Princess of Amathar (27 page)

Climbing down the ladder in the open air, to the landing platform two hundred feet below might have created problems for anyone with a fear of heights, but it was nothing compared to the trip from the platform to the ground on a strand of plastic cable. I am not prone to acrophobia, but was still unnerved. I thought for a moment that the city had gained altitude since we had come aboard, but quickly realized that this was not so, as the cables were still trailing along the ground at about the same length.

"I'll go down first,” I said. “Follow me."

I wanted to make sure that if she fell, I would have a chance to catch her, and likewise if I were to fall, that I would not knock her off as well. She nodded, and I started down. The climb was much easier than I expected. I had gotten used to the effect that the lower gravity had upon me when I walked, ran, or picked something up. I had forgotten that the same principles would apply in this situation, allowing me to lift my own body with much greater ease than I would have had I been on Earth. About half way down the cord to the ground, I stopped and looked up to check on the Princess's progress. She was some thirty feet above me and seemed to be having no trouble with the descent. I paused for a moment to look around and noticed for the first time that as we were climbing down one rope, something was climbing up another. About fifty feet away from our position, a creature was ascending. It was horrible looking. It was frighteningly ugly. It was the stuff of nightmares. I was thankful for the eternal daylight of Ecos, for to face such a thing in the darkness was something I had no wish to contemplate. About twice the height of a man, the creature was covered with slime-dripping green hair. Its upper extremities were half hands, half flippers and its lower extremities were even more flipper-like, with suction cups lining the interiors. Its face was nothing more that a large sucker with a stinger or a long tusk protruding from it.

"Amath preserve us!" cried the Princess, seeing the thing for the first time.

"Indeed," I replied, "Have you ever seen anything like that?"

"No, and I hope I never do again."

The creature stared at us for several moments with its malevolent yellow eyes drilling holes into us. It then looked up and down. Then it attempted to swing the cord it was climbing, as if to, Tarzan-like, propel itself over to us. Quickly realizing that it would not be able to do so, it turned its attention away from us and resumed its task of making toward the hovering city.

"I hate to think of that thing preying on our flyers," I said.

"Or the Kartags," said Noriandara Remontar, and I agreed. I wouldn't have turned that creature loose on a Zoasian.

"Should we climb up and hunt it down? It certainly appears malevolent."

"It does appear malevolent," agreed the Princess, "but, no. We are not familiar enough with the existing eco-structure of that flying city. For all we know, there may well be an entire pack of those things hunting in the lower levels."

I supposed that she was correct. I felt uneasy about even allowing such a thing to exist, so frighteningly horrible was it. The fearsome face of the stummada was nothing compared to the unnamed thing. Still, who was I to be judge of such things? Might not the beautifully feathered flyers have found me horribly ugly? They may well have, but were willing to accept me into their flock anyway. Oh well. The thing continued up to the city, and we lowered ourselves to the ground, dropping from the cables, and feeling the solid ground of Ecos beneath our feet.

"We shall sit and eat," said Noriandara Remontar. "It shall pay for us to lighten our load by transferring some of our fruit into our body. And I would like to watch the city for a while as it sails away." Finding two large rocks to sit upon, the Princess and I watched the Meznark city sail into the distance as we nibbled on the various sweet fruits cultivated by the avians. For a long while, we spoke little. By the time that we had eaten all that we wanted--and that was some time, for as you know, it is difficult to really fill oneself up with fruit--our former vehicle was a dot in the distant sky. Once we had finished our repast, Noriandara Remontar and I started on our way. The flying ship had taken us completely away from the desert and over the rocky badlands and mountain chains which had separated it from the great plains in which we now found ourselves. Unlike the great grasslands which Malagor and I had first crossed after my arrival on Ecos, which resembled the African savannah, these plains were more akin to a temperate landscape. The land here was covered with tall green grasses and seemed barren of large animal life with the exception of an occasional small herd of grazing beasts. As I walked along, I looked at my Amatharian companion. She was incredibly beautiful, but there was something lacking in her face. She was so much like Vena Remontar--perhaps a little more beautiful, in the classic sense of that word, but she did not possess that upward turn of the eyebrow. And when she smiled, the corners of her lips still turned down. Vena Remontar's lips turned up in the corners. She almost always smiled--a happy smile, a sad smile, an enigmatic smile. I missed Vena Remontar's smiles, and her friendship--and Malagor's, and Norar Remontar's. I missed being in the company of a person who cared about me. I had lived without that for the majority of my life, and now that I had experience that kind of friendship, I was not whole when I was without it. The Princess cared about me as one would care about a countryman or anyone to whom one owed her life, but she did not act as though she were my friend, nor as though she wanted to be. How I had longed to find her and to be with her. And now that she was here with me, what could I do to win her love? Did I even want to win it?

