by Tanith Lee
So I sat and stared nervily out over the plain.
Little spirals of dust still spun there. Huge hollow clouds above. A large black bird hung motionless on the air, as if from an invisible rope.
He’d only held my hand and put his arm around me to keep us together. He had felt responsible, like a kind prince for his servant. And I’d let him down. Hadn’t brought enough water.
I thought if anyone in the House had been the way he was it would have annoyed me. Because it was Nemian, I felt in the wrong. Was this a very bad sign?
A huge new blond cloud was streaming along the plain. Getting bigger.
I watched it, then properly saw it. Before I considered I jumped up with a howl.
Nemian woke.
‘Are you a girl or some species of jumping deer?’
‘The storm – it’s started again!’
He looked, with those cool eyes.
‘No, it isn’t the storm. Riders, and vehicles.’
And he sprang to his feet and ran, all in one coordinated bound, across the plain away from me, towards the dust cloud.
Had I been abandoned? Was I expected to follow? I’d better follow, hadn’t I?
I floundered into a panting gallop.
The cloud (riders and vehicles) was going from right to left across the near horizon, slightly looping in towards us as it went. Because the ground was fairly flat now, I didn’t see at first they were on a sort of makeshift road which the storm had obviously uncovered.
How far was it to reach them? Miles. Probably not. Towards the end I had to keep stopping, gasping for breath, but by then some of them had slowed down, and then halted.
When I eventually staggered up, Nemian was in conversation with seven brown men in the two halted vehicles. The others had gone rolling on.
There was a mad noise. This was because the two chariots (I recognized them from the riding vehicles the princes sometimes used in the Garden) were drawn, each, by a team of six, very large, curl-horned sheep. Some of the sheep were bleating in deep voices. And then I grasped the chariot riders were also bleating. And Nemian was bleating too.
For a minute I thought I’d lost my mind. Or they all had.
Then Nemian turned and saw me standing there with my hair raining down and my mouth as usual wide open.
He smiled, and raised one eyebrow.
‘Hello, Claidi. You needn’t have rushed. These are Sheepers. I know their language.’
One of the brown men, who wore their hair in plaits, braided, like the wool of the sheep teams, with beads and sheep-brasses, said loudly, ‘B’naaa?’
Nemian turned back, and bleated in return.
A few moments more, and one of the riders in the second chariot got out, and jumped into the first chariot. Helping hands drew Nemian and me into the second chariot.
Everything smelled very oily and woolly. But – oh wonderful – a leather bottle was being offered to us. Nemian politely let me drink first. It wasn’t water but warmish sheep milk, and I wasn’t terribly delighted. But it did soothe my throat.
‘We’re going to the Sheeper town,’ Nemian informed me.
A whip cracked high, well clear of woolly backs, and we were off.
CHARIOT TOWN
There was quite a welcome.
Under a square gateway in a thick wall, but only just high enough so we could drive through, and into the brown town of the Sheepers. And everyone had come out, in the dusk, with lamps. Women laughing and holding up babies, and children screaming and bouncing, and old men leaning on wooden staffs, and grannies (they call them that), old women, and almost all of them were banging drums and blowing whistles, and some even threw flowers – a particularly hard sort of white poppy.
I gathered, but not right then, the chariot-riding Sheepers had been off somewhere, trading. With some other settlement of Sheepers? Anyway, it was a success. Best of all, the road had reappeared after the storm, which made the journey quicker. Although in fact we’d ridden with them until after sunset.
As the sky flamed, the hills had abruptly seemed to come nearer, then the sheep chariots bundled round a swerve in the road, and we saw the town lying in the curve of two really near, rounded low hills, as if in the paws of a lion.
They call it, not for the sheep, as they do practically everything else, but for their chariots. Chariot Town.
Nemian says the walls may belong to something older and lost. The Sheepers patched them up and built inside.
The houses are made of wood and skins. (Not sheep. They never kill sheep.) Each has a strange little open garden, a stretch of neat close-cut fawn turf.
