Down in The Bottomlands (and Other Places)

by Harry Turtledove

  “I hope no koprit birds come after me,” Evillia said, laughing. She and Lofosa wore matching red-orange tunics — almost the same shade as the shoveler skink’s lure — with two rows of big gold buttons, and red plastic necklaces with gold clasps.

  Radnal smiled. “I think you’re safe enough. And now that the lizard is safe, for the time being, shall we go-? No, wait, where’s freeman vez Maprab?”

  The old Strongbrow emerged from behind a big, wide-spreading thornbush a few heartbeats later, still refastening the belt to his robe. “Sorry for the delay, but I thought I’d answer nature’s call while we paused here.”

  “I just didn’t want to lose you, freeman.” Radnal stared at Benter as he got back onto his donkey. This was the first apology he’d heard from him. He wondered if the tourist was well.

  The group rode slowly eastward. Before long, people began to complain. “Every piece of Trench Park looks like every other piece,” Lofosa said.

  “Yes, when will we see something different?” Moblay Sopsirk’s son agreed. Radnal suspected he would have agreed if Lofosa said the sky were pink; he slavered after her. He went on, “It’s all hot and flat and dry; even the thornbushes are boring.”

  “Freeman, if you wanted to climb mountains and roll in snow, you should have gone someplace else,” Radnal said. “That’s not what the Bottomlands have to offer. But there are mountains and snow all over the world; there’s nothing like Trench Park anywhere. And if you tell me this terrain is like what we saw yesterday around the Bitter Lake, freeman, freelady”-he glanced over at Lofosa-“I think you’re both mistaken.”

  “They certainly are,” Benter vez Maprab chimed in. “This area has very different flora from the other one. Note the broader-leafed spurges, the oleanders-”

  “They’re just plants,” Lofosa said. Benter clapped a hand to his head in shock and dismay. Radnal waited for him to have another bad-tempered fit, but he just muttered to himself and subsided.

  About a quarter of a daytenth later, Radnal pointed toward a gray smudge on the eastern horizon. “There’s the Night Demons’ Retreat. I promise it’s like nothing you’ve yet seen in Trench Park.”

  “I hope it shall be interesting, oh yes,” Golobol said.

  “I loved the scene where the demons came out at sunset, claws dripping blood,” Nocso zev Martois said. Her voice rose in shivery excitement.

  Radnal sighed. “Stones of Doom is only a frightener, freelady. No demons live inside the Retreat, or come out at sunset or any other time. I’ve passed the night in a sleepsack not fifty cubits from the stonepile, and I’m still here, with my blood inside me where it belongs.”

  Nocso made a face. No doubt she preferred melodrama to reality. Since she was married to Eltsac, reality couldn’t seem too attractive to her.

  The Night Demons’ Retreat was a pile of gray granite, about a hundred cubits high, looming over the flat floor of the Bottomlands. Holes of all sizes pitted the granite. Under the merciless sun, the black openings reminded Radnal of skulls’ eyes looking at him.

  “Some holes look big enough for a person to crawl into,” Peggol vez Menk remarked. “Has anybody ever explored them?”

  “Yes, many people,” Radnal answered. “We discourage it, though, because although no one’s ever found a night demon, they’re a prime denning place for vipers and scorpions. They also often hold bats’ nests. Seeing the bats fly out at dusk to hunt bugs doubtless helped start the legend about the place.”

  “Bats live all over,” Nocso said. “There’s only one Night Demons’ Retreat, because-”

  The breeze, which had been quiet, suddenly picked up. Dust skirled over the ground. Radnal grabbed for his cap. And from the many mineral throats of the Night Demons’ Retreat came a hollow moaning and wailing that made the hair on his body want to stand on end.

  Nocso looked ecstatic. “There!” she exclaimed. “The cry of the deathless demons, seeking to be free to work horror on the world!”

  Radnal remembered the starbomb that might be buried by the Barrier Mountains, and thought of horrors worse than any demons could produce. He said, “Freelady, as I’m sure you know, it’s just wind playing some badly tuned flutes. The softer rock around the Retreat weathered away, and the Retreat itself has taken a lot of sandblasting. Whatever bits that weren’t as hard as the rest are gone, which explains how and why the openings formed. And now, when the wind blows across them, they make the weird sounds we just heard.”

