Ehomba laid Simna down at the base of a large tree with far-spreading limbs and deeply grooved bark so dark it was almost black. A small stream meandered nearby, heading for the flower hills and the distant sea. In another tree a pair of crows argued for the sheer raucous delight of hearing themselves caw.
Ahlitah stood nearby, shaking his head as he stumbled nowhere in particular on unsteady legs, trying to shake off the effects of the insidious perfume. He had handled the effects better than the swordsman, but if Ehomba had not apprised him of what was happening and helped to hurry him out of the hills, he too would surely have succumbed to the second cloud of invisible perfume.
Simna must have taken the brunt of the first discharge, Ehomba felt. A blissful look had come over the swordsman’s face and he had gone down as if beneath the half dozen houris he spoke of so frequently and fondly. Then the flowers, the impossible, unreal, fantastic flowers, had actually picked him up and started to carry him off to some unimaginable destination of their own. The herdsman had drawn the sky-metal sword and gone grimly to work, trying not to think of the beauty he was destroying as he cut a path to liberate his friend. The blossoms he was shredding were not indifferent, he had told himself. Their agenda was not friendly. The intervention of active thorns and sharp-edged leaves and other inimical vegetation had been proof enough of that. His lower legs were covered with scratches and small puncture wounds.
The litah had fared better. Unable to penetrate his fur, small, sharp objects caused him no difficulty. Unsteady as he was, he had still been able to clear away large patches of flowers with great swings of his huge paws. Now he tottered about in circles, shaking his head, his great mane tossing violently as he fought to clear the effects of the concentrated fragrance from his senses.
Electing to conserve the safe town water that filled the carrying bag in his pack, Ehomba walked to the stream and returned with a double handful of cool liquid. He let it trickle slowly through his long fingers, directly over the swordsman’s face. Simna blinked, sputtered, and sat up. Or tried to. Ehomba had to help him. Woozy as a sailor in from a long voyage and just concluding a three-day drunk, the swordsman wiped at his face and tried to focus on the figure crouching concernedly before him.
“Etjole? What happened?” Simna looked around as if seeing the grass-covered hills, the grove of trees, and his friends for the first time. To his left, the big cat fell over on its side, growled irritably, and climbed to its feet again. “What’s wrong with kitty?”
“The same thing that is wrong with you, only to a lesser extent.”
“Wrong with me?” The swordsman looked puzzled. He started to stand, immediately listed severely to starboard, and promptly sat down again. “Hoy!” Placing a hand on either side of his head, he sat very still while rubbing his temples. “I remember smelling something so sweet and wonderful it can’t be described.” He looked up suddenly. “The flowers!”
“Yes, the flowers.” Ehomba looked back toward the south, toward the resplendent hills from which they had fled. “For some reason they wanted to keep us there. I cannot imagine why. Who can know how a flower thinks?” He turned back to his friend. “They tried to hold us back with little vines and roots and sharp leaves. When that did not work, they tried to smother us with delight. I caught very little of the perfume. Ahlitah received more. You were all but suffocated.” He held a hand up before the other man’s face. “How many fingers am I holding up?”
“Five. That’s four too many.” The swordsman coughed lightly. “First horses and now flowers. Give me the reeking warrens of a city with its cutthroats and thieves and honest, straightforward assassins any day. Those I know how to deal with. But flowers?” Lowering his palms from the sides of his head, he took several deep breaths. “I’ll never again be able to feel the same way about picking a bouquet for a favorite lady.”
“I am glad that you are feeling better.”
“So am I, though I don’t ever before remember being knocked unconscious quite so pleasantly.” He rose, only slightly shaky. Nearby, the litah was exercising and testing its recovered reflexes by leaping high in playful attempts to knock the agitated crows out of their tree.
“By Gielaraith, wait a minute. If I was unconscious and the cat indisposed, how did I get out of those hills?”
“I carried you.” Ehomba was scanning the northern horizon. Ahead, the terrain continued to climb, but gently. No ragged escarpments, no jagged peaks appeared to block their way northward.
