The Steel of Raithskar (6 page)

But I need not have worried. My body behaved in an almost automatic fashion. Keeshah lay upon the ground, and I sat astride his back, seating myself near the base of his spine. Then I lay forward, drew my knees up against his sides, and reached up with my hands to grasp his huge shoulders. My knees were just below his rib cage, my feet tucked up just forward of his thighs. I could direct him with slight pressure from my hands or my knees—but, as I have said, Keeshah needed no directing.

We traveled for some hours across the desert, the only sound in that vastness the
pad-pad-pad
of Keeshah’s thickly calloused paws against the hard-baked bed beneath us. Occasionally I would hear the cry of a bird, and look up to see a flash of wings, or a distant, almost stationary soaring form. But there seemed to be nothing larger than the sand-ants alive on the desert floor except for Keeshah and me.

I had accepted the leather canteen of water from Balgokh with formal thanks and unspoken skepticism. Keeshah would need no water in that time—he could go for several days without it. But the canteen contained, at a guess, somewhat less than a pint of water, four or five hundred milliliters. Hardly enough for a man for three days in the desert. I felt it wouldn’t be politic to ask for more; I decided I would have to make it last.

I soon found that it would be plenty. In the first place, I didn’t feel thirsty very often—not nearly as often as I should have in this heat. In the second place …

I was a water saver.

We had been on the road for some hours when I noticed a pressure in my lower abdomen which indicated a need that should be taken care of. *Stop,* I directed Keeshah, and when he did, I sat up and swung my right leg over his back, sliding down to the ground. I walked a few paces from the smoothly worn area that was the road and urinated.

I passed very little liquid. As it touched the dry, hot desert floor, the dark urine crystallized rapidly, leaving a little heap of yellow crystals. I stared at them for so long that Keeshah walked over and nosed my back, anxious to get going again.

*
Wait,
* I told him. *
Just a little while.
* Absently I rubbed his jaw and moved my hand up to his ear to scratch lightly. He agreed with some impatience, and lay down by the side of the road.

You find truth in the oddest places
, I was thinking to myself. The concentration of organic and inorganic salts in that urine solution must have been
high. Very
high! Like the kangaroo rat of the American southwest, my kidneys were designed to save every possible drop of water.

With a concentration like that, a human being would have died of kidney stones or other renal failure long since. And here was the truth I had found in a simple, natural act.

I am not
Homo sapiens.
Whatever I am, wherever Gandalara is, I am not a man as I knew men.

Keeshah growled, and obediently, almost in a daze, I mounted him and we set off again. For a long time I simply clung tightly to his back—as though he were my own humanity and I wanted to hold it as long as possible. I pressed my face into his fur and closed my eyes and tried not to think. But by the time I detected Keeshah’s complaining thought—I was pinching his shoulders, and he could sense my distress and was worried—I had accepted it.

I was not human.

I apologized to Keeshah and rode more lightly, turning things over in my mind. The whole situation made less and less sense. And this last twist was cruel. The problem wasn’t so much that I knew I wasn’t human, but that I was so damned
nearly
human. I had already speculated that Gandalara might be, fantastically, on some world that orbited Alpha Centauri or Procyon. If that were true, I wouldn’t really expect to be human—but it was far less likely that I would
look
human.

Parallel evolution was a little too much to swallow. Look at the wide and wild variety of life that had evolved on Earth during two or three thousand million years. The notion that a water-oxygen world much like Earth would necessarily evolve a dominant, human-shaped, intelligent species was nonsense on the face of it. The Earthly dolphin has a brain as fully evolved as the human.

I don’t think I’d have gotten as much pleasure out of waking as, say, a highly intelligent, good-natured spider
, I speculated.
But after the first shock, it might have been philosophically easier to accept. And I’d have known, positively, that I wasn’t on Earth.

I think.

Information, damn it! I need more data before I can place myself in the “grand scheme of things.”

For the rest of that day, I tried to keep my mind a blank. I failed, of course. The questions kept circling and spinning, seemingly in rhythm with Keeshah’s powerful movement under me.