In the middle of the town is a bigger garden, green in parts, with some trees. Water wells up from the ground into a string of pools. The waters clean. (Except for what the sheep do in it, of course.)
When not employed, the sheep simply wander about the town. Everyone pats them, or gets out of their way, and even if they eat the washing, they’re allowed to. They also stroll in and out of everyone’s houses, and sometimes leave sheep pats, but these are used for kindling on the fires. (So are useful.)
People groom their sheep carefully, and plait ribbons and beads in their wool. Sometimes they paint their horns.
The sheep are shod. Otherwise they provide wool, milk and cheese. (Which is quite good, once you get used to it. I think I have.)
The Chariot Towners can talk to the sheep (?), and apparently the sheep can talk to them (?) (all baaing). They do seem to understand each other with no trouble.
The guest-house, where we’ve been staying, is hung with sheep-brasses. And at night they light candles in the skulls of famous old sheep which died peaceful natural deaths. All the houses own such skulls. They’re heirlooms.
The sheep graze the lawns, that’s why they’re so neat, the lawns not the sheep.
The lord here is called the Shepherd.
Look, I’ve gone on and on about sheep.
You catch that, here.
I’ve written everything up now to date.
We’ve been in the town five days.
Nemian talked to me today. I don’t always see him, except at breakfast and/or supper. (Mounds of cheeses, milk-soups, salads, gritty bread. Beer. (Which gives me hiccups, to add to the bad impression I make.)) Then he chats in baaas to the locals.
He said, when speaking to me, I was being ‘astonishingly patient’. Some choice.
Nemian is out all day, with the Sheepers. He mentioned other travellers come and go here, and soon we should be able to hitch a ride to somewhere else, perhaps where there are balloons and ballooneers. So home. (To wherever his home is.) The Sheepers like him. Of course.
Desolate.
That sounds yukky. Just like some swooning princess of the House. Ooh, I’m sooo desolate—
But I am.
I wander about and try to talk to some of the women milking sheep or making sheep-cheese or grooming sheep, or their kids. But we can’t understand each other. I find I must simply amble past, and give a quick cheery bleat, which they seem to take as a well-mannered and pleasant Hallo.
Nemian looks amazing again. We’re able to wash our hair and have baths here, though the water is rather cold (one heated bucket to three not.) He’s dazzled them.
He did say the sheep are fierce and can fight lions. (Do they kick them with their shoes?)
Yes, we too have talked about the sheep.
Depressing.
Have now been here eight days, also depressing.
Depressed.
I’m fed up with me. How can I be depressed. I’m OUT IN THE WASTE. With NEMIAN. Almost.
Depressed.
My God – I know what that means, sort of – and shouldn’t perhaps use it like that (?)
Daisy and Dengwi used to accuse me of being prissy, because I wouldn’t swear.
But the royalty at the house used to swear, and I hated them, so I didn’t want to do anything they did and which I could avoid doing.
(If Nemian swears, it doe
sn’t seem so awful, I have to confess.)
And God is a kind of supreme supernatural figure. Not human. I don’t really understand. But I’ve caught the phrase from him, as I’ve caught this habit of talking about the sheep …
Anyway. Nemian took me aside this evening. And it was sensational. We actually had a conversation, and for hours.
It began with supper. The rough wood tables are outside on a trip-you-up terrace of piled stones. The air was clear and fresh and the sky got dark very slowly.
Everyone baa’d away. I sat there resignedly, only nodding with a quick smiling bleat when anyone greeted me: ‘Claaa-di-baa!’
When it got to the serious beer-drinking stage, Nemian rose and said to me, ‘Shall we go for a walk, Claidi? It’s a fine night.’
One or two of the Sheepers grinned and looked away. And I felt myself blush, which was infuriating. So I said, blankly, ‘Oh, I’m a bit tired. I think I’ll just go in—’ wishing I’d shut up.
‘Let me persuade you,’ said Nemian, very gracious. ‘We can go up to the water pools. It’s cool there. We have to talk, don’t we?’