  “Hmp!” Nocso said. “If there are gods, how can there not be demons?”

  “Freelady, speak to a priest about that, not to me.” Radnal swore by the gods of Tartesh but, like most educated folk of his generation, had little other use for them.

  Peggol vez Menk said, “Freelady, the question of whether night demons exist does not necessarily have anything to do with the question of whether they haunt the Night Demons’ Retreat — except that if there be no demons, they are unlikely to be at the Retreat.”

  Nocso’s plump face filled with rage. But she thought twice about telling off an Eye and Ear. She turned her head and shouted at Eltsac instead. He shouted back.

  The breeze swirled around, blowing bits of grit into the tour guide’s face. More unmusical notes emanated from the Night Demons’ Retreat. Cameras clicked. “I wish I’d brought along a recorder,” Toglo zev Pamdal said. “What’s interesting here isn’t how this place looks, but how it sounds.”

  “You can buy a wire of the Night Demons’ Retreat during a windstorm at the gift shop near the entrance to Trench Park.”

  “Thank you, Radnal vez; I may do that on my way out. It would be even better, though, if I could have recorded what I heard with my own ears.” Toglo’s glance slipped to Eltsac and Nocso, who were still barking at each other.

  “Well, some of what I heard.”

  Evillia said, “This Night Demons’ Retreat was on the sea floor?”

  “That’s right. As the dried muck and salt that surrounded it eroded, it was left alone here. Think of it as a miniature version of the mountain plains that stick up from the Bottomlands. In ancient days, they were islands. The Retreat, of course, was below the surface back then.”

  And may be again, he thought. He imagined fish peering into the holes in the ancient granite, crabs scuttling in to scavenge the remains of snakes and sand rats. The picture came to vivid life in his mind. That bothered him; it meant he took this menace seriously.

  He was so deep in his own concerns that he needed a couple of heartbeats to realize the group had fallen silent. When he did notice, he looked up in a hurry, wondering what was wrong. From a third of the way up the Night Demons’ Retreat, a cave cat looked back.

  The cave cat must have been asleep inside a crevice until the tourists’ racket woke it. It yawned, showing yellow fangs and pink tongue. Then, with steady amber gaze, it peered at the tourists once more, as if wondering what sauce would go well with them.

  “Let’s move away from the Retreat,” Radnal said quietly. “We don’t want it to think we’re threatening it.” That would have been a good trick, he thought. If the cave cat did decide to attack, his handcannon would hurt it (assuming he was lucky enough to hit), but it wouldn’t kill. He opened the flap to his saddlebag just the same.

  For once, all the tourists did exactly as they were told. Seeing the great predator raised fears that went back to the days of man-apes just learning to walk erect.

  Moblay Sopsirk’s son asked, “Will more of them be around? In Lissonland, lions hunt in prides.”

  “No, cave cats are solitary except during mating season,” Radnal answered. “They and lions have a common ancestor, but their habits differ. The Bottomlands don’t have big herds that make pride hunting a successful survival strategy.”

  Just when Radnal wondered if the cave cat was going back to sleep, it exploded into motion. Long gray — brown mane flying, it bounded down the steep slope of the Night Demons’ Retreat. Radnal yanked out his handcannon. He saw Peggol vez Menk also had
one.

  But when the cave cat hit the floor of the Bottomlands, it streaked away from the tour group. Its grayish fur made it almost invisible against the desert. Cameras clicked incessantly. Then the beast was gone.

  “How beautiful,” Toglo zev Pamdal breathed. After a moment, she turned more practical: “Where does he find water?”

  “He doesn’t need much, Toglo zev,” he answered. “Like other Bottomlands creatures, he makes the most of what he gets from the bodies of his prey. Also”-he pointed north-“there are a few tiny springs in the hills. Back when it was legal to hunt cave cats, a favorite way was to find a spring and lay in wait until the animal came to drink.”

  “It seems criminal,” Toglo said.

  “To us, certainly,” Radnal half-agreed. “But to a man who’s just had his flocks raided or a child carried off, it was natural enough. We go wrong when we judge the past by our standards.”

