by James Enge
The road they were walking was fairly well-maintained, but didn’t seem much-used. Occasionally they met people hurrying the other way, most of whom passed without speaking. The only exception was a panicky neatherd who was driving four solemn cows downhill toward the city just as fast as they would go.
Which was none too fast, in fact. The neatherd was nervous and sweating, but his cattle were cool as icicles, treading the road at their self-chosen pace and calmly ignoring the man’s heckling, shouts, and blows.
“It’s that time of year,” he said apologetically to Aloê and Morlock as he passed, to their complete mystification.
“Time to get them to market?” Aloê wondered after the man had gone by. “Time to get them to a butcher?”
Morlock shrugged. Not the man to go to with your farming questions, Aloê remembered.
“Or does something bad happen in the mountains this time of year?” she continued. “Maybe we should have asked him. Snowstorms?”
“No,” Morlock said. “South winds keep Kaen warm all winter long.”
“That’s the first good thing I’ve heard you say about the place.”
Morlock looked at her, mystified. For him, a warm winter was nothing to brag about, clearly.
“Rains, though,” he continued. “Maybe floods. They can be dangerous in narrow places.”
But water couldn’t scare Aloê. “If that’s the worst, we’ll be fine, then.”
The sandy road led steadily uphill to a cleft in the red rock of the dry mountains before them. It looked very narrow at first, but as they spent most of a day struggling toward it she realized how high the stone face of the cliff was. When they finally reached the entrance to the canyon they saw it was wide enough for a dozen men to walk down, side by side.
“If they don’t mind holding hands, that is,” she joked to Morlock, who nodded absently as he watched something off on the side of the road.
She followed his gaze and saw an idol of Öweioreibäto, that was the sheepy one, being beaten by a small boy in goatskins wielding a very large hammer. The idol finally fell to pieces, a large chunk of it landing on one of the boy’s feet. He screamed and dropped the hammer. He hopped away into the peach-colored scrub along the road, holding his injured foot in both hands and hopping on the other, sobbing out curses against Öweioreibäto and prayers to Khÿmäroreibätu.
“So: they’re not friends after all,” Aloê remarked. Morlock nodded thoughtfully.
“I hope we’re not walking into a religious war,” Aloê said, and at that even Morlock smiled.
It grew dark very soon after they entered the cleft and began walking up the canyon beyond. But they carried on as long as the sliver of sky above showed blue. The surface of the canyon was a little rougher than the road, but it was smoother than Aloê had expected. Morlock said he thought it had been worked some—that, in effect, they were still on a road, headed from somewhere to somewhere. That made Aloê feel a little better.
She almost felt—whatever the opposite of seasick was. She was land-sick. She was tired of brownish red dirt under her aching feet, and irregular clumps of red rock banging against her toes didn’t help. She felt like she was strangling as the steep walls of the canyon were pressed against her, and the thin air didn’t help. She wanted something, anything, to distract her from her hellish surroundings, and Morlock’s one-word replies to her conversational gambits didn’t help.
But she kept her whining to the indispensable minimum and tried to crack the occasional joke, and didn’t even shout in relief when Morlock decreed it was time to stop for the night.
Morlock dug their sleeping pit, made the fire, and pulled the provisions out of his knapsack while she sat and rubbed her feet. They ate dried sausage and passed a water bottle back and forth with a minimum of conversation.
“Wish it would rain,” was one of Morlock’s more surprising comments.
“What about floods?” Aloê asked, surprised.
Morlock shrugged. “Air’s too dry.”
She felt she could love this man.
“What did you find to make a fire with?” she said. “Do those scrub trees grow in the canyon?”
“Bones,” he said.
“Bones?”
“Bones. I found a lot of them when I dug our sleeping pit. I think this was a battlefield, years ago.”
In the course of digging their sleep pit, Morlock had come across enough dried bones to realize this was a battlefield. He’d finished digging the pit, and went on to use the bones as fuel for the campfire. And now he expected her to sleep in what was essentially an open grave. An open used grave.
