Tschai - Complete Part 28

"Vervodei."

"Ridiculous!" snorted Zarfo. "Drive east into the back country. We must make our way to the Jinga River and fare downstream to Kabasas on the Parapan."

Helsse tried a voice of calm reason. "To the east is wilderness. The car will stop. We have no spare energy cells."

"No difference!"

"Not to you. But how will I return to Settra?"

"Is this your plan, after what has happened?"

Helsse muttered something under his breath. "I am a marked man. They will demand fifty thousand sequins, which I cannot pay-all through your insane manipulations."

"Whatever you like. But continue east, until the car stops or the road gives out-whichever first."

Helsse made a gesture of fateful despair.

The road led through a weirdly beautiful flatland with slow streams and ponds to either side. Trees with drooping black limbs trailed tobacco- brown foliage into the water. Reith kept a lookout to the rear, but discovered no sign of pursuit. Settra became one with the murk of distance.Helsse no longer seemed to be sulking, but watched the road ahead with an expression that almost seemed antic.i.p.ation. Reith became suddenly suspicious. "Stop a moment."

Helsse looked around. "Stop? Why?"

"What lies ahead?"

"The mountains."

"Why is the road in such good repair? There seems to be no great traffic."

"Ho!" crowed Zarfo. "The mountain camp for insane folk! It must lie ahead!"

Helsse contrived a sickly grin. "You told me to drive you to the end of the road; you did not stipulate that I should avoid taking you to the asylum."

"I do so now," said Reith. "Please, no more innocent errors of this sort."

Helsse compressed his lips and once more began to brood. At a crossroad he swung south. The ground began to rise. Reith asked, "Where does the road lead?"

"To the old quicksilver mines, to mountain retreats, a few peasant holdings."

Into a forest hung with black moss rolled the car, and the road slanted up even more steeply. The sun pa.s.sed behind a cloud, the forest became dark and dank, then gave way to a foggy meadow.

Helsse glanced at an indicator. "An hour more of energy."

Reith indicated the thrust of mountains ahead. "What lies beyond?"

"Wilderness. The Hoch Har tribes. Black Mountain Lake, source of the Jinga. The route is neither safe nor convenient. It is, however, an exit from Cath."

Across the meadow they drove. Thick-trunked trees rose at intervals with leaves like shelves of yellow fungus.

The road began to fail, and in places was blocked by fallen boughs. The ridge loomed above, a great rocky jut.

At an abandoned mine the road ended. Simultaneously the power index reached zero. The car halted with a thud and a b.u.mp; there was silence except for a sigh of wind.

The group alighted with their meager possessions. The fog had dissipated; the sun shone cool through a high overcast, was.h.i.+ng the landscape in honey-colored light.

Reith surveyed the mountainside, tracing a path to the ridge. He turned to Helsse. "Well, which is it to be? Kabasas, or back to Settra?"

"Settra, naturally." He looked disconsolately at the car.

"Afoot?"

"Better than afoot to Kabasas."

"What of the a.s.sa.s.sins?"

"I must take my chances."Reith brought out his scanscope and studied the way they had come.

"There seems no sign of pursuit; you-" He halted, surprised by the expression on Helsse's face.

"What is that object?" demanded Helsse.

Reith explained.

"Dordolio spoke accurately," said Helsse in a wondering voice. "He was telling the truth!"

Half-amused, half-annoyed, Reith said, "I don't know what Dordolio told you, other than that we were barbarians. Goodbye, then, and my regards to Lord Cizante."

"Wait a moment," said Helsse, staring indecisively west toward Settra.

"Kabasas may be safer, after all. The a.s.sa.s.sins would be sure to consider me an auxiliary to your offense." He turned, a.s.sessed the bulk of the mountain, heaved a gloomy sigh. "Total insanity, of course."

"Needless to say, we are not here by our own volition," returned Reith.

"Well, we might as well start."

They climbed the tailings dump in front of the mine, peered into the tunnel, from which issued an ooze of reddish slime. A set of footprints led into the tunnel. They were about human size, the shape of a bowling pin or a gourd; two inches ahead of the narrow forward end were three indentations as of toes. Looking down at the marks Reith felt the hairs rise at the nape of his neck. He listened, but no sounds came from the tunnel.

He asked Traz, "What sort of prints are these?"

"An unshod Phung, possibly-a small one. More likely a Pnume. The prints are fresh. It watched our approach."

"Come along; let's leave," muttered Reith.

An hour later they reached the ridge and halted to gaze out over the panorama. The land to the west lay drowned in late afternoon murk, with Settra showing as a discolored spot, like a bruise. Far to the east glimmered Black Mountain Lake.

