The Feline Wizard (27 page)

“His chances are far better with these good people to ward him, especially since they are wizards, and therefore better able to protect themselves and him!”

“Aye, let him go,” said an older man, stepping up to take Mishara's hand. “We must risk him in order to keep him, for if we do not, he will someday leave us.”

“None of us can leave our apples for long, for we would die without their scent, Haramis.” But Rokin was weakening.

“The traders assure us that there are apple trees in other lands,” Haramis returned. “That is why they insist on so many for one little tusk.”

“True enough, though I suspect ours have a far sweeter taste than any others they have eaten.” Rokin sighed. “Very well, let him go—but see he is well supplied.”

They left soon after, Panyat leading the way out of the valley of apples. He wore a wide sash around his waist, a sash that bulged all along the front.

Balkis counted the bulges and said, “Only three apples? Can that be enough to take you to the borders of Prester John's kingdom and back?”

“Easily, friend Balkis.” Panyat looked back with a smile. “I need only their scent, after all.”

The ant couldn't understand why it was taking so long to reach his stolen property. It knew those confounded humans were carrying the gold nugget, but why was it taking so long to catch up with them? Surely its encounters with all the things that tried to eat it hadn't delayed it all that long—had they? Though of course, once it had defeated them, eating had taken much longer than if it had been traveling with a score of its fellow workers. It didn't realize how much more slowly it had been traveling with an overfull stomach, but it couldn't resist eating as long as there was food.

Now, though, it was hungry again, and had come across a trail of honey that it followed avidly, licking the sweetness from the rocks on which it had been spread. It didn't fear the bees that had made the amber delicacy, for it knew they were small inconsequential things that would only try to strike it with their tails—as though that could do any good!

Then it rounded a rock, and saw the honey's source.

The trail of honey came not from a hive, but from the mouth of a man lying on his belly, chin propped on his fists and mouth open with his tongue out—and that tongue was three feet long and fragrant with the sweet aroma!

Well, food was food. The ant started toward the man. Obviously he had set his mouth as a trap for ants. Well, he had caught one.

The man looked just as surprised as the ant felt, but he grinned with hunger and his tongue leaped into the air, swinging sideways at the ant. It glittered as it came.

The ant danced aside and the tongue smacked the ground, then rose again with a dozen pebbles sticking to it. The ant realized it would have stuck just as firmly to itself, possibly even with its legs in the air, helpless, waiting to be dashed against a rock. But it dodged the tongue again and, before it could swing a third time, dashed in to counterattack. Startled, the anteater man rolled up on his side, swinging a fist—but the insect leaped onto the arm and scuttled up to the shoulder, remembering how it had dealt with the uniped. All these humans were built alike, after all, and the neck was always on top of the shoulders.

Under the circumstances, perhaps it was justifiable that the ant ate the anteater.

As they walked northward the land grew daily more arid; grass gave way to rock, and trees to low thornbushes, though there was still the occasional small, tortured pine tree—usually dead and dry. Finally, when they had been traveling a week, they topped a rise and saw, stretching away before them, a
rolling beige wasteland where nothing grew and nothing moved, except dust-devils and blowing tendrils of sand.

Balkis stared. “How beautiful—and how terrible! What is this place, Panyat?”

“It is called the Sea of Sand, Balkis—and it is a sea indeed, though one without water.”

“A dry sea?” asked Anthony, who had never seen a body of water larger than a pond. “How can that be?”

“It seems still now,” Panyat said, “but look at it again tomorrow from this same place and you will see a completely different picture. Each dune will have moved a dozen feet or so; some will have changed their shapes, and others will have disappeared completely. The sand is always moving, though far slower than water. It swells into waves like the sea and is never still, always slipping, remounding, and being blown about like salt spray—or as the traders tell me seawater is blown.” He smiled sheepishly.

“It is beautiful.” Anthony stared, dazed. “But it is terrible, too. So vast, and without moisture! How are we to cross it? Even our feet will sink in with every step!”

“That much we can cure with the aid of yonder tree.” Panyat pointed to one of the dead pines. “We must cut wood, split it into planks, and tie them to our feet.”

“Of course!” Anthony cried. “If it is like the water of a sea, it is even more like snow! We must make sand skis!”

“If that is your name for them, of course.” But Panyat frowned. “What is 'snow'?”

Anthony and Balkis took turns explaining about the magical white powder that fell from the sky, mounded up into drifts, and pressed itself into ice by its own weight. Then they had to explain what ice was, and finished by telling Panyat that when spring came, the ice turned to water.

“Truly your mountains are lands of wonder!” the Pytanian responded.

Anthony laughed. “Your valley of apple trees seems just as magical to me, friend Panyat, as do your people. How wonderful would it be to survive on the aroma of our food alone in the dead of winter!”

When they had fashioned their skis, Anthony and Balkis
made a meal of hardtack and dried pork, with Pytanian apples for dessert—they had each packed a considerably greater number than Panyat brought. He managed quite well by sniffing one of his own.

“It is amazing how long our stores have lasted,” Anthony said.

Balkis nodded. “We have been lucky to find game, and nuts and berries, so often.”

“And the hospitality of those we have met,” Anthony agreed. “Still, long though they have lasted, our supplies are very low.”

Balkis shrugged. “Scarcely surprising, since we have been on the road two months now. They should last until we have crossed this desert, though.”

They slept through the rest of the day in the shade of a boulder, then set out across the sand-sea at night. Very quickly, Anthony and Balkis lost their bearings. Balkis halted and asked, “How are we to know the way? Every dune looks like every other, when we are down here among them!”

