The Search for Kä Page 4

  Thymas turned to me again, his manner icily formal. “I will ride quickly back to Thagorn, tell Dharak about Yayshah, and relay your request. Please follow at your convenience.”

  “If Dharak denies our request?” I asked.

  “I doubt,” Thymas said, with a trace of sarcasm, “that he would send me to you with such a message.”

  “Dharak will not refuse us,” Tarani said.

  Thymas smiled at her. “No, he will not refuse you—at least,” he added, with a sardonic nod to me, “it is my opinion that when you reach Thagorn, the Lieutenant himself will honor and welcome you—” There was just enough pause to be noticeable. “—both of you. Tarani. Captain.”

  Ronar, complying with the boy’s mental request, moved closer to Thymas and crouched. His eyes never left Keeshah, and I could still feel my sha’um’s wariness toward the other cat. Thymas mounted Ronar, who surged to his feet, whirled, and headed south through the broken brush that marked their entrance. They stopped long enough to allow Thymas to retrieve his hat from the stubborn branch and wave it at us in farewell.

  Tarani was smiling in the direction Thymas and Ronar had gone. “Being a friend to Thymas can be very trying,” she said. “But rewarding. There can be no one else as full of contradiction and surprise as he is; his company is never dull.”

  She had been stroking Yayshah absentmindedly. The cat became restless and stepped away. In following the sha’um’s movement, Tarani caught sight of the look on my face, and laughed.

  “Rikardon, why do you refuse to give me credit for objective perception of other people? It surprised you that I recognized Zefra’s madness and it seems obvious that you expected me to accept Thymas’s swiftly changing moods without irritation.”

  “I guess I tend to put other people—and their feelings—into categories,” I said. “Thymas—well, my feelings about Thymas are pretty complicated.”

  “And you believe mine are not?” she asked.

  “I believe you love him,” I said. “A lot can be forgiven if you love someone.”

  “Forgiven, yes,” Tarani agreed, coming toward me. “But not necessarily ignored.”

  She put her hands on my shoulders, and her face grew serious. “We were discussing this before Thymas came, I believe?”

  “We were,” I agreed. “I didn’t have an answer for your question then, but I do now. Thymas will never be part of my ‘past,’ Tarani—or yours. He is part of us as we are now. I know that you still love him.” She tensed, but I stopped her intended interruption by pulling her against me. “I also know that what you feel for him is different, less … special than what we share. I say I ‘know’ that—my mind believes it, but my feelings don’t learn as fast.”

  She pressed against me, her arms around my neck, and we stood there for a moment. I was nearly overwhelmed with the knowledge of the value of what I held, the loss I would feel if she were never to touch me this way again. She seemed to be in the same sort of mood, for when she finally pushed at me gently, signaling me to let her stand back, I could feel a trembling in her arms.

  “It moves me to hear you speak directly and honestly of what you feel,” she said. “It seems, at such times, that I can truly touch you, that a barrier I sometimes sense between us is missing. Now, while you are open to me, listen with your ‘feelings,’ Rikardon. The kind of future a man and a woman might expect, a home and children and just being together, cannot be ours until we have settled the matter of the Ra’ira. Indeed, for that reason, we may never see such a future. But remember that, even while we are busy with what we must do, even while other people and other things capture our attention and our time, the very center of me is unfailingly and lovingly bound to the very center of you. We are linked, as surely as you and Keeshah, or Yayshah and I—with the difference you defined a few days ago. You and I cannot communicate these feelings directly; we must depend on words, and words can lead to misunderstanding.” She smiled.

  She’s remembering one of the many times in recent history that I opened my mouth and started chewing on my foot, I thought. I wish I could forget a few of those.

  “I ask you, Rikardon, to speak to me as clearly as you can, and I promise the same to you.”

  “It’s a deal,” I said, moving the words around the lump in my throat. “And for starters, how about this? Speaking for Markasset and myself, we have known and loved many women, in this life and … and in my other life.”