The swordsman’s gaze narrowed. “The aroma didn’t affect you?”
“I told you—you and Ahlitah received a stronger dose than I did. Besides, my sense of smell is much weaker than either of yours.” Looking back down, he smiled. “Many years of herding cattle and sheep, of living close to them every day, have dulled my nose to anything very distilled.”
“Hoy—the preserving power of heavy stink.” With a grunt, Simna straightened his pack on his back. “I’m used to my assailants smelling like six-month-old bed linen, not attar of camellia.”
“In a new and strange land one must be prepared to deal with anything.” Ehomba started northward. The grass was low and patchy, the ground firm and supportive. Able to hike in any direction they preferred, they did not need to follow a particular path. Behind them, the litah gave up its game of leap and strike, conceding victory to the exhausted crows. “Old forms may no longer be valid. Seeming friends may be masked by lies, and conspicuous enemies nothing more than upright individuals in disguise.”
Having shaken off the last lingering effects of the potent perfume, the swordsman strode along strongly beside him. “Hoy, that’s not a problem a man has in a dark alley.”
Ehomba took in their clean, bracing environs with a sweep of his free hand. “I would rather find myself in surroundings like this facing adversaries unknown than in some crowded, noisy city where one has to deal with people all the time.”
“Then we make a good team, long bruther. I’ll take care of the people, and you deal with the flowers. And damned if I don’t think I’ll have the easier time of it.”
They slept that night in a grove of smaller trees, welcoming in their silence and lack of activity. They were indisputably trees and nothing more, as was the grass that grew thickly at their bases and the occasional weed flower that added a dab of color to the campsite. The stars shone unblinkingly overhead in a cool, pellucid sky, and they enjoyed the best night’s sleep they had had since before embarking on their crossing of the Aboqua.
At least Simna ibn Sind and Ahlitah did. Ehomba found his slumber unexpectedly disturbed.
She was very tall, the vision was, though not so tall as the herdsman. Her skin had the texture of new ivory and the sheen of the finest silk. Large eyes of sapphire blue framed by high cheekbones gazed down at him, and her hair was a talus of black diamonds. Beneath a gown of crimson lace she was naked, and her body was as supplely inviting as a down-filled bed on a cold winter’s night.
Her lips parted, and the very act of separation was an invitation to passion. They moved, but no sounds emerged. Yet in the absence of words he felt that she was calling out to him, her arms spread wide in supplication. With her eyes and her posture, her limbs and the striking shape beneath the gown, he was convinced that she was promising him anything, anything, if he would but redeem her from her current plight.
Discomfited by her consummate union of lubricity and innocent appeal, he stirred uneasily in his sleep, tossing about on the cushioning grass. Her hands reached out to him, the long, lissome fingers drawing down his cheek to her lips, then his neck, his chest. She smiled enticingly, and it was as if the stars themselves had invited him to waltz in their hot and august company. He felt himself embraced, and the heat rose in his body like steam trapped within a kettle.
Then he became aware of another, a horned presence looming ominously above the both of them. It too was incapable of speech, though much was conveyed by glaring eyes and clenching teeth. Eyes downcast, the vision of the V
isioness pulled back from him, drawn away by an awful unseen strength. In her place threatened the helmeted figure. It blotted out the light, and what it did not obscure, a pair of keening dark clouds that crept along at its heels enveloped and devoured.
“Etjole. Etjole!”
The hideous figure was shaking him now, thrusting him violently back and forth, and he was helpless to stop it. Shaking and—no, it was not the horned and helmeted one. That was a beast inhabiting his dream. The hands on his shoulders were solid, and real, and belonged entirely to the realm of wakefulness.
He opened his eyes to find a concerned Simna gazing down at him. It was still night, still dark out. Unable to stay long in one place, the stars had moved. But the grove of trees was unchanged, undisturbed by hideous intrusion. Nearby, the great humped mass of the black litah lay on its side, snoring softly.
The swordsman sat back on his heels. “Hoy, I don’t know what dream you were having, but don’t share it with me.”
Ehomba raised up on one elbow and considered his memories. “The first part was good. I am ashamed to admit it, but it was good.”
