by Travis Perry
The rider in front of me, rendered passive by the reliance on his leader’s weapon, has not drawn his sword when my mountain horse Gallant, as if obeying Lord Pederson’s command, plows his bulky body forward into the flank of the Olympian’s horse. I kick him forward more, my sword drawn. I clobber the steel helmet in front of me with the flat of my blade, metal ringing like one of the tower bell at the Gran Templo. The rider falls from his horse not even seeing my face.
The lead rider points his device at me, drawn to the noise. I see no obvious anything. But I feel as if my entire body has caught fire. Astonished at the sudden pain, a scream escapes my lips. But I stay on my horse.
I wheel Gallant his way and the Olympian shoots my mount, who squeals and leaps back. But he does not fall and does not buck. By then two other riders reach the shooter from behind him and one repeats my bell-ringing maneuver. The Olympian falls, dropping his weapon. Within seconds all the rest of the Olympians raise their hands in surrender. Those not already knocked unconscious, that is.
The messengers, now our prisoners, my lord sends back the next day with twenty of our hands to the fortress held by Jonathan, to be kept until the end of the war. I do know the Olympians carried with them letters for both Govnor Pederson and for the King of Olympus at Tharsis Tholis. This fact our riders announce as we search their messengers. But the unopened posts in clean white envelopes are handed over to the Govnor, who does not share with the rest of us their contents. At least not the common riders. There is plenty of congratulations to Sir Carson, who stopped the shooter. But none for me or my brave mount—though I do not serve for the praise of men.
With most of us back on the downward-sloping road the next day, three more days pass to bring us even lower onto this plain, the ground now leveling off. We suffer in the greater heat but find comfort in the fact that the stream that followed us from above is joined by other streams, now beginning to meander as a broad river, greatly increasing the green forage for our animals. And the heat of the day forces the night frosts to strike later, so we don’t have to set the tents quite so early to pass the hours of darkness without exposing ourselves or our mounts to frostbite.
At sunrise of that morning I’m out of my tent, my goat wool blankets wrapped tight around me to protect me from the still not inconsiderable cold. With my forged iron hand ax I chop the thin ice crust that tops the stream and I splash my face with cold fresh water, preparing to shave the light blond whiskers from my chin. I hear movement behind me.
“Good morning, Evan.” I turn to see the respected scholar Susan’s face. “How’s the water?”
“Cold. But delicious.”
“Let me try.” The woman, who must be at least thirty cycles old if not more (I am only twelve cycles, 23 years by Earth counting), bends down and splashes herself as I had done. “Brrr! I thought it would be warmer than this. We’ve travelled to a low enough elevation that we should be getting a partial greenhouse effect at all times.”
“A partial…excuse me, ma’am? You mean greenhouse like the glass that warms the crops in the high gardens on Ascraeus?”
She smiles at me, a twinkle in her green eyes, her silvery hair falling across a face thickened with age, which must have once been lovely. “What a clever lad you are, Evan. I’m disappointed you have not continued with your reading lessons. You were doing quite well for having started so late in life.”
I flush. “Thank you, ma’am. M-my duties as a rider take precedence.”
“Shall I talk to Lord Pederson about that? Did you know the literacy program is his idea, not mine?”
I’m too embarrassed to mention I know the meanings of neither the word “literacy” nor the word “program,” though I can guess they have something to do with reading. “No ma’am, no need.”
She smiles at me and without anything else to say through my mouth on my face which I know is still reddened, I march back the thirty paces to the camp without shaving and resume my preparations for the day, the horses, the saddles, and the tents.
After a week of riding in such manner, during which time I make Gallant pass through the stream beside us at least once a day—he is skittish about moving water, so it is my duty to train him not to fear it—we are now in the region of the campments that may be hiding the old path to the northern route to Olympus. Again I am leading the way by my lord’s command, delighted for the chance to prove my worth, several kims in front of everyone else, searching out the path towards Jovis Tholis, taking a steady pace but not so fast as to lather my mount. My horse when I’d been an errant, Meggido, had not been a mountain horse and had borne this warmth of weather—40 degrees or more at the highest every day—much better than poor Gallant.
