I waited. At last the man closest to my feet put out a trembling hand and touched my leg.
“I will try, Captain. What must I do?”
A chorus of voices rose then, asking the same question. I took a deep breath and hoped my relief wasn’t visible in my face.
“Tarani has told me that all her healing skills have availed nothing against your illness,” I said, “but I think they can help you now. Her gift reaches into the part of your mind you never think about using, a part that does things automatically most of the time. She lets that powerful part of your mind free to do its work more quickly, and part of its work is healing damaged areas of the body.
“She could not help you before now because there was no real damage to be healed. It’s that same part of your mind, bonded to the sick sha’um, that is causing the symptoms you are feeling. Now that you know the truth of what has been happening, I believe that Tarani’s healing sleep will stimulate that hidden mind to a different activity. Because you understand, and you are afraid—for yourself, and your sha’um—in the healing sleep, your healing mind will call out and shock the sha’um into a thinking bond again, and they will understand what you want them to do.
“Do you understand—the risks as well as the possible gains?”
Many men nodded, a few calling out affirmatives.
“Any man who does not want to do this may decline without embarrassment,” I said sincerely. “I know how strange this must seem to you, and how frightening is the idea of the totally broken bond. Anyone who wishes to leave, raise your arm and someone will help you to your home.”
Not a single arm came up from the pallets, and I felt a swelling pride in the men, in their faith in me, and—momentarily—in my own strength. I was more afraid than they were because, in spite of their willingness to believe me, they still did not understand the stakes in the same way I did. That I could recognize their ignorance, and take advantage of it, seemed to be exactly the opposite of what I had felt about Keeshah in the Chizan passage. Yet it was only time, now, that kept them ignorant. Their understanding had begun, and would grow as we proceeded with the plan. I was willing to take advantage of their obedience on those terms.
I turned to the standing crowd and said: “Please leave the Hall now, and prepare provisions for the journey. Thymas, will you, Bareff, and Shola figure out how many can go, and make a list of the women, in priority order? This may not work for all the Riders, and any who remain ill or—” I could not say it, could not propose the horror of a fully broken bond.
“When it is over,” Thymas said, with full understanding of my omission, “we will see how much room there is.” Turning suddenly formal, he offered me his hand. “Captain, thank you.”
I took it, and pressed it hard. “Thank me when its over,” I said.
The people began to file out of the half-open door, and I moved among the men, speaking to the ones I knew best, trying to be encouraging. When the Hall was nearly empty of healthy Sharith, I looked up to see a shock of white hair near the doorway. Shola and Dharak had been near the door, but not the first ones out—and so had been pressed back out of the flow of people. It was now nearly possible for them to leave.
“Shola, wait,” I said, standing up and hurrying over to them. When I got close enough to see her face, the only thing I could do was gather her into my arms and hold her. She sank against me briefly, and shook with the dry gasps that served the Gandalarans as weeping. After a moment, she let me push her away and turn her face toward the light. I tried to smile, but found that I could not. “I’m sorry this has been so hard for you, Shola,” I said.
“You are not at fault, Captain,” she replied. “It is only that this—” She gestured toward the pallets. “This has convinced me that Dharak is—will not—”
“Thymas said as much to me,” I admitted, looking over her shoulder to the man who merely stood where he had been when Shola’s hand had left his arm. “May I speak to him?”
“Of course,” she said, and stepped away.
I put my hands on the old man’s shoulders and pulled him closer to the doorway, where the lamplight and the gray nightglow combined to illuminate his face. “Dharak, it is Rikardon. Please listen to me, try to hear and understand what I am saying. Tarani and I are going to try to help the men who have lost their sha’um get them back. We think it’s possible, Dharak. It might help you too. But what Tarani does can only be done with the person’s consent—his full agreement.
