The Vistor

by Sheri S. Tepper

  "Ayup, it is that," whispered the other in response. They watched, fascinated, as the bulky shadow fell toward the ground, then heaved up and moved forward, its head moving back and forth like the head of a serpent or, though they had never seen one, that great snake-headed bear of the north, weaving...

  "It's smelling something," whispered the younger man. "See, how it's sniffing all around the yard, and now it's sniffing the way back to the road."

  Indeed, the bulky shadow had reached the road once more, and was now moving along it, away from the valley, first into the trees, then out of them onto the first visible stretch of road that curved around the hill.

  "Shadua of the Shroud protect us," said the older man, getting up rather hastily and thereby dislodging his tin plate so that it went down the face of the stone like a tambourine, chingling and bashing as it went.

  Far down the road the shadow froze, turned, rose to its full, ogre's height and stared back the way it had come, head tilted to let it look upward at the promontory on which they stood.

  As though by mutual consent, the two men had already frozen. Hall standing, bent double, they remained as they were, every muscle tensed, their very breathing stilled, fearing even to blink. The wind blew into their faces from the valley. The faint smoke of the fire went into the trees. Both of them noticed this with heightened acuity; both silently acknowledged that the direction of the wind was extremely fortunate.

  After a long, long time, an eternity to them both, the shadow on the road dropped down once more and loped away in a hideous shuffling gallop that took it beyond the curve of the hill. Even then the men did not move, for the road came into sight again, further on, and the shadow stopped again on that farther stretch to peer back in their direction once more. Only when the black blotch had reached the end of the second curve and gone on around the hill did the younger man stand erect and draw an explosive breath.

  "What was it?" asked the older man.

  "Don't know," replied the other. "Don't want to know."

  "D'ja see the eyes?" asked the other from a dry mouth.

  "Red," said the other. "Red and glowing. Like coals. Shouldn't a been able to show up so far from here, but they did!"

  "Demon?" asked the older man. "Didn't believe in 'em until now, but it had to be. What else?"

  The younger man shook his head. "What d'ya think? Shoudn' we pack up and get out of here? Just in case it comes back."

  Without further discussion, they fell to clearing their camp, making up their packs, burying all evidence of themselves, including the ashes of the fire. They had come the easy way along the road in the valley, but without discussing it, they turned up the hill to take a steeper, wilder, and infinitely safer seeming route southeast through the Comador hill country toward home.

  Part way there, one of them remembered the tin plate, which would certainly bear the scent of one or both of them. He spent the rest of the journey trying to convince himself that the thing would not come back to sniff it out.

  Discipline at the guard post above Ogre's Gap had long been lax. Though considerable traffic had once passed that way, now there was so little movement on the road that the four guards, changed at the beginning of each span and assigned to watch two and two, night and day, had fallen into the habit of having one man watch the road during the day, while the rest of them slept, and having no man watch the road during the night while they all played cards and drank. Since the daytime watcher had also been up all night, he was usually asleep at his post. That is, during those times when he hadn't taken off to go fishing or hunting for his own amusement.

  Thus it was an unusual state of affairs to find all four men awake and watchful late one night, a state of affairs resulting from the fact that one of them had allowed a wagon to pass that afternoon driven by two demons, a male and a female. None of the guards had ever seen a demon before, and the junior man, the one who had seen them this afternoon had been asked to repeat his description of them until he was heartily sick of it.

  "Look, they din't spit fire or spout smoke; they din't turn me into a frog; they din't look like nothing weird. They looked just like people only they had horns. That's it."

  "Was they real horns," the sergeant asked, for the tenth time. "That's what I want to know. I mean, what's to stop some rebel from getting some horns off a cow and sticking them to his head and claiming to be a demon? To get out of Bastion? He could, you know he could."

  "Why would anybody do that?" the junior man demanded. "When anybody could just walk up over the top of the hill 'thout any trouble at all. Anybody can walk out of Bastion anytime, you know that as well as I do."

