She tried to relax.
He continued speaking in her mind as they went.
In some ways it seemed he relished their surprised reactions.
Galfar smiled over his shoulder.
Jess shook her head; mustered a smile for a man that smiled as he walked past, then put her attention back on Galfar.
Galfar shrugged.
Why do I have to be the one? She expected to feel bitter, but by then could muster little more than angry resignation. Much as she kept trying to run from this destiny it kept smacking her in the face and, for the moment, she no longer felt like fighting it. She would go with Galfar and go to this castle and meet this Lord Cheops and see what came next.
“Bey shon te,” Haz ran up from out of the crowd, hand out with something for Galfar. It looked like a little brown stick. Galfar took it, sniffed it, stuck it in his mouth and bit down. Kind of like one would bite on a toothpick or even a blade of grass. An idle thing. Jess had the idea Haz said something like “here” or “here you go” in the local language, and as he said a few more words to his father she realized the whole telepathy thing was probably, indeed, relatively unique among the two of them. Everyone else was certainly speaking with their voices. Quite loudly, in fact. The whole market was a din.
Her attention wandered as they spoke, then she saw Galfar not so subtly nodding his head in her direction, trying to get Haz to be polite. The boy relented, came over and handed her one of the small sticks. She took it. It was about as long as one of her fingers and half as thick. She put it in her mouth and bit as Galfar did, noticing Haz had another in his hand. He stuck that one in his mouth and together the three of them stood there a moment staring at each other, chewing sticks.
It tasted exactly like the coffee drink Galfar gave her back in the hut. Must be what they use to make it, she thought. Chewing the stick directly was much more intense, both in terms of its cinnamon flavor and stimulation. It had a sharp bite and she began to feel a tingle at once and, after chomping almost involuntarily, began getting a tiny little buzz.
Hmpf. It felt nice.
Galfar turned and continued walking. Haz took up pace on his other side, Jess following as she had been, just a little to the rear, chewing on the stick, taking in the sights, absorbing what she could. Since they left the hut earlier that morning Haz had been doing his best to pretend he was annoyed with the whole proposition, being made to come along on this journey, and in his lightest moments rose barely to the level of acting like he simply didn’t care.
It seemed he liked her.
Haz himself was not un-handsome. In fact he would probably grow into a handsome man. But she had a man. And playing games with a boy on another world did not figure into her plans.
She steeled herself for a journey filled with teenage pouting and awkward efforts to impress her.
Galfar was calling her over. At his direction she tried on a few items of clothing presented by the merchant. For the journey Galfar got her a body suit, made of a looser weave of the same white linen as everything else, almost like a jumper. It hugged her close and covered her from ankle to wrist to neck, leaving only head, hands and feet exposed. It felt nice and really breathed. To go over that he got her a shawl that hung like a rain poncho, down to her thighs, also of the same light weave, with a hood she could pull up to cover her head. Good protection from the sun, she assumed, and probably from wind and sand if that were an issue. She had no idea how the terrain would change where they were going, but Galfar seemed satisfied with what he picked.
He got the same for himself and for Haz, with a little arguing from the boy, and in no time the three of them were outfitted for the road. As they stood there in the dirt street, Galfar debating where to go next, Haz grousing in the confining clothes, Jess felt a sudden lightness. A wave of hope, it felt like; of promise, and it washed over her with a welcome rush.
She was fresh from the fever. Scrubbed, all signs of her former life gone, standing in a no-tech village preparing to leave with no idea what the future held and absolutely nothing to do but go along with it. No decision to be made, no way to do anything but go forward. To see what waited at the end of this voyage. In a strange way it felt liberating. Zac was gone. Everyone was gone. But she’d also lost her fear. In fact, standing there in the midst of that temporary euphoria she realized that, since waking from the fever, of the emotions she did feel, terror, for the first time, wasn’t among them.
Something felt suddenly right about being there.
Galfar was walking again. She and Haz followed. They spent the remaining part of the morning collecting supplies in a few sacks with strap-like saddlebags, Haz and Jess carrying them, stuff
ing them with each new thing as Galfar hobbled from booth to booth in the Babylonian style bazaar, meeting and greeting people he knew, making explanations of Jessica, or at least that’s what seemed to be happening as he pointed and spoke, getting nods of understanding, making his purchases and moving on. By the time they were done and had taken time to get something to eat Jess was quite through with shopping, and quite sure they had enough to get them where they were going. The bags were, by then, heavy. Haz, of course, found fresh ways to complain with each new addition.
As they made their way to the end of a row of shops an epiphany that had probably been building manifested for her. From the dog-headed guards that looked like the Egyptian god Anubis, to the talk by Galfar of ancients who brought horses, to the godmakers who used this so-called Codex Amkradus to act as gods, to the people of the bazaar and, more than that, the frequency at which she’d been seeing Egyptian-style influences, from emblems of golden eagles to scarabs to other items that looked like hieroglyphics to the clothes to the people themselves … she had the sudden conviction this world and hers were connected at that distant point in their history. Perhaps the godmakers went to Earth thousands of years ago. Perhaps even the ancients long before that. Earth had advanced. Somehow this world stayed the same. Or regressed. Galfar spoke of the Wars. Maybe this world had once been like the others but was ruined. So many possibilities, but the connection felt stronger than ever.
