Portlynn was just coming to life when Migray cast off and steered them out of Kate’s Lagoon into the three-kilometre-wide mouth of the Mozal. The water was a thick ochre red from the silt it carried, and it flowed so swiftly at the centre that boats going upstream had to travel close to the side where the current wasn’t as tenacious. Even so, Gothora burnt a lot of logs and didn’t make much headway for the morning of the first day.
The riverbanks for the first fifteen kilometres up from the mouth were still wild despite the heavy cultivation a few kilometres inland. Gothora chugged past a continuous wall of marshes and jugobush swamps, one boat in a long procession of cargo vessels setting off upstream. Five hundred metres to starboard, vessels laden with freshly picked crops were racing past, catching the current downstream to dock in Portlynn where their payload would be transferred to trains or the big seagoing ships.
By mid-afternoon they were seeing the first plantations and pastures encroaching through the flood meadows. Big white-painted manor houses were glimpsed amid the dense groves. Then the villages began to appear on the banks; like Portlynn, the houses were all built from wood and stood on stilts. Landing jetties extended out into the river, with boats docked and stevedores busy.
‘It all looks so lovely,’ Kysandra said wistfully as the pretty little communities slid past. Nearly all the original jungle had been cleared, surrendering the land to cultivation. Rigid lines of citrus trees stood proud in their groves. Small armies of mod-dwarfs moved through them, picking the colourful globes. Big carts stacked high with wicker crates full of fruit wound along the dirt tracks lined with tall fandapalms to the jetties. Paddy fields glinted rose gold in the afternoon sun, with even smaller mod-dwarfs wading through them, planting rice. Cattle and ostriches grazed long lush meadows. Humans walked about or rode horses, all wearing wide-brimmed hats against the powerful sun. It looked such a settled, easy life.
‘Would you like to live here, señorita?’ Jymoar asked.
Kysandra gave a small furtive smile and glanced round. Jymoar was standing beside the small wheelhouse, looking at her. He caught her eye and grinned happily. She blushed and turned back to stare at the riverbank. Jymoar was maybe nineteen, serving his apprenticeship with his uncle Migray. Cute enough, but . . . No thanks.
‘I already have a home, thank you.’ Even as she said it, she regretted it. The lad gave her an apologetic nod and turned to go.
‘But I could be persuaded to move.’ She gave Nigel a sly glance. ‘My guardian won’t be able to order me around forever.’
‘Guardian?’ Jymoar said in confusion.
Nigel tipped his hat at Jymoar. ‘That would be me. But I’m going to check on the horses, or something; you kids have fun.’ With a private ’path, he added, ‘Play nice, now,’ to Kysandra.
‘So have you travelled this far east before?’ she asked.
Jymoar hurried forward to be with her. ‘Never so far, no. But I have only been on the Gothora for seven months. One day I will have my own boat.’
She gave him an encouraging smile. ‘Really? What sort?’
*
As night came, lights from the villages and more isolated manors shimmered across the fast quiet water as the Gothora kept a steady course upstream. They stopped at a village the next day to replenish their logs and buy fresh food for the galley. After less than four hours, they set off again.
It took eight days to navigate the length of the Mozal. Fortunately the main river extended almost all the way to the southern end of the Bouge mountain range, a thousand miles due east from Portlynn. Only the last fifty miles saw them turning down a tributary river, the Woular, heading north again. The mountains had grown steadily up from the horizon for the last two days.
The land on either side of the Woular had reverted to long stretches of raw jungle and scrub. Estates and villages were spaced further and further apart. This was wilderness country, devoid of any terrestrial vegetation. Native natell and quasso trees grew tall along the riverbanks, festooned with vines decorated in an abundance of white and purple flowers. The water was getting clogged with rotting fallen branches and long vine tendrils. Tough bakku weed grew along the edges, forming large wiry mats. Captain Migray had to reduce speed, while he and Sancal used their ex-sight diligently, probing the river for snags. They hadn’t seen another boat for hours.