  “The biggest difference between past and present is that we moderns are able to sin on a much larger scale,” Peggol said. Maybe he was thinking of the buried starbomb. But recent history held enough other atrocities to make Radnal have trouble disagreeing.

  Eltsac vez Martois said, “Well, freeman vez Krobir, I have to admit that was worth the price of admission.”

  Radnal beamed; of all the people from whom he expected praise, Eltsac was the last. Then Nocso chimed in: “But it would have been even more exciting if the cave cat had come toward us and he’d had to shoot at it.”

  “I’ll say,” Eltsac agreed. “I’d love to have that on film.”

  Why, Radnal wondered, did the Martoisi see eye to eye only when they were both wrong? He said, “With respect, I’m delighted the animal went the other way. I’d hate to fire at so rare a creature, and I’d hate even more to miss and have anyone come to harm.”

  “Miss?” Nocso said the word as if it hadn’t occurred to her. It probably hadn’t; people in adventure stories shot straight whenever they needed to.

  Eltsac said, “Shooting well isn’t easy. When I was drafted into the Voluntary Guards, I needed three tries before I qualified with a rifle.”

  “Oh, but that’s you, not a tour guide,” Nocso said scornfully. “He has to shoot well.”

  Through Eltsac’s outraged bellow, Radnal said, “I will have you know, I have never fired a handcannon in all my time at Trench Park.” He didn’t add that, given a choice between shooting at a cave cat and at Nocso, he’d sooner have fired on her.

  The wind picked up again. The Night Demons’ Retreat made more frightful noises. Radnal imagined how he would have felt if he were an illiterate hunter, say, hearing those ghostly wails for the first time. He was sure he’d’ve fouled his robes from fear.

  But even so, something else also remained true: judging by the standards of the past was even more foolish when the present offered better information. If Nocso believed in night demons for no better reason than that she’d read an exciting frightener about them, that only argued she didn’t have the sense the gods gave a shoveler skink. Radnal smiled. As far as he could tell, she didn’t have the sense the gods gave a shoveler skink.

  “We’ll go in the direction opposite the one the cave cat took,” Radnal said at last. “We’ll also stay in a tight group. If you ask me, anyone who goes wandering off deserves to be eaten.”

  The tourists rode almost in one another’s laps. As far as Radnal could tell, the eastern side of the Night Demons’ Retreat wasn’t much different from the western. But he’d been here tens of times already. Tourists could hardly be blamed for wanting to see as much as they could.

  “No demons over here, either, Nocso,” Eltsac vez Martois said. His wife stuck her nose in the air. Radnal wondered why they stayed married — for that matter, he wondered why they’d got married — when they sniped at each other so. Pressure from their kith groupings, probably. It didn’t seem a good enough reason.

  So why was he haggling over bride price with Wello zev Putun’s father? The Putuni were a solid family in the lower aristocracy, a good connection for an up-and-coming man. He couldn’t think of anything wrong with Wello, but she didn’t much stir him, either. Would she have read Stones of Doom without recognizing it for the garbage it was? Maybe. That worried him. If he wanted a woman with whom he could talk, would he need a concubine? Peggol had one. Radnal wondered if the arrangement made him happy. Likely not — Peggol took a perverse pleasure in not enjoying anything.

  Thinking of Wello brought Radnal’s mind back to the two nights of excess he’d enjoyed with Evillia and Lofosa. He was sure he wouldn’t want to marry a woman whose body was her only attraction, but he also doubted the wisdom of marrying one whose body didn’t attract him. What he needed-

  He snorted. What I need is for a goddess to take flesh and fall in love with me… if she doesn’t destroy my self-confidence by letting on she’s a goddess. Finding such a mate — especially for a bride price less than the annual budget of Tartesh — seemed unlikely. Maybe Wello would do after all.

  “Are we going back by the same route we came?” Toglo zev Pamdal asked.

  “I hadn’t planned to,” Radnal said. “I’d aimed to swing further south on the way back, to give you the chance to see country you haven’t been through before.” He couldn’t resist adding, “No matter how much the same some people find it.”

  Moblay Sopsirk’s son looked innocent. “If you mean me, Radnal, I’m happy to discover new things. I just haven’t come across that many here.”

