Tanith Lee - Claidi Journals 01 (7 page)

But he sat up, and shook himself, and combed handfuls of white and yellow dust out of his hair with both hands.

I have this ridiculous idea, only it couldn’t be, could it? He’d
gone to sleep again
. Didn’t dare ask.

I stood up and shook out my skirt and my own hair, and then gave up. (I must, I thought, look like Nemian, as if I’d been dampened and dipped in flour.)

When I looked around, the city ruin was gone again. The dip in the plain had become a mound.

Presently, about an hour later, when we walked up it, I stumbled on one stone blossom still sticking up from the buried vase.

Nemian made no mention of having taken my hand or seeming to try to protect me. He scowled at the Waste, then his face simply became smooth and beautiful again. (His hair had lost its glory, though.) He said, “Well done for bringing the water flask.” (It was in the sack.) And then, “Reliable Claidi.” But I’d grabbed the sack because it had this book in it. The flask, after all, was empty.

==========

There were so many questions I should have asked, weren’t there? I bet you would have. You would have asked, for instance,
Where exactly are we going
? And
What will happen to me when
w
e get
there
? And you might have insisted he knew that, though Claidi was perhaps half royal, she’d lived first as a drudge and floor polisher, and next as Jade Leaf’s maid-slave.

I didn’t ask or say anything much. I’m not completely making an excuse. For one thing, I was so
tired
.

Compared to this tiredness, my other tired times in the House seemed nothing.

Someone else would have been upheld by a sense of excitement and optimism. But I felt exasperated a lot—with the Waste mainly. And with Nemian. And with me.

The sun got higher and hotter and more unbearable, and I was desperate to have a drink of water. One doesn’t realize how awful thirst is until something like this happens—worse than hunger.

After the buried city was behind us, the land was very bumpy and yet totally the same. Crash went the ground, hitting my feet.

Far, far off, still no nearer, were the pale parched hills which looked, anyway, most uninviting.

We reached a rock, one rock, but it threw a shadow. So we sat down in the shadow.

Nemian stretched out his long legs. His clothing had been perfect but wasn’t now.

“You’ve been very strong,” he said to me, “not drinking any water.”

“There isn’t any.”

I’d thought he knew.

“Oh,” he said. He frowned. “Didn’t you bring any?”

“Yes. You—we drank it.”

“Well, yes. But I thought there was more. I thought you understood that this might be a long journey.

Didn’t the princess tell you?”

Had she? I didn’t think she had. I suppose it was common sense, and I was just a twit. Then again, I couldn’t have carried much more. He would have carried it, maybe.

Nemian took the enamelled box out of his pocket. He offered me another of the sugary tablets.

The pill was difficult to chew with such a dry mouth and scorched dusty throat.

But it did help. Even the thirst became more uncomfortable than sharply painful.

“You see,” said Nemian, “there is a town over there somewhere.” He waved idly at the hills. “I saw it from the balloon. We can get transport there, perhaps—unless they’re very unfriendly, which they may be.”

I’d thought everyone and everything was unfriendly in the Waste. But Nemian had come from the Waste.

He closed his eyes. I heard myself say in a faint panic: “Don’t—”

“Don’t? What?”

I wanted to say, Don’t go to sleep. Talk to me, please. But what right did I have to demand that?

 

When I didn’t add anything, he shrugged and… slept.

Glumly I sat there.

I tried to be brave. I tried to think he was wise to sleep, and I should try to as well. But the sugary pill seemed to have made me wide awake in addition to staying tired.

So I sat and stared uneasily out over the plain.

Little spirals of dust still spun there, huge hollow clouds above. A large black bird hung motionless on the air, as if from an invisible rope.

He’d only held my hand and put his arm around me to keep us together. He had felt responsible, like a kind prince for his servant. And I’d let him down—hadn’t brought enough water.

I thought if anyone in the House had been the way he was, it would have annoyed me. Because it was Nemian, I felt in the wrong. Was this a very bad sign?

A huge new blond cloud was streaming along the plain, getting bigger.

I watched it, then properly saw it. Before I considered, I jumped up with a howl.

Nemian woke.

“Are you a girl or some species of jumping deer?”

