He chose an old 4WD jeep with large wheels and he put in the trunk the second spare tire, high hunting boots, a whole battery of drinking water bottles and several tinned food cans. He welded steel supports to the rack and fastened a light motorcycle to them. Bemish remembered how Khanadar had smiled saying that it was impossible to reach Black Nest by a car and one had to ride there on a horse. Knowing Khanadar, he suspected that he had been a butt of a dirty joke and a car road to the castle existed only on the map.
Bemish was driving out of the Empire's center to its barbarian outskirts and it seemed that every kilometer, put between him and the capital, was transposing him backwards in time. Cute manors with satellite dishes disappeared first, foreign goods on the road stands disappeared next, factory-made shirts on people around him disappeared last. A different landscape stretched around him — rice paddies covered with water, clay villages where dogs barked and drums boomed in precincts and where peasants in hemp pants sang thousand-year-old songs while collecting the harvest, and only a perfect highway, like a bridge spanning over time for a curious observer, connected a sprightly rolling jeep with the faraway world of glass and steel.
In thousand kilometers the road finally ended — the jeep started hopping down a rocky mountain path — the highest achievement of the construction methods in sovereign Irshahchan's times. The animals became more audacious and began crossing the road. Occasional people, however, dashed away from a weird cart into the woods. Rice paddies disappeared; the few villages existing in these mountains still lived by hunting and gathering and by robbing occasional travelers.
In the second day's evening, Bemish saw five familiar horses at a roadside tavern and stopped there.
Kissur and his companions were sitting at a plank table and gobbling up a wild boar. Bemish joined them.
'I'll leave you behind,' Bemish said.
'Hmm,' Kissur said, 'By the way, I could order to puncture your tires.' Bemish bantered back, 'And I can sue you.'
Kissur was chewing greedily on the boar.
'This is my land. I am the master of taxes and jurisdiction here. So, if you sue me, I may as well sentence you to hanging for perjury.'
'Do you judge this way often?'
'Never,' Kissur said. 'If you sentence a man to death, his relatives will start hunting you in a vendetta. Who will avenge you?'
'Nobody will avenge an Earthman,' Khanadar the Dried Date agreed. 'Earthmen think that their government should avenge them. Soon, their government will sleep with their women for them.'
Bemish was assigned the best den in the tavern and Kissur sent him a girl. The girl had been washed and she was quite cute. She stood shyly tugging at a mat with her bare toes. Bemish seated the girl on his knees and started fingering her necklace. There were numerous coins on the necklace — several heavy silver asymmetric coins with a hole inside and a partially rubbed off Gold Sovereign's seal, a dozen of dimes and quarters, a Swiss frank and even as far as Bemish could decipher German, one Cologne subway nickel token.
Bemish pushed the girl off his knees, dug in his wallet and spilled all the change on his hand. He found there a dime that had spent a long time in the wallet, showed it to the girl and tapped with his finger a silver 'unicorn' the size of a chicken egg, square shaped and with a round hole in the middle and an encryption glorifying sovereign Meenun on the girl's necklace.
'Let's exchange,' he said.
The girl's eyes blossomed with joy. She quickly started pulling the necklace off her neck. Bemish grabbed her hand.
'Listen, stupid,' he said. 'If you take this dime and one more and a hundred more and a thousand more and fill this coffer in the corner with all these dimes, the whole coffer will be worth less than this silver coin. Got it?'
The girl nodded.
'And now get out,' Bemish said. The girl's eyes saddened.
'Won't we exchange?' she asked looking at the dime with an unconcealed longing. Bemish gave her the dime and kicked her out.
When Bemish woke up next morning, Kissur and his retinue were no longer there, they had ridden away at the crack of dawn.
'Will I catch up with them soon?' Bemish asked the hostess.
'No,' the hostess said, 'You need to take a detour via the White Pass and they rode straight. You will reach the castle by the evening.'
'And what will happen to them?'
'Hmm,' the woman hesitated, 'If snow melts a bit in the daytime and an avalanche comes down, you, of course, will get their first but if no avalanche happens they, of course, will get there before you.'
'Is the straight path hard?'
'I don't know. Since old Shun broke his neck there ten years ago, nobody has taken it.'
The mountain road winded like a pumpkin vine. Heavy rain shredded with snow started suddenly. The wipers were not able to handle it. Bemish was horrified for Kissur — he was not old Shun, of course, but he still could break his neck.
This mountainous area was wild to the utmost. Trade had flourished in the coastal regions and three dozens years ago local cities such as Lamass or Kudum could brag about their good communities and abundant traders. The civil war in the Empire turned everything around — the castles' inhabitants straightened up, the traders' sons left for the castles' regiments and their daughters became concubines. The demand for warlike Alom nobility was such that an average knight could rob more in two month in the Empire than an average trader could make in two years. By the war's end, trading paid off so little that Lamass traders became extinct and it was the land of bandits and robbers that welcomed the people from the stars.
The hands of the Empire could barely reach this strange region; formally a castle owner was responsible for upholding order in the local lands but he usually happened to be the biggest bandit. Nobody even considered mine development here because horsemen with rocket launchers under their armpits invariably approached mine engineers to demand a tribute.
No passerby was safe here. The most disgusting accident happened three years ago when a World Bank vice president, an amateur mountaineer, and two friends of his decided, damn it, to conquer a local mountain Aych-Akhal.
While approaching the peak, he was taken prisoner by a local pedigreed bandit and escorted to his castle. Next day the bank received a fax with a picture of the vice president sitting chained in a real underground pit and a one trillion dinars ransom demand. The World Bank stock capital was five trillion dinars.
The media howled.
The Galaxy demanded the Empire to take decisive actions. The Galaxy demanded to locate the castle the prisoner was in. 'Whatever,' the Empire envoy shrugged his shoulders, 'Whoever caught him keeps him.' The Galaxy demanded the decisive actions to be taken at this region.
The castle owner announced that if anybody resorts to decisive actions, the prisoner would have his throat cut. Kissur helped the World Bank out. He flew to his castle immediately and called the local lords in for a feast and counsel. They arrived. Kissur imperturbably arrested the three dozens guests that came to visit him and announced that he would shoot all these folks if the vice president was not released.
The landowner who took the vice president prisoner was not present among Kissur's guests. However, his brother and his father-in-law were there. The same night, the vice president was released without any ransom. Afterwards, Kissur didn't even bother meeting the man he had saved.
By the evening, Bemish reached the main and the only one street in Black Village; faraway on the mountain amidst the clouds, the castle and its wall, jagged like an EEG, showed up for a moment.
Right at this moment, a goose appeared on the wet road.
Bemish expected the goose to move aside and let the car pass since, in the Earthman's opinion, roads were created for cars not geese. In the goose's opinion however, roads were created for geese and accordingly to his views the goose stared at the car with curiosity and then turned its back to it and lowered its head.
They explained to Bemish afterwards that he should have lowered speed and driven over the goose and the goose would have been unharmed and the car would have been fine. But Bemish wasn't familiar with local geese'
