Shadow's End (25 page)

“What are you thinking?” asked Lutha, coming to sit beside me.

I told her my thoughts, describing the caves, pointing downward where this one was, and that one, shaking my head at the danger, at the difficulty.

“When we came to Cochim-Mahn,” she said, “we left the hostel and started down the trail when it was barely light. Chahdzi said it wasn't quite proper to start before the dawnsong, but we did it, nonetheless. Suppose we take the animals very early in the morning, just at dawn.”

“The herders would not hear us then,” I agreed. “They sleep in the hive, and they do not come out until the daysong.”

“So, if you locate the animals we need, and if Leelson finds a wain, and if we take all our supplies down, a little at a time … well, then, in a few days …”

“It must be sooner than that,” I told her. “There are only a few animals left in the caves.”

“Well, we'll begin at once,” she said. I heard apprehension in her voice. It would have been surprising if she had not felt it. I did.

“At once,” I agreed. “It will take time to carry our supplies down the ladders.”

She sighed deeply. “Do you know the way to the omphalos?”

“No. But I have heard the stories of the journey, over and over since I was a child. How the wains go, and what people see on the way, and how the …” I had been
about to mention what the beautiful people did at Tahs-uppi. That was forbidden. Instead I said weakly, “I've heard how the songfathers draw out the extra days, to balance the seasons.”

“What did they look like, these extra days?” she asked, half smiling.

I shook my head at her. “No one knows. All those present hide their faces. It would be improper to look.”

“Improper to look at a lot of things around here,” she muttered to herself as she rose and went back into the leasehold, to tell the others. I went down the ladders to see if our plan could be made real or would remain only talk.

The herd caves smell only a little, because the droppings are taken away at once to the caverns where fungus is grown, just as our human waste is taken in the hive. So, when I came to the caves, there were herders moving about with their shovels, cleaning the pens and pretending not to see me. Perhaps they did not see me. I tried to remember if I had seen veiled women before I became one myself, remembering times in childhood when adults had whispered to me that it was not wise to look, not wise or polite to see. So I had not seen. Now I was not seen.

So much the better. I could take my time. I could linger. I could see where the stoutest gaufers were, two in this pen, three in that, one in the third. When they are neutered, their horns curl tightly instead of growing out to the sides. That way we may drive them in pairs, side by side, without their bumping. The neutered ones get heavier, too, and tamer, for they are constantly handled. There were seven or eight good ones in the pens, and they nosed the woven panels at the front of the caves, soft noses wrinkling, side-whiskers jiggling.
They
had not been trained not to see me. If I brought tasties for them, they would see me well enough. Well enough to follow me.

Where was the harness kept? I did not see it in the
caves, though there was other equipment hung here and there among the bins of dried fungus. I swept dust from my memory, recalling me as a child, riding on Chahdzi's shoulder, being shown the beasts, the caves, the wains. What had the harness looked like? Chest straps, as I recalled, with fringes on them to keep the insects away from the soft, naked hide between the front legs, where the false udders are. And carved wooden buffer bars, to hold the pairs abreast. Wide hauling straps of gaufer leather, and long, light reins of braided bark fiber, the same as our well ropes.

There was nothing resembling a harness in the caves.

Which meant the harness was with the wains. Or in the hive somewhere.

I passed Leelson Famber on the ladders, murmuring to him that I had not found the harness. He nodded and continued downward. Perhaps he would find it.

If it was in the hive, it was in the quarters of the herdsmen, where their families lived. I could not go there when the people were there. Perhaps at the morning song, when everyone was gathered behind the doorskins, waiting to go out. Then I could slip inside to look around.

There was a time I would have hated this sneakiness. Was a time I would have considered it beneath me, beneath any Dinadhi. Now I was no longer a person to be concerned with such things. I was an unperson. I did not exist. Who would point the finger at me when they could not even see me?