The cloud layer diffused the diminishing rays of sunlight as night approached, so that the light dimmed only gradually. When the sun finally set, the world was plunged into darkness with startling suddenness. I called Keeshah to a halt, slid wearily off his back, and was asleep almost before I touched the ground.

It was full light when I woke again, and I realized that I was not fully recovered from the desert ordeal yet. I ate a light meal and drank sparingly of the water, still surprised by the tiny amount which satisfied me. Then I mounted Keeshah and we were on our way again. I rested my head on his furred back and dozed as he carried me.

Keeshah angled toward the left, and I raised my head from his back to see what had caused the slight change in direction. The caravan trail had turned, and Keeshah was following it. If we had continued straight ahead, we would have had to cross an area of the desert that had a strangely smooth and shiny look about it.

I caught a picture from Keeshah: anyone stepping onto that shiny area would break through the crust and sink. It was a bog of some kind. Though I had known, intellectually, there was more to Gandalara than the dry waste of the desert, the sight of anything wet surprised the hell out of me.

I sat up a little and looked around, glad to have a new puzzle to distract me. In the distance I could see things growing in the marsh. Farther ahead, thicker now as we approached it, was the line of blue that had drawn me through the desert. I knew now that it was the Great Wall, at the foot of which lay Markasset’s home city of Raithskar.

The city has to get its water from somewhere
, I decided.
This bog is the end of the line for whatever source feeds the city.

It had to be a river which flowed down from the mountains, through or beside the city, and picked up more and more salt as it ran south into the desert. Here the intense heat caused such rapid evaporation that the water simply disappeared. Some of it might soak into the ground, but I’d bet money that the hot, dry air sucked up most of it.

At the final edge, the brine concentration was so great that nothing could live in it except some stubborn algae and bacteria. Farther upriver, less hardy plants could live with water that was merely brackish. But this bog contained a saturated salt solution, into which no more salt could dissolve. It was thick, stagnant water covered by a mush of salt crystals which formed a thin, shiny crust.

Keeshah was right; it would not be a good place to walk over.

By noon, the marshy area was dotted with clumps of reeds and an occasional sickly-looking tree. Keeshah slowed, stopped.

*
Too hot. Rest.
*

I was willing. Riding a sha’um is less work than being one, but it was no picnic.

I ate a bit of food from the pouch and leaned up against Keeshah’s heaving side.

“I don’t wonder you’re pooped,” I told him, and he turned his head to look at me. I poured a little of the precious water into my hand and offered it. He lapped it up carefully, the big raspy tongue flipping it
under
itself and into his mouth. Then, deliberately, he licked across the palm of my hand, lightly enough that he didn’t quite scrape off hide.

For a while we sat in companionable silence, staring at the Great Wall. I glanced at Keeshah, and smiled. He looked for all the world like a sphinx in informal dress. I leaned up against his shoulder and scratched under his chin absently as I surveyed the wall.

It looked like a range of mountains stretching to the horizon on the east and west. There didn’t seem to be any high peaks or deep valleys, though; the top edge was a little uneven but, all things considered, remarkably smooth. I’d never heard of any such long,
high
wall as that, anywhere on Earth. China’s Great Wall might be as long or longer, but it was certainly not so incredibly high.

Keeshah’s eyes were closing, and finally he shoved me aside so he could stretch out. I lay down against his back and fell asleep in the shadow of his body.

I woke to a nearly inaudible whining noise and a very definite nudge. As I started to complain, Keeshah’s urgent thought reached me.

*
Silence. Danger. Hide.
*

I woke up fast.

We crept quietly away from the road and lay flat behind a shallow rise. It was dotted with scraggly bushes that wouldn’t have hidden a jackrabbit in the daytime—but it was the best cover available.

It was already night—the sun must have set some time ago. In the east there was a white glow that was the moon shining beyond the thin overcast. It spread an eerie silver radiance over the bleak landscape.

Soon I could hear what had alerted Keeshah. Carrying over the flatland came the sounds of a group of men moving toward us. The low murmurs of men’s voices. The muffled pacing of many feet. An occasional sharper voice calling commands. An organized group of men, coming at a fast march from the north.