  “Hmp,” Toglo said. “I’m having a fine time here. I was glad to see the Night Demons’ Retreat at last, and also to hear it. I can understand why our ancestors believed horrid creatures dwelt inside.”

  “I was thinking the same thing only a couple of hundred heartbeats ago,” Radnal said.

  “What a nice coincidence.” A smile brightened her face. To Radnal’s disappointment, she didn’t stay cheerful long. She said, “This tour is so marvelous, I can’t help thinking it would be finer still if Dokhnor of Kellef were still alive, or even if we knew who killed him.”

  “Yes,” Radnal said. He’d spent much of the day glancing from one tourist to the next, trying to figure out who had broken the Morgaffo’s neck. He’d even tried suspecting the Martoisi. He’d dismissed them before, as too inept to murder anybody quietly. But what if their squawk and bluster only disguised devious purposes?

  His laugh came out dusty as Peggol vez Menk’s. He couldn’t believe it. Besides, Nocso and Eltsac were Tarteshans. They wouldn’t want to see their country ruined. Or could they be paid enough to want to destroy it? Nocso looked back toward the Night Demons’ Retreat just as a koprit bird flew into one of the holes in the granite. “A demon! I saw a night demon!” she squalled.

  Radnal laughed again. If Nocso was a spy and a saboteur, he was a humpless camel. “Come on,” he called. “Time to head back.”

  As he’d promised, he took his charges to the lodge by a new route. Moblay Sopsirk’s son remained unimpressed.

  “It may not be the same, but it isn’t much different.”

  “Oh, rubbish!” Benter vez Maprab said. “The flora here are quite distinct from those we observed this morning.”

  “Not to me,” Moblay said stubbornly.

  “Freeman vez Maprab, by your interest in plants of all sorts, were you by chance a scholar of botany?” Radnal asked.

  “By the gods, no!” Benter whinnied laughter. “I ran a train of plant and flower shops until I retired.”

  “Oh. I see.” Radnal did, too. With that practical experience, Benter might have learned as much about plants as any scholar of botany.

  About a quarter of a daytenth later, the old man reined in his donkey and went behind another thornbush. “Sorry to hold everyone up,” he said when he returned. “My kidneys aren’t what they used to be.”

  Eltsac vez Martois guffawed. “Don’t worry, Benter vez. A fellow like you knows you have to water the plants. Haw, haw!”

  “You’re a bigger jackass than you
r donkey,” Benter snapped.

  “Freemen, please!” Radnal got the two men calmed down and made sure they rode far from each other. He didn’t care if they went at each other three heartbeats after they left Trench Park, but they were his responsibility till then.

  “You earn your silver here, I’ll say that for you,” Peggol observed. “I see fools in my line of work, but I’m not obliged to stay polite to them.” He lowered his voice. “When freeman vez Maprab went behind the bush now, he didn’t just relieve himself. He also bent down and pulled something out of the ground. I happened to be off to one side.”

  “Did he? How interesting.” Radnal doubted Benter was involved in the killing of Dokhnor of Kellef. But absconding with plants from Trench Park was also a crime, one the tour guide was better equipped to deal with than murder. “We won’t do anything about it now. After we get back to the lodge, why don’t you have your men search Benter vez’s belongings again?”

  Amusement glinted in Peggol’s eyes. “You’re looking forward to this.”

  “Who, me? The only thing that could be better would be if it were Eltsac vez instead. But he hasn’t a brain in his head or anywhere else about his person.”

  “Are you sure?” Peggol had been thinking along the same lines as Radnal. He’d probably started well before Radnal had, too. That was part of his job.

  But Radnal came back strong: “If he had brains, would he have married Nocso zev?” That won a laugh which didn’t sound dusty. He added, “Besides, all he knows about thornbushes is not to ride into them, and he’s not certain of that.”

  “Malice agrees with you, Radnal vez.”

  By the time the lodge neared, Golobol was complaining along with Moblay. “Take away the Night Demons’ Retreat, oh yes, and take away the cave cat we saw there, and what have you? Take away those two things and it is a nothing of a day.”

  “Freeman, if you insist on ignoring everything interesting that happens, you can turn any day dull,” Toglo observed.

  “Well said!” Being a tour guide kept Radnal from speaking his mind to the people he led. This time, Toglo had done it for him.