Once a complete halt had been achieved, the entire rear wall of the great machine opened and formed itself into a ramp. The Zoasian guard, or it might have been a replacement for the first, as I have great difficulty telling them apart, stepped over to me and picking me up, slung me over his shoulder like a sack of whatever the snake men eat instead of potatoes. One of his fellows did the same thing with the Princess. They then unceremoniously deposited us on the ground beside one of the great wheels. Several Zoasians were preparing a camp: laying out sleeping mats, and setting up various pieces of equipment, the uses of which I could only guess at. I estimated that there were twenty to twenty five Zoasians total inside and outside their craft. While I might have been tempted to take them all on with my long sword, I didn't see much hope of engaging them with no weapon at all, and with my hands and feet bound.
One of the snake men tossed two foil pouches onto the ground beside us. I watched several of the reptiles open similar pouches and begin to eat the unidentifiable substances within. It seemed to be some type of freeze-dried food.
"Looks like the MREs we had in the army," I mused.
"What are they?" asked Noriandara Remontar, and don't think this didn't take some explaining, since in Amatharian, the words meals, ready, and eat do not start with letters even similar to M, R, or E. It took cooperation between both of us to open the foil pouches, because of our hands being bound, but at last we freed the block of Styrofoam-like food inside. I took a careful bite from mine and nearly gagged. While it was a dry wafer-like thing just out of the bag, when it combined with saliva or presumably any other liquid, it turned to a slimy ooze with the smell and taste of three week old catfish-and I mean three weeks without refrigerated storage, and dead.
"Try and eat it,” suggested the Princess. "We both need our strength, and we are unlikely to get any better from our captors."
"Yes, of course," I replied, as I forced the vile mess into my throat against its will. We ate and then sat in silence for a long time. Most of the Zoasians lay down on the sleeping mats and seemed to go to sleep. It was difficult to tell their actual state, since they neither snored nor breathed heavily, but they did close their eyes and refrain from movement. I could hear a couple of the snake men moving around inside the truck, but the only one outside who seemed to be awake was the one apparently assigned to guard us, and he never turned away and hardly ever blinked. I remain impressed by the Zoasians' ability to remain completely still, watching something. I tried repeatedly to out stare our guard, but could not do it. He blinked perhaps once every ten minutes, and that was a slow leisurely blink, all the while, the rest of his body remaining completely motionless. I had just resigned myself to being continually watched, when without any apparent motivation, our guard got up and walked into the vehicle.
I was not about to waste any opportunity to escape, and as soon as he was inside, I reached down and began unwinding the wire which bound my feet. I urged Noriandara Remontar to do the same, and she went to work on her own bonds. I had just finished freeing my stiff lower extremities, when I noticed two Zoasian feet standing beside me. The guard had returned. I expected to be hit on the head, something to which I was not looking forward to with any pleasant anticipation. But it did not happen. The Zoasian placed the long box he had brought from the truck, on the ground beside me. Then he reached down, grabbed me by the arm, and pulled me to my feet. Then unwrapping the mess of wire, he freed my hands. He then opened the box revealing its contents--our swords, my pistol, and my belt. He pointed to the open box.
I first freed the Princess from her restraints, and then the two of us gathered together our weapons. When I looked at the snake man again, he pointed off to the distance. I realized he was telling us to go. It occurred to me then that this was the same Zoasian that I had freed from the Uursh Poch. He could have been picked up by that transport just before it captured us. I looked into his face to see if I could identify him as the same one, but I could find nothing in his black face and large yellow eyes to help me identify him. We didn't stay around worrying about it, but grabbed our gear, and left the Zoasian encampment at a trot.
Chapter Twenty Three: City in the Sky
Noriandara Remontar and I put as much distance as possible between us and the Zoasians. We didn't stop until we were completely exhausted. Even then, we rested for as short a time as possible, and were on our way again. We journeyed continuously for what seemed to me to be about ten days, though beneath the eternal noon-day sun of Ecos, there is really no way to tell: at least we stopped to sleep about ten times. We had just crossed over a low rise of hills, when I spotted a cave on the face of a small cliff.
