Faro still slept near her, and she was glad of that. But she was feeling increasingly alone. She caught herself wondering what it would be like to spend the night with a man. To wake and find him beside her. To be the object of his passion. Even a demon. She knew that if she asked Ware to join her, he would gladly do so.
No! She had sworn to pay him in silver if not in gold, and she intended to hold true to that. This mission was really a third way to pay him, doing a service for the Queen. Once that service was done, Xylina would be free not only of her monetary debt, but of the dread harassment that had ruined her family. She knew her proper course.
Still, she almost wished she could put on paw-mittens and pretend to be from the Animal Kingdom, just for one hour. Just to see what it was like. Just in case she was missing anything. But of course that was impossible.
Ware, however, was possible.
She banished that thought and focused on sleep. Faro was right: she had more important concerns than such foolishness.
A new challenge was waiting for them on the other side of the great red-earth wilderness. Ware confessed that he was not familiar with the peoples beyond Pacha lands, although he thought he would probably know their tongue, since he was a student of languages. The Pacha themselves were no more help than the demon. At first, when asked about those who dwelled on their border, they could only shrug and say, “we do not know these people.” Then, as the expedition drew nearer to the border, the tribes would say, “they close themselves behind their thorn-wall, they do not travel, they do not trade, we do not go there. We call them the Hates-All-People.”
Not a lot of information, and it was difficult to tell if the Pacha had ever reallytried to make contact with this new nation. Nor was it certain what some of their primitive descriptions of the “Hates-All-People” meant. Xylina had been certain from the moment that she heard those words that the reference to a “thorn-wall” was the barbarians’ attempt to describe the kind of fortified border she had expected on the Mazonite side of the Pacha lands. Certainly a border-wall with spikes to prevent climbing would answer the description of a “thorn-wall.” But when at last they approached this “thorn-wall,” she saw for herself that the Pacha had not been descriptive, but literal.
The Thorn-Wall began as a shadow on the horizon, a gray mist that neither she nor those with her could see over or past. Xylina stared at it in puzzlement as they continued their journey, for it would not resolve itself into anything more substantial, even though they drew nearer to it with every footfall. It was something like a dark gray fog-bank looming up ahead of them, yet it could not be fog, for it did not move or dissipate despite the heat of the sun or the movement of the wind. It did, however, seem to grow taller; she had first judged it to be about twenty or thirty cubits in height, but the nearer they approached it, the taller it seemed. She felt a stirring of cold fear in her throat as she took in how large it was-how could anyone build something so verytall ? It must have taken hundreds of years to complete it!
Then, finally, as her eyes were struggling to make sense of this senseless, formless structure, Faro cursed. “By the gods! Those red savages wereright ! Itis a wall of thorns! Who are these people, to use plants to guard their borders for them?”
She blinked, and suddenly what had been making no sense to her eyes became clear. The “structure” was no structure at all, but a massive hedge of thorny branches, so tightly interwoven that it must be pitch-black a few paces deep within. What her puzzled eyes had taken for tendrils of mist were in reality twining branches.
The road led up to a hole in this hedge, and there seemed to be no viable alternate routes. If they were to pass into the next realm, it must be via this passageway or none at all. There was no other way through, not that she could see, and to leave the road was to court death from lack of water. The Thorn-Wall stretched from horizon to horizon; it was either go on, or go back-or, she suddenly realized, try to make a home among the Pacha.
That might not be too terrible, really. She could certainly keep them happy with nightly drinking-bouts and occasional feasts of magic meat! But she knew, really, that such a thing was not possible-not without losing whatever small honor she still possessed. She must go on; the Pacha had not said that these people were hostile, only that they avoided contact. They could be friendly; they could simply be frightened of the Pacha. People who hid behind a wall of thorns could be gentle and unwarlike.
She tried not to show her trepidation as the column approached the Thorn-Wall; she could well imagine why the Pacha had never bothered to attempt to traverse the tunnel leading into the heart of the wall. To them, worshipers of the sun as she had learned them to be, it would have been a descent into a nightmare-hell of their worst fears, to dive down into this dark hole with only the hope of light on the other side. Their tales of the afterlife for evil-doers depicted a dark and unending void. Surely this tunnel must seem a tunnel to that terrible afterlife to them.
She halted the men just outside of the passageway, and considered it, and the wall. The Wall itself seemed to be composed of millions of plants rather than just one; each one reaching upward to the sun, tangled with its neighbors until there was no saying where one began and the next ended. The branches ranged from limbs the thickness of a man to twigs slimmer than her little finger; the thorns from fearsome projections as long as a horse to mere threads. All ended in points that were probably as sharp as they looked; she did not care to test them herself. They could be envenomed; she had no way of knowing. The branches were covered with tiny round leaves, a dusty gray-green in color, thick and waxy, and about as large as her thumb. That was what had given the mist-like quality to the Wall when they were still some distance from it.
