The River Wall Read online

  So far, things had happened as they had been planned. I was just thinking that it was all going too smoothly when I heard the roar of challenge from just downslope. Another sounded, and another, and before we had time to react, a second line of sha’um appeared behind the first. These were narrow-shouldered females, the striping in their darker coats obscured by the settled ash their fur had collected.

  “They are frightened,” Tarani whispered to me. “Their dens are corrupted, the only security that remains to them is their mates. And they see that the Riders have changed the attitudes of the males, turned them away from den and family.”

  “Is Yayshah telling you this?” I asked.

  “She sees it,” Tarani admitted. “But I interpret it. Rikardon, they are terrified and angry. There is more risk for the women than I imagined.”

  The women themselves saw it, and were moving cautiously backward.

  “Yet they must try,” Tarani said. Her hand, clenched into a fist, struck the boulder on which we were leaning. “And now is the moment, their only chance.”

  She stood up. I grabbed for her, panicked, and sprawled out on the dusty ground as she dashed forward, running down the hill. This isn’t in the plan! I thought desperately. Keeshah, Yoshah, Koshah, protect her!

  The attention of all the sha’um was drawn to the noise of Tarani’s skidding and running. Three of the closest females edged around their mates to face the woman, their neckfur lifted and their tails thickening. Their tusks were exposed, and a low menacing sound rolled out of their throats as they spaced themselves and held their ground.

  But Tarani did not run to meet them. Instead, she angled off to her right, toward the main body of the column. She grabbed the arm of one of the women, and dragged her back toward the three female sha’um. One of the Riders—her husband, I supposed—caught the woman’s other arm and yelled something. The woman, not young by any means, argued for a moment with the man, then freed her arm from Tarani’s grasp and swung it full-force at the Rider, knocking him loose and sending him sprawling. She paused a moment, looking remorseful, then turned back to Tarani, who hugged her briefly. The two women ran toward the females, who had watched all this with growing suspicion. On the hillside above, Keeshah, Yayshah, and the two cubs were arranging themselves for battle.

  *Don’t fight unless you have to,* I ordered my three sha’um. *Try to follow what Tarani wants you to do.*

  I considered joining the mess, and was ready to launch myself downhill, when I spotted Thymas—much closer—doing the same thing. He ran and slid down until he collided with the Rider who had just gotten up, nearly knocking him flat again. Thymas grabbed him, talking earnestly, then he turned and shouted to Tarani.

  “The one in the center,” he said, and we all knew what he meant. Thymas had asked the Rider to find out from his sha’um which of these females was his mate. The man’s sha’urr moved slowly toward his Rider, pressed his forehead into the man’s chest, then with a spurt of energy climbed the hill to join Keeshah and his family.

  Later, I wondered whether Tarani really did have some element of telepathy in her mindpower, because the next few minutes saw a degree of teamwork that seemed impossible without some such unifying factor. Five sha’um faced the three females. Four of them were not bonded to Tarani, but they did the right thing at the right time. I directed three of them, am I was sure the Rider-husband of the woman was directing he male. There was no way for Tarani to tell us—or even to speak to the sha’um directly to tell them—what she wanted the sha’um to do, but we all worked together as if we had practiced it a hundred times.

  The female sha’um in the center of the group lunged forward, not so much attacking the two women as challenging and questioning her mate behind them. But the movemen brought her much nearer the women than the other two, and said: *Koshah, Yoshah, get down there on either side of the center female.*

  They obeyed immediately, and the sudden arrival of the young sha’um set all three females to sidestepping and growling. Apparently because these sha’um were cubs, the females saw no threat in them, so Koshah and Yoshah were able to get into place without causing an uproar.

  Her mate moved forward then, forcing the women to step aside to give him room. He touched noses with the female uttered a low sound from his throat, and rubbed the side of he face along her jaw. Her ears twitched forward, and she raises her head slightly so the male could lick the lighter fur of he throat. I saw her close her eyes as she relaxed and crouches down, offering the back of her neck to the attentions of he mate.