"That looks like a good spot to lie low for a while," I said. "I don't think I can continue this pace."
"I can't either," the Princess replied. "It's hunger that is taking toll upon us most." We climbed up to the cave and found it to be nothing more than a scooped out chamber about six feet high, six feet wide, and perhaps nine feet deep into the hill. It was a place of shelter from unpleasant elements and any pursuers however, so we entered, lay down, and rested soundly. I woke up first and looked at Noriandara Remontar. She was incredibly beautiful. Even after all of her ordeals, after wandering in the desert, after battles, captures, and flight, she still looked like the woman I had dreamed of for so long. Something about the Amatharians' hair seemed to keep it looking shiny and clean, when mine felt matted and dirty and in serious need of a shampoo. The deep blue of the Princess’s Amatharian skin precluded any dark circles under her eyes. As I was looking at her, she opened those beautiful round eyes and sat up.
"Why did you follow me all the way to Zonamis?" she asked.
This wasn’t really a conversation that I wanted to have now, if at all. What feelings did I have for this woman? Was I madly in love with her? I had followed her across the face of an alien world and had passed though numerous trials and tempted many perils to bring her within my grasp. Yet now as I looked at her, I didn’t feel.... I didn’t know what I did or didn’t feel. I didn’t know what I should or shouldn’t feel. She was so very attractive, and yet I was not feeling that deep-down sense of need that I had always believed would be there for the woman I loved.
"From the time I first saw you," I answered slowly, "I couldn't stop thinking about you. I just had to see that you got back to Amathar safely."
"Were you in love with me?"
"For a moment I thought that I was," I confessed.
"Now?"
"I'm not so sure now."
"I do not know you," she said, looking intently into my face. "This has not been the best circumstances under which to meet someone. Perhaps when we reach home, we can become friends. Just remember. My first duty is to my family and to the Sun Clan."
"As is mine."
We decided to split up and search for food and water and to meet back at the cave. I started down the hill and around to the right, while the Princess went left. I felt somewhat uneasy about letting her off by herself, especially after I had spent such a portion of time as I had, finding her in the first place, but she was a grown woman and a knight of the Sun Clan. She was probably more capable of taking care of herself than I was.
I had my light pistol and had high hopes of finding some type of animal to shoot. I felt if I were able to shoot a creature in the head, then perhaps the remainder of the carcass would not be too damaged to harvest. The light weapons of the Amatharians were not designed for hunting, but for war. It was not quite as bad as duck hunting with a bazooka, but it was certainly close. Unfortunately for me, there seemed to be no animals larger than a good sized beetle around. A beetle about three inches long sat in the shade of a rock, and for a moment I thought about catching him for dinner, but I decided that I was not quite that hungry, yet.
As I was searching around for prey, I spotted in the distance, a gathering of rather large bushes. Observing that the only large plants in this Ecosian desert seemed to grow along the stream beds, I made for the brush in h
opes of finding a source of water. As luck would have it, in the center of the bushes was a small fountain bubbling up from between the rocks and forming a small pool covered with moss and insect larvae. I brushed the extraneous matter out of the way and filled my canteen. Then I took a long drink. The water was bitter tasting, but otherwise fine.
What I had taken for bushes around this little oasis, were in fact five thick, but stunted trees. Growing upon them were fruits about the size of a pear, though dark brown in color. I picked one and tasted it. Not only did it taste very bad, it actually burned my mouth. Undaunted by this apparent failure, I cut the fruit in half with my short sword and found in the center, a marble sized seed. Extracting this seed and rinsing it off, I bit into it and found it to be, while very hard, actually quite tasty. I harvested several dozen seeds from the trees, rinsed them off, and headed back to the cave.
I arrived back at the cave to find it still empty. I decided to take advantage of the time and clean out the interior of some of the dirt and plant debris that had been deposited by the wind. I scooped it out with my hands and threw it down the side of the hill. In a short while, I had cleared the entire chamber. The cave was solid rock on roof, walls, and floor, and seemed very safe and secure. Once my cleaning had been completed, I lay down and thought about my situation. While it was true that we were lost in the desert, I thought that things could certainly be much worse. I was alone in the wilderness with a beautiful companion, my arm was no longer throbbing though it was by no means as good as new, and we were at least temporarily safe from attackers.
