The Sovereign of Iss just stared at her. Ashiban sighed. Made sure her bag was securely closed. Gingerly got down on her hands and knees, lowered herself onto her stomach, and inched herself forward under the brambles.
The tunnel wasn’t long, just three or four meters, but Ashiban took it slowly, the bag dragging beside her, thorns tearing at her clothes and her face. Knees and wrists and shoulders aching. When she got home, she was going to talk to the doctor about joint repairs, even if having all of them done at once would lay her up for a week or more.
Her neck and shoulders as stiff as they were, Ashiban was looking down at the red-brown rock when she came out of the bramble tunnel. She inched herself carefully free of the thorns and then began to contemplate getting herself to her feet. She would wait for the Sovereign, perhaps, and let the girl help her to standing.
Ashiban pushed herself up onto her hands and knees and then reached forward. Her hand met nothingness. Unbalanced, tipping in the direction of her outstretched hand, she saw the edge of the rock she crawled on, and nothing else.
Nothing but air. And far, far below – nearly a kilometer, she remembered hearing in some documentary about the Scarp – the green haze of the plains. Behind her the Sovereign of Iss made a strangled cry, and grabbed Ashiban’s legs before she could tip all the way forward.
They stayed that way, frozen for a few moments, the Sovereign gripping Ashiban’s legs, Ashiban’s hand outstretched over the edge of the Scarp. Then the Sovereign whimpered. Ashiban wanted to join her. Wanted, actually, to scream. Carefully placed her outstretched hand on the edge of the cliff, and pushed herself back, and looked up.
The line of brambles stopped a bit more than a meter from the cliff edge. Room enough for her to scoot carefully over and sit. But the Sovereign would not let go of her legs. And Ashiban had no way to ask her to. Silently, and not for the first time, she cursed the loss of the handheld.
The Sovereign whimpered again. “Ashiban Xidyla!” she cried, in a quavering voice.
“I’m all right,” Ashiban said, and her own voice was none too steady. “I’m all right, you got me just in time. You can let go now.” But of course the girl couldn’t understand her. She tried putting one leg back, and slowly, carefully, the Sovereign let go and edged back into the tunnel of brambles. Slowly, carefully, Ashiban got herself from hands and knees to sitting by the mouth of that tunnel, and looked out over the edge of the Scarp.
A sheer cliff some six hundred kilometers long and nearly a kilometer high, the Scarp loomed over the Udran Plains to the north, grassland as far as Ashiban could see, here and there a patch of trees, or the blue and silver of water. Far off to the northwest shone the bright ribbon of a river.
In the middle of the green, on the side of a lake, lay a small collection of roads and buildings, how distant Ashiban couldn’t guess. “Sovereign, is that the monitoring station?” Ashiban didn’t see anything else, and it seemed to her that she could see quite a lot of the plains from where she sat. It struck her then that this could only be a small part of the plains, as long as the Scarp was, and she felt suddenly lost and despairing. “Sovereign, look!” She glanced over at the mouth of the bramble tunnel.
The Sovereign of Iss lay facedown, arms flat in front of her. She said something into the red-brown rock below her.
“Too high?” asked Ashiban.
“High,” agreed the Sovereign, into the rock, in her small bit of Raksamat. “Yes.”
And she had lunged forward to grab Ashiban and keep her from tumbling over the edge. “Look, Sovereign, is that the...” Ashiban wished she knew how to say monitoring station in Gidantan. Tried to remember what the girl had said, days ago, when she’d mentioned it, but Ashiban had only been listening to the handheld translation. “Look. See. Please, Sovereign.” Slowly, hesitantly, the Sovereign of Iss raised her head. Kept the rest of herself flat against the rock. Ashiban pointed. “How do we get there? How did you mean us to get there?” Likely there were ways to descend the cliff face. But Ashiban had no way of knowing where or how to do that. And given the state the Sovereign was in right now, Ashiban would guess she didn’t either. Hadn’t had any idea what she was getting into when she’d decided to come this way.
She’d have expected better knowledge of the planet from the Sovereign of Iss, the voice of the planet itself. But then, days back, the girl had said that it was Ashiban’s people, the Raksamat, who thought of that office in terms of communicating with the Ancestors, that it didn’t mean that at all to the Gidanta. Maybe that was true, and even if it wasn’t, this girl – Ashiban still didn’t know her name, likely never would, addressing her by it would be the height of disrespect even from her own mother now that she was the Sovereign – had been Sovereign of Iss for a few weeks at the most. The girl had almost certainly been well out of her depth from the moment her aunt had abdicated.
And likely she had grown up in one of the towns dotted around the surface of Iss. She might know quite a lot more about outdoor life than Ashiban did – but that didn’t mean she knew much about survival in the wilderness with no food or equipment.
Well. Obviously they couldn’t walk along the edge of the Scarp, not given the Sovereign’s inability to deal with heights. They would have to continue walking east along the bramble wall, to somewhere the Scarp was lower, or hope there was some town or monitoring station in their path.
“Let’s go back,” Ashiban said, and reached out to give the Sovereign’s shoulder a gentle push back toward the other side of the brambles. Saw the girl’s back and shoulders shaking, realized she was sobbing silently. “Let’s go back,” Ashiban said, again. Searched her tiny Gidantan vocabulary for something useful. “Go,” she said, finally, in Gidantan, pushing on the girl’s shoulder. After a moment, the Sovereign began to scoot backward, never raising her head more than a few centimeters. Ashiban followed.
Crawling out of the brambles back into the woods, Ashiban found the Sovereign sitting on the ground, still weeping. As Ashiban came entirely clear of the thorns, the girl stood and helped Ashiban to her feet and then, still crying, not saying a single word or looking at Ashiban at all, turned and began walking east.
THE NEXT DAY they found a small stream. The Sovereign lay down and put her face in the water, drank for a good few minutes, and then filled the bottle and brought it to Ashiban. They followed the stream’s wandering east-now-south-now-east-again course for another three days as it broadened into something almost approaching a river.
At the end of the third day, they came to a small, gently arched bridge, mottled gray and brown and beige, thick plastic spun from whatever scraps had been thrown into the hopper of the fabricator, with a jagged five- or six-centimeter jog around the middle, where the fabricator must have gotten hung up and then been kicked back into action.
On the far side of the bridge, on the other bank of the stream, a house and outbuildings, the same mottled gray and brown as the bridge. An old, dusty groundcar. A garden, a young boy pulling weeds, three or four chickens hunting for bugs among the vegetables.
As Ashiban and the Sovereign came over the bridge, the boy looked up from his work in the garden, made a silent O with his mouth, turned and ran into the house. “Raksamat,” said Ashiban, but of course the Sovereign must have realized as soon as they set eyes on those fabricated buildings.
A woman came out of the house, in shirt and trousers and stocking feet, gray-shot hair in braids tied behind her back. A hunting gun in her hand. Not aimed at Ashiban or the Sovereign. Just very conspicuously there.