“All right,” I said out loud. “I’ll do it.”
6
Without realizing it, I had acquired preconceptions about the lifestyle of the Sharith. Most of them, as usually happens, were wrong.
I had expected an organization like the military groups of which Ricardo had been a member—the Marines during World War II, and the Marine Reserves for many years afterward. The only similarity I could find, during the week I spent learning about the Sharith, was the chain-of-command principal, and the requirement that on-duty Riders always wear their tan, desert-ready uniforms.
The Riders weren’t the only people who were given rank and assigned duties. The distribution of tasks was roughly like this:
The Riders were responsible for city security, surveillance, and “assessment of tribute.” Certain unpleasant jobs—like cleaning the mire from the fine-mesh filters that covered the bath-house drains—were routinely assigned as punishment details.
The women of Thagorn handled the daily maintenance, including cooking, cleaning, and laundry. Wives did these chores for their own households, sometimes assisted by their youngest children or by the kids of a larger family. The older girls and unmarried women did the same things for the unmarried men.
The children were obligated to attend a school conducted by most of the adults on a rotation basis. It taught reading and writing, sewing and building skills, and the all-important history of the Sharith. Girls twelve and younger, and all boys up to age sixteen, worked in the grainfields in their off hours, and helped wherever they were needed.
There was a special category of children called “cubs.” These were boys thirteen to sixteen who had returned from the Valley of the Sha’um with two-year-old cats, after spending a year, living on their own, in that valley. Their off-school time was spent in training with the Riders and in developing precision coordination with their sha’um.
Most surprising of all, to me, was the large number of men who were not Riders—about a third of the adult males. These men were the farmers, the masons, the carpenters, the millers. They were as well trained in fighting skills as any of the Riders. They spent part of their time as guards on the wall and could, if necessary, be carried into battle as second riders on sha’um.
They were treated with no less respect than the Riders. At age twelve, every boy had to make the choice of whether to risk a trip to the Valley of the Sha’um. If he stayed, he learned some other necessary skill, and he was never faulted for his choice. It went without saying that a boy who didn’t want to go would have less chance of survival.
As it was, a fourth of the boys who went to the Valley never returned. I was sure that those losses had contributed to the declining size of the settlement.
The Riders were honored by everyone in Thagorn as the symbol and purpose of the Sharith. But men who did not ride were respected as contributors of important support functions.
A series of ranks existed within each group of the Sharith. The Riders were organized into four companies. Each company had a leader and sub-leaders, though the only title of rank belonged to the Lieutenant. Among the married women, rank corresponded, more or less, to the ranks of their husbands. Age was the general criterion for rank among the unmarried women, and among the children.
Dharak’s wife, Shola, settled disagreements among wives, unmarried women, and older girls, in the same way that Dharak held authority over the men. But his was the ultimate authority in every case. Even children who felt they had been given unjust punishment could appeal to him for an objective decision. He, and previous Lieutenants, had discouraged abuse of these rights of appeal by upholding all prior judgments unless a bias was obvious and the penalty was grossly unfair.
This is not to say that all was peace and order in Thagorn. By no means. The Sharith had their share of wild kids and irresponsible adults. There was just an organized, on-the-spot way of dealing with problems.
Which brings me around to Thymas.
Thymas was the youngest of Dharak’s and Shola’s four children, and he had been conceived almost at the end of Shola’s fertility—she had been forty-two, Dharak forty-five, when the boy was born. Of the other three, two were daughters, both of them married and with their own children now. The fourth had been a boy. He had never returned from the Valley of the Sha’um.
I spent a lot of time talking with Dharak during that week, and I began to understand Thymas better. Sharith custom did not provide for the son of the Lieutenant necessarily to replace his father. But from the time he could talk, Thymas had been determined to make it so in his case. He had worked and trained hard, demanding a great deal of himself, his sha’um and anyone who was under his authority. At thirteen, he had taken the leadership position among the cubs—an unusual achievement—and held it for three years.
Dharak loved the boy, but thought him too much of a perfectionist. Thymas had won respect among the Riders, but not many friends. Still, he had done nothing wrong, so Dharak had given him the red sash of a future Lieutenant at the ceremony when he and three other sixteen-year-olds had been accepted into the Riders.
Thymas stayed out of my way throughout the week I spent in Thagorn, and I was just as glad. I joined the combat exercises, and worked myself to exhaustion. I was pleased that Markasset’s training compared very well with the skills shown by the Sharith, but I knew that if Thymas had participated, the competition would have been much less friendly. I heard, from some of the men, that he was tough and fast, full of tricks in wrestling or sword work.
It’s a good thing he backed down from that fight, I thought then. He wouldn’t have been the easy opponent I expected. There’s going to have to be a showdown before that ceremony. But I won’t worry until it happens.
Keeshah and I rode on patrols, watched the cubs training, and occasionally accepted private lessons in mounted combat techniques, field procedures and orders, and other things a Rider learned as soon as he had a sha’um. Keeshah seemed to enjoy the training, too; he felt at home in Thagorn.
Two evenings of that week, I tried to get drunk with Bareff and Liden. The first occasion had been initiated by Bareff, who had grabbed a handful of the front of my tunic and pulled me nose-to-nose with his craggy face.