  Hypocrite! I accused myself. I’m still covering up the truth. Is this speaking “clearly?”

  I pushed the guilty voice aside, answering: Yes, it is the clear truth as far as my feelings are concerned, and they are most important right now.

  “Tarani, we—I—have never known anyone, man or woman, whom I admire, respect, and cherish more than you.”

  She gasped, and I felt her shiver. “You have a gift for language, Rikardon, and you have seen that your words have power over me. What you have just said will always be my favorite truth, for it speaks what I feel for you, as well.”

  I held her again for a brief and tender moment.

  “As you pointed out,” I said, “we must tend to other tasks—like introducing Yayshah to the Sharith and her new home.”

  4

  *Good,* Keeshah grunted, as he stepped out onto the wide, brush-free caravan road. *Easier.*

  I echoed his sentiment. It had been bad enough breaking our own trail across the rocky slopes of the Morkadahl foothills, where brush and boulders presented equal obstacles. For the last half-mile or so, we had been moving further downslope, looking for the road we had just found. Without the occasional bare rock to keep the ground clear of ground cover, we had been breaking trail literally, crashing through tangles of brush and forcing our way past natural walls of vines, interlaced among the twists of curly trunked, wild dakathrenil trees.

  We might have chosen merely to cross the higher slopes and enter Thagorn from the side, but nobody suggested it. The valley held rich, well-watered soil, and beyond the cultivated areas—meaning the higher slopes—the wild growth made the stuff we were moving through look like the Kapiral Desert. Tarani had made that trip once, on foot, and still carried faint scars on her hands to testify to the struggle it had been. For the sha’um, with their greater bulk, basic four-point balance and less efficient grasping capability, going that way would have been unrelenting misery.

  Besides, we had made a point of requesting permission to enter Thagorn’s valley, and that meant, by every tradition Ricardo or Markasset recognized, going in by the front door—in this case, the front gate. The caravan road came west, more or less, from the Refreshment House at Relenor and led south, more or less, right in front of Thagorn. From there it followed the Morkadahls around the southern tip of the range and headed north to Omergol, a crossroads city noted for the richly veined green marble its natives mined from the hillsides.

  Many of the Gandalaran cities I had seen were surrounded by walls, but there was no other wall like Thagorn’s. It was more like a dam than a wall, its upper edge stretching level across the narrow opening into a fertile, steep-sided valley. Its lower edge followed the shallow-dish contour of the ground. At the center of its hundred-foot span, the wall stood some thirty feet high, and a double gate filled half that height. The doors of the gate were made of thick layers of laminated wood and braced with bronze fittings, and they were usually closed.

  As the sha’um topped the ridge that marked the edge of Thagorn’s valley, I could tell that the gate stood wide open—not because I could see the doors, but because I could see the people who formed a double line along the road and through the entrance to Thagorn’s protected valley. The Sharith formed the edges of those lines, but behind them thronged the women, children, and “cubs”—boys thirteen to sixteen who had sha’um and were in training as Riders.

  The line of people ended halfway between us and the gate, and at its opening, waiting to greet us, stood Dharak and Thymas, the boy a step or two behind his father. There had b
een the murmuring sound common to a crowd of people waiting for something. The hillside had blocked it from us, but we heard it—for the merest instant—as we came over the top. A frantic whispering sound reached us as all eyes turned in our direction—down from the throngs on the wall, up from the waiting people. There was a long moment of total silence, then a roar of noise rose from the throats of the Sharith.

  Yayshah flinched back at the sound, ears flattening and neckfur lifting. Tarani was startled, too, and I recalled that she had not been present at my “installation” as Captain, when I had been honored in this way.

  They were shouting my name. It had moved me then, and it touched me now. Equal parts of pride and humility straightened my shoulders as I pulled myself into a sitting position and urged Keeshah downslope at a slow and steady pace.

  I realized that Yayshah and Tarani weren’t with me, and I directed Keeshah to slow even further, to give them a chance to catch up with us. When they didn’t come up alongside immediately, I became alarmed and glanced quickly back.

