The Sea of Time (16 page)

The assistant wagon masters were shouting through trumpets, down the line. It was a big caravan—one hundred and fifty wagons carrying trade goods, water, food, fodder, and fuel. Each trader was expected to provide the latter four items for his own team and crew. The first lurched off down the southern road. Standing in her stirrups, Jame saw that it carried the middle-aged, blond seeker whom she had last seen during the raid on the small caravan during the summer. An old woman sat next to her on the high seat, rail-thin and white-haired. The other wagons followed one by one, like pulling out a skein of knobby yarn. Now Ean was maneuvering into position with many shouts at his team interspersed with farewells called to his wife.

Evensong collapsed against her father’s chest.

“Byrne!” he shouted, holding her, still scanning the turbulent crowd, now in motion. “
Byrne
!”

“Good-bye! Good-bye!” people cried, drowning him out.

The travelers passed through the South Gate, out between the fields, dust roiling up under thousands of hooves and wheels. Ahead rose the dusky mountains, and beyond that, as yet unseen, the open desert.

III

THAT FIRST NIGHT, they camped halfway up the Apollynes, the terraced slopes stretching down behind them to the dark valley floor. Level with them were the distant lights of Kothifir, sparkling as if in imitation of the stars above. Some gazed longingly back. Most thought only of what lay ahead.

The next day they reached Icon Pass, with much scrambling up the steep road. This time the lights shone above them among the peaks where the fortress known as Mountain Station overlooked both flanks of the range. Snow crowned the heights and the air was frosty. Campfires blossomed beside the wagons. Jame and Timmon played a game of Gen in her tent before she turned him out, protesting, into the night.

On the third day the travelers crossed the pass. Horses leaned back on their hocks against the downward slope and the weight pressing close behind them. Stones rattled down the steep incline. Switchbacks helped for a while, then were left behind. Streams plunged past, fed by the beginning of the rainy season, and the sloping meadows were green. Goatherders watched them pass while edging their flocks out of reach, but the travelers still had plentiful supplies of their own and only laughed at such caution.

On the fourth day they continued to descend through the mountains’ southern foothills, then through date palm groves fed by the Apollynes’ largesse of streams. The desert itself enfolded them almost by stealth. The land flattened into a rock-studded plain with diminishing vegetation and waterways disappearing underground. The monotony Gaudaric had warned about lay on all sides, broken only by silently dancing dust devils and the occasional bush. It was much hotter by day, but when the sun set, the temperature dropped sharply. Jorin hunted by night, usually returning before daybreak with cold paws which he kneaded against Jame’s stomach, claws retracted, under their shared blanket. So it went for several days as the caravan followed the ancient, subterranean stream with its occasional, increasingly gritty wells and stands of dusty palm trees.

Riding behind Ean’s wagon, Jame noticed that it was dribbling water. When she called this to his attention, he untied the tarpaulin, threw it back, and discovered Byrne curled up in a snug hollow that he had made by partaking freely of their supplies. The water came from the wagon’s reserve tank which the boy had tapped and insufficiently closed, with the result that a quarter of it had drained away.

Ean clutched at his curly hair. “What am I going to do with you?” he demanded, distraught, of his young son. “Your mother must be frantic, and your grandfather too!”

“I’m here, Papa,” said the boy with implacable logic and a dimpled, self-satisfied smile. “Now you have to take me with you.”

Indeed, Ean had no choice. He couldn’t turn back himself, given what his father-in-law had staked on this expedition, and no one else would, however much he offered to pay them.

On the tenth day, they came to the last oasis, set in the dusty trading town of Sashwar on the edge of rolling sand dunes.

“How long do we stay here?” Jame asked.

“Long enough to prepare for the deep desert,” said Ean.

He extracted a pot from his load, broke the seal and began to smear its contents on the sloping front of his wagon.

“What’s that stuff?” asked Dar as the trader worked his way to the boards underneath. Byrne crawled after him, as usual getting in the way. Other veterans were performing similar work on their rigs, watched with amusement by the less-experienced drivers.

Ean held up a glistening glob. “I don’t know exactly. Gaudaric brought it back from the heart of the Wastes years ago on his one trip there, but it feels, smells, and tastes—ugh—like congealed fish oil.”

While he worked, Jame took Byrne to explore the town, such as it was. Her ten-command came too. A clutch of drivers whistled after pretty Mint, who made a flirtatious show of ignoring them.

Damson snorted.

“One of these days,” Jame said, “you’re going to get into trouble.”

“I like trouble,” said Mint, pouting, “the right sort, at least.”

At a primitive inn they ate fried locust on toast and goat cheese curds, washed down with bitter tea. Jame noted the women’s veils, reminiscent of the Kencyr Women’s World, and the men’s
cheches
, out of which tufts of hair poked like a furry fringe around their faces. She wondered if the latter were the ends of braids. Under her own head covering, her hair was also tightly woven Merikit style, those strands on the left side for men she had killed, those on the right for children she had supposedly sired as the Earth Wife’s male Favorite. Did the desert tribes follow a similar code? Whom did they worship anyway? The Four or their desert equivalents? Urakarn’s Dark Prophet or the Witch King of Nekrien? There were even rumors of a tribe sworn to the Three-Faced God, rather to the embarrassment of his Kencyr followers who would hardly have wished him (or her, or it) on anyone else.

