The Bronze of Eddarta (6 page)

*
Keeshah, he has to lie down, or Tarani can’t help him.
*

Keeshah’s neck fur was still bristling from the excitement of the fight. Thymas’s sha’um bristled and snarled in an automatic defense reflex when mine closed in, but couldn’t offer much resistance. Keeshah wrestled Ronar to the ground and lay across his shoulders to keep him still while Tarani cleaned the deepest gashes on the cat’s flanks.

I lowered Thymas to the ground and tended him as best I could. He was coming around by the time Tarani got up from Ronar and came over to us.

When Keeshah moved off of him, Ronar rolled up into a crouch and lay there panting. Keeshah cleaned himself—his wounds were mere scratches—and then worked his raspy tongue across the fur on Ronar’s back, licking away the dirt and blood. He was careful not to disturb the ointment Tarani had applied to Ronar’s flanks.

“We need to rest for a couple of days,” I said, watching the sha’um. “But not here. Thymas, can Ronar walk?”

He closed his eyes for a moment, speaking to the great cat. “Yes. But not far.” His hand, pitifully weak, closed on my arm. “This time, Rikardon, you don’t have a choice. You have to leave us behind.”

“You may be right, Thymas,” I said, reluctantly. “But we still have a safety margin for beating Gharlas to Eddarta. We can afford a couple of slow days. If we
do
have to go on without you, at least we can leave you in a more hospitable place.”

He didn’t have the energy to argue. In fact, he’d been pushing his own and Ronar’s reserves to keep up with the morning’s fast pace. Now man and sha’um both were drained, physically and psychologically.

Ronar could barely walk; there was no question of Thymas riding him. I considered asking Keeshah to carry the Sharith boy, so that Tarani and I could keep our swords ready for another attack, but rejected the idea before it really took shape. Keeshah might not have objected—but it would have been a mortal blow to Ronar’s pride, which was already down for the count. So Tarani and I traded off supporting Thymas while we all three walked, nervously, eastward toward Sulis. Keeshah circled warily around us and Lonna kept a lookout from the sky.

Thymas’s informant had said the vineh lived “between Grevor and Sulis,” so we couldn’t be sure of being safe until we had actually reached the next town.

We didn’t find it before nightfall. We took a brief rest, and Tarani asked Lonna to locate the town for us.

The bird reported that Sulis was close, and the way was fairly clear, so we dragged our weary bodies up once again and plodded on. We stopped just outside the city to find a concealed place for the sha’um to rest. Weary as she was, Tarani took the time to hum Ronar to sleep.

*
I will guard, and hunt,
* Keeshah told me. *
This one will have meat at dawn; then I will rest.
*

*
Good, Keeshah,
* I said.
We will all rest for a day, at least.
*

Privately I thought:
They’ve come a long way—from fighting one another to taking care of each other.
I looked down at Thymas. Tarani’s sleep spell had unintentionally zapped him, too.
But then
, I thought, pulling Thymas up from the ground and getting my shoulders under him,
Thymas and I are making the same kind of progress.

I groaned as I lifted him. He wasn’t as tall as Tarani, who was nearly eye-to-eye with me, but every inch of him was solid, hard-packed muscle. Thymas was a hefty chunk.

“Can you manage him alone?” Tarani asked, steadying me as I staggered a little.

“For a while, anyway,” I grunted.

If Sulis had been one step further away, I wouldn’t have made it. As it was, I stumbled into an inn and dumped Thymas on the registration table. The startled clerk didn’t have to ask what had happened to us, but he was plainly curious about how we had survived an encounter with vineh.

“We
won’t
survive, if we don’t get some rest,” Tarani said. “Will you help us take our friend to our room?”

“One room for the three of you?” the clerk asked, then seemed to realize that the question might be offensive. “That is—”

“
Yes
, one room for the three of us,” Tarani said. “Please hurry.”

It cost us the rest of our non-Eddartan cash, but that was the best night’s sleep I ever had.

I didn’t move until nearly noon the next day, and even though I was stiff and sore, thanks to the vineh and the strain of carrying Thymas, I woke up feeling confident.