Such were my musings, when the Princess suddenly jumped forward and took off at a run. I immediately made chase and followed.

"Where are you going?" I shouted.

"Come on!" she called.

As she ran, she drew her short sword and took a great leap forward to land with both feet upon an animal, at the same time driving her sword point into its head. I came to a stop beside her, curious as to the cause of so great a burst of speed. The creature now lying dead on the ground was a large reptile about four feet long, and looked to be about half way between a monitor lizard and a crocodilian. Its mottled greenish skin had rendered him invisible to my eyes, but the Princess had noticed the large orange spots below his eyes.

"Is this for us to eat?"

"Of course," she said. "I killed it. You clean it." Cleaning and dressing an animal carcass with a short sword is not as fun or as easy as one might think it would be, but I managed to do just that. When I had finished, I spitted the animal, started a fire over which to cook it.

"Reptiles are very good to eat,” said Noriandara Remontar. Actually she did not use the word of reptile at all, since the Amatharians don't have a word for reptiles. They do not classify animals the way that we do. Their classification system divides all animals into groups according to how many holes are found in their craniums, and subdivides them according to several other strange things, like the shape of the pelvis, and the type of nose. It doesn't seem to make much sense to me, but it works for them.

"You eat a lot of reptiles, do you?" I asked.

"A popular meat is doir nyee," she replied, then provided a perfect example of the Amatharian's strange animal classification system. "It is a small animal very much like this one—maybe a little larger, and with fur."

"I didn't have a chance to try any of that in Amathar."

"An unfortunate thing," she continued. "It is particularly good when cooked upon an open fire."

"Well then, this should be very tasty."

It was tasty too, when we at last ate the animal. I was amazed at how good it tasted to me, though this might have been more a function of not having had any meat at all while living with the flyers, rather than the choiceness of this particular beast. It seems that the flyers received all their nourishment from the plants they ate, and those same plants offered us sustenance while we were living among them, but the human desire for meat could not be overcome indefinitely. I am reminded of those individuals from my home world who have chosen to become vegetarians. I know that there are a variety of reasons why one would choose this lifestyle--concerns for health or distaste of the sometimes cruel ways animals are treated, or the nonsensical idea that animals should have rights equaling those of human beings. None of these reasons seemed to me to justify the total abstinence from the meat our bodies were designed for. In Amathar, no one ever argued that non-sentient animals should have any kind of rights, though they all had a deep concern for the environment. No one was cruel to animals, nor to anything or anyone else. And no one was a vegetarian.

"On our way again," said the Princess, rising after her repast.

"Yes," I replied. "On our way again."

We walked across the great flat landscape, up to our shins in thick, dark, green grass. Here and there were large succulent plants, something like an aloe vera, but with little tendrils on the ends of its fat leaves. The air was moist and the sun was warm upon the tops of our heads, but not too hot. Occasionally it would be blotted out by tremendously puffy clouds that rolled along in the sky above us, seeming to reach down toward us and at the same time reach up into the highest part of the heavens. The Princess knew the direction in which Amathar lay, possessing that unusual power of direction that I had previously seen evidenced only by Malagor. It seems that all the beings living in Ecos have it to one extent or another. The Malagors are simply the most in tune with the sense. After a while, I believed that I was inexplicably gaining that power as well.

After we had traveled some time, and stopped to sleep several times along the way--I was inclined to think of it as about two days, though of course it never got dark--the land began to slope downward making it much easier traveling. The lovely grassland continued, but trees became more common, many reaching so high up into the sky that they seemed to be trying to touch those great puffy clouds passing by. Every tree seemed to be clothed in huge leaves, each bigger than my hand, and many of them had flowers upon them. When we stopped our journey to rest and eat, I was able to lie upon my back, and imagine that I was taking a nap on an early June morning, after having eaten a picnic lunch. It felt good to let the sun shine down and warm my body. The clouds moved lazily toward the direction from which we had come.

