With Ulashtu’s band came a prisoner. Ulgor, the urrish tinker who befriended Sara back at Dolo, only to spring a trap, leading to captivity by Dedinger’s fanatics and the reborn Urunthai. Now their roles were reversed. Sara noted Ulgor’s triplet eyes staring in dismay at the astonishing oasis.
How the Urunthai would hate this place! Their predecessors seized our horses to destroy them all. Urrish sages later apologized, after Drake the Elder broke the Urunthai. But how can you undo death?
You cannot. But it is possible to cheat extinction. Watching fillies and colts gambol after their mares below a bright rocky overhang, Sara felt almost happy for a time. This oasis might even remain unseen by omniscient spy eyes of alien star lords, confused by the enclosing land of illusion. Perhaps Xi would survive when the rest of the Slope was made void of sapient life.
She saw Ulgor ushered to a pen near the desert prophet, Dedinger. The two did not speak.
Beyond the women splashing in the pool and the grazing herds, Sara had only to lift her eyes in order to brush a glittering landscape where each ripple and knoll pretended to be a thousand impossible things. The country of lies was a name for the Spectral Flow. No doubt a person got used to it, blanking out irritating chimeras that never proved useful or informative. Or else, perhaps the Illias had no need of dreams, since they lived each day awash in Jijo’s fantasies.
The scientist in Sara wondered why it equally affected all races, or how such a marvel could arise naturally. There’s no mention of anything like it in Biblos. But humans only had a sprinkling of Galactic reference material when the Tabernacle left Earth. Perhaps this is a common phenomenon, found on many worlds.
But how much more wonderful if Jijo had made something unique!
She stared at the horizon, letting her mind free-associate shapes out of the shimmering colors, until a mellow female voice broke in.
“You have your mother’s eyes, Sara.”
She blinked, drawing back to find two humans nearby, dressed in the leather garments of Illias. The one who had spoken was the first elderly woman Sara had seen here.
The other was a man.
Sara stood up, blinking in recognition. “F-Fallon?”
He had aged since serving as Dwer’s tutor in the wilderness arts. Still, the former chief scout seemed robust, and smiled broadly.
A little tactlessly, she blurted, “But I thought you were dead!”
He shrugged. “People assume what they like. I never said I’d died.”
A Zen koan if she ever heard one. But then Sara recalled what the other person said. Though shaded against the desert’s glow, the old woman seemed to partake of the hues of the Spectral Flow.
“My name is Foruni,” she told Sara. “I am senior rider.”
“You knew my mother?”
The older woman took Sara’s hand. Her manner reminded Sara of Ariana Foo.
“Melina was my cousin. I’ve missed her, these many years — though infrequent letters told us of her remarkable children. You three validate her choice, though exile must not have been easy. Our horses and shadows are hard to leave behind.”
“Did Mother leave because of Lark?”
“We have ways of making it likely to bear girls. When a boy is born we foster him to discreet friends on the Slope, taking a female child in trade.”
Sara nodded. Exchange fostering was a common practice, helping cement alliances between villages or clans.
“But Mother wouldn’t give Lark up.”
“Just so. In any event, we need agents out there, and Melina was dependable. So it was done, and the decision proved right … although we mourned, on hearing of her loss.”
Sara accepted this with a nod.
“What I don’t understand is why only women?”
The elder had deep lines at the corners of her eyes, from a lifetime of squinting.
“It was required in the pact, when the aunties of Urchachkin tribe offered some humans and horses shelter in their most secret place, to preserve them against the Urunthai. In those early days, urs found our menfolk disquieting — so strong and boisterous, unlike their own husbands. It seemed simpler to arrange things on a female-to-female basis.
“Also, a certain fraction of boys tend to shrug off social constraints during adolescence, no matter how carefully they are raised. Eventually, some young man would have burst from the Illias realm without adequate preparation — and all it would take is one. In his need to preen and make a name, he might spill our secret to the Commons at large.”
“Girls act that way, too, sometimes,” Sara pointed out.
“Yes, but our odds were better this way. Ponder the young men you know, Sara. Imagine how they would have behaved.”
She pictured her brothers, growing up in this narrow oasis. Lark would have been sober and reliable. But Dwer, at fifteen, was very different than he became at twenty.
“And yet, I see you aren’t all women.…”
The senior rider grinned. “Nor are we celibates. From time to time we bring in mature males — often chief scouts, sages, or explosers — men who already know our secret, and are of an age to be calm, sensible companions … yet still retain vigor in their step.”
Fallon laughed to cover brief embarrassment. “My step is no longer my best feature.”
Foruni squeezed his arm. “You’ll do for a while yet.”
Sara nodded. “An urrish-sounding solution.” Sometimes a group of young urs, lacking the means to support individual husbands, would share one, passing him from pouch to pouch.
The senior rider nodded, expressing subtleties of irony with languid motions of her neck. “After many generations, we may have become more than a bit urrish ourselves.”
Sara glanced toward Kurt the Exploser, sitting on a smooth rock studying carefully guarded texts, with both Jomah and Prity lounging nearby.
“Then you sent the expedition to fetch Kurt because you want another—”
“Ifni, no! Kurt is much too old for such duties, and when we do bring in new partners it is with quiet discretion. Hasn’t Kurt explained to you what this is all about? His role in the present crisis? The reason why we gambled so much to fetch you all?”
When Sara shook her head, Foruni’s nostrils flared and she hissed like an urrish auntie, perplexed by foolish juniors.
“Well, that’s his affair. All I know is that we must escort you the rest of the way as soon as possible. You’ll rest with us tonight, my niece. But alas, family reminiscence must wait till the emergency passes … or once it overwhelms us all.”
Sara nodded, resigned to more hard riding.
“From here … can we see—?”
Fallon nodded, a gentle smile on his creased features.
“I’ll show you, Sara. It’s not far.”
She took his arm as Foruni bade them return soon for a feast. Already Sara’s nose filled with scents from the cook-fire. But soon her thoughts were on the path as they crossed narrow, miraculous meadows, then scniblands where simlas grazed, and beyond to a steepening pass wedged between two hills. Sunlight was fading rapidly, and soon the smallest moon, Passen, could be seen gleaming near the far west horizon.
She heard music before they crested the pass. The familiar sound of Emerson’s dulcimer, pinging softly ahead. Sara was loath to interrupt, yet the glow drew her — a shimmering lambency rising from Jijo, filling a vista beyond the sheltered oasis.
The layered terrain seemed transformed in pearly moonlight. Gone were the garish colors, yet there remained an extravagant effect on the imagination. It took an effort of will in order not to go gliding across the slopes, believing in false oceans and battlements, in ghost cities and starscapes, in myriad phantom worlds that her pattern-gleaning brain crafted out of opal rays and shadows.
Fallon took Sara’s elbow, turning her toward Emerson.
