The Well of Darkness

by Randall Garrett

  In a swift movement, Keeshah released the smaller male and backed cautiously toward the lair. Another male, bigger than the gray and marked with a nearly white spot along one side of his muzzle, stepped forward.

  *Keeshah, what‘s happening?* I asked, but was ignored.

  The two sha’um went into crouch, the fur behind their heads lifting into manes and their tails whipping slowly back and forth. After they had each roared a challenge, their voices were reduced to muttering, deep-throated growls that raised my headfur. The other cats moved back, giving them room …

  And a third sha’um entered the clearing, seeming to appear out of nowhere.

  “A female,” Tarani said from beside me, startling me. The vacant look had left her eyes. “She’s Keeshah’s mate.”

  I didn’t wonder, then, how Tarani knew that—I was much too glad to see her responding and recovering from the initial shock of Lonna’s death. And I was engrossed in what was happening in the clearing.

  The female was marked for the forest rather than the desert. Her coat was brindled in browns and grays, and her fur seemed thicker than Keeshah’s. She made no move to join the fight, but walked over to Keeshah and rubbed the side of her jaw along his back. She paused to look at the other male, but made no threatening gestures. Instead she came slowly up the hill—right toward us.

  Tarani stood up and went to meet her.

  They assessed each other warily, the pale-skinned woman and the dark-furred cat. Tarani stretched out her hand, palm up. The female stretched her neck and dipped her head to sniff delicately at Tarani’s hand. I saw the girl’s neck muscles twitch, but she held her arm steady. The sha’um’s nose touched Tarani’s palm, jerked back, then pressed in again.

  Tarani brought up her other hand slowly and touched the female sha’um’s chin. The cat flinched slightly, then stood quivering as the girl’s hand moved slowly, smoothing back the fur on the cat’s throat.

  The sha’um’s ears, folded back when she had approached Tarani, relaxed forward under the girl’s caress. A sound from the clearing snapped them back again, and the female whirled away from Tarani. Tail thickened and neckfur bristling, the brindled female answered the challenge of the white-faced male and stalked down to stand beside Keeshah, making it clear that he would have to take on both of them.

  I’d had enough exposure to sha’um to know they weren’t dumb.

  The white-faced male backed down. He retreated into the circle of males.

  Keeshak took a step forward and called his challenge again, but there weren’t any takers. The ring of sha’um shuffled backward until the sha’um seemed merely to fade away into the shadows of the forest.

  I discovered I was trembling. I moved to stand beside Tarani, touching her elbow to let her know I was there. She jumped, and looked at me with shining eyes.

  “Rikardon,” she breathed. “We are linked, the female and I. We spoke today for the first time, but she has been with me before now.” She spread her arms. “In my dreams I have seen this forest, moved through it on four legs, hunted glith on the plain, wild vlek in the hills above the Valley. Many different dreams, so scattered and seemingly unconnected that their strangeness frightened me.”

  Tarani put her hand on my arm, and spoke tenderly.

  “Now I understand more than my own dreams, Rikardon. I have learned what you and Keeshah shared, and how devastating its loss must have been for you. Your link with Keeshah—?”

  “It’s back,” I said. She smiled and squeezed my arm. “It never left, really,” I told her. “It just went inactive because coming to the Valley was a biological priority. When I needed Keeshah more than his mate did, our link came back to the conscious level.”

  I turned to watch Keeshah and his mate approach us. I scratched Keeshah in his favorite place, just behind the heavy jaw bone. Tarani touched the female more tentatively but, clearly, with no less joy. Keeshah’s mate accepted Tarani’s attention awkwardly as woman and sha’um began to get acquainted.

  “You said you spoke to her,” I reminded Tarani. “What did she say?”

  Tarani laughed.

  “No words,” she said. “And not just pictures, either, the way it was with Lonna.” Her laughter died, and her hands clenched in the female’s fur, causing the sha’um to sidestep uncertainly. Tarani recovered, and resumed stroking the cat. “Not even you, my beautiful Yayshah,” she said softly, “can take Lonna’s place in my heart.”

  “Yayshah?” I repeated.