“Ah!” In the darkness the worldly swordsman grinned knowingly. “A woman, then. Your wife?”
Ehomba did not meet his gaze. “No. It was not Mirhanja.”
A gratified Simna slapped one knee to punctuate his satisfaction. “By Geuvar, you are human, then. Tell me what she was like.” His voice dripped eagerness.
Ehomba eyed him distastefully. “I would rather not. I am not happy with my reaction.”
“It was only a dream, bruther!” The swordsman was chuckling at his stolid companion’s obvious discomfiture. “Wedded or not, a man cannot be acclaimed guilty for enjoying his sleep. A dream is not a prosecutable offense—no matter what women think.”
“It is not that. It was not just any woman, Simna. It was her.”
“Hoy—then there was significance to it.” The swordsman’s smile was replaced by a look of grave concern. “What did you learn from it?”
“Nothing, except that she may somehow know that we are coming to try and help her. That, and the realization that she is more ravishing than even the image we saw above the fire that night on the veldt.”
“So beautiful,” Simna murmured, a far-off look in his eye. “Too beautiful for simple mortals like you and I, methinks.” His grin returned, its lubriciousness muted. “That doesn’t mean we can’t look, at least in dreams. But that wasn’t her you were seeing there at the last. You were moaning and rolling about.”
“Hymneth the Possessed. It had to be, I think.” Ehomba had lain back down, staring up at the stars, his head resting on the cup formed by his linked fingers. “As before, his face was hidden. I wonder if he is hideous to look upon in person.”
“With luck we’ll never find out.” Returning to his own bedroll, the swordsman slipped back beneath the blanket. Having climbed beyond the hills into the gentle mountains, they were now high above sea level, and along with fresh air and quilted silence the night brought with it a creeping chill.
Ehomba lay still for a long time, listening to the quick, sharp calls of nocturnal birds and the muffled voices of inquiring insects. He was both eager and afraid of returning to the dream. But when he finally drifted off, it was into that restful and rejuvenating region where nothing stirred—not even the vaporous images of imagination.
The next day they continued to ascend, but at such a gentle incline and over such accommodating gradients that the increasing altitude imposed no burden on them and did not slow their progress. They saw small herds of moose and sivatherium, camelops and wapiti. Ahlitah made a fine swift kill of a young bull bison, and they feasted luxuriantly.
Small tarns glittered like pendants of peridot and aquamarine at the foot of pure white snowpacks, casting reflections that shone like inverse cameos among the bare gray granites. At this altitude trees were stunted, whipped and twisted like taffy by relentless winter winds. Diminutive wildflowers burst forth in knots of blue and lavender, corn red and old butter yellow. None of them attempted to trip, seduce, or otherwise restrain the impassive hikers in their midst. Small rodents and marsupials dove for cover among the rock piles whenever the marchers approached, and Ahlitah amused himself by stalking them, pouncing, and then magnanimously letting the less-than-bite-size snacks scamper free.
They had already begun to descend from the heights when they encountered the sheep. Simna pronounced them to be quite ordinary sheep, but to the man from the far south they were strikingly different from the animals he had grown up with. Their fleece was thick and billowy where that of the Naumkib’s herds tended to be straight and stringy. Their narrowing faces were black or dirty white instead of brown and yellow. And their feet were smaller, to the point of being dainty. These were coddled animals, he decided, not one of which would survive for a week in the wilds of the dry country inland from the village. Yet they remained, indisputably, sheep.
At the strangers’ approach they showed they were not as helpless as they looked. Amid much distraught baaing and bleating, they hastened to form a circle; lambs in the middle, ewes facing determinedly outward, young rams spacing themselves efficiently along the outermost rim.
One old ram, obviously the herd dominant and leader, lowered his head and pawed angrily at the ground. Bleating furiously, he took several challenging pronks in the direction of the newcomers. At this point Ahlitah, who had been dawdling behind his human companions, trotted forward to rejoin them. Espying and taking nonchalant note of the ram’s challenge, he vouchsafed to give forth a midrange snarl, whereupon the suddenly paralyzed ram froze at the end of an advancing pronk, stood tottering on all fours for an instant or two, and proceeded to keel over onto one side in a dead faint, all four legs locked sideways and straight, parallel to the ground.
