And all around them lay dream country.
They stopped at the edge of a brou field to put soft shoes on the mules while Tasmin picked pods for each of them, a privilege that Brou Distribution Ltd. granted only to ‘licensed Tripsingers going into peril.’ The pomposity of the phrase never failed to amuse Tasmin. Any kid who was fast on his feet could pick brou under the noses of the field guards, and often did. In the last analysis, however, no matter how pompous the organization was, they all worked for BDL; BDL who maintained the citadels and paid for the caravans and the Tripsingers to get them through, and for the Explorers to find the way, and for the farmers to grow the food they all ate, and all the infrastructure that kept the whole thing moving. Tripsingers, Explorers, mule breeders, service center employees, hundreds of thousands of them, all working, in the end, for BDL.
‘May we achieve passage and safe return,’ Tasmin intoned, cleaving to the ritual, distributing the pods.
‘Amen.’ A stuttered chorus from the first-timers amid a crisp shattering of dry pods. They chewed and became decidedly cheerful. Tasmin smiled, a little cynically. The brou-dizzy would have worn off by the time they came near a Presence.
Soon the planted fields gave way to uncultivated plains, sloping gently upward toward the massif that formed a sheersided wall between the deepsoil pocket of Five and all the shallow soiled areas beyond. The stubby, imported trees gave way to taller growths, mythically slender and feathery, less like trees than like the plumes of some enormous bird. They smelled faintly spicy and resinous, the smell of Jubal itself. Among the grasses, smaller shrubs arrayed themselves like peacock’s tails, great fans of multicolored, downy leaves, turning slowly to face the sun. Out in the prairie, singly or in groups, stood small Watchlets no taller than a man. They glowed like stained glass, squeaking and muttering as the wagon passed. Tasmin noted one or two that were growing closer to the road than was safe. He had not brought demolition equipment along on this trip, and in any case he preferred to pass the word and leave it to the experts. He made quick notes, sighting on the horizon.
The balloon-tired wagon was quiet. The mules wore flexible cushioned shoes. There were no rattling chains or squeaking leathers. More than one party had met doom because of noisy equipment – or so it was assumed. They rode silently, Jamieson on the seat of the wagon, Tasmin and the students on their soft-shod animals. Part of the sense of mystery came from this apprehensive quiet. Part came from the odors that always seemed to heighten Tasmin’s perception of the world around him. Part came from the intrinsic unlikelihood of what they would attempt to do.
That unlikelihood became evident when they wound their way to the top of the mighty north-south rampart and looked down at what waited there. At Tasmin’s gesture, they gathered closely together, the mules crowded side to side.
‘What you see before you, people,’ Tasmin whispered, ‘is the so-called easy side of the Watchers.’ He didn’t belabor the point. They needed only a good look at what loomed on either side of their path.
Before them the road dropped abruptly downward to curve to the left around the South Watcher. A few dozen South Watchlings stood at the edge of the road, tapering monoliths of translucent green and blue with fracture lines splitting the interiors into a maze of refracted light, the smallest among them five times Tasmin’s height. Behind the Watchlings began the base of the South Watcher itself, a looming tower of emerald and sapphire, spilling foliage from myriad ledges, crowned with flights of gyre-birds that rose in a whirling, smokelike cloud around the crest, five hundred feet above.
On the north side of the road a crowd of smaller North Watchlings shone in hues of amethyst and smoke, and the great bulk of the North Watcher hung above them, a cliff formed of moonstone and ashy quartz, though chemists and geologists argued that the structure of the Watcher was not precisely either of these. In his mind, Tasmin said ‘emerald’ and ‘moonstone’ and ‘sapphire.’ Let the chemists argue what they really were; to him whether they were Presences hundreds of feet tall, or ’lings a tenth that size, or ’lets, smaller than a man, they were all sheer beauty.
Between the Watchers, scattered among the Watchlings, was the wreckage of many wagons and a boneyard of human and animal skeletons, long since picked clean. Behind the Watchers to both north and south extended the endless line of named and unnamed Presences that made up the western rampart of Deepsoil Five, cutting it off from the rest of the continent except through this and several similar passes for which proven Passwords existed.
Jamieson feigned boredom by sprawling on the trip wagon seat, although he himself had only been out twice before. Refnic, James, and Clarin perched on their mules like new hats at spring festival, so recently accoutered by the citadel Tripmaster as to seem almost artificial, like decorated manikins. ‘Put your hoods back,’ Tasmin advised them quietly. ‘Push up your sleeves and fasten them with the bands. That’s what the bands are for, and it gets your hands out in the open where you need them. I know the sleeves are stiff, but they’ll soften up in time.’ Tasmin’s own robes were silky from repeated washings and mendings. The embroidered cuffs fell in gentle folds from the bands, and the hood had long ago lost its stiff lining. ‘Put the reins in the saddle hook to free your hands. That’s it.’
With heads and arms protruding from the Tripsingers’ robes, the students looked more human and more vulnerable, their skulls looking almost fragile through the short hair that had been allowed to grow in anticipation of their robing but was still only