“When do I get some answers about what the filth has been going on?”
“Would right now be too soon?”
“Right now would be just fine,” he said, and let me go. “Liden’s got the barut poured.”
Barut was a Gandalaran liquor, aromatic and powerful. Thanasset had introduced me to it. Along with water, the Fa’aldu produced it in their refreshment houses and charged a high price for it.
Bareff and Liden both lived in one of the barracks buildings with several other bachelors. There were ten buildings, each built to provide private-room accommodations for forty men. Three of the barracks were still in use as bachelor’s quarters, with fifteen to twenty men in each one, so that the men had plenty of room to spread out.
Bareff had obtained permission to tear down a wall and build an interior connecting door so that, instead of one good-sized room, he had a huge parlor and an attached bedroom. There was a dining area in the center of the building, where he took his meals with the other residents. But he and Liden usually spent their evenings in Bareff’s living room, playing mondea.
I joined them that evening. The explanations were quickly made, since I had no reason to tell them of Markasset’s “memory loss.” They didn’t know that I had been on the caravan, under a different alias, before they attacked it. So the story they heard was of a Supervisor’s son who wasn’t sure how he’d be greeted in Thagorn, as the only non-Sharith Rider in Gandalara. Bareff and Liden were suitably impressed, when I told them that Keeshah had allowed me to ride with them.
“I doubt that Poltar would have stood for it,” Bareff said.
Liden shook his head. “I can’t see how it would be, living off by yourself with no other Riders”.
“Let’s just say I’m glad to be here now,” I said, and li
fted my glass of barut. “Health.”
“And wisdom,” they echoed. We drained the tiny glasses, then Bareff broke out the mondeana, the dice-like playing pieces of the game.
There were six mondeana, cubes cut from some hard wood, with different shapes carved into each two-inch-square side. The carvings had been stained or dyed with different colors to emphasize their detail, and though the surfaces showed signs of wear, the colors were still bright. The figures were men, animals, birds, trees, an image of an oat-like grain, and a symbol I had seen on the map Thanasset had given me to guide me to Thagorn. The symbol represented a Refreshment House.
The rules of the game were complex and challenging, and I understood why Markasset had been fascinated by it. Each of the thirty-six figures had a different rank, and the total score of a throw depended not only on which sides turned up, but where they were positioned. The object of the game was not to achieve the highest score, but an exact one. The player had many choices to make, and there was at least as much skill as luck involved in winning a game.
I was surprised that Bareff and Liden didn’t insist on betting. They explained, with elaborate modesty, that they wouldn’t allow me to lose my money to a pair of pros.
My first impulse was to let Markasset take over as we played, thinking his experience with the game would make for faster, surer playing. Then I recalled his record of losses in Worfit’s gaming houses, and decided I’d struggle through on my own. I had a good command of the rules, thanks to Markasset’s memory, but I tried to learn the game’s strategy from ground zero. By the end of the evening, I was winning an occasional round.
I’ve said that I tried to get drunk. Along about the fifth round of barut, I was feeling pleasantly relaxed and detached from the world. I accepted another glass to keep the high going, but found that I couldn’t make myself drink it. Something inside was saying: This is not good for you. Don’t do it.
I realized, at once, that this was another manifestation of the Gandalaran “inner awareness.”
Gandalarans are highly tuned to their own body needs and rhythms. I always knew, within minutes, what time of day it was, and when the sun or moon would rise or set. Hural, the four-fingered man Dharak and I had questioned, had known that he would die, shortly, of his consumptive cough.
On the ride from Raithskar to Thagorn, I had begun to see a connection between inner awareness and the All-Mind. According to the explanation Thanasset had given me, all Gandalarans were linked, at least subconsciously, with all the experiences of thousands of years of other Gandalarans. It seemed to me that there might be an automatic search-and-report hookup. The body says to the All-Mind: I feel this way, or, Light and temperature are like this. The All-Mind then locates all identical feelings among its members and tabulates the events subsequent to the conditions described by the body. It comes up with: You will hate yourself in the morning if you drink another glass of barut, or, In two hours and six minutes, it will be noon. It’s naming probabilities based on similar experiences. Given a large enough sample, it’s most likely right, nearly all the time.
The inner awareness seemed to be a pretty good deal, in general. But it was a handicap for me, whenever I returned to the unanswerable puzzle about where Gandalara was located. It assured a viewpoint that was incontrovertibly subjective.
I knew that there was no place like Gandalara on the Earth as I had known it. I might have conceded the possibility of an undiscovered salt desert like the Kapiral, but you could never convince me that, even with the Earth’s extensive cloud cover, our satellite surveillance could have missed the Great Wall.
The differences were acceptable. It was the similarities that caused me problems. I could tell by the movement of light across the cloud cover at night that this world had only one moon. There were human-like creatures and cat-like creatures, birds and insects and apes—all not quite the same as I had known them. How was it possible that such similar inhabitants had evolved on two different worlds?