Finally, Croixtown slipped into view round a long curve. The village was made up from about fifty houses, none of which had a second storey. They were huddled together at the centre of an array of big pens, whose high, strong fences contained bison and wild boar. Smaller pens contained neuts. Kysandra craned her neck forward, her retinas zooming in.
‘Are those camels?’
‘You have good eyes,’ Jymoar said, smiling worshipfully. He’d spent most of the voyage flirting hopefully with her and was now badly smitten.
‘Thank you.’
‘And, yes, those are probably camels. The rancheros, they don’t care what they drive into their corrals, as long as it fetches a shining coin from the markets.’
‘That’s a lot of livestock out there,’ Nigel said, regarding the pens attentively.
Jymoar didn’t flinch quite as much as he had at the start of the trip whenever Nigel said something. ‘Si, señor. The savannah is home to many beasts; they run wild here. There are few predators, just mantahawks and roxwolves and dingoes – and the rancheros hunt them down to protect the herds.’ He looked round furtively, then lowered his voice. ‘I’ve heard that the people of Shansville like dingo meat.’
Kysandra stared past the pens. Beyond them, the land rose slowly to the foothills of the Bouge range, a vast open region of savannah where the blue-green native gangrass rippled away like some sluggish sea. The occasional ebony whipwoor tree stood proud, thorny blemishes speckling the endless shifting gangrass. ‘Is that where the Desert of Bone is?’ she asked.
‘Beyond the mountains, yes,’ Jymoar said. ‘I wish you were not going there, señorita. It is a bad place.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Everybody knows. Not even the Fallers dare to travel there. They say there are ten thousand bodies piled up in the centre, their bones are a monster’s treasure hoard and their souls haunt the desert, weeping tears of grey light into the sand.’
‘Fascinating,’ Nigel said. ‘What sort of monster?’
‘Nobody knows, señor. If you encounter it, you do not survive. Those that do manage to avoid its clutches are scarred for life by what they have seen; many go mad afterwards.’
‘Ten thousand bodies? That’s a lot of people. Where did they come from?’
‘Nigel,’ Kysandra chided, frowning at him. It wasn’t fair to mock the poor boy’s superstition.
Jymoar shrugged. ‘You doubt me, but those people have died in the Desert of Bone, señor. I will not go there, not even for the señorita.’
‘And I would never ask you to,’ she told him kindly.
Gothora tied up at Croixtown’s single jetty. The townsfolk were disappointed it wouldn’t be taking any of their livestock down river to the big markets, but Nigel was paying Captain Migray to stay there until they got back.
‘For a month,’ the captain said. ‘Your coins are good, señor, but the Gothora is my life and my living. I cannot chain her to the land; she must travel the river.’
‘I understand,’ Nigel said. ‘We’ll be back before the month is up.’
‘I will wait,’ Jymoar ’pathed privately to Kysandra, ‘until you return safely.’
‘Don’t worry about us,’ she ’pathed back. ‘Please.’
Nigel whistled happily as he led his horse down the jetty. ‘Ahh, shipboard romance. Finest kind.’
‘Oh, shut up,’ she growled at him.
5
It was hard riding across the savannah. Kysandra was almost in tears the first night, she was so saddle sore. Even the nerve blocks her secondary routines established to ease the pain didn’t seem to help much. They set up camp in two tents th
at Skylady had fabricated to resemble ordinary canvas, but were actually lightweight thermo-stable sheets. ‘They’ll keep the temperature just right in the desert,’ Nigel explained. ‘Nights can get exceptionally cold. Explorers have been caught out by that before.’
Kysandra lent some half-hearted help putting them up. She didn’t want to sit down, and watched Fergus disapprovingly as he showed her how to use the valve on her self-inflating mattress.
‘It’ll be soft enough,’ he promised.
‘Nothing could be,’ she assured him.
