The Steel of Raithskar (7 page)

*
No, Keeshah!
* I ordered sharply. *
They don’t know we’re here. Keep still; they may yet pass us by.
*

He didn’t move. But he didn’t relax.

For that matter, neither did I. My hand was on the hilt of my sword.

They were beginning to make sense of the chaos. I could hear Gandalaran voices above the vleks braying.

“Settle down, you fleabitten …”

“Hey! Ganneth tripped! Get him out from under …”

The wind shifted again, and the frenzied animals calmed almost instantly. There was a moment of stunned silence, broken by the now familiar voice of Devok.

“Didn’t I tell you we shoulda never left—”

“WILL YOU SHUT UP!” roared a voice I hadn’t heard before. “Now, anybody know what set ’em off?”

“I dunno,” someone answered. I knew they must be peering into the shadows on either side of the trail—I pressed my face into the hard ground, willing myself to disappear.

“There’s nothin’ out there,” someone said disgustedly.

“Almost anything will spook these fleabitten animals. We should just be glad it’s over and nobody’s hurt.”

“Whaddya mean, nobody. My foot …”

“Didn’t hurt you none …”

“AWRIGHT!”

When a muttering quiet had set in: “Your jabbering probably set ’em on edge. It sure as Gandalara was makin’
me
nervous.

“Let’s get moving again. And this time do less talkin’ and faster walkin’. We’ve wasted enough time, and you’ll need your breath before dawn. Let’s go.”

They moved away in silence. Only when the sound of their feet on the hard-worn trail had faded completely did I dare to breathe again. I let what I judged to be another twenty minutes go by before I remounted a restless Keeshah and we were on our way.

From what I’d heard, it sounded as though the cops were out in force tonight. I didn’t know what instinct had driven Keeshah to conceal us from them—a natural wariness of the unidentified, probably—but I was glad he had done so. In my travels, I have learned that even a respectable university professor is wise to steer clear of the police if he doesn’t know what all the laws are.

Raithskar was itself a jewel.

It sprawled uphill, following the slope that had risen gradually from the salt bogs. Now the slope steepened swiftly to merge at last into the majesty of the Great Wall, some miles beyond the city.

We had stopped several yards distant from the huge main gate, over Keeshah’s anxious protests. I needed time to get reacquainted with this city.

Through the gates I could see a portion of the wide boulevard which led into the city, and I could
hear
the marketplace that filled the boulevard. Voices haggling over prices. The squealing of children forced to tag along on a shopping trip. The clinking of coins.

I could smell it, too—the tang of blood from the butcheries, sweet fruits, sharp spices, perfumes I could not quite identify.

Raithskar seemed familiar to me in many ways. The smells, the sounds, the look of the place made me feel I had been here before—yet I did not recognize it in the sense of
knowing
it. And it called up Earthly memories. The clustered roofs climbing the slope in a riot of color made me think of San Francisco before skyscrapers spoiled the natural line that was so beautiful when viewed from the bay. Some of the roofs had small interlaced tiles like the one which had formed Yafnaar’s watering trough. They were dark brown in color, but otherwise much like the Spanish-style roofing that had been a feature of Santa Barbara.

Raithskar gleamed and glittered in the early morning light. In different ways, it made both Ricardo and Markasset homesick.

I found my gaze drawn to the Great Wall, four or five miles away. It stretched clear to the sky and disappeared in the clouds. How tall was it, I wondered? A mile? Two miles? Maybe three? There was no way to know for sure, but I’d have said at least two.

And directly behind Raithskar was a sight I had never expected to see. From out of the mists at the top of the great escarpment, water cascaded down the almost sheer face of the cliff. At its base was a rainbow-crowned lake which foamed continuously as the tons of water thundered into it. The lake narrowed to a river, which rushed down the slope and through the city.

This had to be the source that wound up miles later as a treacherous salt bog. The Skarkel Falls—the name surfaced from my memory.