It was several minutes before I could see their shadowy figures moving along the caravan trail in the veiled moonlight. Their voices became clear before their bodies resolved from the shadowy silver of the night.

“Might as well be chasing a wild thaka!” grumbled a deep voice. “I say the stone’s somewhere in the city.”

“Aw, you been singing that fleabitten tune for hours, Devok. It don’t matter
what
you think. Orders is orders. Anyway, Klareth’s group is still searching the city.”

A third voice added, “Yeah, Devok, and if the fleabitten thing
did
get shipped out with the caravan, we’d best catch it now. If they get to Chizan or Dyskornis with it, we’ll
never
get it back.”

I could see them clearly now: a dozen men, each leading a pack-vlek.

“What we ought to have done is arrest the fleabitten old man and persuade him to tell us all about it.”

“Arrest a City Supervisor with no evidence? You’re crazy, Devok. Shut up and march. We want to make it to Yafnaar before sundown tomorrow.”

They marched in silence for a while, drawing nearer. Then I heard a new voice.

“What
I
can’t figure is why anybody’d try to steal the Ra’ira. It’d ruin its value to cut it up, and if you leave it like it is, anybody in Gandalara would know what it was and whose it was.”

“Not if it was kept hid for a while.” That sounded like the first voice which had replied to Devok.

“How’s that? What good would that do?”

An exaggerated sigh. “One of these days, Mord, you ought to go to a Recorder and pick up a little education. That’s how
we
got the fleabitten jewel.”

“Awww. That thing has been in Raithskar for hundreds of hundreds of years.”

Another voice. “Not that long. Several tens or hundreds, maybe. But he’s right, I’ve heard the story myself. Tell him, Ganneth.”

“Serkajon himself stole it from Kä,” Ganneth supplied. “Brought it to Raithskar and set up the Council.”

“Didn’t know that!” said a voice down the line.

“Dummy!” came another voice, disgusted. “Whatcha think Commemoration Day is all about?”

The words brought a flash of memory. Parades and celebration, the statue of a man riding a sha’um carried through the city, and his image miniaturized and multiplied in banners displayed everywhere. In one large building, encased in glass so that it might be viewed and appreciated by the public during that annual celebration, a pale blue stone about the size of a glass doorknob. Its surface was unfaceted, but the blue color darkened as one looked deeply into it, and hinted at an imperceptible crystalline structure.

The Ra’ira.

“Him?” another voice bantered. “Give him free faen and he’d drink to his mother-in-law!”

Laughter, then Devok’s voice again, challenging. “So what? Kä’s been long deserted; nobody even knows where it is, anymore. And that was a long time ago. Way I hear it, we never even got a complaint from Kä when Serkajon ran off with it. But you can bet we’ll raise a holler if some other city has heisted it from us! Raithskar ain’t deserted by a long ways.

“Naw, no other city’d have the nerve to swipe the Ra’ira; I still say it’s inside Raithskar!”

“Not again!”

“Knock it off, will you Devok?”

“Yeah, ain’t it bad enough we gotta march—”

The straggly column was abreast of us. I hadn’t noticed that there was a slight breeze … until it changed direction. The vleks caught Keeshah’s scent, and all hell broke loose.

I’ve never heard any sound that can compare with the harsh bawling of a frightened vlek. The pack animals screamed and stamped, straining against their leads and doing their best to trample anybody who got in their way.

Two or three of the vleks seemed to be carrying live cargo of some sort. A horrendous, terrified clacking rose from the woven-reed cages and drove the vleks into an even higher frenzy.

Beside me, Keeshah was tense as coiled wire. I tried to see what was in his mind, but it was seething and unreadable. Anger and contempt for the vleks mingled with predatory desire, frustration and a flash of … guilt? If a sha’um could swear, the silver night around us would have been tinged with blue.

*
It’s all right,
* I tried to reassure him. *
How could you have known the wind would shift?
* No response. He moved his hind legs, getting ready to lunge into the melee. Eagerly.