  "He'd do that to get a wagon out," said the sergeant, to the sycophantic nods of his two cronies. "That's why he'd do that. To get the wagon out and the woman out and whatever was in the wagon."

  "They stopped and got out so's I could look in the wagon," asserted the youthful guardsman, very red in the face. "There was a couple mattresses with blankets, and some bags with clothes in, and some books, and some food stores, and that's all."

  "Contraband," muttered the sergeant into his moustache. "They was probably carrying contraband. I should report that."

  "Well, you go right ahead," said the guard, losing his temper altogether. "And I should report you wan't even here, 'cause you were off fishing, and the other two of you wan't anywhere around, 'cause you'd gone with him and the three of you was prob'ly having yourselfs a nice swim whilst I had two demons to deal with!"

  This statement so far leveled the grounds of accusation that the sergeant wisely decided to let that aspect of the matter drop. "It might be the first of a bunch," he said, flatly. "Or, it might be headquarters, making a test shipment or even checking up on us. For the next few days, we'd better look sharp at whatever comes along."

  All four agreed that this would be prudent. Or, as they put it, "A pain in the ass what those wine-drinking bastards in Bastion get up to."

  So it was that all four of them were more or less awake when, just before dawn, the man assigned to the watchtower, the junior man, the same one who had seen the demons that afternoon, came creeping in the back door of the watch-house, leaving it open, and shook the sergeant to alertness in utter silence, with a hand over his mouth.

  "What the..." demanded the sergeant, before he saw his man's face, which was white and stark eyed and frightened.

  "Something coming up the road," that man said. "Never saw nothing like it. A beast maybe, a big one. Not nothing we can handle, Sarge. Too big, moving too fast, and I think what we ought to do is turn out the lights and get out of here."

  The sergeant was braver than most, and stupider—the two qualities often going hand in hand. Already fully dressed he stalked to the door, tossed his quiver over one shoulder, took his spear in one hand and his bow in the other, opened the door with a crash and strode out into the moonlight.

  By this time the other two were reaching for their boots. The man who had reported gave his two fellows a frightened look and went out the door he had come in by, leaving it open behind him. In the wan light of predawn, the other two saw him running full tilt for the hillside and the cover of the trees.

  That was about when the sergeant yelled, which brought the two to their feet. Then they heard a panicky shout, which made them turn in confusion, first toward their weapons, then away, toward the door. Then the sergeant screamed, a sound which went on interminably without any stop to draw breath, rising in pitch in a tortured shriek which neither of the men had ever heard or wished ever to hear again. They both made for the door their fellow had left by, but by that time they had delayed far, far too long.

  39

  laying a false trail

  When the doctor awoke on the morning of fiveday, he found Dismé seated on the ground beside the wagon, fully dressed, holding the dish-pan and a considerable bouquet of herbs which she was shredding into a mush in the dishpan. As he watched, amazed, she applied that mush to her hair and body, which she had in the
meantime stripped of all clothing. When green from head to toe, she dunked herself in the stream that ran down from the pass, not even noticing its iciness. When she came out of the water, she donned clean clothing and set aside the clothing she had worn.

  "I'd love to know what you're doing," said the doctor, from the wagon seat.

  She started and flushed. "How long have you been there."

  "I'm a physician," he said. "The human form is not a mystery to me, old or young, lean or fat, male or female."

  "Well, being looked at is a novelty to me, and I wish you wouldn't," she said, somewhat angrily. "I seem to be changing the smell of myself. I got the idea in the middle of the night, Dezmai, Dantisfan, dobsi, or demon. Something's following us by smell, and we need to change the smell."

  "How about the rest of us?" he asked, in an interested voice. "Should we adopt a new scent?"

  "I'd recommend it," she said firmly.

  "The thing in your head ... the whatsit?"

  "Dobsi."

  "If the Dantisfan can receive from the dobsi and talk to the demons, then I should imagine you can perhaps listen in on the conversation? Especially when you're asleep?"

