It was not the sort of situation he would have preferred. He didn’t feel quite ready to be on his own, because he had not been schooled extensively as a Warrior. Still, he knew a lot about being tough just from what his father and uncles had taught him; how to make a cryo-gun; how to use lances and cutlery; how to practice several secret figlet arts, unfortunately of dubious value here. But he felt sure he would be of genuine value as a slave to Spacebread if only she were around to keep him from being eaten alive for a while.
Suddenly he caught a vague but startling whiff of smoke. Alarm caught him again, and this time held him close to the foliage of the trees, as he moved. He followed the burnt aroma like a trail sandwiched between air currents, contouring along the edge of trees. Finally it began dropping in height precipitously, and then ceased altogether, forcing him to discover that he was at the seashore. A pale blue, dull sea stretched forever along a spit of white beach.
And there, sitting before a meager campfire roasting a fish, was Spacebread, her sword sticking jauntily in the sand. She looked up and waved.
“Come down and rest awhile, Klimmit,’’ she shouted.
He almost forgot to ionize properly and tumbled a few feet, then, supremely happy to see her, buzzed down and plopped on the sand in front of her. As he did, a multitude of silvery-gray butterflies clustered around Spacebread flew off excitedly. Conversation bubbled from Klimmit in an effervescent stream of non-sequential questions. How was she? How had she escaped? What was she going to do now? Spacebread laughed in her warbling feline way and answered each with a skeleton statement, just enough to satisfy him until the next sally. She explained how she had brought Jolita the ghorse out of her long sleep in the Foldover Bag. The figlet swallowed heavily and stared at the beast tethered in the shadows, munching turquoise vegetation. After a bit the figlet quieted, and Spacebread pulled her fish smoldering from the fire.
“Very good,” she commented as she nibbled at the half-cool parts of the meal.
The butterflies returned, calm now, and made a silvery forest around her. She explained that they were iron butterflies, intelligent, and she’d been trying to communicate with them. She’d known butterfly speech once.
How marvelous! thought Klimmit. “Then will you talk to them, and enlist their help? They could scout for us …”
Spacebread sniffed delicately, as though his suggestion was unsavory. “Help? Why do we need help? Never ask for help unless it is really needed, Klimmit BarKloof, and you will not overtax your friends. There will be time to find the butterflies’ speech patterns and wavelength later, after we have done with Basemore.”
The figlet relaxed and settled into the sand beside her. He was really beginning to become attached to her. She knew so much.
“Have you seen any saucers?” she queried in between bites.
“Saucers? You mean aircraft? No, not at all. But I did run into some sort of huge lizard tracks yesterday, with Ralphian footprints beside them. What are they?”
“Lizards?” She paused to spit out a bone. “They must be mounts. Beasts of burden. And the other tracks are without doubt soldiers’. I saw a saucer early This morning skimming over the treetops, searching. Apparently Basemore has sent men out to track us down.”
“But I’ve never seen such craft on Ralph,” the figlet objected.
“You shouldn’t have. This planet isn’t that advanced or that wealthy. They were moderate sized, and very modern. This whole affair is getting more and more suspicious.”
“Are they Basemore’s saucers?” the figlet asked, glancing nervously into the skies.
“That’s my guess. But why he has them is another matter. There is no need for such advanced hardware on Ralph. And I’m sure the old king knows nothing of this development. But the Planetary Power must, and that’s curious. I was not even allowed to use my ship, and it’s a lot more primitive than the saucers. There’s a mystery here, and the deeper I get into it, the less I am sure it has nothing to do with my buckle.”
“What are we going to do?”
Spacebread shook her head slowly, looking out to sea. “I haven’t decided yet. If I continue north in search of the buckle, I tangle again with Lord Dezorn, and possible Basemore. And, since he is the regent, I will be interfering with politics. And I swore not to. Still, it couldn’t be planet-wide politics, no matter how deep I get. I don’t know.”
She tossed the fish skeleton into the waves and lounged back, curling and uncurling her long tail casually. This world was lovely. She watched as a school of large fish made complex patterns of leaps out beyond the breakers.
The figlet stared into the fire. “Maybe we could send word to King Gallwort. That’s what Captain Thracko wanted to do. I’ll bet Gallwort would make quick work of Basemore.”
“Perhaps. But that was the captain’s concern. I am bound not to change the course of this planet’s destiny. But, I still have a duty to find my stolen buckle and bring Dzackle to justice, for that crime is on my hands. A friend was killed because of me. And before it’s over I may have to resort to sword. But I must think.”
Her wide yellow eyes examined the figlet. “In the meantime, it is not good that you should be without protection. I think I have the parts for the gun you mentioned in my pack …”
“A cryo-gun? Have you a ruglort tube? And Number fourteen silicon ducts?”
“Yes.” She laughed. “Yes. Would you like to …”
Suddenly her sword, which stuck up from the sand like a long silver tongue gave a singing metallic noise and pivoted of its own accord, swinging to right angles from its previous stance. Spacebread shot to her feet, the butterflies flurried off.
“Quickly, figlet, hide! The saucer comes!”