A cluster of pilgrims on the move appear before me finally—before this I have passed only a few solitary travelers, very few compared to what would be normally be seen at this time of year. As I trot up to them, they turn back at to the sound of Gallant’s hoofbeats.
Their clothes are light cotton, pilgrim white robes, their hair and eyes dark, and they barely show any signs of sweat at all. “Are you Amazonians then?” I asked as I brought Gallant to a stop next to a tall man with a long white beard who has stepped forward to meet me.
“We are, sir. We are on the return trip to the Amazonis Planitia.”
“Which crater?” The land of Amazonis is west of Olympus. Few pilgrims come from there, but I have spoken with others of their nation in the past and I am hoping to recognize their exact home.
“We live without walls as homesteaders on the great plain, south of the Amazonis Sea. Barley famers, we are, sir. We protect our lands and our persons ourselves, without riders,” he adds.
I note a long knife at his side and a sling tucked into his belt, his pouch bulging with sling stones. “Yes. I’ve met others like you before. I used to ride this Road as a Pilgrim protector for the Brothers of the Shield. I’ve visited the Viking of Chryse three times myself. Did you happen to see it?”
“Not this time, sir. We have come and gone directly from the Gran Templo. It is said the heretic king forbids any to take the Pilgrim path. We feared being away too long from our homes and crops. It is said he longs to make war on any who disagree with him.”
“Is that so? I admire your courage in passing by his kingdom, then, in both coming and going. Sir.”
The man is not flattered by me using the title of a rider with him. His eyes narrow. “We are Amazonians, sir. This is how we live.”
I ask him after that if he knows the road to the north, but he does not. Soon I bid them God’s blessing and I veer off to the north side of the road to search for the trail again. Bobber once told me “they” say all plains were once nothing more than dust and boulders, red under the dusty sky when men first landed here over 500 cycles ago. But the sky I see is blue, the air very thick compared to the wisps on the high mountain. The road is dusty red and boulders are everywhere, but so are short grasses and scrubby mesquite and juniper trees. Campment sites are obvious from burn pits, mashed grass, and areas of cleared brush.
As the descending sun streaks the western sky in red, old ruts of a wagon’s wheels running north appear at the northwest corner of one of the sites. I follow the ruts a few minutes and see it is a trail, now overgrown from disuse, but all large rocks and boulders have been pushed to either side, giving a place for our wagons to pass without breaking the wooden wheel spokes. This is clearly the trail to Jovis.
The next day, after I return and joyously report to my lord, we follow this route, leaving the water of the stream behind. As we labor more over the next week, not just because of the heat, but because in places brush and trees need to be cleared before we can progress, I am back again with the common riders toward the rear of our formation. As we travel further north, each day the plain becomes drier, the trees fewer. Our progress increases again, not just because we are beginning to fare better in the heat of the day, but because we now pause in the hottest part of the afternoon and continue moving a
fter the sun sets, not making campment until we begin to feel the bite of the cold and our breath begins to show. Madam Susan’s “greenhouse effect” clearly is making things warmer than in the highlands, both day and night.
The path diverts around the largest craters but goes right through the smaller ones. Ascending a rim of such a crater adorned with a few strands of tall grass, my eyes see for the first time see the misshapen volcano of Jovis Tholus. Over the next hours I see it much better—one side of the mountain much higher than the other, a sloping ellipse of a west-leaning caldera of irregular edges in view, vast this mountain, stretching from beyond one horizon to the other. It’s tiny compared to Olympus or Ascraeus, of course, just a small mark on Lady Susan’s map, but unbelievably massive on a human scale. With weather good for crops year-round and good walls. I dream as I ride that I can make this my own govment. That one day I would take Jovis Tholus and rule from there for myself. And that once established in that far away future time I would also write about my travels and adventures.
