Escape from the Drowned Planet

by Helena Puumala

  “True, so true,” Mikal said, cheering up at the thought.

  Yarm headed to where Jocan was untying the Narra. Meanwhile Matto, Cay and Jess arrived, and Mikal turned to tell them to fetch their waterskins, for Chrys to fill while they were eating a bite and downing a quick cup of tea.

  *****

  The six who followed the kidnappers started off on foot, each man leading a sluggish Narra behind him. It would have been frustrating to have to start so slowly, had they not known that their quarry would be moving just as slowly. As a matter of fact, Yarm thought that the chasers had the advantage when it came to the riding beasts. The kidnappers must have pushed their animals through part of the night, to have arrived at the encampment when they did, and, with Narra, riding at night was always a risky proposition. It could be done for a while, thanks to their insulating coats which kept their body temperatures reasonably high for a time, even without solar heat replenishment. But they would grow more and more sluggish with the dark, and, generally, were unable to eat and drink at the end of the journey. Therefore, the following morning, until the sun was up and the Narra had had the opportunity to satisfy hunger and thirst, they were not of much use to their riders. Because of this, Yarm was confident that his group with their rested mounts, would be able to make much better time than the kidnappers could.

  Mikal hoped that Yarm was correct about this. He checked his side pocket again, for the hundredth time, it felt like, to make sure that his stunner was still in there. Jocan had another of those; he and Yarm had decided that they would leave it with him since he had some experience using it. Kati’s stunner was in Matto’s pocket: Yarm had declined it, saying that a younger man would likely handle it better than he could. Mikal had showed Matto, and Jess and Cay as well, how to operate it, stressing that they should stun the men they were after rather than the Narra under them. Human beings were a known quantity to the makers of the stunners; the louts could be expected to react to them as was intended, but the cold-blooded Narra might be an entirely different matter. This was not the time to experiment.

  The six of them trod along, leading their sluggish beasts, in a single file, with Yarm in the lead and Mikal bringing up the rear. Jocan was behind Yarm, persuading his Narra to follow him in spite of its torpor. Cay followed Jocan, Matto behind him, and Jess was between Matto and Mikal. They were moving as fast as the animals deigned to follow, and each man would glance towards the east quite often, hoping for the sun to break over the horizon. There was no talk, except for the occasional encouraging word to a Narra that may or may not have heard it.

  Minutes passed by. Minutes that Mikal spent worrying about Kati; how was she managing in her role as bait? The message that Sany had passed on to him had said little about her situation, other than that the kidnappers had taken the bait and were transporting her with them in a southerly direction, tied on to a Narra. With luck, the louts who had taken her were too busy trying to escape to abuse her. Of course, riding a beast while tied onto it in an uncomfortable position was torture in itself. Surely the louts must have realized already that pursuit would be coming, since they had failed in their efforts to take away the Caravan’s riding beasts!

  The trail that they were on was easy to follow, even in the greyness of the early morning, and Mikal, as the tail of the snake that the chasers were, did not have to think much about his footing. They had passed this way, of course, the previous evening, and the path had looked much like it had looked for a long time now. The old river bottom had enough soil dampness to have produced a struggling eco-system. There was grass which had been trampled along the travelling route to bare ground; there were a few stunted trees, and an assortment of bushes along the sides of the trail. Not enough vegetation to hide any traveller from being observed from a distance, but enough to keep the shifting sands around, from overwhelming the trail.

  Mikal sensed the change in the animal he was leading, the same moment that he realized that there was a difference in the light around him. He glanced to the east, but the sky there was overcast; no sun was in sight. Still, it had risen, he was sure of that. Wayfarer’s head had come up; the animal was sniffing the air alertly, as if it had never been shambling along behind its rider, unwilling to be led along.

  “That’s rather amazing,” Mikal muttered to himself, caressing his Narra’s neck. “How come the change is so fast? You can’t have drawn in much of the sun’s energy yet.”