After dinner, they went to inspect the extensive animal pens. The horses would be left here tomorrow, giving way to beasts better suited to the deep desert. The selection was wide, ranging from giant armadillos to hyenas the size of ponies to burly, long-legged woms to web-footed birds at least eight feet high at the shoulder.

“Which are ours?” asked Byrne, poking at the hyenas with a stick. Brier snatched him back barely before the powerful snap of jaws.

“I don’t know,” said Jame. “Hopefully not those.”

Dawn came with a vivid smear of color across an endless horizon. To the southeast and southwest floated the mirages of distant mountains—the Tenebrae Range and the Uraks respectively.

Ean had unloaded his wagon the day before. Now the wheels and axles were removed, reducing it to a sledge. The goods were reloaded. Out of the growing light came two handlers leading a pair of huge beasts, some ten feet in length with correspondingly long legs and necks.

“Lambas,” said Ean, pleased. “Gaudaric reserved a team of them for us by courier.”

Jame noted their splayed, three-toed feet but even more their short, prehensile trunks. Fur-fringed, slit nostrils opened on either side of the latter, situated on the tops of their small heads. Their bodies, by contrast, seemed swollen.

“They have three stomachs,” she was told. “The biggest one stores up to thirty gallons of water.”

“So what do we ride?” asked Dar. “Oh no.”

Brier had appeared out of the growing light, leading a flock of reddish-brown birds that towered over her.

“Moas,” she said, “good to ride or to eat, if things get rough. Watch out for their teeth; they’re omnivores and have a nasty bite. And make sure the girths are tight.”

Each had a saddle on its back, secured around the rib cage before the long legs. Jame reached up to tug on a strap. The bird squawked in protest and snapped at her. She punched it in the beak.

“Now make them kneel.”

“How?”

“Kick them in the knee, of course.”

Jame gingerly nudged her bird. It folded with a glare and a whistling hiss, bringing the saddle within reach. She stepped on its leg and swung her own over its back. It rose with a forward jolt that nearly dislodged her.

“All right,” she murmured as its head bobbed high above her own on its long stalk of a neck. “Your name is Lurcher, and don’t you dare throw me off.”

The caravan set forth. First went the sledge, formerly the wagon, that carried the seekers. It dragged roughly to begin with, but when it hit the sand it began to slide. A skin of water formed under it where the fish oil met the sand and a remnant of the old sea returned. The next sledge deepened the effect and so on. When Ean’s vehicle joined the line, it skimmed forward behind the lambas who walked on either side of the shallow, watery pathway. The other traders followed, lumbering through the drifts, their laughter dying.

Riding a moas wasn’t too different than riding a horse, if one discounted the loss of two feet and the distance to the ground. Lurcher had a tendency to sway, perhaps because it had drunk half its own weight at the oasis and so was a bit top-heavy. Jame surged back and forth from stirrup to stirrup, glad (not for the first time) that she didn’t tend toward seasickness.

Jorin crouched and sprang up on the sledge where Byrne greeted him with a crow of delight. Trust a cat to spare its paws on the hot ground.

Soon they were deep in the rolling golden sand dunes under an achingly blue sky. For the most part, they tried to follow the dips that exposed the hard desert floor, but often they had to climb over the dunes’ shoulders. The lambas plodded steadily ahead, occasionally hooting companionably from team to team:

Are you still there? Yes, I am. Are you?

Other beasts were soon struggling and falling behind. Most caught up that night, but late and exhausted. Some had already turned back.

“Bet you only the sledges make it,” said Timmon. “We’re down to just over one hundred travelers already.”

They began to pass ruins, jutting out of the sand. Jame remembered that these worn walls were said to travel about beneath the sand, according to the wind. Some presented markets with bread that turned to dust at the touch. Others offered fruits and vegetables that looked whole but crumbled if breathed upon. The dust raised figures to wander about the stalls, in and out of sight. This must once have been a fertile realm, but its inhabitants had long since fled. Lizards watched the caravan go by from the stubs of walls, frilled collars flaring red, gold, and blue in the wind.

“Lesser rhi-sar,” said one of the Kendar. “Useful, but nothing compared to their ancestors.”

That night Jame walked among the tents to stretch her legs after a day of riding. Most traders had settled in the lee of dunes with a haze of sand whistling off the crests over them, but not so close as to be in danger of avalanches. The dunes, after all, were always in subtle motion, and drummed as they shifted slowly forward under the wind’s whip. A storm was building. The lambas’ tufted tails sparked and crackled with electricity. Moas crouched down, hiding their heads under their rudimentary wings. Neither stars nor moon shone, and in the distance thunder rumbled.

She came to a fire leaping high into the troubled night. Around it sat Kothifirans, listening to an old desert woman. Like her sisters in Sashwar, she wore a veil, but made no attempt to anchor it as the rising wind whipped it about her wizened face. When she saw Jame, she broke off her current story and gestured to her with a gap-toothed grin.

“Welcome, my friend, you who seek the truth! Sit with us and I will tell you of the desert gods.”

The others readily made way. Jame sank cross-legged onto the ribbed sand and gazed across the dancing campfire at her ragged hostess.

“Once everything for days in all directions belonged to the Sea of Time. Ah, consider how much of the present floats atop the past. When the Sea died, or seemed to, so did its attendants and all that lived in it. But something that large and powerful never completely goes away. Desert sledge still calls to the memory of water, as you have learned, have you not?”