She changed her mind about being able to love this man.
But she had to admit that the hole was quite comfortably free of bones, maggots and rats, lined with sand and leaves—better than some of the places they’d slept. They lay down together, and as usual he turned away from her without a word. Sometimes she slept back-to-back with him, but she had found she was actually warmer if she spooned up against his back and wrapped her blankets around them both. He didn’t seem to mind—rarely moved the whole night through, though she had to admit several mornings it appeared he had not slept.
She wondered, idly, as they were nestled for sleep, what Naevros was doing and whether it would be better, or at least sexier, if he were here. No doubt he was hate-sexing the Honorable Ulvana or her moral equivalent at that very moment. Never mind: she loathed thinking about him this way—loathed herself when she thought like this.
“Morlock,” she said sleepily, to distract herself. “Anyone waiting for you back home?”
“My harven-kin,” he said. “Some friends.”
“No girl?”
“No.” The answer was harsh, unequivocal, interesting.
“A boy, then?” she hazarded.
“No. It’s not like that. It’s just . . .”
She thought of the terms she’d used, and smiled. “You prefer adults.”
“Yes.”
“Sound fellow,” she said, still smiling, and went contentedly to sleep with her face pressed against his twisted spine.
Morning was a grayish reddish void, empty of sunlight. Aloê woke to find herself alone in the sleep pit. She crawled out of her sandy grave and found Morlock chewing dried meat with a marked lack of enthusiasm.
He saluted her with the water bottle and passed it to her as she sat beside him.
“Feel like an oily rag,” she remarked after a drink. “I don’t suppose we can spare any of this for washing.”
Morlock shook his head regretfully. But he added, “Water cut this canyon, before people made it into a road. There’s water here somewhere.”
“Where?”
“Wells. Or streams dammed up to make lakes. We’ll find it.”
“Mmm.” In her mind she was drifting under the surface of the mountain lake Morlock had created in her mind, shedding the filth from her skin like scales, renewing her life from the life-giving water.
She sighed, opened her eyes, and accepted the fibrous slab of dried meat that Morlock was offering her.
It was noon, by the gleam of gold in the blue sliver of sky over their heads, when they encountered the soldiers of the Goat.
They wore goatskin helmets and goatleather cuirasses shaped to fit their scrawny chests. Slats of pale varnished wood dangled from their belts, making a kind of protective skirt for their groins. They were armed with stone-tipped wooden spears, and rocks, and some had round wooden shields. There were about twenty of them.
“The enemy at last!” they screamed when they saw Morlock and Aloê. “Easy grazing for the Goat of War!”
“We are not your enemies,” Aloê called. “We are not opposed to, um Khÿmäroreibätu.”
There was some confusion at this, and then one goat-soldier cried, “All must die, so that their blood can slake the thirst of the Almighty Goat!”
“Yes!” cried another. “The Goat is great! Praise the Goat and kill the enemy!”
T
he others joined in with their own very similar opinions, and they smashed their weapons together and moved aggressively but not very rapidly forward.
There was obviously no reasoning with them, and they were pretty numerous. On the other hand, they were pretty undisciplined, and those spears were obviously not throwing weapons. Aloê met Morlock’s cold gray eye, and he seemed to be thinking the same thing she was.
They turned together and ran away back up the canyon. Morlock drew his glassy sword as he ran, and Aloê spun her glass staff like a baton, gathering impulse energy as she ran alongside.
The goat soldiers shouted in triumph and began to pursue them, each as fast as he could.
The thing is, most people don’t run at the same speed. As they all ran down the canyon, the goaty troop began to thin out—some running slower, some stumbling over rocks (or bones! Aloê thought), some running a little less enthusiastically.
“Now, I think,” Aloê said quietly to Morlock, after a quick glance over her shoulder.
They turned back together to face their foes. The three or four in front were joyous at the prospect of battle, not realizing or caring that their line was much less numerous than it had been.