  As Yarm had instructed him and the others, he pulled out the water bowl from his pack, quickly slopped some water out of the waterskin on Wayfarer’s back into it and offered the liquid to the animal. It hoovered it up fast, as it did the handful of grain he placed in the bowl next. A glance ahead on the trail told him that Jess, at least, was doing the same with his animal; the others, no doubt, were, too.

  “Not much grain,” Yarm had told them. “We want the Narra to be able to make tracks. They can’t run and digest a big meal at the same time, but we want them to have a bit of food energy, besides what it is that they draw from the sun.”

  “Yarm says that we ride as soon as we’re all on Narra-back,” Jess called to him in a low voice, stowing away his bowl and reattaching his waterskin to the saddle.

  Mikal did the same and mounted Wayfarer. Jess glanced back at him, and as soon as he had mounted his beast, signalled Matto who passed the word on forwards. Moments later Jess’s Narra took off running and Wayfarer did the same.

  *****

  Mikal found that he was enjoying the ride in spite of everything. Wayfarer had a wonderfully smooth running gait, and, clearly, it was taking as much delight in the opportunity to move fast as its rider was taking in being along for the ride. There had been very little racing during the journey up until now; the Caravan’s speed had been steady, never rushed. That had been necessary, considering the variety of people who made up the Caravan, and Mikal had not even realized that he possessed a craving for speed.

  The headlong pace ate up the kilometres quickly, and it was almost too soon that all six riders came to an abrupt halt at a signal from Yarm. Sand flew as they pulled their mounts to a stop in a semi-circle around the Caravan leader who was sitting up straight on his Narra, a hand lifted up in a signal.

  “We've come to the turn-off to the short-cut to MuddyWater,” he shouted, to make sure that they all heard. “The tracks are such that I have no doubt but that the louts took it. I don’t know how far ahead of us they are, but we must be catching up on them, and I expect that we’ll come upon them in the desert, long before MuddyWater.”

  “Then, let’s go get them,” Matto cried, grinning ferally.

  Yarm grinned back at him, and urged his Narra on, turning it off the river bottom trail onto a faint track climbing out of the valley into the true desert. The five following him took their assigned positions behind him, picking up speed as they moved off. Mikal had a moment of misgiving as Wayfarer left the established track for the slight dip in the sand, but the animal moved along just as gracefully and effortlessly across the dunes as it had on the trail. The Narra were desert beasts originally; that was obvious as his mount loped its way over the sand.

  He heard Yarm’s shout while he was still negotiating the rise out of the old riverbed, being the last of the riders.

  “I see them!” Yarm yelled to the men behind him. “They must be having trouble! Something must be slowing them down! They’ve less of a head start on us than I thought they would have! Come on boys, we’ll catch them in no time at all!”

  Once he was out of the valley, Mikal saw them too. They were still well ahead of the chasers, but riding in a clump, rather than the more efficient single file formation that Yarm had insisted on for his troop. That suggested problems. Fleetingly Mikal wondered if Kati had managed to create some sort of sabotage; certainly the kidnappers would have had no idea of the resources that she might be able to bring to bear on her own behalf. Could she, with her ESP, influence her captors’ Narra? If they were tired, hungry and thirsty, perhaps
she could magnify their unwillingness to ride through sand without being refreshed? Even as he rode, Mikal grinned to himself. This woman from a world unknown to him, but who had become his close companion in the past months, was a force to be reckoned with. The desert louts might have already found out that they had bitten off more than they could chew.

  *****

  “What’s the matter with this flipping beast?” Duk was muttering as his Narra was slowing down in spite of his strenuous urgings.

  He was debating whether to pull out the last resort he had for keeping a Narra moving: a sinuous whip that he carried in a saddlebag, and the like of which each of his companions had among their equipment. The trouble was, he had learned as a youngster that the whips were not to be used lightly. The Narra did not like them, and often a beast which had one used on it, never, from that moment on, regarded its user as anything but an enemy. Duk had no qualms about hurting an animal—he was no animal lover, and had little understanding of beasts except as objects to be used—but the Narra were his mode of transportation, and he had little desire to annoy that mode of transportation to the point at which it might decide that he was not worthy of being carried. Most Narra-riders, indeed, did not even carry the whips, preferring to depend on the animals’ good will and enjoyment of desert travel, but Duk took the attitude that he and his gang members ought to be prepared for all eventualities. Thus they carried the whips, although even he had never used one since he was a kid and had lost his temper at one of his father’s recalcitrant riding beasts—and the results had been awful. His father had whipped him, for beating up a valuable animal, and the particular Narra had had it in for him for the rest of its active life, refusing to carry him, and nipping at him with its sharp teeth whenever it could reach him.