As he hurriedly obeyed her, she snatched the sword and shoveled mounds of sand over the fire. Footprints she erased with the tip of her boot, as she retired to the shadowed bushes. She led the ghorse deeper into the wet mossy spaces where the roots of trees made veritable caves. Jolita sniggered. Spacebread patted her across the nose.
Soon, a broad silver disk skittered from behind the fringe of trees bending over the beach and slid slowly along, decelerating until it barely moved, hovering fifty meters above the water. Spacebread hissed angrily and drew further into the shadows. The figlet watched the ship from beneath some sort of root, which made a fibrous cathedral over him. The ship was not very large, perhaps a dozen meters across, but it was like nothing he had seen on the less civilized planets. It was perfectly smooth with no prominences or perceptors wrinkling its surface. It passed along very slowly up the coast and disappeared. They waited in the dank cave of vegetation for perhaps five more minutes, then emerged into the growing heat of mid-morning.
“They should not be searching this far north,” Spacebread said. “I have done nothing that important. Or have I?” She sheathed the long Thorian sword.
“But, Spacebread, your sword … How did it … ?”
“How did it warn us? It is finely attuned to magnetic changes, and that saucer travels by hauling itself up on magnetic fountains. The sword comes in handy for things like that. We will have to beware. I have nothing to defend us from a craft of that sort. “Spacebread mounted and headed Jolita into the labyrinth of dark trees. She took out various supplies, and the figlet sat on Jolita’s rump and tinkered away on his cryo-gun. They made little progress, since they could not travel in the easy, clear places, but were forced to ply a path through the dense growth of equatorial Ralph.
Spacebread was doubtful. A mass of tempting, jostling questions flickered on the edge of being a coherent pattern in her head. As she bobbed in the saddle, she sorted them. Time and again she was led to the conclusion that Basemore wanted her belt buckle for a very important reason. Important enough to send men, murderous men, searching the cosmos for her. And Lord Dezorn was somehow part of the scheme. Still, she could not decide whether to go to the gnorlff’s plantation openly or under cover. May be best to just steal in and see what could be learned.
<
br /> That night, as they camped beneath a spreading violet tree, two saucers floated by. Spacebread’s sword had again warned them in time to dowse the fire and find cover, but it was unnerving. They moved down the small hill they had camped on and cleared out a space in an overgrown thicket where there was more protection.
The figlet directed her attention to the spreading night sky sprinkled with luminous dust. He asked her about the stars and her adventures among them.
“I’m not sure which are which,” she said softly, twiddling a piece of grass along her whiskers. “They vary according to your position in the galaxy. I think that cluster over to the right is the Pleiades. Look how the soft light looks brighter when you shift your gaze to the side of it. There are hundreds of suns there, like a cup filled with milky jewels; it’s bright even in space there. Like constant daytime. I once charted Foldover paths through the Pleiades with Captain McPhreel.” Her eyes drifted dreamily among the stars, settling on one, then flitting through chasms of infinite space to settle on another, even more jewel-like pinprick.
The figlet shifted his unschooled gaze among the stream of suns as though he had never seen stars before. He wished that he knew them as well as Spacebread did.
“How many adventures have you been on, Spacebread?”
Her gentle, wry laughter fluttered in the night. “Only one.”
He rocked up on one elbow, blinking. “But … !”
“There is only one adventure, Klimmit. The one we’re both on. The adventure of being alive. I know what you meant. But you will never have a greater adventure than lying here in the grass with no fire to dim the stars and wondering. You will go out there, like a boat steering on the water, and see hundreds of exciting things and probably know danger. And later, when you can think, there is a surge of good feeling in knowing that you weathered the danger. But just enjoying life where you lie is the only real adventure, despite what you’ve heard.”
They chatted a little more, and soon the twinkling of the starlight drew the figlet’s eyes closed and sewed them tight with moondust, and he dreamed of his Home World and distant, ruined villages. Spacebread covered herself against the dew with her cape, patted Jolita on the snout, and herself slipped into slumber.
HOT DAYS POURED into cool nights. During the days they rode through cloying lanes of blue-green trees, Spacebread hacking through the vines with her flashing sword. Occasionally they ran across iron butterflies, and Spacebread tried talking to them in various dialects, always unsuccessfully. By night they made furrows in choking thickets of rose-colored thorn bushes or beneath huge amethyst-translucent mushrooms, which shielded them from the scrutiny of Ralph’s two moons. They did not see any saucers.
The figlet finished his gun, made a little belt to holster it, and appeared proud and bold bobbing along on Jolita’s rump. He practiced firing the pistol, which could freeze things solid with a beam, at plants and insects. He had a fine sense of adventure. But a few days stretched into a week; and they found themselves wallowing exhaustedly through stenching tropical marshes with thick tarlike mud at the bottom that seemed to wantonly hold Jolita’s hooves back. And there were insects: hungry, swollen glittering flies and drillers, for Spacebread’s blood and the figlet’s juicy sap both. And if the discomfort was bad, the howling sound of their metallic lacework wings in the ear at night was terrifying. Adventure began to wear thin.
