Skeen's Leap

by Clayton, Jo;

  They walked out onto the stone lip, settled to wait for the others. Skeen took the small leather-covered waterbottle from her belt, refilled the darter’s reservoir, slipped in a new capsule of paragee, uncovered the charge plate, and laid the weapon on the stone to catch the long rays of the setting sun. Better if it were noon light, but every little bit helped.

  Timka curled her paws beneath her and stretched out in shade. After a minute she began licking the blood off her paws and washing her muzzle with a lazy contentment, almost purring. Skeen watched her a while, then laughed. Ti looked around, purred louder.

  A large bird swooped low, screeched, went darting away. “Chulji?” Skeen said. Ti-cat nodded.

  Ten minutes later Britt rode his karynx onto the lip.

  Skeen caught up the darter, slid the cover over the charter and holstered the weapon, got to her feet, and looked past him. “The others?”

  “Five minutes back. Better to be sure.” He ran his eyes over the shadowy slopes, the gently rustling trees. “The wilders?”

  “About a dozen drugged, some others hamstrung or other wise wounded, the rest dead. Why was Chulji here? What about the Kalakal Ravvayad?”

  “Following as before about five stads back. Chulji came to report. The Scholar sent him here to see what was happening. Your Aggitj are annoyed at missing the fight.”

  “Wasn’t a fight. More like a trap shoot.”

  “Naels One-eye there?”

  “If he’s a big man with black hair twisted into a single braid, a beard that parts in the middle, huge hands, and a way with a bob-tail lance, then he’s one of the dead. Ti-cat treed him and I slit his throat.”

  Britt’s nose twitched and his ears flattened against his skull, then he tried a tentative smile. “Remind me not to irritate the pair of you.” He glanced at Ti-cat, looked quickly away when she gave him a cat-grin filled with curving yellow fangs.

  Chulji flew over again. A moment later the rest of the company rode onto the lip. Skeen swung into the saddle and tossed Timka her robe as she shifted to her Pallah form. The Aggitj came swarming around her, throwing questions at her, interrupting each other, their karynxes sidling and dipping their horns, infected by the boys’ excitement. “Hey, calm down,” she was yelling so she could be heard over their noise, “or you’ll have us all in the river. Listen, you’ll hear it all once we’re in camp. I don’t want to hang around here,” she glanced toward Timka, saw she was mounted and ready to go, “the tale will tell better over a hot cup of tea.”

  The guide stood at the edge of a long bare slope of scree looking down at the river that was all black glides and silver foam in the light of the waxing moon. Skeen went to stand beside him. “How far is the lake?”

  “We should reach the Bend country this time tomorrow. Five to seven days after that, depending on what meets us and how the going has changed since I was last there. North of the Bend is Min country, though they don’t come into the canyons much. I’m not sure how they’ll take strange Min in their skies.” He glanced south along the river. “They won’t like us pulling that pair after us. Nor will the Ykx. Ykx and Chalarosh mix like oil and fire. Maybe you can fiddle bringing the Boy; he’s a cub and the Ykx think high of cubs. That pair’s different. Ravvayad killers.”

  “Hm. What’s the leeway with the Ykx?”

  “They’ll be watching four, five days out; the Min will let them know someone’s coming and who it is.”

  “Right. The Ravvayad are staying back; I get the feeling they’re following until they can get reinforcements, maybe some new leadership. What they’ve got hasn’t worked out that great for them this far. Canyon country coming up. Hm. Give them two more days, Ti can scout out the ground, then we take them out.”

  He said nothing, she was talking to herself and he knew it.

  They rounded the bend of the river and started moving almost due west through increasingly stony canyon lands, a maze of steep-walled cuts with the Plain rising farther and farther above them. Barren arroyos cut the walls; most of them had streams of varying depths and ferocity dashing down them to merge with the river—streams they had to ford, as many as a dozen in a day.

