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"Those who came from the west," she answered, "were strangers. It seems there is a new enemy abroad in Yiktor, more ruthless than any plains lord has ever dared to be. And that force comes from off-world."
"But the Traders—" I was too astonished to grasp it quickly.
"These are not Traders like unto the men of the Lydis. These newcomers fight to carve themselves a rooting in our soil, gather to themselves power, build their own kingdom. Some of the lords they have already overwhelmed, having worked secretly for a time to sow dissension among their people; others they have gathered to them with promises of much treasure to be later shared. They have set one against another, stirring ever the caldron of war with that spoon which will make it boil the most furiously. I do not know what we shall find now in Yrjar. I do not even know if we can reach the city. We can only try."
What she said was not too enlightening, and not at all promising. It sounded as if this had been longer building than we had suspected– To plunge into a land where every man's hand was raised against his neighbor was daunting. But the port was at the outskirts of Yrjar, and there lay my only chance of reaching the Lydis.
Yrjar lay some distance away, and as I chewed upon what Maelen had said, the journey appeared to double. Were we wise to take the road at all now?
That thought was already shaping in my mind when the summons came. It was sharp and strong, as ringing as any horn call. But it did not reach me through my ears.
There was an after moment of silence, then once more the pealing, demanding order we could not disobey. I heard a small cry from Maelen, of protest—
Then, before we willed it, we had turned our mounts to the right, out of the road into the wilderness of the northern ridges, answering a call which body and mind must obey—the horn-in of the Thassa, which sounded only in times of great import.
XVIII
What I had seen of Yiktor had been much like any other world of its type—plains backed by hills, covered with vegetation varying in shade. But Yrjar, the fort of Osokun, Yim-Sin, the temples of Umphra, had their counterparts on many planets and were also familiar to me in part. Where we rode now was very different.
The horning set such bonds upon us that we could not have disobeyed its order. And we rode on and on, ever north, always into higher country. The rises here were not softened by any growth of trees, or even slightly veiled by brush and shrubs. Only small patches of grass, now killed by the first breath of winter, broke the general desolation of the stone.
For this was truly a desolate country. I have visited planets burned off in some nuclear war of such antiquity that it antedated the coming of my own species into space. That is ruin to daunt the heart of any who look upon it. But this was even more alien than that. It was a vast loneliness which rejected life as our kind knows, a stark stripping to the bones of Yiktor itself.
Yet there was life here. For when we rode deeper and deeper into this wilderness of naked stone and sand, we saw traces of those who had gone before us, tracks left by vans, hoofprints of riding kasi.
It was as if we lay under some spell, for we did not speak to each other, neither did I have any desire to turn back to the plains and what had once seemed my pressing business there. Night came. From time to time we dismounted, rested our kasi, ate of the supplies in the bags, walked up and down to ease our own bodies, only to remount and take up the trail once again.
At dawn our road wound between two towering cliffs. I thought that at some immeasurably early time in Yiktor's history this must have been the bed of a great river. There were sand and gravel and rumbles of bounders which looked water worn, but no living thing, not even so much as a single tuft of withered grass. And that river bed brought us into a huge bowl, also ringed by heights. If we had come up the river, now we entered a lake bed.
Here for the first time had man, or some intelligence, broken the austerity of the wilderness. Cut back into the cliffs about the lake bed were a series of wide openings, each bordered with carving which had once been chiseled deep, but now worn away to faint, unreadable tracings.
These cliff dwellings had inhabitants, for there were vans drawn up before them, the smoke of fires drifted into the morning air. Animals wandered about. But men, or Thassa, were missing. Maelen took the lead, for once we entered the basin the compulsion which had kept me every by her side lifted. She guided her mount to a picket line, slid from its back, and straightaway loosened her saddle pad, freeing it. The kas shook its head and then lay down and rolled in the sand, snorting vigorously. And mine, as I stripped it, did likewise.
"Come." For the first time in hours she spoke to me.
I dropped my saddle pad beside hers and we went across the valley, heading for the midpoint of the opposite wall. There was a rock doorway easily twice the size of the others flanking it. I marveled at the vast labor its carving had demanded, but I could not detect any meaning in the patterns which were outlined, for they were far too badly eroded.
Where were the Thassa? All I could see were animals and vans. But as we approached the cliff door I had my answer. From it came a sound which was more than mere chanting. It partook also of the movement of the air in a way I do not have any words in off-world vocabulary to describe. I fell into the rhythm of it unknowingly and then realized what I did. Beside me I heard Maelen's voice raised in song.
We passed from the light of the valley under that heavy portal into a hall. It was not dark, globes hung high over our heads and we walked through moonlight, although a few feet outside the sun struck hot across the rock.
And the Thassa were there in numbers I could not count. Before us there was a pathway open to the very center of the place, and down that Maelen went; I, less surely, a step or two behind her. Always that singing rang in our ears, beat in our blood, was a part of us.
So we came to a space where there was an oval dais or platform raised a few steps above the surface of the floor. And on that stood four of the Thassa; two were men, two women. Although they were firm of flesh, bright of eye, yet about them was such an aura of age, authority, and wisdom as to set them apart, even as their present positions set them bodily above the rest. Each carried a wand. But these were not the relatively short rods such as Maelen bore; rather did they top their holders' heads when one end was planted firmly on the floor. And the light which shone from these shafts rivaled and paled the moon globes.
Maelen did not mount the two steps to join them, but stood in the open just below. And when I hesitantly came up beside her, I saw that her face was closed and bleak; yet still she sang.
They all sang until it seemed to me that we did not truly stand on firm rock, but rather that we wavered back and forth in the currents of an ocean of sound. I felt that I did not look upon Thassa but upon other people—or spirits. My vision of them was never complete; rather were they shadows of what might be the truth.
How long did we stand so? To this day I do not know, any more than I can dimly guess the meaning of what was happening. I think that by their united will as a people they built up certain forces, and from those they drew what they needed for their purposes. This is a very fumbling explanation of what I involuntarily joined during that day.
The song was dying, fading away, in a series of slow, sobbing notes. Now it carried with it a vast burden of sorrow, as if all the private griefs of an old, old people had been distilled through centuries, and each small ultimate drop of despair preserved for future tasting.