Tarani and Thymas were still sleeping. I slid a single gold coin from my belt and went out of the room quietly. We’d need to eat, sometime between Sulis and Eddarta, and the Eddartan coins were now our only choice. We’d have to risk their being identified. I went in search of a moneychanger.

The man I found had never seen a coin exactly like it, and offered the opinion that it had been stamped to commemorate some occasion. But he shrugged and said: “Gold is gold, no matter whose face it wears.” After he had taken his commission for changing the twenty-
dozak
piece, I had two hundred and thirty-eight
zaks
, in assorted coin sizes, available for spending. It was enough, easily, to manage the rest of the trip—depending on what I decided to do with Thymas.

He was going to have to stay behind and follow later; that much was clear. The exertion of the fight with the vineh had pushed both him and Ronar back to “square one”, in terms of their recovering stamina and spirit.

Keeshah had to come with me, or our plan of laying some kind of trap in Eddarta before Gharlas got there would be useless. But Tarani—did
she
have to come with me?

I mulled over the possible choices as I sat in the inn’s dining room, sipping faen.

One, she could come with me, and leave Thymas to follow whenever he and Ronar could travel. Would Thymas wait until they were recovered? Or would he be just as heedlessly anxious to get going as he had been in Dyskornis, and arrive in Eddarta too weak to be any help at all? Worse than that, would he let his depression convince him that he might as well not follow at all?

Two, Tarani could stay with Thymas, so that he and Ronar would heal faster. Ronar would travel more slowly, carrying double, but they would be able to leave sooner.

I hate it
, I thought,
but the second choice makes more sense. Are there any reasons why Tarani
shouldn’t
stay behind with Thymas? Real reasons, that is—not jealous ones.

There
was
one reason. Zefra.

I had considered Tarani’s plan to find her mother as secondary to our need to find the Ra’ira. But if we could find Zefra, it was possible that she could
help
us against Gharlas.

If
Tarani
asked her.

I paid for my drink, and went upstairs to tell Tarani and Thymas what I had decided.

They didn’t question it—Thymas would stay; Tarani would go. The only argument I got was, predictably, from Thymas.

“You will lose time if you move me elsewhere,” he protested. “There is game here for Ronar, and I can rest here just as well as anywhere else. Pay the clerk for a few days of room and board, and go!”

“I
will not
leave you here, Thymas,” I said. “You need experienced care, and a lot of rest. If you stayed here, you’d be on your guard all the time. We’ll take you to a Refreshment House; you’ll be safe with the Fa’aldu.” I spread out the map, studied it for a moment, then tapped it with my finger. “Stomestad.”

“Too far,” Thymas snapped. “You’d lose three days, poking along at our speed.”

“It would be straight across desert,” Tarani mused. “A rough trip.”

“We can stand a few days of desert travel,” I said. “And Stomestad lies along the most direct route to Eddarta from here. Even if Tarani and I can’t make up the lost time, we should still be able to reach Eddarta before Gharlas gets there. We’ll go to Stomestad.”

I was expecting desert, but not
that
desert. It made the Kapiral, with its stubborn, ground-hugging dry bushes, seem like paradise.
Nothing
grew in that wasteland. The air felt superheated, and the sand was so fine that we had to wrap our faces to keep from inhaling salty particles drifting in the air like dust motes.

By the time I realized what we were getting into, it was the middle of our second day, and too late to turn back. We adopted the travel pattern I had learned from Zaddorn: move for three hours, rest for one, the three of us hugging the shadows of the sha’um. Healthy sha’um could have run the trip from Sulis to Stomestad in two and a half days. It took us five days and nights of miserable tramping before we arrived at the symbolic canvas barrier of Stomestad.

It was mid-afternoon, and the sand shifted under our feet as we stood there, croaking the ritual request for shelter. Vasklar, Respected Elder of the Refreshment House, granted our request and ordered that the symbolic canvas barrier be lowered to admit us. He stared at us in shock for a moment, then hurried his people to help us.

The Refreshment House of Stomestad was the largest I had yet seen. It was enclosed in the same way as all the others I had visited, with a head-high wall of large bricks of rock salt. The interior compound, where the extended family group of desert dwellers lived, seemed much larger than those I had seen at Yafnaar and Relenor.

