In which case, they might well divide their numbers and, by circling around, try to head him off. They could not move fast, for they would not dare to expose themselves in the clearing, and it would be slow going in the woods.
The sun was now high enough for him to feel its rays on the side exposed to it. Without lifting his head or shoulders or increasing his pace, he began to turn, turned, and walked in towards the sun. He could not see, he could feel the dragon as it passed, bellowing, to his left. He kept on walking.
It had not noticed him! It had not noticed him!
That it had noticed the shirt was almost certain, for it had paused in its rushing and he could hear the snapping of the tree and (so he thought) the ripping and the tearing of the cloth.
He kept on walking, the sun warmed his naked shoulders, and presently the sun ceased to do so and the grass fell away from him and underneath it was mossy and overhead it was shady. Slowly and cautiously, but still stooping, he turned around. He saw that he had entered the forest… and safety.
Farther off a dragon called and sounded, but he could not tell if it were real or false.
Once he had been lost in the woods after a dragon had been busy in a clearing, and he was worse off now than then in that he was now naked. But in everything else he was, he reflected, hopefully, better off. For one thing, he was only a foot-journey away from the town instead of a flight-journey. For another, should he find himself again among Doghunters, he could count on aid instead of capture.
But most of all he was better off now because he had already had the experience. And he was where he now was—and how he now was—not because he had fled in numbness from a scene in no way of his own making, but because he had brought himself out of danger into safety. He was mother-naked and alone, there was a wild beast to one side of him and men who sought his life to another. But—he found to his astonished and his marveling delight—he was no longer afraid.
The clean sweet smell of the woods was all around him. A tiny gray creature for which he had no name paused on its way up the side of a leaning tree and regarded him curiously.
“When in doubt,” Jon-Joras said aloud, “do as the natives do.”
He followed the gray one up the tree and looked all around him.
The trees here on Prime World—at least, in this particular area of Prime World—were not as tall as he had seen elsewhere. On Dondonoluc, for one example, or on its mirror-twin-world, Tiran-lou, with their incredible depths of top-soil, the mastadonic trees towered several hundred feet high. But, as though in keeping with the foliage, if Prime World’s trees were not tall, neither were Prime World’s buildings. How far he might be from the nearest settlement, Jon-Joras did not know. The oozy green gum of this one, rank and odorous but by no means offensive, ebbed out onto his flesh as he pressed against the bole and craned, and mingled with the hair. A breeze met his inquiring face, a little wind rich with the smell of sap and earth and plants. But all he could see, whichever way he looked, were more trees, and yet trees.
Not altogether realizing what he was doing (and, afterwards, somewhat surprised that he had in any way thought of doing it), Jon-Joras let his eyes go out of focus. The trees blurred, trunks and crowns and branches. And, in the corner of his eye, something which had not been there before… or which had not appeared to be there before… took shape… a wide, shallow concave arc… a tall, abrupt and flaring fin…
Slowly and carefully, as though fearful that the new shapes had newly materialized from the ambient ether and might, if he were incautious, take fright and vanish away again, he turned his head so that he might see clearly where they were and mark their location. He did, and they stayed where they were and then he climbed down the tree.
Despite his having taken a careful sight on it he still had a hard time finding the flyer. There were not many around, that he had seen; this depleted world could afford, neither materials nor fuel, and the cost of importing made it impossible there should be many. He had seen them, silver and gold and several other colors; no where on Prime World had he seen another one camouflaged. In fact, nowhere did he know of this being done at all… except, of course, on the so-called War Worlds, which did not form part of Confederation.
But he found the flyer at last.
The door was open, as though someone on guard had just slipped out, but if there had actually been someone on guard, and where or what he slipped out to, Jon-Joras never learned. It is only in fiction that all loose ends are always neatly tied up. A tiny nameless creature with stripes along its little back looked up with bright, blank eyes to see the naked man flitting from tree to tree all around the clearing and then dash across it and up and into something for which the small creature had no familiar image. It blinked, instantly forgot, and scurried on, looting for nuts.
