Marko gathered up such spare clothing and other gear as he thought he would need, gave his mother a hug, and went out into the rain. Judge Kopitar’s horse was tethered behind the Prokopiu house. Like all horses on Kforri, it was an animal of medium height and stocky, massive build.
Marko strapped his traveling bag behind the saddle, unhitched, and mounted. The horse shifted its feet and shook its head uneasily. It sensed that Marko was not its owner, but his weight discouraged it from trying to buck him off. Marko pulled the hood of his raincoat down low over his kalpak, so that it nearly hid his face, and turned the horse’s head towards the road to Thine.
Marko knew all the local roads well and had once been to Thine, during his sabbatical two years before. He had, hi fact, traveled all over Vizantia. He had been to the seaports of Chef and Stambu and Moska and Bukres, to the great stupa forests of the Borsja Peninsula, and finally to Thine, where he had studied at the university.
At Chef, he had become acquainted with Woshon Seum, the representative of the Anglonian trading firm of Choerch and Jaex. Knowing Woshon Seum, he was bound to meet Scum’s daughter Petronela. They fell in love and got married, and Marko brought her back to Skudra, to the ill-concealed consternation of his mother and his associates. He had never been popular, and marrying an alien seemed to many townsfolk like the last straw.
As he trotted through the outskirts of Skudra, Marko looked back towards the center of the town. All was dark and quiet under the pattering rain. He turned and faced the road north. Little maintenance was done on this road, so that the only check on the swift growth of the fungi was the hoofs and wheels of traffic. These merely mashed the undiscourageable vegetation into slimy pulp. Despite the calks on its shoes, the judge’s horse slipped and skidded on slight slopes. On steeper ones, Marko had to get off and lead it, wishing he had been able to steal a paxer instead. This was an elephantine plant-eating reptile, which the people of Kforri domesticated and used as a heavy draft animal. The rain let up. Marko plodded on. Wet fronds or stalks of the plants that overhung the road, like grasses and mosses enlarged to tree size, brushed against him. An active volcano glowed dull red against the underside of the rain clouds and its own smoke plume. Rifts appeared in the clouds, through which Marko glimpsed Gallio, the nearest and brightest of the three little moons, sweeping through the stars.
3
Ten days after leaving Skudra, on the first of Napoin or Napoleon, Marko Prokopiu jogged into Thine. He had undergone experiences along the way, such as being pursued in the Zetskan Hills by a transor, the largest of the planet’s dinosaurian predators. Several nights he had to sleep out, but he was used to roughing it. His father, a mighty hunter, had taken Marko on many camping trips.
Near Skiatho, a trio of rash robbers waylaid him and sent an arrow through his raincoat. He turned the judge’s horse while tugging out his ax, and presently the archer was lying among the fungi with a cleft skull, while his fellows fled. Marko appropriated a good steel bow, a lizard-skin bow case, and a quiverful of arrows.
All this, however exciting, had no real bearing on the object of his search. When he arrived in Thine, a spacious city built entirely of marble (a material as common on Kforri as good wood was scarce), he found himself quarters. Then he spent a day searching the city for Mongamri and Petronela.
He inquired at all the inns and promenaded the parks and shops without success. He loitered in the central square, where the caravans made up to cross the Saar to Niok and the cities of Arabistan. He asked the caravan dispatcher whether any persons like Petronela and Mongamri had gone out on the last caravan.
The man assured him that he had seen nobody like that. Moreover, the last caravan, which had left two days before, had been en route to Asham in Arabistan, far from Niok. No caravan had left for Niok in ten days, although one was due to leave in four.
Marko was sure that his quarry must still be in Thin6. They would be bound for Anglonia. Believing him still to be in jail in Skudra, they would be in no great hurry. If he did not come upon them in the next three days, he could surely intercept them when the caravan for Niok mustered in the square. He preferred to catch them sooner if possible, before the news of his escape from the jail at Skudra should reach Thine and a warrant be issued for his arrest.
He was also anxious not to let them escape from Vizantia, for he had heard that in some other countries homicide was a criminal as well as a civil offense. And while Marko had, right after his escape from jail, been in a mood to defy all rules because of the injustice he felt, his basically law-abiding nature had now had time to reassert itself.
On his third day hi Thine, after a perfunctory stroll about the central part of the town to look for his wife and her paramour, he rode out to the university grounds. There he hunted up the professor who had been his faculty adviser when he had studied here.
In his office, Gathokli Noli was entertaining a stranger, a small, gray-haired man with a bulging dome of a cranium, a sharp nose, and a receding chin. The man wore Anglonian clothes: knitted trunk-hose and shoes with flaring tops and pointed toes, instead of the baggy checkered pants tucked into the tops of heavy boots, usual in Vizantia. The stranger wore eyeglasses, a Mingkwoan invention still rare in Vizantia. He spoke with an Anglonian accent, reducing the rolled Vizantian r to a soft, vowel-like sound. Instead of his wearing the Vizantian scalp lock, his hair was cut to a uniform length of a “half inch, so that it stood up in a stiff gray brush.
“By the Great Fetish of Mnaenn, it’s Marko!” said Gathokli Noli. “Come in, old man. Marko, this is Dr. Boert Halran of Lann, the eminent philosopher.”
Marko acknowledged the introduction with the natural dignity of the Vizantian hillman. “What brings you to Thine, Dr. Halran?”
“I have come to purchase stupa gum, sir.”
“Isn’t it for sale in Anglonia?” asked Marko.
“Yes, but only in minute quantities. I require a considerable amount, so it is cheaper for me to come all this distance to obtain it at a wholesale price.”
“Are you using it for some experiment?”
“Yes, sir; the most portentous experiment of the era, if I may so assert.” Halran shimmered with self-satisfaction.
“Indeed, sir? May I ask what it is?”
“Have you ever heard of a balloon?” asked Halran.
“No. The word is unfamiliar to me.”
“Well, are you familiar with the hypothesis that, if one could inclose hot air in a bag, the bag would rise like a bubble in water?”
“There was some talk about it at the university when I was here. As I was immersed in courses in pedagogy, I didn’t go very far into science.”
“Well, I have actually accomplished it.”
“Made a bag rise?”
“Yes, bags of various magnitudes.” The little man glowed with enthusiasm. “One of the largest raised me to an altitude of a hundred feet and stayed up for two hours. It frightened the peasants to death when it came down in their fields, so my next model I tethered by its drag rope to keep it from being wafted anywhither.
“My next step will be to construct a balloon large enough to raise the weight of several individuals. The bag has already been sewn together; there remains but the matter of the stupa gum to render it airtight.”
“How do you heat this air?” asked Marko.
“By means of a large peat stove.”
“I see. But after the machine has risen, won’t the ah” inside cool off and let you down again?”
“Eventually, yes. But this balloon is equipped with a smaller stove suspended above the car, so that, by feeding more hot air into the bag, I can maintain altitude much longer.”’