Shortly after leaving our rest stop, we topped a small ridge and looked down the slope to see a great body of water. It was large enough that one could not see the far side, though there is always the impression of something in the distance in Ecos, as it is the interior of a great ball. Likewise, it stretched out as far as the eye could see to the left and to the right. Though it took us some time to traverse the distance to the shore, what seemed to me to be about four or five hours, neither the Princess nor I spoke. We at last reached the shoreline and she knelt down to taste the still water.

"Salt," Noriandara Remontar pronounced.

I nodded.

"We shall have to cross it," she said.

I nodded again.

"Why don't we make camp here," she continued. "We might as well start looking for something to eat. You follow the coast to the right, and I will follow it to the left." She stacked several rocks, one upon the other. "We can meet back here." I nodded and watched her head away down the shoreline. I always felt uneasy when the Princess found it necessary to be separated from me. Then again, she was probably at least as able to take care of herself as I was.

Turning to start down the shore line in my own direction, I paused to look out upon the water of the sea. The air just above the water was evidently very still indeed, for I have seen back-yard fish ponds with greater waves upon them than were upon this quiet body of salt water. Instead of rolling in at my feet, the water slapped eight or ten inches of the shore, and the beach consisted on only two or three feet of very coarse sand between the water and the green carpet of the grassland above. As I walked, I saw no sign of jumping fish or any other aquatic animal. There were no flying creatures in the air above the water. I was about to conclude that this was a dead sea, when I came across a large piece of driftwood--a log really--which was encrusted with oyster-like shell fish. I gathered together every one I could pull off--which was most of them--and returned the way I had come. I almost missed the little stack of stones which Noriandara Remontar had left as a marker, not that this would have been much of a calamity. I simply would have continued on my way until I encountered her. I placed my collected shellfish in a small pile and sat down. When the Princess returned, loaded down with several types of fruit, I had been peacefully contemplating the sea for what seemed like quite a while. At no time did I see any splash or ripple mar its calm surface.

Chapter Twenty Seven: Across the Silent Sea

The Princess of Amathar and I spent quite some time on that strange shore. It was probably just as long a time as we had spent with the flyers, though I will never know for certain. We utilized that time constructing a raft for the sea voyage ahead of us. It was nothing more than five large logs tied together with rope made of twisted grasses. It seemed unlikely that a sail would be of any use to us, as we never saw any wind on the water, though the clouds far up in the heavens continued to happily roll along in the direction opposite of ours. Instead we made several paddles--one cut from a single long piece of wood, two made from smaller pieces of wood attached to poles with home-made rope, and one made of a long flat horn or antler that I found. Since I never saw the animal from which it came, I can't be any more specific about it.

While we were thus engaged as shipwrights, Noriandara Remontar and I continued to talk and get to know each other. I think she was beginning to like me. And for my part, I was finding myself less and less surprised by her gruffness. She was not at all like her brother or her cousin. She was quiet and somewhat taciturn and had a decidedly sarcastic side to her. Of course, like every Amatharian, she was reserved, and seldom spoke anything that wasn't either interesting or important. She had a way of making me with her feel about ten inches tall, whereas Vena Remontar had a way of making me feel ten feet tall. Maybe it was just me. On the whole, our time on that shore was quite pleasant and in some ways reminded me of my journey to Amathar with Norar Remontar and Malagor. Of more concern to me than the raft, was the availability of food. On a sea without large waves or frequent storms, the stability and seaworthiness of a vessel was only of secondary importance. But, one must eat. And drink, too. We had spent twice as long foraging for food and making containers in which to store fresh water, than we had upon building the raft. We gathered many different kinds of fruits and vegetables, for the surrounding area was a lush garden of plant life. I even found a patch of the strange blue berries which Malagor and I had picked so long ago. Those and many of the other fruits were dried in the sun, as were strips of jerky meat made from a variety of animals. I would have liked to smoke some fish as well, though I could find none, no matter how hard I searched. The shellfish proved tasty when fresh, either steamed or raw, but I was unable to preserve them. At last I gathered a bunch of the oyster-like creatures and placed them in a loosely woven basket which I trailed over the side of the raft. In this way they were able to survive, straining the passing water for nutrients until at last they became my nutrients.