  I’ve been thinking about Yayshah being accepted by the Sharith, I realized. It never occurred to me to wonder whether it would work the other way around.

  My fears had been groundless, though; Yayshah was following with no more display of unrest than an occasional twitch of her ears. Her bulk added to the already impressive stateliness of a sha’um’s gait. I felt, as I looked at her, the reverence common to men of Gandalara and of Ricardo’s world, a sense of the mystery of maternity. Added to it was a purely Gandalaran awareness, awe of the cat and of what it meant to see her here, outside the Valley of the Sha’um.

  I made a very slight hand signal to invite Tarani to ride beside me, but she shook her head and kept Yayshah a couple of yards behind Keeshah. We were nearing Dharak and Thymas, so I didn’t have time to argue with her, but I felt disquieted as I turned to face the Sharith.

  The third repetition of “Rikardon and Keeshah!” faded just as I stopped some five yards from the end of the reception line. Dharak took a step toward me, and it was only then that I realized there were no sha’um visible, except for Keeshah and Yayshah. I slid off Keeshah’s back to meet the Lieutenant on foot. It didn’t matter much—mounted or walking, a man with a sha’um had an emotional and physical advantage over a man without one—but it made me more comfortable to be eye-to-eye with the straight-backed old man.

  “Welcome back, Captain,” Dharak said, fairly glowing with pleasure and extending his hand in front of him. I shook it, touched by the sincerity of his welcome and his adoption of my greeting gesture over his own.

  “You look well, Lieutenant. I’m glad to see your arm has healed.”

  He flexed his left elbow. “Shola has great skill at setting broken bones,” he said, and laughed. “It comes from much practice.”

  He looked me up and down.

  “Shola will be glad to ply her kitchen skills on you, my friend; you look in need of a good meal.”

  “I wouldn’t mind several,” I said, pulling at the shoulder of my ruined tunic, “after I’ve had several baths.” Shola was, most certainly, in the crowd around us, but Dharak’s speaking of her as if she were absent reminded me that, for the moment, the Lieutenant and the Captain were engaged in a formal ceremony of greeting. “But I am not alone, Dharak, and I may enjoy your hospitality only if it is also open to all those in my company.”

  “Thymas has already presented your request, Carillo.”

  A tremor in Dharak’s left arm drew my attention to his hands; they were clenched into fists.

  So it did bother the old man that Thymas kept the scout’s report to himself! I thought.

  “There is another that must be heard,” Tarani said as she walked forward to stand, sha’umless, beside me. Dharak and I both turned to her in surprise—Dharak, no doubt, because she had interrupted whatever he had rehearsed to say to us, and I because of the peculiar tone of her voice. After an instant’s study, I identified it, with more astonishment, as timidity.

  “Dharak, you were injured—and your Captain might have been killed—because of me. I ask your pardon for the role of deceit and betrayal I played on that day. I also ask that you do not allow feelings toward me to color your decision about the female sha’um who walks with me now. She is in desperate need of rest. Though I wish to be close to her during this critical period, we cannot truly be separated—and if you cannot, in conscience, admit me within your walls, I will be content to lodge elsewhere, if I know she is comfortable.”

  Dharak stared at Tarani for what seemed a long time—but perhaps my perception was colored by the fact that I was holding my breath. Finally, the Lieutenant held out his hands to Tarani and spoke with touching gentleness.

  “Thymas has told us why that happened, Tarani, and I would gladly have traded this broken arm for the life of the man you were trying to protect. Not my life, perhaps,” he added with a smile, “but a broken arm—certainly.”

  “You are kind,” Tarani said, placing her hands in the old man’s. “I wish I could forgive myself so easily.”

  “You are welcome among the Sharith, my dear, as is your companion.” He glanced at me, hesitated, then faced Tarani squarely again. “May I greet her?”

  Well, I thought, at least Thymas and Dharak talk to each other. I’d swear that it was Dharak’s first instinct to ask my permission to greet Yayshah, just as Thymas did. The boy had to have warned him against it.