  *Now,* I ordered the cubs. They darted closer to the female and leaned their weight against her, effectively limiting he mobility.

  The females eyes snapped open, and we could see he muscles gathering for a lunge out of the trap, but her mate swung around. Instead of licking the fur on the back of he neck, he opened his jaws. He caught a fold of skin at the nape of her neck in his teeth, and pressed the female down to immobilize her. We could all see he was being careful not to hurt her. He lifted one heavy foreleg and laid it across Yoshah’s hindquarters and his mate’s shoulders.

  The female roared; the male’s jaws twitched; she fell silent. The other females, alarmed by what was going on, roared and paced, but now Keeshah entered the picture, taking a protective position behind the female.

  Facing the big, healthy male sha’um was more than the two other females wanted to handle. They backed down the hillside, crouched and watched.

  Gradually, as the female realized she was not being hurt and no one was threatening to hurt her, the wild look disappeared from her eyes, and she stopped trembling. Tarani lifted her arm, and Yayshah walked slowly down the hillside, passing under Tarani’s arm, crouching slightly and rippling fur and muscle, obviously enjoying the body-long caress.

  Yayshah stopped close to the trapped female and crouched down. Both women went forward then, stopping on either side of Yayshah. Tarani mounted Yayshah, who stood up and carried Tarani off a short distance. The other woman walked forward boldly, and knelt in front of the furry head with its heavy teeth and silver-gray, suspicious eyes.

  The woman seemed very small in comparison with the mass of sha’um around her, but she moved with deliberation and courage. Please, I prayed—to the woman, or to the God of my grandmother Marie, I was not sure which—this is the first one, the keystone. Please let this work.

  The woman reached toward the female, keeping her hand always in the sha’um’s visual range. Even at this distance, I could see the male’s head twist slightly, to watch the woman with as much care as the female was watching her. Either instinctively or at Tarani’s earlier direction, the woman held her hand very still in front of the female’s face. Carefully, the triangular furred head extended itself, sniffing. The woman’s hand moved closer; the female’s ears twitched back, forward, back. The hand touched fur between the female’s eye and the top ridge of teeth. The female’s whole body flinched, but she made no hostile move. Her eyes were on the woman before her, even her captors forgotten.

  Another hand came forward, and both stroked fur. The dark ears came forward, the eyes half-closed. The woman stood up slowly.

  *Koshah, get out of the way,* I ordered the male cub, who stood up cautiously. The dark sha’um made no attempt to break away The woman moved to the sha’um’s side, stroking fur along her jaw, across her head, down her shoulders—behind the jaws of the male, who still held his mate’s skin in his teeth.

  The male still watched the woman warily. The woman laughed softly, and spared a caressing stroke for his sloping forehead.

  The male released his mate, and when Yoshah felt the weight of his foreleg go away, she, too, moved off. As if it were an ordinary, everyday sort of action, the woman slid a leg over the female’s back and settled into a slightly awkward, but conceptually accurate, imitation of a Rider’s position. The female stood up carefully, turned to touch noses with her mate, then moved to stand beside Yayshah.

  Only seconds later, the female�
�s mate—mounted by the new Rider’s husband—joined the two females.

  It had begun.

  19

  It was an inexpressible relief to lie down. The pallet beneath me was thickly padded with vlek hair and, while not the soft comfort of a feather mattress in Ricardo’s world, it was more comfort than I had known since Ligor and I had left Inid. I thought of the tenacious old man, and resolved to send a message, telling him that I was all right. I had the feeling that in spite of having his hands full with rebuilding Chizan, he was worrying about me. He was that sort of a man.

  Tarani lay beside me, sleeping. We had dismounted our sha’um in the clearing that was our home among the Sharith, and sent them into the surrounding forest for a well-deserved rest. Then with one mind, we had staggered toward the stream, stripping off clothes as we went. The clear, cool water had rinsed away the accumulation of soot and dust, and we had been able to walk with more control into the house.

