Skeen's Leap (29 page)

“The High Mother had little Wanasi running all six legs off carrying letters of protest.”

“Have to thank her. Even if they didn't bust me loose, I got good food and those vacuum brains didn't go physical on me.”

Machimim twisted what they needed out of the headman—five tall ponies for himself and the klazits and two carts, one loaded with water barrels, blankets, and other supplies for their trek through the mountains. The other was empty except for a number of coarsely woven sacks that rustled dryly. The women had vanished with the children, the fields were empty, the waterwheels swayed idly. The oleaginous headman kept looking at Skeen and the others from the corner of his eyes as he protested the guide's demands, his pointed ears twitching as spastically as those of the praks hitched to the carts. Machimim sent him off with a snapped command, waved the others into the cart, then mounted the beast one of the klazits held for him and started off down the rutted single street of the small village. Two klazits arranged themselves with the carts between them, spare ponies on a long lead. The other two climbed to the plank seats of the carts and slapped ticklers into the rumps of the offside praks, starting the teams forward, following Machimim through the village.

Skeen, Pegwai, and the Aggitj settled with their personal gear onto the sacks; they were marginally better than the stinking planks of the cartbed, but the fiber they were woven from felt as if it'd been stripped whole off nettle stems; it had millions of tiny prickles that raised red welts even through a layer of cloth. By the time they'd left the village behind, Hal had had enough. When he couldn't make Machimim listen, he argued the klazits into providing blankets enough to cover the sacks, using passion and gesture to make up for lack of language. Pegwai sighed with pleasure and stretched his legs out; as her burning shins cooled off, Skeen promised herself she'd find out what Hal wanted most and see he got it.

The road degenerated to a track as the afternoon turned toward night. Weed-grown and punishing. Not much traffic here, not for a long time. In spite of the slow jolting progress, they reached the lower slops of the foothills before the sun went down and made camp beside a smallish stream. After the meal, plain but filling, Skeen, Pegwai, and the Aggitj passed a wineskin around, sang and told stories, watched from outside the circle of light by the suspicious and grumpy klazits (with Machimim's eye on them, they didn't dare take the cups the Aggitj tried to pass to them).

The next day was spent negotiating an impossible track that the winter storms had eroded into something like a series of animal traps, potholes that threatened to swallow up one or both of the carts along with the riders and anything else that came along. There was a little patchy snow in places where shadow lingered most of the day but none on the track, and rockfalls where snow melt had weakened the soil. Klazits and Aggitj labored to clear these, exchanging curses as they wrestled the stones out of the way until Aggitj were mouthing elaborate Chalarosh anathemas and the klazits were tossing rocks aside in tune with staccato Agga obscenities. And while they were riding between the falls, the Aggitj began coaxing names and small phrases out of the guards, at least while Machimim wasn't watching them.

They camped in a barren pass, a cold camp because there was nothing to burn; they chewed on jerky and honeyed nuts, drank sparingly from the wine skin, even more sparingly from the water sacs, most of the water they carried being for the beasts, and rolled quickly into their blankets to escape the bite of the wind that swept without ceasing along the pass. Skeen wanted to sleep in the cart, but Machimim wouldn't permit that, he was enjoying their discomfort, the worm; no, he was going to sleep in the cart alongside the watch so he'd be available in case of trouble. Think of the watch, he said, the poor man will have to stay awake in the cold and the dark, how can you grudge him that miniscule shelter? I can, Skeen thought, oh yes I can. But she didn't argue, not wanting to breathe out the last threads of warmth in her.

The next day was like the last, only worse. Rumbling downhill on a precarious track with inadequate brakes and drivers whose lack of experience was dangerously evident. More rockfalls. And the supply cart got one wheel over the side of a pothole. But they reached the foothills on the far side of the range still intact, though much shaken, and made camp at sundown in a dessicated wadi, a camp as dry as the one in the pass but a lot warmer. The klazits joined their charges at the fire after supper and helped them kill off a wineskin. Pegwai told a Balayar ghost story (which the guide condescended to translate), Skeen dug out her flute and played an accompaniment to a Chala song after she'd caught the gist of it. The Aggitj came to their feet as soon as the song was done and beat a rhythm for her, then did a leaping, stamping dance while she played for them. That night, for the first time (leaving out Machimim who had his responsibilities) the whole party went to sleep wallowing in good feeling for each other.