There were many things on Jon-Joras’s mind, but one of them was a firm resolution that first things had now to come first. He padded quickly to the controls and he took the flyer up and up until he saw nothing but a green blur beneath him. Then he put her on Hover and locked her so. Then he sat down to consider things.
There was food and drink in the proper compartment and the greedy way he ate informed him that, for one thing, he had been quite hungry, and that, for another, he seemed now to be all better. He thought about this as he gobbled and gulped and picked at something which proved to be a bolus of sticky tree-sap entangled in the hair of his leg. This, in turn, reminded him that he was still naked. He stood up and patted his stomach and stretched and gave vent to an enormous and enormously satisfying eructation. Then he started rummaging around. He found clothes and those items which weren’t clean were clean enough to suit him now. He had a dim recollection of the fastidious Jon-Joras of M.M. beta-world who shifted himself from head to foot three times a day and tossed the discarded items in the incinerator; but he did not pause even to smile. He suddenly had something else on his mind. The under-tunic stayed for a moment just where it was on his arms about to slip over his shaven head. For in that moment everything stayed where it was. Then he lowered his arms and slipped the under-tunic off and held it in his hands, staring, staring at it. Then he brought his face close to, next to it. He did not really think that he was mistaken, but he thought that he might perhaps… just possibly… perhaps… be. So, slowly, one by one, he picked up the other articles of clothing and one, by one, he smelt them.
They smelled, every one of them, faintly, faintly, but definitely perceptively, of that ancient musty odor of the Kar-chee Castle.
But it had burned—had it not? It had. And he had seen it burning. Had… whomever these clothes belonged to… had he been there then or since, it was inconceivable that his clothes should not be smelling of smoke. Reeking of smoke. But it reeked of nothing, had merely the normal smells of man and of flyer fuel and (not, hardly normal, this—) the alien and shadowy scent of the old ruin’s ill-frequented lower passageways. Therefore—
Therefore the man who had worn these clothes there had worn them there and had been himself there before it had burned. And not too very long ago, either, or they would not still retain the scent.
Which made no sense at all.
Hue might not be there now, in the black basalt shell of a ruin, but he… and his people… had been there, steadily, for at least some period of years before. And Aëlorix… and his people… were Hue’s enemies. Jon-Joras stopped here and carefully considered all his thoughts. For one thing, what made him so certain that this flyer belonged to or had at least been used by Aëlorix? Its mere proximity?
Once again he explored the small cabin, this time not looking for anything in particular and therefore looking for everything in particular. The chart-cabinet, the gear-locker, the food compartment, the spaces under the seats, the boot—all yielded nothing in the way of information. Certainly, it was not certain that Aëlorix or any of his men had been the ones who brought the flyer here into the woods. But, if not them, who then? Who else had reason to camouflage the craft and secrete it
here, so far from anything? He had no answer, and yet he would not accept that there should be no answer. So once again he began looking slowly through everything. And this time he found something.
It was only a small something which might turn out to be a nothing. The pile of charts was neatly stacked, perhaps a trifle too neatly. For the regularity of the pile disclosed one tiny irregularity which he would have failed to notice if the charts had been shuffled up in a disorderly manner—and this was the fact that one corner of one chart protruded just the slightest from the neat arrangement of the rest. As if the stack above it had been removed very carefully and then the one chart extracted and subsequently replaced with an elaborate care which had not quite come off. Was it so? Jon-Joras lifted up the charts above and removed this single one.
It was a map of The Bosky.
Or, to be precise, of one sector of it.