I returned to the leasehold. Lutha was there, feeding the child. I offered to do it for her, and she handed me the spoon with an expression almost of relief. She went to sit in the window, looking out at the day while I plied the spoon. It was like feeding a little animal. He was too old for the breast, but I had the feeling he would best have liked to suckle, for he could have done that without thinking at all. Certainly he could not keep his mind on the spoon.

He calmed as he grew less hungry. When we were finished, it took a large towel and a bowl of warm water to clean up the boy and the area around him.

“He has always been this way?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, her body stiffening. She did not want to talk about it.

Well then, we would not talk about it.

“There are some good gaufers down there,” I told her. “But I couldn't find the harness. Perhaps Leelson will find it in a wain. Where has Trompe gone?”

“He's carrying supplies down the ladders,” she said with suppressed laughter. “Or was. Here he comes, very hot looking!”

As he did, out of breath and considerably annoyed.

“Leelson's found a wain,” he said. “It's parked out of sight of the hive, around those stone columns south of the cave. He told me to put the food inside it. Otherwise he thinks it won't last until we're ready to leave.”

I nodded. He was right. Any food left where the Kachis could get it would be either eaten or fouled past use. “Was the harness there?” I asked.

“I don't know. I didn't look and Leelson didn't say.” He collapsed onto a sleeping bench and threw one arm across his face. “Lord, that's a long climb. You Dinadhi must have steel legs and arms, up and down all day as you are.”

“Two trips a day is considered much,” I told them. “One is the usual. When the farmers go to work in the fields, they go down at daylight and return before dusk. They carry their lunch with them.”

“We haven't talked about how long this is going to take,” he said. “How much food we'll need …”

“All we can carry,” I told him.

“Then we'll need a faster way of getting it down there.”

Silence, broken by the sound of the door. Leelson, returning.

“Harness is in the wain,” he said. “I counted the individual
sets, and it looks like enough for six animals. On my way back, however, I overheard several of the herdsman talking. They're taking the animals up tomorrow.”

Silence again.

“We'll have to leave before then,” murmured Lutha. “Won't we?” She gave me a pleading look, as though hoping I could think of some other choice.

“No time for sneakiness,” I said. “Were there panels on the sides of the wain you chose?”

He nodded, his lips pressed tightly together. “Yes. I remembered that part. They make up the pen for the gaufers, I presume.”

“Walls and roof, to keep them safe at night,” I said. “Tomorrow before light, we'll take all the food from the dispenser, put it in sacks, and drop it into the canyon. We need not carry water. This time of year there will be water along the canyon-bottom trail we'll follow. We'll have to be gone before light.” To my own ears, my voice shouted panic, but the others did not seem to hear it. They merely sighed, resolved on the struggle to come but taking no joy in it.

“They'll know the wain is gone,” Trompe objected.

“Perhaps not,” I replied. “There are extra ones. If the one you picked is beyond the pillars, likely it is one that was not to be used this year. Or, if someone sees it is gone, they may think someone moved it. People are always moving wains around. To store things in. Or to repair them.”

“They don't belong to anyone in particular?”

“They belong to Cochim-Mahn. Not to any particular person. Anyone might move a wain.”

“Well then,” said Leelson.

“I just had a thought,” Trompe interrupted. “What about weapons?”

“Weapons!” I cried. “To use against what?”

They looked at me, the two men with those expressions
they have, reading me, knowing how I felt. Well, I could read their faces as well!

“No!” I shouted at them. “That is forbidden. You will not!”

The two exchanged glances, then shrugged, both at once, as by agreement.

“They are our …” I said, trying to explain, remembering I couldn't explain.

“Your what, Saluez?” asked Lutha curiously.

I could not say. I had already said forbidden things, thought forbidden thoughts. I shook my head at her. Enough. One might do this little wrong thing, or that little wrong thing, but not forever! One could not cut across the pattern over and over again. I had to stop, even though these folk were eager to know more. Let them find out some other way. Let them read it in someone else's feelings. I had said all I could say.