  His mount’s behaviour seemed inexplicable, and irritating to the extreme. The Narra seemed unhappy at being ridden, and seemingly did not want to run fast. It kept turning its head to peer behind it, as if looking for something there. And all there was behind Duk and his beast, was what usually was there when he and his mates were pulling off a caper, seven men on seven Narra. Well, this time they had an extra animal and the nightlady that they had kidnapped, but she was of no account. A woman, and a whore at that; surely not even a riding beast found her of interest except for the use that she could be put to, and what possible use could even a male Narra have for a female not of its own species? No, Duk could not credit the possibility that the whore had anything to do with his mount’s behaviour; it had to be something else.

  “What’s the hold up, Duk?” his second, Cob, riding behind him and leading the Narra that carried the kidnapped woman, shouted. “How come you’re slowing down?”

  “It’s not me, it’s my stupid Narra,” Duk called back. “I don’t know what’s the matter with it. It doesn’t want to run, and it’s not listening to me.”

  Just then they could hear shouting from the men behind them.

  “Find out what’s going on,” Duk told Cob, and returned his eyes to the front and his attention to his animal, pleading with it to pick up its pace, to run and run fast.

  Usually that was all it took with a Narra, to get it to gobble up the miles. The animals loved to run fast, and only wanted an excuse to do so—well, assuming that they were watered and fed, and that the sun was up. It was daylight and Mokri, Duk’s mount had had a bit of water and a handful of grain at sun-up before Duk’s gang had begun their morning ride. Granted, the gang members had ridden their runners long into the dark the previous night, and that was considered not a good practice with the Narra. But for deeds such as this one, that sort of thing was necessary, and Duk and his companions had done so on earlier occasions, with few ill effects. Now Mokri was not responding at all to Duk’s talking; in fact it was still trying to turn its head backwards and look at Duk knew not what.

  “Hey Duk!” Cob yelled to him. “Better get that beast of yours moving! We’re being chased! Seems that Lut saw a line of six men riding towards us as we climbed to the top of the last hill! They’re still a ways off but he’s pretty sure they’re gaining on us!”

  Duk swore.

  Six men were not that many; his gang had the advantage of numbers. But he did not want to fight in the sand even with the edge of numbers; this caper was not about fighting, after all. It was about getting the whore to his home village and putting her to work. There was very little coin in MuddyWater or YellowWater, but there were a few dozen men who were hungry for a bit of sexual action, the sort of action that pious wives did not care to provide, and the local virgins could not be expected to even know about. Many of these men were Duk’s friends and to some of them he and his gang owed favours. Kidnapping a trained nightlady, and spreading around her favours had seemed like just the plan to get Duk’s group into their neighbours’ and older male relatives’ good books. Since the gang members tended to avoid the boring physical labour that was plentiful in the villages, and therefore were considered something of layabouts, it made their lives easier if they could provide others a service now and then, especially if it was a service that no-one else was likely to offer.

  Thus, Duk wanted to get his captive to MuddyWater rather than to engage in a melee in the desert. Not that he feared fighting; he liked a good scrap, as a matter-of-fact, and under different circumstances he would have enjoyed carving signs into the chests of foolhardy caravanners who were arrogant enough to take him on, but this time he had other things on his mind.

  He had to get his Narra moving.

  With a snarl he pulled out his riding whip from a saddlebag, and reached behind himself to give Mokri a good crack on its rump. The beast howled—the Narra have a high-pitched, haunting distress call—and reacted by leaping into a run so quickly that Duk had to hang on grimly to stay on its back. For a moment he thought that the animal would try to unseat him, but fortunately the moment passed and then he was practically sailing along the familiar sand trail, his companions following in his wake.