There were no notes or markings, no arrows, no circles-nothing of that sort. But he looked at the chart carefully, very carefully, scrutinizing it very closely, and it did seem to him that on one portion of it the paper was just a trifle smudged, as though it had been often traced by ascertaining fingers. Fingers intent on indicating the terminus of a secret route, perhaps… If one paid visits to The Bosky it certainly made sense to go there by air; it certainly wasn’t safe to go there by land if one could believe the stories. But… still unanswered… why should anyone want to go to The Bosky at all? That is—not to settle there or to pass through it in order to settle elsewhere, but to go there to one particular place and then return? And just once, either. The Bosky…
What did he know about it? It was the terra incognita, the land unknown, the land without people, and it lay beyond the farthest boundary of the land claimed by Sartor, Hathis, Peramis and Drogue. The land where hunts could not be held. No-man’s-land. Where, according to old Ma’am Anna, queen of the Northern Horde of nomads, the dragons were fiercer than elsewhere—so fierce that they needn’t be provoked into charging—so fierce that, time after time, they had prevented human penetration of the area by either herdsmen or farmers. Dragons with which Hue, so his daughter said, had nothing to do. That was The Bosky. And it was also the place where the unknown crew (unless the crew was, after all, composed of Aëlorix and his gang) of the mysterious flyer had gone, and gone again and again, on their even more mysterious errand.
Thus, the strange Bosky, and was it the strangest thing of all on this strange planet believed by most of humankind to be their own ancestral world? With all its peculiar features, known and unknown, hidden and revealed: no. Not stranger, certainly, than the whole antique structure of Prime World society. Certainly not stranger than the brutal-sophisticated customs of the Hunts. Gentlemen-Huntsmen hating their dragon-prey, Doghunters hating dragons even more than the Gentlemen did and simultaneously hating the Gentlemen and being hated by them; this was strange enough, but this was not all. Nomads hating nobody and trusting nobody, working against the Doghunters who were working against the Gentlemen, but sure that they the Nomads were in all this working only for their own selves and opposing the Doghunters because in doing so they were also opposing the Gentlemen. And the band of thieves whose code of battle was perhaps more brutal than that of the Hunts they ignored and scorned, delighting—it seemed so—equally in the most elaborate forms of poetry and in murderous wrestling matches which ended or which were supposed to end in an elaborate and attenuated form of ritual cannibalism. The urban mobs and the rural sycophants. The dragons roused to fury in the woods and the dragons goaded to frenzy in the pit. The beautiful, involved, involuted, convoluted, contrived and bloody ballet of the dragon hunt, which brought to Prime World the wealth and questing zealousness of men from a score of hundreds of other worlds… though Prime World grew no richer, its aristocrats deepening into moral decay, its poor either flinging themselves in murderous fury against the adamantine wall of their oppressors’ scorn or taking the slow road to sudden death in distant fields or submitting to the yoke in ignorance or in silence… or kissing the bloody hand and fawning at the bloody boot.
Jon-Joras sighed, shook his head. What was behind it all? Was anything? Was there a pattern? There did seem to be hints and shadows and he wanted to know and he had to know if there was more. The ancient saying of ancient Charles Ford or Fort, curious chronicler of curious occurrences in the history of pre-Expansion Prime World, arose in his mind. One measures a circle beginning anywhere…
He got to his feet and went to the controls, took the craft off Hover, placed the chart on its scan-sight alongside the drive-seat, and set himself a course for The Bosky.
Below, far, far below were the waters of the Gulf, the land lying to the south of it, and—beyond the land—partly obscured by a mass of cloud like fleecy smoke, were the yonder waters of the Bay. Behind him lay the Main Sea, before him the Main Continent. The original, or at least the natural contours of the Gulf floor lay revealed to him like some great relief map: shelves and shallows and banks and basins and deeps. And, flashing over and through and across all, like some jagged submarine lightning-bolt, was the deep-scored trench which the Kar-chee had made—one of thousands and of hundreds of thousands such in this one body of water alone. Like an ill-healed scar it showed there, and told its tale of how, floating down upon the planet from their lairs around the Ring Stars and finding a world whose land had been almost scraped bare of metals in making multitudes of ships to fling its children out across the galaxy, the invaders had delved into the seas themselves for metals of their own.
He wondered what ores they had sucked up from the hidden treasures of the sands there, beneath the water. Black sands, they looked to be, and had probably been rich in rare earths and heavy metals such as zircon, rutile, ilmenite and others. He wondered—
The flyer’s speaker broke into voice.