  On the middle of the second day in the canyons, when the sun was striking down on stone and water with dazzling force and the world was half dissolved in light, Skeen and Timka went crawling over scree and scruff into a hollow among huge boulders near where another arroyo stream tumbled down to the river. Skeen poured water on a towel, wrapped it about her head and settled into the meager shade, Timka dropped her robe and took wing, spiraling into the wind to ride the thermals over the canyon; a golden bird dissolving into the hot gold glare. Skeen blinked up at her. “Min! Life is not fair, not at all.” She wiped her hands on the eddersil of her tunic, drew her arm across her brow to wipe away sweat that kept getting into her eyes. She sighed with envy, added a bit more water to the sodden towel, then she eased back and drifted into a light doze, stirring now and then to glance at Timka.

  An hour passed. She stirred, looked up. Timka broke her circling, dropped down, rose quickly, flew toward the arroyo and dropped again. Skeen pulled off the towel, rose onto her knees and eased across the hollow to a place where wind had blown dried weed into a crotch between two of the larger boulders.

  The Kalakal were relaxed, their karynxes ambling along. Though they still wore their robes, their veils were untied, blowing back from their faces; those faces were flushed and coated with sweat. They reached the turbulent arroyo stream and started across, eyes on the treacherous footing. Skeen set the darter for bursts, rose to her feet and put a burst in each of them, part of the burst hitting them in the faces. The water caught hold of them, tugged them out into the river where their sodden robes dragged them under. The karynxes would have bolted, but Timka came bounding down the arroyo, a sure-footed cat-weasel, and locked their feet with her Min control of ordinary beasts.

  Skeen scrambled down, stripped the gear off the beasts, went through the saddle pouches, dumping everything but their store of coin into the river. She left the pouches and the rest of the gear on the scatter of boulders for anyone who might want them. She looked at her hands, swiped at the sweat on her face. “Why not,” she said aloud. She stripped, tossed her gear onto the same rocks, and waded into the shallow eddy where the spray of boulders swept into the river.

  While she scrubbed at herself with the handfuls of grit, Ti-cat stretched, yawned, and laid her long body out in a boneless pile of fur atop one of the flatter boulders, yellow-bronze eyes fixed on Skeen. A moment later she yawned again, shifted to her Pallah form, and slid into the water. Laughing and agile, she jumped about splashing water over Skeen, startling her into laughter and retaliation.

  When they tired of playing, they sat side by side in the swirling water, enjoying a cool clean feeling, comfortably weary, wholly relaxed. Skeen turned her head, looked lazily at Timka. “We make one helluva fighting team.”

  “Naels One-eye wouldn’t argue with you if he could still talk.”

  “Pegwai thinks you’ve changed a lot.”

  “You?”

  “Probably not as much as it seems from the outside. You think you’ve changed?”

  Timka fluttered her hands in the water, watched them distort as they wiggled. “More in the past months than in all my life before. My home folk are ignorant because they don’t want to know. They don’t know about the Min living with the Skirrik, living in harmony—both kinds valued. They don’t know about Plains Min because nobody messes with Plains Min, no Min slaves in the coastlands. They don’t even know what Pallah are really like and Pallah are right there. If they don’t know, how can they want more than what they’ve got? I want, Skeen. I want to do … to see …” she spread her hands, “everything.”

  “A lot of that everything is pretty grungy. Don’t expect wonders.”

  “Skeen.”

  “Sorry.”

  A large hawk came spiraling down, landed on a boulder, and screeched at them.

&nbs
p; Skeen sighed, got to her feet. “Go away, Chulji, tell them we’re coming.”

  Three days later a great dark form rode the thermals above them.

  “Ykx?” Skeen said.

  “Yes. One of the outriders.”

  They watched as the Ykx circled above them a last time and drifted away toward the west.

  “The herald flies before us.”

  “Yes.”

  The lake stretched to the horizon; its blue glittered glass-hard in the hammering sunlight. Pale and distant, half lost in heat haze, the heart island Perinpar Dih had mentioned shimmered like a mirage under a swarm of soaring forms. Skeen couldn’t see the lake’s far shore, but this one was spectacular with fold after vertical fold of hard gray granite and cliffs rising a hundred meters above the gentle slope of the sandy shore.

