Elegy and I exchanged an ambivalent glance, having each forgotten about Jaafar. Now that events were progressing so rapidly, his reminding us of his presence elsewhere in the Wild seemed an unjustifiable distraction.
Before I could keep the words from coming out, I said, ‘Did he call you “Civ Cather” last night?’
‘Answer him,’ Elegy urged me angrily.
‘Jaafar,’ I said, activating the transceiver at my throat, ‘we’re fine, we’re doing fine.’
He wanted to know what was happening, why the Asadi had not come crashing back through the Wild now that the sun was down.
‘We’ll be in touch,’ I told him curtly. ‘Stay in touch with us, Jaafar, and we may soon take you to Chaney’s pagoda.’
‘Yes, sir,’ came the faint reply.
Below us in the clearing the Asadi had crept toward the crumpled form of Kretzoi, their ostensible chieftain. As daylight wearily disintegrated, I set my camera to record in the infrared frequencies.
What I saw and filmed was the younger and smaller Asadi moving inward to lift Kretzoi from his pallet and to bear him toward the north. They were bracketed on both sides by larger, more handsome animals with fuller and more strikingly colored manes – as if at last a covert caste system were making itself manifest in this moment of crisis and rare joint endeavor. Chaney had likened the smaller specimens to workers, their protectors in the two exterior columns of the march to warriors, and maybe the dichotomy had a biological basis, maybe it grew out of some self-protective Ur’sadi sociological instinct dormant for thousands of millennia. In any case, Kretzoi floated northward above the heads of the Asadi workers while the silver- and tawny-maned warriors trudged along in their guardian columns keeping a conscientious lookout for who-knows-what likely or unlikely enemy.
‘Let’s go,’ Elegy said, scrambling down the boughs of the lattice-sail. A moment later she was beckoning me from the edge of the assembly ground.
I followed, repeatedly banging the barrel of my camera against both my head and the bole of the tree. When I was safely down, the last members of the Asadi parade were just about to disappear into the dusky foliage.
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I’m not going to be able to do any more filming. It’ll be all either of us can do just to keep up.’
‘Forget the filming. Look – right out there – that’s our artificial huri, Ben!’ She ran to the center of the clearing and picked up the pleated, evil-looking thing. The Asadi had been careful not to step on it, and it was as good as new, if a little dusty. ‘I’ll carry this,’ Elegy exclaimed. ‘Come on.’ And she jogged on ahead of me, her head thrown back and one raised hand beckoning me again and again to follow her lead. Camera barrel banging, I did.
The Asadi procession maintained a stately even pace, swaying as a unit through spaces I would have thought impassable to a single individual. The Asadi made a highway where no human being would have ever been able to perceive anything but creeper-clogged arches and tangled knots of squid-orchids and rainthorn. Elegy and I, though, found ourselves stepping through keyholes in the vegetation already unlocked by the Asadi’s passage.
Chaney could not recall how long he had walked before the Asadi reached their ancient temple, but I made an effort to keep track. My best estimate is a little better than five hours, and my feeling is that we traversed a distance of some fifteen to twenty kilometers. In any case, by the time Elegy and I broke out of dense, clinging jungle and found the Asadi arrayed before a lofty shadow in the dark, we had outlasted the hour of midnight and worn down the leather sidesoles of our boots.
The three moons were up: Balthazar, Caspar, and Melchior. They receded into space one behind the other, staggered against the night like lanterns hung at different levels. The foliage of the Wild, I knew, was straining after this conjunction just as the waters of Calyptra strain toward the moons at the dangerous hour of flood called tri-tide. It happens once every five or six days in BoskVeld’s equatorial zone, but I was surprised to see the conjunction now and disturbed by the eeriness imparted to the night by the polarized lunar light and the murmurous tidal sloughing of the trees.
An accident, this conjunction; mere coincidence.
But the Asadi swaying together in the clearing in front of absolutely nothing but open space and shadow (a shadow that should not have existed in such towering majesty) made me believe that perhaps it was Elegy, Kretzoi, and I who were being manipulated rather than the shrewd and unforthcoming Asadi.
‘Do you see Kretzoi?’ Elegy asked me.
‘No, not yet.’ I pulled her around the outsized clearing to the east. A moment later we were looking inward from a spot where thick vegetation concealed us and we had an end-on view of each of the four Asadi ranks. The huge open space in front of the foremost rank stretched away to the north, to our right, for eighty to a hundred meters.
As we watched, a pair of Asadi, their manes silver-white in the moonglow, detached themselves from opposite ends of the front rank and approached the looming shadow ahead of them. The Asadi nearest us had sustained a wound in that afternoon’s free-for-all over Kretzoi’s meat offerings – its right arm was ripped open from elbow to wrist and coagulated blood glistened in the wound like a vein of caramel. I lifted my camera to film the scene.
‘Don’t,’ Elegy cautioned me. ‘There’s too much risk – we don’t want to undermine what we’ve already accomplished.’ So I eased the camera behind me on its sling.
At the instant, as if they had turned at right angles to the moonlight, or absorbed so much of it that its residual sheen actually cloaked them, the two advancing Asadi slipped out of my vision, poof. Elegy clearly saw what I saw, and