Paused on the side of the road, enthralled as I looked north toward the mountain, my Lord passed beside me between two other riders. He stops and calls out, “Is all well, Evan?”
“It is, my lord.” I turned back to a stern face examining me, Sir Isaac and his thick black beard on his right. I cannot imagine why this man seems to hate me so. What have I done? My voice begins to falter as I ask, “Has-has an-anyone ever lived there?” My right hand points to Jovis as I ask.
“I don’t believe so,” my lord answers. “It probably lacks water. It’s not high enough for snow all year ‘round, not low enough to have a permanent sea like the Valles Marineris.”
“Ah. I see.” But I did not see. I imagined I would find water there, in spite of what I’d just been told.
The next day, after passing Jovis, the plain begins to descend again to the lowlands on the easterly and southern reaches of Olympus, a region Susan calls “Eunostos.” The main road approaches the greatest of all mountains from the south, where a tunnel carved by ancient magic allows pilgrims to pass directly from the inside of the Olympus caldera to the well-graded pathway down the mountain, which has a much smoother downward slope along that path than Ascraeus has. Better for travel, wider and less rocky. That path comes down to one of the wonders from the Time of Magic, a suspension bridge of alloyed steel descending from the flank of the mountain to the floor of the plain. This bridge, much easier to ride than the narrow roadway carved into the rock that climbs the edge of Ascraeus, is not better for defense, but the riders of that great mons number more than enough to make up for an easier approach to their kingdom.
I have traveled up the great bridge, up the mountain slope beyond that to the entrance of the tunnel passing into the caldera, where the Pilgrim Road actually begins. But I have never set foot in the interior land of Olympus itself. Outsiders have never been welcome there.
Instead of turning sharply southward to meet up with that route—the main entrance to and from the mons, we angle west-northwest according to the compass of Lady Susan. Within three days of good riding we come to a series of sharp hills on our left that rise up nearly half a kim above the plain. To me they are hills. I mention them as such to my Lord as he passes me by one day and he laughs, “Spoken like a true flatlander, Evan! Not even high enough to make ice by night, those are. Mere bumps in the road!”
I nearly remark that if they were mere bumps, why is it we did not simply go over them to get to Olympus rather than around them, but I hold my tongue. Summer heats these plains hotter still, perhaps as hot as 50 at the most, and the grasses have all disappeared. The land is strewn with rough boulders and reddish sand, looking very much like what Mars must have been when men first strode upon it, though then there had been no snakes under the boulders and the air wasn’t thicker at this altitude than Earth’s at its thickest. Instead, it had been one hundred times thinner. So Susan had mentioned to me.
I think the Madam Scholar favors me on some account, for it is not uncommon for me to see her once for a few minutes every other day or so. On the third day riding along the hills, we stop in the afternoon to rest, using our tents with the flaps all open, as shading from the heat rather than down to warm us (something totally unnatural to the mountain folk of Ascraeus) which I find necessary to instruct them in again and again.
She passes by as I’m sharpening my sword, as a good rider should do, while I’m in the shadow under a raised tent flap—my blade has long, narrow leaf shape, melted (I heard this from Bobber) by the smokeless magic of electric heat from a piece of a magical bronze machinery. This metal heated without smoke was poured into a single sword mould, blade and handle all one piece, handle now wrapped in leather. My bronze sword has not the sharpest of blades, but is tough and has parried blows that would break iron.
“Evan,” she smiles, “How are you?”
“Very well, Madam Scholar.” I stand up. “What can I do for you?” I feel odd because I have removed my armor. I’m fully clothed in linen under-armor, yet I feel awkwardly exposed nonetheless.
“Have you seen the dragon?”
“Which dragon, Madam Scholar?”
“The one just to the north of the camp. It caught a hawk just after it began to fly upward with a snake in its talons. I saw it leap into the air after the bird myself!”
“Ah, very nice. I’ve seen such dragons before, when I was a rider on the Pilgrim Road. They don’t leave these lowlands often.”