I was just beginning to worry that perhaps my first instincts about letting Noriandara Remontar leave by herself were correct, when she climbed back up to the mouth of the cave. She had managed to capture a small animal, which looked to me to be a cross between an iguana and a horseshoe crab. I didn't make an in-depth examination of it, because the Princess had it skinned and spitted almost before I knew it. I did take a picture of it though.
Once I had created a small cook-fire just outside the cave entrance, Noriandara Remontar started the meat cooking. We shared the water and the nuts which I had procured and recounted the details of our excursions.
"This seems to be an untraveled area," remarked the beautiful woman, "which may be all the better for us. I think we should wait here until we are sure that we have thrown off the trail of the Zoasians. Then we can start on our way home to Amathar. It seems as though I have not seen it in a long, long time." I too, am anxious to return to Amathar," I said. "I was just beginning to make myself feel at home there."
"Tell me what your world is like," said the Princess of Amathar. I told her as much as I could think of about Earth, the United States, and my old home town. I told her of my childhood, my education, my life in the army. I answered her numerous questions just as I had done for Malagor, Norar Remontar, Vena Remontar, and the interrogation team at the Temple of Amath. It was really very therapeutic. I then asked Noriandara Remontar to reciprocate by telling me of the adventures she had faced she was captured by the Zoasians.
"There is really not to much to tell," she began. "I was knocked unconscious in the battle against the Zoasians. When I woke up, I was a prisoner on their ship. There were one hundred one of us, a tiny fraction of our crew aboard Sun Cruiser 9. We were all tossed unceremoniously into an empty cargo hold, with our hands and feet manacled. They kept us that way the entire trip back to their home city-chained up and in the dark."
"It must have been awful," I commented.
"Well, it certainly wasn't good for my physical condition," she replied, "but it could have been much worse, especially from the Zoasians. We had not been in Zonamis very long before the attack came. Though I didn’t know at the time what was happening, I knew that something was going on. The guards forced us onto the transport. I don’t know where they were planning to take us." We sat thinking in silence for a while. At last I felt compelled to break the quiet with a question.
"How long should we stay here?"
"Long enough to get some of our strength back. I am certainly not up to my best, and I can tell that you are not. That arm must be very painful."
"Actually," I replied. "I had forgotten about it until you reminded me." We stayed in the small cave in the desert for what must have been about four days. We rested up, hunted and cooked small game, and harvested and ate a variety of strange but tasty seeds and roots. As it always did in Ecos, time passed strangely. In some ways it seemed as though we had been living together for months, and in other ways it seemed as though we had known each other but a moment. After we had slept one last time in our rock chamber, we set out once again across the desert. During our stay, the sandy landscape had remained cool and dry, though several large clouds occasionally crossed the sky. Great square rocks were piled here and there as though they had been left behind by some cyclopean preschooler. A few large trees clung to life in the beds of dry rivers. The only other vegetation was an abundance of small shrubs which carpeted the land. Here and there, one could see large dunes of billowing red sand. It was quite a rugged country, but it was also very beautiful, and it reminded me somewhat of my childhood home in the American southwest. Noriandara Remontar looked even better than when we had first met. The stopover at the cave had been a chance for her to recover from past ordeals. Fewer troubles now seemed to wrinkle her brow. I probably looked better myself, having benefited for the rest.
We had not walked too many miles when Noriandara Remontar called to me. As I looked up, she pointed to a large object in the sky. I thought at first that the object was an Amatharian or Zoasian battleship, since it was about the same size. It was not one of the air vessels. It was instead a floating city. While the bottom was far from smooth, with openings, windows, and protrusions, the top was a jagged skyline of tall buildings shooting up toward the noon day sun.
"Have you ever seen a floating city like that?" Noriandara Remontar asked.
"No," I replied. "You?"