The travelers spent an eerie night at the edge of the forest, starting up at far noises; a thin uncanny screaming, a rap-rap-rap, like blows against a block of hard wood, the crafty hooting of nighthounds.

Dawn came at last. The group made a glum breakfast on pods from a pilgrim plant, then proceeded down over a basalt palisade to the floor of a wooded valley. Ahead lay the Black Mountain Lake, calm and still. A fis.h.i.+ng boat inched across the water and presently disappeared behind a jut of rock. "Hoch Har," said Helsse. "Ancient enemies of the Yao. Now they remain behind the mountains."

Traz pointed. "A path."

Reith looked. "I see no path."

"Nevertheless it is there, and I smell wood smoke, from a distance of three miles."Five minutes later Traz made a sudden gesture. "Several men are approaching."

Reith listened; he could hear nothing. But presently three men appeared on the trail ahead: very tall men with thick waists, thin arms and legs, wearing skirts of a dirty white fiber and short capes of the same stuff. They stopped short at the sight of the travelers, then turned and retreated along the trail, looking anxiously back over their shoulders.

After a quarter-mile the trail left the jungle, and angled off across the swampy foresh.o.r.e of the lake. The Hoch Har village stood on stilts over the water, terminating in a float to which a dozen plank boats were tied. On the sh.o.r.e a score of men stood in att.i.tudes of nervous truculence, striding back and forth, bushknives and long spring-bows at the ready.

The travelers approached.

The tallest and heaviest of Hoch Hars called out in a ridiculously shrill voice: "Who are you?"

"Travelers on the way to Kabasas."

The Hoch Hars stared incredulously, then peered back up the trail toward the mountains. "Where is the rest of your band?"

"There is no band; we are alone. Can you sell us a boat and some food?"

The Hoch Hars put aside their weapons. "Food is hard to come by,"

groaned the first man. "Boats are our dearest possessions. What can you offer us in exchange?"

"Only a few sequins."

"What good are sequins when we must visit Cath to spend them?"

Helsse muttered in Reith's ear. Reith said to the Hoch Hars, "Very well then, we shall continue. I understand that there are other villages around the lake."

"What? Would you deal with petty thieves and cheats? It is all those folks are. Well, to save you from your own folly, we will strain ourselves to work out some sort of arrangement."

In the end Reith paid two hundred sequins for a boat in fair condition and what the Hoch Har chief gruffly claimed to be sufficient provisions to take them all the way to Kabasas: crates of dried fish, sacks of tubers, rolls of pepper-bark, fresh and preserved fruit. Another thirty sequins secured the services, as a guide, of a certain Tsutso, a moon-faced young man somewhat portly, with an affable big-toothed smile. Tsutso declared the first stages of their journey to be the most precarious: "First, the rapids; then the Great Slant, after which the voyage becomes no more than drifting downstream to Kabasas."

At noon, with the small sail set, the boat departed the Hoch Har village, and through the long afternoon sailed the dark water south toward a pair of bluffs which marked the outlet of the lake and the head of the Jinga River.

At sunset the boat pa.s.sed between the bluffs, each crowned by a tumble ofruins, black on the brown-ash sky. Under the bluff to the right was a small cove with a beach; here Reith wanted to camp for the night but Tsutso would not hear of it. "The castles are haunted. At midnight the ghosts of old Tschai walk the pavings. Do you want us all put under a taint?"

"So long as the ghosts keep to the castle, what's to prevent us from using the cove?"

Tsutso gave Reith a wondering look, and held the boat to midstream between the opposing ruins. A mile downstream the Jinga split around a rocky islet, to which Tsutso took the boat. "Here nothing from the forest can molest us."

The travelers supped, laid themselves down around the campfire and were troubled by no more than soft whistles and trills from the forest, and once, far in the distance, the mournful call of the night-hounds.

On the next day they pa.s.sed across ten miles of violent rapids, during which Tsutso ten times over earned his fee, in Reith's estimation.

Meanwhile the forest dwindled to clumps of thorn; the banks became barren, and presently a strange sound made itself heard from ahead: a sibilant all-pervading roar. "The Slant," explained Tsutso. The river disappeared at a brink a hundred yards ahead. Before Reith or the others could protest, the boat had pitched over the verge.

Tsutso said, "Everyone alert; here is the Slant. Hold to the middle!"

The roar of water almost overwhelmed his voice. The boat was sliding into a dark gorge; with amazing velocity the rock walls pa.s.sed astern. The river itself was a trembling black surface, lined with foam static in relation to the boat. The travelers crouched as low as possible, ignoring Tsutso's condescending grin. For minutes they dashed down the race, finally plunged into a field of foam and froth, then floated smoothly out into still water.

