by Ron Collins
Everyone except Hateri, anyway.
CHAPTER 8
That first night, while M’ran and the whelps took refuge in cavern spaces, Taranth stayed above the surface, watching Katon cross the sky and dip toward the horizon. He wanted to be alone, he said. He wanted to sit in a quiet space and drink water. He wanted to watch over the land they had crossed over these past many heats.
But that was not true.
He thought about that as he pressed himself into a dark slot in the west-facing cliff that gave him cool shade. Eldoro had set long before, leaving behind Katon’s thin, almost shimmering glow. The lesser heat was still before its highpoint and its light cast a shadow out in the distance before him. The grounds of Harshish Point proper lay in a depression below him, and for a few moments he watched as two quadars worked to repair a portion of their water catch.
He sat back and laid his head against stone.
The liquid he drank filtered through his body with a tingle that made his skin sensitive to everything it touched.
He thought about the truth of why he wanted to be out here rather than in the caves with the rest. The only useful part of getting old was that he had gotten better about lying—even to himself. But, of course, that was too harsh, also. What he had gotten better about was not lying, but in holding two or more ideas in his head, and working with whichever was most convenient at the time.
He could, for example, tell M’ran that he was happier on the surface, and he could make the executive believe it because he could pull up his memory of Alena, and he could use her love for this place and this moment as if it was his own. He could push away his own discomfort with the heat, and shelve his desire to be surrounded by stone—or at least he could put that desire into a side-stage of his mind like his body stored away pools of blood in his third heart for use later—and he could, instead, bring up the memories of sitting with Alena right here at Harshish Point or at any one of the other outposts they had traveled through when she was alive.
He could remember the feel of her head on his shoulder, and the taste of witze oil on her kisses. He could recall the feeling of the world being so incredibly large when he sat next to her in Katon’s twilight.
“It’s my favorite time,” she said to him the first time they were here together. She pointed to the brown and the red troughs of clouds that shifted in the sky, and talked about the light of Katon as the lesser heat rode her excruciatingly slow and seemingly haphazard dance across the sky.
He remembered Alena’s touch now, sitting in the calm of the crevasse and looking out over the horizon as wind carried waves of dust to the west and as heat waves warped the view.
The desert was their place, he thought.
The “outside.” Away from Families and their dislike for each other.
The outside was the only place Taranth and Alena could be together, so it was where he brought her. And Harshish Point was the first place they had come. It was here that he had sat with her on that first evening. Here that he understood exactly what they were doing together.
So this is why he stayed above the surface that first evening.
Because he was thinking of Alena again.
Or, of course, he could instead pull up memories of those quadars of his own Melarin Family and his own Kandar clan who attacked him for his interest in one of the Hlrat clan. He could choose to remember the bitter voices that called him a traitor and a turncoat. The hissing names that his own Kandar called him: Westie, witze breather, or worse. Considerably worse. And he could remember the feeling of rocks pelting him as he came from the eastern slopes to her western homeland of the Hlrat.
He closed his eyes and saw Hateri and Pietha together—but mostly what struck him was how unaffected the rest of the whelps had been, how simple it had seemed to the collective of the whelplings to see the two of them pair-mated, as if mixing of the clans was normal. As if they never considered the idea of picking up stones to separate the pair.
He had met Alena only three cycles ago. Just over sixty years, but it could have been six hundred. How different might his life had been if they had been born in the time of these whelps? Where might they have lived? What might they have done?
Sitting here, Taranth wished he hadn’t taken this charter.
He wished M’ran hadn’t put Alena’s name so directly back on his mind.
He wished he had not seen Pietha M’ktal sliding out of Hateri E’Lar’s lean-to or the smear of her witze oil across Hateri’s face, and he wished he had not been so pleased to see them separate.
He wished…he wished he could stop thinking about her.
But that, too, was all a lie.
At the end of it all, the pain of being on the surface was worth every minute of remembering her.
“There you are!”
The voice startled him enough that the back of his hand hit the stone of the crevasse beside him. It was M’ran, up from the caves.
“I’m sorry,” M’ran said as he gathered his thin field robes and sat on the dusty ground outside the crevasse, his hood pulled partially over his head. When he was settled, he handed Taranth a skin that smelled sharply sweet. Taranth drank from it and was not surprised to taste root wine. He handed the skin back and wiped his hand over his lips.
“Not a worry,” he said. “I was just thinking too loudly to hear you coming.”
“What about?”
“Time, mostly. Time, and things that happen in it.”
“Easy to get sentimental when you find a place to rest, eh?”
“I suppose that’s it.”
Taranth waited until M’ran drank from his skin again before continuing.
“What is it you want?” he asked.
M’ran gave him a sideways expression.
“Don’t pretend you didn’t come out here for a reason.”
M’ran scoffed, but settled in. “You need to be careful of the whelp,” he said.
“Hateri?”
M’ran nodded. “He’s a leader.”