Panyat pointed at the sky. “In the desert, you can always see the stars—and though they move through the night, they turn like a wheel, and its hub is one star that moves very little. It lies in the north; therefore, as long as we keep it before us, we march toward the land of Prester John.”

“So that is what the caravan drivers mean when they say they follow the North Star!” Anthony exclaimed.

“You have seen it before?” Panyat asked.

Anthony nodded. “There is little else to see, in a mountain winter—but the cold makes the sky clear and the stars bright. We can tell the hour by their positions.”

Panyat grinned. “Then there is little chance of your becoming lost, so long as you remember where to find the center of your clock.”

They shuffled on through the night, and the sand-skiing was hard enough work that there was little breath to spare for conversation. They halted to rest at midnight, though, and Balkis asked, “Where shall we spend the day?”

“At an oasis I know,” Panyat told them. “During my wander-year, I traveled with the traders all the way across this desert.
They knew how to follow a line of oases so that they never had to go more than three nights without fresh water.”

“That,” said Anthony, “has the sound of an underground river that comes to the surface now and again.”

“Perhaps it is,” Panyat replied, “but legend says the first caravan master told a djinni where to seek the most lovely djinniyah in the world, and in return the djinni dug him a string of wells from here to the northern edge of the desert. The oases sprang from those wells.”

“As well the one explanation as the other.” Balkis rose, dusting her hands and taking up her curving pine ski-poles. “But dawn will come and find us nowhere near your oasis, Panyat. Let us walk.”

They shuffled rather than walking, but made surprisingly good time for so slow a mode of travel, reaching the first oasis when the east had begun to brighten with dawn. There, they washed their faces and hands, refilled their waterskins, and made a breakfast of hardtack and jerky. Panyat watched with amusement, sniffing his apple. They took turns telling stories as they ate, and Balkis was fascinated to discover how easily and naturally Anthony's speech fell into meter and rhyme. They fell asleep in the shadow of palm trees before the sun rose, and slept through the day.

They rose as the sun was setting, ate again, and set out on their night's journey. Thus they traveled from one oasis to another. Anthony and Balkis could see the fear in one another's faces when they had camped for two nights in a row and their water was growing low, but Panyat always led them to another oasis before that third dawn.

Still, he noticed their anxiety, and as they pitched camp at the fourth oasis he told them, “Sleep a little longer today, and when the sun has set I shall show you how to find food, even in this desert.”

“Where?” Anthony looked about at the waste around them, totally confounded.

“You shall see,” Panyat promised, “and there is no point in my telling you, for you would never believe me without seeing it.”

He was right—they never would have believed him. They
had trouble enough taking him seriously when he showed them how to weave nets of palm fronds and bury them in the sand sideways, with one handle sticking up. When the handle trembled, Panyat said, “Now! Pull it up!”

Anthony yanked as hard as he could, Balkis caught the rim of the basket as it surfaced and threw her weight against it, and the basket sailed clear of the sand. In it was a flat, foot-long fleshy slab, about an inch deep and four wide, and pointed on each end. It thrashed and leaped.

“Hold it up by its tail!” Panyat directed.

“Which end is that?” Anthony cried in dismay.

“The end without the eyes!” Balkis answered, and caught it as Panyat meant. She had to use both hands to hold it up, head pointing downward, while Anthony hovered, ready to catch it if it slipped through her fingers, but the creature rapidly stilled. Then Anthony was able to make out two spots a bit darker than the tan of the rest of its body, but nothing he would have called eyes.

“Hanging like that freezes them, for some reason,” Panyat said. “Now you may chop off its head, grill it, and feed upon it.”

He turned away with a shudder.

Balkis stared at him in distress, but Anthony said, “Unlike him, we must eat,” and took the creature, to prepare and cook it.

From her earliest days, when Balkis had been saved by nixies, she had not eaten fish, out of respect for the water-spirits. But these fish surely had little to do with water, and with her hunger now, she looked forward to eating.

“What are these called?” Anthony asked Panyat as the tantalizing aroma rose into the night.

“The traders call them sandfish,” the Pytanian answered, still with his back turned. “After all, if this is a sea of sand, why should it not have fish? They come to the surface about an hour after sundown. Only then can you catch them, for they swim too deeply during the day.”

It was surprisingly tasty, a savory flavor with a smoky overtone, though that could have been the result of the dried palm fronds that made their fire. Every night thereafter, Balkis and
Anthony caught three or four of the fish, and found there were many different kinds, from half a foot long to two feet, with many different flavors. Apparently, they weren't the only ones eating them, for several of the larger fish had smaller ones in their stomachs. Panyat always refused to look until they assured him that the meal was already cooked. The strips of crisp flesh bore so little resemblance to the whole fish that he could watch them eat without having to remember from where the food had come.

When they came to the fifth oasis, though, they found trouble. The pool teemed with water snakes, and Balkis drew back with a cry of distress. Anthony came at the run, saw, and blanched. “Quickly, away! They might squirm out onto land!”

They backed quickly, then watched warily, but the snakes seemed quite content in their watery home, darting and coiling and flashing about to feast on their smaller cousins.

“How can we dip up water?” Balkis asked, at a loss.

“We dare not,” Anthony said, tight-lipped. “There are so many that we cannot hold a waterskin under long enough to fill before one of them bites us—and they might be poisonous! Indeed, their very presence may have contaminated the water.”

Panyat stared at the pond, appalled. “These snakes were not here when I came by with the caravan last year!”

Balkis turned to him with narrowed eyes, thinking. “Someone may have brought in a mating couple,” she said after a moment, “but surely so many could not have grown from one gravid female in a year! Someone has polluted this pool deliberately.”