She stared upwards at the Thorn-Wall, deep in thought, trying to imagine who or what had grown this prodigy. For surely nothing like this could have occurred without a controlling mind behind it! It was too deliberate, too regular, and too purposeful to have simply sprung into being accidentally. She saw no signs of pruning or other shaping within the tunnel, and yet it was as regular as if it had been cut by an exacting hand. Someone must have control over these plants. And besides, the Pacha had spoken of people on the other side of the Wall.
She peered into the darkness of the tunnel, shading her eyes with her hand, but saw nothing. No sign of the other end at all. They probably have some kind of gate or guard on the other side, she thought, considering how impossible it would be to climb to the top of the thing, much less climb over it. There was no sign of light, as though the tunnel came to a dead-end, but a gate closed across the other end would account for that. She did not want to consider the idea that it did not go all the way through.
And yet she must.
If it did not go through-why would there be a road here? They couldn’t completely close themselves off. No, there must be a portal on the other side; this road was made by someone or something. And it went beneath the thorns. So that was where they had to follow. There were other possibilities; that the “road” was no road at all, and that the tunnel was the work of the plants in order to trap prey within. But others must have come here; the bolder of the Pacha must have dared this road. They did not have reports of folk being devoured by the plants, or of vanishing, never to return. She must trust in that.
Finally, she conjured oil and ordered the lanterns brought out and lit. If they must travel under this monstrous thing, at least it need not be in darkness. She sent the lanterns down the line, one to every two men. They seemed glad of her foresight; she was just grateful that conjured oil burned as readily as “real” oil.
A few cubits into the tunnel, and it was as black as a starless night-and quite surprisingly cold. Not cold enough to freeze, but certainly as chilly as the nights hereabouts became. And damp, as well: a kind of clamminess that clung to the skin and penetrated her clothing. She had ordered one of the men to walk in front of her with a lantern, and his little circle of light illuminated bare, dark earth, of a dark br
own that was nearly black, utterly unlike the soil outside. The light cast upward from his lantern shone on a densely interwoven mat of gray-green branches and thorns, as tightly intertwined as any basket she had ever seen. And still no sign of the marks of pruning. The air, besides being chilly and damp, smelled like the earth in a cellar: dank and redolent with mildew.
The men and even the beasts became strangely silent.
She had no wish to break that oppressive silence with so much as a whisper. She had the uncanny and uneasy feeling that to do so would be to call down unwelcome attentions on all of them. From time to time, she thought perhaps she heard rustlings out there just beyond that mat of thorns, or whisperings from the darkness ahead of them and behind them. But she did not want to halt the column and call for silence. She did not want toknowthat she heard these things.
There seemed no end to this tunnel, and no way of judging how long they had been inside it. With no light of day to tell, it could have been mere moments, or hours. She kept herself from looking back at the bright circle of light behind her for as long as she could. After all, what was behind her did not matter, really.
When she looked back at last, she could no longer see the end of the tunnel. She fought down panic at that; it occurred to her that it might have grown closed the moment they passed it-
No. No, she couldn’t think that. There was no evidence that these plants could grow that quickly. And it wouldn’t matter if they could; she could always conjure oil and burn them free, or conjure great slabs of stone to crush the branches at the entrance. There were a hundred things she could do. So long as she did not panic. No, probably they had been curving off to the right or the left, and the end of the tunnel was hidden behind that curve. There was no easy way to tell if the tunnel curved from within it.
The tunnel itself remained the same size, which was reassuring-tall enough for a tall woman to ride a tall horse, carrying a banner, and still have a cubit to spare above the tip of the banner, and wide enough for three horses to walk side-by-side with comfortable space between them and between the sides of the outermost and the walls. There was certainly enough room for her men and wagons to pass along it. And interestingly enough, the horses gave no signs of fear or restiveness.
Perhaps they had no concern about vegetation, which was what this was.
Nothing changed. They rode on and on, and nothing changed; there was only the endless tunnel before them, the same tunnel behind them. Finally, when she was beginning to wonder in despair if there was no land, no people, only an unending thorny growth over the length and breadth of this county, there seemed to be a change in the texture of the darkness just ahead of them.
She narrowed her eyes against the darkness, and leaned forward, trying to see beyond the little circle of light ahead of her. A moment later, and she was certain of the change ahead. And that was when she noticed that the tunnel itself was beginning to widen, opening up like a great funnel.
Finally, after being beneath the hedge long enough that she was chilled to the bone and longing for a bit of sun and warmth, they came to the end: a huge, bark-covered slab, with a round, door-like aperture in it, without visible hinges or any way to swing it forward or back to open it.
Before she could direct her man to knock on that door, it opened, and a single, slender figure stepped through to face them fearlessly.
That figure was as strange as the hedge; it was dressed in a bright blue, form-fitting garment of something shiny and flexible, a fabric that moved with it as easily as a skin. “It,” she thought, because she could not put a sex to the person; there was no sign of external genitalia, neither breasts nor penis, and inthat garment the existence of either would have been quite obvious. There did not even seem to be nipples on the chest, only flawless skin. The face was as smooth as a prepubescent child’s, with no sign of beard or other facial hair, but the hair upon its head, of a white-gold in color, was as long and luxuriant as Xylina’s own. Its eyes were a bright, unnatural blue, and its skin was a dark brown, as dark as the earth beneath this hedge. It did not seem to have a weapon, but she did not take that as being evidence that it was weaponless. For one thing, it could very well have formidable, and unknown, magic. And probably did. The very arrogant posture was a challenge, a dare to attack and face the consequences. She did not intend to try and call the creature’s bluff.