“He’s an obnoxious braggart.”
“I understand you were, too, in your first cycle.”
Taranth grumbled.
“You should have seen him below.”
Taranth glanced at M’ran with his central, waiting for the executive to continue.
“Several of the team still want to go home underground,” M’ran said.
“They would never make it.”
“That didn’t matter to them. They are tired and sore. Their feet are bloodied up, and their bellies hurt from the diet we’ve got them on. You have to remember they are not used to this.”
“It takes no effort to remember they’ve grown up soft,” Taranth said. “Do they think they are the only ones to feel the wrath of the desert?” He arched himself against the rock, then uncrossed his legs to stretch them across the ground. “My back hurts, too. My legs are bunched like knotted rope. The plates on my blades are still warm with the heats and my shoulders burn with the ache of the walk.”
M’ran took in a breath of patience through his nostrils, then let it out. “Did that feel good?” he said.
Taranth’s laughter was both dry and caustic.
He reached for M’ran’s skin and took another drink, a full mouthful this time, a gulp of liquid that went down with an acidic pain that did somehow serve to make him feel better.
M’ran took his wine back, and merely put the topper on.
“You think of yourself as an ancient who holds onto the old truths,” M’ran said. “You see yourself holed up in the caverns of the old cities built down in the cool rivers that flow in the deepest depth of Esgarat’s ring. But these new quadars of the Families see you in different ways.”
“They see a bitter old quadar who lives to walk the caves,” Taranth said. “What of it?”
M’ran shrugged and squinted into the harsh distance, then took another swig of his skin.
“You’re going to get clobbered at that rate,” Taranth warned.
&
nbsp; M’ran’s eyes gleamed in Katon’s darkening rays.
The aura of contentment that settled around the executive annoyed Taranth even more for the fact that M’ran was right. Taranth did not miss the fact that M’ran ran called the party quadars rather than whelplings. He had been around too long to miss the point that M’ran was making about their status.
“So, tell me about the whelp,” Taranth said. “What did he do with these rabble-rousing mates of his?”
M’ran grinned. “Got them settled.”
“Wonderful.”
“Brought them water, and got katja root for the ones sick from the heat.”
“Sounds like he’ll make a delightful nurse when they get back home.”
“He listened to them complain, and didn’t say a word.”
“That’s useful.”
M’ran drew himself up. “Don’t be like this.”
Taranth grumbled.
“The Taranth Melarin I supported at the council was more willing to see the heats of truth rather than use sand to blind himself.”
Taranth grimaced. “Go on.”
“After the rest of the party began suggesting they leave on their own, Hateri told them stories.”
“About what?”
“About the Quadarti. About their Families. Times they had gotten together for events, and how they found games to play while their Families worked out issues. He answered them all with talk about why they were here, about how they were trying to work together for the first time, and then finally about the Taranth Stone, of course. Its purpose. What it might mean to get something of that nature back into the Esgarat for study.”
As M’ran paused for a breath, Taranth’s anger faded to something closer to embarrassment.
“It was interesting to watch,” M’ran said. “As a professional politician, you know? I almost didn’t believe it myself, but he was very good. He told a thing about Eldoro and Katon, and wove in a joke about their parents on the council. And as he did it, he wondered what this ‘stone’ out in the desert could be. A message from one heat or the other? Something from another quadar someplace far away?”
Taranth interrupted. “Sounds like he has a touch.”
M’ran nodded. “I think that after this, the entire group would rip a passage through the Esgarat Mountains if he would ask them to.”
“Even the Waganat?”
M’ran chuffed. “There is more to Satrak than you might think,” he said.
“I think he’s too silent for his own good.”
“Maybe. But he comes from a Family of not inconsiderable power, and one where to question the head is to be chastised.”
“Which means?”
“It is a life that teaches one to silence questions.”
“Thank the old gods for miracles, I guess.”
“I don’t think the old gods had a lot to do with it.”
Taranth gave his travel partner an inquisitive gaze. “There’s more to this, isn’t there?”
“More to what?”
“You came here for a purpose, and I can’t imagine it was to tell me things I already know, or to brag about a whelpling’s ability to twist his friends about his fingers.”
A grin came over M’ran’s face.
“I cannot pull truth over an ancient’s gaze, eh?”
“What is it?”
“We are going to speak with L’rdent tomorrow about acquiring the tal beasts.”
“Yes. That’s what we’re here for.”
“We need to include Hateri in our party when we meet L’rdent tomorrow.”
“No.”
“It’s the right thing to do.”
“It’s insane. There’s no way to know what Hateri E’Lar would say if he spoke with L’rdent.”
“The group needs to feel like they are participating.”
“Don’t cast your diplomat’s cloak around me.”
“It’s true.”
“Pah!”
“But that’s not the only reason we’re going to bring him with us.”
Taranth bit back a groan. He didn’t want to hear what M’ran was going to say next because it was going to be about the aspect of this mission that annoyed him most.