It was a meaningless jumble of phonemes to him. Helplessly, he looked at the decoding cams under the speaker. But unless he knew the combination, he might press on them forever without result. The voice, having made its unintelligible announcement calmly, paused. Then it repeated it a second and then a third time, calmly. Then it waited. It spoke again in its broken syllables, and it seemed to Jon-Joras that there was now a touch of impatience… a fifth time… annoyance… pause… a sixth time… concern…
The voice barked its scrambled syllables at him now, abruptly ceased, abruptly spoke in plain speech, softly, so softly, that Jon-Joras jumped.
“Who has this boat up?” He made no answer. He could hear the man’s troubled breath. “Listen, now—Put the controls onto Receive and lock her so. We’ll guide her back and in. Do you understand? Or you’ll be in trouble. Answer. Answer.
“Answer—”
But Jon-Joras said nothing. And then, softer yet, sickening in its implications, the voice said, slowly, “Oh… you… karching… thief—” and clicked off on the closing fricative.
And the thief looked behind him in dismay, as if he expected pursuit to burst immediately from the nearest cloud. He laughed at himself, but not for long. What should he do now? Put her on All Speed? If he did, he would leave a trail along the sky. Head for clouds and hope to hide the trail? The clouds were too far away, and not where he wanted to go, anyway. He put her into a diagonal descent as fast as she’d go without making marks, and leveled off at about a hundred feet above the water, and locked her so. Then he swiveled the seat around and looked up and waited.
He had not much long to wait.
The pursuers seemed to come bursting out of the fabric of the firmament, their trails thick and heavy and angry. He shot down at forty-five degrees, surged forward against his safety-belt as she hit the surface and watched the sudden surge of frothy water close over the dome and bubble like a dying whale. He put her onto full descent; descend far she could not, of course not, but if it were only hold here where she was as she was—And if the seams and shell proved leak-proof—And if they, the ones so way up high, did not see him—He looked at the chronometer and tried to c
alculate how long it would take for them to pass over and be gone.
The small craft surged slowly back and forth and slowly up and down. A dull, grinding nausea which seemed to go down to the very marrow of his spine began to afflict him. Finally, he could not go on standing it, tried to surface slowly, shot up like a cork in a spume, fell back and wallowed and rocked again. Hastily, he looked up, but through the moisture running down the dome he could see nothing. And when, finally, he could, he saw only the fading trails of vapor, vanishing into the Gulf.
And now at last he came to the end of that more-than-peninsula and not-quite-subcontinent where it joined the main landmass. He looked at the chart a moment, magnified in the sight-scan, then looked again below. Those rounded hummocks (from above they seemed little more than that) must be the Sixteen Hills; those sudden sparkles of light, the sun reflecting on the Sweet and Bitter Lakes. And there, there, shadowy and sere, was the abrupt descent of the Great Dry Valley. All the landmarks.
Beyond lay The Bosky.
He dropped lower. He looked up and around again. And still no signs of recurrent pursuit. The speaker was, as it had remained, silent. Whom had it been? Who were they? Again, Aëlorix? Or—his mind raced and tumbled about a bit—the Chairman of Drogue? Was there perhaps some force on Prime World of which he had never heard? After all, there was a lot more to it than this part which lay behind him and which was about all that he had ever known. Were there not thriving cities, so it was said, on that great archipelago which formerly formed part of Australia and ringed round that shallow sea once called Lake Eyre? It was possible that the flyers might have come from down there. But bound upon what mystic errands which required them to camouflage their craft, hide in woods, speak in code, and pursue him as though he were himself a rogue dragon—? He could conceive of nothing, in answer. And turned again to chart and to controls.
Meanwhile, let him pursue some answers to some previous questions. And follow his course to the nameless, numberless hill which seemed to have been the locus or focus of the unknown fingers whose tracery had left, faintly, the only clue there was. He went lower. He went lower. And there he saw where it was and what it was. His breath hissed in between his teeth. His decision was immediate, neither to stop nor even—there—to slow down. He went on as though he had not seen it at all. He had certain qualms as to whether or not it had seen him, though. But these did not preoccupy him long.
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