  The guide led them along the grassy dunes near the foot of one of the folded cliffs, out around a bulge and into a narrow crack in the cliffs that led into a miniature valley with woods, meadows, a gossamer streak of waterfall at the back and about five hundred meters away, a small bubbly stream with a single deep pool. There were some huts among the trees, rough stone walls and what looked like ax-cut shakes on the roof, a pole corral with water trough and a broad shallow manger. Skeen went into one of the huts, looked around. Two beds, a chair, and a table. A box on the wall with a hinged lid that held a number of candles and some neatly turned candlesticks. She came back out. “Not fancy, but it’ll keep the wind off and the rain out. Ti, you want to have this one with me? Good. The rest of you suit yourselves.”

  When the karynxes were in the coral, feed box and water trough filled, Skeen went hunting for the guide and found him up near the mouth of the valley, sitting on a flat round stone about a meter thick and five meters wide. He’d stripped off everything but a flimsy pair of underpants; still, sweat was beading on the skin that showed and his fur was already damp in blotches. The sun was almost directly overhead, hot, bright; there was no movement in the air, the steep sides of the valley shutting out any wind. “You do this every time you’re here?”

  “What you have to do,” he said. “Sit and wait until they decide to come calling.”

  “Night, too?”

  “No. No thermals, downdrafts instead. They don’t walk unless they have to.”

  “Want to set up watches? The rest of us can broil an hour or two and give you a break.”

  “Better not, might scare them off. They’re touchy. Took me almost a month to get anyone to come near me the first time I was here. But I would appreciate some cold water and towels now and then.”

  “I’ll tell the Aggitj; they’re good about things like that. What are they like? Hard bargainers? How long before they show?”

  “They know me, so the waiting and watching should be shorter. Might not be, depends on the mood they’re in.” He glanced at her, looked away. “What you get depends on what you’ve got to trade.”

  He rubbed thumb against forefinger as if he were rolling his thoughts into small neat balls. “Why do you want to go back there? From what I’ve seen, you’d do well here.”

  “Questions, Britt, questions I can’t answer this side.”

  “Family?”

  “No. Just questions. Ones I’ll have no rest from until I get answers I can accept.”

  “Sounds like the kind of questions no one finds answers for. Why waste your time?”

  “It’s my time.”

  “True. And mine, you’re paying for.” He looked up. “They’re watching now.” Three dark forms sailed across and across the narrow jagged slash of sky. “There’ll be more tomorrow.”

  She closed her hands into fists, scowled down at them, beat them suddenly, once, against the stone, then backed away. “Waiting,” she said, “the last stretch, that’s the worst. I’ll send Ders with water in half an hour, that all right?”

  “Yes.” He lifted a string of wooden worry beads from the stone beside his knee and began running them through his fingers, eyes closed, lips moving, some kind of meditation, a way of passing the time. She watched a moment, happy it was he who had to do that sitting. I’d bite my nails off up to the elbows. She sighed and started back for the camp.

  At noon the next day, Skeen took food and water out to Britt. “You were right. Swarms of them out today.” She set the bread, cheese, and fruit on the stone, added a pot of tea and some mugs. “Would they get agitated if I joined you there for a while?”

  “You think I know? Give it a try and find out. If you feel like it.”

  She tilted her head back, stood with hands on hips watch the Ykx drifting about overhead like autumn leaves blown ing along by a gentle autumn wind. “Come down,” she called to them, but they neither heard nor obeyed. “What’s another day.” She climbed up beside Britt and poured herself a cup of tea. “You ever think of going back?”

  “No. And I’m not thinking of it now either. I’m a lot better off here.”

  “Some good people here, folk I’ll miss if I don’t see them again.” She bit into a plum and brooded over this while she chewed, tossed the seed into the bucket she’d used to carry the food. “But I’ll say this, being stuck on one world (don’t tell me how interesting it is) gives me claustrophobia. And don’t sing me those songs about the beauty of Nature with a fuckin’ capital N, I’ve had altogether too much of that. Bugs and snakes and no hot water for a bath unless someone hauls it for you, wearing the same understuff until you’re itching it instead of your skin.” She tapped the waybread to chase the gnats away, looked at it with disgust. “Fight the bugs for every mouthful. Huh.” She dripped the bread into her tea, worried off a bite, and sat chewing at it. Britt laughed at her, began telling her about the year he spent as a slave on a Pallah estate some distance north of Dum Besar.