  Tarani released Dharak’s hands and took a small step backward. The gray-brown cat came forward slowly. Tarani reached up with her left hand to stroke the side of the sha’um’s muzzle and said: “This is Yayshah.”

  Dharak let the cat examine his open hand until her ears came forward, then rubbed behind her ear. I could almost feel waves of tenderness and awe from the watching crowd as Yayshah closed her eyes and twisted her head against his hand. After a moment, Dharak stepped back into position between the rows of Riders, and the crowd’s mood became more crisp.

  “Captain, the Sharith are honored that you pay us the courtesy of requesting what you might command. Again, welcome—Rikardon and Keeshah, Tarani and Yayshah.”

  A shout rose from the crowd—no words or names, just a joyful sound. I felt my throat tighten with the special joy and terror that a demonstration of the respect of the Sharith always brought to me. Beside me, Yayshah flinched slightly, but I saw Tarani’s hand moving on her neck, calming the big cat.

  When the roar had died down, Dharak spoke again. “We have one request, Captain. You will have noticed that our sha’um are not with us.” I nodded. “I can speak for the Riders, my friend, but not for our sha’um. Until we can be sure that Yayshah is accepted among her own kind, we are asking our sha’um to remain on the far side of the river, except when their Riders call them for exercise or patrol. We ask, therefore, that Yayshah and Keeshah find their home on the nearer side of the river, at least temporarily.”

  *Keeshah, they want you and Yayshah to stay on this side of the river for a while, away from the other sha’um. Do you have any objection to that?*

  *Food there?* he asked.

  I tried to remember. The Sharith kept tame herds of glith for their own meat, but allowed a large herd to run wild on the slopes of their valley, to provide natural game for the sha’um. I knew that the tame herds were restricted to the farther side of the river, which was the main residence area for the Sharith, but I couldn’t see the possibility, much less the value, of placing any restrictions on the wild herds.

  *I think so, Keeshah. If not, I’m sure Dharak will see to it that you have good hunting.*

  *All right,* Keeshah agreed.

  The mental exchange took much less time than a vocal conversation would have consumed. It was barely a second after Dharak had made his request that I looked toward Tarani, who moved around Yayshah so that I could see her nod her head.

  “The sha’um consent,” I told the Lieutenant.

  5

  We walked into Thagorn between the lines of c
heering people—Keeshah and I in the lead, followed by Yayshah and Tarani, then Dharak and Thymas. The boy had stood by mutely throughout the ceremony of greeting, and he disappeared into the crowd as soon as we stepped through the gate.

  The crowd started to dissolve, the crisp lines behind us fragmenting into clumps of people who drifted through the gateway, smiled at us uncertainly and from a distance, edged around us, and set off for the bridge that led to the family dwellings across the river.

  I felt a coldness creep in, where a moment ago there had been only the warmth of joy.

  “Dharak—” I began, but when I turned around, Shola was standing beside her husband, her eyes on me.

  “I, too, bid you welcome, Captain,” she said, extending her hands. “Our home is open to you—to you both. If you’d care to come with me now—?”

  “Thank you, Shola,” I said. “We will see our sha’um settled, then accept your invitation with pleasure.”

  “Thank you, Shola,” Tarani said. The Lieutenant’s wife gave the girl a brief glance and nod, then walked away.

  The moment of silence that followed Shola’s rudeness was awkward. Finally, Tarani spoke, her voice clipped and tight to conceal the hurt I knew she felt.

  “Perhaps it would be better if I—”

  I interrupted her. “Tarani and I will avail ourselves of one of the vacant houses,” I told Dharak, not trying to hide my anger. “Join us later, and we will talk.”

  “Please, Rikardon,” Dharak said. His use of my name, rather than title, caught my attention, as did the whispered pleading in his voice. “We must talk later, in truth—but for now, I beg you, it is very important that you and Tarani share our home. Shola—I will speak to her. If you can be tolerant for only a little while, she will change, I promise you.”