They had almost traversed the isthmus and were nearing the mouth of the Sonweck River when they stumbled upon their first settlement. They had purposely gone up the less inhabited coast to avoid detection, and they had certainly seen no sign of search in more than a week, so they allowed themselves to feel happy.
The villagers had short huts woven of heavy marsh grass and roofed with dried mushroom tops. They shone in the sun like frosted glass domes. All the children in the settlement ran out to look at the travelers and their strange mount, giggling and surging as if a tiny blue dam had broken and they had tumbled out. The men were apparently way in the fields, except for a few elderly men playing a game with prickly nuts and shells in the dust, who stoically refused to gawk. But there were lots of short blue women, dressed in colorful swaths of native silk and bright plumes. They formed a circle around the two aliens and stared silently, protectively.
A graying woman stepped through a space in their ranks and greeted them in a clear voice. Spacebread dismounted and bowed.
“Greetings, madam. We are happy to see your village and your people. I have only had tough wild animals to eat lately, and I would trade you useful goods for some food.”
“Alas, milady, the Vortex spins slowly.” (Spacebread recognized the invocation of the local Deity, a proverb of bad luck.) “The regent’s soldiers were here the day before yesterday to collect a Coronation Tax. We have little left. Perhaps some grandl roots and porridge?” The head woman curtsied oddly.
Spacebread glanced grimly at Klimmit. “It is as I feared; Basemore has already begun looting these people whom he supposedly protects.” Then, turning again to the head woman, she held up her hands. “You have nothing to fear from us. We travel a different road from the regent. What you offer sounds generous. I shall accept. Have you need of mirrors and tilling tools?”
All the Ralphians broke into giggles and soft exclamations when they realized she meant no harm. They were shown through the dusty lanes of the village to a common area where stone kettles and bowls simmered and the dim smoke of a dozen fires filtered through the sunbeams spangling the forest floor. Children danced in delight when Spacebread handed out sparkling hand-mirrors and gleaming hoe-heads from the chilly depths of her magical satchel. Jolita placidly endured the wondering prodding and touching of a hundred little blue hands. The figlet hovered protectively off Spacebread’s right side, as if guarding her as she sat cross-legged and ate some porridge and tubers. In all this time they had not yet seen a young or mature male in the village.
The old woman who appeared to lead them steered Spacebread’s queries away from the subject of the village males, although she answered the matter of Basemore’s soldiers. There had been a dozen or so of them on giant thorny reptiles. They demanded a tenth of the village’s harvest, but took much more and told them that they would be back in a month to collect again, for a fort was to be built upcountry and needed provisions. The old woman’s eyes grew misty with sadness as she spoke.
Spacebread filled quickly on the bland gruel and mildly sweet roots. The story of Basemore’s injustice did not digest so well and made her long to be rid of this planet. She had just stored a few roots in her limitless bag and was thanking the people for their kindness when a name rustled through the circle of women like a dry wind through cornstalks.
“Lucidan. Lucidan comes.
Their ranks parted and an ancient woman, her face furrowed with countless years’ erosion, her eyes white as pearls, felt her way through them leaning on a battered broom haft. She stopped dramatically in front of the two aliens and their odd mount, her wizened fingers feeling, sifting the air around them as though feeling a tapestry. Old Lucidan nodded.
“I seek the one who comes from the sky on a ladder of fire,” she said in a voice like willows washing in an ageless stream.
“That is I,” Spacebread responded; and then, when the figlet cast a wondering look at her, whispered, “She means my rocket; she has star-sight.”
Star-sight. A blindness that carried with it the ability to see things no ordinary person could guess, things in the future. Some said it was the influence of the constellations at birth, others, that the gods spoke through the star-sighted.
“You must leave, now,” the old woman said cryptically. “The vandals return.” Lucidan the old turned to the headmistress. “You have not told them why the men are not here? We must tell this white angel everything. I have seen her shape dancing in the Vortex. She is to free us. I take them now to the safe place in the trees. Erase their footprints! The evil soldiers come!”
The silent throng erupted i
nto activity. Spacebread motioned the figlet into silence and bemusedly let the old women take her by the cape and sternly, not missing a step, lead them away from the settlement. Lucidan ensconced them snugly in a thicket that was secretly thatched, roof and floor, and which contained bales and barrels of hidden foodstuffs.
“Our larder,” she whispered in a moth-wing voice. “Hard times have come. Trust me; be silent.”
Spacebread did not know what to think. She knew of star-sight, and vaguely believed the stories, but trusted this woman only with misgivings. What had she meant, Spacebread was to free them? This was not her fight. She was here only to get her buckle back and meet Dzackle once more. Besides, she had promised the Power not to meddle. (Though why it should permit Basemore to was beyond her.)
Then the soldiers came. They wore the familiar golden armor and rode heavy elephantine lizards, toadlike and thorny. As Spacebread watched through the thatched walls of the larder, the captain of the five or so soldiers spoke arrogantly to the headwoman. She insisted that they had seen no one but soldiers in days, and no aliens in ever so long. They searched the village anyway, rummaging from hut to hut, scattering belongings. One of them found a mirror, bright, shiny, new. The captain yelled gruffly at the headwoman, his eyes like coals with anger. She calmly replied that the children had found it in the jungle.
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