I couldn’t tell for sure without standing a human next to a Gandalaran, but I thought these people were about the same size as humans—perhaps a little shorter, on the average. Mostly, that judgment was based on the comparative size of the sha’um. Their musculature was thicker and more dense than that of the tiger, which the sha’um resembled in shape. That fitted in with what I knew of the square-cube law, that the mass of a thing increases cubically as the size is squared. The bigger the cat, the more need for muscle.
There was a further coincidence in the time-keeping methods of my two worlds. The Gandalaran year had three hundred and sixty-five days; it was composed of thirteen “moons” and a “year day”—which Raithskar celebrated as Commemoration Day. I would have regarded that as tentative proof that I was, indeed, still on Earth—except for the existence of inner awareness.
I knew how long a day was, but there was no way to measure it against Ricardo’s subjective standards. The days and nights might be fifteen Earth hours long, or only three. How could I tell? And regarding this world’s single moon—I had never seen it. The cloud cover had broken only once at night. I had seen a sky with no familiar constellations, but I hadn’t seen the moon. Markasset didn’t know what the phases of his moon looked like.
Gandalarans did have a concept of objects in the sky which gave off light, but their actual words for “sun” and “moon” meant “daylight” and “nightlight.” I had developed the habit of translating automatically into my own, more familiar, terms.
I had begun doing that for distances, as well. Thanasset’s map had shown distances in “days”—a day was the distance a man could walk in one day, allowing adequate time for food and rest. I computed a day to be twelve hours of walking at an average of two and a half miles per hour, or thirty miles.
I suppose it would have been easier, in the long run, if I had just learned to use Markasset’s terminology. But Ricardo Carillo, a reasonably intelligent man who had learned to speak several languages with great fluency, had readied age of sixty, using the same set of measurements all his Through my frequent trips to Europe for conferences, and a conversion campaign in the United States, I had learned to live with metric measurements—but I had always needed to think about them in the terms of the English system. Markasset’s memory was with me now, but Ricardo was doing most of the thinking.
What I thought, when I got that glass of barut close enough to drink, was: I can still drink this, and suffer the consequences. But why should I?
I put the glass down, shaking my head, and Bareff poured it back into the glass pitcher and put the stopper in. “Yeah, I’ve had enough, too,’ he said.
We played mondea for another hour or so, then I said good night and went to my own room, which was located in the same barracks. Dharak had wanted me to stay at his house, but I had refused as gently as possible, saying that I wasn’t officially the Captain until after the ceremony. I wanted to be part of the group for a while.
I discovered that I liked being part of the group. As the day approached when I would be named Captain, my resistance began to increase again.
It had all sounded so simple when I had talked with Dharak. Take a title. Don’t do anything with it. Whatever I was moved by “fate” to do, even if turned out to be doing nothing, that would be the right thing to do.
There had to be a catch. I knew it couldn’t have been set up deliberately by Dharak. It was clear that he believed everything he had said to me. But the feeling persisted—there was a catch.
It was to escape that feeling that I suggested another session of mondea on the night before the ceremony. Privately, I had resolved to ignore my inner awareness and get blotto. It was an impulse as rare in Ricardo as it had been in Markasset, and it worried me. As I sipped my third glass of barut, it seemed to me that this kind of make-merry-now philosophy had been the basis for bachelor’s parties in Ricardo’s world. While I regarded that as a deep truth in my fuzzy state of mind, I failed to see the parallel until the fatal sixth glass was be
ing poured.
Then it hit me.
Of course there was a catch.
I was the catch.
No matter what I said I wanted, no matter that nothing would be demanded of me—I couldn’t go through that ceremony without being prepared to accept the responsibilities it conferred. I was none too sure what they were, or might be in the future, but I knew that if I didn’t commit myself to them, totally and honestly, I would be doing the very thing Thymas had accused me of—betraying the Sharith.
With a sigh of resignation, I handed my filled glass back to Bareff. “I’d better quit now,” I told him. “I’ll need to be sharp for the ceremony tomorrow.”
7
In the morning, I called Keeshah, and we ran up into the hills at the back of the valley. The ceremony had been scheduled for early afternoon, and I wanted some time alone before facing Dharak at lunchtime.
This slope, and the heavily wooded areas at the sides of the valley, were the hunting grounds of the sha’um. The Sharith raised herds of domestic glith, but were careful to repopulate the wild herds, when necessary. The sha’um hunted their own food, which kept them in shape and maintained their sense of freedom. Not that they were captive in any sense—they remained in Thagorn because their riders were here, and they wanted to be with them.
Keeshah picked his way carefully through the tangled brush of the hillside. Several times, his presence startled small groups of glith from their grazing. The glith were goat-sized animals with thin, graceful legs, and bilateral horns that came straight up from their skulls, then twisted slightly to point forward.
Their fur was dark and long. In the domestic herds, the fur was salvaged when the skins of slaughtered animals were tanned. It was too fine and smooth to be woven into yarn, but it served as filling for the sleeping mats.
Except when we had trained together, I had left Keeshah pretty much to himself. Any fears I’d had about his being accepted by the other sha’um had vanished immediately. There was plenty of room in the valley, and plenty of food. And the other traditional source of conflict between male cats wasn’t a problem.
The Glass of Dyskornis Page 6