“Easy meat,” the litah commented idly as they strolled past the trembling herd.
“Mind your manners,” Ehomba chided his four-legged companion. “You cannot be hungry. Not after that half an animal you just devoured.”
“You’re right; I’m not hungry. But I’ve run too many hot mornings in pursuit of prey that eventually escaped ever to ignore something that looks like roast on a stick.” The maned head gestured scornfully in the direction of the herd, and thin, hoofed legs quaked at the casual nod. “These things are domesticated. They are become the vassals of human appetite.”
“You can say that again. I love mutton.” Simna was eyeing several plump members of the herd more covetously than the big cat.
Ehomba sighed. Belying his stocky frame, the swordsman’s appetites were outsized in every way. “If not the shepherd, we may encounter the landholder. Perhaps we can bargain for some chops, if you must have some.”
Walking on, they stumbled not on the landowner but upon his dwelling, a modest and unprepossessing structure of stone walls and thatched roof. There was a well out front, and a small garden fenced to keep out the wild vermin as well as sheep and goats. Smoke rose unhurriedly from the stone chimney, and flowering wisteria vined its way up the walls and around the door and the single window. Several young lambs grazed in a stone paddock back of the main building. At the travelers’ approach, an old dog lifted its head to check them out. Broad bands of white streaked her long black fur. Apparently satisfied, it laid its lower jaw back down on its paws. It did not bark, not even at the sight and smell of the litah.
“Quiet, tidy little place,” Simna declared grudgingly. “Simple lodgings for simple folk.”
“Even simple folk may have useful information to give.” Tilting back his head, the herdsman squinted at the sky. “And there are clouds gathering. If we are polite, and pleasant, perhaps the owner will let us stay the night.” Trying to see inside, Ehomba bent low and shaded his eyes with one hand. “When traveling in a strange land, any known direction is welcome.” Advancing on the half-open swinging door, the lower half of which was latched, he raised his voice. Impressively, the dog continued to disregard them.
 
; “Hello! Is anyone at home? We see your smoke.”
“It’s not my smoke, no. It belongs to the fire. But you may come in anyhow, all of you.”
Ehomba led the way into the cottage, which was very neat and clean. Among the Naumkib, it would have been accounted a palace. Sturdy chairs surrounded a table. Both were decorated with carvings and fine scrollwork. An iron pot hung from a swing-out cooking bar in the large fireplace, and there was a sink with a hand pump on the far side of the room. Facing a stone fireplace off to the right were larger, upholstered chairs and a sitting couch. Bookshelves filled with well-thumbed tomes lined the walls, and hanging oil-filled lamps were in place to provide light throughout the evening hours. To the left, a door led to rooms unseen, and a short ladder leaning against one wall hinted at the presence of a copious attic. The cottage’s lone occupant was working at the sink, wet up to his elbows. He turned to smile at them as they entered.
“Mind your head, stranger. I don’t get many visitors, and few your size. Now, I’ll be with you in a moment. I’m just finishing up these dishes.”
The owner was plainly dressed in ankle-length pants and matching shirt of dark brown. Both were devoid of decoration. The simple elegance and efficiency of the furnishings suggested that they had not been made by the cottage’s occupant, but were the product of other craftsmen and had been bought and brought to this place by wagon or other means of transport. If true, it meant that the owner’s isolation was deceptive. He was here by choice rather than out of necessity, and had the resources to pay for more than basic needs.
Not that there was any overt reference to wealth to be seen anywhere within the cottage, unless one so considered the many books. But even a poor man could accumulate a decent library through careful purchasing, especially if it was accomplished over a matter of decades. And their diminutive host certainly had, if not obvious wealth, many years to his credit. His beard and hair were entirely gray, full but neatly trimmed, and despite the blush in his pale cheeks he was clearly an individual of considerable maturity.