Aloê spun her crystal staff one last time, then gripped it firmly below the center and struck at the nearest spearman. The staff passed through the spear, shattering it to splinters, and proceeded to do the same thing to the spearman’s arm. He fell screaming to his knees, screaming out curses in the name of his goaty god. She jumped over him and began laying into the next goat-soldier in the long straggling line.
Morlock’s sword was a flash of glassy light at her side. She was worried at first he was a sword-waver—the kind of person it was dangerous to stand next to in a fight. But he used the edge of his bright blade only to block attacks; at every chance he thrust the point home with deadly efficiency. The sharp end of the sword was already red with enemy blood.
The front of the straggling line broke, and the terrified goat-soldiers ran back, stumbling into their fellows who were running up from behind. The panic and confusion spread, and soon dozens of soldiers were fleeing from the two glass-weaponed Guardians.
Eventually the mass of soldiers to the rear forced the frightened vanguard to slow down and regroup. They rallied each other, shouted a few slogans about cloven hooves of courage, and lumbered forward to attack again.
“Same same?” Aloê suggested to Morlock.
“Won’t work again,” Morlock said.
But it did, and twice more after that. They ran until their attackers spread out behind them, turned to counterattack, and drove the broken vanguard fleeing back up the canyon.
The last time, though, they heard a loud chorus of triumphant shouting farther up the pass: hundreds, thousands of voices re-echoing down the stones.
The two vocates looked at each other without speaking and took the better course of valor, running off in the other direction.
But they had not gone far before they heard sounds coming toward them up the canyon—not the sounds of an army, exactly, but many strange footfalls and a kind of muttering.
“Cavalry with muffled hooves?” Aloê whispered to Morlock.
He shrugged. “Camels, maybe.”
“What’s a camel?”
Morlock looked at her to make sure she was serious, and then briefly described a camel.
“You’re making that up!” she accused him.
He didn’t have time to respond, if he was going to, before they rounded the bend and saw what was making the noise.
Filling the canyon before them, down to the next turn, was a herd of sheep. They had to be sheep. They were about waist-high to Aloê or Morlock, had long floppy ears, and round bodies covered with closely crimped wool. But the wool gleamed like polished steel; the eyes of the beasts were red as blood; instead of bleating they seemed to be gasping or groaning; and each sheep had a pair of long curling horns, pointed at the ends, from which dark venomous fluid was dripping. The sheep had long pointed teeth as if they were meat-eaters.
As soon as the sheep saw Morlock and Aloê the flock rushed forward, gnashing teeth and thrusting with their horns.
“Don’t get stuck by one of those horns,” Aloê said, just to make conversation while they waited for the onslaught.
Morlock nodded seriously, and added, “Strike for the face. That wool looks to be armor.”
They stood, in fighting stance, and waited. Aloê spun her staff a few times to build up impulse force. She wondered if she should say something mushy like It’s been nice knowing you or There’s no one I’d rather die fighting beside. But she decided that, even if the words were true, they might ring false . . . and they would probably be wasted on Morlock anyway.
Morlock stood like a stone until the beasts came within striking range. Then he stabbed and stabbed, the glass sword like lightning in his hand. Four bodies fell in a row, forming a low wall, and the beasts beyond milled about in confusion.
“A barrier! A barrier!” shouted Aloê joyously, and lashed out to smash two sheep-skulls, one with either end of her staff. “You beautiful son-of-a-brach’s-bastard!”
He gave her a gray astonished glance even as he continued to strike sheep dead. She did the same, and soon they were surrounded by a wall of dead sheep at least two sheep in height.
But by now the army of venomous, steely, red-eyed sheep had filled the whole canyon, as far as they could see from bend to bend. It’s true the army seemed mostly intent on marching past them now that they were hidden behind the army’s dead flock-mates. But the pressure of the marching sheep was pushing the wall back toward them. Soon Aloê and Morlock might be killed by dead sheep, impaled by the horns of the beasts they’d slain.