  *****

  Kati who had been using her psychic talent to cajole the gang leader’s Narra into slowing down, felt the animal’s pain almost as clearly as if the whip had struck her. She physically convulsed as she lay face down on the beast that she was tied to, and was mentally thrown back into her body from a position just by the lead Narra’s neck. The animal on whose back she lay took off running at top speed, seconds after she had returned to her body, and the vertigo that she was experiencing increased enough that she, too, wanted to scream, just like Duk’s Narra had. Instead, she tried to relax into the runnerbeast’s gait and to keep the contents of her stomach inside her.

  “What happened?”

  She directed the mental question to the granda. With luck, its knowledge of her situation was greater than hers; often that was the case. The granda seemed to be able to use her PSI powers to extend its mental reach to a considerable extent; the combination that their two consciousnesses created was that of a powerful psychic. The node had an answer for her, even as it steadied her bodily functions to cushion her from the worst effects of the sudden shock and speed.

  “That Duk used a whip on his riding Narra, the one you were persuading to slow down,” the granda told her.

  “Shit! I didn’t intend to cause the animal pain!” Kati subvocalized remorsefully.

  As a matter of fact, the possibility that a rider might hit a Narra had not occurred to her. Makkaro had not included whips in the equipment that his employees had packed for Mikal, Jocan and her; she had simply assumed their gear was the standard riding kit, and therefore contained what every other rider also should have had.

  “You were closer to the mark than you realized when you named them the ‘desert louts’,” the granda responded. “They’re a pretty crude bunch, Duk perhaps the crudest of them all.”

  So she dare not try that trick again. She did not want to feel responsible for an animal being ill-treated, even if the direct blame fell on the leader of the gang that had captured her. But surely the
re was some other way she could help herself; she was not about to give up in despair quite yet.

  “Duk’s mount is furious with him,” the granda commented. “The Narra do not like being hit, and they’re smart enough beasts to connect the hitting and the hitter. Maybe with a little finesse we can get some retaliatory action from the mount.”

  “You work on it,” Kati subvocalized with a sigh. “I’m pretty preoccupied with staying conscious under the circumstances. At this speed, this is a flipping lousy way to ride a Narra.”

  *****

  “They’ve seen us,” Yarm shouted to Jocan so that he could pass the words back to the others. “At least they picked up their pace. I’m not worried though. They can’t keep it up for long, considering that they must have been on the move much of last night. Our mounts are much fresher; we can at least match their speed, until they start slowing down again.”

  He bent down to whisper sweet nothings to his Narra’s ear, and the animal responded by speeding up. Jocan followed suit as soon as he had passed Yarm’s message to Cay, and Runner responded eagerly to his urging. A quick glance behind told him that the others were also sweet talking their animals into hurrying. Within moments, they were all hurtling across the sand, the mounts acting as if running headlong across the desert was a thrill they had been waiting for all their lives. Jocan chuckled and gave Runner’s neck a pleased hug. The Narra truly were remarkable beasts!

  Mikal’s thoughts were in more of a turmoil. Perhaps the kidnappers’ burst of speed was a normal development and one that he should have expected, and which Yarm most certainly had, but it increased his worry about how Kati was doing. He had agreed to go along with her scheme, but that did not mean that he felt complacent about it, or her. He recognized that deep within, he had been terribly worried about her, he had worried that the louts would succeed in hauling her off somewhere where they would feel free to do with her as they pleased. He did agree with Yarm that physically and psychologically, Kati was much more capable of protecting herself than Chrys would ever be, but the thought of the kidnappers abusing her twisted his stomach into knots. Nevertheless, she was a free agent, and she had knowingly accepted the risks involved in the role that she had chosen; he could not deny her right to do so. She had been so frighteningly casual in her statement that she trusted “her knights in shining armour to rescue her in time”; he wondered whether or not she was having second thoughts about that right now.