‘All right,’ I charmingly snapped, got up, and stalked away up the terrace towards the big garden further along the track. Let Nemian catch up with me, for a change.
He didn’t bother, of course. So then I had to pretend I’d got a stone in my shoe. It could have been true, my shoes are wearing out fast.
He sauntered up and asked me, all concern, ‘A stone?’
‘Oh, I’ve shaken it out now.’
‘Look,’ said Nemian, ‘there’s the moon.’
We looked. And there it was. Since the storm it hadn’t properly been visible. Now it looked clean and white, a half round, like half a china clock-face, but without hands or numbers.
‘Poor Claidi,’ said Nemian. ‘Are you very angry with me? I’ve been selfish, haven’t I?’
I had to remind myself here that although he is a prince, he thinks I’m a princess, at least a lady.
‘Everyone’s selfish,’ I said. ‘We have to be. How else can you get by.’
‘My God, that’s a judgement,’ said Nemian. ‘But you could be right. Can you forgive me, then, since you never expected anything much from me in the first place?’
I stole a look at him. Wonderful.
‘Oh, yes,’ I said, as firmly as I could.
We walked into the garden.
The trees grouped around the pools, and the moon shone in each scoop of water, as we went by.
He found a smooth stone, where the white poppies grew, giving off a ghostly musk in the moon-watered dark.
‘You see,’ he said, ‘I never expected the balloon to be shot down. Most of the places I passed over were so primitive they didn’t have the means. I thought anywhere that was sophisticated, would also have balloons itself. Perhaps be used to travellers. But then all those guns went off, and I thought I was going to be killed.’ He looked across the garden, bleakly. ‘It shook me up. And then – quite a reception your people gave me.’
‘You didn’t seem …’ I hesitated, ‘upset at all.’
‘Oh come on, Claidi. That was an act. All noble and dashing. I was at my wits’ end.’
‘So you lay down on the floor in front of everyone and went to sleep.’
He frowned and cast me one slanting look.
‘Actually, I passed out. I’d had a thump on the head getting into the tree. Rather than just fall over flat, I did it that way, noble and dashing again, and very careless. An act. I said.’
I was amazed. I felt strange. I can’t describe it. I’m not sure I’d want to. I admired him, too. And – I felt guilty. Those times on the journey when he’d simply gone to sleep – had he been feeling ill? And he hadn’t trusted me, or was too proud to show it.
‘Anyway,’ he now said. ‘I owe you my life.’ (The words I’d wanted before.) ‘I won’t forget that, Claidi. I have an important position in my own city. You’re going to have wonderful experiences there. You’ll live in a luxury beyond anything in that House. And you’ll be respected and honoured.’
All this sounded so bizarre, I couldn’t take it in. Me? I didn’t really care anyway. Just liked him to go on talking.
So then he told me things about his city. I was impressed. Apparently it far outshines the ruin we’d glimpsed. A mighty river runs through, a mile or more wide, so in places you can’t see across from one bank to the other. The water is pure as glass. The buildings rise to vast heights, and are so tall they have sort of clockwork cages in them, they call lifters, which carry people from the ground floor to the top storey.
He said they’d let off fireworks in celebration to welcome him home, and to greet me. I’ve heard of fireworks, but never seen them. He said they’re the colours of a rainbow, shot with gold and silver stars.
He said the city is governed from four great towers. The most powerful tower is the Tower of the Wolf. And he was born in this tower.
Then I remembered something he’d said in the Debating Hall, about being on a search or quest.
I asked him what that was. Nemian laughed. ‘Oh, I was just making it sound grand. I was only travelling.’
I asked him where the red flowers grew, like the one he’d given to Jizania Tiger.
‘In my city,’ he said. ‘We call them Immortals. After you pick them, they can live for months, even without water. You see, Claidi, even here the Waste isn’t all a desert. And there are places where everything’s – like your Garden. Only far better. Cooped up in that House, you must have found it very dull. You must have been very bored.’
‘It was all rules and senseless Rituals,’ I muttered.
‘I can guess. Rules should never be boring,’ he oddly replied.