"I have heard of them. They were built long ago by the Meznarks, contemporaries of the Orlons. They built hundreds of floating cities and sailed all over Ecos, until they angered a race of beings far away known as the Oindrag who hunted the Meznarks down and destroyed them. There are numerous artifacts from a fallen Meznark city at the Tree Clan Museum in Amathar, but I don't think anyone has ever come across a city still in flight."
"Are the Oindrag still around?"
"I believe they are also extinct."
"How far away to you suppose that thing is?"
"It is at least twenty kentads," she replied, indicating a distance of about fifteen miles, "but is seems to be moving toward us."
"Do you think there is anyone there steering it?"
"Our archaeologists believe that these cities were designed to float around at random." We continued on our way, watching the floating city moving in our general direction, though not altering our own course because of it. There seemed to be no purpose in moving toward the city as there was no obvious way for us to ascend to its height. Likewise there seemed to be nothing to fear in letting it cross our path. The closer it came, the more abandoned and broken down it appeared. We were less than a mile away from the city in the sky, when we simultaneously noticed several hundred long cables and ropes hanging from the artifact, some dragging along the ground below.
"If we could climb up there," I suggested, "perhaps we could find some sort of steering mechanism, and use this as transportation back to Amathar."
"My feelings exactly."
We increased our pace to a slow jog, but it soon became apparent that the ancient city was not heading directly toward us, but would instead cross our path somewhat ahead of us. We changed our course to correct the discrepancy, and increased our pace yet again. It was very difficult to run over the uneven desert landscape, at one moment sliding in soft sand and in the next hopping over mounds of stones. If I had not had the benefit of gravity enhanced strength, I would not have been able to keep up with the Pr
incess of Amathar.
At last we reached the shadow of the hovering metropolis, or rather we and the metropolis crossed paths, since we had intercepted it. The cables were just ahead of us. But there was a problem. We were running out of land. The object of our chase was heading toward a huge canyon--not as large as the Grand Canyon of Arizona perhaps--but pretty big. If the city, which I estimated to be moving at about one to one and a half miles per hour, were to reach the canyon before we could climb aboard, we would lose it.
With an extra burst of speed, Noriandara Remontar and I reached the closest cable. It was long enough to drag along the ground. I grabbed the rope, which seemed to be made of a plastic like fiber, and the Princess started to climb up. I followed her, but could only climb a few feet from the ground with great difficulty. I realized that I would probably never be able to climb up the rope to the city with my splinted, broken arm.
My beautiful companion looked down and saw my predicament and dropped from her hand hold to the ground below me. She gathered up the slack rope below me and tied it around my waist, then climbed up beside me, just as we passed over the edge of the great canyon. It was almost a mile to the bottom, and it looked to me to be ten times that.
"I'll climb up and maybe I can pull you,” suggested the Princess. I looked up to the bottom of the flying behemoth above us. It seemed to me to be about six or seven hundred feet up. There was no guarantee that there was even a suitable entrance there, let alone a place from which the Princess could draw me up.
"I don't know about that," I replied. "Maybe we should wait until we are on the other side of the canyon and let it go."
"Don't be silly," she replied.
She started quickly up the rope, hand over hand. Climbing a rope had been one of the many fun activities I had gone through in Army boot camp. While I was there, I saw a great many men and a quite few women who could get to the top of a fifty foot tower at a pretty good clip, however none of them could match the climbing ability of the average Amatharian picked off the city street. I knew that Amatharians were on the whole, incredibly fit physically. I also knew that the huge amount of time spent wielding swords had to be a great enhancement to the arm muscles of warriors, swordsmen, and knights. Still, I was amazed at how fast Noriandara Remontar climbed up that cord. I watched the Princess as she climbed, though I stopped periodically to look around at the canyon below, and to make sure that I was securely tied. By the time she reached the top; between the distance involved, the movement of the rope, and the size of the floating city, it was difficult even to see her. But moments later, the rope began to be pulled up, and me with it. It started up slowly, then stopped, dropped a bit, and started up again more quickly.
Princess of Amathar Page 18
