“The question is not really settled, then?”
“Not in the sense that the sphericity of Kforri may be taken as settled, although I think the odds are at least ten to one in favor of Descensionism.”
“Then who were the Ancient Ones?”
Halran shrugged. “There are as many interpretations of those myths as there are mythographers. One plausible interpretation is that they were the leaders of a band of settlers who somehow came from Earth and who died or were killed off after the landing. Do you know the story of Hasn the Smith, who, denied an honorable place at the Feast of the Ancient Ones, stood in the doorway and slew them all with his magical arrows?”
“Yes.”
“That no doubt refers to some real event, although we do not know what.”
Marko asked: “How about the myths of the gods on Earth, such as the one about the rivalry of the sea god Nelson and the war god Napoleon for the favor of the love goddess Cleopatra?”
“I do not know, though there are the usual speculations. There is a story that the key to these mysteries lies on the Isle of Mnaenn, but the witches do not let outsiders go poking around their sacred island.”
The following day, there was still no sign of water. Suffering from thirst, Marko watched for the main caravan route. When he failed to sight it, he could only suppose that they had crossed it without noticing it. It had no permanent marking, and a good breeze soon obliterated the tracks of the animals with blown sand. Halran complained incessantly. Marko twice lost his temper and roared at the older man, feeling ashamed of himself afterwards.
The next day, Halran began to reel in his saddle. They choked down their food as best they could. Marko, rolling a pebble about his mouth to lessen his thirst, looked longingly at a distant herd of dromsors. If he could kill one, its blood would relieve their thirst. But he had no more arrows, and the beasts could easily outrun even a fresh horse.
The day after that, Marko was nodding, half-asleep atop his camel, when a violent jerk of the saddle caused him to open his bloodshot eyes. He blinked, then croaked down to Halran:
“Look! Water! The sea!”
Halran looked. “Huh? Where?”
“There! I suppose you can’t see it because I’m higher than you.”
Halran wiped his glasses. “Curse my weak eyesight.”
Marko shaded his eyes as he gazed towards the faint line of blue, which showed along the horizon between the humps in the barren gray and buff landscape. The animals’ nostrils dilated, and their pace quickened.
As he neared the sea, Marko saw that the Saar extended out to the edge of a slope, which ran gently down to a sandy beach. Before he reached the beach, however, a small bay appeared on his right. He angled towards it. The basin in which the bay lay supported a sparse growth of onion-mushrooms and bat-veiled fungi, in contrast to the almost complete lifelessness of the Saar during the last day’s ride.
The margins of the bay, however, did not form a beach. A mat of seaweedlike vines made a green strip ten to twenty paces wide around the marge, converting it into a kind of swamp.
Halran kicked and beat the horse into a semblance of a trot. When he reached the vines, he turned left and rode parallel with the shoreline, until he came to where the vine thinned out. Then he flung himself off his mount and ran to the edge of the water, stepping over the few vines.
The horse followed. Sap-sucking arachnids, like large land crabs covered with long red hair, scuttled rustling away. The horse buried its muzzle in the water and drank noisily, while Halran flopped on his belly beside it to drink too.
The camels also showed signs of eagerness. Marko hit Mutasim over the head with the butt of his whip to quiet him and clucked to him to kneel.
When the camels had both knelt, Marko got off. He set about staking down Mutasim’s halter to keep the animal from running away, keeping a wary eye on the creature’s head lest it bite him. Then a yell from Boert Halran attracted his attention.
The philosopher was wrestling with a length of acceleratum vine. While he had been drinking, a tendril of the vine, half buried in the sand, had looped itself about one of his legs and had begun to root through the boot. In thrashing about, he had touched another tendril with his arm; this seized him too. He shrieked as the rootlets penetrated his skin.
Marko caught Halran’s free hand and tugged, but the effort merely pulled lengths of the vine out of the sand for a few feet until the really thick trunks were exposed, without breaking the hold of the tendrils. Another tendril fastened itself to Halran’s other leg. Halran yelled:
“You are pulling my arm off!”
Marko relaxed his grip and got out his ax. Three slashes chopped off the tendrils that had fastened to Halran. The stumps, dripping greenish-white fluid, fell to the ground and lay limply, looking like ordinary harmless vines.
Halran staggered back from the margin of the bay and sat down to cut loose the tendrils still clinging to his arm and legs. First the main tendril had to be cut loose from the rootlets that it had sent through his clothing. Then he had to work off his boots and jacket, leaving the rootlets in his skin. Finally the rootlets had to be pulled out one by one, each leaving a puckery little hole, which bled freely.
“I am a dead man!” said Halran. “I shall bleed to death, or at least be rendered unable to travel!”
“It doesn’t look that serious,” said Marko. “I had heard of this stuff, but had never seen it. I didn’t believe it would root so fast.”
“I knew about it,” said Halran, “but I erroneously supposed there was not enough at this spot to be dangerous. Or perhaps I was so thirsty I did not think. I am no good at roughing it, no good whatever. There is one individual who got captured.” He pointed westward along the shore of the bay to the bones of a dromsor, lying scattered among the cables of the vine.
When he saw that Halran was all right save for minor punctures, Marko walked over to where Halran had been drinking. He severed all the vines that he could see with his ax and kicked the sand to uncover any others beneath the surface. Then he drank, making a face at the taste of the water. Drinking sea water on Kforri might not kill a man, but too much of it would upset his digestion.
After that, Marko led the camels down through the path that he had cut so that they could drink. Halran chased the horse, which had run away when he dropped its reins. The beast was, however, so exhausted that it did not try very hard to escape.
When they were eating, Halran said: “You are an odd fellow, Marko. You have saved my life twice on this trip, yet you have no more compunction about slicing off the head of this fellow who eloped with your wife, and hers too, then you would have about killing one of those.” He pointed to one of the hairy arachnids.
“I see nothing odd about it,” said Marko. “You’re my friend, while Mongamri wronged me in a malevolent and perfidious manner. So it’s only right that I should kill him. But I agreed to drop the plan out of deference to you.”
“So you did, so you did. I had forgotten.”
They marched north along the eastern shore of the Medranian Sea, sometimes seeing the white tooth of a sail or the black plume of a steamer’s smoke on the horizon. One of Marko’s burning ambitions was to ride a steamship, despite the fact that their bronzen boilers sometimes blew up with grisly results. But then, Halran explained, they had been invented only a half century earlier and were not yet perfected. During his sabbatical, Marko had admired a couple of the craft tied up to the piers at Chef. He would have liked to go aboard to look around, but his timid shyness had prevented his asking permission.
Marko continued to ply Halran with questions, partly because it seemed like a good opportunity to enlarge his knowledge and partly to practice his Anglonian. The only trouble was that, once opened up, Halran talked so much that Marko got little chance to speak any language.