Then he leaned over and kissed me lightly on the lips.
I was so stunned, that it meant almost nothing as it happened. So I have to keep recalling it, reliving it, that kiss. Trying to feel its staggering importance.
In a funny way it makes me think of when I scalded myself once, as a child. For some moments I didn’t feel a thing.
I’m still waiting to feel this. I know when I do, it will be colossal, sweeping through me, like the pain of the scald, only not pain at all.
After he’d kissed me, we went on talking, as if nothing at all had happened.
He knows so much. But then, I know nothing.
My head’s bursting now with sketches of other places in the Waste, towns, cities, places where they use hot-air balloons for flight.
A couple of times, people had passed, more or less unnoticed by me. But then some sheep came wandering by, and after them some couples, saying to us shyly, ‘Brur’naa-baa,’ which apparently, (Nemian) means something like ‘Are we disturbing you?’ And since they seemed awkward, and it’s their garden, we got up and walked back to the guest-house.
When I’d climbed up the ladder (no lifters here) to my narrow bed, piled with woollen blankets and scented by sheep, I was frozen.
Since I couldn’t sleep at all, I’ve sat and written this down, and now I think that may be dawn, that light low in the window – or is it?
After I went down the ladder again, I peered over the sort of gallery there, where a famous sheepskull called Praaa burns a big candle all night.
Coming into the guest-house was a crowd of men, mostly young. They were dressed in rather a fantastic way, skin trousers, tunics, boots, jackets with gilded buttons and tassels, and whirling cloaks. They had a lot of weapons, knives and bows, and a couple of rifles.
The Sheepers were baaing and bowing.
Candlelight pranced on wild tanned faces.
I wondered if Nemian knew about this, and if it was going to be useful.
But really, they looked, the newcomers, like accounts I’d heard mumbled in tales in the House. Wandering bands of bandits from the Waste, criminals, who’d stab you as soon as say hallo.
I crept back up the ladder and huddled into bed.
Of course, the House told lies about
the Waste. The Waste isn’t like anything I was told – or not all of it. Or not all of what I’ve seen so far.
Finally I did go to sleep, because I was woken by a riotous row downstairs.
Was it the bandits? What were they doing? Murdering everyone and about to set fire to the guest-house?
I scrambled up and got dressed, but just then one of the Sheeper women came in, bleated, and handed me some milk and a piece of bread.
You can imagine I wanted to ask her what was going on, but I couldn’t speak the baa-language, and pointing anxiously at the floor and straining my eyebrows up and down, only seemed to make her think I thought there were mice in the room. She hurried about looking under the wool rugs, found nothing, and bleating reassuringly, went out all smiles.
Presumably as she’d brought the breakfast and was smiling, nothing too awful was taking place.
I ate. Then washed my hair in what was left of last night’s washing water. I did it for something to do, really. The day was already hot, and I was soon almost dry. Someone knocked.
It was one of the Shepherd’s men. He put a small chunk of wood into my hand. I bleat-thanked him and stood there stupidly. Then he pointed at the wood, and I saw something had been scratched on it. The Sheepers didn’t have paper. Their writing seemed to have something to do with the patterns they make with the beads and things on the sheep …
Anyway, the scratches read, ‘Go with him. Bring everything you want. We’re leaving at once.’
I gulped. ‘From Nemian?’ I asked.
‘N’baa miaan’baa,’ said the man. Or something like that. But nodding.
There wasn’t much now to pack in the sack. This book, of course, the ink pencil I write with, the flask, even though I hadn’t had a chance to refill it. A few bits and pieces.
I was scared. I had to face it now, the Waste still frightens me. Although apparently full of towns and tribes and settlements and even ‘sophisticated’ cities, there were all those deserts and poisonous areas in between.
No time for qualms. I climbed down the ladder after the Sheeper.
In the main indoor room, where usually we’d eaten breakfast, the loud noise was going full tilt. Men were roaring and laughing, and someone was singing, and plates were smashing or just being used very roughly. Through a doorless doorway I caught a rush of tan cloak, flaming with gold fringes.