“Would you like to see another one? Come with me, and I’ll show you where it’s feeding.”
I really do not care to walk away from the shade of the tent flap, but because the scholar seems so eager to show me, I go with her. We weave through the standing tents and yes, about fifty meters north of our campment a knee-height dragon the length of two horses (not at all the largest of the beasts) is tearing into a large mass of feathers, a hawk adapted to the thick air of the lowlands with a wingspan wider than the arms of a man, which the dragon is holding down with its clawed left front foot. It glimpses our way, its side-splayed legs and curvingly long leathery body draped with large folded wings across its back. These wings, unlike the poor bird it is making into a meal, are completely without feathers. Just reptilian skin, thin enough that I can see veins within them, stretched over frameworks of bones.
Three riders have been assigned to watch the beast, to ensure it does not attack the camp. They eye us as we walk past them, but seeing Madam Susan, they say nothing.
The dragon’s head turns completely our way as we step several paces away from the camp. It freezes in place, not moving a muscle, not even blinking. We stop and wait a moment. It soon begins tearing into the bird again, now a splash of blood evident on its reptilian version of a dog’s muzzle.
“I’ve read an account that these were bred in the Time of Magic, though this is the first one I’ve seen one myself.” Susan’s eyes remained fixed on the dragon as she says this. “Adding wings to something that was called a ‘Komodo Dragon,’ and making other changes to it, so it could fly. The account says this was done simply because it could be done, because someone wanted to make the legend of the dragon real. But I have wondered—if the dragons of Earth were mere legends, how was there was such a thing as a ‘Komodo Dragon’ to make into a flying dragon? Doesn’t the story imply dragons already existed on Earth?” She turns my way and meets my eyes, her look as if appraising me, “What do you think about that, Evan?”
I shrug my shoulders. “There are many stories told of the Time of Magic, and of Earth before that, and of the Bible even, which seem as if they cannot possibly be true. And yet, here we are, looking at a dragon. I’m not sure what is true, but surely something is.” I realize this does not sound particularly intelligent. I feel redness rushing into my cheeks and I lower my eyes to the ground.
Her hand touches my left arm. I look up at her and she smiles. “It’s as good an answer as any I know, Evan.”
I want to ask if dragons ever did breath
e fire, or if spitting acid like the one before us can do is all they ever did. But I don’t ask. Soon I’m walking back separately from her, back to sharpening my sword and she back to advising and planning. The dragon, I presume, is now hunting another bird.
We reach the northern limit of the hills the next day and we go round them, now our train of wagons and riders and marching hands headed south, the hills still on our left side, as if we intend to circle them all the way around. We ride another two whole days southward before we turn again to the west. High cirrus clouds stream overhead. Susan tells me these come from the top of Olympus, that we are in the rain shadow of the mons.
The following day’s movement west-southwest brings more of the high thin clouds overhead. And a dark shape begins to rise up in front of us as we ride its way.
The next day’s progress brings the shape higher and higher and higher, rising up in the west as if it were growing, a black monster released from the depths of the world, the entire width of the horizon. Whiteness above the dark shape’s rise is visible for a time but disappears as we get closer still, but the top of Olympus remains too far away from us for it to be visible. The darkness is in fact the flank of the mountain, the side, a sheer cliff that marks the mountain’s edge. It is in fact only the beginning of the mons.
The third day we ride to the point where these cliffs now tower above us, blocking off nearly half of the western sky. We for the first time see that a canyon stands in front of the mountain, a deep gulf over a kim wide, with over a kim to its watery bottom. As if the cliff at the mountain flank was not protection enough, Olympus has a massive natural moat of a greater size than any such watery pit a human being could ever dream to make.
The height of the cliff to the west of the canyon makes the darkness of night come much quicker as we ride to our last campment on the plains, bringing some coolness in relief from the lowlands’ simmering and blowing hot sands. We set places some fifty meters from the canyon edge.