But because the mattress was some fancy Commonwealth fabric, it was indeed soft enough to lie on without wincing and cursing. Madeline came in with a large tube of cream from the first-aid kit and told her to roll onto her front.
‘I’m going to need this as well as you, kiddo,’ she admitted to Kysandra as she rubbed it on red-raw skin. ‘That was a long ride, and I haven’t been on a horse in years.’
Kysandra sighed in relief as the mild analgesic took hold.
‘We should put some dermsynth on that,’ Nigel announced. ‘It’ll strengthen your backside for tomorrow.’
Kysandra yiped in shock and hurriedly pulled a towel over her bare buttocks. She glared up at him. ‘Don’t they have privacy in the Commonwealth?’
‘Hmm.’ Nigel scratched the back of his head, seemingly bemused. ‘It kind of depends which planet you’re on.’
‘Out!’
He chuckled as he left the tent. Kysandra glared at the flap for a long moment. Her u-shadow told her Nigel was sending a file, which she accepted reluctantly. It was a list of dermsynth properties.
‘Always got to be right,’ she grunted. ‘Madeline, fetch the dermsynth spray, would you?’
‘Sure thing, kiddo.’
Russell started a small fire and cooked their rations. As the sun finally went down, Kysandra was suddenly very aware of animals snuffling about through the long gangrass at the periphery of her ex-sight where she couldn’t quite identify them. Cries of lone roxwolves began to sound further off across the savannah, answered by the challenging howls of dingo packs.
‘They won’t come near the fire,’ Nigel said, picking up on her concern.
‘It’s not the genuine animals I’m worried about,’ Kysandra said. ‘It’s the Fallers. The eggs don’t get to choose what they eggsume.’
‘Interesting,’ Nigel said. ‘They must have some basic parameters. I mean, eggsuming a roxwolf I can understand, but there’s no point in them becoming bussalores or flies.’
‘They call it the first forty rule,’ Kysandra said. ‘I read it in the Research Institute’s manuals. If an animal weighs less than forty kilos, it doesn’t get attracted to the egg in the first month, but after that the egg gets less fussy and starts to attract smaller creatures.’
‘So they’re smart even at the egg stage,’ Nigel mused.
‘Not smart,’ Russell said. ‘Cunning, like all evil things.’
Kysandra grinned at the man’s certainty. Even this new Russell liked his world simple.
‘We’re going to have to examine an egg at some point,’ Nigel said. ‘See what makes it tick.’ Then he cocked his head to one side. ‘But the Faller Research Institute must have done that already; and they would have had the best equipment – if it worked. We need to get their results, if they ever published them.’
‘Coulan will find it,’ she said confidently.
‘If it’s there.’ Nigel gave Kysandra a sharp look. ‘So, do Faller animals eat humans, too?’
‘No. They only ever eat what they’ve become, it’s in the manual.’
‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ Nigel muttered.
‘The animals know,’ Madeline said in satisfaction. ‘They can always tell if one of their own is really a Faller. They attack instinctively. Bienvenido would be overrun otherwise.’
‘But Faller animals kill humans, they always have,’ Kysandra said. ‘They know we’re their real enemy. That’s why . . .’ She gestured into the night.
‘I’ll be on watch all night,’ Fergus assured her. He patted the high-powered hunting rifle Skylady had fabricated to look like a normal Bienvenido-manufactured weapon. ‘You’ll be perfectly safe.’
Despite the worry about possible Faller animals, and the nagging pain from her thighs and bottom, Kysandra fell asleep quickly.
It was another two days’ ride over the savannah before they reached the foothills. This was the southernmost point of the Bouge range. Three hundred miles directly east lay the coast with the Eastath Ocean beyond, while to the north the Desert of Bone rolled away for nearly eight hundred miles before eventually breaking up against a small range of hills that dipped down to the northern, equatorial, coast. The north-eastern boundary of the desert was formed by the Salalsav mountains; while not as high as the Bouge range, they formed an effective barrier to any rainclouds coming off the Eastath Ocean. So only the southern edge of the desert was unguarded by highlands, and it was a rare wind indeed which blew any rainclouds in that way.