“Do we wait it out?” she asked Morlock, hoping that he would not shrug or grunt or something. “I suppose they will pass by eventually.”
“No,” said Morlock. “Can you keep the wall? I’ll get us out of here.”
“Yes,” Aloê said gratefully, and turned to keep wandering sheep from walking over the heap of dead ones.
Morlock said, “Noddegamra,” and his glass sword fell into separate shining spikes. He gathered them up from the ground and slipped them into the many pockets he had sewn into his jacket and shirt and did something with one of them against the wall of rock behind them. Then he stepped two feet in the air, drove another crystal spike into the cliff, and put his foot on it. He drove a third spike into the wall and stepped up to it. Then he turned back to Aloê and motioned for her to follow.
He expects me to climb that cliff, Aloê realized. She almost refused, almost shouted for him to come back off the rocks and fight the sheep like a man. Then she thought about how crazy that would sound. The venomous sheep were there, and so was the army of goat-soldiers; she had to get away. And: she remembered Morlock rowing his seasick sodden self away to fight the dragon on the sea. I’ll need a boat. Or is it a ship?
She groaned and sheathed her staff across her shoulders. One long step took her up to the first spike. His foot had left the second by then, and he was driving spikes up higher on the cliff and lifting himself up to them like a misshapen monkey.
“Have to go up straighter to reach the first shelf,” he called back.
Shelf? What shelf? To Aloê’s eye the cliff was a sheer mass rising up to the path of the sun.
“Shelf, schmelf, bite an elf,” she muttered through clenched teeth as she followed somewhat slower. She hated heights. Hated them. Even when there weren’t venomous sheep and clownish goat-warriors capering around at the height’s base.
“What?” he called back.
“’S a boat. Not a ship.”
He stopped what he was doing and looked down at her. She waved hurriedly at him to keep on going, clenched her teeth together, and kept going herself.
Presently she came to the thin irregularity in the cliff face that Morlock described so generously as a shelf. Morlock matter-of-factly pulled her up. She wedged her feet on the stone,
with her back to the cliff, and tried to look down without obvious terror.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
It struck her as a very un-Morlocky sort of question. “Perfectly well,” she said with quiet dignity. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
If he shrugged she didn’t see it, God Creator be praised. He bent over the venom-stinking sheep-filled abyss and shouted, “Armageddon!”
Aloê’s vision was a little wavery, but she was pretty sure she saw the glassy shards of Morlock’s sword flying up toward them from the cliff face. She resisted the impulse to duck; it would have sent her tumbling off the narrow ledge.
In the event, there was no danger. The shards reassembled themselves into a sword, whose grip landed in Morlock’s outstretched hands.
“Nice trick,” she said in a level voice she was rather proud of.
“Eh,” he said, embarrassed and pleased. “Simple, really. Talic impulse woven into the shards holds them together, and makes them responsive to summoning. Got the idea from . . . from . . . from something I’m working on at home. I’ll. I’ll. I’ll show it to you sometime.”
“Love to see it,” she said, lying politely through her clenched teeth.
“I have to refresh the talic charge,” he said. He sat back and ascended into rapture: she saw the faint glow through his closed eyelids.
As she waited she looked down into the chasm below. The tide of sheep up the canyon had stopped for some reason. The sun, straight overhead now, painted a stripe of noon-light down the middle of the pass, making the steely wool of the deadly flock shine like gold. As she waited, the edge of light moved to the opposite side of the pass, climbed the red-black stones of the canyon wall, was gone.
Morlock awoke. Aloê smiled when he met her eye, and she repressed any light-hearted comments she may have thought of regarding noonday naps. She was very much afraid that, if she opened her mouth, vertigo would force her to vomit.
Morlock held a corner of his jacket under the pommel of the glass sword and said, conversationally, “Noddegamra.” The glass sword fell to shards again, which Morlock deftly caught in his jacket and afterward stowed efficiently in his myriad pockets. He met her eye again.