The next day they left the low hills for a land of gently rolling swells, a brown land, brown up the sides of the mountains to the stony peaks, brown up close, gray-brown, red-brown, hazel, bright brown, dull brown, yellow-brown haze at the horizon blending brown sky and brown earth so that it was impossible to see where one ended and the other began. Around noon they hit a tiny area of living green as refreshing to the eyes as the water of the spring was to their gullets. They refilled the waterskins and the stock barrels, considered camping, but the greater part of the day was ahead of them and Pegwai didn't want, to waste a moment of the short exploration time given him, so they went on. More brown—a plethora of browns in a monochromatic landscape. There was plenty of growth, but everything from the patches of brush to the flat succulents were sundried to some sort of brown, most of it a dull beige. What leaves the vegetation sported were smaller than the last joint on a man's little finger, with slick shiny surfaces as if painted with a gray-brown varnish. Lots of long thorns everywhere, thickly set, changing their slant with the change in the altitude of the sun.

Midday on their fourth brown day Machimim led them back into the hills and around the side of a mountain to a narrow wadi by a cliff that rose a steep four hundred meters, its glossy glassy surface, though ancient, still visibly the result of a power cutter sweeping down through the mountain. Interesting, Skeen thought, lost it all? If not, what's the problem? Why couldn't you tromp a bunch of barbarians? A scratchtrail switched back and forth up the slope south of the cliff to meet a horizontal wrinkle drawn across the face around three hundred meters up. Front door? Looks like it. What it'd be to have wings right now.

They stopped at a crude stone fort near the base of the cut. No roof, a head-high circle of stone laid on stone, built by the sedentaries from Atsila Vana when they heard the Gather was empty and came to see if there was anything valuable to be found in the ruins. There was a well inside, a wobbly corral for draft and riding animals, water troughs, feed boxes (after a look at the well and its proximity to the pen, Skeen refused to drink that water; Djabo knows what's waiting there to claw my gut, she said. The Aggitj agreed with her and went off to look for a cleaner source of water plus some firewood). The ground inside the circle was badly littered, but the klazits and Skeen, Pegwai a little later, shamed into helping by Skeen's example, cleared out the bird dung and rotting leaves and bones and prak manure. By the time the Aggitj returned with huge armloads of roots and short limbs and news of a small stream a short way off, the klazits had disinterred two large tents from the load in the second part and were setting them up.

Skeen carried off a waterskin, scrubbed her hands, and splashed more over her face, then drank a long time. She gasped, spat, slipped the skin's strap over her shoulder, glanced at the sun. A little less than three hours before dark. She looked around. The klazits were tangled in ropes and poles and unwieldy canvas, swearing at the tent while Machimim shouted orders at them, the Aggitj keeping out of the brouha; from the grins on their faces, enjoying it thoroughly. She strolled over to Pegwai who was organizing his measuring and recording instruments into the pockets of a broad bandolier. “We could take a look up there while everyone's still busy,” she murmured.

“No need to hurry.” He continued with his work. “If you think he'll let us go up there without him, you're dreaming. Here.” He gave her two sticks of soft white chalk. “And the this.” A pressure lantern. He got to his feet, dusted himself off, put his arm through the sling, eased it over his head, patted it into place. “Ready?”

Hands full of chalk and lantern, waterskin bumping against her thigh, Skeen started up the scrawl of the scratchback, moving rapidly, knowing there was nothing waiting for her, but eager to see that nothing for herself. Pegwai followed more sedately, though his desire was scarcely less than Skeen's. Machimim yelled at them, then came charging out of the fort ring and started up after them, cursing under his breath.

