High Couch of Silistra (3 page)

I broke the seal and withdrew the sheet within. The hand was sure and strong. There was no greeting.

“The woman I seek, whose name the envelope bears, is all of a color, the color of the spring sun rising, with hair of molten bronze that brushes the ground. In my vision it seemed that this woman and I were of a kind. I will never know. To her I say: ‘Guard Astria, for you may lose it, and more. Beware one who is not as he seems. Stray not into the port city of Baniev. And lastly, look well about you, for your father’s daughter’s brother seeks you.’

“If you succeed, you will be lauded, even as I am lauded, for you will accomplish more than you attempt. Be strong, for the father will surely help his daughter.”

It was signed “Astria Barina diet Hadrath.” I read it twice. It seemed that every hair on my body stood away from my flesh. It is said that obscurity is the cloak of the forereader. My great-grandmother had drawn that cloak close about her in the writing of this message. That it was meant for me, and no other, was beyond doubt. But no one is as he seems; I had no intention of visiting Baniev, far up the coast; and I had no brother. Her encouragement made even less sense. My search was of personal import only, and my mother had said it was a testing, so no help from my father would be forthcoming.

I had no fear for Astria. The Well was in the same hands that had guided it these three hundred years. But I would take care.

I shook my head and handed the perplexing oracle to Rathad.

I felt most discomfited, yet I was glad my great-grandmother’s message had reached me. It would be a great lever with which to pry the Day-Keepers from their conventions.

“What sense do you make of it, Estri?” said Rathad, frowning at the letter in his hands.

“Very little,” I replied, “but I will look more sharply about me, and you must see the affairs of the Well with great care.”

“Doubtless there is a hidden meaning,” he mused.

“Doubtless,” I agreed. “But perhaps it is too well-hidden.”

“I would take all pains to avoid Baniev, were I you,” he continued.

“I will avoid,” I announced, “not only Baniev, but Baniese also, and products bearing that city’s stamp.”

“Has it occurred to you,” my mother’s brother asked, “that much time has passed since Hadrath’s death, and the father you seek may be no longer among the living?”

“It occurred to me,” I admitted. “But the message of my mother said he awaits me, and it was she who chose the point in time at which I would assume the chaldra. If he is dead, it is by accident and not by age or infirmity. I must seek him. Who knows how long the bronze people live? Not I.”

Rathad grunted and sucked his teeth. “I yield.” He sighed. “If it was known that you would take this chaldra and make this journey eight hundred and forty years ago, then, by the Day-Keepers’ Clock, you must make it, and I must give you whatever help I can.”

He reached behind him for the silver cube, and handed it and the letter, which he placed carefully within the envelope, from his pale hands into my copper ones.

“Run, child,” said he, bending to kiss my cheek, “or you will keep the Day-Keeper waiting.”

When I could restrain Santh’s need to hunt no longer, I found a resting place in the shade of two large boulders, removed the surcingle from about his black-furred girth, and let him loose. With a great leap and a snap of his mighty wings, he was off, bounding and gliding, silent, deadly. Four bounds took him from my view. There is nothing on Silistra to compare with the speed of a hulion at the hunt.

While I waited for him to return, cool and comfortable in the late-morning shadows, my back against the larger boulder, I reviewed the events that had brought me here to the trail that would lead, by nightfall, to the house of the Liaison First, M’lennin, my former couchmate.

My mid-meal with Ristran had produced some surprises, and a satisfactory outcome. The Day-Keepers are a mysterious, solitary lot, and rarely frequent the Wells. I had supposed, somewhat naively, that his interest would be only for the objects of antiquity I possessed. I read his desire when we touched hands in greeting, and the fantasy deep within his mind was an easy one for me to fulfill. I pleasured him while he lay back on the amber cushions, matching my actions to the picture I had pulled from his subconscious. Thus I delivered him his dream, and the taste of him was thick and overly sweet, the taste of a man long denied.

It had been so quickly done that the food upon the low thala table was still warm when we seated ourselves to eat.

