The recovery of the poisoned draft beasts and infantrymen had burned up thirty hours of grueling, nonstop medical labor. By the time Arthur Vance returned to Dugout Seven. His eyes were burned with fatigue, his canvas trousers caked in dried charcoal slurry, and his muscles aching from hours of wrestling two-ton oxen in the mud.
Yet, inside the shelter, a very different kind of living miracle was unfolding.
Titus was hungry.
It wasn’t the polite, intermittent appetite of an ordinary domestic reptile awaiting its weekly feeding of water lettuce. It was the insatiable, ancient hunger of an organism whose skeletal system was synthesizing high-thickness hard pressure-forged rock at twenty times the normal living rate.
The tortoise sat in the middle of a cleared floor space between the supply crates. His dark, polished dark rock back shell caught the flickering yellow light of the kerosene stove. It shone with the deep, rainbow-bright sheen of newly glass-fused black glass.
Arthur sat on an overturned barrel, an iron mortar between his knees and a heavy steel pestle in his hands.
On the workbench beside him lay the raw materials for Titus’s afternoon ration: five pounds of crushed black dark rock from the deep stone retaining wall quarries, two pounds of fine cast-iron filings from the battalion armory shop, a bowl of dried sulfur clover powder, and two huge heads of fresh winter mountain cabbage brought by Toby Mallow.
