He even met a party of Pachi Lei. This was another of the eight friendly nonhuman species which shared Tekumel with humankind. Harsan had not been this close to one of these creatures before. They were pear-shaped, soft-skinned beings, greyish-green in hue, a hand taller than a man, with four curiously articulated lower limbs for locomotion and four more, longer upper limbs for swinging in the trees of the forests of the Pan Chakan Protectorate that lay to the south of Harsan’s own Do Chakan hills. The Pachi Lei wore little more than cross-belts of untanned hide, and their leader carried a thick, short spear tipped with a barb of white bone. Harsan stared at them, and they stared back from round, platter-sized eyes, greeting him pleasantly enough in oddly accented Tsolyani and chattering amongst themselves in their own burbling tongue.
On the sixth day, footsore but nevertheless pleased with his growing stamina, Harsan reached Paya Gupa-not PA-ya Gu-PA, as the Tsolyani called it, wrongly accenting the last vowel, but PA-ya GU-pa. The name meant “Red Mountain” in the older dialect of Do Chaka, and thus it appeared: walls and towers of rufous sandstone heaped along the summit of a low hill spurring out of the Chakan forests. The houses behind the walls were whitewashed, tiled with reds and tans, and scattered like children’s blocks around the summit upon which the palace of the local governor stood.
Harsan’s writ obtained lodging at the temple of Thumis. The sect of the Master of Wisdom was very powerful here, and Lord Gamulu hiBeshyene, the Grand Adept of the Temple, made his summer headquarters in the old, grey shrine that clambered down the hill to the west.
The Proctor of the Dormitories arranged for Harsan to continue on to Tumissa and thence to Bey Sii in the company of a party of merchants. This was in itself somewhat daunting, for the capital still lay over a thousand long Tsan away. Even though Harsan felt himself capable of making thirty to forty Tsan a day, he wondered if he could keep up.
He need not have worried. Much of the cargo carried by the thirty-odd slaves of the little caravan consisted of fine pottery and the crimson crystal goblets and ewers of Mu’ugalavya. Mnesun hiArkuna, the chief of the party and owner of most of its merchandise, fussed over the packing of each reed basket and the balancing of every slave’s burden in the morning and then again over its unloading at night while the other merchants dawdled over their food and the tasks of the camp. They made little more than twenty-five Tsan a day. Harsan guessed that it would take seven days to reach Tumissa, one day more than if he had travelled alone. Yet he found the bustling routine comforting and the company of the others a reassurance.
Besides Mnesun, squat and thick-set as a river Ghar- beast, there were six in the party, not counting the slaves. Two of these were twin brothers, Mu’ugalavyani, whose goods included rare earths, perfumes, and scented oils from distant Kheiris. The third, a Salarvyani named Bejjeksa, was a trader of much experience and self-proclaimed cunning. He was now returning home with bales of finely-figured cloth and chests of soapstone carvings, products of Livyanu, the land to the south of Mu’ugalavya. The next, Hele’a of Ghaton, brought wares concealed within stoppered jars. Of these he said nothing, nor did he speak much otherwise: a small, tight, hard, little man as grey as the seas of his northern homeland. The fifth man was Sa’araz, a Livyani who affected all the airs and niceties of that nation’s aristocracy, though none could actually attest to his antecedents. He had neither chests nor bales but carried whatever it was he sold in a worn leather wallet affixed to his belt with a stout chain of rare iron.
The sixth member of the group was a nonhuman, a hulking reptilian Shen, native to the hot lands south of Livyanu, half a continent away. He traded in the flame opals of Pan Chaka and in garnets, commodities which the Shen knew were valued by humans and other races, but which they themselves held in no particular esteem. Although the Shen was friendly enough, his guttural name was unpronounceable-something between a hiss and a snarl. Harsan made do with calling him “companion,” which seemed to please the creature greatly.
It was the afternoon of the seventh day before they saw Tumissa. Once the guardian of the western marches of the Tsolyani frontier, its ponderous bastions and serried battlements had seen no fighting since the two Protectorates, Do Chaka and Pan Chaka, had been wrested from Mu’ugalavya in the great war some three hundred years before. Harsan looked upon the looming rings of concentric walls inlaid with marching rows of serpentine glyphs in the old Classical Tsolyani script, the tier upon tier of red-tiled roofs, and the dizzy turrets of the prow-like fortress which crowned the city’s westernmost hill, and would have greatly liked to spend a few days here. Others in the monastery had had much praise for Tumissa: its goods and shops, its rich palaces and mansions, its great library of hoary fame, the image called “Thumis Ascending to the Sun,” carved long ago by Marya of Tsamra, and many other wonders. They had also spoken of entertainments and displays more to the tastes of a young man-and of pretty clan-girls and courtesans and a dozen things more. But Mnesun gruffly stated that the caravan would journey forth in the morning. Lodgings were arranged outside the walls in the clanhouse of the People of the White Pebble, a mercantile clan allied by both blood and marriage to Mnesun’s own Clan of the Green Reed.
When the party gathered at dawn in the cramped courtyard to curse and coax the caravan’s slaves into wakefulness, Harsan discovered that another small group had been added.. A score of bearers and servitors in an unfamiliar clan livery stood stamping and yawning around a blue-curtained covered litter.
“We are joined by a lady,” Mnesun announced to all within hearing, “one Eyil hiVriyen, of the Green Kirtle Clan of Tumissa, who is on her way to marry her clan-cousin in Bey Sti.”
There was no sign of the occupant of the litter, and thus it remained for a six-day. The party now took the Sakbe road which branched off directly to the east, an endless three-step staircase, the highest level of which faced north towards hostile, distant Yan Kor. The foothills were left behind, dust storms lay ever along the flat horizon, and heat lightning flickered there throughout the summer evenings. All of the visible world consisted of endless fields of standing grain, plots of yellow-brown earth, lone Wes-trees, olive-drab and drooping like lost wayfarers in the tawny yellow desolation, and occasional villages of baked brick, where naked dusty peasants lifted their heads from the perpetual round of toil to watch them pass by.
The lady made but few appearances. Harsan had occasional glimpses of a tall, boyishly slender girl, attired in the embroidered open vest and slit-sided skirt preferred by the women of the western provinces. The Lady Eyil did not come to sit by their fire in the evenings but instead sent her attendant, a grim-faced peasant woman named Tsatla, to get her dinner from the common cookpots.
It had gradually come to be understood that, as the only priest in the party, Harsan would offer the prescribed libation before each meal. This he did with care, choosing words that would give no offence to worshippers of other gods than his. One evening when supper was finished and his comrades had retired to drink wine and gamble or to seek sleep, the woman Tsatla came to Harsan and said that the Lady Eyil would speak with him.
The litter lay in darkness, one curtain thrown back all along one side, forming a little three-sided room. The ochre-red glow of Kashi, Tekumel’s smaller, second moon, turned the gilded orbs of the four comer-posts into ruddy copper coins. Two of Lady Eyil’s attendants dozed upon their haunches nearby, while a little farther away her bearers lay sprawled in shadowed huddles, asleep.
“Worthy priest?” The voice was low and musical, the accent the purring, slurred speech of Tumissa. “I have troubled you that I may ask a question.”