We struck a bargain that benefited us both. I would leave the cube and letter with the Liaison, who would deliver the originals into Ristran’s hands. I would take with me copies which I knew M’lennin’s star technology could provide. In exchange for these priceless artifacts, Ristran waived all formalities and ceremonies usually associated with the assumption of chaldra, including the need for a new, virgin chald, and upheld me in the face of the chalder’s wrath. After a perfunctory blessing, my old chald was cut from me by the chalder’s hand, the red chain woven into the already existing belt, and certain alterations made in the chald’s construction. These were the addition of a hidden lock, and a tiny key which slipped into a compartment in the lock itself when not in use. Thus I could remove the chald at will, rather than wearing it soldered about my waist. Before I snapped the lock shut, I had drawn the width of the chald through the band of my father’s ring, so securing the ring to my body.

The other considerations I had from Ristran were equally valuable. He had been unable to decipher the script on the ring, or name the race of people to which my father belonged, so he suggested that I travel to Arlet. There he would provide me with an expert in off-world culture and language, in such a way that secrecy might be maintained. I accepted, only afterward realizing that Arlet lies uncomfortably close to Baniev, that port city which I had intended to avoid. But by the time I had recollected my geography, Ristran was long gone, and I was already making my way across the plain that separated the Liaison’s keep from Well Astria.

With the help of the two toilet women, I had made what I considered the supreme sacrifice. I had cut my ankle-length bronze mane. It had been my trademark. I could do little about my skin tone, but it had become fashion in Well Astria, and to a lesser extent in Port Astrin, our dependent city, for the women to spend long hours beneath the sun, gilding themselves with oils and ointments, that their skin might glow golden in the manner of Well-Keepress Estri. With my hair now so shorn that it barely covered my buttocks, I could be any Astrian well woman of high position. My chald was thicker than most, but whatever degree of anonymity I could foster would serve me.

I wore a soft tas-skin jerkin, cream-colored and sueded, and matching knee boots to protect my legs on the trail. Above my chald was another belt, of thick parr-hide, from which hung a full coin pouch and double-bladed hunting knife. My hair was confined in a thick braid down my back.

I felt fierce and strong, and very free. I had not realized how heavy the cares of the Well had been until I laid them aside.

I took the surcingle I had removed from Santh and wedged it between the boulders. In its laced pockets were the cube and letter, dried meat and fruits, and a waterskin.

The shadows were rapidly disappearing as the sun reached its zenith, and I was thirsty and anxious to be on my way. I called Santh silently, with all the mind-force I had. The answering picture was clear and sharp, of that black wedge-shaped head, tufted ears laid back, yellow eyes slitted from the sun, mighty fangs bared in a silent roar. He had heard me and was on his way.

M’lennin had found Santh and his sister abandoned by the Falls of Santha. What had happened to their mother was never determined. He had been small enough to cuddle in my arms when the Liaison gave him to me as a couch gift. His shoulders now were the height of my own, though I stand upon two legs and he upon four. The intelligence of the hulion has never been studied, for they are rare and seldom thrive outside their native mountainous home, but I guess it to be as great as our own. However, they are not toolmakers. Somewhere back in time Santh’s ancestors had chosen not to compete with the hairless bipeds of the plains and valleys. They live their own way, isolated, primal, high in the crags of the Sabembe range.

In some ways the hulion and Silistran are much alike. M’lennin calls us of Silistra anachronistic, haughty primitives. We, like the hulion, insist upon our freedom and individuality. Silistra once trod the path of technological culture. In our prehistory lies a long and bloody story of wars, of great and powerful governments, of taxation and oppression, of madness and suicide. At length the people rose up and dismantled the machines that had come to rule them, and the parasitic bureaucracy that served those machines.

It is a Silistran saying that the law lies within the man, and that no amount of coercion from without can alter that law. The hulions, also, obey the law within. Santh is no more mine than I am his. It may be, in his mind, that I am his charge, and in his care. We serve each other, with respect and admiration, and more than a little love.

I saw a spot in the azure sky, far to the west. I stood and shielded my eyes and watched him come. The spot became a speck, rising high into the air, gliding, falling from sight, then rising again. Soon I could see his wings, snapping out straight at the height of his arc, beating the air to ease his descent, then the coiled crouch and spring as his powerful hindquarters thrust him almost instantaneously back into the air, with those mighty wings pulled close to his sleek black back.