  Tarani had kissed me tentatively; I had responded tentatively; we had both laughed.

  “One would think,” she said, “that we had only just met, since neither one of us is honest enough to plead fatigue.”

  “Every day with you,” I had said, running my fingers across the delicate bone beneath her left eye, “I seem to meet you for the first time. And desire for you is always with me, even when I’m too tired to demonstrate it.”

  She had drawn me down, then, to the pallet, to hold me tenderly. “It is decided, is it not, my love, that we shall never be parted again?”

  “Never,” I had promised, and then I had held her until her breathing slowed and she slept.

  But I was in that state of utter fatigue that defied sleep. We had stayed the rest of that day and part of the night in and near the Valley. As I had hoped, that first bonding had been a breakthrough. It had convinced the Riders that it could be done, and their sha’um in turn had encouraged their own mates into similar bondings.

  When the wives of the Riders of the Valley sha’um had achieved their bonds, every one of them following the first woman’s careful approach, we were greeted with some surprises. The oldest Thagorn sha’um had left us one by one, to return later with not only one, but three or four sha’um—his mate, and the last batch of cubs, now grown. Where the wife of an active Rider had been with us, the male had controlled and threatened the cubs in order to give his mate the chance to bond to his Rider’s mate.

  When all the bondings had been achieved—not totally without damage, but at least with no sha’um or Sharith having been killed—we had ridden back to our camping spot and spent the night in the fresher air, allowing the Valley sha’um to recover some of their strength.

  On the following day, the bonded sha’um—males and females, unbonded cubs accompanying them out of family loyalty—had reentered the Valley and herded out all the sha’um that could be found. Though it had hurt us to see them so weak and ill, we had not hesitated to take advantage of their condition. Mounted, the Sharith had herded the protesting sha’um away from the place that had been their home. They had begun to recover as soon as they reached clear air, and though there had been a few breakneck attempts to circle back to the Valley, for the most part they had seemed content to move along with us.

  The Sharith had opened their confining circle of bonded sha’um just north of Thagorn, and the ex-Valley sha’um had bolted for the overgrown hillsides.

  The mood of the Sharith had been subdued—due as much, I had suspected, from thoughtfulness as from fatigue. Their lives had changed—drastically, irreversibly. They had accepted the change without question for the sake of the sha’um, but had not yet taken the time to assess the nature of that change.

  Tarani and I had left a weary Thymas at the gate of Thagorn, declining the offered hospitality of his own home. Now that Yayshah was not the only female outside the Valley of Sha’um, there was no reason to forbid her presence in Thagorn. But this house was the only real home Tarani and I had known together.

  Sheltered by the warmth of Tarani’s closeness, I closed my eyes and, at last, let myself feel the pain. Outside the Valley I had told Tarani that we would never forget the sha’um we lost. I had not foreseen how personal that sense of loss would be.

  As we were gathering up the camp after making the painful decision that any sha’um left were beyond saving, something had drawn my gaze to the western hills.

  Doral had been there, at a level above the worst of the haze, watching us. Dharak’s sha’um had no distinguishing marks, and the sha’um crouching on the hillside might have been any sha’um—but I had known it was Doral. I had almost called to Keeshah, tempted to ride after him and corral him like a wild stallion, but Doral had stood up just at that moment, had issued a heart-rending cry of loneliness, and had jumped down to appear in flashes, running among the rocks of the hillside. Running away from us—not into the Valley but parallel to the line of haze.

  It was as if he knew the danger, I thought now. Maybe some part of Dharak understood what went on in the Hall, and was able to warn Doral. But that sound the cat made—it was good-bye to us, and good-bye to the Valley. If there were any trace of Dharak left, surely Doral would have come back with us.

  I squeezed my eyes shut, and became aware that I was physically shaking my head in denial of that vision. Doral will be one who survives—for a while. He’ll cling to the area until he starves, or becomes so weak that other survivors, driven mad by hunger and poison, gang up on him and kill him for food. I couldn’t face Dharak tonight. I couldn’t do it.

