Reith saw her looking back the way they had come, somewhat wistfully, he thought. "Do you miss the Shelters?" he asked.
Zap 210 considered her reply. "I am afraid. We can be seen from all directions.
Perhaps the zuzhma kastchai watch us from the gap. They may send night-hounds after us."
Reith looked up toward the gap: a shadow, almost invisible from where they sat.
He could detect no evidence of scrutiny; they seemed alone in the open valley.
But he could not be sure. Eyes could be watching from the gap; the black cloaks made them conspicuous. He looked toward Zap 210. Almost certainly she would refuse to remove the garment ... Reith rose to his feet. "It's growing late; perhaps we can find a village along the shore."
Two miles downstream the river spread wide to become a swamp. Along the opposite shore grew a dense forest of enormous dyans, the trunks on the periphery slanting somewhat outward. Reith had seen such a forest before; it was, so he suspected, a sacred grove of the Khors, a truculent folk living along the south shore of the First Sea.
The presence of the sacred grove, if such it was, gave Reith pause. An encounter with the Khors might immediately validate Zap 210's fears regarding the ghaun, and the unpleasant habits of those who lived there.
At the moment there were no Khors in sight. Proceeding along the verge of the swamp they came out on a knoll overlooking a hundred yards of mud flat, with the sluggish First Sea beyond. Far to right and left were crumbling gray headlands, almost lost in the afternoon murk. Somewhere to the southeast, perhaps not too far, must lie the Carabas, where men sought sequins and where the Dirdir came to hunt.
Reith looked up and down the coast, trying to locate himself by sheer instinct.
Zap 210 stared glumly off to sea, wondering what the future held. A mile or so along the shore to the southeast Reith noticed the crazy stilts of a pier extending across the mud flats, out into the sea; at the end half a dozen boats were moored. A swelling of ground beyond the swamp concealed the village which must lie at the head of the pier.
The Khors, while not automatically hostile, lived by a complicated etiquette, transgressions of which were not tolerated. A stranger's ignorance received no sympathy; the rules were explicit. A visit with the Khors thus became a chancy occasion.
"I don't dare risk the Khors," said Reith. He turned to look back over the desolate hills. "Sivishe is a long way south. We'll have to make for Cape Braise. If we get there we can take passage by ship down the west coast, although at the moment I don't know what we'll use for money."
Zap 210 looked at him in slack-mouthed surprise. "You want me to come with you?"
So here was the explanation for her melancholy inspection of the landscape, thought Reith. He asked, "Did you have other plans?"
She pursed her lips sullenly. "I thought that you would want to go your way alone."
"And leave you by yourself? You might not fare too well."
She looked at him with sardonic speculation, wondering at the reason for his concern.
"There's a good deal of 'boisterous conduct' up here on the surface," said Reith. "I don't think you'd like it."
"Oh."
"We'll have to go warily. These cloaks-we'd better take them off."
Zap 210 looked at him aghast. "And go without clothing?"
"No, just without the cloaks. They attract attention and hostility. We don't want to be taken for Gzhindra."
"But that is what I must be!"
"At Sivishe you may decide otherwise. If we arrive, of course. We don't help ourselves going as Gzhindra." He pulled off his cloak. With her face angrily turned away she removed her cloak and stood in her gray undergown.
Reith rolled the cloaks into a bundle. "It may be cold at night; I'll take them with us."
He picked up the blue portfolio, which now represented excess baggage. He wavered a moment and at last slid the portfolio between the inner and outer layers of his jacket.
They set off to the northwest along the shore. Behind them the Khor grove became a dark blur; the far headland grew bulky and dark. Carina 4269 moved down the sky and the sunlight took on a late afternoon richness. To the north, however, a bank of purple-black clouds threatened one of the sudden Tschai thunderstorms.
The clouds moved inexorably south, muffling, half-concealing spasms of electric light. The sea below shone with the sallow luster of graphite. Ahead, close underneath the headland, appeared another grove of dyan trees. A sacred grove?
Reith searched the landscape but saw no Khor town.
The grove loomed above them, the exterior boles leaning outward, the fronds hanging down in a great parasol. The headland conceivably concealed a village, but at the moment they were the only animate creatures under the half-black, half-golden-brown sky.
Reith imparted none of his misgivings to Zap 210, who was sufficiently occupied with her own. Exposure to the sunlight had flushed her face. In the rather flimsy and clinging gray undergown, with the black hair beginning to curl down on her forehead and her ears, she seemed a somewhat different person than the pallid wretch Reith had met in the Pagaz refectory ... Was his imagination at fault? Or had her body become fuller and rounder? She noticed his gaze and gave him a glare of shame and defiance. "Why do you stare at me?"
"No particular reason. Except that you look rather different now than when I first saw you. Different and better."
"I don't know what you mean," she snapped. "You're talking foolishness."
"I suppose so ... One of these days-not just now-I'll explain how life is on the surface. Customs and habits are more complicated-more intimate, even more
'boisterous'-than in the Shelters."
"Hmmf," sniffed Zap 210. "Why are you heading toward the forest? Isn't it another secret place?"
"I don't know." Reith pointed to the clouds. "See the black trails hanging below? That's rain. Under the trees we might stay dry. Then, night is coming soon, and the night-hounds. We have no weapons. If we climb a tree we'll be safe."
Zap 210 made no further comment; they approached the grove.
The dyans reared high overhead. At the first lines of boles they stopped to listen, but heard only a breath of wind from the oncoming storm.
Step by step they entered the grove. The sunlight shining past the clouds projected a hundred shafts and beams of dark golden light; Reith and Zap 210 walked in and out of shadow. The nearest branches were a hundred feet above; the trees could not be climbed; the grove offered little more security from night-hounds than did the open downs ... Zap 210 stopped short and seemed to listen. Reith could hear nothing. "What do you hear?"
"Nothing." But she still listened, and peered in all directions. Reith became highly uneasy, wondering what Zap 210 sensed that he did not.
They proceeded, wary as cats, keeping to the shadows. A clearing free of boles opened before them, shrouded by a continuous roof of foliage. They looked forth into a circular area containing four huts, a low central platform. The surrounding boles had been carved to the semblance of men and women, a pair at each tree. The men were represented with long nutcracker chins, narrow foreheads, bulging cheeks and eyes; the females displayed long noses and lips parted in wide grins. Neither resembled the typical Khor man or woman, who, as Reith recollected, almost exactly resembled one another in stature, physiognomy and dress. The poses, conventionalized and rigid, depicted the act of copulation. Reith looked askance at Zap 210, who seemed blankly puzzled. Reith decided that she interpreted the not-too-explicit attitudes as representations of sheer sportiveness, or simple "boisterous conduct."