incapable of just shutting the hell up for more than five minutes. She always had to be making some noise in the form of talking, singing, humming, or whatever.

The hapless thief was building a fire in a narrow clearing of scrubby oaks, hands shaking a bit as he struck his flint into the pile of deadwood and kindling he had collected. He accidentally scraped his hand and uttered a curse as he dropped the flint into the fire pit he had constructed.

“Are you okay?” Namo asked, concern framing her voice as she interrupted whatever long-winded exposition she had been carrying on.

Martin stuck his thumb in his mouth to clear the blood away from the cut and ignored Namo, as he had been attempting to do for the better part of the evening. Namo took the hint and left the area around the fire pit to go dig in her pack. Meanwhile, Martin eventually was able to get the kindling to ignite, and cradled the fire, careful not to drip blood on it.

As he tended the nascent flame, Namo sidled up next to him with a small pouch, similar to the one she had given him when they first met. “Here, use some of this.” She reached into the pouch and pulled out a small dollop of what was likely a medicinal salve.

“I don’t need it,” Martin retorted and continued nursing the flame.

“Maa’ko, what’s wrong? Your hands are shaking.” She rested her elbows on her thighs as she looked at her travel partner’s hands, then his bearded face, with concern.

Martin immediately sat up from his hunched stance over the fire. “Nothing. Nothing is fucking wrong, Namo. Just leave me the hell alone for five fucking minutes, alright? I don’t need your help.” He managed to keep a level tone, though his stiff posture and furrowed brow betrayed his acute irritation.

In the fading indigo light of eventide, Martin caught a glimmer of sadness and hurt in Namo’s eyes that she was quick to conceal with an unsettlingly practiced ease. “I understand. Sometimes people just need space. I’m sorry for pryin’.” She said nothing more, but simply sat next to him in silence after wiping the salve back onto the inside of the cloth pouch she had held out for him.

Martin returned to the fire, which had petered out as he had been looking at Namo through the corner of his eye. “Fuck’s sake,” he muttered to himself, and resumed building the fire.