O
n Perdur Alas, night on night the monstrosities returned to wander the world. Even when Snark did not see them, she could tell they were present somewhere: just over a cusp of hills, in a valley somewhere, at the bottom of the sea, perhaps, for when she stood with her mouth open and turned about slowly, she could taste them, strongly or faintly. At first she would taste nothing, perhaps, but then her tongue would curl at the subtle disgust of them, the cloying rottenness, the foulness that could not be spat away.

One taste was enough. Whenever she detected it, she went to ground. Driven as much by instinct as by prior knowledge, she made herself a dozen hidey-holes around the camp and between it and the sea. She dug upward, into the sides of hills, so the tunnels would drain and the holes would stay dry. She made them large enough to be comfortable. She knew if she was surrounded by earth, the beings could not detect her. If she was in a hole, with foliage drawn over her, they could not tell she was there.
She thought someone had told her this, just as they'd told her how to dig holes. She seemed to remember these things from that former time.

The blacknesses, as she called them, did not always come to the camp. Moreover, the blacknesses were not always the same. Occasionally, rarely, they were like the first time, with that same muffled soundlessness, that same trembling of the soil, that same monstrous plodding. More often they were merely shapes against the stars, who brought with them a horrible taste. Very rarely they were both. They came irregularly, once every three to five nights, seldom two nights in a row, always after dark. She wondered if they came to the other side of the planet when it was night there. She dug out the reports and found that the other side of the planet was mostly water, covered by the vast shallow sea that made up nine tenths of Perdur Alas. They came when this side was in darkness, she decided. The other side was not useful to them, or was less useful, or was … unimportant, perhaps. Who knew?

Why did they come at all? After that first night, they changed nothing. They took nothing away. They added nothing at all. They merely came and wandered about, black against the stars, occasionally trembling the earth, shaking the hills, shaking Snark herself in absolute terror.

At first she survived on this terror, letting it drive her deep into her cave and keep her there. As time went by, however, curiosity asserted itself, and she found herself speculating more and more about what the presences were, and what their enigmatic business might be. She wanted to see them. She wanted to get a good look! She did not consider that she might have been conditioned to be curious. The feeling was natural to her. She had always been that way. Mother had …

Mother had always been that way too. Mother had been here with her, long ago, and Mother had always been curious about Perdur Alas. The others … the other
people used to warn her. Don't take chances. But Mother had taken chances. The memory came and went, evanescent as a breeze.

It was time to satisfy curiosity. Since the beings seemed no longer particularly interested in the camp, she stealthily removed a number of items to make night spying easier: devices for seeing in the dark; recorders activated by change in air chemistry or pressure, by sound or movement, by temperature change; solar-powered lights, solar-powered reference files. More food and blankets, to make her other hidey-holes warm enough to spend whole nights in, if necessary. The things that wouldn't fit into her cave or into the new hidey-holes, she hid elsewhere. The solar devices she secreted here and there in newly dug holes or among piles of stone, covering them with layers of furze that she could remove each morning to allow the devices to charge. The night eyes she secreted in her hole above the camp. There, lying in the mouth of her tunnel, rolled into a pair of soft blankets and screened by carefully positioned branches, she propped herself in a comfortable position, one she could wake from silently.

They didn't come. Toward morning she roused, tasting them. They were somewhere, but not here, not at the camp. The taste was mild, barely discernible. She stood up, yawned, and made her way to the cave over the sea.

Twice more she waited fruitlessly.

On the fourth night they came. She gagged on her own saliva and knew they were nearby.

She focused the device, propping it in the opening, careful not to move the screening grasses and leaves. She watched them come from the west, over the sea, watched them traverse the moor between, watched them gather south of the camp as though waiting for something or checking on something or, perhaps, merely assembling there prior to departure. Through the device she could see the shape of them, the way they moved. They had no legs. These could not be the earth tremblers; these were
the others. Monstrous and shaggy, they floated in air, multiple appendages hanging limply below, a few of them reaching to the sides as though feeling the way.