“Dharak,” I continued in a soft voice, very much aware of Shola standing just behind me, “I know that you don’t have full control of yourself right now. But I will accept anything, any voluntary movement, as a signal that you can give consent to this. If you can give me some sign of consent, I feel sure that this will help you and Doral too. Please, my friend, you don’t need to take the effort to speak. Raise your hand, nod your head, blink your eyes twice quickly. Dharak, Lieutenant, my good friend—let us help you.”
I waited, holding my breath and watching Dharak’s face. Though deeply lined, it was passive now, its blankness more terrible than the fiercest frown.
I waited.
Something happened—an eye movement. The eyelids closed, and opened again, and Dharak’s dark eyes were no longer unfocused. They were looking at me, seeing me, studying me—it was as if Dharak had never seen me before. The old man’s face almost had a real expression on it, one I could not identify because it was only a fleeting impression.
The expression faded, the eyes went vacant.
After a few more seconds, Shola and I let out our held breath almost simultaneously. The second eyeblink never happened.
I stepped away from the old Lieutenant, and Shola moved into my place, taking his arm in her hand.
“Thank you for trying, Captain,” she said. “I hope your effort is successful.” She led Dharak out of the Hall.
Tarani began the odd, tuneless humming that was part and parcel of her healing skill. Her power of compulsion could affect the autonomous nervous system of Gandalarans. Her mindgift could affect the conscious mind too—it was the conscious mind she tricked when she cast her illusions. The healing gift combined those two powers, lulling the conscious mind into peace and comfort and withdrawal, and stimulating the autonomous body functions to accelerate their healing processes.
Neither areas, of course, equated to the subconscious mind. I was guessing that it was connected, though. After some discussion, Tarani and I had agreed on a technique. She would call the men into a trance state just short of the deep sleep required of self-healing, then would direct them to do as I instructed. I was hoping that the result would be something close to true hypnosis, so that the conscious minds of the men would touch and control the subconscious link with the sha’um.
I had to force myself to keep still as Tarani’s voice filled the cavernous room with low-pitched echoes. Her power affected me only if I wished it, but I had always found it so pleasant that now I felt a tugging from my own subconscious, a latent wish for the peaceful state her voice invited. In other circumstances, I would move and distract myself while she worked. But I had to be here, and any movement might distract the Riders and make her job more difficult. So I sat still upon the edge of the big center marble block, willing myself to stay awake.
Tarani moved, walking soundlessly along the rows of pallets, her touch helping to focus their minds and complete the enhancement. She came to me quietly and said: “I believe they are ready.” She drew me into the center of the pallet grouping again, and spoke in a clear, vibrant voice.
“Of your own will have you come to this place, between sleeping and waking. You have given consent to be guided by Rikardon, your Captain. As he speaks now, listen and obey.” She stepped aside, with a small, unconscious bowing movement.
I began to talk quietly. My voice, though deeper in pitch than Tarani’s, seemed to echo harshly in comparison to Tarani’s rich tones. “Reach out to the sha’um whose mind you have touched,” I directe
d. “You will find him as an animal, an unthinking being, a presence whose thoughts are so limited that you have been unable to detect them since he left for the Valley. Find that presence, follow it, touch your sha’um again. Wake him and touch him fully again. When you find him, when you can speak to him, let him see your fear and your need, and tell him that he must do this: Find the high ground and sleep. We will be together soon. Repeat this message: Find the high ground and sleep. We will be together soon.”
I walked among the pallets, repeating that statement over and over again, for about fifteen minutes. There was no visible change in the men during that time—no one stirred, no one spoke. Without exception, they lay with their eyes closed, breathing deeply as if asleep.
At last I stopped, and shrugged to Tarani. She came into the center again, and her voice rolled out softly. “You have done what was agreed,” she said. “Wake now, slowly. Remember all that happened, and awaken with new strength.”
As one, the men moved in small ways—stretching, rubbing their eyes, yawning. They blinked and stared upward, and I could not stand the suspense. I knelt down beside Liden, the Sharith who had been with Bareff at our first encounter, and who had also become a close friend. I had last seen Liden just after his sha’um had left him. He had been lying face-down in the main road through Thagorn, having drunk himself into a stupor in defiance of his self-preserving “inner awareness.”