“The storm—its started again.‘”

He looked with those cool eyes.

“No, it isn’t the storm. Riders, and vehicles.”

And he sprang to his feet and ran, all in one coordinated bound, across the plain away from me, toward the dust cloud.

Had I been abandoned? Was I expected to follow? I’d better follow, hadn’t I?

I floundered into a panting gallop.

The cloud (riders and vehicles) was going from right to left across the near horizon, slightly looping in toward us as it went. Because the ground was fairly flat now, I didn’t see at first they were on a sort of makeshift road that the storm had obviously uncovered.

How far was it to reach them? Miles. Probably not. Toward the end I had to keep stopping, gasping for breath, but by then some of them had slowed down and then halted.

When I eventually staggered up, Herman was in conversation with seven brown men in the two halted vehicles. The others had gone rolling on.

There was a
mad
noise. This was because the two chariots (I recognized them from the riding vehicles the princes sometimes used in the Garden) were each drawn by a team of six very large, curl-horned sheep. Some of the sheep were bleating in deep voices. And then I grasped the chariot riders were also bleating. And Herman was bleating too.

For a minute I thought I’d lost my mind. Or they all had.

 

Then Nemian turned and saw me standing there with my hair raining down and my mouth, as usual, wide open.

He smiled and raised one eyebrow.

“Hello, Claidi. You needn’t have rushed. These are Sheepers. I know their language.” One of the brown men—who wore their hair in plaits, braided, like the wool of the sheep teams, with beads and sheep-bells—said loudly, “B’naaa?”

Nemian turned back and bleated in return.

A few moments more, and one of the riders in the second chariot got out and jumped into the first chariot. Helping hands drew Nemian and me into the second chariot.

Everything smelled very oily and wooly. But—oh wonder-fill—a leather bottle was being offered to us.

Nemian politely I. let me drink first. It wasn’t water but warmish sheep milk, and I I wasn’t terribly delighted. But it did soothe my throat.

“Were going to the Sheeper town,” Nemian informed me. A whip cracked high, well clear of wooly backs, and we were off.

CHARIOT TOWN

There was quite a welcome.

Under a square gateway in a thick wall, but only just high enough so we could drive through, and into the brown town of the Sheepers. And everyone had come out, in the dusk, with lamps. Women laughing and holding up babies, and children screaming and bouncing, and old men leaning on wooden staffs, and grannies (they call them that), old women, and almost all of them were banging drums and blowing whistles, and some even threw flowers—a particularly
hard
sort of white poppy.

I gathered, but not right then, the chariot-riding Sheepers had been off somewhere, trading. With some other settlement of Sheepers.? Anyway, it was a success. Best of all, the road had reappeared after the storm, which made the journey quicker. Although in fact we’d ridden with them until after sunset.

As the sky flamed, the hills had abruptly seemed to come nearer. Then the sheep chariots bundled around a swerve in the road, and we saw the town lying in the curve of two really near, rounded low hills, as if in the paws of a lion.

They call it—not for the sheep, as they do practically everything else, but for their chariots—Chariot Town.

Nemian says the walls may belong to something older and lost. The Sheepers patched them up and built inside.

The houses are made of wood and skins.
(Not
sheep. They
never
kill sheep.) Each has a strange little open garden, a stretch of neat close-cut fawn turf.

In the middle of the town is a bigger garden, green in parts, with some trees. Water wells up from the ground into a string of pools. The waters clean (except for what the sheep do in it, of course).

When not employed, the sheep simply wander about the town. Everyone pats them, or gets out of their way, and even if they eat the washing, they’re allowed to. They also stroll in and out of everyone’s houses and sometimes leave sheep pats, but these are used for kindling on the fires (so are useful).

People groom their sheep carefully and plait ribbons and beads in their wool. Sometimes they paint their horns.

The sheep are shod. Otherwise they provide wool, milk, and cheese. (Its quite good, once you get used to it. I
think
I have.)

The Chariot Towners can talk to the sheep (?), and apparentry the sheep can talk to them (?) (all baaing). They do seem to understand each other with no trouble.