A bound away, I saw that he carried something in his jaws. When he furled his pinions and padded to my side, he dropped the mangled carcass at my feet and lay proudly beside it, growling softly in his throat. I could not tell what animal that bloodied corpse had been. Only a few tatters of red-brown fur remained, and the head had been bitten cleanly off the shoulder. Its hooves were cloven and black, its four legs long and spindly. I thought it some subspecies of bondrex, the nimble plains grazers—but which, I could not tell.

I stepped over it, to scratch Santh behind his ears. He stretched his neck appreciatively and began licking the blood from his outstretched paws with his coarse tongue.

“Thank you,” I said, and bent to cut a strip of the still-warm flesh from a half-gnawed haunch. It would have been an insult not to eat of his kill, though I had neglected to bring a fire-maker, and I am not fond of raw meat.

Santh rolled onto his side and watched me eat, through slitted, yellow eyes. I cut another piece and chewed it noisily, exclaiming my praise through a half-filled mouth. The blood ran down my arms and stained my tas-skin jerkin. I made great show and ate little. The meat was tough, stringy, and tasteless.

I got down a third thin strip, wiped my bloodied knife on my boot, and returned it to its parr-hide sheath.

Then I got the surcingle from between the boulders and stood over Santh’s drowsy head.

“Get up, lazy one,” said I, prodding him with my foot and pointing to the surcingle. “We must make M’lennin’s by night.”

Complaining loudly, Santh stretched and rose. I threw one end of the web-weave band over his back, between his shoulder and forewing, and grabbing the dangling end from beneath his belly, hitched it tight. Having secured the cube and letter from harm by this means, I relaxed again. Whatever happened on the trail, Santh would bring the cube and letter to M’lennin. Although the danger of the open plain is slight, and with such a companion slighter still, I had been uneasy in Santh’s absence. Silistrans have only one natural enemy. Other Silistrans. I had seen no one since we had set out before sun’s rising, but one fears the enemy one doesn’t see. With Santh at my side, I feared nothing.

We set out again, I at my easiest jog and Santh padding beside. He would have allowed me to ride him, but my legs were strong under me. I had not had time for my usual exercise this day, or yesterday, and I had need to work the kinks from my muscles.

Santh paced me patiently until I felt loose and pleasantly tired. Then we rested and shared the waterskin. When I had replaced it in the pocket and laced the flap securely, he nudged me toward his back with his wedge-shaped head. He could not understand the slowness of our pace. I laughed and scrambled onto him, placing my feet and hands in the surcingle loops provided for that purpose. When I was secure, he got carefully to his feet and broke into an easy lope that ate up the distance. His approval was a purr in his throat.

We sped across the green and yellow flatlands, toward the foothills where the Liaison First had built his angular, ugly complex. The jitkaws swooped and darted in the green-blue sky. It was a clear afternoon, and the west wind carried the smell of new awakening, for it was Detarsa first first, that is, the first day of the first seven-day set, or of the pass of Detarsa, our fifth month from winter solstice. Yesterday had been Macara fourth seventh, that is, the last day of the last set of the pass Macara. We have on Silistra a fourteen-month revolution, each month containing twenty-eight days. Our year is eight days less than the standard B.F. year of four hundred days. Our day is forty minutes shy of the Bipedal Federate Standard day of thirty hours, but we divide it into twenty-eight “enths,” or “bells.” Each enth, or bell, contains seventy-five iths.

I had not been conscious of the problem relating times until I had spent a year as M’lennin’s couch-mate. This questionable custom is not a chaldric matter, but courtesy to the outworlder Liaison, and had been originated by Well-Keepress Astria. I had found it very difficult to live with M’lennin, in his strange home of clicking machines and canned and frozen food, where time and date are Bipedal Federate Standard, and nothing Silistran. M’lennin prides himself on his retention of off-world customs, and holds us, I am afraid, in sour contempt. He would have us mechanize and modernize and become like all the other Federate worlds. Much money comes to Silistra, but little goes back to the star-worlds. This is a great problem, in his mind. I think matters are as they should be. If Silistra became as all the other star-worlds, if we were not unique, what would we have to offer them?