The base of the falls was shrouded in mist—the water, falling from such a height, virtually pulverized the lake, sending up an endless spray of water vapor.

I could see then why Raithskar glittered so in the sunlight. Even this far from the falls, there was
moisture
in the air, cooling off the fearsome heat of the desert. Invisible droplets coated the roofs of the city, causing them to shine as though they were polished.

After the hot, dry journey, the coolness of the city called out to me.

* * *

Keeshah and I had traveled through the night. From his back I had watched the dimly-lit countryside change around us. The vegetation in the swamp had grown denser, the mucky ground gradually solidifying to support short grasses and bushes. I saw trees more frequently, and they seemed taller and healthier—although I had seen larger manzanita bushes in California. Just as the land began to look all overgrown, with fields of grass and shadowy clumps of growth that might almost have been wooded areas, the moon set.

The blackness was complete; it was as though I had been suddenly blinded. The cloud layer had diffused and distributed what little moonlight remained, so that I hadn’t noticed the gradual dimming.

Frightened in the abrupt blackness, I ordered Keeshah to stop. He did, but he protested.

*
Soon there
,’ he said.

*
Can you see through this darkness?
*

*
No. Follow road smell.
* He was panting heavily; he had been running for hours without a break.

*
We’ll wait till dawn,
* I told him.

I slid off his back, and when I moved away from him he was completely invisible. But we were still together. He was a large warm presence in my mind, and I was no longer frightened of the dark.

*
Rest, Keeshah.
*

He agreed—not with reluctance, but with some puzzlement. I heard him moving around in the bushes, settling to the ground. I lay on my back in the tart-smelling grass and looked up into the darkness.

As though the sky had been waiting for me, the clouds broke apart and I was looking at the stars.

But not
my
stars.

I had spent enough romantic moonlit nights gazing into the sky to know that for sure. There wasn’t a single constellation up there that I recognized. And there was one bright configuration that I knew I had
never
seen. Then the clouds swept together and left me again in darkness.

I’d had enough of questions today. So the stars were different—I listed that among things to think about and sort out later. It was another datum, only that.

I was emotionally drained, tired past the point of sleeping, afraid that if I slept, I would dream of unfinished puzzles, mazes with no end and no beginning, paths that led only into other paths. So I listened to the night.

Riding with my head on Keeshah’s body, the soft sound of his paws striking the ground had blocked out all other aural input. I had noticed the landscape changing visually; now I became aware of the different sound of it.

The desert had been so quiet. The cry of a bird had been an intrusion out there. Now I could hear the flutter of wings all around me, and the soft rustling of small animals moving through the grass and bushes. Skittering sounds made me think of squirrels and their nervous, rush-and-stop zigzags.

What did these night creatures look like? Would I ever see them clearly in the daytime? I could well understand that even here, where the desert was fading, the cooler night was more inviting than the day. And I wondered then whether the vast savage desert, so desolate in the heat of day, had its own sort of night life.

As I lay there listening in a sort of sleep-daze, it occurred to me that I believed dawn was imminent because on Earth it would be so. I’d had no evidence so far that I
was
still on Earth. It might be hours before dawn.

I was too relaxed to move right then. But eventually I summoned the energy to sit up, to tell Keeshah it was time to get started. I looked for and found him nestled into some scratchy-looking bushes …

Looked? Bushes?

It was gray and dim, but the dawn had already begun. A few minutes later, the red glow of the rising sun spread through the thin clouds in the east, flushing the sky. I stood up and stretched, and watched while Keeshah yawned and
stre-e-e-etched.
I ate a little food, and we shared what was left of the water. Then I mounted and we were on our way again.

The land began to change quickly, the open area giving way to cultivated fields. There were waist-high, grass-like plants that had to be some kind of grain. Evenly spaced humps of vines or low bushes—what they produced I could only guess.

Smaller tracks crossed the caravan road, and as the morning brightened we passed Gandalarans on the road. Some carried wood-handled, bronze-headed tools toward the fields. Others were leading laden vleks in to the market.