M’ran said it anyway.
“If the Families learn there was such a negotiation, and that they were not a part of it, they will be very unhappy.”
The words hung invisibly in the air, no different from the curtain of dust that the wind blew up in the distance. That curtain settled in the light of Katon’s highpoint, but the words remained in Taranth’s mind. He did not like politics, but he was not stupid. If he would have thought harder about this before, he could have predicted it.
“All right,” Taranth said. “He can come. But he cannot speak.”
M’ran smiled and gave Taranth’s knee a bit of a shake.
Taranth grimaced.
Then M’ran stood up and smoothed his robes as they flapped in the gentle breeze.
“I’m going to get some sleep before our session,” he said.
“I will see you at first Eldoro,” Taranth replied.
When M’ran left, Taranth turned his gaze to watch the last heat waves of the night rise up into the horizon.
CHAPTER 9
“I cannot sell you what I have already sold to another,” L’rdent said. He held a stone bowl beneath his nose, rolling it in gentle circles to disperse the aroma of the smoldering root that burned in it.
L’rdent did not own Harshish Point.
He was not its ruler, and did not claim to govern it.
He was never elected to a position of power so much as he had always given so fully to the land that other quadars had taken to deferring to him. They had been doing this for so long now that no one challenged him.
Whatever history lay behind his position, his opinion was respected and his word taken with the same certainty as the fact that Eldoro and Katon would bring along shifting of clouds and colors. The ancient quadar now controlled every aspect of this collective, and the rest of the quadars here were fine with that. His word was the closest thing they had to law.
Harshish Point had been that way forever.
To the whelplings their guide was old flint, but Taranth himself could remember L’rdent as a figure of excitement as far back as when his own da had brought him to Harshish Point. He was a true ancient, shriveled into a tangle of rough skin and dry bones that Taranth thought the wind might pick up and smash against the desert every time he stepped outside. His breathing sounded like a desert wind, dry and rustling on both its intake and its exhale. The skin at the folds of his eyes and lips were fleshy and lined, but his fingers were bony and the knuckles of all six fingers of each hand were as bulbous and hard as deep-rooted hoi.
He was still sharp, though. Sharp and brilliant.
L’rdent’s primaries may have been baked to the deepest brown, but his central was still crystalline blue. And right now those eyes said L’rdent could do nothing for them, and those hands said he was not willing to discuss the topic further as, quavering, they placed the smoldering bowl back to its place at the center of the table that stood between himself, Taranth, M’ran, and Hateri. Like almost everything here, the table had been chiseled of bare rock, but unlike everything else its top had been polished to the smooth glow that Taranth had complimented so sincerely when they first entered.
Good stonework was a gift.
The meeting was being held in L’rdent’s chamber—which was a rounded area that legends said the quadar had single-handedly carved from the cliff when he was younger. He had wanted the place to be his, said those stories, so while others made their homes in the natural depths of the caves and by building shacks and lean-tos above the surface, L’rdent had taken pick to rock and, using only the sweat of his own effort and the smelted metal of the tool, had gouged this place straight out of the land.
This, some philosophers of the outside said, was what kept L’rdent alive. He was tied to the land now, they said
. It was impossible for the old quadar to die. Taranth had his own opinions on that, but when he looked at L’rdent’s withered shell of a body he could not totally discount the idea.
The room was oval in shape, a single space sectioned in ways L’rdent used to manage different pieces of his life.
A straw and bramble bed lay to the left of the entryway. The center of the floor was marked with concentric circles such that when the door was opened, shadows of Eldoro and Katon fell at places that told the story of the heats’ movements. Taranth knew from experience that L’rdent used the center mark of this map as a place of meditation, believing as so many did that it was a position of power, and that the old gods had looked upon his place with relative peace for so long in part because he had remained true to the old ways.
The table where they sat had been placed to the room’s east.
Taranth squirmed on his bench.
The door was closed behind them, and the fact that the chamber had no other opening gave Taranth a sense of being trapped that he never got while out in the free caves. The strong odor of burning root, and the fact that he was here with M’ran and Hateri added to the feeling of being out of place. He was not one who enjoyed the politics of barter, and the addition of Hateri in particular made the conversation feel like a competition.
They exchanged pleasantries and stories about the desert for several moments before L’rdent had finally broached the subject of what they were here for and Taranth asked him the price on tal beasts.
This was when L’rdent had said he could not sell the animals.
“You have already sold them all?” Taranth replied.
“I have.”
“We need only three.”
Taranth had assessed the settlement earlier, strolling past the corrals and open ranges in the span of pre-Eldoro, and counted easily fifty head in and around the settlement.
“I have made word to sell them all.”
True gloom came over him. The hollow sound of wind and the scratches and thumps of movement along the paths outside L’rdent’s chambers were audible in the distance. If L’rdent gave word, it was as good as having already laid trade.