  I tried to dispel the vision of Doral with images of the females, the cubs, the families who had visibly healed as they had traveled southward with us. The sha’um had considerable native intelligence. Even unstimulated by a mindlink with a Gandalaran, they were capable, I was now convinced, of understanding that they had been sick in the Valley, and were well outside of it. We might lose a few whose instincts for home were paramount, but I felt confident that most of them would stay close by—some out of fatigue; some, perhaps, out of curiosity.

  The good thoughts relaxed me, but just before I drifted into an exhausted sleep, I saw again a swift and fleeting vision of a tawny coat flashing into sight between rocks, of a beloved friend fleeing to his doom.

  I woke suddenly, my heart pounding. Someone was squatting next to me, the barest silhouette visible in the darkness. A hand was touching my shoulder, and an almost inaudible voice whispered: “Come outside.”

  The shape stood up. I heard, rather than saw, it move through the bedroom doorway. I heard the difference in the step when he left the tiled floor of the house and stepped softly on the dirt.

  Whoever he is, I thought, he didn’t alarm Keeshah, which means he’s a friend. And if he had wanted Tarani awake, he would have woken both of us. I listened for a moment to Tarani’s even breathing, then made up my mind. I got up quietly, grabbed the light woven cover we seldom used, folded it and wrapped it around my waist. Then I went outside to see the person who had come to us with such an air of mystery.

  The moon was setting, the silvery light that pervaded the Gandalaran night was fading swiftly. But I could see, from the doorway of the house, what I could not have sworn to from that brief whisper—my visitor was a man. He stood for a moment facing away from me, watching the tiny waterfall of the stream in which Tarani and I had bathed. Then he turned around.

  It was Dharak.

  And yet it was not Dharak. This was not the strong and gentle, privately uncertain Lieutenant I had known before Doral had left Thagorn. Nor was it the empty shell, the blank-faced body which had lived in silence in Shola’s home for the past few months.

  The man was giving off an aura that reminded me of the look I had seen so briefly in Dharak’s eyes in the Great Hall. His posture, his positioning, the tension evident in his silhouette—I could almost smell his fear. He looked, for all the world, like a wild thing poised to bolt at the slightest sign of aggression.

  I had not been wrong about seeing some intel
ligence in him before, and in the Great Hall. But I had assumed it was the old Dharak, trying to break out. I was wrong, so wrong, I thought pityingly. The strain snapped him. Amnesia, insanity, something—he’s not the Dharak I knew.

  But he is still, I thought with determination, the Lieutenants father, and he needs my help. For some reason—probably a lingering memory—he has let only me see the truth. I have to try not to scare him, to win his trust.

  My heart was grieving for the old man as I stepped cautiously out of the doorway, into the fading moonlight. “Your name is Dharak,” I said quietly, “and mine is Rikardon. We are friends. Please, don’t be afraid of me.”

  I extended my hand toward him—slowly, as the first woman had done toward the frightened female sha’um. He sidled away and I froze, unwilling to frighten him further. He hesitated, then seemed to come to a decision. In amazement I watched him straighten up and step toward me with a strong, confident bearing. He took my arm in a forearm-to-forearm grasp, and held it firmly.

  “I know who you are, my friend, because those around me have spoken of you. I know, too, from the leadership you have offered the Sharith and from this personal demonstration of your kindness that you are a fine and good man. But I must tell you that your friend Dharak is no longer here. He has chosen to pass to a different existence, and in his absence I seem to be using his physical self—something that I believe you understand very well.”

  Shock held me silent for a moment, then in a wave of primordial panic, I let go the stranger’s arm and fumbled for the scissor-shaped scrapers on the ledge above the chimneyed lamp mounted on the wall beside the door. Frantically, I snapped the tiny chip of iron against the flint until a spark ignited the candle wick; then I replaced the chimney, put the sparker down, and pulled the man I had known as Dharak into the circle of light around the lamp.