  "It's possible," she admitted. "In which case the Dantisfan have been passing on to the thing in my head that something dangerous is about, which makes me even more nervous. If something evil comes, it will have grown used to the smell of the rest of you as well. Michael, you, Bobly, and Bab. And the wagon. And the horses."

  "Should we use those same herbs?"

  She shook her head. "No. Those herbs were for me, particularly, to disguise some particular attribute which some creatures can find by smell. Or so I am led to believe. In addition to this, we must all eat summerhay after our breakfast. And rub some on our shoes, on the wagon, on the horse's feet. If we can get them to eat some summerhay..."

  He made a face. "Summerhay? Even cows won't eat it."

  "You can make pills of it, if you like. If that would be easier."

  "How much for each."

  She shrugged. "Enough to make us stink, including the horses."

  He set about gathering summerhay from along the stream, making a face at the smell. So far as he knew, summerhay was used only to keep moths out of woolens, though odiferous things were usually ascribed virtues even when they had none. When he had the summerhay gathered, he put it in a pan and began drying it over the fire, then setting it aside to cool before crushing it with mortar and pestle. Finally he combined the powdered herb with some substance scooped out of a jar that bound the herb dust together.

  "What's that?" asked Dismé.

  "Paste. With some sugar in it." He rolled the resulting substance into pills, smaller ones for people, larger ones for horses, leaving a mass of the stuff as it was, for rubbing on the outsides of things. He had barely finished by the time Michael, Bobly, and Bab returned to the camp bearing a dozen good sized fish.

  "Phew," said Bobly. "What have you been up to."

  "Dismé has had an intimation," said the doctor. "One I think we'd be wise to heed."

  "It smells as though she's had something worse than an intimation," said Bab. "That's summerhay."

  "The doctor has made some pills," said Dismé, her eyes vague and glassy as she gazed up the peak they had climbed the day before. "Something up there is following us. Following the trail we made over the rock. It knows our smell. It knows the wagon smell, and the smell of our horses. It is very near us now, but it does not move by day."

  Michael had brought a pile of wood for the campfire. He laid it down and asked Dismé, "Do you sense that the thing is after you, personally? Or after all of us?"

  Dismé nodded, dismally. "Oh, Michael, it's after me, only me, and the rest of you only because you're with me. And the reason it's after me has something to do with Dezmai, but she comes and goes so quickly, I can't grasp what she knows of it."

  Michael frowned in concentration. "Well, if it's following you personally, we need to make a false trail. I'll take your clothes, the ones you've worn, and I'll take the doctor's horse—forgive me, doctor, but I've seen you on a horse, and I can make far better time—and lead the creature away from whatever route we are taking."

  "It won't come after me until dark," she said firmly. "The thing travels in the dark. It's made of darkness."

  "We'll still need to change our smell," said Bobly, taking a proffered pill from the doctor's hand. "And I have no doubt this will do it. Our Uncle Titus was given some once, for a bellyache, and he stank of the stuff for days!"

  Michael and the doctor put their heads together while Dismé sorted her clothing, using a long stick to separate the things she didn't mind losing, and drawing the rest into a pile to be washed in the herb mixture which also had a strong smell, though one that was spicy and resinous rather than sickening.

  Michael made himself a sandwich of bread and meat for his breakfast, packed up enough food for another few meals, rolled his blankets, bundled Dismé's discarded clothes together and tied them into a bundle at the end of a length of rope. The doctor, meantime brought out a hand-drawn map and laid it on the tailgate of the wagon.

  "Here," said the doctor, pointing at a painstakingly inked line upon the map. "This is where we are. We went west from Bastion, into the mountains to the pass, then southward, down this road. The road forks just below us, one southeast, one southwest, both of them headed toward the rim of the east-west canyon you can see there, almost a day's ride away. We'll take the southwest fork—it's better for the wagon. You take the southeast one that goes all the way to this bridge crossing the canyon. It's been there since before the Happening. Across the bridge the road runs both ways, up the canyon and down, east and west. The east way goes uphill, past some old quarries and over a pass by a waterfall and eventually ends up in Comador. It's a bad road. The west road is better. It lies between the canyon wall and the river, and it works its way down to a river ford in a wide valley. If you cross the river there, the road climbs north to rejoin this road, and the Seeress we're going to see will be just a few miles west. I figure, two days."