The Fa’aldu provided most travelers with sparing accommodations—mere cubicles with sleeping ledges and plain pallets. The small rooms opened directly on the enclosed courtyard where, on any given night, there might be twenty to a hundred vleks stamping and bawling. Travelers were also given water and cooked food, all in trade for some kind of goods—food products, fabric, crafted articles.

Across the long, rectangular court were doorways which opened into the family residence area.

I was one of the few travelers ever invited into the Fa’aldu homes—a privilege for which I often thanked Balgokh, the Elder at Yafnaar, who had been Ricardo’s first source of information in Gandalara. Balgokh didn’t know the truth about me; he believed that Markasset had awakened in the desert without his memory, and had later regained it. He had taken a fatherly pride in my possession of Serkajon’s sword, and had accepted, without question, Thanasset’s decision to implement the old custom of changing a son’s name when he has proved himself ready to carry the family’s sword.

It was part of the obligation of the Fa’aldu, assumed during the time of the Kingdom, to assist anyone in need in the desert. But I thought that Balgokh had helped me willingly, because he had sensed something of my difference from other Gandalarans. So I had returned to Yafnaar to give him a resolution to the mystery I had started. Balgokh had appreciated that gesture so much that he had sent word to all the Refreshment Houses, asking that I be honored as a fellow Fa’aldu.

And, as a side effect, making me into a legend.

When we surrendered our weapons and gave our names, the whole family came out to help.

The respect of the Stomestad Fa’aldu embarrassed me, but I didn’t hesitate to take advantage of it. Fa’aldu children dusted us off with stiff-bristled brushes, and gave us a little water. Then Tarani took Thymas into a cubicle to tend him, while I arranged for meat and water for the sha’um, and had a talk with Vasklar.

Thymas’s wounds, though deeper and nastier looking than the bruises and scratches Tarani and I had suffered, had been reduced to thin scabs after the two nights he spent in Sulis under Tarani’s healing sleep, but the trek across the desert had reopened some of the worse ones. The salty grit that covered us from head to foot had crusted in the bloody scars, even though we had used some of our precious water to clean them whenever we rested. The edges of the opened wounds looked swollen and inflamed, even after they had been cleansed.

I went into Thymas’s cubicle just as Tarani was using the last of her supply of soothing ointment on Thymas’s nastiest gash. It started beneath his right ear, and slid down his neck and across the right side of his chest. She was sitting on the sleeping ledge with her back to me, blocking sight of Thymas’s face, but I could see most of his body. She left her hands on his chest after she finished, moving them in small circles, massaging lightly. He said something too softly for me to hear it, and she laughed.

“I need to talk to Thymas for a minute,” I said. She jumped, then stood up and left the room, turning back once to smile at the boy.

“I guess you know that Ronar is doing pretty well,” I said, sitting down where Tarani had been. I could feel her warmth in the thin padding of the pallet, even on the surface of the huge block of rock salt beneath it. Thymas watched me warily, waiting. “Tarani’s ointment matted his fur over those really bad cuts, and kept out the dust. They’re starting to heal. I want you to stay here until you both feel
fit
to travel—got that?”

The boy nodded, and winced with the pain the motion cost him.

“Tarani will help you and Ronar sleep tonight—that should give you a good start on getting well. Vasklar will take good care of you, and he will give you whatever provisions you need when you’re ready to go. Wait until Ronar can travel full speed, and ride directly for Eddarta.”

“Where will you be?” he asked.

“Tarani and Keeshah and I will leave in the morning for the Refreshment House of Iribos. Vasklar gave me the name of one of the Fa’aldu there who can tell us about Eddarta. When we have some kind of a plan, Tarani will send Lonna to you with the details. If you need to contact us, send Lonna back—she’ll be able to find Tarani, no matter where we are.”

“All right,” he sighed, and closed his eyes. There were creases of weariness radiating from their corners.

“One more thing, and I’ll let you get some rest,” I said.

He opened his eyes and looked at me again. I didn’t have a clue as to what he was thinking.

“I’m going to leave Serkajon’s sword here, where it will be safe, and where it can’t identify me. I’ll take yours in its place.”

He didn’t say anything, and after a second or two, I stood UP.

“See you in Eddarta,” I said, and went out into the courtyard.