  “Yes, I have given her that name,” Tarani said, pulling herself away from her grief. “As I say, there were no words between us, only emotions and, well, meanings.” She shrugged. “You understand what I mean better than I, I expect. Surprise at discovering our link, and—after a moment of hesitation—a sweet, uncomplicated delight. Then she asked me if you were my mate.” She smiled, but looked at Yayshah as she said: “I said yes, of course.”

  “Is that why she joined the fight?” I asked Tarani. “Was Keeshah defending me?”

  “I think so,” Tarani said. “Why does that surprise you?”

  “I figured he was fighting for you,” I said. “When I—when Markasset came here as a boy and linked with Keeshah, the other sha’um accepted me, but you’re totally a stranger to them.”

  Keeshah, apparently, had been following my thoughts.

  *Cub was one of them,* Keeshah told me. *I am a stranger.*

  I felt the irony, and Keeshah’s regret, in his acceptance of being an outsider among his own kind.

  *I have done that to you, Keeshah,* I said, but the sha’um forestalled what would have been an apology that would, in any case, have been insincere. I couldn’t wish Keeshah back to his natural state if it meant sacrificing his link with me.

  *Others wanted you for food,* Keeshah said, radiating contempt. *Female, too.*

  “Yayshah?” I said out loud. Tarani looked at me. “Keeshah says the other sha’um, including Yayshah, wanted me for dinner—or,” I added, looking around the clearing and listening to my inner awareness, “breakfast.”

  Tarani stroked the female in silence for a moment, frowning with concentration.

  “I think—it seems that wasn’t it at all,” Tarani said. “She had been hunting, and returned to her lair to find that Keeshah had appropriated it for us. She resented it, but she had a vague sense of her linkage with me, and tried to get inside to see us. Keeshah drove her off, and she waited until he was occupied to return. That gesture we saw—the way she rubbed his back?”

  I nodded.

  “She was telling him—and the others—that she’s his mate and on his side.” Tarani shook her head. “Rikardon, how is it they speak so clearly to us, but cannot talk to one another?”

  “I’m beginning to have a theory about that,” I said. “Keeshah says he’s an outsider, now, and I think it has more to do with our link than it does with his long absence from the Valley. That ‘dream’ I had of him, just after we came through the Zantril Pass—I saw him the way the others must always be. He was … only an animal, with a native but largely inactive intelligence. When a sha’um links with a man, it gives him a way to use that intelligence, it teaches him how to reason, educates him, if you will.”

  “So he speaks to man and sha’um in the language each will understand,” Tarani said, scratching behind Yayshah’s ear with more assurance. “You came here as a child, Rikardon, and bonded with a young sha’um. But I—and Yayshah—how can it have happened?”

  I cleared my throat, but found I couldn’t say what I was thinking.

  Tarani smiled. “Carn’s cellar,” she said. “It occurred to me, too, that if you were linked to Keeshah at the moment of his mating with Yayshah, our—uh—” She broke off, blushing, then continued. “But I am sure Yayshah was with me even before then, Rikardon. On the hillside—remember?—I wanted you, lured you, fought you, and still, throughout it all, wanted you. When I laughed—the sound of it frightened me. I felt I couldn’t control my own feelings. She was with me then, R
ikardon.”

  Tarani left Yayshah and came to stand in front of me.

  “But her influence was only in the character of my actions,” Tarani said. “She added an extra dimension to a passion that was already my own. Knowing that about Yayshah and myself—it tells me something of you, as well.”

  I took her hands.

  “I don’t have answers, Tarani, only opinions. Keeshah and I share a mindlink that is special, even among Sharith. You’re strongly mindgifted. I’m not saying your power, by itself, set up the link with Yayshah—but it might have made you susceptible. A compulsion is direct mind-to-mind communication of a sort, isn’t it? When I came here, it was Keeshah who first spoke to me—perhaps it’s always like that, and the boys who don’t return from the Valley are unlucky enough to choose cubs who aren’t capable of the—what? Curiosity? Initiative? Perhaps they just don’t have the native skill at all.