  Michael nodded. "I'll drag the clothing across the bridge, throw it over, then dose me and the horse with summerhay and follow the west fork to the ford, cross the river and rejoin you at the Seeress."

  "We won't throw them," said Dismé in a worried voice, putting her hand on his arm. "We'll dangle the clothes down the side of the canyon on the rope, to leave a scent trail down the stone, then drop them at the bottom. And we'll rub the rope with summerhay as soon as we've done, or it will still smell of my clothing."

  "We?" he cried.

  "I'm going with you, Michael. If the herbs don't work, I don't want the thing going after Bobly or Bab or the doctor. Let it come after me if it will."

  Michael shook his head firmly. "You're not coming."

  "Dezmai says I am," she said with equal firmness. "Dezmai says I am because Tamlar says so, and neither of them are anyone I can argue with."

  Michael turned to the doctor for help, but he only shrugged helplessly. "I can't argue with members of the Guardian Council or Rebel Angels or whatever they are, Michael. If any force can outwit whatever's after us, it's more likely to be them than it is us!"

  A few moments later, with Dismé's cast-off clothing at the end of a rope, his face set in frozen disapproval, Michael mounted the doctor's horse and pulled Dismé up behind him. He rode off in a mood of considerable confusion, for he had been hugged by women, many a time, but he had never really been touched by Dismé until now. Her arms were tight around him, her body was pressed against his back. He found the experience unsettling and chose to deal with it by picturing her as Dezmai, huge and powerful, not at all girlish, not at all someone to be ... lusted after. This vision, once well summoned, was slightly terrifying and worked almost too well for comfort.

  The doctor looked after them, shaking his head. "I wish she wasn't going off alone like that."

  "She isn't alone. Besides, Michael's fond of her," Bobly offe
red tentatively. "She's fond of him, too."

  "The question is, can he be fond of Dezmai? Or she of him?"

  "I don't know," Bobly whispered. "I haven't any idea. Don't plague me with questions like that."

  Bab summoned them to breakfast. They took their pills, gave some to the horses, then smeared summerhay on everything in sight, including the wagon and everything in it. When they left shortly thereafter, they moved in a traveling stink. At noon, they did not want to eat. When thirsty, they could barely stand the taste of water.

  Meantime, on the road to the bridge, Michael broke his silence to ask, "Where did you learn this use of summerhay?"

  "I dreamed it," Dismé said into his ear, her lips brushing his neck with each stride of the horse. "Perhaps Dezmai of the Drums leaves messages for me while I am asleep. I get them at times when I know she is away, otherwise occupied."

  "Away from you?" he asked, trying to keep the question merely interested and impersonal.

  Dismé shook her head. "Michael, I don't know. I can only guess. I've always been curious about birds and small creatures. Sometimes I've wished I could inhabit one, to learn how it thinks and what moves it and whether it hopes or not. This being treats me like a ... a house she is visiting. She comes in and looks around, very curious, turning things over, opening the cupboards, but remaining aware the house cannot be my house if she fills it with herself. So, most of the time, Dezmai goes elsewhere, perhaps leaving some tiny part of her alert within me, to warn her if something goes awry. She is close enough to intervene if I am in danger, but she does nothing to stop my fear, and I am deathly afraid of that thing the dobsi senses."

  "You think it is stronger than Dezmai?" he asked in dismay.

  She tried to come up with an answer, saying finally, "I think she feels it may be someday if it isn't yet."

  In the wagon which was now some distance to the west of them, Bobly broke a long silence to ask, "Where are we going?"

  "To see a woman named Allipto Gomator," said the doctor. "She's a seeress. A good one."