“The expedition could be postponed,” Fitharn said.
“That would mean waiting a whole year!” Felice blazed. “I won’t do it! I’ll go get the damn Spear all by myself!”
Back at the cypress, Martha cried out to them, “We can’t postpone the search, Madame. Anything could happen in a year. I’ll be all right in a day or two. If I get a little help, I know I can make it.”
“We could rig a litter from one of the cots,” Claude suggested.
Felice brightened. “And in the rough spots, I could carry her on my back. She’s right about anything being likely to happen if we delay.” Her eyes strayed to the Firvulag, who looked back at her with bland objectivity. “Others could find the Ship’s Grave ahead of us.”
“It would be wisest to turn back,” Fitharn said. “However, the decision will have to be that of Madame Guderian.”
“Dieu me secourait,” the old woman murmured. “One of us has already given his life.” She took a few slow steps toward the Mylar-wrapped bundle lying on the trail “If we could ask him his opinion, we know very well what he would say.”
She turned back to them, lifting her chin with the familiar gesture. “Alors… Fitharn, you will turn back with Peo. The rest of us will go on.”
They concealed themselves for the rest of the day in a dense taxodium grove hard by the western bank of the Rhine. The gnarled, low-growing branches made comfortable perches. Curtained by festoons of lichens and flowering epiphytes, they could safely observe the river traffic and at the same time be secure from the crocodiles, hoe-tuskers, and other potentially dangerous wildlife that infested the bottomland.
It became very hot as the sun climbed. Food was no problem, for there were plenty of turtles whose meat could be roasted with the power-beams, as well as palms with edible hearts and an abundance of honey-sweet grapes the size of golf balls that drove Richard into raptures of oenological speculation. But as morning dragged into afternoon, boredom and reaction from the dawn violence made the younger members of the party drowsy. Richard, Felice, and Martha striped off most of their clothing, tied themselves to upper limbs of the big tree, and slept, leaving Claude and Madame on branches below keeping watch over the broad river. Only a few supply barges from upstream plantations drifted past their hiding place. Finiah itself lay about twenty kilometers to the north on the opposite bank, where the short Paradise River tributary tumbled out of a deep gorge that almost bisected the Black Forest massif.
“Later,” Madame told Claude, “when it is dark, we will be able to see Finiah’s lights against the northern sky. It stands on a promontory jutting into the Rhine. It is not a large city, but it is the oldest of all the Tanu settlements and they have illuminated it with great splendor.”
“Why did they migrate southward, out of this area?” Claude asked. “From what I’ve been told, most of the Tanu cities are down around the Mediterranean, with this northern country left pretty much to the Firvulag.”
“A very warm climate is more to the Tanu taste. I believe that the division of territory between the two groups reflects a very ancient pattern, perhaps one that goes back to the origins of the dimorphic Race. One might imagine a world of singular niggedness where highland and lowland forms evolved, perhaps interdependent yet antagonistic, With the coming of high civilization and the eventual migration of the race to other worlds in their galaxy, these ancient tensions would be sublimated. But it would seem that Tanu and Firvulag genes never blended completely. From time to time during the history of these people the old rivalries would be resurrected.”
“And crushed by the high-tech majority,” Claude said. “Until this one group of barbarian throwbacks found a perfect refuge instead of coming to the usual quixotic end.”
She nodded her agreement “It was perfect for the exiles, our Pliocene Earth… except for the irony that equally quixotic humans should also have desired to dwell on it.”
She pointed to a pneumatic barge far out on the river. “There goes one of the products of the human advent. Before the humans came, the Tanu had simple rafts of wood. They had little river commerce because of their dislike of water. They supervised their own plantations and even did honest work because there were not so many rama slaves. The torcs for the little apes formerly had to be made by hand in the same manner as their own golden torcs.”
“Do you mean that human know-how enabled mass production?”
“For the ape torcs, yes. And the entire silver and gray system, with its linkage to the golden torcs of the Tanu rulers, was devised by a human psychobiologist. They made him a demigod and he still lives in Muriah, Sebi-Gomnol the Lord Coercer. But I remember the pinched little self-hating man who came to my auberge forty years ago. Then he was called Eusebio Gomez-Nolan.”
“So a human being is responsible for this slave setup? Sweet Lord. Why do we screw things up, wherever we go?”
She gave a short bitter laugh. With her hair straggling in sweat curls about her ears and forehead, she seemed to be scarcely forty-five years old. “Gomnol is not the only traitor to our race. There was a Turkish man of the circus, one of my earliest clients, named Iskender Karabekir. His fondest wish, as he told me, was to train sabertooth tigers to do his bidding. But I have discovered that in this Exile world he devoted himself instead to the domestication of chatikot and heuadotberia and amphicyons, which became pivotal in the subsequent Tanu domination of society. The ancient Hunt and Grand Combat were fought by Tanu and Firvulag afoot. The groups were evenly matched, for what the Firvulag lacked in finesse and sophisticated metafunctions they made up in sheer numbers and a more rugged physique. But a mounted Tanu Hunt was a different matter. And a Grand Combat with Tanu and torced human warriors on chalikoback and Firvulag afoot has become an annual massacre.”
Claude stroked his chin. “Still, there was the Battle of Agincourt, if you’ll pardon my mentioning it.”
“Bof!” said Angélique Guderian. “Longbows will not conquer the Tanu, nor will gunpowder. Not while perverse member of our own human race betray their fellows! Who taught the Tanu physicians how to reverse the human sterilizations? A gynecologist from the planet Astrakhan. A human woman! Not only our talents but our very genes have been placed in the service of these exotics, and many, such as Martha, choose death rather than the degradation of becoming brood stock. Do you know how Martha came to us?”
Claude shook his head.
“She threw herself into the Rhine, hoping to drown herself in the spring flood rather than submit to a fifth impregnation. But she was cast ashore, Dieu merci, and Steffi found her and restored her. There are many others like Martha among us. Knowing them, loving them, and knowing also that I am the one ultimately responsible for their pain, you will understand why I cannot rest until the power of the Tanu is broken.”
The river was turning from shining pewter to gold. On the Black Forest side, the heights of the Feldberg to the south became luminous with the sinking sun, tinted primrose and purple. In order to reach Sugoll, they would have to go up into that high country and cross at least seventy kilometers of mountain forest, and all this before even beginning their search for the Danube.
“Quixotic,” Claude said. He was smiling.
“Are you sorry you agreed to help me? You are an enigma to me, Claude. I can understand Felice, Richard, Martha, the strong-willed ones of our company such M Chief Burke. But I have not yet been able to understand you. I cannot see why you came to the Pliocene at all, much less why you agreed to go on this quest for the Ship’s Grave. You are too sensible, too self-posssessed, too, debonaire!”