The guesthouse, where we’ve been staying, is hung with sheep-bells. And at night they light candles in the skulls of famous old sheep that died peaceful natural deaths. All the houses own such skulls. They’re heirlooms.

The sheep graze the lawns; that’s why they re so neat—the lawns, not the sheep.

The lord here is called the Shepherd.

Look, I’ve gone on and on about sheep.

You catch that here.

I’ve written everything up now to date.

We’ve been in the town five days.

==========

Nemian
talked
to me today. I don’t always see him, except at breakfast and/or supper. (Mounds of cheeses, milk-soups, salads, gritty bread. Beer—which gives me hiccups, to add to the bad impression I make.) Then he chats in baaas to the locals.

He said, when speaking to me, that I was being “astonishingly patient.” Some choice.

Nemian is out all day with the Sheepers. He mentioned that other travelers come and go here, and soon we should be able to hitch a ride to somewhere else, perhaps where there are balloons and ballooneers.

So
home
(to wherever his home is). The Sheepers like him, of course.

Desolate.

That sounds yukky. Just like some swooning princess of the House.
Ooh, I’m sooo desolate
…

But I am.

I wander about and try to talk to some of the women milking sheep or making sheep-cheese or grooming sheet) or their kids. But we can’t understand each other. I find I must simply amble past and give a quick cheery bleat, which they seem to take as a well-mannered and pleasant hello.

Nemian looks amazing again. Were able to wash our hair and have baths here, though the water is rather cold (one heated bucket to three not). He’s dazzled them.

He did say the sheep are fierce and can fight lions. (Do they kick them with their shoes?) Yes, we too have talked about the sheep.

 

Depressing.

==========

Have now been here eight days, also depressing.

==========

Depressed.

==========

I’m fed up with me. How can I be depressed? I’m OUT IN THE WASTE. With NEMIAN. Almost.

==========

Depressed.

==========

My God—I know what that means, sort
of-
—and shouldn’t perhaps use it like that (?).

Daisy and Dengwi used to accuse me of being prissy because I wouldn’t swear.

But the royalty at the house used to swear, and I hated them, so I didn’t want to do anything they did that I could avoid doing.

(If Nemian swears, it doesn’t seem so awful, I have to confess.) .

And God is a kind of supreme supernatural figure—
not
human. I don’t really understand. But I’ve caught the phrase from him, as I’ve caught this habit of talking about the sheep…

Anyway. Nemian took me aside this evening, and it was sensational. We actually had a conversation, and for hours.

==========

It began with supper. The rough wood tables are outside on a trip-you-up terrace of piled stones. The air was clear and fresh, and the sky got dark very slowly.

Everyone baa’d away. I sat there resignedly, only nodding with a quick smiling bleat when anyone greeted me: “Claaa-di-baa!”

When it got to the serious beer-drinking stage, Nemian rose and said to me, “Shall we go for a walk, Claidi? It’s a fine night.”

One or two of the Sheepers grinned and looked away. And I felt myself blush, which was infuriating. So I said, blankly, “Oh, I’m a bit tired. I think I’ll just go in—” wishing I’d shut up.

“Let me persuade you,” said Nemian, very gracious. “We can go up to the water pools. It’s cool there.

We have to talk, don’t we?”

“All right,” I charmingly snapped, got up, and stalked away up the terrace toward the big garden further along the track. Let Nemian catch up with m
e
. for a change.

He didn’t bother, of course. So then I had to pretend I’d gotten a stone in my shoe. It could have been true; my shoes are wearing out fast.

He sauntered up and asked me, all concern, “A stone?”

“Oh, I’ve shaken it out now.”

“Look,” said Nemian, “there’s the moon.”

We looked. And there it was. Since the storm it hadn’t been properly visible. Now it looked clean and white, a half-round, like half a china clock-face but without hands or numbers.

“Poor Claidi,” said Nemian. “Are you very angry with me? I’ve been selfish, haven’t I?” I had to remind myself here that although he is a prince, he thinks I’m a princess, at least a lady.

“Everyone’s selfish,” I said. “We have to be. How else can you get by?”

“My God, that’s a judgment,” said Nemian. “But you could be right. Can you forgive me, then, since you never expected anything much from me in the first place?”