The wrinkle was a broad ledge that stuck out like a pouting lip. Skeen moved to the edge of the lip and stood looking out across the brown landwaves that faded imperceptibly into a dusty yellow-brown sky, pausing to catch her breath and organize her thoughts before she plunged into the Gather. Pegwai stumped up to her, the faint sprinkles of sweat on his face and the redness of his dark skin evidence of his exertions. She smiled at him, lost her smile and looked quickly away. The cut along his jaw had healed, only a faint pinkness left, but it was suffused with blood now and looked like a ragged scarlet crescent; she saw the marks of her teeth with embarrassment and shame, as if she'd been suddenly exposed naked to the gaze of the klazits. She turned away from the empty landscape, pumped up the lamp and lit the mantle, then moved cautiously to the large flat oval opening; sometime in the not too distant past the funnel-shaped hole had been closed by a heavy door, deeply carved in bold curved forms. It was relatively intact, lay flat on the stone. Skeen held the lantern close. Those forms were at once totemic and linguistic—and resembled something she'd seen somewhere. The Stranger's Gate? Of course, but that wasn't it.… She hesitated, trying to catch the tail of the memory, then straightened and went on; poking at fugitive memories like that never worked. It'd come later or it wouldn't. Pegwai hastened around her, held a small black instrument to his face, fingers flickering a pattern along the side. When he lowered the imager, she walked on, stepping over other fragments of carved stone torn from the stone of the walls. The sides of the broad entranceway were intensively decorated, panels of wood and stone arranged around glass inserts, some few still intact, the rest shattered to show a tracery of painted metallic lines on the back of the shards and some straggles of fine blackened wire.

The corridor bent through a deep double curve then opened into an immense cavern, a wonderland of glass and metal, rooms like bubbles floating in webs of tarnished silver and blued steel. The vast arching hollow was filled with the sounds of running water, with gentle rustles, with bell chimes from long glass tubes swaying in the breezes that wandered through the spaces. She didn't need the lantern. The Gather was full of light. A system of mirrors, many of them still intact, caught light directed onto them from outside through baffled boreholes, amplified it into a soft silvery glow, enough to illuminate the broken magic of the place. Beside her she heard the whistle of Pegwai's indrawn breath. “What they took,” she said, “is trivial compared to what they left.” From where she stood she could see a thousand things she'd cut free and haul off if this were a world in her home universe and Picarefy waited outside with the androids set to load her up.

“Hard to know where to start.” Pegwai rubbed his hand across his chin. “Lifefire, I could spend a year in this Gather and only begin the survey.”

“I suppose we ought to dip into each section and make a rough plan of the way things are arranged.” She spoke absently, her mind invaded once again by that flickery uncatchable memory.

Behind them, the guide leaned against the wall with bored indifference. The only secrets that interested him were those in men's heads and between women's legs, not those hidden here, living in these half-shattered artifacts. All this puttering about ruins made him intensely suspicious of the motives of these strangers, though that wasn't his primary reason for being here.

“It would take years to really strip this place,” Skeen said, “but it would be worth the time, so much to learn. Is there a chance the Lumat will invest that time?”

Pegwai's eyes caressed the ruins with an avidity equal to hers though not quite the same. “All I can do is gather images,” he said finally. “As many images and measurements as we can manage and hope they convince where words wouldn't. Though money's tight.…” He sneaked a glance at her, mischief in his eyes.

She caught the gleam and chuckled, then remembered the guide and bit back what she'd been about to say. She pinched his arm. “Let's look about and get some idea how we're going to work this.”

They worked for a sennight in the ruined Gather—all that Machimim would allow them—Skeen sketching, noting down dimensions, making charts, Pegwai storing images in the multi-faceted crystals he loaded into the imager. Each night he projected what he'd taken and erased those that were unsatisfactory (delighting the Aggitj who'd never seen such a thing and waking envious desire in Machimim). Skeen took Pegwai aside the morning after the first showing and warned him to keep a tight hold on his equipment, otherwise it might disappear somewhere between the Gather and Atsila Vana.

During the first few days Machimim had followed them about interrupting constantly to ask what they were doing, what was that they were holding, why were they interested in this other bit of debris. Since their answers were I don't know, or it has an interesting look, or this is part of that and I haven't the faintest notion what that is, he got rapidly bored with poking about and left them in peace. On the third day it was one of the klazits who followed them into the Gather; Machimim vanished and didn't return until long after dark. Skeen was coming back from the stream, towel over her shoulder, when he rode in; she ignored him until he strode over, caught her by the arm, and shouted into her face, “Where have you been?”