Now Liden lay on his back, staring at the ceiling. He looked at me when I touched his arm. He blinked, and then he grinned.
“Poltar is back, Captain. I reached him. Even now, he is climbing into the hills on the side of the Valley farthest from the Well of Darkness.” He rolled up to brace himself on one elbow, and pressed my shoulder with his other hand. “And I am well, Captain. The debt I owe you can never be paid.”
I put my hand over his and pressed it. The stress had been so intense, and the relief was so sudden, that I felt giddy. I grinned at the snaggle-toothed man and said: “A game of mondea, double or nothing?”
He blinked at me, then slapped my shoulder and burst out laughing. It seemed to be a cue of some sort. All around me, men started to talk and laugh and sit up. After a confused and tumultuous few minutes, it became clear that Tarani’s power and the Riders’ courage had worked a miracle. Every single one of them had recovered their bond—even the Riders whose sha’um were in the Valley during their natural cycle.
Tarani and I joined in the wild, slightly frantic laughter. Some of the other Sharith had lingered outside. When they heard the happy noise, they rushed in and became part of it. I saw Bareff talking to Liden, and their roar of laughter told me that Liden had quoted my first remark to him. I looked around for Thymas, but did not see him.
He showed up later, when the rush of joy had settled into the need for action, and everyone was leaving the Hall.
“The provisions and the chosen Sharith are ready, Captain,” he said. “We leave at your command.”
18
One hundred and forty-four people and seventy-four sha’um left Thagorn that night, traveling north. Koshah and Yoshah had offered, tentatively, to let someone ride, but I had seen too much uncertainty in their mindvoices to allow it. They were large enough by now, certainly, to carry smallish people, but they knew through me that a sha’um normally carried only the person to whom he or she was bonded. Keeshah had carried Ligor alone to Chizan and back, but that, too, had been a service to me. The cubs made their offer because they sensed my need to take as many people as possible, and I could sense their relief when I turned it down.
We left in the first hours after midnight, Keeshah and Yayshah and the cubs leading. I felt that the timing was fortunate. Guided by the more sensitive sight and smell of the sha’um even through the darkest part of the night, we would reach the Valley area at midmorning, and have the daylight hours to accomplish whatever we could. I was grateful, too, that the night diminished the visual impact of the volcanic cloud. It could still be detected as an area of the sky blacker than the moon-grayed cloud cover, but its presence was not as overwhelming as it would have been had we ridden toward it in daylight.
In the darkness, then, my mind was free enough to plan, instead of merely worry. By the time dawn streaked through the cloud cover to our right, I had formulated several strategies for approaching the Valley sha’um, and I called a halt. We all needed time to rest and eat.
Dawn stopped just this side of the Korchi mountain range. The beautiful, streaking shades of orange and red simply vanished at the edge of the blackness, which was now overhead as well as ahead of us. We ate a nervous meal as absolute darkness transformed into a weird twilight, and in the half hour or so we rested, our clothes collected a fine, dark dust.
Before we had left Thagorn, Thymas had organized all of us into several smaller groups, each with an active Rider for its leader. While we were eating, I called a meeting of those leaders, and I went into more detail about the cloud and what it was doing.
The Valley of the Sha’um was not a true valley, but merely a triangular area bounded by the Morkadahls on the west and the northern mountains which, by Gandalaran convention, were considered to be part of the Great Wall. Its mountain borders provided several cascading streams and, I guessed, an underground water table of considerable size, judging from the quantity of plant life supported in the area. Ordinarily, it was a fortunate place, ideally suited for the support of the large cats and all the other biological entities that supported them and their food chain.
Now, however, those same mountain borders were collecting and bouncing back the ash and gas expelled by the volcano, so that the Valley area would soon be totally unlivable. The poisonous gases would disperse eventually, now that they had been freed of the relatively confined space inside the Well of Darkness. But the ash would settle, and destroy.