  “Whatever it is, Yayshah has it. When she formed the mate bond with Keeshah, who was mind-bonded to me …”

  “But I told you,” Tarani protested, “that it was present before …”

  “Not before we established our ‘mate bond’,” I interrupted her. “That happened long before we arrived at Carn’s cellar, Tarani. At least, for me it did.”

  “Then it must be the same for sha’um,” Tarani said, smiling up at me. “It is the act of choosing a mate, not of possessing him, which forms the bond.”

  20

  Tarani and I found a beautiful spot to wash off the grime, if not the memory, of our ordeal in the Well of Darkness. One of the several small streams which fed the lush growth of the Valley tumbled down a brief cataract and changed direction suddenly, leaving at one edge a small, rock-lined bay of less turbulent water. We came upon it suddenly while following a stand of brambly berry vines, eating as we walked. We weren’t the least surprised to find that the bank was free of undergrowth, green and soft with a springy grass-like ground cover. We had already discovered that these hills in the Valley were an endless and delightful mixture of impassable briars, sunny meadows, and open, shaded groves.

  We stripped out of our clothes and waded into the pleasantly cool water, tearing up handfuls of the grassy stuff as we went. We found a rocky ledge at the base of the short waterfall where we could kneel waist-high in the water, and there we scrubbed the dirt off each other. Then we moved out onto the grassy bank and stretched out, letting the sun warm and dry us.

  The forest around us was alive with sounds—insects, birds, the chittering of small animals. We could hear the muttering of sha’um and, too distant to concern us, the grunting sounds of a boar-like creature Keeshah had warned us to avoid.

  Tarani sighed. “I could wish to stay here, Rikardon,” she said. “I did not believe such beauty could exist. Indomel, the Ra’ira, Kä—they seem so distant and unimportant here.”

  I felt the same way. I wanted to live here with Tarani, Keeshah, and Yayshah, to see the cubs born and grown, perhaps to bring up children and cubs together. No roguelords, no politics, no complex destiny to clutter up our lives.

  I let the fantasy claim me for a few seconds, then the sound of nearby movement brought me sharply back to reality.

  *Keeshah?* I asked. *Is that you behind us?*

  *I guard,* he said.

  “Where is Yayshah?” I asked Tarani.

  “In the lair,” she answered, after a moment. “She misses Keeshah.” Tarani looked at me questioningly.

  “He’s protecting us,” I said. “Tarani, we—I have interrupted an important natural cycle. As long as I’m in the Valley …”

  I didn’t have to finish the thought. “I merely dreamed of staying, my love,” Tarani said. “We must go soon, and not only for the sake of the sha’um.”

  “The search for Kä will be more difficult without Lonna,” I said, remembering the joyful moment when the white bird had come to Lingis with Tarani’s letter.

  Tarani reached across the distance between us and put her hand in mine. “I am glad to hear you speak of Kä,” she said. “I had feared you would argue again for Rika as the needed symbol, especially since it is with us again.”

  “I … believe the other sword is what we need,” I said.

  Tarani stared at me as though she could hear what I hadn’t said: for your sakes, Tarani and Antonia. I braced myself on my elbow and looked down at her.

  “We have to go, but not right away,” I said. “After what we’ve been through, we deserve a little peace, some time together.”

  I reached for her, and she came hungrily into my arms.

  We touched and learned and loved, together but alone, a less wild but no less passionate joining. We slept, woke, accomplished the mundane chore of washing our clothes, bathed and laughed and made love. For the rest of that day we were free and natural creatures, with no thought but to exist and enjoy one another. When night came, we returned to the lair. The sha’um hunted in the early evening, but returned in the night. Tarani and I woke inside a cozy nest of fur, between the curled, sleeping bodies of Keeshah and Yayshah.

  Keeshah and Yayshah walked with us into the western hills of the Valley, toward the Alkhum Pass. Other sha’um appeared along the way to make unfriendly comments, but no one stepped forward to challenge our escorts.

  As we moved through the forest—taking a route which zigzagged through sunlight and shadow and avoided the worst patches of thorny briars—I felt the peace fading and the world closing in on me again. I was aware of being dressed for “civilization” with boots and weapons, a moneybelt and a waterpouch.