Galfar led them up to a horse stall. The crowd had thinned at that end of the bazaar and by the time they reached the stall it was just them and the proprietor, a middle-aged man in a loin cloth, sitting on a wooden stool out front. There were three horses in the stall and, just as Jess was noticing this, so did Galfar.
Lucky? she thought. The available horses looked like something out of Goldilocks. One was too small, one was way too big, and the other was just right. So far she’d seen no saddles on any horse being ridden or tied off, so she assumed bareback was it. Which meant no one was getting on the giant one. Its shoulders were well above her head. In fact, based on what she knew of horses this one looked to be, like, twenty hands or something ridiculous. A real record holder.
Haz was pointing and heading for the middle horse. Wait! Jess wanted to argue. She and Haz were about the same size. Whatever happened to chivalry? It apparently did not apply where an insolent teenage boy was concerned, especially one who was already conflicted about her.
The giant.
She looked at the towering beast more closely. It was a boy horse. And how. Handsome, actually, now that she looked, mottled gray and supremely sturdy. But that wasn’t the point. She didn’t care how good her horse looked, or how strong it was. This was a freak of nature. On top of being tall he almost looked like a draft horse, like a big Clydesdale or something, making him even more massive. He wasn’t just tall he was big. Like, easily over a ton. Had to be.
She would have to make the best of this.
The idea of that hit her like a load of bricks.
Talk with a horse?
How cool would that be?
Suddenly this intrigued her. Animals didn’t use words but they could understand simple concepts, couldn’t they?
All at once this whole prospect seemed very interesting and she found herself stepping closer to the goliath.
Jess looked back at the horse, then over her shoulder toward the giant blue Saturn filling the sky. The planet had been there the whole morning, always hanging impossibly over the horizon, and in some ways she’d grown used to its majesty. Now she looked at it anew. Definitely not a moon. They were on the moon. But Galfar or none of them would know that. To them it was a satellite of their world. Their land.
She looked back at the horse, Erius, massive, the mottled grays of his coat taking on an almost bluish hue as she studied him closer, like some kind of magical beast. Fitting he be named after the blue giant in the sky.
The proprietor and Galfar continued their discussion, Haz took his horse the rest of the way out of the stall and began brushing it with his hand and …
Jess turned to face Erius.
The giant horse. Her companion for the journey ahead.
She came all the way to him and put a hand to his flank, deciding to try and give him that impression, that they would be companions and she would treat him well.
Outside the stall she stopped near Haz and his horse. Erius dwarfed them all so she decided to try and turn the tables. Rather than be mad she instead put on a proud face, at having snagged the most impressive one. The beast. Haz chomped his cinnamon stick and smirked.
She shifted her own stick to one side of her mouth and looked up at Erius. If she reached all the way up, on tiptoe, she could leap and grab a big handful of his mane. That was really going to be the only way to get on and it wouldn’t be graceful. She would have to pull and scrabble to get a leg over. Then, she realized, as she stood there looking up at his hugely wide flanks, her legs would be split like a wishbone or something.
And, just as she had that impression, he knelt.
Hah! she smiled to herself with the little success.
It was just a slight bend of the knees but it brought his mighty shoulders down a few feet and suddenly she could see herself leaping aboard.
She did. With both hands wound into the hair of his thick mane she jumped and heaved in the same action and … as smooth as any old Western action-movie mount-up ever was she was leaping, one leg flying over and … foomp! astride his back.
Easy.
Erius rose to his full height and … whoa! suddenly her head was ten feet off the ground. As expected her legs stuck out awkwardly to each side and ahead of her, making her feel like a small child on Daddy’s shoulders, feet dangling in thin air, but for the moment she was king of the world.
She looked down on Haz and grinned. Standing there on the ground, not yet on his own horse, his head barely level with her outstretched heels.
Hah! She chomped her cinnamon stick happily. He tried to ignore her as he got on his horse, even as Galfar led the pony out into the street. All business had been transacted and the group was ready to go. Galfar was no stranger to horses and had surprisin
gly little trouble getting up. Once he was on Jess looked down on both of them, Galfar and Haz, towering in the air, towering over all others down the street—towering over everything, even the roofs of many of the stalls—Erius wide and strong between her legs. She couldn’t resist a little chuckle of happiness.
Feeling as confident as she ever had.
**
Zac was having a huge effect. The Kel weapons had so far been unable to stop him. The ones that hit, hurt, especially the mounted cannons when they connected, but none brought him down. And so he kept coming. Whatever transformation was underway with his greatly challenged Kazerai body, from Icon transitions across space to exposure to vacuums to time elapsed since the conversion to all else, he was definitely getting stronger. On Anitra, during his time with the Dominion, he’d been in battles such as this, bombarded with explosives, plasma, bullets and other weapons, but he expected the Kel were even more powerful. He knew they were. Yet they were having no more effect than had those less advanced weapons.
Another of the Kel tanks bore on him. He thrust away from where he stood, shoving a leg deep in the ground before it packed enough soil to propel him in an arc toward it. Unnn! he put a fist out before him, WHAM! impacted the tank and hooked his arm inside the alien armor, slammed the palm of his other hand on the outside and pulled back with a yank, ripping free a long shred. WHOOOOM! it fired blindly, cutting a hot beam down-field, throwing up a long rut of flaming terrain where he’d just been. He was on it now; felt a few Kel infantry rifles hit his back. He flipped and launched himself over the top of the turret, out of their line of fire.
Star Angel: Rising (Star Angel Book 4) Page 21