  Two more days passed.

  Noon the third day; Skeen hauled Britt his midday meal and joined him on the stone.

  The Ykx came spiraling down through the hot gold noon air, wrapped in a shimmering sphere twisted from the sunlight. He hovered before the stone, covered in fur like the guide, a short plush shading from a pale amber hardly darker than day-old cream (over his chest and the fronts of his upper arms) to a darkish gold-brown about the color of a dark bay horse. His flight skins draped like a cloak along his sides, cream on the front, bay on the back. He wore a vee-shaped harness passing from groin to shoulders with horizontal straps, the leather elaborately inlaid with metal and gemstones, joining the two slants of the vee. All light and airy and elegant (her fingers twitched with a quiet greed), yet the mechanism that worked the lift bubble was concealed there, and probably several weapons that could do disastrous things to flesh and bone.

  He touched down on the stone; the bubble dissolved and he stood looking from one to the other with deepset amber-crystal eyes.

  All doubt flashed away. “Raaal lennn.” The word came out in a drawl of vowels and an en that was a quivering hum.

  The Ykx heard her, lost his calm for a fragment of an instant. “What does that mean to you?” He struggled to keep his voice even, but didn’t quite manage it; a beautiful fluting voice that couldn’t help playing with the syllables of Trade-Min until they were barely comprehensible.

  “I am a thief,” she said.

  “You admit it so casually?”

  “You asked me to explain. Will you listen or lecture me?”

  Britt stared from one to the other, saw they’d forgotten him. He’d said to her, what you get depends on what you have to trade. She had something to trade all right and from the look of it, the Ykx would sell his firstborn to get it.

  “I will listen.”

  “In the course of playing my trade I had acquired certain objects.” She gazed blankly at the Ykx, memories suddenly vivid. Buzzard’s storeroom, wandering about too restless to sit, still fuming at Duncan; she’d kicked him off Picarefy to Picarefy’s delight, then fought with him half across Revelation. What am I, garbage dealer? All his fault, that wart, that.… It had been a miserable trip,
that one. Low-grade artifacts, her timing off, her nose half-ruined by a frag with Duncan because he messed up her deal with the locals, almost getting them both caught. One of those locals was a hulk who decided he wanted a hack at a foreign woman and challenged Duncan for her. The shithead wouldn’t let her deal with that walking gonad—no, he had to show off his muscles and his training. “While gold can be spent anywhere, other things need a specialist to handle them. In the shop where this person did his business I saw quite by chance a number of objects the dealer had just acquired. Among them was a plaque with a low-relief carving of a being much like you; and there are objects with lines and forms much like those on your harness. I found them interesting and asked about them. Rallen work, the dealer said. He’d purchased them from a young man only an hour before; that’s why he remembered the name, but he knew nothing of the world where the young man had acquired the objects, nor did anyone else I spoke to.”

  “Were they old or perhaps recently made?”

  “Recent. It is true. This is my profession. Old things bring higher prices. Several of the objects were cast in bronze; you know the patina that age brings to bronze. It can be faked, I don’t deny that; there was no question of faking, that bronze was new, almost raw. Why would a man however young and inexperienced destroy half the value of such pieces by removing that patina? To say nothing of the work required. I can’t see any reason for that, perhaps you can.”

  “Noooo.…” The word was a long shivery sigh. “What do you want?”

  “To go back. The Gate is closed. Open it for me.”

  The folds of the Ykx’s flight skins shifted and stiffened, dark blood running in veins that had been pale before. He blinked slowly, made a complex gesture she couldn’t read. “You have been candid, sinsa, let me be equally candid. This is the last Gather on Mistommerk and it is beginning to die.” He went silent again, battered by a hope he was afraid to host. “What you bring …” he said finally, “if we can believe … don’t be offended, please, we dare not believe too easily.” His hands moved over his harness. “I must, I must confer. You’ll wait? Ah, my mind rots. Of course you will wait. I will return. Tomorrow. Yes. Tomorrow.” The glow thickened about him and he rose in a graceful sweep toward the top of the cliffs, flattening on the air when he was high enough, soaring swiftly away.