  I felt a poignant regret at leaving the Valley, but no real hesitation. I had intruded on Keeshah’s world; I appreciated his tolerance, but I knew I had to go back to my own. I tried desperately to prepare myself to leave him again. It wouldn’t be as bad this time, with our link active and the knowledge—absolute sureness—that he would come to me as soon as he could leave his family. But I would miss him.

  I held Tarani’s hand and reached out to Keeshah’s mind as we walked. I sensed restlessness and anxiety in the sha’um, and I attributed it to concern for our safety and anticipation of missing me. I could hardly offer the cat comfort which eluded me, so I merely tried to keep warm, caring thoughts at the forefront of my mind.

  We reached a point which seemed to be a natural place to part, where the forest was giving way to patchy green hillside that rose sharply toward the Alkhum Pass. I turned to face Keeshah, to say goodbye … and reeled backward as if from a physical blow.

  The sha’um released all his anxiety in a flood of garbled pleading, anger, and confusion.

  *Stay.

  *Others will kill.

  *I guard.

  *Female; cubs; need me.

  *Can‘t guard and hunt too.

  *I will come.

  *Cubs; must stay in the Valley.

  *Rikardon; desert; die alone.

  *Female; soon too clumsy to hunt; die alone.

  *Stay.

  *Intrudes; female; cubs; important; right.

  *No thinking here; lonely.

  *No female outside; lonely.

  *Female …

  *Cubs …

  *Rikardon …

  Yayshah approached Keeshah and stretched out her head to lay her dark throat across his tawny shoulders. Keeshah pressed into her caress briefly, then sidestepped with a snarl and aimed a clawless swat at her nose.

  The female sank instantly into a crouch, her ears flattening. She growled, and was answered with a roar. She lunged past Keeshah, took several long jumps up the hillside, then turned and planted all four feet firmly. The fur behind her head lifted in a mane, and her lips trembled back from her teeth, exposing the wide, sharp tusks at either side of her mouth. A sound so low that I wasn’t sure I heard it floated down the hillside to us.

  Keeshah’s mane lifted; his tail fluffed and whipped back and forth as he paced indecisively, keeping his eye on the female.

  They don‘t need a mindlink to understand each other, I thoug
ht to myself.

  Tarani whirled on me. “Keeshah can’t leave the Valley!” she screamed, and started pounding on my chest with her fists.

  I grabbed her shoulders. “Tarani!” I shouted. “Is that you or Yayshah talking?”

  A look of understanding replaced the scowl on her face, and she brought one hand up to touch her forehead. “I—It’s difficult to separate myself from her in this, Rikardon. It touches such a basic need—mate, family, all her survival instincts are involved.

  “Is Keeshah truly thinking of coming with us? Leaving her?”

  “He doesn’t know what he wants,” I said. “I think I really fouled up his life, forcing the link to become active again this early. He can’t quite regain the ‘animal’ state he was in, but that same instinctive need to protect his family is still very strong. His loyalty to me, and his loyalty to her—he’s caught between them.”

  I‘m sorry, Keeshah, I said, but only to myself. I didn‘t know I was going to precipitate an identity crisis. If there had been any other way to get out of the Well of Darkness alive, I would have taken it.

  “He loves you both,” Tarani summarized it. “Oh, Keeshah, how hard this must be for you …”

  She walked over to the pale-furred sha’um, who paused in surprise at her approach. She smoothed the fur along his wide jaw, then put her arms around his neck.

  Keeshah twisted his head around and rubbed his ear against Tarani’s shoulder. Then he pulled away and crouched down to the ground—in the mounting crouch.

  *I will come,* he told me, the tone of his thought final.

  I felt as confused as Keeshah had been. I was delighted (with, I admit, a touch of gloating) that Keeshah had chosen me above Yayshah. Tarani’s gesture had been a reminder of friendship—a relationship of choice, unavailable in the Valley, where circumstance and instinct ruled. Keeshah cared deeply for his mate, but the fact that his mate was Yayshah was a biological accident—it had simply happened that way. Keeshah’s bonding to Markasset could be put into almost the same category—that it was mere accident that Keeshah had been the cub whom Markasset first met in the Valley.