I sat up on Keeshah’s back and moved forward to ride just behind his shoulders, asking him to slow to a walk. The people who passed us greeted me politely and edged carefully past Keeshah with looks of mingled fear and curiosity on their faces. Those who led vleks simply stood still until we had passed, holding tightly to the looped halters so that the beasts would not stamp around and spill their cargo.

And so we had come to Raithskar at last, and I had paused a moment to absorb my first impressions of the place which was to be my home now.

I yielded to Keeshah’s impatience and urged him on; he ran eagerly toward the gate, then stopped.

*
Well?
* I asked him. *
I
thought you were in a hurry?
*

He twisted his neck to look back at me.

*
City,
* he explained. *
Get off.
*

*
Oh, sure. Sorry.
*

It was logical. Balgokh had said that Markasset was the only Rider not connected with the Sharith. Therefore I was the only man in Raithskar who could ride instead of walk. Common courtesy demanded that I shouldn’t flaunt it. I dismounted and walked into the city beside Keeshah with my hand resting lightly behind his left ear. That, too, was at Keeshah’s direction—a ritual gesture to assure the people in the china shop that the bull was under control.

The bustling marketplace reminded me strongly of the older sections of Fez and Marrakesh. The streets here were wider and much cleaner, but the noise and the confusion were the same. There was color everywhere, as though the town itself was rejecting the uniform paleness of the desert. Most of the shoppers wore long- or short-sleeved tunics of lengths which varied from very short for the children to ground-sweeping for some of the women.

Here and there a man was dressed, like me, for the desert: loose trousers tied at waist and ankles, long-sleeved tunic slit to the waist for leg freedom, soft leather boots calf-high under the trouser legs, a piece of cloth tied so that its loose edge hung down the back. More commonly, however, and almost as a rule for the vendors seated in the shade of the selling stalls, the men wore only the loose, comfortable trousers.

No one made any attempt to blend colors or find compatible combinations, and all the colors were bright. A green tunic was belted round with red; yellow trousers screamed against a rich purple tunic; a worn blue tunic was patched neatly at the shoulder with lurid orange.

I blinked at the vivid display, but soon found that the unplanned, fluid melange of colors cheered me. Unmistakably, I had left the desert behind me.

The only
pattern
of color to be seen was in the fabric awnings under which the merchants sat. Each one was a square of canvas supported and stretched by a framework of wooden poles. In places there were several of the same pattern grouped together. Markasset’s memory told me that the weave of the fabric identified the merchant, much like a Scottish tartan identified a clan.

Merchandise was arranged in the same neat, hollow squares under each awning. They were spaced so that a customer could walk all the way around them. The merchant or his man sat in the center of the square, calling out the value of his goods and hawking business like a carny talker. A customer could touch, look at and, within reason, test any merchandise as long as he remained standing or kneeling. When he’d found something he wanted, he literally “settled down” to dicker, seating himself beside his choice. Then the merchant turned to him and they began to haggle over price.

The bright, busy stalls lined the boulevard three deep on each side of the wide, hard-surfaced street. The thronging pedestrians were polite and cautious, avoiding collisions with studied care, laughing and smiling. As Keeshah and I threaded our way through them, I felt my spirits lifting. The touch of light mist on my face, the gay color all around me, people who were happy and ordinary, though they might not be human—and an unforced feeling of having come home.

We moved out of the busiest area of the marketplace, where the out-of-town merchants conducted business under their temporary shelters, and into the city’s own trade district. Neat, stone-walled buildings crowded together and narrowed the street slightly, offering for sale those things which the townsfolk would regularly need. From the aromas here, as richly confused as the colors of the bazaar, I guessed we were in the food-selling district.

Keeshah and I stopped at the same time. We were outside a meat shop which was a cross between a delicatessen and a butcher shop, and featured both cooked and fresh meat. The roast had stopped me; the raw had stopped Keeshah.

*
Eat?
* The quasi-question hung in his mind, and it echoed through mine.