The walls rose sheer a thousand feet: brown sandstone pocked with b.a.l.l.s of black starbush. Tsutso steered the boat to a fringe of s.h.i.+ngle. "Here I leave you."

"Here? At the bottom of this canyon?" Reith asked in wonder.

Tsutso pointed to a trail winding up the slope. "Five miles away is the village."

"In that case," said Reith, "goodbye and many thanks."

Tsutso made an indulgent gesture. "It is nothing in particular. Hoch Hars are generous folk, except where the Yao are concerned. Had you been Yao, all might not have gone so well."

Reith looked toward Helsse, who said nothing. "The Yao are your enemies?"

"Our ancient persecutors, who destroyed the Hoch Har empire. Now they keep to their side of the mountain, which is well for them, as we can smell out a Yao like a bad fish." He jumped nimbly ash.o.r.e. "The swamps lieahead. Unless you lose yourselves or arouse the swamp people you are as good as at Kabasas." With a final wave he started up the path.

The boat drifted through sepia gloom, the sky a watered silk ribbon high above. The afternoon pa.s.sed, with the walls of the chasm gradually opening out. At sunset the travelers camped on a small beach, to pa.s.s a night in eerie silence.

The next day the river emerged into a wide valley overgrown with tall yellow gra.s.s. The hills retreated; the vegetation along the sh.o.r.e became thick and dense, and alive with small creatures, half-spider, half-monkey, which whined and yelped and spurted jets of noxious fluid toward the boat.

Other streams made confluence; the Jinga became broad and placid. On the following day trees of remarkable stature appeared along the sh.o.r.e, raising a variety of silhouettes against the smoke-brown sky, and by noon the boat floated with jungle to either side. The sail hung limp; the air was dank with odors of wet wood and decay. The hopping tree-creatures kept to the high branches; through the dimness below drifted gauze-moths, insects hanging on pale bubbles, bird-like creatures which seemed to swim on four soft wings. Once the travelers heard heavy groaning and trampling sounds, another time a ferocious hissing and again a set of strident shrieks, from sources invisible.

By slow degrees the Jinga broadened to become a placid flood, flowing around dozens of small islands, each overgrown with fronds, plumes, fan- shaped dendrons. Once, from the corner of his eye, Reith glimpsed what seemed to be a canoe carrying three youths wearing peac.o.c.k-tail headdresses, but when he turned to look he saw only an island, and was never sure what in fact he had seen. Later in the day a sinuous twenty-foot beast swam after them, but fifty feet from the boat it seemed to lose interest and submerged.

At sundown the travelers made camp on the beach of a small island. Half an hour later Traz became uneasy and, nudging Reith, pointed to the underbrush. They heard a stealthy rustling and presently sensed a clammy odor. An instant later the beast which had swum after them lunged forth screaming. Reith fired one of his explosive pellets into the very maw of the beast; with its head blown off it careened in a circle, using a peculiar prancing gait, finally floundering in the water to sink.

The group gingerly resumed their seats around the campfire. Helsse watched Reith return the handgun to his pouch, and could no longer restrain his curiosity. "Where, may I ask, did you obtain your weapon?"

"I have learned," said Reith, "that candor makes problems. Your friend Dordolio thinks me a lunatic; Anacho the Dirdirman prefers the term 'amnesiac.' So-think whatever you like."

Helsse murmured, as if for his own ears: "What strange tales we all could tell, if candor indeed were the rule."Zarfo guffawed. "Candor? Who needs it? I'll tell strange tales as long as someone will listen."

"No doubt," said Helsse, "but persons with desperate goals must hold their secrets close."

Traz, who disliked Helsse, looked sideways with something like a sneer.

"Who could this be? I have neither secrets nor desperate goals."

"It must be the Dirdirman," said Zarfo with a sly wink.

Anacho shook his head. "Secrets? No. Only reticences. Desperate goals?

I travel with Adam Reith since I have nothing better to do. I am an outcast among the sub-men. I have no goals whatever, except survival."

Zarfo said, "I have a secret: the location of my poor h.o.a.rd of sequins. My goals? Equally modest: an acre or two of river meadow south of Smargash, a cabin under the tayberry trees, a polite maiden to boil my tea. I recommend them to you."

Helsse, looking into the campfire, smiled faintly. "My every thought, w.i.l.l.y-nilly, is a secret. As for my goals-if I return to Settra and somehow can appease the Security Company, I'll be well content."

Reith looked up to where clouds were clotting out the stars. "I'll be content to stay dry tonight."

The group carried the boat ash.o.r.e, turned it over and, with the sail, made a shelter. Rain began to fall, extinguis.h.i.+ng the campfire and sending puddles of water under the boat.