I had explained this once to the Sharith, and they had believed me. Hearing it again while the powdery stuff was darkening their blondish headfur, accumulating on their sleeves, and settling on their food as they ate it, they began to really understand, and their fear mounted.
We had three objectives. One, call the bonded sha’um out of the Valley. Two, create bonds with as many other sha’um as we had people, and convince those sha’um to leave the Valley. Three, bring as many others out as possible.
The “priority order” of these objectives was also an advancing degree of personal danger, but the Sharith had passed the point of any hesitation. The group leaders stood up, a few of them brushing the ash from their sleeves in disgust, and departed to deliver the same instructions to their groups. Thymas paused to clap me on the shoulder, then left for his own group.
It was only to Tarani, who had stayed beside me silently throughout the briefing, that I could voice my doubts.
“They won’t all come,” I said.
“The Sharith know that,” she said.
“No matter how many are saved, they’ll never forget how many they lose,” I said. “Neither will I.”
“Yet each one saved, my love,” Tarani said, “will be remembered with joy, and in tribute to you.” She put her arm around my neck and pressed her cheek to mine, briefly and warmly, then rocked back to look directly into my eyes.
“You have not said it, Rikardon, but I cannot believe that you have not thought, as I am thinking, that this may be our destiny. Can it be that the safety of the sha’um, not the Ra’ira, is the goal to which we have been driven these past days?”
I shrugged. “The thought has crossed my mind,” I said. “But there’s only one way to tell, isn’t there?”
She returned my smile, and even laughed a little. “Yes—as always, we will not see the next task until this one is done.” She stood up, and offered me both her hands. “Shall we begin?”
Nearly single file, the sha’um moved carefully through the Morkadahl foothills, as high as they could get without laboring for breath. The terrain was rocky and treacherous, far above the edge of the greenery that marked the bounda
ry of the Valley. Both sha’um and Sharith wore dampened headscarves wrapped over nose and mouth, but still the air we breathed carried an ominous, unhealthy odor.
When we had formed a ragged line through the hills above what I judged to be the western edge of the Valley’s triangle, I raised my arm; signal shouts ran down the column, and our sha’um turned eastward and began to pick their way carefully, heading downslope. We moved through a thickening twilight, drifting ash creating a dark haze under a darkened sky. When I heard coughing start, and felt the tickle in my own throat, I signaled a halt, and the sha’um backed up to a position where breathing was possible, if not comfortable. The sha’um were both advantaged and disadvantaged by their size. On the one hand, the quantity of air they breathed assured a greater percentage of useful air with every breath, which meant that they might be able to go more deeply into the smog than Gandalarans could manage. On the other hand, they were taking a greater absolute quantity of pollutants into their bodies with every breath.
“Now,” I called. “Riders, summon your sha’um!”
We all dismounted. Most of us found secure places within the line, where we would neither hamper the movement of the sha’um nor be likely to lose our footing and slip noisily at a crucial moment. Two groups of people moved forward, about thirty of the first Riders who had been ill, then a much smaller group of women—wives—of those Riders. A third group formed, but did not move forward yet. These were the other women, wives of the Riders whose sha’um had brought us here. I had insisted that the women come only voluntarily, and a few had been too afraid—with what consequence to their marriages, only time would tell. Still others had been very pregnant, so that the trip itself was a danger the Riders would not allow.
Thirty or so men, and no more than ten women, faced the huge shapes that we now spotted moving slowly uphill through the haze.
The men walked forward to meet their sha’um, and I felt my heart go out to them for their gladness and their distress. The beautiful cats, gray or tan or some combination, were uniformly sooty, their eyes sunken, their bodies thin, their steps uncertain. I saw Liden reach up to Poltar’s neck, hesitate, then wrap his arms around the cat in a way that would support, rather than lean on, him.
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