They trekked round the Bouge foothills until the scrubland grew arid, gangrass giving way to tufts of succulent weed which itself soon became sparse. Loam turned to gritty soil. The first of the dunes were visible a few miles ahead, and with the sight of them came fine particles of sand, blown by the parched wind that came off the Desert of Bone, stinging Kysandra’s face.
‘There’s a stream over there,’ Nigel said, standing up in his stirrups. ‘That’s where we’ll camp and prepare.’ He flicked the reins, reinforcing the ’path order to his horse. The rest of them followed.
The stream was barely more than a winding line of rushes in the grit, betraying the damper ground. When they parted the sharp blades to expose the water, it was brackish and slow moving. ‘It should be enough,’ Fergus said. He took a spade and started digging.
‘I’ll help,’ Russell said, always keen to prove his worth.
Nigel, Kysandra and Madeline opened the trunks the modhorses were carrying and unloaded the extra bundles of rods, laying them out on the ground in the pattern they’d all memorized from the countless rehearsals they’d gone through before setting off. Had anyone examined the thin composite struts, they would have assumed they were just more tent poles.
Once they had them in the right order, they clipped them all together, forming three simple square framework platforms. Kysandra slotted the curving struts together to form wheels and fitted the tyres to them – superstrength fabric tubes that weighed less than a kilogram each. There were six of them. She twisted the footpump hose into the valve of the first and started inflating. It was hot, exhausting work that had her sweating profusely after the first minute, but she kept going determinedly. Nigel took over and inflated the second. Once all six tyres were inflated, they fixed the wheels to the platform axles, and they had three small carts which the mod-horses could pull.
Russell loaded them with the water bladders made from the same fabric as the tyres.
‘Now the tough pumping,’ Nigel declared.
They used a second, larger, footpump to siphon water out of the hole Fergus and Russell had dug, impelling it through a sophisticated filter and into the bladders. There were three on each cart, holding a hundred and fifty litres each.
‘Isn’t this too much?’ Kysandra asked, a question she’d asked often enough back at Blair Farm as they put their equipment together.
‘It’s a desert,’ Nigel had explained patiently. ‘Eight hundred miles long and three hundred at its widest. We have to find the one point that produced the anomaly, and I’ve only got an approximate coordinate for that. Now I have no idea how many days this search will take, but I’m budgeting a couple of weeks. A horse will consume a minimum of twenty-five litres of water a day under normal circumstances, but this is a desert, not normal circumstances. And we need a good three to four litres a day ourselves. Even carrying thirteen hundred litres, we’ll have to go back to the foothills and refill every few days.’
‘All right, all ri
ght,’ she surrendered.
They’d only pumped three of the nine bladders full when Fergus said: ‘Oh, yes, look at this – there, where the air’s cooler.’
Kysandra looked in the direction he was pointing. High on a slope about three miles away she saw some grey specks moving slowly round the gradient. When she zoomed in, she realized just how big the animals were. ‘Are those elephants?’ she asked. She’d always wanted to see one of the big animals.
‘Mammoths,’ Nigel said, with a knowing smile. ‘Hell, I remember when the first one was born. San Diego Zoo was swamped for months after; even baby pandas got ignored by the media.’
‘Are they artificial?’
‘Oh, no. Well . . . not exactly. They were terrestrial animals that died out during Earth’s last ice age; then the Genome Structure Foundation sequenced their DNA from mummified remnants dug out of the Siberian permafrost. Controversial at the time, especially given what that particular foundation morphed into, but we wound up taking them to half the planets we settled, them and the crudding dodo – though what the point in recreating that was I’ll never know. Dumbest creature ever, and as ugly as sin too. Plus, it tastes exactly like chicken, so that wasn’t a valid reason, either.’