It looked over Xylina and her expedition with a cool, calculating gaze, and a complete lack of expression. After staring at the slaves for a long moment, its gaze returned to her, and there its attention remained. “Ah,” it said after a pause, in a high, fluting voice. “A Mazonite. A Mazonite warrior and her entourage of slaves. And one other. A demon, it would seem.”
To Xylina’s surprise, it spokehertongue, with no discernible accent or inflection. She wondered where and how the creature had learned the language.
“Yes,” she said simply, deciding in that very breath to keep the real task of their expedition a secret. “We are sent by Queen Adria, and our mission lies beyond your borders. May we pass your land? This is all we ask, that you not hinder our passage.”
The creature continued to gaze at her, as she attempted to keep her face as expressionless as the one it showed her. “You passed the Pacha without incident?” it asked, finally. “You spilled no blood, murdered none of the savages?”
“We passed peaceably. The Pacha tribes have declared themselves our brothers,” Xylina replied, making no attempt to elaborate on that statement. Perhaps this would be enough. She really didn’t want to lie to this creature. It might have ways of detecting such a lie. She could not guess how it might react if it knew that she was lying. But she was also dubious about the impression the truth would make.
The creature burst into peals of bell-like laughter; Xylina fought down her resentment, for it was making no effort to conceal the fact that it was laughing at her. “Fitting!” it crowed at last. “Oh, fitting! One barbarian declares himself to be brother to the next! Pledging eternal peace like a pair of children promising to be best of friends forever!” And it resumed laughing.
Xylina stared at her mule’s ears, and told herself that if this creature called the Mazonites “barbarians,” it probably had good reason to.She was petitioning to crossits land. There was no point in getting it angry with her. There was even less point in getting angry with it. Nothing she could say or do would change its opinion of her civilization or supposed barbarity.
Get it angry, and it might make them go all the way back through that tunnel again, she chided herself, and suppressed a shiver. No, it was worth bearing with a little laughter, to avoidthat . At least the creature wasn’t actively hostile; it was not rejecting their request to travel out of hand.
Finally the creature composed itself. “What is your mission?” it asked. “If it is to seek out lands for conquest, you have come to the wrong place. We could shut the door here, and let the Thorn-Wall grow up, and you could throw your pitiful conjurations against it for the next thousand years with no effect. Our science is beyond your meager magic; we can eliminate you without risking so much as a patch of skin. So tell me now: what is it you come here for?”
Interestingly, it made no mention whether it could tell if they were speaking the truth. It seemed to Xylina that if she were in its place, and she had that power, she would make a point of it. Still, this creature hardly seemed human, and she could not make assumptions about how it would think. She had already made clear that they were only passing through, and it refused to credit that truth. What would it accept?
“We are here for trade,” Ware said. “As you know, the Mazonites are skilled in many things, but only lately have they looked beyond their borders for things other than conquest. The Queen and my people are looking out for new opportunities for trade, for my own kind are skilled at such things. Obviously, it is no use to them to expand the boundaries of Mazonia beyond the place where women’s conjuration reigns supreme. It is therefore much more logical to expand by commerce ra
ther than conflict. The Queen has heard of lands of great wealth and civilization beyond the Pacha territories, and she has sent us to find the truth of the matter. It is logical to send one of her subjects to discover this, rather than depending upon the tales of travelers and foreign traders.”
The creature turned its strange blue eyes upon him with seeming approval. Xylina noted Ware’s emphasis on the word “logical” and wondered if this had some meaning for the creature. “It is,” it agreed. “You show a firm grasp of reality. Perhaps you are not as barbarous as you once were, you Mazonites. Well, come. You may travel through our land, and see what you will, and when you come again, perhaps you will have some trinkets we think worth trading for. We, of course, will have much that you will want. Some of it we may be willing to trade.”
Such arrogance! Xylina forcefully reminded herself that it was better to deal with an arrogant person than a savvy one, because the advantage was with the realist. She quelled her ire. It was possible that the creature was trying to make her angry, so thatit would have the advantage.
“Thank you,” Ware said gravely.
“Before you enter our land, I must search your belongings,” the creature continued. “In particular, I must see what you carry in your wagons.”
That was hardly an unreasonable request. Xylina had heard that many lands required a search at the border. She nodded acquiescence, and waited patiently while the creature rummaged through their goods.
But it paid no attention to the weapons, the gold, or even the souvenirs the men had picked up from the Pacha. What itdidpay close attention to was the kitchen-stuff. Finally, when it was through, Xylina asked it what on earth it had been looking for.
Its face hardened for a moment. “Plants,” it said in a dire voice. As if “plants” were carriers of some deadly peril. Xylina simply blinked, and said nothing. Plants? This creature was afraid of plants? Surely this was some kind of joke!
If I Pay Thee Not in Gold Page 23
